Precious

by Precious Williams

  Our driver, who has no more than five teeth in his mouth, tosses our suitcases into the boot of his brown car as though they weighed no more than balls of cotton wool. I watch the driver’s liquorice-black hand turning the tattered steering wheel and wonder at the huge knobbly bones on his wrists. The driver’s neck jerks back and forward like a turkey’s as he concentrates on driving us along the dusty orange roads that lead to Chukaro, the town where my mother’s mother lives.

  The plate slid in front of me is piled high with steaming-hot rice. On top of the rice are a couple of spoonfuls of a thick oily stew I know will be peppery-hot enough to burn the skin off the roof of my mouth. I watch my mother’s mother watching me as I pick at the reddish-orange stew with the very tip of my fork. She claps her hands twice and says something very quickly, making clicking sounds as she speaks.

  ‘Your grandmother said that when she last saw you as a baby you were fat and as light in complexion as the inside of a banana,’ says Aunty Onyi, whose mouth is full of un-chewed rice. ‘You looked half-caste then. You were so nice and fat. My mama says you’re still a fine yellow girl, but you need to eat more.’

  I look down at my long, increasingly thin, brown legs and feel disappointment hit me in waves. What went so horribly wrong, and why? Why can’t I become beige and beautiful and loveable like a half-caste once again?

  Aunty Onyi rubs the small cluster of red bumps on my arm. ‘They love biting you,’ she says.

  My grandmother reaches across the table, pinches my cheek hard with her soft fingers then laughs and says something else, again in this fast language that I can’t understand. My eyes plead with Aunty Onyi, Aunty Nneka and Agnes for an interpretation.

  ‘Your grandmother just said she can see her own face in your face,’ says Agnes. ‘But honestly, Anita, I look much more like her than you do.’

  I screw my nose up at Agnes.

  ‘Where’s our mother?’ I ask. ‘She didn’t come to breakfast. I haven’t seen her all day.’

  I only ask because I think it’s polite for a little girl to ask after her mother. It’s the way Nanny’d expect me to behave. The question is unlikely to yield an answer. People rarely know precisely where Mummy Elizabeth is. You can shut your eyes and open them again and she has gone.

  ‘Your mama and Adaeze went to Aro-Eze,’ says Aunty Nneka.

  ‘What’s that?’ I say, in awe of any person able to keep tabs on my mother.

  ‘It’s the town your great-grandfather’s from; where the big pink house that he built is,’ says Aunty Onyi. ‘Your mother went to check on the place and pay some men to do some more work on it.’

  ‘That place is really something, it’s beautiful,’ says Agnes, clapping her hands for no reason that I can see. ‘It’s a palace, I’m telling you. It’s painted pink, and it’s made of real bricks.’

  ‘Aren’t all houses made of real bricks?’ I say.

  But I already know that all houses are not made of real bricks; my grandmother’s house, the house I am living in, is made of what looks like wood and has a crooked corrugated-iron roof. From the outside, the house looks to me a little like a rubbish heap and on the inside, there’s no bathroom or toilet and the water we have to wash with outside is light brown. My family’s fortunes plummetted during the Biafran War and never recovered.

  But still, everyone in my family here (so I am told) is ogaranya, which means rich. This richness is the reason we have a collection of sulky-looking ladies and girls and men waiting around to plait our hair, wash our clothes, deal with the contents of our outside toilet and do anything else we might tell them to do. These servants are the mbi, the poor people, and their whole families – even kids younger than me – have to spend day-in, day-out making life easier for lazy people like us. None of this seems fair to me, but Agnes says that it is fairer than her and me having to wash clothes and sweep floors ourselves.

  I watch as a tiny brown lizard scuttles up the wall, its head moving in the opposite direction from its tail. I run over to the other side of the room after the lizard darts away from me and creeps onto the ceiling. I wonder if it’s a salamander.

  My grandmother watches and giggles. My grandmother’s eyes crinkle up when she laughs, reminding me of Nanny. I wish I could ring up Nanny and laugh with her about the real live lizards and about having servants and about having to traipse outside to go to wee. But as far as I’ve seen, there is no phone here.

  ‘Oh, girls, girls, darling girls,’ says Aunty Onyi. ‘In a few days, by Christmas Eve at the latest, dozens more of the family are coming home for the holidays. We are all going to have so much fun with each other!’

  The thing about Aunty Onyi is that she is always saying, ‘We are going to have so much fun!’ I can imagine her saying it even if we were all in the middle of a car crash.

  ‘Soon, we will all travel to Aro-Eze together to join Adaeze and your mother. So Anita can see the palace and see where she really comes from, eh?’ says Aunty Onyi. ‘Maybe we will even go there tomorrow.’

  Everything is ‘maybe’ or ‘soon’ or ‘we might’. Daily life flows easily and feels uncomplicated. Languid. Every day it turns out to be far too hot and sticky to put much effort into doing anything at all. Mostly, we sit around the plastic dining table that my mother bought my grandmother as a present, drinking orange Fanta, talking, laughing, eating and making plans to do things that we never quite get around to doing.

  ‘Can I go outside and play, Aunty Onyi?’

  ‘It’s really still too hot, my little Precious. Aren’t you going to finish eating?’ says Aunty Onyi.

  A girl with a head as round as a sponge cake and eyes the colour of treacle slides her face around the open door and peers into the parlour.

  ‘Precious-Yes!’ Aunty Onyi screams, fanning herself. ‘Come in, come in here and see us.’

  In strolls Precious-Yes, my best friend here in Chukaro.

  As well as being my new best friend, Precious-Yes is one of the dozens of cousins I never even knew I had before I came here. My family, it turns out, is so big and the members of it are so keen to spend time with me, my mother and Agnes, that there is not enough space or time for me ever to be alone.

  I am not even allowed to sleep by myself: I sleep under a musty and greasy mosquito net, pressed between Agnes and my snoring grandmother. My mother sleeps elsewhere in the house, with one or two of her sisters for company.

  I spend my nights half-awake, dodging two sets of sharp elbows as Aggy and my grandmother roll around in their sleep. During the day, aunties, uncles and cousins I’ve never even heard of jostle into my grandmother’s parlour. There’s no stopping them because they all live on my grandmother’s compound, where the houses are not joined together the way our houses are on Woodview but rather are scattered in clusters, like stars in the sky. In one of these rickety old houses lives Precious-Yes.

  Precious-Yes’s parents met me when I came to Africa before; when I was three years old and I’d already earned the nickname Precious-No for clinging to my mother and crying NO, NO, NO whenever anyone else tried to touch me. Precious-Yes’s parents took a great liking to me (so I’m told) purely because I had been born a British Citizen; they hoped some of my ‘natural good luck’ would rub off onto their own newborn daughter if they named her after me.

  Now Precious-Yes slides her big bottom onto a wicker seat next to me and, noticing that I’m not eating my rice and stew, she picks up my fork and begins gobbling up my food. She lowers her head so close to my plate that her flat face is almost resting on top of the rice. Precious-Yes’s hair is cornrowed in a style that makes her bowed head look like a game of noughts and crosses. She has a red ribbon tied to one of her plaits.

  ‘Precious-No,’ she says, munching. ‘If you go to Great Britain again, I beg, can I come and live over there with you? Tell me everything that has ever happened in Great Britain! What kinds of food do they serve you over there?’

  Were I a braver girl, I’d speak up and say: I like the food
there better than the food they’re serving us here.

  The food that’s dished up here in Africa terrifies and confuses me. Everything I am given seems to be either slimy or peppery or slimy and peppery. Every day at around noon, the house-girl slaps down a big bowl of white mush with steam rising out of it and smaller bowls of what looks like snot, with little green flakes and stiff bits of fish floating in it. You have to use your left hand to roll the white mush (gari) into a gooey little ball which you dip into the peppery green snot and swallow whole. Then you try not to choke as the hot slippery ball of mush slithers down your throat and lands heavily in the pit of your stomach. I am desperate to have something in my mouth that feels and smells and tastes like home.

  I watch Aunty Nneka, my mother’s youngest sister, as she turns a page in her book.

  ‘Aunty Nneka,’ I say, trembling slightly. ‘I’m really terribly sorry to ask. But . . . is there any . . . normal food?’

  Agnes laughs and her laugh sounds dry and full of spite.

  Aunty Nneka looks up from her book and calls the house-girl, ‘English food,’ she says. ‘Bring Anita some English food.’

  Agnes rolls her eyes.

  ‘Every time you talk,’ says Anita-Yes. ‘Your voice sounds like a white person’s.’

  Agnes laughs.

  ‘So what?’ says Aunty Onyi. ‘You could learn something from her. Her voice sounds beautiful.’

  A few minutes later, the house-girl, Patty, undulates into the parlour, holding a plate on the palm of her outstretched hand as if she’s a waitress in a restaurant. Patty puts the plate down in front of me with no comment. Two fried eggs are sweating oil onto the brown plate.

  For a while, no one says anything and I feel sure that my aunties and my sister and Precious-Yes are disappointed in me for asking for the normal food. The room has turned so quiet that I can hear the frogs croaking outside the window. The squelching sound the egg white makes as I mash it between my teeth seems horribly loud.

  ‘I remember when you came before, when you were one small-small girl,’ says Aunty Nneka, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand. ‘You’re a lot more sociable since then. You don’t start crying every time another black person talks to you like you did then.’

  Agnes laughs her spiteful laugh again and I glare at her. Precious-Yes wolfs down the scraps of fried egg that I can’t finish. The room stinks of egg and hot pepper and palm oil. A lukewarm early evening breeze blows in through the window, flicking the pages of Aunty Nneka’s paperback and making her purse her lips.

  I’ve been told Aunty Nneka is the most intelligent person in the whole family. She doesn’t look much like the rest of us; she has a long nose and her face is light brown and long and thin, like one of the cashew nuts that grow in front of the house. She’s taller than a man and she has this look of really serious concentration on her face all of the time, even when she’s doing nothing more important than leaning back in her wicker rocking chair, sipping lukewarm Fanta.

  ‘I have been given instructions from your mother,’ Aunty Nneka says, folding the corner of the page she’s reading and shutting her book. ‘The travelling musicians are coming soon and Agnes has permission to take you to see them.’

  ‘We are all going to have so much fun!’ says Aunty Onyi.

  Men with glistening bodies and painted white patterns on their faces glide over to us, making me leap back and suck in a scream. Some of the men carry small drums; others dance, with such bounce in their steps you’d think they were dancing on a trampoline. The tallest of the dancing men stops right in front of me and suddenly opens his mouth into a huge O, as if he’s in terrible pain.

  There’s a bale of straw hanging from the tall dancer’s head and more straw wrapped around his legs. I can smell the sweat running down the groove in the centre of his chest. The man lunges forward as if he’s going to grab me but instead he hops back. He keeps lunging forward and dancing back again as the straw around his legs shakes and shudders. I gaze into his eyes until I feel dizzy, lose my balance and fall into Agnes’s arms.

  Agnes sits me down on a log that’s propped against a tall thick tree and makes me take deep breaths as she holds my hand and smooths down my dress. Although we’re sitting on a dirty old log, both of us are dressed in our very best clothes. I’m wearing a white, frilly, itchy party dress from Harrods that makes me look like a very small bride. I have a hairdo that Patty, the house-girl, did on me that’s called threading. Little bunches of hair all over my head were rubbed down with hair grease and wrapped tight with black cotton thread. Now I have thick coils of hair standing away from my head like shiny black antennae.

  Agnes is lit up now and again the flickering light cast by the bonfire that the men are dancing around. In the orange firelight, Agnes’s nose looks a bit like a toad: squat and brown with tiny bumps all over it, but still she looks beautiful. Her hair is cornrowed back from her shiny face. She’s wearing a red-and-purple dress with very wide shoulders and white embroidery down the front. Agnes sits down next to me on the log and starts rolling her shoulders in time to the singing and drumming.

  ‘I used to belong to a dance troupe when I was little like you, doing native dance,’ she says. ‘But we didn’t know anything about magic like those men.’

  I imagine Agnes as a little girl with bales of straw around her legs and on her head, leaping up and down.

  ‘You have to keep your distance from those travelling musicians, you know,’ she says. ‘If you get too close to them; if you look any of them directly in the eye, then you’ve had it!’

  ‘What exactly do they do to you?’

  ‘They charm you,’ says Agnes. ‘They get inside your blood; you become enchanted and you can never be the same again. You start wanting to roam from place to place, just like they do.’

  ‘What if you only look at them for one second?’

  ‘I don’t know, Anita,’ she says, stretching. ‘It’s so beautiful here, isn’t it? Being here with you reminds me of when I first met you and I begged Mum to let me come to England and be with you.’

  ‘Why did you like me? I thought I was horrible to everyone and kept saying “no” all the time.’

  ‘You’re my sister,’ Agnes squeezes my hand. ‘How does it feel for you to come home?’

  ‘This isn’t my home,’ I reply.

  But as soon as I’ve said these words, I begin to doubt them. Maybe this is my home. I do miss Nanny and Gramps and Aunty Wendy and Uncle Mick; I do think about them every day. I miss them the way I miss my favourite characters in a brilliant novel once I’ve reached the last page, when I’m forced to admit I don’t quite live in their world anymore.

  And when I was in Fernmere, the place I have always called home, I always had the unsettling feeling that I was sort of living on borrowed time, that I wasn’t really supposed to be there. But here, in Chukaro, the days slip by. I’ve no clear idea how long I’ve been here. Even my mother’s disappearances don’t feel confusing because she’s just one of an entire sea of family members here.

  All of us here: family. With our matching wide cheeks and narrow chins and long legs and short bodies. I’m fussed over more than ever before in my life but I’m not special or different; I’m no longer a circus freak. Chukaro and everyone and everything in it, even the frogs and lizards, belongs to me and maybe I, too, belong to them.

  But I also feel like a traitor. What kind of girl would shed Aunty Wendy and Nanny and Uncle Mick like they were crappy old clothes that no longer fit? I feel guilty for enjoying myself so much here: I was supposed to hate it. After all, I’m a British girl, aren’t I? Isn’t that what Nanny’s always told me? I’m just like all the other nice little British girls in Fernmere. That’s what Nanny says. That’s what Aunty Wendy says.

  ‘So you hate it here then?’ says Agnes, breaking into my thoughts.

  ‘No, I like being here. But I . . . I mean; don’t you miss being English. Don’t you miss Nanny and everyone else?’

  �
��Not really,’ says Agnes.

  I lean back against the tree trunk. Even with the dancers’ drumbeats in the distance, it is so quiet here that I can hear the zzz of insects rubbing their legs against their bodies and a sort of whirring noise coming from inside the tree trunk itself.

  ‘Can you hear that, Agnes? There’s something crawling around inside this tree. I can hear it.’

  ‘Bloomin’ heck! Let’s get out of here. Let’s go. It’s getting late anyway.’

  Agnes can’t wait to get home and I know why: she’s meeting a boy called Duro in the woods behind our grandmother’s compound, at eleven o’clock sharp. She has completely forgotten skinny Barry.

  Walking home, we can’t quite see where we’re going. If Agnes didn’t know the way by heart, I’d fear we’d just be walking in circles.

  ‘Agnes? Do you think I could tell you a secret?’

  ‘I don’t know? Could you?’ Agnes’s laughter rings out in the darkness like a tinkling bell. ‘What secret could you have? You’re a little girl.

  ‘Here, take this,’ she continues.

  She hands me two pieces of akara, the crunchy greasy balls that are made, I think, from fried beans. To my surprise they taste delicious. I ask for another one. Agnes doesn’t give me one, she looks at me and what I can see of her expression in the moonlight is deadly serious.

  ‘What is it, Anita?’ she says.

  ‘If I tell you do you promise you won’t stop wanting to have me as your sister?’

  ‘You’re crying,’ Aggy says, draping her warm arm around me.

  I feel her fingers tugging playfully at one of the antennae on my head.

  ‘Go on,’ she says.

  ‘When I was little . . . these men . . .’ I say, feeling that I am about to choke. ‘These men, they used to do things to me that made me hurt down there. And one of them, he went to the wee-wee in my mouth . . .’