Precious (9 page)

‘Eddie,’ I say, still not daring to look up at him. ‘Do you like me?’

‘Yeah,’ says Eddie. ‘I do like you.’

But even though I try to separate myself from what is happening to me, a sneaky, traitorous part of me wants to be liked, wants to know that Eddie wants to do this because of me, not just simply because I’m there and it’s something to do.

He tries to slip his other hand inside the waistband of my jeans, but the jeans are skin-tight and there’s no space between denim and flesh. He moves my hand faster inside his pants. Then he gives me a smile that’s like a ray of unexpected sunlight. In the dim light Eddie’s green eyes seem to glitter a bit, like marbles. I know I’m not supposed to be letting him make me touch him like this but his approval of me feels good. I shut my eyes. If I don’t actually see his thing it’s as though this is not happening.

And then the bedroom door swings open.

The little room fills with voices and music. A woman in a gold lace wrapper, with her hair done up in a huge melon style, bounces into the room. I smell her yeasty champagne -breath. Barely looking at me or Eddie, the woman snatches up a golden handbag from the floor, reaches inside it and pulls out a lighter.

Eddie winks at me. He wriggles back into his trousers and drags me through the now open door and into the group of grown-ups who are twirling and sweating in my mother’s parlour. The sweet, thick, oily scent of fried plantains hangs in the stale air of the parlour, mingling with the whiff of hot armpits, hot pepper and Sta Sof Fro spray. Making me want to puke.

My favourite record is playing. Michael Jackson’s thin voice sails out of my mother’s speakers singing the track ‘I Want You Back’. I’m glad it’s dark. No one can look at me. I feel lumpy in my too-tight new clothes. And I feel I’m overflowing with filth.

Eddie lowers his eyelids as he moves to the music. He spins around, lifts one knee, sinks almost to the ground, gets up, spins around and touches the Afro comb stuck in the back of his head.

I move around on the dance floor just enough not to draw attention to myself among the dancing, swirling bodies. I stand opposite Eddie with my long arms held stiffly at my sides, concentrating hard on staying in rhythm with the music as I move one leg behind me and back to the centre and then the other leg behind me and back.

I steal glances at Eddie. I wonder if the slimy stuff that must lurk inside his willie, the disgusting stuff that I know he wanted to empty out into my hand, will instead leak out inside his orange cords; staining them. Ruining them.

Eddie stops dancing after a while, looks at me and says, ‘Don’t you know how to dance?’

‘I
am
dancing.’

He thinks about this and then bursts out laughing ‘Yeah, right,’ says Eddie. ‘Dream on.’

He touches the Afro comb in his head again and keeps dancing.

Humiliated, I turn away from him and look at my Aunty Adaeze who is doing a dance my mother calls the ‘funky chicken’ and crooning, ‘Hey, hey’ in time to the music. I envy Aunty Adaeze’s lack of self-consciousness; her obvious joy in her own body. She curls a finger, beckoning me over to her.

‘Where’s my Aunty Onyi?’ I ask her. I want to feel Aunty Onyi’s thick brown arms around me, pressing me into her solid motherly flesh and hugging me and never letting me go.

Then my mother cuts in front of me, swaying gently to the music and carrying a silver container filled to the brim with ice cubes.

‘Who let you out?’ she says. And with her bony knee in the small of my back she nudges me towards a row of brand-new dining chairs whose seats are still wrapped in plastic.

‘Sit down and stay down,’ she says. ‘And stop dancing like that. It’s an embarrassment.’

I sit down, as instructed. I watch the party reach a crescendo and then wind down again before my eyes and I sit there through it all, feeling completely distanced from everybody in the room.

Racialism

WE TURN RIGHT, ONTO Woodview, passing tall red letters, spray-painted across a garage door: WOGS OUT. PAKIS DIE. NF.

And here I was, thinking I was home now, and safe. I’ve been longing to get home, to disappear inside Nanny’s puffy white arms. And now these words, blood-coloured words. Were they written as a warning specifically to me?

There has – had – always been a sort of grudging tolerance of me on Woodview, or so I thought. No one – not even the handful of skins on the estate – has ever tried to kick my head in. The worst thing that’s happened was a drunken skin accosting me when I was walking home from Brownies one night with Aunty Wendy. ‘Mind yourself, nigger,’ he snarled.

Aunty Wendy snarled back, ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, picking on a little girl, you racialist bastard,’ and the skinhead scuttled away without another word.

Aunty Adaeze glances out of the car window, at the same blood-red words I’m seeing. But she doesn’t comment.

‘Nice weather today, eh?’ she says. ‘It’s cooled down a bit.’

Pulling up outside number 52, Mummy Elizabeth toots her horn again and again until Nanny appears in the doorway of our house, holding a piece of kitchen towel. My mother lowers the car window.

‘Is Agnes inside?’

‘No, Lizzy,’ says Nanny. ‘I think she’s at work.’

‘She doesn’t work on Sundays, Nanny,’ I say. ‘Remember? She’s probably round Aunty Wendy’s.’

Nanny grimaces at my comment. Then she says, ‘By the way, Lizzy,’ and a cheeky, crooked little smile appears on her face making the wrinkles at the corners of her mouth deepen. ‘Mrs Tucker next door’s found someone to take in Judy. There’s nothing for you to worry about at all, Lizzy. The little dog’s gone.’

Judy. Gone? The grown-ups’ behaviour is confusing me to the point where it’s making my head hurt. If Judy has really gone, why on earth’s Nanny grinning like the Cheshire Cat?

My mother, Aunty Adaeze and I continue on to 16 Acacia Way: Aunty Wendy and Uncle Mick’s house.

‘Anita,’ Mummy Elizabeth says, without even turning around to look at me. ‘I’ve got a feeling that Agnes is up to no good. She’s never around when I look for her. What is she up to?’

I shrug my bare shoulders and look out the window. I’ve no idea why Agnes makes a point of being out when my mother visits. One of the Scott brothers across the road sees me and sticks two fingers up at me. I mouth the words ‘You can get lost’ and clench my fist at him through the car window, thinking of the black fist on Eddie’s Afro comb.

My mother slides out of the driver’s seat and walks up the front path and raps on Aunty Wendy’s front door. She balances on one toe of her Italian shoes – fawn with gold detailing today – and then on the other, waiting for Aunty Wendy to come to the door.

‘Hello, love,’ she says when she finally opens the door. ‘Hello, Lizzy. Hello, Ada. Did you have a lovely time in London, Neet?’

‘No,’ I almost say. But then, instinctively, I nod.

‘We are looking for Agnes,’ my mother says.

‘Oh yes,’ says Aunty Wendy, standing there in her blue triangle-shaped skirt. ‘I think Aggy’d like you to meet her friend, Barry. He’s a lovely lad, isn’t he, Neet?’

‘Don’t know,’ I say.

‘Aggy and Barry have just gone up the shop. They’ll be back in a minute, Lizzy.’

In the sitting room my mother, Aunty Adaeze and I occupy the whole sofa. Suddenly, Aunty Adaeze and my mother scream in unison as Judy appears from nowhere and tries to rub her shaggy little head against my mother’s legs. I am so happy and relieved that I feel almost like kissing my mother.

‘What is this little witch?’ screams Aunty Adaeze, inching away from Judy who is threatening to jump onto the sofa and into Aunty Adaeze’s lap.

‘This is the final straw!’ my mother hisses, hopping up from the sofa.

And then we all see it, at the same time. Agnes sliding along the hall, holding hands with a tall, long-legged white boy who is thin, like a rasher of bacon. It’s her boyfriend, Barry, and he whispers something that makes Agnes tip her head back and chuckle. Agnes’s face is shining with happiness – until she sees Mummy Elizabeth and Aunty Adaeze through the open sitting-room door. She peers furtively at us, looks up at Barry and whispers,

‘
Kedu
, Aunty Adaeze? Mum? This is my . . . umm . . . friend, Barry.’

‘He’s ever such a nice boy, Lizzy,’ Aunty Wendy claims again.

My mother’s face writhes with outrage.

‘A
white
boy,’ she whispers. She sits, unmoving, her lower lip wobbling as if she’s about to cry. ‘A
white
boy?’

Aunty Adaeze covers my mother’s delicate hand with her own man-like one.

‘OK, Elizabeth,’ she says her orange and gold wrapper crackling. ‘I will handle this.’

‘No,’ says Mummy Elizabeth. ‘No.’ And with that, my mother runs into the kitchen and begins throwing open the drawers beneath the sink. I see something flash in her hand. She raises it high above her head: Aunty Wendy’s new carving knife that gleams in the late afternoon sun spilling through the kitchen window.

Barry spins on his heel and legs it out of the back door. My mother goes after him but her dress gets caught on a corner of the rabbit hutch in the garden. Barry doesn’t stop to look at the sight of Mummy Elizabeth on her back with one bare toe poking through the grid of the rabbits’ cage. With his long legs he sails right over the top of the garden gate and out of sight. And, just as quickly, my mother picks herself up, grabs the fallen carving knife, hitches up her dress and leaps clean over the closed garden gate, yelling, ‘Come back here, you lout!’

Aunty Adaeze, Agnes, Judy, Aunty Wendy, two of the neighbours and I hover outside the garden gate, in the square. I am trembling so much that my teeth are chattering.

‘You all right, Neet?’ says one of our neighbours, who’s standing with her hands on her huge hips, relishing the unexpected drama. ‘You look cold, love.’

I am in a trance. I say nothing.

Still carrying the carving knife, my mother comes stalking back towards us. ‘He x-scaped,’ she hisses, dropping the knife on the floor.

She glares at Agnes and then grabs Aunty Adaeze’s hand and the two of them flounce through the hall out the front door and into the car.

‘Our mother is a flipping mental racist cow,’ says Agnes. ‘And there’s nothing that woman can do that will stop me from loving Barry.’

Agnes doesn’t look much like Agnes any more. For the first time in my life, her hair looks quite a bit worse than mine. She’s wearing one of Nanny’s blue nylon shirtwaister dresses and the dress hangs limply from her shoulders like a huge blue potato sack.

This hideous change in Agnes’s appearance is my mother’s doing. After chasing Barry out of Aunty Wendy’s, my mother and Aunty Adaeze had burst into Nanny’s house, stormed up the stairs into Agnes’s box room and tossed everything they found there into bin bags. When Nanny asked them what on earth they thought they were doing, she was warned ‘Stay out of this.’ Finally, with the bin bags on the back seat of the car, they’d driven back to London.

The good thing about my mother’s ‘outburst’, as Nanny calls it, is that now Agnes talks to me more than she ever has before. She spends hours every day telling me how much she loves Barry and how much she hates our mother.

‘
That cow
only acted like that because Barry’s white, innit?’ she says.

‘So they’d like him if he was coloured, then?’

‘Yeah. Or at least they wouldn’t try to knife him.’

‘But what about if he was half-caste?’

‘They’d cut him in half and only keep the black part.’

Agnes and I look at each other and burst out laughing.

‘What would you have done if she killed him?’ I say.

‘What?’

‘What if our mother or Adaeze had killed him?’

‘It’s
Aunty
Adaeze.’

‘All right,’ I say. I poke my tongue out at Agnes.

‘You need to learn respect,’ she says, looking very cross. ‘You don’t have no respect for anything. And it’s your fault, anyway. You’re the one who told them I was at Wendy’s.’

‘It’s
Aunty
Wendy.’

‘Oh my God. I am so sick of you!’ she says.

I hop off the bed and walk to Agnes’s tiny bedroom window, turning my back on her. Aggy glides up behind me and presses her palms down on my shoulders.

‘What’s wrong,’ she says. ‘Are you crying? Come here. I’m not really sick of you.’

I stand on tiptoes to pull apart the curtains and gaze out at the nearly black sky, looking for stars. I’m not sure why I am crying. All I know is that I feel clogged up with secrets, with filth. That I have absolutely nobody in my life I trust enough to tell.

‘Come on, what’s wrong?’ Agnes says, trying to turn me around so that I’ll face her. ‘I
know
you, Anita. You haven’t been the same since you came back from London. You’ve been walking around saying nothing, like a ghost.’

I want to tell her what happened in London. But I can’t. I want to tell her how I feel like I’m sliding down into someplace that’s dark like the inside of a coffin, some place I can never, ever be rescued from. The right words don’t come. I can’t find them.