I tear up the stairs and knock on the door to the box room. I press my ear against the wood. No response. I knock again. Silence. Agnes is very light on her feet and can slip down the stairs and through our front door without being heard; she could be anywhere. I envy her freedom. She may be out eating ice-cream or drinking Pepsi in a café – or, for all we know, she’s smoking fags in the bus shelter.
Or perhaps she’s gone round to Aunty Wendy’s for one of her showers. Agnes goes there nearly every day now because Nanny finds it impossible to let anyone touch her bathroom unless she’s right in there, supervising them. Agnes demands privacy and claims she needs to wash her body every day. She calls the shower a ‘bath’ and she pronounces it ‘batt’. It’s like a ritual. She uses a special bundle of beige fibrous twigs that Mummy Elizabeth gives her, to clean her skin.
‘Aggy’s not in there, Nanny!’ I shout from the landing.
The phone rings downstairs and I tiptoe down to eavesdrop. I hear Nanny speaking in her special phone voice. The very posh voice where it sounds almost like she’s singing; or reading the Nine O’ Clock News.
‘Oh, but Lizzy!’ sings Nanny. ‘My Wendy was planning on taking Neety to the Isle of Wight this weekend.’
I am horrified to hear that it’s Mummy Elizabeth. I feel my familiar world collapsing in on me.
‘Nin! It’s your mother on the telephone! Neety – it’s for yoo-hoo!’
Nanny opens the sitting-room door, which nearly smacks me in the face.
‘Good God,’ says Nanny. ‘You almost made me jump out of my skin. What are you hiding behind the door for, my little pickanniny?’
‘I’m not speaking to her,’ I whisper, afraid Mummy Elizabeth might hear me and reach through the phone and get me.
Nanny had told me that my mother was in Africa again. One of her relatives had died. She didn’t tell me which one. It’s been months and months since I’ve seen my mother and I’ve started pretending she doesn’t exist. I told my friend Becky at school that my mother died, that I’m an orphan.
‘Do I have to speak to her, Nanny?’
‘Neety, you know you have to speak to your mother. Now stop being silly and take this phone.’
Nanny wipes our phone with kitchen towel smothered with Jif, leaving a powdery residue on the receiver. Gramps is in his wheelchair with his eyes closed. I wish I was him. No one forces him to speak to people he hates on the phone.
‘NITTY? Is that you, Nitty?’ screams Mummy Elizabeth.
Who on earth does she think it is? Of course it’s me. Hearing my mother’s heavily accented voice fills me with dread. I don’t want this weird, unkind, loud, constantly disappearing woman to be my mother. I feel pinpricks of tears forming behind my eyes.
‘It’s me,’ I force myself to say.
‘Nitty!’
‘Yes, mother?’
‘Nitty, darling, it’s your mummy!’
Does she think I’m three years old or something?
‘I’m back in London, Nitty.’
I hate being called Nitty. Why can’t she pronounce it Neety, the way everyone else does? Nitty just makes me think of the nit comb at school and the scalding humiliation I feel when Mrs West, the school nurse, calls my hair ‘woolly’ and complains that she can’t get the nit comb through ‘hair like this’.
‘How are you, darling?’
‘I’m fine, thank you.’ Nanny’s taught me to always say that when someone asks. Regardless of whether I’m fine or not.
Nanny nods now, showing me I’ve said the right thing. She’s standing next to me, rubbing her hands together again and again.
‘Tell your mother you’ve been ill with a nasty cold and a sore throat,’ Nanny instructs.
‘I’ve been ill with a nasty cold and throat,’ I mumble.
‘Oh, sorry, darling! Is your throat still painin’ you?’
‘No.’
‘Tell her it was probably the change in the weather that did it,’ says Nanny.
‘It was the change in the weather that gave me the cold.’ I say dutifully.
‘Tell your mother you’ve nearly grown out of your school uniform.’
‘Tell Nanny to stop telling you what to say,’ says Mummy Elizabeth. ‘Tell Nanny to just shut up.’ She pronounces this ‘shot up’.
‘I can’t. I’m not allowed.’
‘What? Hold on, OK. Your aunty wants to talk to you.’
‘Anita!’ screeches this nameless aunty. ‘Do you know who this is?’
‘No.’
‘This is your Aunty Onyi!’
‘Wow! Hi, Aunty Onyi.’
I had feared Aunty Onyi, my mother’s baby sister, was the relative who’d apparently died in Nigeria last year. Aunty Onyi’s the only coloured grown-up I’ve ever met who I liked. She is giggly, has an American accent and two-inch-long red nails.
‘Anita, we’re having a party tonight and I’d like you to come,’ says Aunty Onyi. ‘We’re celebrating my graduation.’
My mother comes back on the phone. ‘We’ll come and pick you up later, Nitty.’
‘What does graduation mean, mother?’ I ask.
I hear the paper boy drop our Daily Mirror through the letterbox. Judy barks loudly.
‘What is that sound?’ says my mother. ‘It sounds like a dog barking.’
‘It’s Judy.’
I see Nanny shaking her head and mouthing the word ‘no’.
‘Give me Nanny,’ says my mother.
I hand Nanny the receiver.
‘It’s not our dog,’ Nanny says, smirking. ‘We’re just looking after it, for our next-door neighbours. They’re . . . on holiday. All right, I’ll put Neety back on.’
‘Stupid white people, and these disgusting animals crawling everywhere,’ moans Mother.
‘Sorry, Mother.’
‘It is not your fault, darling. Now, Nitty. Tell me, how is Agnes?’
I shrug.
‘Are you deaf ?’ my mother shouts. ‘I asked you, “how is Agnes?” Give me Nanny again.’
Nanny tells Mother that Aggy’s gone out. Then she says, ‘All right. Yes, all right. Yes, we’ll be expecting you.’
Nanny puts the phone down and hurries into the kitchen to wash her hands. I follow her and hold out my own hands obediently so that she can massage a squirt of Fairy liquid into them and then rinse the germs from the phone safely down the plughole.
‘Your mother told me she wants our Judy destroyed. Arrogant bloody bitch. Thinks she can tell me what to do in my own house.’
I feel light-headed with fear at the thought of my mother breaking into our house in the night and killing Judy. ‘Can I have a Wagon Wheel please Nanny?’ I turn to food, the way I always do when I am afraid.
‘Help yourself to a bit of kitchen towel and use it to open the cabinet and take one. Make sure you don’t get your dirty little mitts all over the inside of my cabinet, Nin, won’t you?’
When I amble back into the kitchen having eaten three Wagon Wheels, Nanny is still washing her hands and she looks deep in thought. I open the kitchen bin to toss in the contaminated piece of kitchen towel.
‘Nin, don’t you dare touch the lid of that bin with your hands!’
‘Are we going to be allowed to keep Judy?’ My voice comes out high and thin like Donna Summers’.
‘I don’t know, Nin. I don’t know.’
Nanny sends me to my room to write a short story to read out to her after our tea. ‘You know how I love to hear your stories,’ she says.
I will write a story about my mother, designed to make Nanny and Gramps laugh – or shudder.
I sit at my dressing table with a blank writing pad in front of me, staring at my reflection in the three-way mirror. I’m shocked once again at how ugly I look. My lips are as fat as satsuma slices and my nose so flat it looks like I got hit with a hammer.
I look away in disgust and gaze instead at the state of my room. Nanny’s going to go spare when she sees it. She boasts constantly about how neat a
nd tidy I am. My shiny pink eiderdown is draped across the floor, where I left it after I used it earlier as a cloak when I dressed up and pretended to be a queen. There are piles of books all around my bed. 101 Dalmations. James and the Giant Peach. A Collins Gem dictionary. Nanny’s BT phone book. Little Red Riding Hood. Grimm’s Illustrated Fairy Tales.
‘Once upon a time . . .’ I write in my exercise book. ‘There was a lady called Lizzy who was . . .’
Who was what? I don’t know anything much about my mother, do I?
I close my eyes and think of all the stories inside my huge stash of overdue library books. I picture my mother as Cruella de Vil and I see her parading into our sitting room, lips shining with the blood of freshly killed cairn terrier puppies.
And then I hear a whoosh of crackly music, coming from the box room.
I sprint along the hall and rap on the door again and again. No answer. I turn the handle and peer in to the semi-darkness of an un-aired room. There’s a smell of singed hair and Charlie perfume.
‘Excuse me, madam,’ I say, copying words I’ve heard Nanny use. ‘But would you mind terribly turning this racket down? You’re ruining my short story.’
‘Come here, you cheeky little monkey,’ says Agnes. She drags me by the arm further into the darkness. Her curtains are shut as usual, just as they are all day and all night.
‘Why did you pretend to not be in just now?’ I say.
Agnes ignores my question and sits me down on the bed and stands in front of me, hands on hips. She’s wearing a white polo neck and bell-bottom jeans that make her thighs look massive. Her hair is in the umbrella style. She flips a 7-inch on to her dusty jumble-sale record player and a man begins singing ‘Love Me Tender’ in a horrid slow-motion voice and she begins to dance, slowly swaying her round hips and slim shoulders. She clicks her fingers right in my face and laughs.
We don’t know exactly how old Agnes really is (Mummy Elizabeth’s given us two completely different years of birth for her) but she’s definitely in her teens and should be studying hard for her CSEs. Instead she puts all her energy into disco dancing and has become the most accomplished dancer in the whole of Fernmere.
I’d love Agnes to teach me to disco dance, but even if she wanted to, there’s no room for two of us to dance at the same time in the box room. My own bedroom’s big enough for us to practise in together but Agnes’s not allowed in my room. Nanny says she’s got orders from Mummy Elizabeth that too much ‘mixing’ with Agnes is banned because it might taint the way I speak and make me sound African. After all, what would be the point of giving your daughter the advantage of speaking and acting white if only to have it all undermined and Africanised? Later my mother will claim it was Nanny who had banned Agnes from my bedroom for fear of me becoming ‘a full-blown African’.
There’s a new poster on Agnes’s wall, above her bed.
‘Who’s that in the poster?’
‘David Essex, you spac.’
‘Who’s he?’
Agnes gives me her you-have-to-be-kidding look.
‘What have you been doing in here all day?’ I say.
‘Today is a terrible day-O,’ Agnes says.
‘How come? Is it because Mother’s coming?’
‘Who told you she’s finally bothering to come down? Nanny?’
I nod. Agnes grimaces and moves about her tiny room impatiently, like a caged lion. ‘What’s wrong with your hair?’ she asks suddenly. ‘You look like a hedgehog. You look like you’ve had an electric shock.’
‘No I don’t.’
‘You bloomin’ do.’
‘Agnes. Can I ask you a question?’
‘Of course.’
‘Is our mother really our mother?’
‘Of course she is. How can you ask me that? You look just like her.’
‘I do not!’
‘You do. You should be proud. She’s pretty.’
‘She’s disgusting,’ I say. ‘Agnes, if we’re really sisters, then how come we haven’t got the same dad?’
‘Because I’ve got my own dad. You’ve got your own dad.’
I’ve never owned any picture of my dad. If he’s real, if I really have a dad, how come I’ve never heard his voice or got a postcard from him? I suspect my dad, whoever he is, dropped dead years ago and that nobody’s telling me about it because they think I’m too young to know.
It’s all right for Agnes. She’s got a dad back in Nigeria. Her dad’s name is Sunday, I think. She looks like him. I’ve seen a picture of him in her room. He’s got a massive nose, like her.
‘What has got into you today?’ says Agnes. ‘Leave me with this nonsense. I’m grievin’ today, isn’t it?’
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘The King died today.’
‘What king?’
‘Elvis. He was only the greatest musician of all time. Sad, innit?’
‘Nope. It’s not sad.’
‘You little devil.’
Agnes playfully pulls my hair. Almost certainly some of my hair will snap off in her hand. I have unbelievably terrible hair. It’s tough enough to break most combs that have ever been used on it, but at the same time loads of my hair breaks off every time you try to comb it.
‘Come here,’ says Agnes. ‘Let’s see if we can do the umbrella style on you before our mother arrives.’
The umbrella style is Afro hair made smooth as silk with a hot comb then curled in to an exaggerated flip using curling tongs. Agnes plugs in her curling tong and rubs a big turquoise dollop of Ultra Sheen into my scalp and sprays Sta Sof Fro into my hair – and eyes.
It’s teatime. Nanny sits opposite me, watching me eat a banana and sugar sandwich made with bread as white and soft as cotton wool. My lips are covered with sugar and butter.
The bright white kitchen table is set just for me. Nanny’s got no appetite because she’s sad I’m leaving her for the weekend. Agnes has gone to her job at the nursing home where she spends the evening wiping old people’s bums.
Earlier, I heard Nanny tell Mummy Elizabeth that Agnes had to leave for work at six.
‘I’ll be there by five thirty at the latest,’ my mother said.
It is now half past seven.
‘What do you think my mother will be like now?’ I say.
‘Adults don’t change, darling. That woman will still be tall and ever so high-faluting, I would think.’
‘Do you think she’ll be nice this time?’
‘How would I know, darling?’
Nanny covers my hand with hers. There are little bits of dry skin flaking off her hand like white confetti.
‘I know you don’t want to go to your mum, but it’s only for the weekend. You know there’s nothing I can do to stop her making you go up to London with her. She’s your mother.’
‘I know, Nanny. I love you.’
‘And I love you too, darling. You know that, don’t you, darling?’
Judy begins barking. There is the sound of a cuckoo hooting at the front door. The cuckoo is Aunty Wendy who makes that noise every time she comes round. To let us know it’s her before she nudges our front door open.
‘All right, Mum?’ she says, sitting down at the table, stretching out her toes. ‘All right, Neet?’
Aunty Wendy’s carrying a handbag my mother brought her from Africa last year. It’s made from a lizard’s skin. She’s also wearing the shoes she normally saves for very special occasions: gold flip-flops she got from Woolworth’s in Chichester.
‘You hear anything back yet from your letter to little Effy?’ says Nanny.
‘Not a thing. Been ringing and ringing her mother’s number as well from the phone box. No one ever answers,’ says Aunty Wendy.
I feel angry at once on so many levels: because Aunty Wendy has done herself up just for Mummy Elizabeth, and acts like my mother’s a visiting dignitary. And with Effy, for leaving me, even though I know she had no choice in the matter. I don’t understand why it’s taking her so long to find
her way back.
‘Is this it then, for my tea?’ I snap, hoping that I sound every bit as rude as Uncle Mick. That’ll give Nanny and Aunty Wendy something to think about. ‘Is this all I’m getting?’
‘Are you gonna let her get away with talking to you like that, Mum?’ says Aunty Wendy.
We’re interrupted by the soft gurgle of my mother’s car outside our open sitting-room window, then the jingle of car keys. I have not forgotten the sound the leather soles of my mother’s Italian shoes make as they scuff against the concrete of our garden path. Today, as usual, there are also other footsteps approaching our house too; the scrape, scrape of high heels and a solid, flat-footed plod.
Suddenly I’m almost desperate to see my mother and for her to see me. Since she last met me I’ve grown a lot taller and I won an award for one of my poems at school. My hair, though still awful, has grown longer too, and thanks to Agnes it is stiff and shining. I am eager for Mummy Elizabeth to be forced to swallow her own words and admit that I’m not that dull, I’m not as boring as she’s made out.
Nanny and Wendy rise from their chairs and stand at attention.
Pathetic! I think. Grown-ups actually straighten their backs and speak more slowly and crisply whenever Mummy Elizabeth is in close proximity. Everyone seems afraid of my mother, even her own sisters. Even me. Especially me. I suck in my tummy, hold my breath, pull my shoulders back. If only I had the courage to stick out my tongue at her and show her two fingers.
‘The door’s open!’ says Nanny.
My mother has proudly described herself to me before as ‘anti-social’. Hardly. Even if she is rude all the time to almost all people, she always has friends and family members swarming around her with smiling faces and terrified eyes.
Mummy Elizabeth advances into our kitchen, closely followed by a very round plump baby-faced lady and a very thin male stranger. She is wearing black sunglasses and a white suit covered in tiny navy blue polka dots. My mother never, ever, wears the African clothes you might expect her to wear. She once told me ‘African garb’ is for people who are ‘primitive and unsophisticated’. My mother’s clothes are made on the Continent, by white people. But the plump lady and the thin man are done up in African gear, which swishes crisply as they move; all of it brightly coloured, like sweet wrappers.
Precious Page 4
