Winter Coat

 The day she gave her last coat away to charity was the first day that the doubts wiggled in her stomach like worms. It was a warm day – a day on which she had no need for a winter sheepskin coat, even if she hadn’t been moving to Namibia. Spring had arrived at last and the hanging baskets that lined the river on her way back home were in full bloom – good job, they’d paid enough in council taxes in the two years they’d lived in their cosy but modern flat.

Winter had taken its time this year, as though Jack Frost was mocking them – So, this is why you wanted to go away, hey? – but all the while knowing that this crisp white winter (the first since she was a teenager and certainly the first – and now the last? – in her married life) would only make her long to stay.

On her way out to the charity shop she had bounced down the high street, playfully opting not to cross the busy road at the pelican crossing but instead hopping in and out of the stream of cars. She had something of the spring lamb about her; even her hair was fluffy after she had attacked it, unusually, with the hairdryer. She had taken time over her grooming that morning, like a cat who licks herself on a windowsill full of spring sun; she was making herself smooth, preparing for the new start.

Yes, going out had been quite different to now, coming back. Going out she had not thought so much of the coat that fit her shoulders so perfectly – moulded to her from four winters’ wear – rather she had thought of the Goodbye party she still had to host, of what to cook, of which of her friends might get on with which of his, although she realised with a smile that by now their friends knew one another: their lives had merged. Now, coming back, she was very aware of the coat, or rather of its absence. She felt exposed and was sure that the builders she passed working on the latest celebrity restaurant were staring at her bare shoulders beneath the unsuitable spaghetti straps, even though builders in this area of London rarely stared, let alone cat-called or whistled. It was the sort of area where even builders were middle class – most of them had come over fro Eastern Europe where they held degrees. See, there are plenty of people who leave their countries, she told herself, stop being so precious. Besides, she would only be a ten hour flight away. The world was small.

But that was where the sadness began. She had met Axel, her husband, not in London (her home town) or Berlin (his) but in Austria, on a ski-ing holiday she had struggled to enjoy almost as much as she struggled to manoeuvre the wide, beginner pair of skis into a position which wouldn’t send her ass over tits downhill. In the end though she was thankful to her clumsiness on skies, for it was on one of the occasions that she had fallen ass over tits that she quite literally bumped into Axel. Axel, the ski-instructor with the dark coiffure so neatly swept into a side-parting that she would have laughed at him were she not so instantly in love with him (Later, when they had been married a year, she read in the Sunday supplement in bed one weekend that people are prone to fall in love with individuals who look after them when they are in a life threatening situation, but she was enjoying the whiskey-laced marmelade on her toast and failed to make any connection to her own life). Axel, the Swiss-German who lived ‘off-season’ in Berlin as a graphic designer. Axel who when he spoke sounded like he was coughing his lungs up, which made her laugh at first. Axel, who could turn his hand to anything, unlike she, who on that miserable day on the black run way over Interlaken which she should never have been on in the first place, reached out his hand to her.

When they had first met, each had been impressed and excited by the other’s country. She, for her part, had invested in a potted history of Britain’s kings and queens which she kept by the toilet and dipped into every day at 7.50a.m., 10 minutes before she had to leave for work, when inevitably her bowels started to move. When he had come to London, just two weeks after the end of ‘the season’, she had taken him to The Tower of London, Hampton Court, just about anywhere she could think of where she could show off her new-found knowledge. It had been early summer, June, by the time things had work had eased up enough to allow her a long weekend in Berlin. She hadn’t worn the coat then. It was hot and they spent most of their time getting drunk in parks. Later on, back on the fourteenth floor of her office near Liverpool Street , wearing spaghetti straps in an effort to stave off sweltering behind glass, she worried that they had drunk too much. She had happy but vague memories of the weekend, but if they were to break up she wanted more than that. And, she started to reflect – letting the uncorrected words from the pages she was supposed to be editing glare angrily at her from the computer screen – everyone in Berlin seemed so young, even him, Axel. As though they hadn’t a care in the world. As though everyone could, if they wanted to, take the winter off to ski. They scorned ‘normal’ people, these Berliners, she thought. But then Axel came to visit her again and declared that he was thinking of moving to London, that it was time for a new phase, and she forgot these early criticisms and in October had a great time with him not in Berlin but in Munich, at Oktoberfest.

He moved to London in November, just in time for Bonfire Night so that she had the opportunity to regale him with all that she’d learnt about the Stuarts and Guy Fawkes failed republican plot. He’d liked that; he’d laughed at her triumph in telling the story and accused her, fondly she thought, of being a monarchist.

That first winter, his arm looped through the arm of her sheepskin coat, she showed him parts of the city she had never seen before. They stumbled across the flat they’d lived in since and even though both of them agreed it ‘wasn’t what they were looking for’ it somehow was, and the price was right and it was very practical.

By January, when she met up with her girlfriends in her now ex-local pub, she had trouble answering their questions about her former ambitions and when they actually said that, ‘your former ambitions’, all she could do was laugh inwardly at the Germanic way in which Axel often said, ‘in former times’ It was a joke she could share with no one; not Axel and certainly not with her friends.

That February, one year after she had crashed into him only a few metres from the start of an Austrian black ski-run, Axel asked her to marry him. Neither of them had, they confessed, considered themselves the marrying type, but both agreed that their different nationalities complicated things, EU or no EU.

Her parents were not overjoyed. She had had to ask her father to stop referring to Axel as ‘your Kraut’ and her normally shopaholic mother appeared amazingly reluctant to even look at wedding dresses. So the wedding had been held in Switzerland – no, not to spite them, she insisted to herself, but because the scenery was better. They had drunk schnapps after the champagne for the toasts – chasers, they had called them – and she had got quite sleepy and sick. It reminded her of their first weekend in Berlin.

Then it was back to London and London life: his graphic design, her editing. Jobs which, they both excitedly concurred, they could do anywhere.

Yes, when she had met him the world had not seemed small at all; it had seemed dizzying! A place of deserts and icy ravines, of glaciers and rocky overhangs, of fish brighter than all the colours in the rainbow and with him, Axel, she had someone to explore all this with. Axel too was full of plans. Every time he turned away from his Apple computer screen he had a new plan. Then he’d turn back to the computer and e-mail the plan to her at work. She loved these plans. She boasted of them to her colleague, Anne, and printed them off, threatening to make a book out of them one day: ‘One hundred places to visit with your partner before you divorce’. If asked by her girlfriends in the pub where her particular brand of wanderlust had sprung from, she – who had skied for the first time at 27 and whose most exotic adventure had been snorkelling in the Florida Keys after a trip to Disneyworld – had just laughed. She had become very good at laughing; she considered that it was feminine and suited her.

She had given Axel her consent to go ahead and lay plans. They were going to do charitable work in Africa. It didn’t matter that they had no relevant experience, ever her father had said as much. Or rather, he had said, ‘There are plenty of failed states in Africa. Pick your worthy cause! What will it be? Orphans? Aids? Disability?’ She had laughed and Axel had nibbled his lip seriously and said, ‘It should not be anything medical.’

It had been easy enough to register as a charity and set up a board of trustees. She had typed up their objectives and their registered charity certificate had been promptly delivered and she had framed it and asked Axel to nail it to the wall of their Chelsea flat. But Axel had never got round to it and the certificate lay face down on top of a bookcase that housed the book on the kings and queens of England (amongst others) which had lost its place by the toilet to ’101 Handy Household Hints’.

There had been another year, their second year of marriage, between the registered charity certificate arriving and their packing now, for Namibia. It had gone quickly and now here she was, on the brink of thirty, coatless in March, about to move continents, ready or not for a new life.

Namibia was supposed to be a neutral choice, a country neither of them had set toe in before. But Axel had ‘found’ some contacts there, cousins twice removed, German descendants who ran a housing project outside Windhoek. At first she had been cautious; she wasn’t sure what a housing project was, but then it turned out that the cousins twice removed (‘as much yours as mine’, said Axel) weren’t sure either and that there was therefore plenty of scope for her and Axel to put their stamp on the project. She devised to run a library scheme and had already started collecting books form her London friends, books which now lay, deadweights, in cardboard boxes in her wardrobe where the winter clothes used to be. Soon the poor, illiterate Namibians would be able to lose themselves in Nazi detective novels and romances set in Skiathos as well as urban dystopias and the odd pastoral classic, her friends’ last remnants of their student days.

He was going to run outdoors holidays, the profits of which would be ploughed back into the ‘project’. He was wild with ideas for it. He e-mailed them now to her in her last days at work to replace the earlier travel plans. But these she didn’t share with Anne, nor did she print them out. She simply shifted them to a file named ‘Axel’ and wondered if a time would ever come when the two of them were not making what the Germans called, ‘future plans’.

She was nearly back at the flat now. They had already found a tenant to take over their lease as soon as they left so that it wouldn’t matter that they were breaking their twelve month contract. The new tenant was Hannah, a tall, dark girl, half Jamaican or something (everyone Axel knew was half-something, except her) and recently arrived in London from Berlin.

He wouldn’t be working when she got in, of that she was sure. These days he was too excited to work. He’d be handwriting plans that he’d blue-tac to the walls, plans they’d have to take down in only two days’ time when they’d lock the door of their flat for the last time.

It was as she reached the bottom of their apartment building that she really became aware of the worms in her stomach. Before her wedding her unmarried friends had asked her, ‘Do you have butterflies?’ But she hadn’t. And she hadn’t now; these were worms. Worms which she sensed – with that sense women have and try their best to resist – would grow longer in Namibia, feeding off the tropics and off other things.

She barely wanted to eat ever again but there was still the food to prepare for the Goodbye Party that night. She’d have a shot of vodka before she started cooking to steel herself. Berlin vodka. Then it would be once again like that first time in Berlin, which after all was summer, and she would remember that night, once in Namibia, as a bleary haze – Axel greeting guests at the door and hugging people other than herself and the image in the back of her mind all night of the shadows of boxes in the space in her wardrobe where her winter coat used to be.