Precious (13 page)

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 . . .’

Agnes stops and turns around to face me in the dark, so suddenly that I almost walk straight into her. I feel the
akara
sinking into my stomach.

‘I keep having nightmares, Agnes. Where the men come back again.’

‘Why didn’t you talk to me about it before, Anita?’

‘I – I didn’t know what to say.’

I am seeing myself as I was when I last remember it happening. Alone in a room at my mother’s house in London. Behind a closed door. Footsteps. A man’s laughter. A door opening. My knickers being pulled down. More laughter. Feeling like my skin is being peeled off from the inside. Later, walking with my legs very far apart, like a cowboy in a Western.

‘I’m really sorry, Anita,’ Agnes says. She grabs my hand and we keep walking.

An insect lands on my wrist and starts inching up my arm. I slap it away.

‘Anita, listen to me,’ she says. ‘All you need to do is just forget about what happened to you, OK? Put it out of your mind. Don’t ever think about it again after tonight. OK?’

Agnes and I walk through the darkness towards our grandmother’s house, holding hands and saying nothing. I whisper ‘thank you’ but I’m unsure what I’m thanking her for.

It turns out that my revelation wasn’t news to Agnes; she’d witnessed what she’d called an ‘incident’ between me and one of my mother’s male friends, years ago. I was a few weeks away from turning four. I don’t remember Agnes being there. All I remember about this particular man is him being fat. That he kept perspiring and that he must have been rich because he handed me pocket money afterwards: a twenty-pound note that smelled brand new. Agnes had tried, without success, to protect me.

I uncover this information as an adult, when I gain access to my childhood Social Services records. I find that my then social worker had written and filed away a short report about what happened:

5.6.1975

Mrs Taylor had requested a visit especially as a result of information that Agnes had given her. Agnes is Anita’s half-sister and when they were last at home [with their mother] on a weekend together, Agnes was concerned about incidents that occurred with Anita and a man that visited her mother.

Mrs Taylor then said that Anita had complained of vulval soreness and irritation and that when her own daughter, Mrs Travis, had bathed Anita, she had put some cream on that area and thought that Anita was different in some way.

I explained to Mrs Taylor that it was very doubtful if a doctor would be prepared to examine such a small child internally, but I suggested that she might take Anita to her GP for some treatment for the soreness and if the occasion arose, she could then tell him what she suspected.

I suggested to Mrs Taylor that she should endeavour to let Agnes feel that she could talk to her freely about anything for the child had obviously been very bothered by it, to mention it to Mrs Taylor on her return.

I sit in dirt that’s as bright as the skin of a clementine. Ants, fat and glossy like black beads, crawl all over my legs and I don’t even care. At home, in Fernmere, I see creepy crawly things and I run screaming at the sight of a single ant, the tiniest spider. Here, I am me and an ant is an ant and ‘Hideous Africa’ is not in the slightest bit hideous.

‘What are you doing all by yourself, Precious-No?’ says Aunty Nneka. The bones in her knees creak as she crouches down beside me. ‘I’m going to tell you a story,’ she says.

The best-ever stories are told in Africa, and Aunty Nneka is the best-ever storyteller. She speaks of something called an
mbari
house where the village’s craftsmen congregate to carve sculptures in an orgy of artistry that they offer up to native African gods. Once the gods have feasted their eyes on all the art, the craftsmen destroy it all – and go on to rebuild it again when the gods need soothing next time.

African gods? I just can’t believe it. I’ve heard of Greek gods. I’ve seen pictures in my illustrated children’s Bible of the English god who I thought was everyone’s god: a white man in a white robe with a long white beard.

‘Are the gods coloured, Aunty? Is their skin brown like ours?’

‘Gods don’t have skins,’ says Aunty Nneka.

We sit in silence.

‘I can feel your mind whirring,’ Aunty Nneka says, finally. ‘What are you thinking about?’

‘How come I don’t live with my real family all the time, Aunty?’

‘It’s just the way things are. Right now.’

‘But there must be a reason.’

‘Everything is everything.’

This new phrase crawls into my head and my mind goes round and round trying to understand it.

‘Is that a riddle? What does that mean, Aunty?’

‘It means that everything in this minute is exactly as it is meant to be.’

I begin to count. One-plus-two-plus-three. All the way up to sixty.

‘It’s a new minute now, Aunty. Is everything still everything?’

‘Everything is as it’s meant to be in
every
minute.’

On Christmas Eve, I begin seeing things that other people say are not real.

The day starts as normally as a Christmas Eve spent in Africa can: I wake up covered in sweat and fresh mosquito bites. When I climb out of my grandmother’s bed, it is so early that night hasn’t quite given way to morning and the sky outside is still dark and bluish-purple, like a bruise. I trot through the small house and slip noiselessly into the steaming-hot kitchen where I stand in a corner, watching Patty do her chores.

Patty has a rhythm going. She leans over the table holding a big rusty knife and begins chopping up something I can’t quite see and every few minutes she stops, cocks her head to one side, looks out of the window and leans forward and starts chopping again. Finally, she turns around and screams.

‘Anita! You scared me-oh! I didn’t hear you come in!’

As soon as Patty sees me, she starts spooning bright orange palm oil into a big brown frying pan. She grabs two ripe plantains and yanks their skins off. She slits the yellow flesh into thin slices with her knife, sprinkles the slices with salt and flings them into the frying pan.

Patty fries plantain pretty much every time she catches sight of me. Now that she’s found African food that I will actually eat, she seems pleased, or relieved.

‘Eat,’ she says, putting a plate piled high with sweet, crisp plantain on the table in front of me.

As I munch plantain, Agnes strides into the kitchen, carrying what looks like a gigantic knobbly bar of soap. She drops this bar of soap – which is about three feet long – onto the kitchen table and it lands with a gentle thud on top of the plantain skins and chopped onions.

‘I made this myself,’ Agnes says.

‘Wow!’ I say. ‘How did you make it?’

‘Palm oil; lye,’ she says, cutting off chunks of soap and placing them into a large basket. ‘I’m going to try to sell it at the market today and make
naira
to buy Christmas presents with. Want to come and help me sell it?’

‘Will you give me my own bar of soap if I help you?’

‘I’ve got something better for you. Aunty Edna already gave me some traditional soap she said I should give to you; it will help your eczema. Wait, yeah?’