Aunty Wendy snarled back, ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, picking on a little girl, you racialist bastard,’ and the skinhead scuttled away without another word.
Aunty Adaeze glances out of the car window, at the same blood-red words I’m seeing. But she doesn’t comment.
‘Nice weather today, eh?’ she says. ‘It’s cooled down a bit.’
Pulling up outside number 52, Mummy Elizabeth toots her horn again and again until Nanny appears in the doorway of our house, holding a piece of kitchen towel. My mother lowers the car window.
‘Is Agnes inside?’
‘No, Lizzy,’ says Nanny. ‘I think she’s at work.’
‘She doesn’t work on Sundays, Nanny,’ I say. ‘Remember? She’s probably round Aunty Wendy’s.’
Nanny grimaces at my comment. Then she says, ‘By the way, Lizzy,’ and a cheeky, crooked little smile appears on her face making the wrinkles at the corners of her mouth deepen. ‘Mrs Tucker next door’s found someone to take in Judy. There’s nothing for you to worry about at all, Lizzy. The little dog’s gone.’
Judy. Gone? The grown-ups’ behaviour is confusing me to the point where it’s making my head hurt. If Judy has really gone, why on earth’s Nanny grinning like the Cheshire Cat?
My mother, Aunty Adaeze and I continue on to 16 Acacia Way: Aunty Wendy and Uncle Mick’s house.
‘Anita,’ Mummy Elizabeth says, without even turning around to look at me. ‘I’ve got a feeling that Agnes is up to no good. She’s never around when I look for her. What is she up to?’
I shrug my bare shoulders and look out the window. I’ve no idea why Agnes makes a point of being out when my mother visits. One of the Scott brothers across the road sees me and sticks two fingers up at me. I mouth the words ‘You can get lost’ and clench my fist at him through the car window, thinking of the black fist on Eddie’s Afro comb.
My mother slides out of the driver’s seat and walks up the front path and raps on Aunty Wendy’s front door. She balances on one toe of her Italian shoes – fawn with gold detailing today – and then on the other, waiting for Aunty Wendy to come to the door.
‘Hello, love,’ she says when she finally opens the door. ‘Hello, Lizzy. Hello, Ada. Did you have a lovely time in London, Neet?’
‘No,’ I almost say. But then, instinctively, I nod.
‘We are looking for Agnes,’ my mother says.
‘Oh yes,’ says Aunty Wendy, standing there in her blue triangle-shaped skirt. ‘I think Aggy’d like you to meet her friend, Barry. He’s a lovely lad, isn’t he, Neet?’
‘Don’t know,’ I say.
‘Aggy and Barry have just gone up the shop. They’ll be back in a minute, Lizzy.’
In the sitting room my mother, Aunty Adaeze and I occupy the whole sofa. Suddenly, Aunty Adaeze and my mother scream in unison as Judy appears from nowhere and tries to rub her shaggy little head against my mother’s legs. I am so happy and relieved that I feel almost like kissing my mother.
‘What is this little witch?’ screams Aunty Adaeze, inching away from Judy who is threatening to jump onto the sofa and into Aunty Adaeze’s lap.
‘This is the final straw!’ my mother hisses, hopping up from the sofa.
And then we all see it, at the same time. Agnes sliding along the hall, holding hands with a tall, long-legged white boy who is thin, like a rasher of bacon. It’s her boyfriend, Barry, and he whispers something that makes Agnes tip her head back and chuckle. Agnes’s face is shining with happiness – until she sees Mummy Elizabeth and Aunty Adaeze through the open sitting-room door. She peers furtively at us, looks up at Barry and whispers,
‘Kedu, Aunty Adaeze? Mum? This is my . . . umm . . . friend, Barry.’
‘He’s ever such a nice boy, Lizzy,’ Aunty Wendy claims again.
My mother’s face writhes with outrage.
‘A white boy,’ she whispers. She sits, unmoving, her lower lip wobbling as if she’s about to cry. ‘A white boy?’
Aunty Adaeze covers my mother’s delicate hand with her own man-like one.
‘OK, Elizabeth,’ she says her orange and gold wrapper crackling. ‘I will handle this.’
‘No,’ says Mummy Elizabeth. ‘No.’ And with that, my mother runs into the kitchen and begins throwing open the drawers beneath the sink. I see something flash in her hand. She raises it high above her head: Aunty Wendy’s new carving knife that gleams in the late afternoon sun spilling through the kitchen window.
Barry spins on his heel and legs it out of the back door. My mother goes after him but her dress gets caught on a corner of the rabbit hutch in the garden. Barry doesn’t stop to look at the sight of Mummy Elizabeth on her back with one bare toe poking through the grid of the rabbits’ cage. With his long legs he sails right over the top of the garden gate and out of sight. And, just as quickly, my mother picks herself up, grabs the fallen carving knife, hitches up her dress and leaps clean over the closed garden gate, yelling, ‘Come back here, you lout!’
Aunty Adaeze, Agnes, Judy, Aunty Wendy, two of the neighbours and I hover outside the garden gate, in the square. I am trembling so much that my teeth are chattering.
‘You all right, Neet?’ says one of our neighbours, who’s standing with her hands on her huge hips, relishing the unexpected drama. ‘You look cold, love.’
I am in a trance. I say nothing.
Still carrying the carving knife, my mother comes stalking back towards us. ‘He x-scaped,’ she hisses, dropping the knife on the floor.
She glares at Agnes and then grabs Aunty Adaeze’s hand and the two of them flounce through the hall out the front door and into the car.
‘Our mother is a flipping mental racist cow,’ says Agnes. ‘And there’s nothing that woman can do that will stop me from loving Barry.’
Agnes doesn’t look much like Agnes any more. For the first time in my life, her hair looks quite a bit worse than mine. She’s wearing one of Nanny’s blue nylon shirtwaister dresses and the dress hangs limply from her shoulders like a huge blue potato sack.
This hideous change in Agnes’s appearance is my mother’s doing. After chasing Barry out of Aunty Wendy’s, my mother and Aunty Adaeze had burst into Nanny’s house, stormed up the stairs into Agnes’s box room and tossed everything they found there into bin bags. When Nanny asked them what on earth they thought they were doing, she was warned ‘Stay out of this.’ Finally, with the bin bags on the back seat of the car, they’d driven back to London.
The good thing about my mother’s ‘outburst’, as Nanny calls it, is that now Agnes talks to me more than she ever has before. She spends hours every day telling me how much she loves Barry and how much she hates our mother.
‘That cow only acted like that because Barry’s white, innit?’ she says.
‘So they’d like him if he was coloured, then?’
‘Yeah. Or at least they wouldn’t try to knife him.’
‘But what about if he was half-caste?’
‘They’d cut him in half and only keep the black part.’
Agnes and I look at each other and burst out laughing.
‘What would you have done if she killed him?’ I say.
‘What?’
‘What if our mother or Adaeze had killed him?’
‘It’s Aunty Adaeze.’
‘All right,’ I say. I poke my tongue out at Agnes.
‘You need to learn respect,’ she says, looking very cross. ‘You don’t have no respect for anything. And it’s your fault, anyway. You’re the one who told them I was at Wendy’s.’
‘It’s Aunty Wendy.’
‘Oh my God. I am so sick of you!’ she says.
I hop off the bed and walk to Agnes’s tiny bedroom window, turning my back on her. Aggy glides up behind me and presses her palms down on my shoulders.
‘What’s wrong,’ she says. ‘Are you crying? Come here. I’m not really sick of you.’
I stand on tiptoes to pull apart the curtains and gaze out at the nearly black sky,
looking for stars. I’m not sure why I am crying. All I know is that I feel clogged up with secrets, with filth. That I have absolutely nobody in my life I trust enough to tell.
‘Come on, what’s wrong?’ Agnes says, trying to turn me around so that I’ll face her. ‘I know you, Anita. You haven’t been the same since you came back from London. You’ve been walking around saying nothing, like a ghost.’
I want to tell her what happened in London. But I can’t. I want to tell her how I feel like I’m sliding down into someplace that’s dark like the inside of a coffin, some place I can never, ever be rescued from. The right words don’t come. I can’t find them.
‘It’s just that I’m worried about my spelling test tomorrow,’ I say finally.
‘Anita, why? You’ll probably come top, just like you win everything,’ says Agnes. ‘I wish I could come top in something.’
I feel a wall sliding between Agnes and me, with Agnes on one side, and on the other side the girl Agnes thinks I am. And in between, squashed against the wall, is the real me.
Going Home
‘THIS IS WHAT I gave up, Nin,’ says Nanny, pressing a miniature pork pie into her mouth. ‘I gave up all of this, for love.’
We are parked near a driveway on the outskirts of Selsey. Sitting in Nanny’s car, munching our way through a packet of little gourmet Marks and Sparks pies. Drinking in the sight of the tallest, widest mansion I have ever seen. The mansion is painted white and it has a pointed grey roof. Green triangle-shaped trees are dotted in front of the house, as though guarding it.
‘Nip out of the car and round the side there and see if you can see anything through the windows,’ says Nanny. ‘I’d give anything to know who lives in there now.’
Nanny always seems to be asking me to spy on people (mainly on Agnes or my mother) and then report back on what I’ve seen and learned. Like I’m a walking, talking, tabloid newspaper. It’s not that I dislike spying – I’m a masterful eavesdropper – it’s just that I mind being ordered around.
But of course I have to do as I am told. I trot across the driveway and the loud crunch of the gravel beneath my plimsolls makes me fear the owner will hear me and demand to know what a wild-haired coloured girl is doing darting up his drive.
I smooth down my hair, which for days has not been combed properly, and it springs right back up. I stand on tiptoes, balancing against the side of the house. I crane my neck and try to peer into the lowest of the windows, but the windows are covered by white wooden shutters. I can’t see a thing.
Before her dad lost all his money at the horse races, before she married Gramps, Nanny used to live inside this same gigantic house, with her parents.
Her dad was an engineer, I think, and Nanny and her parents and her younger brother Frank had riding lessons, tennis courts, horses, money. Her parents had their own housekeeper. Then she met Gramps, who was poor but kind and who had a movie-star smile. Nanny forgot all about money and from that day onwards she never really had any.
‘It wasn’t easy after I got married,’ Nanny says, staring at the house as she eats another little pie. ‘My dad was a Jew, so he always had a lot of money. At first my father gave me an allowance but that was humiliating for Matt. He said he wanted to be able to support his own wife. But he had no money. Do you remember Great-Grandpa, darling?’
Great-Grandpa was Nanny’s dad and he died when I was very small. I remember a thin man with a long thick nose.
‘Didn’t Gramps have any money?’ I say.
‘No, Nin, darling. He came from a poor family. His mum was just a young girl, a servant, and we think the man she worked for had his way with her. Matt never did know who his father was. There was nothing more humiliating – then – than growing up knowing you were illegitimate. He never got over it.’
‘What does it mean, Nanny? Illegitimate?’
‘It means that your mother and father aren’t married.’
‘Am I illegitimate?’
Nanny doesn’t answer.
‘Are we poor now, Nanny?’
I’m pretty sure we are. We don’t get those little brown envelopes fat with fivers and tenners that the other families get every Friday.
‘Money doesn’t really matter when you’ve got love, darling.’
The time of having odd days off school, going for long drives and then sitting watching things began after Gramps died. There was a funeral for Gramps; my mother and Agnes went to it, but I wasn’t allowed to go – Nanny said I was too young. Instead Nanny and I said our private farewell to Gramps a little while after the funeral. The two of us drove to Lily Pond, one of Nanny’s favourite spots, and spent an hour gazing at a heron. I demolished two packs of salt and vinegar crisps. I tried not to cry, and failed.
Since losing the love of her life, Nanny’s changed. It’s like I’ve become almost a grown-up in her eyes. All of a sudden I get away with a lot. Aunty Wendy says my behaviour’s getting ridiculous and Aggy says my spoiled bitchness is ‘becoming a joke’. But no one can put their finger on precisely what’s wrong with my behaviour – all they know is it’s getting irritating. Nanny’s far too indulgent, everyone says.
If Nanny catches me with my light on, still reading when it’s close to midnight, she just says, ‘You still awake then? You’ll be ever so tired in the morning if you don’t go to sleep soon, Nin.’ And leaves me be.
One night, having read all of the books in my bedroom at least twice, I wander downstairs. Nanny is asleep upright in her blue armchair. The phone receiver, wrapped in a piece of kitchen towel, is resting in her lap.
I slip into the kitchen, open the cupboard, take a Wagon Wheel and slide the whole biscuit into my mouth. I linger by the sink, feeling like a well-fed cobra and I just can’t take my naughty little eyes off the taps. I reach up and turn on the cold water. I long to know why Nanny won’t touch the taps without a piece of kitchen towel being present to protect her skin. Would her skin melt if the tap touched her?
I rub my hand against the cold tap again and again. Nothing happens. Any minute now I am sure to hear Nanny’s voice hissing, What the hell are you doing touching things in my kitchen, you dirty little bitchie? Or Aggy might spring down the stairs and call me a weirdo. But my curiosity won’t let me stop.
I run my hand along the back-door handle. I slowly turn it and it makes a sound like the grating laughter of an ancient man, making me leap back. Then I skim my fingers over the rubbish bin lid and smear them across the fridge door. Nothing happens.
I tiptoe across the room and peer round the sitting-room door to check Nanny’s still asleep.
But her eyes are wide open. Tears are oozing out of them.
I rush to her side and pat her arm. I often find her crying to herself nowadays – I think she’s crying because she still misses Gramps.
‘Don’t worry, I wasn’t doing anything, Nanny,’ I say, feeling very mature.
‘What are you on about, Nin?’ Her voice is cracking, her eyes averted.
‘Your mother,’ she says finally. ‘She rang up just now and told me, Nin. Darling, she’s gone and bought you a ticket to Africa. You’ll be there before Christmas.’
‘Africa? Will I ever come back?’
‘I don’t know, Anita. I don’t know.’
‘But she’ll probably forget to come and get me anyway and go to Africa by herself, without me. Won’t she?’
‘I doubt it. Who could afford to waste the kind of money she must have spent on your aeroplane ticket? Must have cost her five hundred pounds for a journey like that.’
An icy little thrill runs through me at the thought of somebody spending five hundred pounds on me. And then, just like that, the thrill is gone.
‘But I don’t want to go,’ I say, my voice quivering.
I absolutely do not want to be alone with the maniac who calls herself my mother. Ever since she tried to slash up Agnes’s boyfriend, Barry, I’ve had this feeling that my mother, or one of her sisters, might just knife me next time I annoy her.
‘I know, darling. I know,’ says Nanny. ‘It breaks my heart to even have to think of letting you go. I feel so helpless . . .’
Nanny’s voice disintegrates into an inaudible whisper. She begins weeping again and I sit on the edge of her armchair, holding her hand. I feel an unnatural, dazed sense of calm. I sit holding Nanny’s hand, wondering – in a detached, disinterested way – what piece of my life is about to be ripped off my back next.
Early the next morning, Nanny rings up Mr Clifford, my headmaster. She tells him in a shrill, on-the-verge-of-tears voice that I’ll be missing the last week of term because I’m going to Africa for who knows how long.
Mrs Pope, the art teacher with the free-flowing greying blond hair, the flapping corduroy flares and the cheesecloth smocks, just cannot keep my grim news to herself. ‘One lucky little girl here is going somewhere very special and exciting for Christmas this year,’ she announces to the class.
Sitting cross-legged on the classroom floor, everyone turns their heads to spot the kid she’s talking about and I keep a neutral expression on my face, hoping nobody will guess. If only Mrs Pope would shut up . . . But Mrs Pope is thrilled. Not because she wants to get rid of me and lose me to Africa but rather because she thinks my ‘links’ to Africa are a wonderful thing. She’s said, before now, that I’m exotic. She’s told me I need to get into expressing my ‘roots’ in my artwork.
‘Anita is going to Nigeria in Africa for the holidays!’ Mrs Pope exclaims, grinning like crazy. ‘Can anyone point out Nigeria on the map?’
Why can’t the grey classroom floor be made of quicksand so that I can be swallowed up? Why can’t God stop Mrs Pope from unwittingly reminding all my classmates that I should be holding a spear, not a paintbrush.
‘Does anyone know where Nigeria is on the map?’ asks Mrs Pope again.
You’ll never catch me sticking my hand up and drawing attention to myself. When I was five I once wet my knickers in class rather than ask for permission to go to the loo. My school reports say, ‘Excellent potential but needs to participate more in class.’ Sometimes I am so ready to speak up that I can taste the answer on my tongue. But I stay quiet. I’m afraid that my truth is not the accepted truth.
Precious Page 7
