A Cupboard Full of Coats (4 page)

‘Hello, little man,’ I said and kissed his cheek.

‘Urgh.’ He wiped the kiss off. ‘I hate lipstick.’

I laughed as if he were joking and kissed him again. ‘You’ll love it when you’re older.’

‘When I’m older,’ he asked, ‘will you be dead?’

Though there was nothing in his tone but interest, the question floored me completely. Stunned, I opened my mouth to reply, but could think of nothing to say.

‘The mum of one of the kids in Ben’s class is dead,’ Red said, his tone neutral. ‘Ever since he found out, he’s been obsessed.’

‘Will you?’ Ben pressed.

‘Mummy will die when she’s old,’ his father answered, and I had to bite my tongue, because I knew better than anyone that death did not pre-book appointments decades in advance. Its approach was random, based on whimsy, often violent. I came from a line of women who bore a single child and were dead before its eighteenth birthday. ‘You’ve got nothing to worry about,’ Red said.

I turned and carried Ben into the living room, giving Red an eyeful of my bared legs. I had been up for hours after sleeping badly, head full, muscles aching. My legs were freshly shaved and creamed from the heel up to the high hemline of the fitted black skirt I had worn for his benefit, so short that it was a wonder it covered the icebox he believed hummed between my legs. I heard the squeaky friction of his trainer soles against the flooring as he followed me in.

‘So how
is
school?’ I asked my son. He would be five next month, had started school last week. It was incredible to me that his nursery days were at an end when I was still getting over his birth. He was growing up fast, getting heavy. I put him down.

‘Okay,’ he said, twisting and bending his head and shoulders and hips in a writhe.

I looked up at Red. Even in my heels he was still a clear foot taller than me. Smelling of shower gel and aftershave and skin cream freshly applied. He was dressed casually in a tracksuit, hands tucked deep inside the pockets of his trousers. His body language was, as always, relaxed. It was one of the first things that had attracted me to him, the perfect proportions of his body, the grace in his movements, the flawless lines.

We had met over his father’s corpse after he had died from a stroke, his face contorted. I had spent the day working on him: inserting eye caps to close his eyes, small pieces of foam in his cheeks to recreate symmetry, suturing his upper and lower jaws to bring his lips together naturally, then using a mouth-former to fix them in a position inclined towards a smile. I had shaved him and trimmed his hair, and applied a layer of make-up that was virtually imperceptible but restored his colour and gave his cheeks a healthy flush.

I had almost finished dressing him when Red returned to view him in his casket. Having been the person who had discovered the body, he’d had to brace himself hard against seeing his father again to say goodbye. When he saw what I had done, he was speechless, just stood there staring down at his father for the longest time, then finally cried. Days later, he told me he had been too horrified to cry when he had found his father. The tears he’d shed in the parlour had been sheer relief. Laid out, his father not only looked dapper, but also completely at peace.

I had been attracted to Red straight away. Grief-stricken, with his height and grace and raw vulnerability, to me he was irresistible. It was ironic that the same things I’d been attracted to, now made me feel mocked.

‘Is he settling down okay?’ I asked.

‘Yeah. Fine. You should’ve phoned him. He would’ve told you himself.’ His tone was even for Ben’s benefit. ‘School was good.’ His voice became gentler as he stepped over to stand beside Ben, rubbing his enormous hand over the small boy’s skiffled head. This was where he always won, hands down. He was a good dad. Naturally good.

‘You were
so
grown up, weren’t you? Come on, gimmee a hug. I’ve got to go.’

‘I wanna come with you,’ Ben’s voice was tiny. He glanced up at me as though he would have preferred it if I wasn’t listening.

‘Come on, don’t start that again. We’ve talked about this, haven’t we? Your mum
wants
to spend time with you…’ – he threw an angry glance at me – ‘…and I’ll be back to get you tomorrow.’

‘But I’m not feeling well. My tummy hurts. Feel my head.’

Red put his hand on Ben’s head. ‘You’re not hot. You’ll be fine.’

‘I wanna come with you,
please
, Daddy...’

He stooped to hug his son tight, to kiss him, and I watched Ben’s desperate response, claw-cuddling, kissing
him
back, trying to lift his legs from the floor to force Red into picking him up.

‘Come on,’ I said, going over and lifting Ben up myself. ‘Your dad has to go. He has things to do.’ I imagined they involved another woman, on her back, legs wide, wet. ‘We’re gonna have fun.’ My smile felt tight.

Ben stopped struggling, resigning himself to my hip and his staying. His lower lip trembled.

‘You’ve got my number. Any problems, ring,’ Red said. ‘I’ll pick him up tomorrow about four.’

‘Fine,’ I answered.

A moment later I heard the metallic click of the front door as it closed behind him and, simultaneously, Ben began to cry.

He didn’t want to eat or drink or watch TV or play. He followed me around like a dog, not speaking or interacting, with a wretched expression on his face as if his small shoulders bore the weight of the world in grief.

On my part I made small talk, trying to engage him in a conversation of some kind:
How’s school? Do you have many friends? Are they nice? Would you like me to make you something to eat? Please tell me, is your mouth going to stay like that for the rest of the day?
Often his reply was a single word consisting of just the one syllable. Occasionally it was not even that, just a nod or a shake of the head. It was as exhausting trying to get a conversation going as giving birth itself. He had only been with me an hour when I found myself working out that it would be twenty-nine hours more before his dad came back to collect him.

So far, Lemon had slept through everything. There had been no sounds from upstairs, no indication he planned to get out of bed at any time today, but the fact he was here, the things he had stirred, the
feelings
, put me under more pressure than usual, which I hadn’t realized was even possible. Since Lemon had arrived, I’d found myself engaged on some kind of voyage of discovery. The failure of my relationship with Ben was something I simply accepted. I had no friends to speak of, there was no family to visit on my side, there were no observers. But with Lemon here, after my silly boast about Ben’s needs being my top priority, I felt ashamed, as though for the first time I was on the outside of our relationship looking in, trying to gauge how it might appear to someone else, and from that perspective, things looked pretty grim indeed.

‘I know,’ I said, ‘let’s go out and do something.’

Though I wanted to change into something less dressy and maybe head for the park, I was reluctant to go back upstairs. I didn’t want to wake Lemon just yet, or to introduce him to Ben while he was looking so unhappy, accusing me with his expression alone of being the world’s worst mum.

So I decided to do something with him I didn’t need to change for, and also that he would enjoy. Something nice together, something different, something fun.

‘You’ve never been to the cinema before, have you?’ I asked.

He shook his head.

‘In that case, you’d better hurry and put your coat on. You’re in for a real treat.’

We drove to the Rio on Kingsland High Street where, luckily, some kids’ film or other was just starting, so we quickly bought popcorn and Coke and sweets, then hurried into the cinema before we had missed too much of the beginning to be able to follow the storyline.

He wanted to sit in the very front row and as I was determined not to spoil the occasion, I conceded. There, he faffed and fiddled, picking up his drink every fifteen seconds for a sip, putting it back down, then somehow finding yet more reasons to continue fidgeting. He stared around behind him regularly, as though the people sitting there were more interesting than what was on the screen in front of us, and asked a hundred questions about what was going on in the film, every one of which, had he been paying proper attention, he would have known the answers to himself. Finally, after about twenty minutes, he needed to go to the toilet.

‘What,
now
?’ I asked.

‘Yessss,’ he moaned, ‘I can’t hold it.’

We had to leave our seats, disturbing everyone else in the process, and crossed the foyer with me trying to explain that he shouldn’t wait till the last minute to ask for the toilet, but should mention it in good time so it was not an actual emergency to get him there. As I spoke he was doing what looked like some kind of monkey dance, legs bowed wide, one hand cupped over his crotch, index finger and thumb in a pinch, as if he was holding the end of an inflated balloon and was trying to stop the air inside from escaping.

At the women’s toilets I opened the door and stood waiting for him to enter.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I don’t go in the girls’ toilets,’ he said, ‘I go in the boys’.’

‘We’re not going into the men’s,’ I said.

‘My daddy doesn’t take me in the girls’.’

‘I’m not your dad. I’m your mum and I’m not allowed in the men’s toilets. We don’t have a choice.’

‘I can go on my own.’

‘No you can’t.’

He began to cry. ‘I’m a boy,’ he said.

‘It’s just a toilet, Ben!’

‘But I go in the boys’ toilets with Daddy.’

‘Well, he’s not here so you can’t,’ I said.

He didn’t move, so I picked him up, ignoring the tears. Then he wriggled and howled as I carried him in, wrestled him into a cubical and undid his trousers. After he had emptied his bladder there was wee all around the seat and on the floor. There was even a little spray on the walls. I cleared up, then coerced him over to the sink so we could both wash our hands.

Outside in the foyer I had to calm him down because he was making too much noise for us to go back into the cinema. Even then, when we went back inside and took our seats, he was still sniffing, but mercifully subdued and quiet enough for us to be able to carry on watching what remained of the film. But just as I had begun to relax and think it might yet all come good still, he began to cry again.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

He shook his head.

‘Shush! People are trying to watch the film. What on earth are you crying for now?’

His response was to cry yet louder. I stood up.

‘Come on,’ I said, but he shook his head. Other people in the cinema had had enough of us and were making their feelings known. I had no choice but to lift him up, put him on my hip and carry the reluctant boy out. As I put him down in the foyer, I felt the wetness of my skirt against my hip, then saw the telltale patch on the crotch of his pants.

‘I can’t believe you’ve wet yourself,’ I said. ‘This is bloody ridiculous!’

‘I’m sorry, Jinx,’ he said, and to his credit he did actually look as though he felt bad. But I was too far gone to be able to respond to his belated remorse.

‘Don’t give me that!’ I shouted. ‘I
know
you did it on purpose!’

Ben didn’t speak to me on the drive home. He stared out of the passenger window all the way so that even when I could bring myself to glance at him from time to time, there was nothing for me to see but the back of his head.

I was angry, not just with him, and the wet pants, and the whole disaster of the trip, but with the entire and complete fiasco of our relationship. I felt like I was always a hair’s breadth away from losing it with him, like I was out of control, like the capacity to hate and hurt was bigger inside me than any capacity to nurture. Instead of loving him, I was messing up his head. He would grow up to be the thing I wanted least for my son: to be like me. But though this was crystal clear, I did not know how to change it. It felt like something needed to happen inside me. But I was not a magician. There was no quick-fix abracadabra available to change me into anybody else.

At the traffic lights by the junction of Amhurst Road and Shacklewell Lane, in a car that pulled up alongside me while we idled waiting for amber, there was a woman with two young kids in the back, and she was pulling faces in the mirror and laughing with her offspring, and they were happy back. Though I couldn’t hear a word of the exchange between them, it was not necessary. It was so obvious, her pleasure in them, in being with them; she was beaming. Her car was full of happy family sounds that I could only imagine. And I was jealous. I wanted what she had for myself.

My fortnightly sessions with Ben were a chore, a series of exasperations that drove me to despair. They always made me feel like I was on a treadmill pounding away without making the slightest iota of progress. And I hated it. Hated it all, the false hope, the wasted energy, the inevitability of failure it presented every time.

He could not get out of the car fast enough when I pulled up outside my house. Still tangled up inside the seat belt, stumbling in his haste, he leapt for freedom the moment I turned the ignition off. Then he ran up the garden path. By the time I caught up with him he had ripped three or four heads off the crocuses planted along the thin bed that ran the length of the path from the gate to the front door.

‘Ben, don’t do that please,’ I said as he started tearing off another. Ignoring me, he yanked it off anyway, adding it to the collection in his other hand.

‘Will you bloody stop!’ I said.

When he looked at me, those enormous eyes were filled with tears. He held out his hand. His voice was tiny. ‘These are for you,’ he said.

And I looked at the small, fresh, squashed bouquet held out to me, and for a second I could have taken his gift and smiled, then cuddled and whispered to my son,
Forgive me. I love you.

But the words that came out of my mouth instead were: ‘Great! Why don’t you kill every single flower you can see?’ And I looked away, into my handbag, searching for the keys as he opened his hand and let them fall, then rubbed his palms together to dry them.