Precious

by Precious Williams

  ‘I think I prefer it when it’s in those little tails, Nin,’ says Nanny staring at my squeaky-clean face. ‘Like dear little Topsy.’

  I check out Uncle Tom’s Cabin from Fernmere library. Nanny rang the librarian up and ordered it specially, so I could read it and love it as she loves it. I sit in my cupboard, flicking through the book, thrilled at the prospect of finally reading about this character Nanny’s always insisted is ‘the living spit’ of me.

  I whizz through chapters until I arrive at a page announcing the arrival of Topsy. Tracing the words with my finger, I drink in the author’s description of Topsy. And then I stumble upon a line that reads, ‘grinning like an ugly black doll’, and I freeze.

  I hold my breath and force myself to continue reading.

  She was quite black. Her round, shining eyes glittered like glass beads. Her woolly hair was plaited into little tails which stuck out in all directions. Her clothes were dirty and ragged. Miss Ophelia thought she had never seen such a dreadful little girl in all her life.

  I close the book and sit staring at the blank wall in front of me, my very worst fears about myself confirmed. So, this is how the grown-ups and the other kids see me. This is what people really think of me.

  I wonder – do the social workers, the judge and the court welfare officers see me as an ‘ugly black doll’ as well? These social workers and court welfare officers have to write reports about me and submit them to the Family Court. It seems an enormous lot of bother to go to for a dreadful little girl. Seems even more of a waste of time when I get interviewed by the headmaster at the primary school, who sends a statement about me to the court. And my GP, Dr Gillies, sends a letter about me to the court as well.

  Nanny seems excited by the action. The lawyer Mr Braithwaite gets hold of all the statements submitted and lets Nanny read them and Nanny paraphrases them to me.

  ‘Dr Gillies has done us proud,’ she says. ‘I wouldn’t have expected it from the miserable bugger.’

  Nasal-voiced Dr Gillies has written: ‘It would be psychologically very unsettling for Anita to return to the different culture of Nigeria. Anita is fully adapted to our way of life.’

  But Mrs Berry, Nanny says, she’s let us down. Mrs Berry’s declared that although I might feel English now, I will reach a point in life where it is made very clear to me that I am not actually English at all. Like that’s not damaging enough, she has also reported that I had a withdrawn and ‘shut-in’ look when she interviewed me. She feels I should perhaps be referred to a child psychiatrist.

  Nanny says the officials are now looking into sending me to Great Ormond Street, as a residential patient for two weeks, to be assessed and interviewed by ‘a leading child psychiatrist’ called Dr Seaton.

  ‘What does being assessed mean, Nanny?’

  ‘The doctors and nurses watch you and get you to open up to them,’ Nanny says.

  ‘How do they open you up?’

  ‘By talking to you gently, I’d imagine. I’m sure they’ve got all sorts of wonderful facilities up there.’

  I ask question after question about Great Ormond Street and Nanny says it’s a hospital that has a good reputation for helping sick little children but that it’s not really a place I should go to, because there is absolutely nothing wrong with me. I am as right as rain.

  I disagree. Great Almond Street, as I call it, sounds magical and I am determined to go there. Nanny tells me it’s located somewhere in central London. I visualise a road made of yellow bricks leading to a lilac-coloured castle-like hospital. Inside are nurses in powder-blue uniforms, leading the children, all of us black, out to paddocks where we feed apples to ponies, a pony for every child. The nurses will feed us ice cream, speak to us tenderly, and cajole us into talking about what’s troubling us.

  I am a kettle so choked up with stagnant water that I can’t even come to the boil and release steam. Great Almond Street, as I imagine it, is the one place in the world where the pressure will be taken off me, where I can tell the truth without suffering potentially terrifying repercussions. I want to tell someone how I feel.

  If I’m to ever get all of this off my chest, I must just find my way to Dr Seaton and curl up in his hospital, sipping cocoa, and begin to talk. I can already almost feel the sweet relief that will wash over me when I finally let it all out.

  ‘Can I go, Nanny?’

  Nanny looks suspicious. ‘I don’t know whether it’s a good idea or not, darling. You’d have to be away from your Nanny for two weeks. You’d have to live there. Let’s wait and see what the authorities say.’

  One afternoon, Aunty Wendy drops me home from school and a bald man is waiting for me in Nanny’s sitting room. He’s wearing wire-rimmed spectacles and sniffing as though he’s coming down with a cold – or maybe it’s the strong smell of Ajax in the house that’s irritating his nostrils.

  ‘I’m Mr Parsons,’ he says. ‘I’m with West Sussex Social Services and I’m your social worker.’

  I’m not surprised when this Mr Parsons starts up with the probing questions but every time I answer one, Nanny opens her mouth as if to speak or complain but instead just rubs her hands together and stares hard at us both.

  ‘What do you enjoy doing?’ Mr Parsons says with a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

  ‘Um, reading books and comics. Watching films.’

  ‘What kinds of films do you enjoy?’

  He really doesn’t sound very interested: I wonder why he wants to know.

  ‘Westerns,’ I mumble. ‘And I like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Death Race 2000.’

  ‘And writing stories,’ says Nanny. ‘She’d sit up in her room on her own writing stories until the cows came home if I let her.’

  ‘What else do you like doing, Anita? Do you enjoy playing with your friends?’

  ‘Not really,’ I say.

  ‘She hasn’t got all that many friends around here,’ says Nanny. ‘There are some pretty unsavoury families on the estate so I make sure she keeps herself to herself. She had a poem she wrote printed in a comic the other day, didn’t you Nin,’ Nanny continues. ‘I was ever so proud of her.’

  Mr Parsons seems to be getting a bit fed up with Nanny. He ignores her interruptions. ‘Now tell me, Anita,’ he says. ‘What does being an African girl mean to you?’

  ‘It means people call me names.’

  ‘Do you see yourself as English?’

  ‘Yep.’

  I wait, peering through the foliage. I’m not supposed to stand out in the open, on the common, but rather to scrunch myself into the actual bushes, where I’ll be less conspicuous.

  Nanny has helped form a search party in the town, to look for me. The search party’s already phoned up Mr Franklin, my headmaster and had him open up the school grounds to check I’m not hiding in there. They’ve sat down with the sergeant at Fernmere Police Station to give him my photograph and description.

  I don’t understand the point of this game of hiding alone in the woods with nothing to do. But if I show my face I will make Nanny look bad. And then what? What if my real mother doesn’t really want me back? What would happen to me then? Would Great Almond Street still take me if nobody was fighting over me anymore in court?

  It started, as so many weird things do, with a phone call from my mother. I heard her screeching echo through the receiver, ‘You are a violent woman and if you want violence you will get it! When my brother-in-law and my husband come down to get Anita, I assure you you will never see her again.’

  And so Nanny told me to run away as soon as Uncle Abejide arrived to pick me up. I was to run as fast as I could up the common and wait in the woods for further instruction. That way, Nanny said, Uncle Abejide would get annoyed and drive off to London without me and the courts would ‘see’ that I hated my mother and my stepfather and that I wanted to stay in Fernmere for ever.

  As soon as Uncle Abejide approached our open front door, I shot through the door, trembling, ran round the bend and off
the estate. I didn’t stop running until I reached the road leading to the common. The last I saw of Uncle Abejide was his white shoes as he stepped out of his blue BMW. Weeks later, in a meeting with social workers, he says, ‘I knew they’d pull a stunt like this.’

  Nanny’s beautiful sing-song voice rings out into the foliage.

  ‘Nin! Neety! Are you in there dear?’

  I am astonished. I’d thought Nanny would send a neighbour to call me out of the bushes. For Nanny to be walking in the woods, with her asthma and her arthritis, willing to risk rips in her stockings, mud in her high-heeled shoes, this must be an extremely important occasion.

  ‘You can come out now, darling,’ she whispers. ‘Your mother’s husband has gone.’

  The following day my mother keeps ringing us up. Nanny answers, listens, scowls and replaces the receiver. ‘Your mother’s just threatened to send a hitman down here to kill me and Wendy,’ she says.

  The phone rings again and I answer it. It’s my mother again. ‘What do you think you are doing,’ my mother hisses. ‘How can you do this to me? I’m your mother! What was all this pretend-running-away nonsense?’

  I see myself standing in the bushes the day before. Bored, afraid, guilty. I wish I’d had the courage then to set fire to the leaves so that I’d go up in flames.

  Nanny is gesturing and mouthing instructions.

  ‘WHY?’ screams my mother.

  ‘Nanny’s told me I’ve got to put the phone down,’ I say, replacing the receiver.

  Nanny sends me round to Wendy’s so that Wendy can come round and answer the phone should my mother ring again.

  The case rages on, taking custody of all our lives. The first hearing is in Sussex but the case gets transferred to the High Courts in London. Every day, Nanny buttons up her new mac, swipes lipstick across her mouth and leaves with Aunty Wendy for London. Nanny’s posh son Dave drives down from Guildford and picks them up each morning in his fast car. The first day they go to court, Nanny chuckles, ‘I haven’t been to London since 1956.’

  Nanny fills me in on each day’s events once she’s back home. It is as though she’s reading articles from the Daily Mirror aloud. ‘Your mother screamed at the judge in court this morning,’ she tells me, gleefully. ‘She gave her barrister the sack right there and then in front of everybody.’

  ‘Your mother wouldn’t stop screaming abuse at people in the courtroom’.

  ‘Your mother was wearing a suit that must have cost a thousand pounds.’

  ‘Your mother’s pregnant again.’

  ‘The paramedics had to be called to the court because it looked like your mother was about to miscarry her baby.’

  ‘Your mother called me a devil in disguise.’

  ‘Your mother attacked me in the court today and had to be hauled off by one of the ushers.’

  I let these words and stories wash over me, feeling distanced from both the subject of these tales and their bearer. I begin to regard these adults I once yearned for – Nanny and my mother – as characters, totally removed from me. I write stories about them in my exercise book, while sitting in the cupboard. In my stories, Nanny and my mother beat each other to death and I am left alone to live happily ever after.

  One night, trying to iron the trepidation and excitement out of my voice, I ask, ‘When am I going up to Great Almond Street, Nanny?’

  ‘You’re not, darling. You don’t have to go! That Mr Parsons has really come through for us and he’s said you don’t strike him as the sort of child who needs to see a psychiatrist at all. He thinks you’re well adjusted and very happy here with your old Nanny!’

  Nanny reads me a portion of Mr Parsons’ report:

  Anita’s command of the English language is very good. Her attachment to the British way of life is evident. Mrs Taylor has devoted more time than most would have done to this coloured child.

  My mother’s cheques have stopped coming. She wrote to Nanny about it, explaining that there was no way she was going to pay a manipulative evil devil to steal her very own child right from under her nose. To make ends meet, Nanny takes in an extra foster kid – Jemima, the five-year-old daughter of a Ugandan doctor who’s studying in London.

  Jemima moves into my pink bedroom, plays with my dolls and leafs through my books. I’m moved into Nanny’s bedroom. I must now knock first if I want to enter my own room. One night, I slip out of Nanny’s bed and into my bedroom and stand there looking at Jemima. As I watch her chest rise and fall and her limbs flail and twist as she sleeps, I feel myself shrinking. I now understand that I am replaceable. There is very little point to me.

  In the end, Jemima doesn’t stay very long. She won’t cooperate with Nanny in the bathroom. Instead of using the loo, she wets my bed. At night, she creeps downstairs, poos on our kitchen floor and hides her turds underneath Nanny’s red-and-white pouffe. As soon as Jemima’s dad’s finishes his studies, we send her back. I return to my own bedroom.

  One afternoon, Uncle Mick hands me a photograph of a golden-beige, round-faced baby with spiky black hair.

  ‘This is him,’ he says. ‘He’s all right, ain’t he?’

  Uncle Mick and Aunty Wendy have been sneaking off to Brighton at the weekends. Now that they have Kelly, they’re applying to adopt a second baby of their own so Kelly won’t be an only child. The baby boy is Indian. In Brighton, they’re taking lessons with social workers to learn how to care for an Indian baby.

  ‘He’s lovely,’ I say when I see the photograph. ‘I love him.’

  ‘How can you love him when you ain’t even met him yet?’ says Uncle Mick. ‘We don’t know yet whether the adoption people are gonna approve us.’

  ‘What’s his name?’ I say.

  ‘The old dear wants to call him Andrew if we get him. Says that was her old man’s middle name.’

  I look at the photo of this Andrew for a long time. He has a beautiful innocence to him I’ve never seen in my own baby photos.

  ‘What’s wrong with me then? Why don’t you just adopt me? If you want another child of your own, I mean?’

  ‘We tried to adopt you, didn’t we?’ says Uncle Mick. ‘When you was tiny. Me and Wendy talked about how much we’d like to adopt you. But the old girl, the bleedin’ Queen Mother, she wasn’t having any of it. She wouldn’t let us do it, would she? So we never had the chance.’

  Fragility

  IT IS NOT LONG before Nanny has a brainwave. She says that since I enjoy writing so much, I must write a letter to the judge, telling him who I’d like to win custody of me, and why. Mr Braithwaite, the solicitor, thinks this is a marvellous idea.

  I, meanwhile, feel disappointed. I’d secretly begun to daydream about ‘appearing’ in court, being bought brand-new outfits fit to wear in front of a judge, and, most of all, stopping at Wimpy for tea each evening after the day’s ‘hearing’ was over.

  But both Mr Braithwaite and the social workers have other ideas. Nanny says they’ve both agreed I’m too ‘fragile’ to speak in court. They reference the fact I recently emptied all of Aunty Wendy’s kitchen drawers onto the floor and sat amongst the debris, crying, claiming that monsters were coming to get me. And I’ve been caught at school, stealing a loaf of bread from one of the dinner ladies and then garbling something to the form teacher about God having given me the bread.

  Mr Parsons, the social worker, feels that I’m still not in a bad enough state to be assessed by Dr Seaton, but that I’d benefit from a sedative. He writes in his report:

  Anita’s general personality seems to have changed from a pleasant, happy and well-mannered child, to that of an irritable, unhappy and suspicious person.

  This behaviour is not like me, the teachers say.

  I’m not myself, according to Aunty Wendy.

  I ask Nanny what they mean by ‘fragile’ and Nanny says, ‘You’re delicate, darling. Sensitive.’

  I ask Uncle Mick why they’re saying I’m ‘fragile’ and he says, ‘It means they think you’re mental.’

&n
bsp; So Nanny takes me in to see Dr Gillies, which pleases me because it means a morning off from school. Nanny is thrilled too because there is no place she loves more than the doctor’s surgery, with its hushed corridors and its antiseptic smell.

  ‘It’s her nerves, Doctor,’ Nanny says.

  Dr Gillies appears uninterested. Nanny is always bringing me in here. She sits by my side, boulder-like handbag in her lap, while I look at my feet and the bored doctor gets out his stethoscope and presses his icy palm against my round belly to perform another of his fruitless examinations.

  Last week we came about my eczema. And in the months preceding this one, about my tonsillitis, my urinary tract infections, my sinus infections, my constipation, my headaches, the fact my feet are flat and have no instep, my hay fever, my peculiarly shaped skeleton (my bottom seems to curve up and outwards), my mood swings, my nightmares.

  ‘She needs tranquillisers, just for a week or so, Doctor,’ says Nanny. ‘The social worker’s said so. The nerves are affecting her studies. The poor child can’t cope with the pressure of The Case.’

  ‘I thought the social worker said I needed sedatives, Nanny,’ I whisper.

  ‘Same thing, darling,’ Nanny says as Dr Gillies scrawls something unintelligible onto his prescription pad, tears it off and virtually tosses the little sheet of paper at us.

  I take one of Dr Gillies’s sedative/tranquilliser pills and the nightmares begin to fade to white, giving way to gorgeous soothing daydreams filled with unicorns and fairies and gnomes, good witches and puppies. Everything in my life seems at once light and unreal, like my thoughts are suddenly wrapped in candy floss. This is surely almost as good as being at Great Almond Street.

  One afternoon, I sit at Aunty Wendy’s kitchen table, smiling to myself and drinking Lucozade through a straw. Nanny’s dehydrated hand grips my plump wrist, bringing me back from my daydreams. There is a pad of baby-blue Basildon Bond notepaper in front of me with a new Berol pen laid across it.