Everything the Winter Coat Kept

The coat was heavier than I remembered. I lifted it off the hook by the front door tonight and the hook nearly came with it. Spring has turned properly this week. The kowhai down the road dropped its last yellow a while ago and now the jasmine has started, that thin sweet smell coming in through the bathroom window. So the winter coat goes in the wash and then up on the shelf until May.

I stood in the hallway holding this big navy thing and I could smell the whole season in the wool. Wet wool, mostly. A bit of woodsmoke from the night my wife borrowed it to walk home from the neighbours because she'd only taken a cardigan.

I laid it on the kitchen bench and started with the right pocket.

A petrol receipt, crumpled to the size of a grape. I flattened it against my palm. July, 9:47pm, eleven litres. I know exactly which night that was. The baby had been crying since six, one of those evenings where nothing worked, not the walking, not the hold where you lay them face down along your forearm like a rugby ball. My wife hadn't slept more than three hours in two days. So I strapped him into the car seat and drove. Around the block twice, then a third time, then I lost count and had to stop for petrol, which is how a man ends up buying eleven litres at a quarter to ten with a sleeping baby in the back and no plan.

When I got back to our street he was out. Mouth open, chest going up and down in that quick way that worries you until you're used to it. I turned the engine off and sat there. Forty minutes, maybe more. Rain on the roof, the windscreen fogging from the inside, and me too scared to open the door in case the click of the latch woke him. I remember thinking it was a strange thing to be, a grown man in a parked car going nowhere, and how sure I was that this was exactly where I was needed.

The left pocket had a sock.

Tiny, grey, little white grip dots on the sole. Only one. I held it up and turned it around as if it might explain itself. I don't remember putting it there. Maybe my wife did, holding the baby in one arm and posting things into whatever opening was nearest. Maybe I did, meaning to carry it upstairs. Its partner never turned up, not in the drawers and not under the couch. I put it on the windowsill above the sink, because these things do come back sometimes, months later, in a place you've already checked ten times.

Then a shopping list on the back of an envelope, my handwriting. Milk, nappies, coriander, call mum. Every item crossed out in thick pen except the last one.

I remember the crossing out, in the car outside the dairy, very pleased with myself. And I did call her, a few days later. It was morning in India and I could hear the pressure cooker going behind her, that steady hiss and whistle I grew up with. She asked if I was eating properly. I said yes. She said I sounded tired and I said yes to that as well. The call lasted eleven minutes. I know because the phone keeps count, which always feels a bit rude, like someone timing your hug.

Three cardamom pods came out next and rolled across the bench. One night I'd scooped a handful from the jar, meaning to put most of them back, and these three went into the coat instead. I cracked one with my thumbnail and the smell filled the kitchen straight away, warm and resinous and impossible to describe to anyone who didn't grow up with it.

My wife came through for a glass of water and said, "What are you cooking?"

"Nothing," I said. "Just going through my pockets."

She looked at the coat laid out like a patient and the little pile beside it, and she didn't ask anything else. She's good at that.

* * *

Mr. Mummu next door has a stone. I found this out in August, in that cold week when the footpaths never dried, because I kept watching him pat his left coat pocket while we talked over the fence. I asked what he kept in there. He took out a smooth grey stone about the size of a quail egg. He has carried it for years, he said. He put it there to remind himself of something very important.

"What was it?" I asked.

"No idea," he said. "Completely forgotten."

I asked why he still carried it, then. Mummu turned it over in his palm, slowly, and gave me a look as if I'd asked why he still had a nose.

"It reminds me I was once a man who wanted to remember something," he said. "That is already quite a lot."

Pockets keep the version of you who was worn out and still meant to do things. Emptying them is a small way of saying hello to him.

* * *

Back to the bench.

A folded paper napkin, the thin kind, with a phone number on it in blue biro. No name. I honestly have no idea whose it is. A builder someone recommended, maybe. A dad from the coffee group I went to once in my wife's place. I held the napkin for a while. Then I put it in the bin. If it mattered, it would have mattered by now. That isn't quite true and I know it, but it's what I decided.

The last two things were a lemon sweet wrapper and a two dollar coin. The wrapper still smelled faintly of lemon when I held it to my nose, that sharp, sugary, not-quite-real lemon. I must have bought a handful from the jar at the chemist's counter for no reason except that I used to love them as a kid and seeing them made me nine years old for a second. The coin was just a coin. It went in the jar by the kettle, where coins go to be forgotten in a more organised way.

So that was the coat. A drive in the rain, one sock, one unfinished list, three seeds, a stranger's number and a sweet.

The sock stayed on the windowsill, standing up a bit, like a small grey flag. The list with "call mum" went on the fridge under the fish magnet that the baby will one day pull off and put straight in his mouth. Everything else went in the bin, the cardamom last. I heard the pods land at the bottom, a tiny sound, like the first drops on a roof before the rain makes up its mind.

The coat went in the machine on the wool cycle, which is probably wrong, but it's what the label says and I'm too tired to argue with a label. I stood watching it turn behind the glass, that heavy dark shape getting heavier and darker. The baby was asleep upstairs. My wife had gone to bed with a book she has been reading since about April.

I made chai and only remembered once it was boiling that I'd just thrown the cardamom away. I drank it anyway, standing at the sink. Plain chai, in spring, in a quiet house.

Outside, a car pulled into a driveway and sat there for a long time with its engine off. I didn't look to see who it was. I just hoped the latch was quiet.