Precious (26 page)

‘Is that so?’ says the man interviewing me – an accountant named Simon.

I tell Simon I’ve just turned eighteen, which is true and that I’ve just passed A Level maths, which obviously isn’t. Surprisingly I pass an on-the-spot maths test.

‘Ever since I was a child, I’ve always been obsessed with numbers,’ I say. ‘You couldn’t get me to write anything or read a book. All I did was play with calculators, do sums in my head. People used to nickname me Figures . . .’

The lies pour forth. I listen to myself as if from afar. I sit there thinking sell-out, sell-out, sell-out.

Simon uses phrases the career advisor at my school used to use, such as ‘You’ll receive on-the-job training’ and ‘There’s room for growth and promotion.’

He can start me on a salary of £8,000 a year. I’ll start on Monday. I’ll be able to put myself forward for exams, which, if I pass them, will transform me into something called an Accounting Technician. From there, apparently, the sky’s the limit as far as accounting goes.

Life as a Junior Accounts Clerk in the City is so soulless and unchanging that it’s almost funny. And yet I turn up on time, day after day after day, breathlessly reliable like a ticking clock. I’m modelling myself after a nugget of advice Mick gave me when I first became a drop-out. ‘Holding down a job builds your character, dunnit?’

But despite my extreme reliability, I feel constantly on edge as a Junior Accounts Clerk. Like something bad is about to happen. The numbers on my VDU screen make my head contract and ache. The figures on the sheets of paper I keep being fed look like code to me.

Perhaps it’s my own fault I feel on edge. By the end of my second month at my new job, I’ve told my new colleagues so many lies about my life that it’s no longer possible to indulge in normal conversation even, in case I give myself away. I’ve claimed to have a mum and dad, who are married (to each other) and with whom I live. I said it all because I wanted to fit in. As the only black girl in the office besides the cleaner, I felt a need to seem ultra respectable and ultra likeable. And normal.

Now that I’ve got a job, I’m able to get a room of my own: in a flat-share in Brixton, on Coldharbour Lane. I rent the room from a posh white woman called Jane. She’s older than me and from Chichester. I’ve no idea what she thinks she’s playing at living on the frontline in Brixton.

At the interview for the flat-share, Jane says – her voice rich with surprise and delight – that I am ‘so well spoken’. She wants to know what my parents do and where I went to school. I claim to have attended a well-known Catholic boarding school. And my dad works in oil, I say. My mother’s a maths professor at Oxford.

Jane tells me the room’s mine if I want it.

Effy’s not impressed.

‘You’re fucking watchin’ Channel Zero,’ she screams. ‘You’ve lost it.’

And our friendship fizzles out in much the same way it originally began, back when we were toddlers duelling for Nanny’s love. A vicious argument, then a punch-up and mutual hair-pulling and scratching outside Peckham Rye station, leaving me suddenly friendless and with a small bald patch on one side of my head.

Jess, a friend from Fernmere Grammar School, moves to London to work as a PA in the West End. The two of us take up raving. Incredibly, nobody has the heart to openly laugh at our lame dance moves and we spend several nights a week in the West End, trying our hardest to dance, right through until dawn. And that’s when I meet the boy.

The boy is swaggering to and fro outside the Limelight nightclub in Piccadilly. Handing out flyers for an upcoming rave in Deptford. He has fresh tramlines etched into the sides and back of his head and he’s wearing a white-and-yellow shell suit that reminds me of a parachute. He calls himself MC Hassan. He looks me up and down and inclines his head in such a way that it’s clear he thinks I’m attractive. Jess gives me that nudge in the ribs that means, ‘You’ve pulled.’

‘You. You look like Bola,’ says MC Hassan.

‘What’s Bola?’

‘She’s just a friend, innit. She’s pretty. Like you. You Nigerian?’

‘I guess so.’

‘You
guess
so? You need to claim your culture! Igbo, yeah?’

‘How did you know?’

MC Hassan winks at me.

‘You ever been back home? Nigeria?’

‘When I was a kid.’

‘How old are you now?’

‘Old enough.’

He laughs a little and fiddles with the massive ring on his finger.

‘I knew you were Nigerian. Word.’

For reasons I cannot explain I agree to accompany MC Hassan back to his council flat in New Cross Gate. He says we’ve got a lot to talk about. He says he can see that I need schooling about my culture. As far as I’m concerned my culture is hip-hop and I don’t need schooling in it. I know everything about it.

I sit on his tatty sofa with my arms wrapped tightly around my body. There’s no heating, but I’m too shy to admit I’m cold.

‘You all right?’ he says.

‘I’m fine, thanks.’

‘I’ve seen you around.’

I arch an eyebrow.

‘You hang out with that white girl, innit?’ Hassan says. ‘Yeah, what’s up with that girl? She’s been all over the estate.’

He’s talking about Jess. Ever since she moved to London, Jess has become obsessed with black blokes. She seeks them out when we go raving – or rather they find her. Jess’s blond whiteness shimmers like a beacon on dance floors packed tight with black bodies. Black homeboys make a beeline for her, sauntering and doing the running man across sweaty dance floors to get next to her.

As if Jess’s blonde beauty wasn’t enough, she also has me at her side: I’m, like, her visual affirmation, a walking, talking reminder to anyone watching that Jess is down with black peeps.

‘I couldn’t even get it up for a white girl, you get me?’ says Hassan.

I don’t get him actually. I hear what he says but I don’t see how it can be true. So far I’ve not met a black guy who didn’t, on some level, seem to rate white girls higher than black ones. It’s not clear to us black girls why this is but it is just how it is. And the black boys who can’t pull white chicks often go for mixed-race girls instead, the ones with tea-toned skin and long bubbly hair.

I’ve heard it’s different in America. I’ve heard that LL and Kane
only
go out with black girls. But here in England, it seems girls who look like me, we’re the boobie prize, the bottom of the barrel. Nobody’s first choice, ever. But Hassan swears he only fancies Nubian sisters, which means that by default he must fancy me more than he fancies Jess. I try to take this all in. It doesn’t seem to add up. I feel like I just won the pools, like a prize I don’t deserve and didn’t even compete for just dropped into my lap.

Hassan hands me a bundle of flyers depicting Alsatians’ heads superimposed onto human bodies wearing raincoats. The dog-headed bodies in the picture are jostling along a train platform carrying briefcases.

‘It’s white people, innit?’ Hassan says. ‘Blue-eyed devils.’

‘The things in the picture are dogs. Alsatians.’

‘It’s what white people are, innit.’

‘You’re saying that white people are actually dogs? You’re a fucking nutter, man!’

Hassan says he belongs to an organisation I’ve never heard of, called The Nation of Islam.

‘White people,’ he says, ‘are devils.’

‘What?’

‘Blue-eyed devils.’

I giggle.

‘This ain’t no joke.’

‘Why would you say such evil things?’ I’m ready to get up and leave.

‘Don’t ever. Don’t
ever
call a black man evil. Whites are evil. Blue-eyed devils. They’re snakes. You can’t trust any of them. They’ll trick you. They’ll always betray you.’

His deep, hypnotic voice begins to coax and persuade me. I start to think Hassan perhaps, maybe, possibly has a point. The way I see things, white people have let me down, assaulted me, ruined my life. I don’t think of my mother as having abandoned me; I think of Nanny as having stolen me from my mother. Images of white people flash before me: the white soldier in the gents’ toilets. Nanny telling me to run away when my stepfather came to collect me for a visit.

This, I decide, is surely what I came to London for; to be a part of something
exclusively
black.

‘I want to join it,’ I say.

‘Join what?’

‘The People of Islam.’

‘You mean The Nation, yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You’ve got a lot to learn before I can take you to the mosque.’

Hassan never does take me to the Nation of Islam mosque. Presumably I never learn enough. Eventually he drops out of the Nation himself. A decade later, fresh from a postgraduate journalism course, I approach the Nation of Islam and tell them I’d like to write an article about them. I am not the only journalist interested. There is a high-profile inquiry underway into Stephen Lawrence’s murder. Men from the Nation of Islam show up at the inquiry, immaculately turned out in black suits and red bow ties. National newspapers are running headlines asking, ‘Nation of Islam – who are they?’

My interview request will be denied: a Nation spokesman will ask me, ‘Why should we care what the white media thinks of us?’

I decide then to join the Nation of Islam, under an assumed name. I spend about a week in the Nation. I ring up
The Times
’ features desk and say, ‘You don’t know me but I’ve got a story I think you might want to have a look at.’ The media’s been slating the Nation as wholly sinister and racist but I explain the strong elements of self-discipline and self-respect they teach.
The Times
will bite and even though I have no cuttings to prove I’ve got what it takes, they publish my 3,000-word piece about life and training for women in the Nation in their Saturday magazine a couple of weeks later.

‘So what ends you from? Where’d you grow up?’ asks Hassan.

And what do I do?  I only go and mess everything up by letting it slip that I was brought up by a white woman. In West Sussex. I presume Hassan will jump to his feet and usher me out of his flat. Instead he becomes (even more) animated at this news.

‘
Is it
?’ he says. ‘My cousin Kemi was fostered by whites innit? In Horsham. She was lost, so lost. Lost! They’d brainwashed her into thinking whites were better than blacks. You remind me of her, innit? She came to London, hooked up with me and her other cousins and now she’s rejuvenated. Re-educated. Rejuvenated. Re-educated.’

I find myself wanting to be rejuvenated and re-educated too.

‘I was fostered myself by a white woman in Essex, you get me?’ he reveals suddenly.

‘Don’t take the piss.’

‘Word is born, I was fostered. Only for a year though innit.’

‘What was your foster-family like then?’

‘Not that bad as far as things go. But I was miserable. Miserable. I was so sad and felt so isolated that I couldn’t stop eating sweets. I got so fat. I put on so much weight. By the time I was ten I had a thirty-six-inch waist!’

There’s a spark, a connection made. I feel as though I’m a jigsaw puzzle, made of fragments, and that only now are the pieces of me being slid into place. I’m finally, in this moment, at ease. And I mistake shared experience for instant love. This is the man I am going to marry, I think to myself.

I return to Hassan’s flat three days later wanting more, but not at all sure what I’m wanting more of. He asks me what I think I know about hip-hop. As well as owning over a hundred hip-hop LPs, he also does a bit of rapping at raves, and presents a community radio show. Hassan’s favourite group is Public Enemy. I say I like NWA better but that ‘Don’t Believe the Hype’ is one of the best tracks I’ve heard in my life.

He begins firing questions at me, about rappers and the true meanings of their names.

‘D’you know what KRS-One stand for?’ he asks.

‘Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone.’ I fire back.

‘What does the KANE part of Big Daddy Kane stand for?’

‘King Asiatic Nobody’s Equal.’

Hassan looks impressed.

‘All right, all right. Who invented hip-hop?’

‘Kurtis Blow.’

‘Wrong!’ he says, leaping up from the sofa. ‘It’s DJ Kool Herc!’

At seventeen, Hassan’s six months younger than me. Like me, he started his A Levels but quickly dropped out. The white education system couldn’t teach him
nothing
. His parents moved back to Nigeria without him when he was only sixteen and that’s when he got his own council flat. We’ve been chatting for about an hour when I tell him that I think I am in love with him.

‘Nah,’ he says. ‘How can you be? You hardly know me.’

Soon Hasssan’s entire tower block, and other blocks surrounding it, will be condemned by Southwark Council and bulldozed into dust. All I notice about his flat is that it is dark and that there is no bed, only a mattress on the floor. I’m on that mattress, laying flat on my back. Unmoving.