The Terrible

by Yrsa Daley-Ward

  not a girlfriend, you understand,

  but a Cool Black Girl Friend

  with spongy hair that was dead cool.

  I had been praying for beauty for two years straight, with no real success, no concrete results. No one could see it unless they were adults, so I made plans. After all, there was lots I could do to facilitate this.

  Plan one. Ask Grandma about hair relaxer. Or a perm. The white girls used Pantene Pro-V in their hair. I needed to get hold of that and mix it with our horrible shampoo to make my hair come out straighter, shinier, LONGER.

  Plan two. Do exercises every day from Grandma’s yoga book and DO NOT EAT TOO MUCH.

  That meant NO CRISPS, DESSERTS,

  only GRANDDAD’S DIABETIC BISCUITS when he shares them.

  Buy Sugar and Bliss magazines to learn tips on how to attract boys.

  Use Mum’s hair gel for shine. Dream/idol look:

  Kelly Kapowski from Saved by the Bell

  or

  Pamela Anderson

  or one of the Sweet Valley High twins.

  Only a tiny amount of people will enter the kingdom of God, says the Bible. Only a small section will be saved from the fires of damnation; that is to say, those who take the narrow road and work hard and worship God and are hardworking and modest. Children of the Lord who do everything right. Each time we got on our knees to pray in church I began to cry, because I wasn’t sure that I would ever make it to heaven. The Bible said we come into the world as sinners. Perhaps I just wasn’t a good enough person to turn it all around. I wanted to have long, shiny hair and read magazines for girls and wear pink lip gloss and short skirts and be completely adored and wanted and loved;

  I was sure of the heaven in that.

  wildlife

  I am moving around, slowly, with intent,

  underneath my Very Best Friend. We are “practicing for boys,” you see. An important and necessary task. We call this sex thing “snakes and elephants,”

  so no one finds us out when we refer to it at school. Code words are everything.

  This friend is mean to me sometimes, at school. But never when we’re in bed. Never ever in bed.

  After it’s finished,

  after we have acted just like wildflowers

  daisy headed,

  after we have rubbed together in the wind, somewhat

  been as dandelion clocks, drifting

  summer tuliped

  buttercupped

  come away; once our inner petals are softened

  we go downstairs. I reek of her. She is a petite girl and my T-shirt totally drowns her. My insides still ache with longing. She is on my skin. I want more,

  so much more,

  but it’s dinnertime,

  i.e., we have been summoned.

  We sit down to rice and chicken

  and I really, really think I could be in love,

  i.e., not “practicing for boys,”

  not really, not ever.

  Grandma and Granddad know nothing, of course. They are talking over our heads about how someone’s eighteen-year-old daughter at church is pregnant and not even married!

  This thing we’ve been doing, my Very Best Friend and I,

  this feels right; feels free. Like life could be completely new. I feel like myself, stronger. Like the warrior me. As though I could take on an army. Strong like Samson.

  Dashing like Samson. I wish I was Samson. No boobs, just strong and kinglike and black.

  Some distant soldier. A wonderful mirage. A thing that all the girls love.

  The news hit us. Linford was living with Auntie Lizette. Mum’s best friend.

  Linford went and moved in with Auntie Lizette. Mum’s best friend.

  Linford and Auntie Lizette aka the Best Friend of Mum. Auntie Lizette? Linford? Our jaws dropped.

  Auntie Lizette was brown and plump with a silky curly-perm and plum, frosted lips.

  Auntie Lizette and Mum stopped speaking, unless they saw each other in the street or at Carnival or something. Then they would nod hello to each other, keeping it moving. We were warned to be polite if we ran into her, though, because children were to be respectful at all times, with no exception.

  “Leave them to it,” Mum said, tossing her head, drinking her brandy tea.

  “I would never have expected it, but leave them to it.

  And be wary of friends, yeah? They are the ones who will kill you, in the end.”

  everything else

  Wishes do come true after all. I was eleven when Little Roo and I were able to live with Mum again. She had moved into the area and lived a fifteen-minute walk away from Grandma’s, opposite the cemetery and right next door to my high school. Being back with Mum was such a relief. We could exhale. So we did.

  Mum had a microwave and cable TV, chocolate in the cupboard, Bakewell tarts, ready-made apple pies and a plastic electric kettle with no whistle

  (we were tired, by then, of the whistling). Everything was plastic and modern and we could warm up our delicious ready meals in minutes. Pictures of Jesus did not adorn the walls and there were no cabinets filled with china, although she did leave the wrapping on the chairs, like all the other Jamaicans we knew. She was still working night shifts at Manchester hospital and would return home at eight the next morning, exhausted. In the daytime, Mum would try to catch up on her growing deficit of sleep while we were at school. We would see her around six to seven p.m. as she prepared for the night shift again. She did her best.

  Mum didn’t like to throw things away reader’s digest books stethoscopes sellotape old high school jotters stained pieces of paper monopoly pieces and the fake money photographs pens that didn’t write the bingo card perfume bottles old plant food tomato sauce sachets mustard in case someone needed it kfc after dinner wipes old credit cards keys to boxes long forgotten tea stained cloth the sewing kit plasters and bandages from 1984 old surgical gloves pills we didn’t know the name of painkillers antiinflammatories antihistamines vitamin capsules cod liver oil rust filled biscuit tins plastic money boxes stress balls shells from Blackpool beach nuts bolts and screws recipes scrawled on old magazine covers letters from Jamaica postage stamps photos of Samson and we could not keep our house well. Everything was in disarray. Cobwebs grew in the corners of the ceilings and there was grime on our skirting boards and door handles. Grassy weeds sprung up from the gaps in the windowsills. Mold grew in cups and mildew on old clothes on the floor. The garden was a junkyard.

  We ate store-bought ready meals in boxes, rice and chicken and party food, unless Grandma sent fish and chicken, macaroni and cheese or rice and peas in Tupperware boxes.

  We were not inclined to cleaning, even after all of the meticulous attention to detail we had been taught. Especially after that. At Grandma’s, wiping our faces in the hand towel would earn us a slap. At Mum’s, Little Roo and I could do what we wanted. So we did.

  Grandma and Granddad despaired over the state of the place,

  but it was out of their hands.

  At night I was entrusted to put Little Roo to bed at seven forty-five and retire myself at a time I deemed reasonable. It took a while to settle into this new lifestyle of freedom. Apart from medical journals, her cabinets were full of Mills & Boon romance novels and sex booklets.

  Great Sex,

  Sexpectations (a tale of lusty romance)

  and an illustrated Kama Sutra. My favorite picture was entitled “The Only Way for Women to Be Together.” I dog-eared the page and tucked it behind my pillow every night.

  Roo would read anything he could find too. He would pore through the medical journals like a little professor and he learned to pick up most church songs by ear. He could mimic all the cartoon character voices and strained his eyes by sitting too close to the TV until he had to wear glasses. We memorized the words to everything we watched and read a
nd made brightly colored picture books out of scrap paper, felt-tips and Samson’s old comics from the eighties. We had a radio show that we would record on my cassette recorder and we made plans to get famous and live in a house with all the computer games, sweets and books we could dream of.

  physics and magic

  Every night around ten p.m. they play reruns of this old, old show from back in the day called Quantum Leap. In the show, Scott Bakula aka Dr. Sam Beckett travels through space and time in just a matter of seconds. Mum has a book of magic in her front room, sandwiched between the Bible and the non-illustrated Kama Sutra. A powder-blue hardback book from the School of Divine Power about “jumping timelines,” documenting various scientists who say that you can jump into whatever reality you can conceive with positive activations.

  Just think, says the book, these are all your lives, happening right next to each other, and you get to choose your frequency.

  Meaning dimensions are very, very real.

  Meaning Roo and I did see a unicorn last year.

  Meaning we were absolutely Not dreaming.

  So beauty is coming. Money is coming. Fathers are coming. The book says that time is an illusion, a bendable concept. Unreal. So maybe as you are reading this I am already twenty-nine or fifty or something, or two and still reading on the worktop with Mummy. I am also very unmistakably here and you are so unmistakably there—only we aren’t. We are anywhere we want to be

  and if that beautiful actor Scott Bakula can travel through time, collapsing the old timelines in seconds, I bet we could even travel diagonally. I can see my father, or something like that, and stop him from going back to Nigeria (although I wouldn’t want my brothers and sister to be without him).

  Maybe he could travel backward and forward in time and they won’t notice him gone!

  Mum says I might be mixing concepts and not to think about this so much and also not to mix the actor Scott Bakula with his character, Sam, but she is always tired and not a good person to discuss this with. Quantum Leap is the best thing on television, in my opinion. Scott aka Sam travels through space and time because he accidentally stepped into some time vortex or cupboard or something when it wasn’t ready. I feel for him. As soon as he gets comfortable he gets blasted to another set of bad circumstances in a different space and time and he has to rely on his friend Al to guide him through the dodgy situation in order to stop the bad thing in history from happening,

  which makes me so, so happy before I go to bed. I have moved through several timelines already, I think. Time is an illusion, say the scientists. It is molecular, it is bendable or liquid, it is soldered metal;

  or it is droplets of memory. I imagine it looks like mercury, silver and illusive.

  The powder-blue book is amazing. I love magic science. The book takes a dim view on the West and its trapping, limiting concept of time. Burn all the clocks. I am free. My friends can come to call for me at night and there is no more church on Saturdays and Linford has gone on his merry way. My Very Best Friend is a droplet of chemical memory as well. Our timeline has totally collapsed. She is trying to spread rumors about me all the way over at another school, miles away, calling me a lesbian. I don’t care. If Scott Bakula aka Sam can jump from the future to a nightclub in the sixties to being sheriff of a small town in the forties to teaching Michael Jackson the moonwalk, I can deal with a mean deadweight disappearing from my life. There are always new people to touch and be touched by. I have just started high school for God’s sake, where the real stuff is about to begin, and I am too excited at this moment in time to be missing my Very Best Friend or anyone else. It’s just as Mum says. Be wary of friends. Anyway, I have more important things to be concentrating on, like Growing Up. High school will be everything. I am porous, I am bold. I am a space-time traveling expert.

  I am close to twelve, you know (in theory;

  in your Western linear time concept at least),

  and this is how it goes.

  TWO

  12.0

  This is how it goes.

  You start having sad days. Get to know what “going under” is.

  Going under is when everything

  feels pitch gray. You crave something

  but you don’t know what. The boys at high school are juvenile, small and rude. The girls at school flirt with the boys at school.

  Samson gets married. The whole family travels down South to the wedding on a Friday. He is marrying a pretty girl from near London. She has lots of tattoos and is lovely and everything

  but you can’t stop crying at the wedding. It feels so much like the end of things.

  “You are erratic,” says your mum, often.

  “What’s wrong with you? What are these black moods?”

  You feel your body temperature sinking

  feel tired all the time

  sweat too much

  stop washing. You read Joy of Sex

  the man looks like

  Christ but you ignore Jesus these days

  you want love these days

  you imagine what sex must be like

  and know you must find out.

  So you can’t leave the earth just yet.

  13.0

  One day

  two builders whistle at you in the street.

  Oi, sexy!

  Ello, gorgeous!

  It’s a feeling you

  haven’t had before

  something prickly and bright.

  Power. Fear.

  13.2

  feel fat

  feel fat

  stop washing

  feel

  Little Roo says,

  “I don’t think you’re fat.”

  You sigh and hate yourself

  in the mirror.

  13.9

  or

  how it begins

  Your friend’s dad likes

  to joke about the length of your legs

  asks why you’re not a supermodel yet.

  Tells you he’s sure you’ll go far if you try.

  You like the look in his eyes when

  he says it.

  14.0

  Your friend’s dad is looking at you

  Your friend’s dad likes you. Your friend’s dad says

  Look . . . I can’t have you walking home at this hour. Put your bike in the back of my car and I’ll

  take you. There is musk in his voice. Just like that, something shifts

  and you know something

  and he knows something

  but nobody knows for sure. You have something to trade

  and you’re not sorry. Smile back at your friend’s dad in the rearview mirror

  hold his gaze, daunting as that might be. Let him drive you home (again)

  and let him say (again) that you’ve got legs that go on forever

  notice—it takes him twenty minutes to drive you home

  when you live ten minutes up the street

  feel good about that.

  Know that he wants to be around you.

  Play into the powerfear. Pretend you dropped your purse

  and stretch out on the back seat like a cat

  smile at his confusion in the dark

  then say “thank you” and bolt quickly

  soon as he pulls up to your front door, before he

  has time to do or to think a thing. Before he has an issue. Feel funny when you get in the house. And relieved. The wrong kind of tingling.

  Make an excuse the next time he wants to drive you home.

  With a pert black body

  and a wet, wet mouth

  maybe

  anyone’s dad can be yours. You’re the danger.

  14.2

  Meet Terence

  Mum’s boyfriend

  who cheats on
her but is otherwise fine

  good to talk to. A laugh, sometimes, if he’s in a good mood.

  Little Roo does an excellent impression of Terence. Puffs out his chest and puts on a deep voice. Terence is always slicking his curls with wet-look gel and playing with his mustache. Twirling it around like a classic villain. Little Roo could be an actor if he wanted. The master of impersonation. Cheeks out like Terence, walks with his belly sticking out.

  Terence has Nike trainers

  says he’ll pick you up a pair

  Terence likes R & B. You get into R & B

  feel like a girl from the video

  realize you

  could

  look like a girl from the video

  Get long hair, soft, long, waist-length

  braids that make you look

  like something lovely.

  Little Roo says you look like a princess.

  Thank him on the way out. You don’t have time to stay in and watch TV shows with him anymore. There are things to do and people to see. Go to the off-license, brazen as anything, to

  buy booze for your friends and anyone else who asks.

  Always get served; anyone would swear you’re at least twenty.

  Huddle up with the gang on park benches in the bitter northern winter

  drinking cider, talking shit, sharing cigarettes. There is a blond boy who curses and spits a lot

  and never looks at you. You’re scared if you catch his eye.

  Disappointed when you don’t.

  One night he places a head on your lap, drunk.

  “You’re all right, you know, kind of pretty.

  I don’t mind Coloreds; it’s the Pakis I hate.”

  14.3

  Pose naked for a strange man in the next town

  who says he can shoot portfolios. He tells you