by Hannah Lowe
His friends sat on the floor of his room, listening to music, sometimes getting stoned. I knew the smell of hash from Charlie White, and then Craig Fox at school had brought some in and we’d smoked it on the shot-put circle at the back of the school field, four of us pretending we’d smoked dope before, hiding our coughs in our stripy Pinners scarves. I hadn’t enjoyed it much.
On the landing outside my brother’s door I would rack my brains for reasons to knock – I’d lost my book and wondered if he’d seen it, or did he know what time our mother would be home. I was Annoying Little Sister, Nosey Little Sister. I’d push open the door to find the room thick with smoke, and the faces of my brother’s friends all turned at once – the twins, Colin, Mickey. I had a crush on them all, and I was suddenly shy, stammering over my words.
One time I came in and saw Solomon Kallakuri sitting cross-legged on the floor with a tin of Red Stripe at his feet, a cigarette in his hand. There were six or seven of them there, a record spinning on the turntable, the gentle thud of Soul II Soul. I was shocked to see Solomon. He was taller, bigger, filling out his green bomber jacket. His hair had grown long and was parted in the middle, like the others. He looked straight at me, but his look said don’t say a word, don’t say a word. Little Solomon playing at being grown. Something in his face had changed – he wasn’t my friend any more.
♣
I had become a thief again, but of a different kind. I can’t recall the first thing I shoplifted. A lipstick from the chemist, was it; a pot of lip balm? It was something to do. Sally Ramwell first suggested it. She was an old hand and never got caught, she said. Every Saturday we went to the shops in Romford and spent an hour or two helping ourselves. Four girls conspicuously loitering in the aisles of Marks and Spencer, fingering the underwear we couldn’t afford, or in the Body Shop, smelling lotions and bubble baths, waiting for the right moment, when the till girl was serving and the security guard had looked the other way, to shove a bottle in my bag. There was a thrill to stealing. My heart hammered hard in my chest when I walked back through the shop doors.
I was at it for months, coming home every weekend with new things I’d hide in my room, never enough of anything to raise suspicion. I didn’t value the things I stole and none of them lasted – clothes fell apart or I lent them out and never cared to get them back. I’d lose the cheap necklaces from Chelsea Girl, the hairbands and hairclips. I remember feeling upset about stealing. I didn’t want to do it, but I couldn’t stop, even when the thrill had gone. What was wrong with me? It occurred to me there was something wrong with both Sam and me, though it manifested itself differently. Where Sam was rebellious and angered by authority, I was sneaky and dishonest. Was it because I came from a home where dishonesty was an organising principle, where we all turned a blind eye to the shady goings-on of my father; was it my own boredom; or was it, as I suspected, just something I did because other kids did, just because I could?
Looking back, I can’t believe we didn’t get caught more quickly, and of course we were caught in the end – myself and Claire Fitzgerald. The others ran out the door when the security guard laid his hand on my shoulder. Upstairs, the manager had us tip out our bags in his small, hot office. They dimmed the lights and stood behind us as we watched the CCTV footage. The delinquent girl in the grainy picture was me, I realised, watching myself slip a box into my carrier bag from the shelf. On the table in front of me were tubes of anti-aging cream and eye cream, nothing I wanted or needed. The manager said the police were on their way and made us write down our phone numbers. Claire had the sense to give a false one, but it didn’t cross my mind. Perhaps I wanted to be found out. When, after half an hour, it was clear the police hadn’t really been called, the manager told us never to come in his shop again and sent us away. When I got home, my mother was ironing in the back room. She didn’t look up. ‘So you got caught,’ she said, running the iron down a shift sleeve. ‘Maybe it’s time to stop, eh?’
My father said nothing about the shoplifting. It was not his place to tell me off. Nor did he say anything to Sam about the smell of dope outside his bedroom door, the late nights and early mornings, Sam’s unruliness. But he’d been quieter anyway since our return from Jamaica. Nothing had come of the talk of going home. I doubted he’d even mentioned it to my mother.
When I see photographs from that time, I’m shocked by the image of a frail man standing in the kitchen, or sitting in an armchair, always smoking, never smiling. He was still taking medicine for high blood pressure; the stomach ulcer had gone, but he looked unwell. Often I’d come home from school to find him sitting in the thin light of the front room, staring at the net curtains, no book in his lap, no newspaper. He went out less often. There were no more trips to Newcastle, but he must have had one big win around then because one evening he announced he was opening a bank account for me. ‘You need to save,’ he said, trying to look wise. ‘I’m going to give you fifty pounds a month.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of notes and peeled some off.
Fifty pounds. This was strangely generous, and I reciprocated with simulated seriousness regarding my financial education. Of course I would manage the money carefully, I promised solemnly, before going to Romford to spend it all on clothes I didn’t even like and a mountain of sweets. I remember thinking I would be rich now, there’d be no temptation to steal with fifty pounds a month. But the following month there was no fifty pounds, or the month after, and my father was back in his armchair, the dog curled in his lap. One afternoon I found him rifling frantically through the living room bin. He pulled out a few dog ends, rolling the charred tobacco in a Rizla and lighting it. ‘I can’t afford tobacco,’ he told me, exhaling a stale gust of smoke with relief. I didn’t want to know. I wanted that fifty pounds – and not just for clothes and sweets. I wanted to live in a world where my father could make me a promise like that and be able to keep it.
♦
In line with my bad behaviour outside of school, my conduct in school worsened. Looking back, I’d like to say I was the architect of an insurgence against the school’s authority, but this imbues my immature pranks with a grandeur they do not warrant. At best I was irreverent, at worst completely puerile. I was rarely acting alone – Emily Bonnyface was my main accomplice. As a twosome we were negative influences on each other, according to our teachers, and, looking back, they were right. When we were banned from sitting together in lessons, lunchtime became our witching hour – we sprinkled paprika and chilli onto the charity cakes we sold in the staff room, stole paintbrushes from the art room, bunked off cross-country running to hide out in the wood behind the school field.
A particular low point in our mischief-making was an incident involving an iced bun, for which we became notorious for a time – and which involved Kim. This was unusual since she was normally well behaved. But one lunchtime in the dining hall she dared me to throw a flat currant bun topped with glutinous pink icing at the school caretaker as he stood on a stepladder, fixing a window. My aim was always poor – hence my place on the second reserve teams for both rounders and hockey. But by some miracle, the pitch of the iced bun that day was perfect – it sailed gracefully through the air on a perfect arc, hitting the caretaker on his left cheek, sticking to the side of his face for a second, then slowly peeling off and dropping to the floor.
Kim, Emily and I were fixated by the spectacle, which seemed to play out in slow motion, the slap of the bun on the ground jolting us back to reality. Witnesses were all around, fellow students and dinner ladies, not to mention the red-faced caretaker, who stared across the room looking outraged. In these circumstances there was only one thing to do – scarper! We scraped back our chairs and hurried from the hall conspicuously, hiding out behind the bins for the rest of the lunch hour to formulate a ‘story’ we swore to stick by, despite its implausibility. We would swear on our lives that Emily had dared me to throw the bun at Kim’s mouth; the throw had gone askance and the bun had hit the caretaker. We were d
esperately sorry. We ran away because we knew we wouldn’t be believed.
It was Friday lunchtime. We anticipated being pulled out of lessons that afternoon. But by the end of the day nothing had happened. Perhaps the incident had not been reported after all. We went our separate ways for the weekend. But on Monday morning, in a manoeuvre reminiscent of a police raid, the three of us were removed from our different lessons at exactly the same time. I knew it was serious when Mr Harrington, our head of year, loomed up through the window of my French class. Little did I know the two deputy heads had gone for Emily and Kim. Like members of a resistance group, we stuck to our story religiously in the ensuing grillings. As I implored Mr Harrington to believe me, his moustache twitching irritably, the time I’d stolen my mum’s meringues came to mind. What was it with sweet things that made me so fraudulent?
When the three of us were brought to the dining room an hour later, the game was over. We were ordered by our respective inquisitors to sit at separate tables in the hall. Mr Harrington handed us each a sheet of graph paper, a pen, a protractor and a compass, and asked us to draw an exact diagram of the events of last Friday lunchtime, mapping our places at the table, the position of the caretaker and the flight of the iced bun. We were not in a position to collaborate. When we had finished, Mr Harrington laid our drawings out and announced the disparity of our diagrams evidenced our duplicity and guilt. Admittedly we had drawn each other in different locations, with wild variations in the positioning of the caretaker. But what all of this demonstrated to me was the pedantic nature of the powers-that-be at Pinners, wasting a valuable morning of teaching on their petty investigation. Sadly, my mother didn’t see it this way when Mr Harrington phoned to say I was suspended for a week and would be readmitted only after a parent–teacher meeting at which my ‘immoral conduct’ and ‘burgeoning delinquency’ would be discussed.
♠
My father was actually seven years younger than Nelson Mandela, who was born in 1918. In April that year, my mother bought us tickets for the Nelson Mandela Tribute Concert in London, to mark Mandela’s release two months earlier. At one point, Mandela backed out of appearing at the concert because bloody Margaret Thatcher, as my mother put it, was still prime minister and supported the apartheid regime. But he changed his mind on the condition the speech he gave would be broadcast unedited on television.
Sam didn’t want to go to the concert so I invited Kim, and we took the Tube to Wembley with my parents, joining the crowd of thousands in the stadium, my father receiving the odd glance by concert-goers who noted his resemblance to Mandela. I’d never been to a concert before, and the scale of this one was huge – hours of performances: Tracy Chapman strumming ‘Freedom’ on her guitar, Simple Minds singing ‘Mandela Day’, and as the sun went down, Anita Baker on stage belting out ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’.
What everyone was waiting for was the appearance of Mandela himself, his face broadcast in close-up on the big screens, very thin but standing proud, smiling and waving as the crowd erupted into cheers that lasted nearly ten minutes. Winnie Mandela and Adelaide Tambo stood behind him on stage, their fists raised in solidarity. We were high up in the stadium, standing in the night air, cheering with the crowd. There was a black South African family behind us, a man and woman, two children the same age as me, dressed in their traditional clothing – bright coloured robes and headdresses. It was clear they were deeply affected by the appearance of Mandela and his speech. He thanked the international community and paid long tribute to Oliver Tambo, the exiled ANC leader who was ill and unable to be there. I kept looking at that family so enraptured by Mandela – I wanted to know their story. When they played the South African national anthem, they sang along, their fists raised. I was stirred by Mandela’s appearance too, the crowd’s reception, the music, to be part of that momentous day. It made me want to live a different sort of life. I was a teenager with teenage concerns, I knew, but even so, my current existence was pretty contemptible. Life in and out of school was infantile and inconsequential, and just a bit grubby.
♥
Suddenly I was tired of Romford, hanging around smoking, hoping boys would talk to us. I stayed home, read more, played the piano more. I was still having lessons with Maisie the punk, but by then I could sight-read well, and, with practice, play most of the music in the front-room cupboard. This housed piles of my mother’s old manuscripts and my grandfather’s piano scores, signed in his scratchy fountain pen.
It was there that I found an anthology of a black American composer, Scott Joplin – railroad labourer turned ragtime impresario at the turn of the century, a solemn portrait of him at his piano on the front cover. Joplin’s music made me sad – his melodies both jaunty and melancholy in turn. They spoke to me of another time and place – the bars and saloons of Memphis and New Orleans at the turn of the century, America reconstructing itself post-slavery – my imaginings constructed from films and books.
I’d spend hours playing Joplin’s pieces in the front room – straddling the left-hand chords of ‘Bethena’ and ‘Maple Leaf Rag’, the tricky runs of ‘Elite Syncopations’. One version of Joplin’s death says he went mad and died from syphilis contracted in a brothel where he was a pianist, but the biography of my anthology told a much greater tragedy: how Joplin’s magnum opus – an opera named Treemonisha – was never published or performed because he was a black man. Faced by the will of a society whose racism was endemic and crushed his creativity, I read that Joplin died in the asylum of ‘a broken heart’.
I was practising his ‘Pineapple Rag’ one day when the phone rang. My parents were in the garden making a bonfire. I answered to Emily Bonnyface’s mother, a woman I’d never properly met, only seen at the school gates parked in her shiny black car, patting her blonde hair in the side mirror. She wore sunglasses no matter the weather.
‘Is that Hannah?’ she asked in a thick Essex accent. ‘Is your mum there?’
‘No,’ I lied. The tone of her voice made my wary.
‘Well,’ she carried on, ‘I want to talk to you. Emily’s been in trouble. We think she’s been stealing.’
I didn’t know what to say. Why was she telling me? ‘I’ve had a long talk with her dad and we’ve decided we don’t want her to see you any more.’ I hadn’t shoplifted for months by then. ‘We’ve decided,’ her mother repeated, as though I had challenged her. She sounded flustered. ‘Is that clear, Hannah? I’ll tell your mum if I have to.’
‘OK,’ I said. She hung up.
After, I wished that she had told my parents because they would have stood up for me. I felt angry and misjudged. But something told me to keep it to myself. I phoned Kim and told her instead.
‘Stupid woman,’ she said. ‘That’s nothing to do with you. But Emily probably told her you came from Ilford and …’ She paused. ‘Well, she probably told her your dad was black. I heard her saying something nasty about it, and her dad would be pissed off if he knew. Sorry, Han.’ Oh God, was that it? How stupid were these people? I felt enraged, but I also didn’t want to talk about it. ‘What’s your art project?’ I asked, changing subject.
Later I lay on my bed thinking. I had another year of Pinners. I was tired of the small-mindedness, the petty prejudices. One more year. I curled up with a book, impatient to leave school behind.
♣
Alan Slade was a strange, gossipy boy, a loner in our class, but not shy, often in trouble with the teachers. He lived with his mother, a fierce presence in his life whom he talked about endlessly. Alan didn’t register on the wavelength of the boys at Pinners, who were more concerned with rugby trials and football, but the girls ribbed Alan constantly – for his small stature, big ears and slight lisp, for his sometimes tatty clothes and unfashionable school bag. In the world of Pinners, taunting and derision were everyday occurrences, but the cruelties of one day were often forgotten the next. Alan had a survivor’s instinct – no matter how harsh our heckling, he came back with quick and spiteful rejoinders.<
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It was Alan who labelled me ‘white wog’ at school – a name that gained widespread use for a time. He shouted it out as we jostled down the corridor after an hour in the French language lab, listening through huge headphones to François booking a hotel room avec douche, Michelle asking directions to le banque.
‘All right, white wog!’ Alan called out, coming up to me, laughing.
Peter Collins was standing next to us. ‘Why’s he calling you that?’ he asked.
‘’Cos her dad’s a wog, but she’s white,’ Alan said matter-of-factly, before I had the chance to speak.
‘Oh yeah,’ Peter said. ‘That’s funny. Funny-ha-ha and funny-peculiar.’
‘No, it’s not funny,’ I said. ‘It’s racist and pathetic.’ But I already knew I’d hear it again.
‘Oh, come on,’ Alan said, pushing his arm through mine. ‘I’m only joking, aren’t I? Can’t you take a joke?’
‘You shouldn’t say things like that,’ I said, but he wasn’t listening. I let him drag me off to the dining hall.
♦
We bunked off school one Thursday afternoon, Alan and I. His mother was at home, so we caught the train to Goodmayes, walking cagily down Ashgrove Road to my house. It was a sunny day. I hoped my father would be out, or asleep, although I could usually rely on his obliviousness – he might not even notice I’d come home.
Alan had cigarettes and we shared one as we leant out of my bedroom window, letting the warm air in. It was a while before I heard Dad’s footsteps on the stairs.
‘Why aren’t you at school, Han?’ He came into the room just as Alan stubbed the cigarette out, flicking the butt from the window sill, standing in the corner looking conspicuous.
‘Got the afternoon off,’ I said, turning back to look out of the window, willing him to leave, but he didn’t move. I turned again. ‘What do you want, Dad?’ I said.
‘I don’t want anything,’ he said, ‘I’m just wondering what you two are up to.’ He’d adopted a sterner demeanour in front of Alan, who stayed silent, looking at the books on my shelf. My father was standing in the middle of the room, looking worn out, his old cardigan draped on his hunched shoulders.
