Precious

by Precious Williams

  ‘Dear Judge,’ I write and I sit there biting the pen, waiting for further instruction.

  Nanny stands over me, holding the edge of Aunty Wendy’s table tight.

  ‘This will determine our future, Nin,’ Nanny warns, and goes on to tell me, word-for-word, what to write in the letter. The letter is a mish-mash of truth and fantasy and writing it feels like writing one of my short stories. In between whispering words, Nanny’s breath comes out ragged and shallow. I can smell the stale coffee on her breath.

  ‘I have written to tell you how I feel about this court case,’ I write, in my neat, joined-up writing. ‘I have lived with Nanny in Fernmere for a long time and would like to remain in Fernmere.’

  Aunty Wendy turns away from her washing-up to face us. She looks sceptical.

  ‘You’re being ridiculous, Mum. A kid her age wouldn’t say remain,’ Aunty Wendy says. ‘The bloody courts aren’t gonna believe a nine-year-old would use big words like that.’

  ‘Will you mind your own business, Wendy, you daft bitchie,’ says Nanny. I look up at Nanny, startled. She smiles down at me gently and tells me what to write for the next paragraph. She tells me to stop holding my pen so tightly as it’s making my handwriting come out spiky.

  ‘Nanny taught me to read when I was three and four,’ I write. This much of the letter is true. Nanny says I took to reading like a duck to water and that in this regard I am like Topsy who also loved reading and ‘learned her letters like magic’.

  ‘I have many friends in Fernmere,’ I continue. ‘And I like my teacher Mrs Southgate and my headmaster, Mr Franklin. I go to Brownies and country dancing and can swim fifty metres because I go regularly to swimming lessons. Nanny gives me lots of love and my mother does not when I have to stay there for short periods. My favourite meal is “roast” which Nanny cooks on a Sunday.

  ‘My mother cooks hot peppery meals that hurt my throat. I am working hard at school so that I might win a scholarship to a good school. If I went to London it would take me a long time to get used to the Nigerian way of life and it would put me off working at school. I had an unpleasant two weeks with my mother in the summer holidays. Obi, my cousin, stole a bar of chocolate from a shop. My mother made no attempt to take it back. So as I know it is wrong to steal, I had to. I have written this letter on my own and only me and you will see it. Yours sincerely, Anita Williams.’

  My letter is sent in to the judge as evidence that I love my life in Fernmere. A photograph of me dressed up as Miss Biafra, grimacing at the camera with a vivid nylon scarf tied mammy-style around my head, is presented to the court as evidence that I am in touch with my ‘cultural background’.

  But the judge is unimpressed. He says a child my age would not use such long words, that the entire tone of the letter suggests it was written by somebody other than me.

  Nanny has a stack of paperwork from the judge crammed into her handbag and she starts crying as she tells me what it says. The judge has said that despite me being ‘anglicised’, I am still a coloured girl and that it seems best that I am re-introduced to the African way of life and sent back to my ‘perfectly good natural mother’.

  But despite sort-of winning the case, my mother suddenly loses interest and stops turning up for the hearings. When the social workers and official solicitors ring her up she does not answer the phone. They write letters to her and the letters arrive back with ‘return to sender’ scrawled across the envelopes.

  Years later, when I obtain the court files and social workers’ notes from this period, I read reports claiming my mother’s interest in the proceedings, and in me, waned quite suddenly in 1981. The files say my mother claimed she had no time to see me because she was travelling overseas a lot for work. She had one son and another on the way. She didn’t have enough money or time to travel to Fernmere to collect me for visits. She couldn’t afford the cost of long-distance phone calls from London to Fernmere.

  My mother has a different story. She says she was treated in a racist, biased way. And that she felt ‘put off ’ after reading an affidavit submitted to the court by Mr Parsons, the social worker, a man who’d written lengthy reports about my mother despite never having met her or spoken to her. Mr Parsons had submitted the following statement to the court:

  This is not an easy matter since cultural background is an important feature here and the mother’s attitude towards the children is common enough amongst the tribal customs of which she is influenced. In Nigeria and many other African states most children are ‘farmed out’ amongst the tribe and are treated as ‘possessions’ and therefore Anita’s mother is doing no more than her cultural background would demand. However, it would have been hoped that the completely different culture of the host country would have influenced the mother to accept a new approach to child care . . .

  My heavily pregnant mother’s response to the above was to collapse on the courtroom floor, ‘out of anger’. She experienced severe stomach pains right there in the courtroom, she has said, and began haemorrhaging a ‘scary green liquid’.

  Her own mother, in Nigeria, consequently advised her that I was a revolting, treacherous child who deserved no more of my mother’s time or attention. That if the stress of this ‘rubbish court case’ continued, my mother might die – and that no mother should be prepared to die for an undeserving child.

  Neither Nanny nor my mother have custody of me now: I am a Ward of Court. Until I turn eighteen, the court has to make all the major decisions about me. The court says that for now, at least, I must remain with Nanny.

  Aunty Wendy and Uncle Mick throw me a party in the newly built hut, on the marshy field that marks the edge of Woodview estate. It’s to commemorate winning the case and to celebrate my eleventh birthday. Nanny would have come but her nerves are playing up, so she’s at home in front of the TV.

  Uncle Mick’s bought me a strawberry gateau with eleven pink candles in the middle. Nanny’s made a blancmange in the shape of a rabbit, nestled in a bed of bright green jelly which is supposed to look like grass. Aunty Wendy stands proudly in charge of a mop bucket filled with fruit punch that’s swimming with slices of orange and chunks of pineapple.

  Our DJ, Uncle Mick, puts on Dexy’s Midnight Runner’s single, ‘Come On Eileen’, and everyone starts dancing, even the boys. It’s rare for a girl to have so many boys at her birthday party, but it’s not because I’m well liked because I’m not, particularly.

  I managed to get them here by going up to the coolest boy in school, Tom, and handing him an invitation. I did this because the last time I saw my mother, she said something to me about bold people getting everything in life that they dream of. Tom – who has taken Eddie’s place in my heart – considered my invitation for a full week and came up to me on the playground and said, ‘All right. I’ll come.’ After that, the other boys in my year begged for invitations.

  ‘Come On Eileen’ slows right down and starts to build again in tempo and Uncle Mick clamps his hands over the headphones on his head. He is jerking his hips back and forth in tune with the beat. My mother walks in just as it reaches a crescendo.

  My mother’s sudden arrival shocks and thrills me. She merely nods at me and ignores Aunty Wendy. Dressed in red and sparkling with gold jewellery, she plunges into the party and immediately announces that she will conduct a dancing contest. She will give the best dancer among us a twenty-pound note.

  My mother marches across the rough floorboards to Uncle Mick and whispers a greeting to him, making me choke a little on my fruit punch.

  It’s sad Nanny’s not here to see this. Nanny’s been saying my mother’s not welcome at my party since she hasn’t contributed a penny towards the cost of it; I’d love to see Nanny saying this to my mother’s face.

  Uncle Mick puts Dexy’s Midnight Runners back on. My friends begin dancing furiously, for all they’re worth, forming a circle and nudging me – the girl with the rich, glamorous mother – into the centre of this circle. I feel bold and limitless, perhaps bec
ause Mother’s attitude is contagious or perhaps because her turning up to my party after all makes me feel so special.

  I close my eyes and dance, giving my body over to the beat the way a tree surrenders to the wind. I dance until I feel droplets of sweat swimming from my hairline down the sides of my face, spinning and swaying through ‘Come On Eileen’ and ‘Dancing Queen’ and ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’.

  When I open my eyes and finally stop dancing, my mother is next to me and I dare to look directly up into her amused eyes. I hold my breath and wait for her to hand me the twenty-pound note. She runs a gentle hand through my hair. ‘I see the straightener didn’t last,’ she says. ‘Your hair looks disgusting.’ And she walks up to my best friend Tara and slips a twenty-pound note into the waistband of Tara’s skirt.

  Before she leaves, I say to my mother, ‘Thank you for coming to my birthday, Mummy.’

  ‘I wanted to wish you a happy birthday, Precious,’ my mother says. Her voice is loaded with bitterness as she adds, ‘I wanted to tell you that I’ve had another son, Chika. He nearly died before he was even born, because of you.’

  After a sweat-inducing silence, I say, ‘What’s Chika like, Mummy?’

  ‘My son is beautiful,’ she says fiercely.

  I flinch when she says ‘my son’, wondering why she doesn’t say ‘your brother’.

  When Chika’s lying in his mother’s arms, he must not know that I exist or that she’s my mother too.

  ‘Any news of Agnes?’ my mother says.

  The last we heard Agnes was doing something called ‘sleeping rough’. I say nothing. I want my mother to hold me, the way she must hold her new son.

  ‘Well,’ she says. ‘I wanted to tell you that, after this, I’m washing my hands of you. I can’t believe you chose that woman over me.’

  She rubs her hands together briskly, and she walks away, across the field, her high heels stabbing the marshy soil.

  Book Three

  How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers’ names.

  Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens

  Who I Am

  I’M SITTING ON A scarred wooden bench, with condom wrappers and broken Diamond White bottles at my feet. Chewing gum’s stuck to the graffiti’d walls around me. An obscured, faded bus timetable, dotted with fag burns, advertises the sluggish, infrequent passage of buses to and from Haslemere, Pompey, Chichester and Bognor.

  Sitting next to me: Tom. Just about the coolest, best-looking boy in my year at school. Unbelievably, his arm is draped around me. I pretend, in this delicious second, that he fancies me. Even though I know better. Truth is, when the two of us hang out like this, Tom talks non-stop about other girls – the girls he fancies. White girls. Blond girls. And I just listen. Or sometimes I give him advice about his love life. Like I know anything about romance.

  A car cruises the perimeter of the bus station; a white car that’s as rusty and insubstantial-looking as an ancient Diet Coke can. It inches towards us and its windows slide down on the passenger side. Wendy leans out. ‘What do you think you’re doing, you idle little devil?’ she yells.

  ‘Can’t I stay?’ I look at Tom who’s staring at Wendy.

  ‘We’ve been driving all over the town looking for you,’ she screams. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing in this disgusting bus shelter? You’re coming grocery shopping with us, my girl. It doesn’t hurt you to give Nanny a hand.’

  ‘I’ll see you later, Tom, yeah?’ I whisper, inching apathetically towards Nanny’s car.

  Nanny turns in her seat and narrows her crinkle-rimmed eyes at me. She purses her matt-scarlet lips. And then she revs the engine.

  ‘Mick said he saw you with that little waste-of-space Debbie earlier,’ says Wendy.

  ‘So?’

  ‘My Mick said you refused to tell him where you were off to. God I don’t know how you can go around with that Debbie. Dunno what germs you might pick up from being around her.’

  ‘Well I’m not having sex with her am I?’

  ‘Will you shut up, for Pete’s sake, you insolent little slut! This is the second week in a row you’ve tried to skive off coming shopping. I’ve got my spies. I know what you get up to.’

  I may be insolent but I’m definitely not a slut. In theory I could have become one. I value my body so little that I’d probably let absolutely anyone do absolutely anything to it. But I don’t put it about, I don’t get around. Because the intense disgust I feel at the very thought of sex overrides everything. And so I am laughably chaste. Never snogged a boy, never gone on a date.

  Not that anybody’s queueing up to get off with me anyway. The only guys who find me at all pretty are not my peers but rather the grown men who occasionally sidle up to me at the bus station or at my part-time waitressing job, calling me a ‘sexy little jungle bunny’. Telling me, ‘You ain’t half exotic.’

  ‘You know what they say,’ says Wendy. ‘Hang around with dogs and you’ll wake up with fleas.’

  ‘You’re so fucking sad,’ I hiss.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘That was that Tom you were with, wasn’t it? What were you doing with him then? Slow down, Mum.’ Wendy pokes her finger through the open car window as we crawl up Chichester Road. ‘That’s where that Tom lives, isn’t it?’

  Craning her neck and peering through the car window, Wendy takes in the details; the large detached house set back from the main road, the unblemished white Mercedes parked in front, the beautifully tended flower beds. Wendy turns to look at me, a curious smile on her face. ‘What are you doing knocking about with someone like him then?’ she says.

  ‘What’s it got to do with you who I go round with?’

  ‘You don’t half have an attitude, my girl,’ says Wendy. ‘You don’t half think highly of yourself. I love you and I always will, but I don’t know who you think you are.’

  Who I am is a thoroughly English girl. The colour of my skin doesn’t mean a thing. I’m as white as the next person. Inside. I know nothing about Africa. I care nothing about Africa. And everyone in Fernmere is so used to me now, so friendly with me, that they see me as one of their own. This is the fantasy, Nanny’s fantasy, of how my life is.

  Then there’s my reality. Someone’s spray-painted a message for me across one of the garage doors on Woodview. ANITA GO HOME, YOU WOG. The message was probably left by the same National Front boys who sometimes follow me home from school, throwing stones at me, hissing, ‘What you got to say for yourself then, Sambo?’

  My social worker, Barbara, has been to the police station to report the ‘racialist abuse’ but the cops can’t do anything unless one of the stones thrown at me actually hits me. Or unless one of the NF boys himself hits me.

  Life would be a lot easier for me if I didn’t act so stuck-up, Barbara says. Or if I didn’t keep ‘going on all the time about being black’, Wendy says. Barbara disagrees with Wendy and says my ‘ethnicity’ can’t be ignored. Barbara talks about it – my colour – like it’s a disease and over the years has advised me that I need to accept it, deal with it, overcome it, live with it, get to grips with it, adapt to it and stop being so sensitive about it.

  Barbara comes to visit Nanny and me at six-monthly intervals, to talk to me about my ‘situation’, and to interview us both so that she can draw up an evaluation report that she shares with the other senior social workers. According to her latest evaluation report, the situation looks like this:

  Mrs Taylor needs to examine her own motivation for fostering Anita and to learn to ‘let go’ and allow her to develop her own identity. Mrs Taylor is not always able to act clearly in Anita’s best interests, owing to her own emotional need for the child. She lacks understanding of the need for Anita to be aware of and to accept her own cultural background.

  Nanny reads this report and calls it ‘poppycock’.

  I don’t care what the grown-ups say: I don’
t feel like blending in any more. I’ve no inclination to continue apologising for the colour of my skin. I want to be allowed to be me. But then, can I really be me when I am not a hundred per cent sure who me is yet?

  At school, I belong to every social subset going. I am an outcast in outdated Marks and Spencer get-up and at the same time I hang out with the clever, the popular and the trendily dressed kids. I’m a teacher’s pet, at times, but when I feel like it, I transform into the lippy thorn in the teachers’ sides – I become the kid who sits at the back of the classroom, lobbing scrunched-up paper at the teachers’ backs as they write on the blackboard.

  I’m a great admirer of the kids who smoke puff and of those who get arrested and the ones who get expelled. I worship the boys who carry flick knives in their rucksacks and the girls who give blow jobs in the bus shelter to boys they’re not even going out with. But me, I just teeter on the precipice of delinquency; I never fully make the leap. Something – the risk of disappointing Nanny? My pride? – prevents me diving in.

  I’ve got ambition. I want to escape to London and get my own flat and write stories for magazines and find a posse of black friends who – hopefully – will teach me how to stop being a laughing stock among other blacks.

  Other black people mesmerise me but I only see them on TV – sprinting, doing the long jump, singing, dancing, rioting, stealing cars and sometimes stabbing or shooting at one another.

  Last time I saw young black people – in real life and en masse – was when I went on a school trip up to the National History Museum. There they were: a crew of black kids in Adidas trainers, standing outside the museum chatting, posing, larger than life. Unmistakeably Londoners because of their sharp accents, their swagger. I stood there, in my navy school skirt and my lace-up Clarks shoes, staring at them like they were images on a cinema screen, sucking in the sweetness of every detail. One of the crew, a girl with thin, tight cornrows, stared right back at me, and yelled, ‘Picky head!’ and her mates looked me over quickly and erupted into rounds of chainsaw-like laughter.