They snigger and continue to stare at me until what feels like hours later Adam comes to fetch me to tell me we are going home.
When the new school term starts a few months later, the tall, brown-skinned boy, whose name is John Mbugua, becomes a prime target for bullies. Throughout middle school he is known as ‘Rubber Lips’ and ‘Ooga-booga Mbugua’. I feel helpless and hate myself for staying silent through the torment, but for my own survival I just try to keep my head down and blend in as much as possible. Years later we meet in a pub, John and I, and share a drunken kiss. His big lips taste nice, I think to myself.
CHAPTER 7
Brown girl in the ring
* * *
In the summer of 1989 my friends and I discover the joy of sleep-overs. The movie Grease becomes our go-to. We watch it incessantly, learning the dialogue line by line, perfecting the choreography and swooning over a young John Travolta in tight black jeans. When we return to school in the autumn we relay to the boys in our class the basic premise of the film and tell them we will be recreating The Pink Ladies and The T-Birds. In the same way I know I will never play the Virgin Mary in the nativity play, I know I will never make it as one of The Pink Ladies. Despite the fact that I have the best singing voice and know all the parts, I also know there’s no brown girl in The Pink Ladies.
I spend most of my childhood accepting that my brown skin sets me apart from my friends. Brown is not the norm. No one looks like me. All, all, of my friends are white and for most of my childhood I don’t even think about thinking that this is strange, because they are my friends.
Pretty little girls, with swingy hair who, like me, are into ponies, New Kids On The Block and coming-of-age movies. We skip around the playground, our arms linked, longing for the day when our chests will be full enough to support even the most basic of sports bras. I mostly feel that I am just like them, but there are times when it hits me that the colour of my skin will always get in the way of my truly being part of the group.
‘Are you a packet?’
A packet of what?
‘Not a packet, a paki.’
I have no idea. A group of dirty-looking kids come over to where I’m sitting, clock watching and longing for the day to come to an end. It’s the summer of ’91 and I’m eleven years old. It’s the long school holidays and Adam and I have been ferried off to a kids’ day camp whilst Mum deals with the great unwashed at work. She’s now working as a child protection social worker, removing kids from unsuitable parents and getting the occasional death threat for her efforts. Usually during the holidays we get to stay at home, but sometimes it’s deemed necessary for us to leave the very informally supervised locale of the farm and its acres and acres of free – literally and figuratively – open space, and get out into a different open space, one that costs money. I despise this enforced socialising. I’m longing to be at home, on the farm, knee deep in horse shit, in my uniform of jodhpurs and wellies. I want to be out with Katherine, hacking around the bridleways near our house or building show-jumping courses from fallen trees and discarded oil barrels in the bottom field. I like the friends I have, the friends I know. I do not want temporary, transient ‘day’ friends. They require too much surveillance.
These activity day camps are run by the local council and take place at various locales in the area, depending on what ‘fun’ activities have been organised. Often we end up at one or other of our schools; Adam is now at the local high school, and I prefer this because it is familiar and I know where the toilets are. I like the feeling of being on home turf, plus the chance of seeing recognisable faces is greater. I don’t like to feel like a stranger. I want to be part of.
Today, thankfully, we are at Adam’s school. A large, imposing, late 1920s’, red-brick building about six miles from our house. Next year, I will go here too. The day might be made marginally more bearable if the gangly youths in charge were making any effort to demonstrate control over the day’s activities, but they’re barely past puberty themselves. They’re obviously being employed by the local authority for minimum wage and believe two hours’ babysitting for the neighbours’ belligerent Labrador once a week for the last two years qualifies them to not only entertain, but prevent from dying, a group of eleven- to fifteen-years-olds. I imagine we could intravenously inject heroin into our eyeballs and this band of hormone-crazed youths would keep reciting lines from Nightmare on Elm Street II while trying to get off with each other.
I blame their negligence for leaving me left wide open to this posse of tormentors and their rough questioning. A paki? Was I? I prided myself on my broad vocabulary but ‘paki’ was new to me. Was it a good thing or a bad thing to be? I couldn’t tell from their tone, they’d been clever like that. Perhaps it was a joke? The kind where there was no right answer. Like the one where boys would run up to the pretty girls in the playground at school and snigger, ‘If I said you had a sexy body would you hold it against me?’ I cursed myself for being out of the loop. If I said yes I was a paki, what ugly fate would I cast upon myself? If I said no, I was bound to become the latest unwilling star in their theatre of cruelty. I was entirely out of my depth. I wasn’t used to being confronted by these strange creatures with their dropped consonants, ill-fitting, cheap, nylon track suits and synthetic cheese sandwiches.
They were so alien to me, so different, and yet, as I was about to learn, they considered me the outsider.
It turned out that paki was short for Pakistani. But I knew I wasn’t a paki because the type of people these kids were talking about and had mistaken me for were nothing like me. First of all, ‘pakis’ looked different, and second, they sounded different, certainly not like they were from Surrey. Some of them didn’t even speak the same language as I did. I knew this because to my utter excitement a family had just recently moved from another country (not actually Pakistan but Bangladesh, an apparent irrelevancy for those who took umbrage to the new arrivals and would graffiti the walls of their home every week) and their children were coming to our school. Even more exciting, my mum was helping the oldest girl, Rahela, to learn English. I was mesmerised by Rahela. She was beautiful. Perfect straight teeth, a tiny, pretty nose, skin darker than mine – which I hardly ever saw unless it was someone on the TV – and the pièce de résistance: her hair. She had acres and acres of dead-straight, black, shiny hair. It moved, actually moved in the wind! When she tied it up, her ponytail hung loose and danced about her back; she was lucky enough that sometimes she’d have to brush it out of her face and over her shoulder as she leant over to read her book. I envied her and adored her simultaneously. But we were not the same. I had an enormous gap between my teeth, my nose was embarrassingly wide, and my skin only ever came close to being really dark when we took our family holidays near the equator. My hair was another story altogether. It grew out rather than down. Whilst it was always clean, it was never exactly shiny; there was no movement to it and a ponytail was a thing of pure fantasy. Texture-wise, as I was told so often by people who thought it entirely acceptable to randomly pat my head, it felt ‘just like a sheep’.
As a child, I hate my hair and I will continue to hate it long into adulthood. My hair is ‘difficult’. Something akin to a wild animal that needs to be ‘tamed’, Mum says. As a very young child, the unruly mess is kept under control with a simple short-back-and-sides. The exact same haircut as my brother, a boy. As I grow older it will be plaited, permed and pulled into order. It will, of course, fight back because the hatred, it seems, is reciprocal.
The battle begins when I am about three or perhaps four. The hair is being brushed only once a week, by my father, on Sundays before church, the whole experience requiring the saint-like patience of both father and daughter. I sit on the bottom step between my father’s legs, facing the front door, my eyes tightly closed, wincing with every drag of the brush. ‘Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ooouch!’ my father sings in his bellowing tenor to an arpeggio scale. The singing is supposed to distract me but in fact only serves to make
me more aware of the fact that none of my friends has to sit on the bottom step and be subjected to the same. They all, all, have lovely, long, little-girl hair. It is swingy, and it is shiny and it sometimes slips out of a scrunchie during PE. My hair won’t even accommodate a scrunchie, let alone fall out of one, yet theirs is able to form exquisite French plaits and cutesy bunches with pink ribbons, and requires the use of Alice bands to corral flyway fringes. Each strand has a beginning and an end and it grows from scalp to shoulders, not scalp to ceiling, and when it’s wet it looks and feels wet. Once compulsory swimming lessons begin at school, there is the palaver (and humiliation) of fighting with latex rubber swimming caps, a battle that often involves two or more teachers grappling with the cap and my unrelenting volume of hair. The hair always wins and the cap either ends up perched comically on top of my head or ripped to shreds on the changing-room floor. Worse still, there are times when the hair pretends to acquiesce, and then as I leap from the diving board, about to hit the water for an Olympic-style front crawl, bursts free from its prophylactic.
On the occasions when swimming caps are not required, like at public pools, humiliations are, even then, inescapable. One day I am practising my diving, when I notice that a crowd of older children have gathered to watch. With each dive I grow in confidence, sure none of the bigger kids can top my form. I come up from what I think is my most impressive dive yet and am pulling myself up onto the steps, ready to dive again, when I see one of the boys tugging at his mother to come look. ‘Watch the brown girl, Mummy, she goes underwater but when she comes up her hair isn’t wet at all!’ Making no attempt to lower her voice ‘Mummy’ stares straight at me and says, ‘Yes, Dylan, that’s because they have different hair to us.’ I know I cannot possibly dive again. I feel the heat in my cheeks, although I know I can’t be going red because people often tell me that brown people can’t blush. I walk past the crowd of children. I’m now feigning a limp and praying they will think I’m injured and believe that my diving practice is over for the day. That night I will go to sleep wondering who ‘us’ is.
The hair saga continues and at some point an ‘afro comb’ is bought. Adam and I take turns with it, poking it into our respective fuzz, but it will be a few more years before any further attempt is made to deal with my ethnic hair.
In the meantime, conditioner and Vaseline become the greatest weapons in my arsenal in the fight to tame the beast. Conditioner is heaped on in great globs, after which the Vaseline is then smeared on in generous handfuls to coax the mane into a ponytail of sorts. The whole congealed wad is then forced into a hair band that frequently pings apart under the strain. In the early days, we use a rubber band but when it becomes clear that I am determined to abandon my boy hair for good, proper hair ties are purchased. When I take the ties out, my hair stays in place. It does not fall or stream down my neck onto my shoulders. It. Does. Not. Move.
One day in class, I am pouring over fractions, my pencil pressed deep with concentration into my workbook, when I hear giggling behind me. I ignore it initially. I am not socially significant (scholastically speaking), nor self-obsessed enough to believe that I could be the cause of the laughter. The giggling continues. It’s the boys behind me. Again, of no concern to me. I am eleven. Boys are still two summers away from being of any interest to me; they are, at best, an annoyance. Still the sniggers continue, but now the whisper of a girl sitting two rows behind joins in. It’s the distinctive pony-club drawl of Catherine Sasoon. Blonde, cobalt-blue eyes, impossibly tiny features. ‘It’s because she doesn’t wash her hair,’ says Catherine knowingly in a stage whisper, fearful of being caught talking in class. My hand instantly whips up to the back of my head and I feel it. One of the boys has slid a pencil into my afro and it has stayed there. I am a child of South Africa, but I am not a South African child and the irony of this incident is lost on me.
I am fourteen the first time a black person touches my hair. Mum has made an appointment for me at a salon that ‘deals’ specifically with ‘Afro-Caribbean’ hair. It has taken fourteen years, but we have finally admitted total defeat. My hair is a problem. I am sorry for that. I feel guilty. I am embarrassed, but I am also excited. Soon I will have new hair! Swishy, flicky, flappy, silky new hair. I am of the belief that I will be able to use things like diffusers and barrettes and butterfly hair clips to create the styles I have seen in Just Seventeen, Sugar and More, although I have yet to see a girl who looks like me in any of those magazines. I will be able to toss my hair over my shoulder and out of my eyes. I cannot wait for my hair to be a stylish nuisance. Most of all, though, I cannot wait to walk in to school on Monday morning and look like all the other girls – at least from the back.
Mum and I take the train into Croydon, the closest big town to our little village and what one might cringingly call ‘culturally diverse’. It’s a thirty-minute trip from our house, but a world away from village life and the sea of white where I am growing up. There are literally no black or even mixed-race faces where we live – to the extent that my brother is frequently stopped by the local police for Walking While Black. Once, after arriving home from school, we realise we have forgotten our house keys, so Adam climbs over the locked back gate to get the spare we keep hidden under a flower pot. Within three minutes three police cars are at our front door, the occupants demanding to know what we are doing on the property.
Mum and I make our way to ‘Splinters’, which is situated on the corner of a busy road at the end of the High Street. To the west is West Croydon train station and, past that towards a London that isn’t Big Ben and Hamleys, the London where cramped shops sell strange dirty vegetables, out-of-date chocolate milk and calling cards to places whose flags I don’t recognise. The people in these shops talk fast, they don’t make eye contact and they don’t say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ when I buy a Coke. They make me nervous.
Splinters also makes me nervous, but in a different way. We walk in and everyone in the salon stares. In fact, they stop what they are doing and then stare. Everyone. People getting their hair done, people doing the hair, people sweeping the hair, some people who don’t even seem to be there for the hair. But they all stare.
‘Hellair!’ says Mum briskly. To my ears, she’s never sounded so posh. ‘Way-ar h’yarr for mayy daught-aars harr appoinT-menT.’ She certainly isn’t being rude. but something about the way she speaks, holds herself, her rather false, slightly patronising smile, makes me retreat into myself. Inside, I am furious. The staring continues; Mum is oblivious, but I can feel everyone’s eyes burning inquisitive, almost accusatory, marks onto my skin. I am achingly aware of this collision of the two worlds to which I am connected, but neither of which I feel a legitimate part of. Frustratingly, though, I am expected to navigate both with ease and assurance and apology where necessary, but I will for a long time feel like an ill-equipped mediator required to translate between two reluctant strangers.
A man named Errol comes over and introduces himself. He asks what we are ‘doing today’. ‘Taming it!’ Mum says. Errol gives her a strange look. He sits me down in a chair facing a mirror, something I will hate forever. I am disappointed at how ugly I am. Errol unceremoniously pulls my hair from its tie and expertly rakes his hands through it. No one has ever touched my hair like this before.
‘It’s thick,’ he says.
‘I know,’ I whisper apologetically.
‘So much hair!’ he says smiling and patting me on the shoulders. He sounds like he’s congratulating me on an accomplishment. ‘Great, we’re gonna do a relaxer, a treatment, get the ends off and tong, okay?’
I nod. I don’t know what he’s talking about.
Eight hours later, to much fanfare in the salon, the shy ugly duckling emerges a swan of sorts with a sleek, jaw-length, impossibly shiny bob. I still have the unsightly monobrow, the unfortunate teeth, the undeniable thatch on my top lip, but my hair, my hair! I swish and flick it with caution, lest I actually move a hair out of place. I want to look like
this forever. Mum is delighted too and leaves Errol a big tip. It’s cost a fortune, but the slow process of morphing into the little girl my mother really wanted has reached its next stage. School smarts? Check. Musical talent? Check. Manageable hair? Check.
As we leave the salon, a group of older teenage boys wolf whistle at me. The admiration continues from various passers-by all the way to the train station. I start to walk differently and instantly realise the power that my new hair holds. Monday morning can’t come soon enough.
Unfortunately, my magic hair doesn’t survive the weekend. The belief that I am somehow now like the other girls is dealt a heart-breaking blow with the first drop of rain that falls post-Splinters. My faith that, once dry, my magic hair will be sleek and shiny again, just like Errol made it, is soon dashed. I am bought back to Earth with a thud when I come to the realisation that I have none of Errol’s tools or experience. By Sunday evening, having woefully underestimated my hair-care skills, I’m back to the conditioner/ Vaseline combination.
One of my first jobs is as a Saturday girl at the local newsagent in the village. Apart from having to get up horribly early, it’s mostly enjoyable and easy work, with all the sweets I can eat and much, much better than a paper round. One of the best things is that I get to read the magazines. Of course, there are the regulars like OK! and Hello! for the housewives and Country Life for the horsey set, but there are also the more niche ones. Customers ask us to order certain titles for them because they’re specialist, like the ones about dollhouse furniture making or pheasant shooting. Because we’re a newsagent, we can order them directly and have a huge catalogue of the names of all the magazines. One is called Black Hairstyles. It’s an American, bi-monthly publication full of African-American celebrities and their various hairstyles. Whitney, Mary, Brandy, Monica, Nia, Monifah, Tisha, Countess, Angela, Da Brat, Toni – all there in glorious Technicolor, braided, weaved, cornrowed, twisted, relaxed, permed, grown out, cut short. I want to be them. I want to be beautiful like them. I put in an order for the magazine. I’ve seen it for sale at a newsagent in Croydon, but Croydon is a long way to go for self-identification when you only earn £1.75 an hour and a train ticket cost ten pounds. Instead, I bite the bullet and ask my manager to place the order for me. It’s an awkward moment. He is baffled, I imagine, by the fact that such a publication even exists. He is also uncomfortable. I have forced him to look beyond what and who he thinks and wants me to be in order for him to be at ease. He looks scared, as if here in the back room of a newsagent, at the age of fourteen, I am about to transform before his very eyes into every negative stereotypical image of a black person he has ever believed and internalised. In response, I am apologetic for putting him in position where he feels this way. Regardless, when the magazine arrives two weeks later I can hardly wait to run home and read it in secret. I start ordering and collecting similar magazines with addict-like obsession. They begin to pile up in my bedroom and, such is my attachment to them, I am unable to throw them out.
Killing Karoline Page 7