But Nanny’s still alive and so my mother will not come to the bungalow her granddaughter and I share with Nanny. We meet on relatively neutral ground – in Wendy’s sitting room. My mother arrives with three of my uncles, and with Uncle Abejide. My new daughter is gorgeous, Uncle Abejide says.
My mother says, ‘Why is the child so dark? How has my beautiful Precious given birth to this Idi Amin lookalike? Is the child’s father one of those black-as-tar Ghanaian men?’
It is like being kicked backwards in time. I look at Wendy, willing Wendy to say something, to stick up for me, to slap my mother around the face or order her to leave. Instead – silence. I hold Alice tight, hoping she has no awareness yet of her grandmother’s knife-like words.
‘Well?’ demands my mother. ‘Who is the father? What is going on here? Doesn’t this stupid girl know who made her pregnant? It must be some “Kofi” from Ghana. The child is so dark!’
I ignore her and so does everyone else in the room.
‘I think Alice’s hungry,’ I say to Wendy.
‘Well, feed her then love,’ says Wendy, grinning as goofily as any newly minted grandmother.
‘Feed her!’ my mother repeats.
‘Can I feed her up in your room, Wendy?’ I say
‘Course you can, love.’
Wendy understands my shyness about my body, my reluctance to breastfeed in public. And Wendy’s daughter, Kelly also understands – when we’re out and Alice gets hungry, Kelly shields me with her body and keeps an eye out to make sure no pervy old men are trying to sneak a look at my tits.
‘What is this rubbish?’ my mother says. ‘Feed her here. Feed her!’
Wendy’s adopted son Andrew watches my mother with awe and fear in his eyes, like he’s watching the hard nut on the playground, happy he’s not the target.
My mother chases me up the stairs and into Wendy’s bedroom. Leaning dangerously against Wendy’s wardrobe she says, ‘Well you’ve flushed your future down the toilet now, haven’t you? This is ridiculous and it makes me so angry! How can you become a mother when you’re not even a grown woman?’
‘I am grown! I’m nineteen now.’
‘Exactly,’ my mother says.
Before she leaves, my mother hands me a fat wad of notes ‘for the baby’. I end up frittering away the cash on faddish, foolish baby clothes – a tiny lilac puffa jacket and a pair of baby Nike Air Jordans.
September passes by, humid. I sit in my bedroom cradling Alice, staring into space, sweating, swollen and immobile. On my bedroom floor is a bin liner filled with the day’s dirty nappies. I’ll walk it up to the public rubbish bin outside the shop in a minute. I can’t dispose of too many nappies (or any other rubbish) in our bin because Nanny feels unable to let me handle the bin much any more, in case I forget to wash my hands afterwards and then spread germs around the bungalow.
Wendy says the situation’s not satisfactory; that no doubt I’d qualify for my own council flat, now I’m a single mum. But in order to get one Nanny would have to write to the council saying she didn’t want me living in her bungalow. Then I’d technically be homeless, forcing the authorities to provide housing. Nanny says, ‘Not over my dead body.’
Nanny does want me here. The outspoken, rebellious, theiving teen I had become has receded, disappeared even, as far as Nanny’s concerned. I’ve borne redemptive fruit. I’ve brought home a brand-new Nin. Alice, Nanny says, is the ‘living spit’ of me.
Alice is asleep in my arms. Nanny and I are watching The Bill.
‘Isn’t our little angel beautiful?’ Nanny says.
She is. Alice has masses of soft black hair now and she can’t seem to stop smiling. And yet, and yet . . . I feel almost afraid of her. It’s as if she is somehow silently accusing me of something. I look at Alice and I remember myself when I was a child, when I was a scared little girl. I’m reminded of how unkindly I treated myself, how I hated myself and blamed myself for the bad things that happened to me then. And now, being Alice’s mother seems to be forcing me to confront me and my own past and I don’t feel ready to do that yet. Maybe not ever. It’s like the rabid ghost of my childhood is chasing me, and the more time I spend masquerading as a mother, the more I feel compelled to try to run away.
One morning Wendy comes into my bedroom and finds me sitting at my desk, staring at my sleeping baby, crying so hard that my entire face is drenched.
‘You need a break, love. I think you’ve got post-natal depression,’ says Wendy. ‘I’ll take Alice for the day and you get some rest.’
I take Wendy’s advice, and set off for Chichester for the afternoon, alone. When I return several hours later, my eyes are shining with adventure.
‘I’ve decided to go back to college!’ I announce. ‘I start next Monday!
Indeed I’ve convinced the principal who kicked me out of college three years ago to reinstate me. I’ve promised him I’ll be the most impressive A level student the college has ever seen and he’s let me enrol for A levels in English, Film Studies and Law. Alice can come to Chichester with me each day; I’ll entrust her to the college crèche from Monday to Friday. I’ve got it all planned out.
I half expect Wendy and Nanny to dissuade me but then I realise that, perhaps, they are so sick of seeing my morose face that they’ll be relieved to see the back of me.
Wendy says she thinks it’s a great idea. Nanny says she’s proud of me.
‘Alice’s such a tiny baby,’ Wendy says. ‘I wouldn’t feel comfortable with her being carted in to some crèche where the people there don’t know her. How are you gonna manage with her and her buggy on the bus, love?’
‘I’ll manage,’ I say, sounding more confident than I feel.
‘Listen, love,’ says Wendy. ‘I’ll child-mind her during the day for you, while you’re at college.’
‘Really?’ I say. I run up to Wendy and hug her. ‘Thank you!’
With each week that passes, I’m shrinking. Literally. For no reason I can fathom, I am losing enormous amounts of weight. My pregnancy weight and the heft borne of years of comfort eating melts away. I drop from eleven stone to eight and a half stone and all at once I have cheekbones. My arms and legs are like pipe-cleaners. I feel more attractive than . . . ever, in my life. With each pound I lose I look more and more like my mother. With each pound I lose, I feel less and less motherly.
I watch Wendy cradling Alice. She makes mothering look as effortless as reading, as effortless as writing or walking or breathing. Wendy has grown plump over the years and she wears these hairy cardigans she buys from Marks and Spencer and when she holds you, it feels like you’re being swaddled in cotton wool. Me, though, I am all skinny arms and long spindly legs and nervous energy. Despite my abundant breasts, poor Alice won’t even ‘latch on’ properly and she has had to go on formula. She seems almost desperate to be weaned, and to go to Wendy, and who can blame her?
Having babies is something African women can do, but – from what I’ve seen in my life so far – it’s only white women who can be truly maternal. My mother and all of the other African women who’ve sent their children to Fernmere over the years seem to feel natural indifference towards their own offspring, a casual disregard that makes it feel okay to advertise them and give them away to total strangers, to use violence when children become annoying. Can someone like me – a pseudo-African – really compete with Wendy when it comes to raising a baby properly and being a decent mother?
Slowly I begin to fall in love with my newfound slimness. In fact I reach a point where I can barely stop checking myself out in the mirror, fearing my attractiveness may dissolve and vanish as suddenly as it appeared. Nanny watches my physical transformation and observes without comment as I begin to to slowly fall in love with my body, with my sexual attractiveness.
Without explanation, Nanny begins to offer me more and more food, getting up early to cook me fry-ups before I set off each morning to drop Alice off at Wendy’s and catch the bus to college. When I decline the ext
ra food Nanny warns me, ‘Be careful, Nin. Men will know about you.’
‘Know what about me?’
‘That you’ve got a little baby, dear. They’ll think if you’ve done it once, you’ll do it again. They’ll think you’re a woman of easy virtue.’
Male students at college do pay me a lot of attention now – perhaps unsurprisingly given the outfits I’ve taken to wearing. In the mornings, when I catch the doubledecker to Chichester Tech, I’m glared at by the other girls, the Woodview girls, who are three years younger than me and studying for BTECs in hair-dressing and beauty therapy. They’re sensibly dressed in jeans and T-shirts. I rock up to the bus-stop in pum-pum shorts, platform heels and cropped sleeveless tops so short they barely cover my breasts.
While I dress in a way that rubs most other girls up the wrong way, I manage to make a new friend. Annabel. Annabel is easy about her sexuality and doesn’t seem to have any hang ups.
I begin to wonder what it would be like to to act more like Annabel. How would it feel to toy with men instead of being their prey? I remember the days when boys felt, at best, sorry for me. When I was invisible. What would it be like to be in control and to be desired, not in a furtive, degrading way but rather in a majestic way. To feel beautiful and powerful.
There is only one way to find out.
Wendy’s observed that I seem knackered and suggests that she takes Alice for the night, as it looks like everything’s getting on top of me. I say I’ll spend the evening revising. Instead, I wait until Nanny’s asleep and then I climb out of my bedroom window, wearing a Benetton slip dress that barely covers my knickers. Nanny would hear the front door if opened it, but she won’t my hear my bedroom window from where she’s snoozing in her armchair.
I jog to the foot of Woodview where I meet Annabel, who drives us to London, to a nightclub, where we chat briefly to a hyperactive hip-hop DJ called Dave. Kool G Rapp and DJ Polo are doing a show.
On the dance floor, Annabel and I are approached by a man who asks us if we want to ‘party’ with Kool G Rapp and DJ Polo. Annabel says she’s encountered this sort of thing before, that hip-hop stars have scouts at their gigs, searching for girls to introduce to the rappers. I’m not sure whether this means the scout thinks Annabel and I are pretty, or that we just look very easy.
Annabel and I sit in the limo with Kool G Rapp and one of his back-up dancers, Kenny, gulping Moet et Chandon. Kenny tells me I’m ‘fine as hell’ and I am so stunned that I cannot reply.
We arrive at the Hilton, where Annabel slinks off with Kool G Rapp and I’m left in the bar, talking to Kenny, the dancer. He says he grew up in the South Bronx. Kenny says he was there when everything kicked off and he tells me about it all. He knows Slick Rick and he knows Doug-E-Fresh. He became a break-dancer when he was ten. We talk until 2 a.m. and then we go to his room and have sex until five. When I reluctantly prepare to leave, telling him I’ve got to get back home, he says, ‘Call me.’
Annabel drives us back to Sussex and I climb back in through my bedroom window. Later that morning, I sit in my law class, marvelling at this development. I can’t believe I just had sex with someone and that I liked it and that I want to do it again. When my lesson ends I skip to a phone box and call Kenny in his hotel room.
‘Who this?’ he says.
‘It’s me!’
‘Who’s me?’
‘Anita. From last night. I just wondered, umm, if you slept well.’
‘Oh, you the sexy brown-skinned girl wit da long legs?’
‘I guess so,’
‘What’s up? Listen, I’ll call you back in a bit. Gimme your number right quick.’
‘What time are you gonna call? It’s just that I go to college. I’m not always home.’
It takes me the entire bus journey to Fernmere to realise I’ve just been given the brush-off. When it dawns on me, I don’t mind. Even if it was for only one night, I finally understood what all the fuss about men and sex was about.
I get home to Woodview and Nanny says, ‘Some young man with an American accent rang for you earlier, Nin.’
‘OH MY GOD!’ I scream.
I race to the phone box, with Alice in her pushchair and I dial the Hilton, only to be told that Kenny’s checked out.
I write endless letters. I’m always at the post office in Chichester or Fernmere, pushchair in tow. Or at WHSmith’s, gazing longingly at the expensive vellum stationery. The letters I write – to magazines, to pen pals – are my lifeline, my connection to the possibilities of the future.
In April, I get my first-ever byline in a newspaper, the Fernmere Observer. They assign me a story about a field on Woodview that’s turning into a quagmire. The Woodview residents (not that I’ve noticed) are furious that the council’s doing nothing about the state of their field. I head to Woodview with the photographer. The photographer makes a joke about us possibly being unsafe venturing into a cesspool like Woodview. I laugh at his joke and don’t admit that I live there.
I write to Vogue, plucking a name from the magazine’s masthead – Georgina Boosey, the managing editor. She sounds important, I think. Important and very posh. I doubt I’ll hear back, but six weeks later, a letter arrives. I race around to Wendy’s, Alice on my hip.
‘Look!’ I shout, thrusting the letter towards Wendy. ‘It’s from Vogue! They want me to go in there for a month’s work experience!’
I don’t understand why Wendy doesn’t look impressed. If anything, she looks bored.
‘Do you understand what Vogue is? This is, like, beyond anyone’s dream!’
‘But haven’t you already done enough work experience now at the Observer?’ Wendy says. ‘It’s like this writing stuff ’s taking over, love.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, you have to give up your own dreams, don’t you? Now that you’re a mother. You can’t let this writing stuff take over. You can’t do all this runnin’ round writing if you’re going to be a mum. You can’t do both.’
And there it is. My answer.
One-Way Ticket
FOR FILM STUDIES A Level, we are doing coursework on modern African-American cinema. First, we watch and analyse New Jack City, Straight Out of Brooklyn and Boyz N The Hood. Then the film tutor delivers a lecture about a new black American director called Spike Lee and unveils Do The Right Thing on the huge projector screen in the lecture room. During the scene in the movie where Mookie turns his back on his racist white employers and helps trash their pizzeria, I feel as if each and every member of the all-white film studies class is watching me, and mistrusting me.
For the majority of students in the film class, black cinema is just a course module, but I am spellbound. Each time the film tutor asks the class a question – ‘Why does the Ice Cube character pour alcohol onto the ground after his brother is shot?’ or ‘What were the factors motivating the elderly man to shoot Wesley Snipes’ character at the end of the film?’ – mine is the first hand to shoot up.
I screen and re-screen the films obsessively at home, on the rental TV and video-player in my bedroom. Never before have I seen black people of my own generation depicted in the movies and I feel almost as if I’ve made a discovery nobody else in Fernmere knows about. In fact, I probably have.
Alice is spending more and more nights as well as days at Wendy’s. It’s an unspoken agreement. A silent agreement that I’m so maternally incompetent that this move is for the best. Obviously I don’t really go out in the evenings, because, if I’ve got time and energy to spare it should be spent on Alice, not on gallivanting around with my mates. So I stay home with Nanny. Usually I’m in my bedroom, glued to the TV screen, watching films. By the end of my first year of A Levels, I’ve watched Boyz N The Hood more than fifty times and I’m still not done. One evening I ask Nanny if she’d like to watch Boyz N The Hood with me and she sits through it, almost jumping out of her armchair every time there’s a gunshot.
‘Isn’t it brilliant? What do you think of it, Nanny?’ I ask.
Nanny says that Angela Bassett’s character’s ‘ever so pretty for a coloured girl’ but that she didn’t understand why the boys in the film kept shooting at each other.
I launch myself into student-hood with an almost deranged zeal, handing my essays in days before they are due. I stay up all night to study, just for the sheer joy of studying, and in the afternoons after college I stagger to my part-time job, half-asleep. Then I rev myself up with coffee and Korean ginseng capsules so that I can do yet more studying, deep into the night.
Nanny tells me I am doing a good job at juggling being a mum and being a student, but I know she is lying about the mothering part. I am the most distracted, inadequate mother that ever lived.
At the end of my first year of college and my first year of motherhood, I win the college prize for academic achievement. Alice stays home with Nanny while Wendy and my former social worker, Barbara, accompany me to the awards ceremony.
My English and Film tutors don’t ask me whether or not I intend to go to university; they ask me which universities I’m applying to. I’m predicted three A grades at A Level. I play along and fill out an UCCA form just for the hell of it. Just because everyone else on my course is filling out UCCA forms. I try to keep things at least slightly realistic by only applying to universities relatively close to home – UCL, Sussex, Royal Holloway and Southampton. Then I throw caution to the wind and apply to Oxford.
The news of my Oxford application does not impress anyone. In fact, everyone I tell has the same query: what on earth do I think I’m playing at?
Nanny says, ‘Oxford? The university?’
Nanny’s son Dave and his wife Julia say that this is the most preposterous idea us lot in Woodview have come up with yet.
My English tutor, who’s recently marked my coursework on Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison, warns me that Oxford is not a progressive institution, that it’s mired in the dark ages.
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