Cack-Handed

by Gina Yashere

  Forty-eight hours later, a huge moving truck turned up outside the house on Lancaster Road. My mother and her four remaining children loaded up that truck in silence with all the clothes, toys, and whatever possessions we could carry while the step-bastard looked on in dumbfounded shock. When the truck was fully loaded, we all climbed in, and the driver pulled away with all of us looking straight ahead into our new future. Not even Asi turned back to look at her father.

  Years later, I asked Mum why she, such a strong, self-sufficient woman, had stayed with him so long.

  “You young ones can just have babies all over the place, no husband, nothing. In my day, it was shameful. How many men would have taken on a woman with four children already? Heh? Abandoned by not one but two useless men? I took what I could get. He was a good provider.”

  “But he hit you!” I blurted.

  “So what?” she responded. “I have a sharp tongue, and I pushed him too far sometimes!”

  While Nigeria is a multicultural society comprised of hundreds of ethnic groups, each with its own traditional value system, the prevalent belief is that men are the authority figures and women are expected to show due respect for that subordinate position at all times. This is the tradition Mum had been raised under, and although she was headstrong and independent, she still held those beliefs.

  I remember once a friend of the family discussing with my mum how her daughter, a doctor, had complained that her husband had been physically abusive towards her. Mum had responded, “Well, maybe she was rubbing it in his face that she is a doctor. She needs to be more humble and make him feel like a man.” The doctor’s mother had agreed wholeheartedly, and undoubtedly had rushed home to tell her daughter to try harder in her marriage. Mum’s mindset was that the physical violence she suffered was just another facet of marriage and a by-product of her being unable or unwilling to bite her tongue. The straw that finally broke the camel’s back was a combination of the step-bastard’s theft of her money, his threats to her life, and her fear that I would in fact ruin my future by slitting his throat.

  9

  Where You Fall, You Should Know that It Is God Who Pushed You

  After we left Step-Bastard, we moved into temporary accommodations for a couple of weeks. We were basically squeezed into a hotel room, paid for by the council, until a suitable flat or house became available. Mum had everything planned, so we were soon able to move to Crouch End, a wealthy enclave in North London inhabited mainly by actors, filmmakers, and other entertainment industry types. It had originally been an area beloved by students and artists because of its cheap rents, but as is often what happens to neighborhoods made desirable by artist communities, gentrification brought in wealthier buyers.

  Fortunately at that time there was still a good amount of social housing in the area, and Mum was able to successfully apply for a council flat in a small building, Williams Close, tucked behind all the massive, more expensive houses. It was a nice little flat that was part of a block of six apartments, and we were on the ground floor. It had three bedrooms, one of which my mother shared with Asi. The second bedroom was for the boys, and the third was for me! I had my own room! Okay, it could hardly be called a room, as it was a tiny little box that could only fit a single bed. No room for a side table. In fact the bed was so close to the wall that had my feet been any bigger than a size 6 I’d have had to get out of bed sideways. And definitely no wardrobe. My clothes hung in the coat closet in the hallway or were folded in bags under my bed, but I didn’t care. It was my room, a space that I had full ownership of for the first time in my life. And best of all, we were all free of the step-bastard’s oppressive presence.

  Mum, by this time, had secured a little stall to sell her clothes and bags at the famed Ridley Road market. Well, sort of. Technically it wasn’t a stall, and technically Mum wasn’t in the market, but it was as close as Mum could get.

  Ridley Road market was the go-to weekly shopping spot for every Black person I knew. Immigrant mums would go there with their kids in tow, pulling large wheeled trolleys that by the end of the day would be filled with all the meat and vegetables needed to feed their families for the week. It also sold clothes, bags, shoes, and household goods. I had spent many miserable Saturdays dragging Mum’s trolley around that crowded market, trying not to run over people’s feet as I struggled to keep up with her. She would whip through the market, squeezing plantains and taking bites out of random apples to test their ripeness, but God forbid if she turned around with an onion and I wasn’t there to take it from her to put into the trolley. Every market trip took hours, as Mum bargained at every stall. “I will give you two pounds for that chicken! No? Okay, then, I am walking away . . . Last chance!” Sometimes I felt my mum haggled more for sport than necessity. The market was also where Mum caught up with her friends. If she bumped into one of her Nigerian companions, that often had added a good forty minutes to my torture.

  Ridley Road market was where Mum wanted to sell her wares, but getting a stall there was nigh on impossible, unless a stallholder died or you wanted to pay a humongous premium while also giving out sexual favors. My mum, always resourceful, instead found the leaseholders of a dilapidated old warehouse across the street from the market and rented a corner of it, where she could store her stuff and set up a little stall outside. That became her shop, and she was there seven days a week, rain or shine, setting up, selling, chaining everything back together, and doing it all again the next day.

  At that time, my brothers and I complained about being expected to help out at the shop some evenings and weekends, but looking back, I appreciate how hard Mum worked to provide for us on her own while also following her dream of owning her own business. I wanted to take myself off that list of burdens Mum was carrying, and I was still on summer holidays, a month away from starting my new school, so I began working full-time in bakeries, stores, and supermarkets to at least provide for myself. Mum had always said, “You want all these fashionable clothes? Then you pay for them yourself!” Now I actually could. Or so I thought.

  Mum demanded half of my earnings. She expected it. Taiwo, before she had moved out and bought her own house, had handed over half her salary to my mum every month. When she began work at her first full-time job as a trainee auditor, she made the huge error of letting my mother see what she earned, complete with a projection of yearly wage increases as she progressed up the corporate ladder. My mother had demanded half my sister’s income for her “keep,” and she had made a copy of that projection, bringing it out every year to ensure she got a raise that matched my sister’s.

  I was thirteen when Taiwo had started working. I had watched, learned, and vowed to never let that happen to me! When my time came, I told my mum that I was earning half of what I actually was earning, then gave her half of that. If I earned ten pounds on Saturday, I told her I’d made five, and she’d take two pounds fifty. She never saw a pay stub. I tore them all up and threw them in the neighbor’s trash. I always told her I was paid cash in hand.

  Later, when I began working full-time as an engineer, I refused to tell her what my salary was, which infuriated her, but instead I negotiated a mutually agreeable monthly amount for the rent for my bedroom and to help with household expenses. I was happy to contribute, but I was no fool.

  The two years we lived in Williams Close were some of my happiest. We children were a little older—me, sixteen; Dele, fifteen; Sheyi, thirteen; and Asi, ten. Mum felt confident enough to concentrate on building her business and letting us fend for ourselves at home, but she would still cook one pot of stew for the week, from which we kids would feed ourselves when we got home from school.

  In the early to mid ’80s, VCRs were pretty new technology and very expensive to purchase, as were good-quality televisions. Most people rented them from British companies like DER or Rumbelows, which had branches all over UK high streets. Some of these companies also rented VHS movies to go with the VCRs and became one-stop shops for all your at-home ente
rtainment. These companies were eventually put out of business by the availability of cheaper, more reliable equipment, meaning more people could afford to buy instead of rent units, and also by the advent of Blockbuster Video, which had made its way over from the US in 1989, completely obliterating all competition and taking over the UK movie-rental market share. But pre-Blockbuster, Mum’s TV and VCR rental setup included a free VHS movie every day for the first year.

  We kids were in heaven. Every day after school we would congregate in the video shop and take turns picking a film to watch. Horror was a favorite genre. Through that little shop, we watched 365 movies, never missing a day. A Nightmare on Elm Street 1, 2, and 3; Robocop; all the Alien movies; The Entity; The Exorcist. We spent many an evening with the curtains drawn, huddled on the couch, scaring ourselves to death, and we loved it!

  On the weekends, Asi would travel back to Lancaster Road to visit her father, the step-bastard, and on the days my mum didn’t take the boys to the stall with her, we’d sneak out to the local funfair. Whatever money I’d earned that weekend from my supermarket job I would blow on a day of fun for my brothers. One day in particular I spent thirty pounds just on the bumper cars alone. We rode those for several hours at fifty pence a ride until my money ran out. This was the most freedom we’d ever had, and my favorite summer holiday as a student.

  If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

  When summer ended, I began my new life at Camden School for Girls. Although not a private school, this was an upper-middle-class establishment, as was reflected in the subjects some of the girls took, all of which Mum would have classified as “useless”: Latin, History of Art, and Classical Civilizations. Mum picked most of my A-level subjects based on “our” daughter-doctor dream, so she erred towards all the sciences. But I’ve always loved languages, and I wanted to take French. Thankfully, she wasn’t too bothered, as long as the other two subjects (biology and physics) were enough to get me into medical school. It also helped my case when I explained that being a doctor who could speak other languages would be much more lucrative. I had no idea if that was true or not, but it sounded legit, and my mum bought it, which was all that counted.

  With my new name, half a wardrobe of supermarket-wage-purchased clothing, and my finely tuned personality and humor skills, I strutted into this new school and made friends easily. In fact, I became cool. Coming from a distinctly working-class background in comparison to the other sixteen-year-olds, who’d had mainly sheltered and coddled upbringings, my embellished stories of council estates and skinheads had them enthralled. There was only one other girl, Columbine, who came from a similar background to mine, and we secretly giggled at how gullible these girls were to my stories. I became everyone’s cool Black friend.

  Our sixth form of approximately a hundred was made up primarily of white girls along with four first-generation Indian girls, Sian (a biracial girl), and me. Sian’s mother was white and her father Nigerian. We bonded over our shared Nigerian heritage and the fact that both our fathers had been absent from our lives. At one point we became excited by the possibility that we might even have the same father and be long-lost sisters, like in an American sitcom in which she had been raised by her middle-class mother in relative comfort and I had been banished to the council slums of London’s East End.

  I reveled in my new status at Camden Girls and became a social butterfly, flitting easily between different friend groups. I could hang with Columbine and laugh at the posh girls. I could hang with the Indian girls, enjoy our shared brownness, and laugh at the posh girls. But I could also hang with the posh girls while maintaining who I was and not trying to be them. I was aware that to some of them I was a fun token, validating their own coolness by my proximity to them, but I didn’t care. I preferred the “Your hair is so pretty. Can I touch it?” well-meaning racism to people who had the same hair as me abusing me at the drop of a hat. Because I was the cool Black friend. You wouldn’t have believed that we were only in Camden, North London, a mere four and a half miles from Bethnal Green and just three miles from my previous school. But it felt like another world, and I couldn’t have been happier.

  Camden was one of those pretty progressive schools. We sixth formers were considered young adults, and therefore treated as such. We had a smoking room—yup, a room dedicated as a safe space for those sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds who wanted to smoke their cigarettes in peace. That had not been included in the school brochure, as my mum would never have sent me here in a hundred years had she known. She was puritanical in her belief that cigarettes led to weed, which led to crack, heroin, robbing your own parents, prostitution, death, and shame on your family. In that order.

  Mum had often accused me of being an “alcoholic, just like your father,” based on the fact that I loved Coca-Cola. Not a sugar addict, which is what I really was, an addiction actually mirroring her own, but an alcoholic, based on my love of a sugary nonalcoholic drink. For the record, I don’t believe my father was an alcoholic, just a regular guy who liked a beer or five at parties, sometimes got drunk, and found himself facing the wrath of his wife, the lifelong teetotaler. At worst, my father was a lapsed Muslim.

  The smoking room was where all the cool girls hung out, so naturally I began to smoke cigarettes and found myself in there a lot, in between classes. After a month of being a smoker, though, I turned to some of the girls. “This is shit. I’d rather be eating a Snickers bar right now. I’m done!” And I gave up smoking. Just like that. Several girls bet me money that I would be back, but a nicotine addiction never got ahold of me. I wasn’t willing to keep forcing myself till it did, and so I never smoked again. For all my mum’s fears of her offspring falling under the spell of peer pressure and their lives careening off the rails, she should have trusted that she’d raised some pretty strong, self-sufficient kids, who would obviously make mistakes but ultimately lead fruitful lives.

  My two years at Camden were my best school years and set me up to move forward in life with a renewed confidence.

  When the elderly ones in a house travel, the younger ones grow in experience.

  When I began studying French in high school, I became fixated on getting to Paris and conversing with real French people in their actual country. How I would do it with Mum’s overprotectiveness, I didn’t know, but I was going to get there and work things out when I arrived. And you know what? I did it. In retrospect, I’m impressed with how determined I was to take my dreams and destiny into my own hands. As I stood at the Gare du Nord, a huge hub train station serving northern Paris, I thought, I made it! I stood amidst the Parisian hustle and bustle and under the high, ornate ceiling, excited. I was going to walk the Champs-Élysées, see the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. I had enough money to afford one or two McDonald’s meals a day for the week, which was plenty for an excited, skinny teenager, but not much money for anything else.

  I was then seventeen and had figured out a way around my mum’s restrictions to go off to France on my own. How, I hear you ask, when your mum never let you go on any school trips? Let me tell you.

  A-level French promised to be intensive. There would be both written and oral parts of the exam that had to be passed in order to gain the overall qualification. I would have to demonstrate my fluency by being able to hold a proper, high-level conversation in French with a native French-speaking person, and my proficiency would be graded on that.

  At around this time I found out that the council was giving grants to language students to do exchanges at colleges and universities in different countries to take short language courses. These local government grants covered course fees, travel costs, and accommodations for up to a month. I knew someone who was studying German and going off to Berlin to further her language studies, and I was sure that if I went to France, it would put me in a much better position to pass my French exam.

  I went ahead and applied for the grant without telling my mum. I’d figure out later how I was going to get her to ag
ree to let me travel alone to another country when she was the type of Mum who, if she could, would use one of those stargazing telescopes to watch me in school all day. A few weeks later, I got a message that I was approved for a grant to study at a school in Southern France! My excitement was tempered, though, as I had to come up with a plan.

  I decided to tell my mum I had to go on this course in France because it was a compulsory module of the A-level exam, and the entire class had to go, and I’d be failed if I didn’t. Failing would mean I’d have only two A levels when the minimum requirement to get into university was three. The word “fail” is like Kryptonite to Nigerian parents, and I swear I could see my mother physically shrink at the word. I added that all the expenses for this trip would be covered by the council so she wouldn’t have to pay any money, which was helpful at the time, because although we weren’t dirt poor, Mum was still struggling. I also told her that I’d be living at this university (which was true) and I’d be going there with my teacher and all the other students (not true) so I’d be safe. And would you Adam and Eve it (Cockney slang for “believe it”), she agreed to let me go! On the condition that I called collect every other day and sent postcards (remember those?).

  Woo-hoo! But also . . . Shit! As this now led to the next hurdle in my escape-to-France plan. I knew for a fact that, as her first child to travel not only alone but also to another country, she would definitely come to see me off at the station. How was I going to pull this off? I concocted a plan as close to perfect as I could get. I persuaded a bunch of my Camden School friends, about twelve of them, to meet me at the train station, carrying suitcases, as if we were all heading off on this school trip to France together.

  Luckily for me, some of them were actually going off on their own trips to other countries anyway, and the rest were just down for the fun of taking part in this ruse. I prepped them all with the same script, for when my mum asked any questions. We were all going to take the same course in France, and the teachers were there already, meeting us when we arrived. We would be chaperoned for the entire month, and we’d live in an all-girls dormitory. All my friends, God love them, turned up and acted convincingly. I waved my mum goodbye and got on the train with my friends, who then all exited at the next stop to either continue their own respective journeys or go back home with their empty suitcases, leaving me to adventure onwards.