Free A Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvvette Edwards

close.’
    He paused for a moment and lit a cigarette. With a grimace, he swallowed a mouthful from his glass, then took a deep drag and exhaled.
    ‘He call me a fool when I marry Mavis.’ His voice was quieter now, tired. ‘Think that was the only time we nearly come to blows. Said she was easy, I wasn’t the first to fuck her, that she take me and make jacket to give her bastard a name. She never forget that. Never forgived him neither. After we come to England I still use to see him, we was still tight, but he couldn’t visit my yard. Was his fault for true and probably serve him right, but he still hate her for it. Hate her bad.
    ‘Course Mavis tell me all was lie, Berris jealous, the kinda thing she had to say, if you think on it, and I listen to what she have to say, but I study my son when he born, study him hard to see what he have for me. Like you, he favour his mum bad. Never could see me in him ’t’all. Think that was the reason I never send for him, even when we get settle here and we coulda.
    ‘Deep down in my heart, all that time, I never knowed, never knowed for sure…was he mine?’
    ‘Are you telling me all those years you never had a relationship with your son was ’cos of what Berris said?’ I asked.
    The soup was finished. I replaced the spoon in the bowl as he took it, nodding. ‘Yep.’
    ‘So he said one thing and your wife said something completely different and, of the two, you believed him ?’
    ‘You wanted the truth, that’s what you getting.’
    ‘Just so I’m clear, you messed up but it was Berris’s fault?’
    ‘I’m not making excuses…’
    ‘Yes you are! So what that he said it? So what?’
    ‘I did what I did. Can’t turn back the clock. All I’m trying to do is tell it like it was,’ he said.
    He raised his brows, his hands, his shoulders in a shrug, and all at once he looked old. How many lives had Berris trashed in his lifetime, I wondered? How many? And yet Lemon still stood by him, still visited, still had him round for talks on old times. Even though I felt like a bully, like I was beating someone up who was making no effort to defend himself, I couldn’t stop.
    ‘She was your wife.’ To my surprise, my voice was choked. ‘Why couldn’t you just believe her?’
    ‘You think I didn’t want to believe her? You think I never try? Girl, you can’t even begin to imagine my misery, the ways I let her down. What I told you ain’t nothing.’
    ‘What, there’s more?’
    ‘Always more. But I need to get a refill first. You want one?’
    I shook my head. I had been concentrating on eating. The glass of wine he’d brought me was still full.
    ‘Think I better have some soup first; line me stomach a bit.’
    ‘Okay,’ I said, and he went.
    There was a time when I would have been overjoyed to know just how dissipated Lemon’s family life was. Clearly, since then, I had grown up. Now I just felt angry with Lemon, angry he had given Berris free reign to manipulate his thoughts, then done little else other than sit back and accept the resulting unhappiness, like a willing victim patiently poised, awaiting a fatal stab in the back.
    I asked him why he had come to see me and he had started from the beginning, with his childhood, and Berris was there. Berris was at my own beginning too. Everything had begun with him, literally begun from the first moment I laid eyes on him here in this very house. Up until then, my childhood had been spectacularly humdrum. It had chugged along with the monotony of a fairy tale; the odd discomfort here and there swiftly resolved and resulting in a happy-ever-after. It had been solid, unwavering and predictable. Like my friendship with Sam, my best friend from the day I started secondary school and found myself in the formroom sitting beside her. Samantha Adebayo. She was also at the beginning. My life changed on a day that started with Sam, the day we counted virgins and netball practice got cancelled.
    Considering it was the