The Boy Who Lived With Ghosts: A Memoir (18 page)

And even though Mum said she would have Ngozi chatting away in no time and potty trained, she is still wearing nappies. And Akanni is eating solids. Now we have two nappy buckets under the sink and there were some terrible things floating in them this morning.

There is a very old Hotpoint top-loader washing machine in our backyard that Mum got from the Methodist Church jumble sale. It’s in the backyard beside the coal bunker because Mum says it is possessed on account of it hopping all the way across the kitchen when it was on the spin cycle. And leaking most of its tub of dirty water all over our kitchen floor every time she used it, which is not very helpful, even if it was only once a week and probably explains why it was only two shillings in the Methodist Church jumble sale.

But it’s my own fault that I ended up taking Akanni and Ngozi with me to the launderette with the buckets of nappies in the tray under the pram. Mum emptied some of the fluid out of the buckets so they wouldn’t splash around too much.

I was hardly out of the garden gate when an old lady came up to me and looked in the pram.

“How old is your baby?” she asked.

“He’s just twelve months old.”

She peered around the pram hood.

“Oh my! It’s a pickaninny! A little black pickaninny!”

Then she looked at Ngozi who was hiding beside me.

“Really! What on earth did we fight a war for? Pickaninnies indeed! In England! Bring back the Empire!”

It’s not surprising really. There are only three black children on our council estate and two of them live with us. It must be quite a shock for old ladies to suddenly see a little black face for the first time when they were expecting to see a shiny white face with blond hair and blue eyes looking back at them. It’s just like Mum said. People don’t say anything about the color of your eyes but they have a lot to say about the color of your skin. It doesn’t matter if we ignore it because everyone else shouts, “Nigger!” and, “Sambo!” and, “Wog!” and, “Fucking darkies!” I never heard any of those words before we became a refuge-for-troubled-children.

I headed straight for an empty machine when we got to the launderette.

“Are those with you?” said a woman who was obviously in charge.

She nodded at Ngozi and Akanni and I could feel my cheeks get hot and red and all the women in the launderette turned and stared at us.

“I said, are those with you?”

“Yes.”

“Are you washing their clothes?”

“Nappies.”

“Their nappies?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t wash them here. You can’t put
their
clothes in these machines.”

“Not clothes. Nappies.”

“Or nappies. You’ll have to take them back with you. You can’t use these machines,” she said and stood in my way so I couldn’t get to the empty machine.

The other women just stared at me and all I could think about was taking the two buckets of nappies back home and Mum would not think I was her little helper anymore and Margueretta would laugh and Mum would probably cry because she would have to wash all those nappies by hand.

And then the woman shouted at me.

“Wait!”

I turned around.

“You can wash them in there!”

I looked at the machine. It had a sign on it,

Use This Machine For Oily Work Overalls Only
—May Cause Soiling —
Management Not Responsible

48

I
t’s freezing cold now and we still don’t have any heaters in our bedrooms. I’m quite sure that we will freeze to death in our beds. They will find us stiff as boards and our hot water bottles will be blocks of ice and they will carry us out like that cat they found in the scullery.

Our only paraffin heater has to stay in the kitchen so we can dry the nappies. Normally we hang them on the washing line in the backyard and prop it up with an old branch from a tree. But when we hang the nappies out in the winter they freeze solid and don’t even begin to dry and you don’t want to run out of nappies with two children shitting themselves like donkeys.

I told Mum about the woman at the launderette and she said that some people are ignorant and the worst thing you can be in this world is ignorant because knowledge frees us and ignorance traps us. The only way that some people can feel better about themselves is by looking down on other people instead of looking inside their hearts and finding God. Mum told me to say a prayer for that woman tonight and at first I did not want to because she made me feel bad in the launderette even though I hadn’t done anything wrong. But I did pray for her and it made me feel better because I asked for Jesus to go into her heart and free her and I know that will happen and she will wake up one day soon and not care which washing machines black people use.

I should never have asked for that glass of water right before bedtime. And the worst thing about the cold is that it always makes me want to pee in the middle of the night. And I was about to get up to pee when the screaming
started right above my head. It was coming from the attic as it always does. It’s almost two years since we moved here but we still haven’t been in the attic.

It makes me shiver when I hear the screams. It’s a shiver that comes from deep inside you and makes your head feel hot and cold at the same time and then you can’t even think.

But tonight it was different. Just as suddenly as it began, the screaming stopped. But I still needed to pee.

So I climbed out of bed and felt the terrible pain of the cold and wanted immediately to get back under the blanket. But I had to pee and the only other alternative was to wet the bed and blame it on the hot water bottle leaking, which I have done before, but we don’t have any clean blankets and its too cold for the pee to dry and so I will have to get into a wet bed tomorrow night and I will be really angry with myself.

So I kept moving, slowly in the dark, and found the bedroom door handle, and the door creaked ever so slightly as I pulled it open. It was a shock when I saw a light shining across the landing. We never sleep with the light on because we don’t have money to waste on those things, like we are millionaires for God’s sake.

So I looked to see where the light was coming from and my bladder hurt with the sudden pain that shot through it, seeing that light. I stopped for a moment and didn’t breathe and waited to hear something or someone.

And there was nothing. Not a sound.

I could go back but I would have to piss myself because it was too late to hope that I could hold it in all night, not now that the pain in my bladder was made worse from the light that shouldn’t be there.

The toilet door was closed. No, not completely. Just enough to let the light out. The light was coming from the toilet.

It moved easily when I touched it. Just the slightest movement, as I pushed the toilet door. The bare light bulb was there, brightly lighting the toilet. And nothing. Nothing in there except the toilet bowl and the cistern with water droplets all around it. Black mold on the boards around the bowl.
And the handle on the end of the chain, swinging there on its own. Swinging from nothing.

Swinging, swinging, swinging.

I pushed the pee out and it rattled the water in the toilet bowl and it felt like it would never stop and I shook the last drips away and turned to the door. I couldn’t move, of course. Who could? The toilet door was moving inwards on its own. Slowly, ever so slowly, the door was opening towards me.

There it was.

In the doorway of the toilet, standing on the landing in the half-light in its gray-white gown, it was staring at me.

And then it opened its mouth and screamed. But nothing came out. I knew it was screaming because its face was screwed up and its mouth was wide open as far as it would go. And still nothing came out. Wider and wider it opened its mouth until it seemed that its whole face was just a giant mouth. And it was screaming in silence.

Screaming silently in its gray-white gown.

And then it was gone.

The handle on the end of the chain was still swinging.

Diddle, diddle dumpling, my son John,
Went to bed with his trousers on,
One shoe off, and the other shoe on,
Diddle, diddle dumpling, my son John.

49

I
have been trying all morning to get Mum to listen to me but her mind is on something else, as usual. She says I have an overactive imagination and there is not a ghost of a child living in the attic who came down last night and tried to scream in my face but had no voice. I know very well that I saw a girl making a silent scream in the door of the toilet. And I saw it with my own eyes and I was not half-awake in bed dreaming, which Mum said I was, because I was in the bloody toilet for God’s sake and it was so bloody freezing that no one could be half awake.

This is getting worse. Something terrible is going to happen.

I cannot talk to Emily about it because she is very sensitive and she is easily frightened and she has already told me many times that there is something with a big face that comes into her bedroom and sits on her legs in the middle of the night. Anyway, she is more upset about Ngozi sleeping with her in a nappy that sometimes leaks than anything else now. I don’t blame her.

Mum’s still trying to learn the ways of the Nigerians so now she’s got a book from the library called
African Glory: The Story of Vanished Negro Civilizations
. She wants to understand more about why they are always at war with each other. And she’s been to see the reverend because he always comes up with a plan. In our case, it needs to be a plan for dealing with warring tribes and genocide.

“
Ek’abo
! Hello!” Mum said, holding
The Story of Vanished Negro Civilizations.

Joan Housecoat was holding the other book.

“
Teach Yourself Yoruba
. Ooo-er! You’re much braver than me. I can hardly speak English!”

“
Bawo Iowa
? How are you?”

“Ooo-er! Very well, thank you! Ha, ha!”

“It’s easy really.”

“It is, isn’t it? Well. Didn’t you know they were from warring tribes?” Joan asked.

“No, of course not. How could I? I mean, the fighting started last year but I never saw anything on the
BBC News
about it. Did you?”

“No. It’s all about those Rolling Stones with their drugs and that Marianne Faithful woman with the Mars bar. Ooo-er!”

“I know. Imagine that!”

“Hmm. Do you know where he put it? Sticky. Ooo-er! So what are you going to do?”

“About what?”

“About the warring tribes?”

“Well. I know exactly what to do.”

“You do?”

“Yes, I do. I spoke to the reverend. He says we are all the same in God’s eyes.”

“What?”

“God does not see the color of our skins. Or what country or tribe we come from. We are all equal in the eyes of God. We will all be equal on the Day of Judgment.”

“Ooo-er! Imagine that.”

“So I’m going to have an open house.”

“An open house? What’s that?”

“I’m inviting them all to tea.”

“Who?”

“All of them. The Igbo and the Yoruba. Yes. I’m inviting them to tea and then they can see they are just same. Well, almost. But those Yoruba are very, very tall.”

“Ooo-er! Won’t that be nice? Can I come too?”

I knew the reverend would have a plan.

50

I
t does not matter that Misty is not house-trained. If she takes a shit in the scullery it doesn’t worry any of us, because we don’t use that room except to keep the paraffin cans and the broom and some of Grandpa’s rusty old tools that no one has used in years. And if Misty takes a shit in the kitchen, we leave it to dry up and then you can kick it under the sideboard or scoop it up with the coal shovel and throw it into the backyard by the coal bunker. Mostly, I kick the turds under the sideboard. I looked and there are a lot of turds under there, which is probably no surprise because a cat’s got to take a shit almost every day.

Cleaning up cat shit is not something that a teenager would ever do. Margueretta says we live in a midden, which is a place where they dump all the rotten food and garbage and excrement. And apparently, she was born for better things but it’s easy to say that when you are thirteen and don’t even wash the dishes because you have delicate skin. But every day she still beats me with her fists and her nails and she spits in my face until it runs down my cheeks and makes me scream, “Submit! Submit! Submit!”

Mum says she had better watch out because one day I will be big enough to hit her back and I have a lot of pent up anger from five years of being beaten every bloody day. And Mum is right. I will hit her, and more, just you wait. Tonight I promised myself that one day I will kill her.

Margueretta hears voices inside her head. She told me. She said the voices tell her to do things to herself and to me. But I know that there are only two people who talk to you inside your head and they are God and the Devil.
And you would know if God was actually talking to you because it is very rare and it would make you want to join a monastery or become a saint and have a stained glass window made with a picture of you in a white robe holding a dove and looking up to Heaven. But Margueretta does not believe in God so I know what that means. Yes, it means it is the Devil who is talking inside her head.

She says that the sight of a running tap makes her want to scream if it looks like a single tube of water that never splashes. And there are colors that talk to her and make her want to cut herself and bleed. I know that is not normal because a running tap is just water and not something that would make you want to scream. And I’ve seen blood and I know it’s not really red but it’s purple but it doesn’t make me want to bleed if I see the color purple on a carpet or a wall.

I think that’s why she beats me. She beat me again today.

We came home from school and we had to wait on the doorstep because Mum was gone with Akanni and Ngozi. She was at the Young Wives Club at the Methodist Church again and sometimes she starts talking and forgets that she has other children who need to get inside the house because they are still not allowed to have a key or they will lose it and then someone will break in and steal all of our valuables.