A Cupboard Full of Coats
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Authors: Yvvette Edwards
A Cupboard Full of Coats
YVVETTE EDWARDS
A Oneworld Book
Published by Oneworld Publications 2011
This ebook edition published by Oneworld Publications 2011
Copyright © Yvvette Edwards 2011
“Turn Around Look at Me”, by Jerry Capehart (CA) ©1961
Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. (BMI) All rights Reserved
The moral right of Yvvette Edwards to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved
Copyright under Berne Convention
A CIP record for this title is available
from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-85168-762-6
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Cover design by Ghost
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Table of Contents
A Cupboard Full of Coats
1
It was early spring when Lemon arrived, while the crocuses in the front garden were flowering and before the daffodil buds had opened, the Friday evening of a long, slow February, and I had expected when I opened the front door to find an energy salesperson standing there, or a charity worker selling badges, or any one of a thousand random insignificant people whose existence meant nothing to me or my world.
He just knocked, that was all, knocked the front door and waited, like he’d just come back with the paper from the corner shop, and the fourteen years since he’d last stood there, the fourteen years since the night I’d killed my mother, hadn’t really happened at all.
I had imagined that moment a thousand times; Lemon had come back for me. He knew everything yet still loved me. Over a decade filled with dreams where he did nothing but hold me close while I cried. Had he come sooner, my whole life might have panned out differently and it might have been possible to smile without effort, or been able to love. Had he come back before, I might have been happier in the realm of the living than that of the dead, but he had left it too late and things were so set now I could hardly see the point of him coming at all. Yet there he was.
He stood there in the cold, wet and wordless. He offered no excuses or explanations; no
I was just passing through and thought I might stop by
. He didn’t tip a cap or smile and enquire after my health, nothing. He stood there watching me as if he wasn’t sure whether I might throw my arms around his neck with a welcoming shriek or slam the front door in his face. But I did neither. Instead I watched him back, till eventually he gave a small shrug that could have meant just about anything.
He had what my mother had always called ‘high colour’, a black man with the skin of a tanned English gentleman, and like a gentleman, he had always dressed neatly. In that respect, he hadn’t changed at all.
His taste in clothes seemed the same a decade and a half later, or maybe he’d just found himself stuck with the wardrobe he’d purchased in his youth. He wore Farah slacks that day and a Gabicci suede-trimmed cardigan with a Crombie overcoat thrown casually over them.
Though the rain had stopped, he was thoroughly soaked through, from his hair – which he had always kept skiffled low but which was longer now: a silver-tinged Afro that was damp and forged into steaming tufts – to the lizard-skin shoes on his feet. But though his clothes were still the same,
he
had aged. There were changes around his face; the crow’s feet at the corner of his eyes were wider fanned, the bags beneath them full and heavy, and his old skin bore new lines. His eyes were red-rimmed, the whites yellowed, the expression intense as he looked at me, already asking questions, talking of things that should be whispered even when alone, and it was me that looked away, looked down, wondering if my own eyes were as eloquent as his, afraid that they might be speaking volumes, scared of the things they might have already said.
I opened the front door wide as he wiped his feet on the mat outside. It used to say Welcome, but was so faded now, only someone who knew what it had said before would be able to guess the word had ever been there at all. He bounded over the step like a cat, lithe-footed. He had always been a good mover, the kind of man you could not take your eyes off when he danced, the kind of man you had to drag your eyes off, period. I closed the front door quietly behind him.
He was in.
He stood inside the hallway looking around. I had done a lot with the house in the time he’d been away. The green doors and skirtings had been stripped. The old foam-backed carpet had been replaced with laminated flooring. The last time he’d been here, the walls were covered in deep plum velvet-embossed wallpaper; now they were smooth, clean, white. I sniffed.
‘You need a bath,’ I said.
He nodded. I walked up the stairs to the bathroom and he followed. I turned on the taps and the tub began to fill.
‘I’ll get you a towel.’
I left him in the bathroom while I went in search of a towel and some dry clothes for him to put on afterwards. As guys go, he wasn’t really that big, kind of average height, medium build, but he was bigger than I was, and I knew nothing of mine would fit him, even if he had been prepared to wear it. There was still some male clothing in the wardrobe in my mother’s room. Though I had considered it often, I hadn’t cleared out her stuff, and her room was pretty much as she’d left it, but tidied, her things neatly packed away, as if she’d gone travelling on a ticket with an open-date return and might come back at any moment. I even changed the bedding every couple of months, though I couldn’t say why. It was just me here, and while I often passed time in her room, I never slept in my mother’s bed, ever.
Inside her wardrobe I found a dressing gown, maroon with paisley trim, and I took it back to the bathroom with the towel. The door was still ajar, and though I knocked first, I found him stepping out of his underclothes as I entered.
He turned around to face me, making no effort to cover himself. The bathroom light was on and its bright glare permitted neither shadow nor softening. Though only in his fifties, he was headed towards an old man’s body: thin and hairy, and gnarled like a cherry tree. His pubic hair was thick and grey. His penis flaccid. I could smell his body above the hot bath steam: moist stale sweat, tobacco and rum. He nodded his thanks for the clothes, turned his back to me and stepped into the bath.
I heard him turn the taps off as I picked up his wet clothing from the floor, and as he lay back and closed his eyes I backed out of the bathroom, pulling the door shut behind me.
*
By the time Lemon came downstairs dinner was ready. Minted couscous, grilled salmon and cherry tomatoes, with spring onions, black olives and yellow peppers tastefully strewn across two large white plates. The dressing gown was knotted tightly around his waist, and his pale legs carried him soundlessly across the living-room floor.
‘You hungry?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘You have anything to drink?’
I indicated the bottle of wine on the table, but he shook his head.
‘Water? Juice? Strong?’
‘Strong’s good.’
‘Help yourself. Cupboard under the microwave. Glasses are above the sink.’
In my mother’s day, unless she was entertaining, the double doors at the end of the through-lounge were always kept locked, so that you had to go out into the passage to enter the kitchen. But I kept them open always, and he went through to the kitchen. I heard him opening cupboards, finding the things he needed. He’d always been good in the kitchen; tidy and able. I only just made out the sound of the fridge door closing and I shivered.
Most things, all they want is a little gentle handling.
I refilled my own glass for the second time from the bottle on the table, sipping this one slowly as I waited for him to return. When he did, he was clutching a tumbler filled with a clear liquid that was probably vodka, diluted with water perhaps, or perhaps not. I picked up my fork and began to eat as he sat down and took a couple of glugs from the glass in his hand. I saw him wince as if he felt the liquor burn on the way down. He glanced at me, read the question in my eyes, and briefly waved a hand in my direction, dismissing it as nothing.
His knuckles were bigger than I recalled, or maybe they just seemed bigger because they were so clumsy wielding the knife and fork as he grasped them tight and started poking around the food on his plate, investigating, unhappy. After a while, he looked at me and asked, ‘Ah wah dis?’
My laughter caught me by surprise. He had come to England when he was still in his twenties, had lived here some thirty years since, and normally spoke slowly, his English tinged with a distinctly Caribbean drawl. He was from Montserrat; a small islander. That he had chosen to ask what I was feeding him in that way was an indication of the level of his disgust.
‘If you were expecting dasheen and curry goat you’ve come to the wrong place.’
‘I never expect that, but little gravy would be good.’
‘You should taste it,’ I said, as he pushed the plate away from him into the centre of the table, shaking his head.
‘You want some pepper?’
He shook his head again.
I carried on eating. He liked the brown food; brown rice, brown chicken, brown macaroni cheese, brown roast potatoes, the kind of food my mother was so good at cooking, the kind of food I never prepared.
‘My wife died,’ he said.
‘Did she?’
‘Cancer. Five months back.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Wasn’t ill or nothing. Just couldn’t eat. Lost some weight. Went to the doctor’s. Doctor send her straight to the hospital. They open her, look inside, then sew her back up. Wasn’t nothing they could do.’