More than a quarter of a century later, I sit in this driveway once again, with Agnes and Agnes’s new husband, Wachuku. Agnes is giving Wachuku a guided tour of her past.
‘I was so sad when you went into that house and shut the door,’ I tell Agnes. ‘I couldn’t bear it that you were leaving me.’
‘Precious, really?’ Agnes says, genuinely shocked. ‘I never knew. I didn’t think you felt anything, the way you just sat there egging Nanny on like Nanny’s little henchman.’
‘What else could I do? If I didn’t do what Nanny wanted then I could have lost her as well as losing you.’
The house we’re sitting in front of is smaller than we both remember it. Its door opens and a middle-aged white man emerges and peers through the window of Wachuku’s car.
‘Can I help you with anything?’ he says, eyes roaming from Wachuku’s gold tooth to my dreadlocks. He takes two or three steps backwards. In this part of West Sussex, even in 2007, our presence – three black people in a jeep blazing Notorious B.I.G. – is like a vaguely menacing question mark.
‘We’re looking for a Christine Baker,’ Agnes says.
‘The Baker family left here in the 1980s,’ the man replies, incredulously.
Once it’s clear Agnes is not getting in the car, that we’ve lost her, Nanny drives me to our favourite haunt, Lily Pond, to see if we can ‘calm our nerves’ by taking a look at the heron that lives among the rushes. But when we get to Lily Pond, all we can see in the moonlight are the shadows cast over the water by the reeds growing at the edges of the pond. We sit in darkness.
‘You can’t really blame Agnes for being a bit confused,’ says Nanny. ‘Things haven’t been exactly easy for Agnes, thanks to your mother. Why do you think poor Else always made sure she was scarce whenever your mother turned up? The pair of them never saw eye to eye. It just wan’t fair on her, the way your mother dragged her here from Africa, from everything she knew and loved.’
Agnes never returns to 52 West Walk. I’ve no idea how long she stays in Hop’s Corner with the Baker family. Eventually I hear – via Sasha at school – that Aggy’s gone to London.
During the months that follow, Agnes – who loves gossip the way I love Wagon Wheels – appears to still be in touch with our mother. I overhear crumbs of increasingly melodramatic adult conversations and Agnes is at the centre of them all. Agnes has supposedly been told by my mother that Nanny tipped Gramps in his wheelchair down the stairs, killing him on purpose to release herself from the burden of looking after him. How on earth my mother would claim to know this is beyond me and, anyway, Gramps died after slipping on the floor while using the loo. His fall led to a heart attack and he died in hospital.
My mother’s also supposedly told Agnes she’s planning to remove me permanently from Nanny’s ‘any day now’. But my mother regularly makes similar threats and I’ve learned not to believe a word of any of it.
Much of this web of intrigue and threats evaporates once Aunty Wendy’s fat, pink baby girl Kelly is born. Kelly’s bald except for a stripe of blond hair down the centre of her head, which makes her look a little like Uncle Mick’s dad, Uncle Malcolm.
Kelly’s a miracle baby for two reasons – first because Aunty Wendy wasn’t even trying to get pregnant when she did, and secondly because Kelly isn’t handicapped – unlike Aunty Wendy’s first baby, Christian, who died soon after he was born.
Christian had an illness called Lees Disease and he died when I was about four. My memories of him revolve around a single image, a golden-haired gentle baby boy who never seemed to move.
Winter of 1980 brings a letter that instantly changes our lives. I recognise the large, spidery scrawl on the envelope at once – my mother’s handwriting. Nanny reads the letter out to me over breakfast.
The letter says Mummy Elizabeth wants to talk to Nanny about my future. She’s had enough of how boring and dull I am and she is finding absolutely no pleasure at all in interacting with me. Something’s got to be done. So she’s going to be removing me from Nanny’s care in the near future and sending me back to Africa.
The enclosed cheque, for my keep, flutters onto the kitchen table. I watch Nanny fold the letter in half and slide it back into its blue envelope.
‘I’m keeping this as evidence,’ she says cryptically. ‘There is no way I am letting that bitch take you to Africa again. I’m not having it. She’s given me no choice but to go a solicitor, Anita.’
I digest the contents of my mother’s letter – and I have questions, questions, questions. Excitement overlaid with dread. There’s an urge rising in me to speak up, to ask my questions, but Nanny’s face warns me to remain quiet. I want to know why Nanny’s so sure that going to Africa is automatically bad. Uncle Mick said once that it would make him sad if I ever went there for good but that he understands that, at the end of the day, I’m an African. Why does Nanny see it all so differently then?
And what about if I went to live with Aunty Wendy and Uncle Mick instead? Would Mummy Elizabeth then let me stay in Fernmere? I’d be happy living in Aunty Wendy’s house; I’d be allowed to go out and play with the other kids on the estate and I wouldn’t have to keep washing my hands all the time.
It takes Nanny mere minutes to find a solicitor, making me suspect she’s had one up her sleeve all along, in preparation for this moment. The solicitor’s name is Mr Braithwaite, a man Nanny calls ‘a hell of a chap’. We go to his office. He’s dressed in a pinstriped suit and sits at a desk the colour of milk chocolate that’s piled high with faded hardback books. He wears an enormous watch and his dainty wrist looks like it could snap under the weight of all that heavy metal – real gold, I think.
Nanny tells me I must put my best foot forward and we must ‘present a good case’ to a lot of very distinguished people who are going to be interviewing me and asking my opinions about things. There is no opportunity, it seems, for me to ask questions or to voice my fears. I am the one who will be questioned.
I prepare myself for this scrutiny by locking myself away. When not at school or asleep or eating, I try to spend as much time as I can shut inside the cupboard beneath the stairs, sitting at a makeshift desk Uncle Mick put together for me, flicking through piles of fusty library books with brittle pages. Aunty Wendy makes frequent attempts to coax me out, to get me to go out and play with my friends, but I’m stubborn and, anyway, Nanny thinks I should be allowed to spend my time alone with a stack of books if that’s what I want.
I hear a voice outside my cupboard: low, conspiratorial. It’s Aunty Julia, the wife of Nanny’s posh-voiced son Dave. ‘I’m very fond of Anita,’ she says. ‘But I’ve always thought she was a strange little girl.’
Here we go again. Another of Aunty Julia’s sermons about how I should be out interacting with my peers, not spending all this time by myself.
‘She’s just a shy little thing,’ says Nanny. ‘There’s nothing wrong with my Nin at all.’
Nanny always contradicts Aunty Julia because she is keen to put her in her place. According to Nanny, Aunty Julia’s mum used to be Nanny’s housekeeper, back in the days before Woodview, when Nanny was still middle-class.
Aunty Julia’s not entirely wrong about me, I suppose. I am strange. Here I am, nine years old and reading books about Indian holy men and yoga, when I could be out climbing trees or roller-skating through the Woodview streets with my friends. But life inside my cupboard is so much more interesting. According to my books, the Indian holy men can literally float in the air. All it takes to float in the air is the right frame of mind, the books say.
I take notes in my exercise book, close my eyes and imagine sailing up into the sky. The books say that in order to be ‘enlightened’ one must avoid certain ‘poisonous’ foods – and that’s why I’ve decided to give up orange squash and tomato ketchup.
When I tell Nanny this news about my new dietary requirements, she smiles and says, ‘Oh really, darling? How long will that last?’
‘I wouldn’t have it,
Mum,’ Aunty Wendy says.
When I am next at Aunty Wendy’s house, Uncle Mick makes a point of squirting a huge blob of ketchup onto my chips. ‘Eat it,’ he says.
I do not say ‘no’. I just sit there in silence, meditating.
‘Eat your bloody tea!’ Uncle Mick picks up a ketchup-sodden chip from my plate and angles it towards my mouth.
‘I can’t eat it,’ I say.
‘What do you mean, you bloody can’t?’
He soon gives up and crams the chip into his own mouth.
‘This is ridiculous,’ says Aunty Wendy. ‘There’s something wrong with you, my girl. Nanny needs to stop letting you get away with this nonsense.’
‘Here comes the future Dr Williams,’ says my mother, scanning me for faults and weaknesses as I walk into her parlour with Uncle Abejide, who has just picked me up from Fernmere.
There are two unfamiliar women in the parlour: a petrified-looking brown girl holding a tiny baby and a white woman with a haystack wedge of hair who introduces herself to me as Mrs Berry, Court Welfare Officer.
I sit there trembling, afraid of my mother’s scrutiny. My hair is a mass of wild knots and clumps and she’s bound to say something any second now.
‘Even her grandmother, her father’s mother, was very brilliant,’ says my mother. ‘She was doing her doctorate at Oxford University.’
So the paternal grandmother I’ve never met is a doctor then. Not a medical doctor, I learn later, but rather a PhD in English Literature. So that’s why my mother wants me to become Dr Williams when I grow up. The only doctor I know is Dr Gillies, poking his little wooden sticks down people’s throats and his tiny lamp up people’s noses. I’m thrilled when my mother boasts about the jobs my family members hold and reels off lists of their academic achievements. It’s a reminder to me that I have a lot of very clever people in my real family. Maybe one day I will take after them.
There are two new silver-framed pictures on the formerly bare walls: one is of my mother in a crocheted ivory bridal gown, towering over Uncle Abejide; the other a picture of a baby who looks like a newborn seal; all big eyes and smooth sleek skin, the baby who’s now lying in the lap of a stranger opposite me, gurgling.
‘Aren’t you going to say hello to your brother?’ my mother says.
‘He’s beautiful, mother. What’s his name?’
‘James. But we call him Chuka.’
‘Are you going to keep him?’
‘Of course I’m going to keep him. Be polite, Nitty. This is Chimamanda, who I brought over from Chukaro to help me with him. And this is some kind of social worker,’ she jerks her thumb at Mrs Berry. ‘Say hi.’
‘Hi,’ I say.
Chimamanda looks up and smiles shyly.
‘Hallo, Anita,’ says Mrs Berry. ‘I’m here to see how you get on with your mother.’
What on earth? Even I, aged nine, can see that this is a complete load of crap. Of course nobody is going to act like their normal self in front of a spectator from the High Courts. Does this Mrs Berry think we’re thick or what?
Mrs Berry asks my mother questions but my mother speaks to Ngozi and Uncle Abejide in Igbo rather than answering any of the questions. The only thing she says to Mrs Berry is: ‘I’ve enrolled Anita in a local private school.’ As if this information exempts her from needing to answer further questions.
‘I’ll need to speak to Anita briefly on her own for a minute,’ says Mrs Berry.
And off we go into my mother’s kitchen where Mrs Berry sits opposite me, pen poised. The questions erupt out of her and I answer her just as rapidly, without thinking clearly about what I’m saying.
‘Apart from Mum,’ Mrs Berry says, ‘do you have contact with any other people of your own ethnicity?’
‘What’s ethnicity?’
‘Coloured people.’
‘My sister. But she ran away from us. And Eddie.’
‘How often do you see Eddie?’
‘I’ve seen him twice so far. His mother’s one of my mother’s friends from Africa.’
Mrs Berry scribbles something in her notepad.
‘I see. Where would you like to live, Anita, if you could choose?’
‘Do I have to say?’
I’m wearing a blue-and-white gingham sundress which Nanny spent twenty minutes ironing this morning. I rub my palms against the stiffened fabric to calm my nerves and wipe the sweat off my hands.
‘I’d like to hear what you have to say, yes.’
‘I’d live with my dad.’
‘But your dad’s not in the picture, is he?’
‘Which picture?’
‘You don’t see much of Dad, do you? Where does Dad live?’
‘I never see him. He lives in America.’
‘How did you find out that he was living in America?’
‘I just know, that’s all.’
‘When did you last see Dad?’
‘I don’t think I ever have.’
‘Anita,’ Mrs Berry leans forward, really peering at me. ‘This might be a difficult question for you to answer, but I need to ask you whether anyone has ever touched you in a way that made you feel uncomfortable?’
I shrug my bare shoulders and shiver a little, even though it’s very hot in the kitchen.
Earlier, at breakfast, Nanny said, ‘if you say the wrong thing, darling, they’ll send you straight to Africa and you’ll get terribly ill again. And you won’t have any of your friends or any of your toys.’
I’m not sure whether I’m allowed to tell this drained-looking beige-toothed lady the truth about my life so far. Have I ever felt uncomfortable? Let’s put it this way, only very occasionally have I ever felt comfortable. In my life or in my body. But if I say this, if I tell the truth, I’m pretty sure I’d be letting both my mother and Nanny down and then what would be left?
‘I’ve never felt uncomfortable,’ I say.
The following morning, my mother says, ‘I’m taking you to the hair salon. If you’re going to live with me, you’ve got to look decent. You’ve got to do something with your hair.’
I’m very excited about finally having straight hair because my bushy, brittle hair is the main thing that makes me so ugly. I don’t want to be a pube-head anymore: I want hair that swings and shines and reaches my shoulders.
Gloria’s Hair Salon and Braiding Centre smells disappointingly of disinfectant and rotten eggs. While my mother watches, looking bored and impatient, Gloria smoothes a stinking yellow cream into my head and combs my hair with a fine-tooth comb. I monitor her progress in the huge mirror in front of me. As my hair is combed, it stretches like plasticine until finally it is hanging down flat, smearing the rotten-egg creamy substance all over my neck and cheeks.
Then comes the heat. Fire ants crawling all over my scalp, and burrowing into the flesh beneath. The nape of my neck and the flesh at my temples and the tips of my ears are all ablaze and I scream and I try to leap out of the big spongy chair. The towel around my shoulders slides to the floor. My mother tells me to shut up and to stop embarrassing her and when I won’t stop squirming and wincing she grips my arm hard and tells me to sit still.
‘I think it must have taken by now,’ says Gloria. ‘Even on her hair.’
The warm water stings my raw scalp as the cream is rinsed out and my hair is washed with a shampoo that’s bubblegum-pink but smells of apples. As clear water drips down my face, I look in the mirror. I see my mother’s approving eyes reflected back at me. The true nature of my hair has been rinsed away down the plughole. Every coil and kink that once lived and thrived on my head has vanished. My tough frizz has transformed into a series of limp, straight, long-ish strands hanging wanly from my cooked scalp like over-boiled spaghetti. I am beautiful.
I get back to my mother’s house, straight-haired and in love with myself, reeking of the chemicals Gloria used in her salon, tossing my head like an agitated pony. Uncle Abejide, says, ‘You did your hair, Nitty!’ He hands my baby brother to me.
&n
bsp; The doorbell rings. It’s Mrs Berry. My mother reluctantly lets her in.
‘Hi, Mrs Berry,’ I say, smoothing my new flat paper-thin hair back with my hand.
‘How was your visit to the hairdresser’s?’ she asks, beaming. ‘Don’t you look beautiful?’
‘How did you know I was going there?’
‘A little birdy told me. How are you getting on with your little brother?’
‘Do you like my hair, Nanny?’
‘I’m not sure yet whether it suits you,’ Nanny says.
I’m in the bath. Nanny swishes my pink flannel over my torso, lathers up a bar of Pears soap and rubs it into my wet skin. Her wrinkled fingers dance across my slippery skin like a moth’s wings.
‘I bet you haven’t had a good wash since you went up to your mother’s,’ says Nanny.
I lose myself in the pattern on the pink-and-white tiles above the tub.
‘Did she remember to help you clean behind your ears this time?’ says Nanny, squeezing soapy water over my shoulders.
I shake my head.
‘What was it like then? Up at your mother’s house in London?’ says Nanny.
I select the details I think Nanny will find most rewarding.
‘My brother hardly ever cries,’ I say. ‘He’s beautiful. And my mother, well she’s got this weird stuff like string in her bathroom. Called dental floss. And she told me to use it on my teeth. She said that if I didn’t start using it, my teeth will eventually drop out.’
‘Ooh yes?’ says Nanny.
Nanny’s pretending to be interested but I suspect she has no real interest in hearing about tooth care. Her teeth dropped out when she was pregnant with Aunty Wendy. She chews with her gums now and hasn’t had to use a toothbrush in thirty or more years.
‘And my mother was in bed most of the time with her bedroom door shut and I kept hearing giggling coming out of her room. Do you like my new hair or not, Nanny?’ I ask again.
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