‘Precious!’ says Aunty Onyi, pinching my cheek and moving it from side to side.
‘Precious Anita!’ says Aunty Adaeze.
Why do my aunties get so excited just from saying my name?
‘Anita, you’re so tall! You look just like your mother, eh?’
‘Do I, Aunty?’
‘You have your mother’s stature.’
‘What’s a stature?’
Aunty Onyi laughs and then says, again, ‘Precious Anita!’
‘Where’s the picture?’ says Aunty Adaeze
‘Go and get the picture,’ says Aunty Onyi
My mother slips into her bedroom and comes back holding a photograph in a gold frame, a photograph that she has shown me before. It’s of a girl with long, dusty-looking brown legs, in a very short white skirt and a white jacket so tight that it looks like her chest will explode. It is my mother as a girl. When she still lived in Africa.
‘See?’ says Aunty Onyi. ‘Your mother was modelling!’
I look at my mother’s image and my eyes linger on her hair, which is straight and shiny and hangs almost to her waist in the photo.
‘That was a wig,’ says Aunty Adaeze.
My mother sucks her teeth and makes no comment.
In the picture, my mother is pouting, just like she is now. I can’t see whether she had the gap between her teeth back then, or not. This must have been her when she was working for the Bank of America. I’m not surprised that a country as glamorous as America would hire somebody like her to represent their bank.
My mother has brought me a new outfit which she hands to me in an Army & Navy carrier bag. The outfit has that new clothes smell: a slight undercurrent of chemicals behind the fresh fabric. I wriggle into it while standing behind my mother, looking over her head into the huge gold mirror on her dressing table. I’m astonished and excited my mother has bought me new gear, but I don’t think she realised how much I’ve grown. My new bell-bottom jeans don’t reach anywhere near my ankles and the pale-pink and shocking-pink striped T-shirt ends above my belly button.
But Mummy Elizabeth doesn’t appear to notice there’s a problem.
‘Turn around,’ she says. ‘Turn back around. It suits you, Nitty!’
She is sitting at her dressing table, flicking a toothpick in between the teeth at the back of her mouth. Tossing the toothpick into the bin, she takes a gulp from a glass with a slice of lemon floating in it.
‘Mama,’ I say hesitantly.
I want to ask her a question but I do not know how to phrase it. I want to ask why sometimes she slaps me and other times she acts like she loves me. And I want to know what I can do to make her always love me and never want to slap me anymore.
‘Yes?’
‘I was just wondering . . .’
‘What?’
‘If you like me.’
She giggles.
‘Strange, strange child,’ my mother says, smiling at my reflection. ‘There’s a juicy fruit lip gloss I bought for you in the bathroom. You can find it in the cabinet above the basin.’
I take that as a ‘yes’ and skip off to the bathroom.
While I’m smearing sweet-tasting grease over my lips and looking in the mirror for a gap between my own front teeth, my mother’s friend Aunty Patience rushes into the bathroom unties the top of her halter-neck flared jumpsuit and peels it down past her thighs. I watch her in the mirror.
‘Hey baby,’ she says. ‘Ooh, I am dying to pee!’
She pulls down her knickers. I glance, horrified, at the forest of black hair growing between her legs and she watches me in the mirror and laughs as I look. I am disgusted. I knew that men had tufts of wiry hair growing around their privates but I didn’t know that women did too.
‘Never seen a grown woman naked before?’ she says, sitting on the loo, a cigarette in her hand, still laughing. ‘Eddie’s here. You two can hang out.’
Aunty Patience’s son, Eddie is stretched out on the bed like a cat in the sun, on top of dozens of leather jackets and fur coats and colourful handbags and shawls. Eddie’s skin’s the colour of milky tea. His big eyes are the green of unripe strawberries. His Afro is bigger than Michael Jackson’s. We’ve never met before but we’re shut into a room together.
Mummy Elizabeth doesn’t like kids running round, getting under grown-ups’ feet, getting up to no good and spoiling grown-ups’ parties. So she tends to shut me in the spare room, along with the coats and handbags. Even when I’m all alone, I don’t mind at all. In fact, I like being told to stay in a room, where I can stand with my ear pressed against the door, eavesdropping, memorising adults’ conversations, searching their handbags.
But today I am not all alone.
I’m all but ignoring the boy here with me though because I feel too shy to make eye contact. I am sitting at a gold-and-cream dressing table with my face so close to a small colour TV that I’m afraid I might end up blind. I pick up an already opened glass bottle, filled with what looks like water. There’s a dead fly floating on its back inside the bottle. I know that it might contain booze and although I’ve never dared drink booze before, I am willing to swig it now in order to impress this Eddie whose eyes I can feel on me.
‘I’m not afraid of no fly,’ says Eddie. ‘Give it here. I’ll drink it.’
His voice is low-toned and he lays his words out slooow, like he doesn’t give a shit whether or not you’re going to agree with anything he says.
‘Go on, then,’ I say, offering him the bottle.
‘I was only joking,’ says Eddie. ‘Come over here.’ He pats a space next to him on the bed, on top of a cream fur coat.
We lay side by side in silence, watching telly with the volume turned off. It’s this programme called The Fosters and I suppose there’s no need for words. We just drink in the mesmerising sight of so many faces like ours, brown faces, on the TV.
After a bit, Eddie says, ‘Do you like my jacket? It cost my dad two hundred quid.’
He’s wearing a chocolate-brown jacket with a long pointed collar and is smells like real leather.
‘I don’t believe you,’ I say.
Secretly, I do believe that Eddie’s jacket cost two hundred quid. I am also jealous of the fact that Eddie has a dad, and a dad who buys him cool clothes, no less.
‘How many times have you met your dad?’
‘I see him all the time,’ says Eddie. ‘But my parents are divorced, aren’t they? I live with my mum.’
‘How come you live with your mum?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘How long have you lived with her?’
‘Since I was a baby. My entire life. Everyone lives with their mum, don’t they?’
I’ve never heard of a coloured kid who lived with their real mum for their entire childhood. I didn’t know such a situation could exist.
‘How old are you, then?’ he says.
‘Seven and a half,’ I lie, hoping that the lip gloss my mother gave me to wear at least makes me look seven and a half.
‘You look older than that,’ Eddie says and I watch him looking at the way my bum sticks out behind me, as round as a football in my new too-small jeans. ‘You look eight.’
He is twelve, he says.
‘You know what?’ says Eddie. ‘You’re really pretty.’
It’s like being on a ferris wheel and the ride stopping suddenly, mid-air: my whole world shudders to a delicious halt the very second Eddie calls me pretty. I feel an urge to run to the nearest mirror and gaze at my myself in a new, rose-tinted light. Instead I just blush.
‘Wanna see something?’ he says.
I’m not sure whether I want to see what ever he’s offering to show me, or not; but I can’t just say no. Eddie’s words have control over me now. With one spiteful word he could wipe out the glow he’s planted inside me by calling me pretty, and make me feel ugly again. I’m not sure what, if anything, to do next.
‘Yes or no?’ he asks, yawning.
I feel the w
ay I did when I was learning to dive and I was teetering on the edge of the swimming baths in Haslemere, watching and listening to the older kids who were treading water in the deep-end as they smirked and then chanted at me to ‘Jump! Jump! Jump!’
‘Ok then,’ I say to Eddie. ‘Show me.’
I close my eyes for a second, open them and see Eddie reach into the back of his head and pull out a silver-pronged comb that was completely hidden inside his Afro. At the very end of the comb’s handle is a black hand, clenched into a fist.
‘Wow!’ I say.
‘I’m telling you,’ he says. ‘This comb is righteous.’
‘It is really, really cool.’
‘So what’s happening then, pretty?’ Eddie says, sort of grinning.
I blush and shrug at the same time. I never know how to answer when the trendy kids ask, ‘What’s happening?’
Eddie’s wearing a heavy gold ring on his middle finger with a tiny lion’s head on it. His fingers – softer than I’d imagine a boy’s could ever be – start dancing along the side of my face. I feel the ring, chunky and hard, rubbing against my cheek. Eddie’s mouth is so close to mine that I can nearly taste the cheese and onion crisps on his breath.
‘So what should we do now?’ he says, resting the side of his head in the palm of his hand and breathing the question into my ear.
‘Whatever you want to do. We could play cards.’
‘You wanna see something else?’ he says in that easy voice.
‘OK then.’
Eddie flips onto his side and yawns and stretches, then smiles at me approvingly. He lays his hand on top of my hand which makes it hard to tell where my skin begins and his skin ends.
With his other hand, Eddie eases his orange corduroy flares halfway down over his hips in one long slow movement. Gently, he pushes my hand inside the waistband of his white underpants. I feel a hard, hideous-feeling wriggly lump beneath my fingers.
‘That’s my prick,’ he says.
I know, I think. I know, I know.
There is something deeply wrong with me.
Something ugly in the way I walk, smile, smell, talk, that makes men – and now, boys – want to do certain things. Show me things. Show me their privates. And not just show me their things and then run off, the way I’ve heard flashers do.
The grown-up men who trail after me want to make me dirty and disgusting. They want me to feel and become so dirty that I can’t tell on them, because if I did tell, no one I love would love me anymore.
When I was younger, before I started primary school, my mother had a boyfriend. Denny. He was the first one I can remember. She’d go out shopping and to the hair salon and Denny would babysit me. I’d sit there doing my colouring and he’d play Boney M records and read magazines filled with pictures of ladies.
I still see him. Denny. I see him all the time, especially at night. In my nightmares. Nanny has never understood why I wake up screaming at least once a week. And I’ve never told. I see Denny’s teeth, which are huge. I hear his laugh, which is surprisingly soft, like a sheep bleating or something, the sort of laugh you could wrap yourself up in. He has strange tastes. He likes to slice up cucumbers length-ways and dip them in salt before eating them. He likes to sit me in his lap and lay kisses all the way up and down my arms.
He kept saying, ‘You look just like a little version of your mother.’
‘Feel it then,’ says Eddie. ‘Touch it.’
‘OK then,’ I say. My voice sounds like it’s coming from far away, like it’s not coming from my own body.
I lie on my side, staring bleakly at the bedroom door behind Eddie’s head as he slowly manoeuvres my numb hand up and down and up and down the length of the thing inside his pants. I have not even a shred of willpower.
The feel of Eddie’s prick inside my hand, this rhythmic movement, makes memories of being much younger, much smaller erupt from where I had buried them long ago. Denny, my mother’s old boyfriend, wore these weird jeans that had buttons instead of a zip, which I found strange. When he pulled those jeans down and I saw – for the first time – the horribly wrinkly sacs hanging down against his thighs, everything started fading in and out of focus, like a flickering TV screen.
Fragments of images. A bush of wiry hair smashing against my mouth. Feeling myself choking. Hearing myself spluttering. All this happening in broad daylight right in my mother’s parlour, which meant, despite how disgusting it seemed, it must be normal. Normal, like a baby drinking milk from a bottle or sucking on its dummy, maybe. Normal like Dr Gillies putting one of those little wooden sticks down my throat so he can look at my tonsils. Normal.
I remember a scream caught in my throat like a too-big particle of food. I remember gliding into a dark place where I held my breath and clenched every muscle so fiercely that even my tongue was rigid. Then the little girl they still call Anita shattered into tiny bits and the broken pieces flew into space and nothing much was left of her at all. Except numbness. And nightmares. And the ability to pretend to be OK.
Now I think to myself: I’ll do whatever Eddie asks. But I won’t do anything: I’ll let him do whatever he wants to do. As long as I keep completely still and just lie here and do not take part in this, and do not think about what is going on, then this is not really happening to me. Not the real me, the precious and untouched part of me I keep protected inside like an unborn baby. My body’s a nasty dish-rag that I can evacuate whenever I want and return to only when I absolutely have to.
‘Eddie,’ I say, still not daring to look up at him. ‘Do you like me?’
‘Yeah,’ says Eddie. ‘I do like you.’
But even though I try to separate myself from what is happening to me, a sneaky, traitorous part of me wants to be liked, wants to know that Eddie wants to do this because of me, not just simply because I’m there and it’s something to do.
He tries to slip his other hand inside the waistband of my jeans, but the jeans are skin-tight and there’s no space between denim and flesh. He moves my hand faster inside his pants. Then he gives me a smile that’s like a ray of unexpected sunlight. In the dim light Eddie’s green eyes seem to glitter a bit, like marbles. I know I’m not supposed to be letting him make me touch him like this but his approval of me feels good. I shut my eyes. If I don’t actually see his thing it’s as though this is not happening.
And then the bedroom door swings open.
The little room fills with voices and music. A woman in a gold lace wrapper, with her hair done up in a huge melon style, bounces into the room. I smell her yeasty champagne -breath. Barely looking at me or Eddie, the woman snatches up a golden handbag from the floor, reaches inside it and pulls out a lighter.
Eddie winks at me. He wriggles back into his trousers and drags me through the now open door and into the group of grown-ups who are twirling and sweating in my mother’s parlour. The sweet, thick, oily scent of fried plantains hangs in the stale air of the parlour, mingling with the whiff of hot armpits, hot pepper and Sta Sof Fro spray. Making me want to puke.
My favourite record is playing. Michael Jackson’s thin voice sails out of my mother’s speakers singing the track ‘I Want You Back’. I’m glad it’s dark. No one can look at me. I feel lumpy in my too-tight new clothes. And I feel I’m overflowing with filth.
Eddie lowers his eyelids as he moves to the music. He spins around, lifts one knee, sinks almost to the ground, gets up, spins around and touches the Afro comb stuck in the back of his head.
I move around on the dance floor just enough not to draw attention to myself among the dancing, swirling bodies. I stand opposite Eddie with my long arms held stiffly at my sides, concentrating hard on staying in rhythm with the music as I move one leg behind me and back to the centre and then the other leg behind me and back.
I steal glances at Eddie. I wonder if the slimy stuff that must lurk inside his willie, the disgusting stuff that I know he wanted to empty out into my hand, will instead leak out inside his orange cords; stai
ning them. Ruining them.
Eddie stops dancing after a while, looks at me and says, ‘Don’t you know how to dance?’
‘I am dancing.’
He thinks about this and then bursts out laughing ‘Yeah, right,’ says Eddie. ‘Dream on.’
He touches the Afro comb in his head again and keeps dancing.
Humiliated, I turn away from him and look at my Aunty Adaeze who is doing a dance my mother calls the ‘funky chicken’ and crooning, ‘Hey, hey’ in time to the music. I envy Aunty Adaeze’s lack of self-consciousness; her obvious joy in her own body. She curls a finger, beckoning me over to her.
‘Where’s my Aunty Onyi?’ I ask her. I want to feel Aunty Onyi’s thick brown arms around me, pressing me into her solid motherly flesh and hugging me and never letting me go.
Then my mother cuts in front of me, swaying gently to the music and carrying a silver container filled to the brim with ice cubes.
‘Who let you out?’ she says. And with her bony knee in the small of my back she nudges me towards a row of brand-new dining chairs whose seats are still wrapped in plastic.
‘Sit down and stay down,’ she says. ‘And stop dancing like that. It’s an embarrassment.’
I sit down, as instructed. I watch the party reach a crescendo and then wind down again before my eyes and I sit there through it all, feeling completely distanced from everybody in the room.
Racialism
WE TURN RIGHT, ONTO Woodview, passing tall red letters, spray-painted across a garage door: WOGS OUT. PAKIS DIE. NF.
And here I was, thinking I was home now, and safe. I’ve been longing to get home, to disappear inside Nanny’s puffy white arms. And now these words, blood-coloured words. Were they written as a warning specifically to me?
There has – had – always been a sort of grudging tolerance of me on Woodview, or so I thought. No one – not even the handful of skins on the estate – has ever tried to kick my head in. The worst thing that’s happened was a drunken skin accosting me when I was walking home from Brownies one night with Aunty Wendy. ‘Mind yourself, nigger,’ he snarled.
Precious Page 6
