The Terrible
Page 1
Advance praise for The Terrible
“A powerful, unconventionally structured memoir recounting harrowing coming-of-age ordeals . . . Daley-Ward resists classification in this profound mix of poetry and prose. . . . [She] has quite a ferociously moving story to tell.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Yrsa Daley-Ward is a marvel. Her words twist and breathe like a living thing. In her debut memoir, she turns the story of her difficult coming-of-age, punctuated with terrible loss, into language that is impossibly beautiful, hopeful, and wise. A stunning book; I will never forget it.”
—Julie Buntin, author of Marlena
“Yrsa Daley-Ward is laying her pain bare and turning it into uplifting, unconventional poetry. . . . If readers thought she bared her soul through bone, her memoir The Terrible will be another lesson in how to fearlessly turn the pain of her past into uplifting prose.”
—POPSUGAR
Praise for bone
“Yrsa’s work is like holding the truth in your hands. It sweats and breathes before you. A glorious living thing.”
—Florence Welch, of Florence + the Machine
“[Daley-Ward] has a knack for getting directly to a story’s heat-point and, once there, to distill the emotions within it down to a line or two. . . . [An] impressive debut.”
—Hanif Abdurraqib, The Atlantic
“[bone is], first and foremost, about being human, but [it] also thoughtfully, skillfully, and pissed-off-edly dive[s] into the complexities of race in our new world.”
—Glamour
“Daley-Ward’s short poems cover subjects like depression, falling in and out of love, and sexuality, with a fierce staccato that, as the title suggests, cuts deep.”
—Vogue
“[With] poems that touch the heart, question societal norms, and talk about the complexity of sexuality, [Yrsa Daley-Ward] has a book of great depth.”
—Essence
“[A] stunning excavator of human heat and light, Yrsa Daley-Ward goes straight to the messy beating heart of animal attraction with bone, mesmerizing poems that strip bare the pain and beauty of negotiating longing, sex, and love.”
—HuffPost
“The perfect title for a book that looks for that hard place between the will and the flesh. . . . bone is a bounty of passionate and pained lines, narrators whose hearts have been turned, twisted, and sometimes stomped, but who remain open and willing—because how else could we live?”
—The Millions
“bone opens with a small explosion. . . . The poems that follow pick up the dual meaning . . . of threat and of erotic desire. Often, the two are intertwined. . . . Excellent.”
—The Paris Review (Staff Picks)
“[bone] is an interrogation of self, offering a lyrical autopsy on the manner in which we are harmed by the traumas of those who share our dark skin, female gender, and cultural displacement.”
—Vice
“yrsa daley-ward’s bone is a symphony of breaking and mending. this whole book is an ache. and a balm. daley-ward effortlessly mines the bone. the diamond from the difficult. the things that are too bright and taboo. she lays her hands on the pulse of the thing. . . . an expert storyteller. of the rarest. and purest kind.”
—nayyirah waheed, author of salt. and nejma
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE TERRIBLE
Mike Kobal
Yrsa Daley-Ward is a writer and poet of mixed West Indian and West African heritage. Born to a Jamaican mother and a Nigerian father, Yrsa was raised by her devout Seventh-Day Adventist grandparents in the small town of Chorley in the North of England. She lives in New York.
PENGUIN BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © 2018 by Yrsa Daley-Ward
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
ISBN 9780143132622 (pbk.)
ISBN 9780525504535 (ebook)
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
Cover design: Grace Han
Version_1
For Little Roo.
contents
Advance praise for The Terrible
Praise for bone
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Marcia Daley-Ward aka “Mum”
ONE Aa
Bb
a red home
contradictions and info
the grand chapter / the seventh day / the meaning of life
8.0
truth
8.8
a total nightmare
LITTLE ROO AND YRSA’S PLANS TO GET MUM TO TAKE US HOME ASAP—MEANING AS SOON AS POSSIBLE
8.9
9.1
9.5
9.6
a weekend at Mum’s
our day out
10.0
pink / yellow
10.1
wildlife
everything else
physics and magic
TWO 12.0
13.0
13.2
13.9
14.0
14.2
14.3
the girl and the cleaner of glass
16.0
It is summer.
let’s do something together
17.0
17.5
18.0
18.5
THREE the ninety-eight blues
gamma hydroxybutyrate
19.8
Mr. Jumeriah at the Penthouse.
20.0
21.0
on the monday
RE CREATION
21.2
RE CREATION (2)
22.2
you see it and see it but you never really see it
an end
heaven 1
FOUR twelve minutes past one
heaven 1.5
heaven 2
Little Roo
Things that I could tell you about Little Roo
true lies
Love/Money
data
the animals
son.
horrible info
green: a run
awayness; an almanac
(i)
(ii)
Epilogue
in love with how it happened so far,
even the terrible thin
gs.
Prologue
My little brother and I saw a unicorn in the garden in the late nineties. I’m telling you.
Neither one of us made it up; it was as real as anything else.
Sometimes, when the world around us grew indistinct, when facts would blur into less certain truths and frightening things looked set to occur, the two of us could see clearly into the Fourth Dimension. So when Linford James was on a ladder at midnight, banging on the bedroom windows, shouting at Mum,
and later, when the color in his throat deepened and they were nose to nose, neither one of them spotted the unicorn. Adults went about their lives missing beauty all the time.
Little Roo was six. I was ten. The unicorn strode a couple of majestic laps of the garden, before vanishing completely into the rosebush. The Fourth Dimension was our only explanation for this. We weren’t dreaming.
That night, Mum called the police. The next evening, Linford was sleeping in her bed again, snoring the walls down in his frightening manner.
The unicorn wasn’t the only strange thing. Living in Chorley, up in the North, we were closer to the sky than most. What luck. Little Roo often saw things written in the stars. Signs, Facts and Other Things. I’m telling you.
He knew why adults said the things they said. And why they didn’t mean the things they said
and even less what they did. Sometimes it wasn’t answers that he found, but entirely perfect questions.
A genius, my little brother.
Marcia Daley-Ward aka “Mum”
had a slim waist (in the very beginning)
soft hair
a gorgeous smile (pearly arcs, those teeth. Shining church doors).
Marcia had smiling eyes
loose hips
could dance as well as anyone on television
lived with her grandparents in Kingston, Jamaica,
and she was oh so kind,
had some art about her.
When told to go into the woods to choose a branch with which her grandfather would beat her little brother
(for some tiny offense), chose a weak branch that came apart in her grandfather’s hand
and earned a beating too.
Marcia
was fourteen and still skinny when she flew over to England, alone and terrified
with a baby in her belly. The boyfriend at that time was not the baby’s daddy
but none of that mattered, because everything was about to change. She had been sent for, finally, by her mother
and would be as far away from all of these men as God would allow.
She trembled when stepping off the plane. She was about to see her parents, for the first time in years. How would she tell them? How would she explain?
Marcia
is sixteen with screaming Baby Samson, in the Northwest of England.
What a mess
and he’s only getting bigger. A real-life mini-man; the sum of several fears. Growing and growing, faster than she can handle. She curses the Lord Above. Marcia’s parents step in. Especially when little Samson rides his small tricycle all the way to Grandma’s just to get away from Marcia and her mood swings. They raise him like a son;
never mind a grandson. He even calls them “Mum and Dad,”
leaves Marcia’s title
blank.
Alone,
Marcia trains to be a nurse.
So
soon, Marcia, the student nurse, is twenty-six. The man she loves is a dark, beautiful scholar with some height to him, some education
and a wife and family in Nigeria. Guinness is his drink. He’ll be the last one to leave the pub. The last one home and, most every night,
he turns toward her with those irresistible, glazed eyes,
blackshining. So she can’t stay angry, even if she tries.
But his other home calls and the academic year ends
and their time will soon be up. He knows and she knows that he will not stay, but they make a child anyway.
Y R S A,
she says. Yrsa. I like the sound of that.
ONE
Aa
Read to me! Mummy would say;
and boy, she and I read. We read our lives out. Right from the very beginning.
Hot, thick worlds with ladybirds and puffins on their spines. Watery, cool-mountainous wholewideworlds.
Why didn’t anyone help the Little Red Hen make food?
or
Why was the cat so naughty?
And Mummy would point at the picture of the cat who wouldn’t behave. The angry, frowning cat
sitting, arms folded, in the corner.
It’s because he needs love, she would say. It’s only because he’s frightened.
Why did the lion scream, “Over my dead body!”
when someone tried to give away his comb? Why did
he bellow,
frightening the entire jungle?
It’s because he needs things, she would say,
the lion is lonely and vain.
Mummy was soft. Warm-milk soft
and everything written in our paperworlds
made hot, small sense.
Bb
She lifts me up onto the kitchen counter.
The child is so, so gifted.
She’s reading already?
Well, hear for yourself.
And way before school?
Yes, quite. Kids can do anything, you know. It’s all in teaching them early. Just look and see how easily she forms the words.
She smiles at me. Her eyes, like honey. Bronzeshining.
You’re my supernova,
says she.
My thrilling, bright explosion.
Marcia is thirty,
loves Linford
but feels bereft of something. A friend (Sonny, his name)
stays overnight (again) and when her little girl comes to the door, she ushers her out, quickly.
“Go back to bed,” says she. “See you in the morning, baby-girl.
I love you.”
Then she lies back, a hand on her stomach, wondering what time it will be this dark morning when Sonny the Friend will make his excuses and disappear off into the town.
Somewhere inside her, Little Roo is beginning
and nobody knows yet but God.
a red home
We moved house. Linford is Mum’s boyfriend and we are staying at his place right now. It is a two-up two-down in Warrington. Linford’s house is under construction, but getting there. At first it is exciting, moving to this half-built redbrick house with red, red floors. An almost-house. A house nearly on the corner of the street.
The kitchen floor tiles bother me because they are all scratched and uneven and I think there might be germs there.
I have a baby brother these days. I call him Little Roo because he is what older people call “hyperactive” and likes to skip-hop around, kangaroo style. Linford is a traveling salesman and sometimes he has to go away for two to three days while Mum is still working nights at the hospital, so we have this babysitter called Bev. Bev the Babysitter smells of Parma Violets and has yellow wavy hair and long nails and lots of freckles, and talks a lot on the phone late at night. When I’m in bed I can hear her cackling up through the flooring.
My big brother, Samson, is away, fighting in the army. I miss him holding my hand and walking to school with me. I love my little brother, but he’s too small to know how to do things and he cries a lot.
Samson had to get away, he said. He is sorry to leave. But he can’t stand that guy Linford
and he had to get away. Mum tells all this to Bev the Babysitter while they are drinking tea in the morning and Bev tuts and sucks on a cigarette and calls him a “typical teenager.”
“How old is he? Seventeen, eighteen? They�
�re all rotten at that age,” she says,
and Mum, still in her blue-and-white nurse’s uniform, looks down at her tea and says, quietly,
“He isn’t rotten; they just don’t see eye to eye.” And Bev shakes her head and says,
“The army isn’t the thing, though, is it? Just teaches them to be violent, I think. Ruins ’em more, I say,”
and Mum gives Bev twenty-five pounds and slowly gets to her feet, holding her head,
and says,
“Well, Beverly, I’d better be getting to bed. Thank you,”
and Beverly nods and puts on her coat.
I am only seven years old and already getting round in the wrong places. The swellings of my little breasts are showing through my clothes, growing into small, protruding points
. . . so very fast, says Mum, getting nervous. She works night after night at the local hospital
and frets
and tells me to wear big T-shirts over my nighties—especially the long, silky blue one, which is so low-cut that it needs three safety pins.
Remember, Linford is not your dad, she says. Wear my orange gown at all times at night now. The one with the flowers. Be mindful.
What is mindful?
It means, use your head. You’re growing into something else now. All little girls grow and change
and . . .
look,
it is what it is.
It’s true. I feel like something new. Something uncomfortable. Aware of my largeness for my age, the things I have growing on my front and the one who is called Dad
but is not Dad.
Dad is something that I didn’t know that I had. Or needed.
Who is my dad, then? I ask one day.
He’s Nigerian. He’s from NIGERIA,
Mum states proudly, as though that answers the question.
Handsome as anything and he’s AMAZING. I still love him. I do.
And he is a PRINCE, you know. Royalty. You have royal blood in you, you know. We write to each other, you know. Do you want to see what he looks like?