Precious (16 page)

‘If you don’t want to come to the party, you can go to the pictures,’ she says in a sickeningly gentle voice. ‘It’s up to you.’

I ask who’ll be at the party.

‘People from my office,’ says my mother.

Boring as grown-ups’ parties are, I’m tempted to go so that I can obtain rich gossip for Nanny and Aunty Wendy. They would love to know where my mother works and what sort of people she spends Monday to Friday working with and so, I suppose, would I.

‘Would I have to go the pictures all by myself then?’ I say curtly, still weighing each option.

‘I’ll call Patience and tell her to send Eddie to keep you company and take you to the pictures,’ my mother says, sounding as though her mind’s now made up.

‘Isn’t he at boarding school?’ I say, trying to hold in my interest. If my mother realises I’m excited about seeing him she might decide to take me to the party after all; she seems to get turned on by other people’s sadness.

‘Eddie got expelled,’ my mother says, pouting into her dressing-table mirror.

Eddie arrives in a denim jacket with studs all over it. He’s had his Afro cut off which makes his face and his nose look larger than when I first met him.

‘What’s happenin’?’ he says, in a new American accent. ‘What have you done to your face?’

I had hoped he’d say: ‘I’ve missed you.’

‘I was playing in the garden and I fell over,’ I mumble.

I look through the parlour window, into the blackness of the back garden and wonder if the dead rat’s still out there, decaying. Maybe it was my mother who actually killed that rat; I imagine her stamping on it until its insides spilled out onto the un-mown grass.

The raw memory of my mother hitting me lingers inside, rendering me thirstier than ever for approval from someone, from anyone. From Eddie.

‘I stayed in the US all summer with my aunty,’ Eddie says. ‘You should see it, man. Everyone has huge cars and the sidewalks are this wide,’ he spreads his arms wide.

‘What’s a sidewalk?’ I ask.

‘Say what?’ he says, clicking his fingers. ‘It’s a pavement, ain’t it?’

‘Why did you get expelled from boarding school?’ I say.

‘What’s it to you, babe? What movie are we gonna see?
Quadrophenia
?’

‘I doubt we’d get in to see it,’ I say. ‘We don’t look old enough.’

It occurs to me that whether we look old enough or not, we cannot get into the pictures without money. I go upstairs and poke my head around my mother’s bedroom door. She is sitting at her dressing table, patting caramel-coloured powder all over her face, grinning at her own reflection. How can somebody so pretty be so unkind? I linger in the doorway watching her, waiting for her to ask me what I want, hoping she’ll be able to read my mind so that I won’t have to ask her outright for cash.

‘Go and play with Eddie,’ she says to my reflection.

Before my mother leaves the house, she hands Eddie and me a fifty-pence coin each. ‘Remember to eat,’ she says. ‘I left
gari
and stockfish in the oven for you two. And see a movie that’s suitable for children, OK?’

I cannot find the food my mother says she’s left for us.

Rifling through her cupboards, I find nothing that looks even vaguely appetising.

‘Are you hungry, Eddie?’ I call from the kitchen, thinking – hoping – that he’s got some pound notes in his pocket. ‘There’s a Kentucky around the corner. We could go and get some to take away. If you want.’

Eddie’s too cool to say yes or no but he says ‘maybe’ and slips his denim jacket back on.

At the Kentucky Fried Chicken, I grin greedily as we ask for five pieces of chicken each.

‘Legs only,’ Eddie says. ‘No breast.’

The girl dishing up our chicken has dark freckles forming a thick pattern over the top of her face, like a mask. I can’t stop looking at it. She slaps a red and white Kentucky Fried Chicken paper bag on top of the counter and I feel ravenously hungry at the sight of the chicken grease that’s oozing through the bottom of the bag, turning it translucent. Eddie reaches into his stripy trousers, pulls out the fifty pence my mother gave him and looks at it thoughtfully and he reaches up, grabs the bag from the counter, grabs my hand with his other hand and pulls me through the door. We run down the street, our boxes of chicken bouncing inside the paper bag.

‘Did you pay the lady?’ I ask breathlessly.

‘No.’

We eat our contraband at my mother’s house.

‘Isn’t it wrong to steal?’ I say.

Eddie shrugs.

Eddie puts his arm around me and tells me he’s missed me.

‘Did you go out with anyone else when I wasn’t around?’ I ask.

‘Of course not,’ he says immediately.

We talk more about New York and about the black kids Eddie met there who drove their own cars. I tell him about Nigeria and about looking into the eyes of the travelling musicians and how it has left me restless and feeling uprooted and almost ready to run away from home and unsure even of where or with whom my home is these days.

I realise that this is the first time I have given voice to these feelings. I really do feel like a leaf being swept along by the wind. I’ve no idea what my future holds; where I might end up, whether I’ll eventually live in Nigeria or not. What will happen to me if Nanny, who is in her late sixties, should die? What if my mother has new children after she gets married? Will I count? Will I still matter? Why do Aunty Wendy and Uncle Mick need a baby of their own when they already have me? I talk and talk about all of these things until Eddie suddenly yawns. He looks deeply bored. I shut up. Neither of us says anything.

The clock ticking over my mother’s marble mantelpiece says eight o’clock. My mother said she’d be back late. Late means after midnight. I know what a boy like Eddie must be thinking right now: that I’m not cool or interesting enough to be worthy of his time. What if he stills see the dull me; the drab, timid little girl who used to call herself coloured? It may be only a matter of minutes, before Eddie decides that I’m nothing special.

Silence.

I search my mind for something that might hold Eddie’s interest. I find it.

‘Umm. Would you like me to do something?’

‘Go on, then.’

I kneel on the porridge-coloured carpet and feel my knees sink into its softness. Pushing aside the empty fried chicken cartons, I crawl closer to Eddie, open my mouth into a wide O and clamp it on the mound where his thighs meet, feeling movement beneath the heavy cotton of his trousers. I am secretly hoping my mother will walk in and see me and be utterly repulsed and humiliated by what’s become of her daughter. I want her to
know
.

I wait. Mouth open, jaw starting to ache.

Eddie smirks and gently strokes my face.

‘You’ve got to take my thing out of my trousers first, ain’t it?’ he says, stepping back a little and unzipping his flies.

Two weeks later, a letter filled with long words arrives for me from the Gateway building society. I show it to Nanny at the breakfast table. ‘That cheque your mother wrote you has bounced,’ says Nanny with a flicker of a smirk. ‘Either that or she put a stop on it.’

Upside Down

LIFE TURNS EASY AND weeks and months melt happily into one another.

I write a poem about a cat that can read people’s minds. I send it into a comic, they publish it and pay me two pounds.

As Aunty Wendy’s belly swells, she and Uncle Mick buy me more sweets, more stickers, more Sindy doll’s clothes than ever. ‘I don’t want you feeling left out or nothing,’ Uncle Mick says.

My mother doesn’t ring or write or turn up, and I don’t care since I still hate her.

Then, one afternoon, I emerge from school, laden with library books, and find there’s nobody there to meet me. I wait and wait. I walk down the steep little hill to Parkfield Road. No Nanny. No Aunty Wendy. Not even Agnes. I stare wanly at the passing cars, my satchel weighing heavily on my shoulder.

‘Wotcha!’ A rough male voice. ‘Where you off to then?’

Across the road, leaning against someone’s garden fence, one skinny leg crossed in front of the other, is Uncle Mick. He is rolling a Rizla between his thumb and forefinger. Uncle Mick’s hair billows out in the wind, forming a halo around his thin face. He dips his head and lights his fag.

‘What are you doing here?’

I dread hearing the answer to my own question. Uncle Mick should be at work. Him being here means something is seriously wrong. Nanny and Aunty Wendy may be dead. My mother might have killed them.

‘Shouldn’t you be at work Uncle Mick?’

‘Keep your hair on, mate. Got the afternoon off, didn’t I?’

‘How come?’

‘Do you ever stop asking bleeding questions? Like being interrogated being around you. Hurry up then, nipper.’

I try to keep up with Uncle Mick’s loping strides.

‘Where’s Aunty Wendy then?’

‘She’s up St Richard’s hospital, isn’t she.’

I stop mid-stride.

‘Is she . . . still alive?’

‘Of course she’s bloody alive! She’s having a check-up.’

‘Is her baby coming out, Uncle Mick?’

‘I should bloody well hope not,’ says Uncle Mick, laughing nervously. ‘It’s not due yet, is it?’

‘Where’s Nanny?’

‘With Wendy. Drove her to the hospital. You gonna stand here talkin’ then, or are you coming home?’

We walk through Hunter Close, where some of the poshest kids at my school live. We cross New Road taking the shortcut to Woodview – a narrow path that’s sandwiched between the fire station and an explosion of blackberry bushes whose branches tear at your hair as you pass.

‘I’ve been told to tell you your mother’s rung for you earlier. You know, you never told me what that Africa was like. Secretive little bugger, ain’t you?’

‘It was quite a good laugh being there,’ I say, smiling up at him. ‘Until, you know, I got ill. My cousins and aunties were really nice.’

‘So you liked it then? I don’t blame you.’

As we walk, I casually search the blackberry bushes for ripe fruit but every blackberry I see is either green and too unripe to eat or brown and all shrivelled up. Somehow Uncle Mick finds one that is deep purple, fat and bursting with sugary juice. He pops the blackberry into my eager mouth and I swallow it without chewing, as if I was a snake.

‘That one had a worm inside it, didn’t it?’ he says laughing.

After we’ve had our tea and watched
Top of the Pops
, Uncle Mick lets me flick through his record collection.

‘I’m teaching myself to become a DJ, aren’t I?’ he says

‘Why?’

‘So I can make a bit of money, DJin’ at people’s parties and weddings and that.’

‘Uncle Mick? who’s your favourite singer?’

His smile is radiant. ‘Who do you think? The Stones! I’d give anything to meet that bloody Mick Jagger.’

We delve into Uncle Mick’s stack of records, which is at least twice the size of my mother’s record collection. A Diana Ross single called ‘Upside Down’ falls out of the stack and slides onto the floor of the loft. On the cover of the single is a photo of Diana wearing skin-tight jeans. Her hair’s long and wavy and her brown eyes are glossy and enormous. This is how I’d like to look when I’m grown up. Apart from her lips, which are plump and slightly parted; they look wet. Her mouth looks disgusting, I think.

‘Nice isn’t she? That Diana Ross.’

Not exactly nice, I think. She reminds me of my mother, which means she is scary and beautiful at the same time.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ says Uncle Mick.

I shrug.

‘Haven’t changed, have you?’ he says.

‘Since when?’

‘Since your mother first brought you. Lovely little kid then you were and you still are, aren’t you? But you’ll go back one day, won’t ya Neety Williams?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ll go back one day. You’ll forget all about us lot one day. Won’t you? We love you, but you’re not ours.’

It is half term. I’m gulping lemonade straight from the can and watching raindrops bounce off a wide white London pavement. Uncle Mick is standing next to me, holding my hand and singing:

‘Where are we going? I said: “where are we going?” ’

‘To the zoo!’ I shout.

‘We’re going to the zoo, zoo, zoo,’ he sings. ‘How about you, you, you. You can come too, too, too. We’re going to the zoo. If we can bloody find it.’

Aunty Wendy looks up from the map she is reading. ‘Watch your language, Mick.’

Uncle Mick smirks and sucks on his roll-up cigarette.

When we finally arrive at London Zoo, Uncle Mick looks around, unimpressed.

‘They got a lot of these animals where you’re from, Neeta. Ha ha ha. They’re used to seeing kids that look like you,’ he says. ‘Ha ha ha, look at that! It’ll show us its arse in a minute.’