Precious

by Precious Williams

  Nobody asks.

  ‘Did you know black people could be kings, Nanny?’ I say one day.

  ‘You know we don’t use the word “black”, Nin,’ she says, and dashes off to get my lunch ready.

  I am black now, actually. Since Nigeria, I’ve ceased being coloured. Aunty Nneka explained to me that only racist whites call us coloured now and we must never use that word to describe ourselves.

  Back in Fernmere it is hard to continue to see being black as a good thing though. I test my new way of looking at myself on Aunty Wendy and Nanny. On the way to Sainsbury’s in Chichester in the car I say, ‘Guess what?’

  ‘What, love?’ says Nanny.

  ‘I’m black and I’m proud!’ I say, copying words I’ve seen a bouffant-haired, dancing black man say on TV. I giggle nervously.

  Nanny turns round and look at me as though I’ve just announced that I am Lucifer. She stops chewing her little Scotch egg, her mouth drops open ever so slightly, and I can see the mashed up pink and yellow and white inside.

  One winter afternoon, while I’m still off school, I am woken from a snooze by the sound of a human trying to imitate a cuckoo at the front door downstairs: it’s Aunty Wendy. Suddenly I hear Aunty Wendy actually running up the stairs.

  Aunty Wendy sits on the edge of Gramps’s bed with such bounce that she almost lands on top of me. ‘Don’t you feel like getting up and going out for a bit of a walk? Get some fresh air, love?’ she says. ‘Can’t be doing you no good just lying there like an invalid.’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  Nanny, who is perched at her dressing table, tweezing at a hair on her chin, turns around and smiles at us.

  ‘Are you going to tell her or shall I, Wendy?’ she says

  Looking at Aunty Wendy’s lit-up face I can see what she must have looked like when she was my age.

  ‘You tell her, Mum.’

  ‘What?’ I say. ‘I mean, pardon?’

  ‘Wendy’s having a little baby of her own, Nin. Isn’t it wonderful?’ says Nanny.

  Aunty Wendy squeezes my hand tight.

  At the end of the month, I finally return to Fernmere Primary and kids who’ve never so much as said hello to me before, come up to me on the playground and go, ‘Hi. How’s it going?’

  Later I learn from a new kid in my class, Tom, that our headmaster told everyone to be kind to me when I came back, since I’d been through an ‘ordeal’. I revel in my new-found fame and wish I could have malaria more often.

  A few weeks later, my mother struts back into my life to take me up to London for the weekend, and I’m thrilled to see her. I’ve been feeling so threatened by this white baby that’s growing in Aunty Wendy’s tummy that I feel relieved to have my own mother, however flawed and unpredictable she might be.

  According to Nanny my mother is behind with her payments for my keep, but she surprises us all by giving me a cheque for a hundred pounds.

  ‘To put in your building society account,’ my mother says.

  After thanking her, I fold the cheque in half and tuck it into my pink plastic handbag. My mother says that her car has gone and when I ask her where it went, she doesn’t answer me. We’re on the train. My mother whispers into my ear that there is going to be a surprise for me in London and that the surprise is a person.

  ‘It’s somebody I want you to meet,’ she says.

  ‘Give me a clue. Man or lady?’

  ‘Oh, it’s a man.’

  I think of the man holding me in the Polaroid I found long ago at my mother’s house; the man with the small teeth who I’ve always thought was my father. I’ve never dared ask my mother about this man because I came across the Polaroid one day when she went out when, out of boredom, I rummaged through three of the animal-hide handbags she kept in the bottom of her wardrobe.

  My mother has never seemed to want me to meet or know anything about my father. Nanny once helped me write a letter to the Sierra Leonian High Commission, enclosing a copy of my birth certificate and asking them to help us locate him, but we didn’t hear back.

  When I do eventually trace my father, more than twenty years from now, I will be informed that I have missed him by three years. He was shot in the chest during the Sierra Leonean civil war in 1999.

  ‘Can you give me another clue, Mummy? What sort of teeth does the person have?’

  My mother ignores the question but doesn’t appear annoyed that I asked it. She sweeps one of her long arms around my shoulder and presses my face up against her cheek.

  ‘You’re a blessing to me, do you know that?’ she says, nuzzling her nose into my cheekbone.

  I nod, not because I understand what my mother really means, but because I think she’s expecting me to nod.

  ‘I’m going to try to be a better mother to you from now on. Tell me some nice things you’d like to do with the rest of the day. Your choice.’

  ‘Do they have libraries in London, Mum?’

  ‘Libraries? I mean something fun. Like the pictures or shopping.’

  I watch her, not quite trusting her. If I do anything that’s even the slightest bit annoying, I know there’s a good chance she’ll explode.

  But I never know when she’s going to totally lose it with me and starting punching or kicking me again. It may never happen again, or it may happen five seconds from now, and that’s the horror of it.

  But when we arrive in London, my mother’s still in a light-hearted mood. We drift from shop to shop and my mother buys a lot of things on each floor of each shop; lip glosses, glitter pens, a gold bangle, five bottles of body lotion, nail varnish and rings. She doesn’t say whether these things are for me, for her or for somebody else. I get swept up in the euphoria of her spending and assume everything’s for me – although later I find out that only the glitter pens were bought with me in mind. When it’s time to pay my mother hands over a plastic card that the checkout girls slide inside a metal machine and hand back to her with a big white receipt, smiling.

  Later, in Selfridges, my mother buys me a jacket made of brown leather and rabbit fur. It’s too big for me but she tells me to put it on, there and then, over my anorak. The jacket reaches my knees and I stand there, rubbing my chin against the fur and smiling bravely at my mother, trying not to think of the blood-soaked bunnies who lost their lives so that I could wear this jacket.

  ‘Don’t let that foolish Nanny put it in the washing machine,’ says my mother.

  We leave Selfridges just as it’s about to close. Laden with shopping bags, we battle our way along a very wide pavement that’s clogged up with people pushing and shoving and carrying three or more carrier bags each. My mother gestures towards a grand-looking hotel that’s tucked along a side street between Selfridges and Marble Arch tube station.

  ‘I used to live inside there when I first came to London,’ she says.

  ‘You lived inside a hotel? How come?’

  ‘Where else would you expect me to live? You think any white person taking one look at my black face or hearing my African name or my accent, you think they’d rent to me?’

  Isn’t her name, the name she uses most often, Elizabeth Williams? How African is that?

  ‘Your name’s not really African though, is it, Mummy?’

  ‘My African name,’ my mother says. ‘Oluchi Eze. I already told you. Remember?’ I nod.

  ‘What’s my African name?’

  ‘The last thing I’d want to do is hinder you with some kind of Third World name,’ my mother says. ‘You don’t have any such thing.’

  ‘Has Agnes got an African name?’

  ‘That Agnes’s got an African everything. That girl,’ my mother says, ‘that girl is just like any girl from back home in the village. It’s like she never left there and lived in England. You wouldn’t even know she goes to school. I’m telling you! Education is wasted on her.’

  Seven a.m. I’ve been with my mother exactly sixteen hours and she hasn’t blown her top once. She hasn’t hit me or even raised her voice and
she hasn’t buggered off and left me on my own either because I can hear her laughter floating up from the dining room.

  I climb out of bed, retrieve my cheque for a hundred pounds from beneath my pillow and tuck it into my dressing-gown pocket. I have a rummage through the drawers in the dressing table opposite my bed. Nanny’s instructed me to find out whether my mother has any DHSS child benefit books lying around (I find two of them) and how much money she’s got in her building society account. I’m unable to find a building society passbook anywhere, so I’ve nothing to report to Nanny on that front. I’ve no idea why Nanny wants to know and I don’t ask.

  Feeling guilty for snooping, I close the drawers. I open my little suitcase and take out my sketchpad, rip a page out of my sketchpad, fold it in half and draw a picture of a brown woman sporting a big red smile and a huge red outline of a heart on her chest. I draw the letter M inside the heart. Inside the folded page, using my new silver glitter pen, I write the words I LOVE YOU arranged in a rainbow shape, around the woman’s head.

  I put on my dressing gown and leave it unbuttoned so that it floats behind me as I walk in the exact same way I’ve seen my mother walk, with her dressing gown float behind her. I descend the stairs preparing what I’m going to say, whispering aloud, concentrating very hard; mornings at my mother’s can be complicated. It can be a bit tricky to get everything right and I have to remember to not just say ‘Hi’ or ‘Good morning’ when I first encounter my mother in the morning: I must say, ‘Good-morning-mummy-did-you-sleep-well-can-I-make-you-a-cup-of-tea?’ My mother has spent a lot of energy teaching me this.

  On the dining table there are three plates of toast cut into triangles, smeared with my favourite grapefruit marmalade. And sitting opposite my mother is a man, a man with very wide dark brown cheeks and a pointed chin. Although he is sitting down, big thighs splayed, I can tell that he’s very short for a grown-up, barely taller than me.

  I keep my eyes on the man as I hand my mother the card I just made. ‘This is for you. The “M” inside the heart is for mother.’

  I feel like a moron giving her the card while the short man watches me but he just smiles as though he’s impressed and my mother smiles too. She’s wearing shimmering burgundy lipstick, even though it’s not quite eight o’clock in the morning.

  In a slightly shaky voice I offer to make my mother and the man a cup of tea but they say no thanks. I sit down and bite into a triangle of toast and wait for an explanation as to who the man is and what he’s doing at my mother’s dining table.

  ‘This is Uncle Abejide,’ my mother says finally. ‘He’s my fiancé.’

  ‘Neety,’ Uncle Abejide says, in a voice that would make you think he actually knew me. ‘Your mother tells me you’re very brilliant.’

  He grins. He has very uniform white teeth, this man. All of Mother’s boyfriends have had lovely teeth and smile a lot. But that doesn’t mean I can trust them. This man can smile at me all he wants, I will not drop my guard when he’s present.

  I smile nervously, giggle a little, and look down at my plate.

  ‘Answer him!’ my mother says, drawing in breath sharply, sounding like she’s rapidly running out of patience with me.

  ‘Um, thank you, Uncle Abby.’

  ‘Drink up your Horlicks,’ my mother says.

  After he’s gobbled up most of the toast, Uncle Abejide says, ‘Well, I must be going.’

  He hops up and puts a black bowler hat on his head and twists the brim around a little and makes a big show of bowing down to kiss me on the cheek. The hat makes his face look even wider. ‘I’ll see you again, Neety,’ he says.

  My mother helps him into a long, stiff-looking black coat and he takes her into his arms and kisses her, keeping his lips on hers for a long time. I wonder what sort of Valentine’s card he gave her and whether he bought her flowers too. The door closes and my mother puts the chain up.

  ‘He’s crazy about bowler hats,’ she says, smiling. ‘He collects them.’

  ‘That’s nice. Is Uncle Abba-thingie my real father? Is that how come you’re getting married to him?’

  ‘Don’t start this up again.’

  I lean back in my chair and stretch, pretending not to feel disappointed. ‘What are we going to do today, Mummy?’

  ‘We’ll start,’ my mother says, ‘by clearing these dishes.’

  I follow her into the kitchen.

  ‘I remember when you were three or four,’ she says, grinning, ‘and you were so sweet that you tried to do the washing up for me because you didn’t want me to ruin my hands. You said, “But I want to do it mummy.” But you were so small that you couldn’t even reach as high as the kitchen sink!’

  ‘Aww,’ I say, enjoying this image and the fact that it seems to soften and amuse my mother.

  The kitchen sink is filled with large plates and there’s an oily orangey-red film floating on top of the water. I put the plates and knives that I’m carrying on the sideboard next to the bread bin. Through the kitchen window I can see Cynthia and another girl, both in powder-blue anoraks, playing some kind of skipping game out on the pavement.

  ‘Would you mind if I go outside and play, Mum?’

  I want to escape my mother’s gaze for a while, so that I can take a bite out of this idea of her getting married and chew it over in private. I’m the child; I’m the one who’s supposed to be constantly changing but suddenly it’s the grown-ups around me who are growing, changing, making babies, getting married, stirring up excitement among themselves and I don’t like it. I need to come up with a strategy to prevent more change from happening.

  ‘And is it all right if I go and find a sweet shop as well?’

  From out of nowhere, my mother’s palm lands with a crack against my cheekbone, propelling me backwards. I smash into the fridge-freezer behind me and the fridge’s handle digs into the place where my spine meets the bottom of my neck. I begin trembling, literally vibrating; partly from the impact of my mother’s punch but mainly I am shaking with anger.

  ‘Who do you expect to do all this washing up?’ my mother screams, stalking towards me with her finger pointed at my face, her face drained of all affection for me.

  I close my eyes, turn my head away and reach my hand over my shoulder and inside my pyjama top to see whether my back is bleeding. It isn’t.

  ‘Just leaving the plates there like that,’ my mother continues, furiously turning on the kitchen taps. ‘Who exactly do you think you are? Who do I have here to help me with the housework? Do you see any house-girl here? You are my child, you should be helping me, not pissing me off!’

  I touch my swelling cheek with the tips of my fingers. ‘I wasn’t thinking,’ I say. ‘I’m really sorry, Mummy.’

  But I am not sorry. Not at all. My mother has pushed me over an invisible edge. I am vibrant with rage: a cauldron of anger and hate is cooking inside me. I desperately want to hit my mother back, smash her against the fridge and humiliate her; force her to know how it feels to be bullied. Soon, I think. Soon. I simmer, and wait.

  I feel her eyes boring into my back as I tiptoe across the room to the sideboard, pick up the small stack of plates and cups I left there and lay them gently on top of the dishes already filling the sink. I think: I’m not going to let her get away with this.

  My mother doesn’t believe kids should be seen and not heard; she believes they should be neither seen nor heard. So it’s strange when she asks me if I want to accompany her to a grown-ups’ party that she says she’s been looking forward to all week. It’s my mother’s way of saying sorry for hitting me, I think. But I’m not impressed.

  ‘If you don’t want to come to the party, you can go to the pictures,’ she says in a sickeningly gentle voice. ‘It’s up to you.’

  I ask who’ll be at the party.

  ‘People from my office,’ says my mother.

  Boring as grown-ups’ parties are, I’m tempted to go so that I can obtain rich gossip for Nanny and Aunty Wendy. They would love to kn
ow where my mother works and what sort of people she spends Monday to Friday working with and so, I suppose, would I.

  ‘Would I have to go the pictures all by myself then?’ I say curtly, still weighing each option.

  ‘I’ll call Patience and tell her to send Eddie to keep you company and take you to the pictures,’ my mother says, sounding as though her mind’s now made up.

  ‘Isn’t he at boarding school?’ I say, trying to hold in my interest. If my mother realises I’m excited about seeing him she might decide to take me to the party after all; she seems to get turned on by other people’s sadness.

  ‘Eddie got expelled,’ my mother says, pouting into her dressing-table mirror.

  Eddie arrives in a denim jacket with studs all over it. He’s had his Afro cut off which makes his face and his nose look larger than when I first met him.

  ‘What’s happenin’?’ he says, in a new American accent. ‘What have you done to your face?’

  I had hoped he’d say: ‘I’ve missed you.’

  ‘I was playing in the garden and I fell over,’ I mumble.

  I look through the parlour window, into the blackness of the back garden and wonder if the dead rat’s still out there, decaying. Maybe it was my mother who actually killed that rat; I imagine her stamping on it until its insides spilled out onto the un-mown grass.

  The raw memory of my mother hitting me lingers inside, rendering me thirstier than ever for approval from someone, from anyone. From Eddie.

  ‘I stayed in the US all summer with my aunty,’ Eddie says. ‘You should see it, man. Everyone has huge cars and the sidewalks are this wide,’ he spreads his arms wide.

  ‘What’s a sidewalk?’ I ask.

  ‘Say what?’ he says, clicking his fingers. ‘It’s a pavement, ain’t it?’

  ‘Why did you get expelled from boarding school?’ I say.

  ‘What’s it to you, babe? What movie are we gonna see? Quadrophenia?’