‘I’d be, like, a PA.’
‘That’s more than my Mick makes to support a whole family.’
‘Well that’s his problem, not mine.’
‘I don’t know who you flipping think you are, but I do know that you need to get off your high horse, madam.’
I’m not on any kind of high horse. How could I be when I’m a drop-out? The first day of my five-pound-fifty-an-hour temp-to-perm job arrives and I can’t get out of bed. My legs feel so heavy that I’m unable to slide them out of bed and I remain there all day, staring at the ceiling.
Wendy comes around, enters my room uninvited and sits on the end of my bed for a talk. I can tell she’s consulted her fat blond social worker friend Andrea, because she uses the sorts of words Andrea uses.
‘I think you’re clinically depressed. I think you’re using drugs. Heroin.’
I begin to laugh. Heroin? I’ve never even smoked a cigarette.
‘What the bloody hell are you laughing like that for?’ says Wendy. ‘I’m worried about you, Neet. I love you.’
I don’t care whether Wendy loves me or not. I don’t care whether anyone loves me, or not.
I keep hearing voices and they keep me awake all night. My head is filled to tipping-point with mocking words:
‘I spent my life savings on you.’
‘I know you black girls: you love it.’
‘I wash my hands of you . . .’
‘Your own mother doesn’t even like you.’
I can only fall asleep at night if I knock back four or five or more cans of Special Brew at bedtime. Then eventually I’ll pass out on top of my bed. One night I have an epiphany: I’m hearing voices and I’m drinking like a fish so clearly I have nerves. I wait until Nanny falls asleep in her armchair and slip into her bedroom and open the bottom drawer of her gold-edged chest of drawers. Among the sea of silver foil packets and brown glass bottles I find what I’m looking for. It feels soothing to steal something. To steal anything.
I soon see – or rather, feel – why Nanny likes her nerve pills so much. They’re called Distalgesic and are part opiate and part paracetamol. I take thirty-eight of them, washed down with a lukewarm can of Special Brew. I dress in my African outfit and lay on my bed with my hands crossed over one another, on top of my chest. I don’t want to die. I just no longer want to live the life I’ve been given.
Mick’s got this button on his Atari computer that he can press and it shuts down and resets the machine’s entire system. That’s what I am trying to do to myself. This is not suicide. Suicide is surely wrought with melodrama and desperation, involving wrist-slashing or holding a gun to your head or hurling yourself off a tall building. But I just feel utterly at peace.
I fall into a velvety snooze, my mind feels like it’s been cocooned in delicious softness and I am suddenly insulated from the anxiety that’s been eating at me for months. For years, really. All of that friction, fear and worry evaporates, and I shut my eyes and let myself sink.
After ‘what happened’, as Nanny will come to call my overdose, she discovers what she fears is my dead body and rings Wendy. When Wendy rings 999, she’s warned that I might die before an ambulance has time to weave its way from Chichester to Fernmere to collect me. It’s quicker if Mick drives me into St Richard’s hospital in the Ford Escort. I’m placed on the back seat. Wendy’s in the passenger seat. Mick keeps taking his eyes off the road and turning round to watch me.
‘Don’t you go to sleep,’ he says. ‘Open your sodding eyes! Wendy! Make her open her eyes. I’m stoppin’ the car!’
Mick is more animated than I have ever seen him.
My eyelids drop. A huge sense of spaciousness and peace opens like a rainbow inside me.
‘Make her open her eyes Wendy!’ says Mick.
He pulls over. Wendy slaps me lightly around the face.
‘Neet, if you don’t open your eyes, love. You might not ever wake up again,’ she says.
‘That’s good,’ I say.
‘Why did you do it, love?’ says Wendy.
I’m in a bed at St Richard’s, with a tag taped round my wrist that says Williams, Precious Anita. I’ve just had my stomach pumped.
‘I’m sorry,’ I try to say. My voice is faint, my throat feels battered, probably by the tube that was rammed down it last night.
‘I just wanted to feel something,’ I say.
The concerned smile slides off Wendy’s lips.
‘You what?’ she says.
Mick’s face slackens and crumples making him look like somebody who’s been cheated in a game of cards but can’t work out exactly how the deception occurred.
Nothing I am saying makes sense. Not even to me.
I can hear myself speaking and I can see myself thinking and trying to form the right words in my head but the words don’t filter down into my mouth. What streams out sounds like a string of dream-talk, the sort of stuff I scrawl in my diary at night.
‘I dunno,’ I say, altering my accent. Aware of how incongruously posh my voice sounds reverberating around that bright white hospital room. I sound like Nanny. ‘I dunno what made me do it.
I’m sent back home, and a couple of outpatient sessions with a psychiatric nurse are scheduled. I don’t bother to turn up to see the psychiatric nurse because I decide before even meeting her that she won’t be able to understand or help me.
‘I’m off out for a walk, Nanny.’
The only time my head feels unclogged anymore is when I go for long walks by myself.
I’ve got my headphones on, listening to Public Enemy. I pull the door closed and plunge into the dusk. Nanny and I now live on the very edge of the estate, by a little path that runs past the fire station. Ours is the last of a strip of faded little bungalows created for the estate’s elderly and infirm. Parked next to our bungalow, behind Nanny’s Datsun, is an abandoned yellow car with foliage shooting through its broken windows.
Leaning against the rusty car is Keith, the hardest man on the whole estate. As I near him, I see that he’s picking at the door of the car, and watching me. I try slipping straight past him but he follows me and stands in front of me, blocking my path. I pull off my headphones.
‘What are you doing?’ I say.
Keith smirks. He smells of dog’s piss and wet fur. His mum, who he lives with when he’s not in jail, breeds Jack Russells for a living. I try to step past him again and he jumps forward and blocks my path.
‘What do you bloody want?’
I can’t believe I’ve got the nerve to even look at this man, let alone argue with him. But something outside of myself is operating.
‘I’m waiting for you, aren’t I?’ Keith says.
I study his face, trying to figure out what he’s talking about and whether or not he’s taking the piss. He’d be almost good-looking if it wasn’t for the little mound of brown rot where one of his front teeth should be. He reminds me of Shakin’ Stevens, but with longer, curlier hair.
‘Why would you be waiting for me?’
‘I need some help, don’t I?’ Keith says, eyeing me sceptically. ‘We need someone nice-looking and that. As a sort of decoy. There’s money in it. Thought you might wanna be in on it.’
Nice-looking – that’s a bit of a stretch. Why would he single me out? Me, out of all the openly delinquent girls on our estate? It’s not as if my shoplifting prowess is common knowledge. Does he suspect that as Woodview’s only black girl I have a natural propensity towards crime?
Keith has been inside, for two long stretches, and he’s proud of this. He went down for armed robbery the first time, GBH and possession of firearms the second. For Keith, sticking a rifle in somebody’s face is all in a day’s work. So how come he’s talking to a nonentity like me?
I am flattered that he knows I even exist, that he knows exactly where I live. That he is standing here sizing me up, appraising me, and not in a sexual way but rather seeming to judge whether or not I’ve got the mettle to perpetrate crime at his le
vel.
To be honest, I have little respect for the law now. I don’t believe the law even applies to me anymore – it’s never protected me, so why should I follow it? I have this malice and fury curdling inside me, making me see everything in a crude and simplistic way. I feel like lashing out. I’ll never let anybody trample me like road kill again. It’s my turn to hurt somebody, anybody, everybody. I want others to feel as frightened, as vulnerable, as robbed as I feel. As I have felt.
So, perhaps I really can and should do this, now – while the opportunity presents itself. Surely it’s no coincidence that Keith has found me. I imagine the ring-ring of a till flying open. The fear in the shopkeeper’s face. Keith’s remorseless laughter as he realises we’ve pulled it off. Launching ourselves into a getaway car. A thick bundle of fifty-pound notes. Freedom. Redressing the balance.
‘So, you up for it or not?’ says Keith
I want to say yes. I want to say, ‘Let’s do it. Let’s fucking do it.’
But I hesitate. Finally I squeak, ‘But, why me?’
‘Don’t stress yourself, mate,’ Keith says. ‘I can find someone else. Just thought you might be up for it.’
Behind the abandoned car there’s a tangle of blackberry bushes and then a drop down to a measly trickle of dirty shallow water that’s supposed to be a stream. I look down into the filthy water. I look up at Keith, without quite meeting his gaze.
‘I’d better not do it,’ I say.
‘I’d better not,’ he mimicks, thrusting his hands in his jeans pockets, squaring his shoulders and walking away.
I shrug and put my headphones back on: Public Enemy – ‘Rebel Without A Pause’. It’s not that I’m against being – or continuing to be – a badgirl crim, per se. It’s just that I want to keep all my options open.
It’s just that I want to go to London.
Paid In Full
I EMERGE FROM BRIXTON tube station carrying an Adidas holdall containing an LL Cool J cassette tape, bras, knickers, a spare tracksuit and a toothbrush. I have twelve pounds in my pocket, and no plan at all, other than to hang around with black people and maybe find a way to get into journalism.
I’m met at the station by Effua, my former foster-sister. Effy wrote to me, sending me her address and a recent photo. I have written to her telling her I’m coming to London. Here I am.
There’s a record shop by the tube station exit. A Rastaman in a camouflage jacket leans in the doorway of the shop. His dreadlocks are impenetrably thick, spiralling from his head in a gravity defying brown and black mane. His eyes sweep over me, lingering on the picky ends of my matted hair. When he looks away, into the flowing rush-hour crowd, I stand there transfixed, unable to move past him and his hair.
‘I love his hair,’ I whisper to Effy. ‘How do you get it like that? Is that, like, hair extensions?’
‘Man,’ says Effua, shaking her sleek head. ‘You’ve got a lot to learn.’
Effua’s mum, Aunty Akosua, has a shop in Brixton market. There’s African material hanging up in sheets. Wrinkled brown ladies sitting in fold-up chairs – chattering and slurping down mashed boiled plantain. Through the open door I feel reggae playing so loud it makes the pavement shudder. I try to etch the hustle of the market into my memory because I know Wendy will ask me about it, the way she always does when I see something she doesn’t get to see.
Then I remember. I don’t live in Fernmere anymore. I’ve said my goodbyes. I called Wendy from a phone box at Waterloo and said, ‘I know you won’t understand but I’ve got to go. I’m sorry. I do love you.’
‘It’ll break Nanny’s heart,’ Wendy said. ‘It’ll break Mick’s heart.’
Why didn’t Wendy say it would break her heart too? I’d asked myself, as I bought a tube ticket and slipped underground.
Half an hour in London and I feel alive, I’m shaken awake by the sights and sensations I’ve been longing for all my life without even realising how hard I was longing. Everywhere I turn there are b-boys clutching ghetto blasters, black kids in Adidas shell-toes with fat white laces. Stalls selling hair-grease, plantains, yams, 12-inches of LL Cool J and Lisa Lisa tracks. Even the shuddering London buses enchant me. In Fernmere our buses come once every two hours and only go to Hampshire, Surrey or deeper into Sussex. Here the bright red buses appear every second and shoot off to Notting Hill, Oxford Street, Victoria, Peckham . . .
‘How is your mother?’ Aunty Akosua asks.
‘I’ve no idea,’ I say, my voice a monotone.
‘Is she still living in Belsize Park?’
‘I don’t know.’
My mother has kept the promise she made when I was eleven. Aside from the two-minute conversation at Agnes’s wedding, she has had absolutely nothing to do with me. She’s washed her hands of me and moved on. Agnes has followed her lead.
Aunty Akosua gives Effy and me a tenner to spend at McDonald’s. As we munch Big Macs, Effua says, ‘We’ve got nuff catching up to do. Can you stay the night with us?’
I’m staying much longer than that, I think.
I stay at Aunty Akosua’s council flat, on the twelfth floor of a Catford high rise. Weeks drift by. I’m an uninvited but constant presence. Aunty Akosua doesn’t seem to mind me, but she screams all day and night at Effua, criticising her virtually every time she moves or breathes. Effua says she wishes she’d been allowed to stay in Fernmere with Wendy and Mick for ever. She reminisces daily about her time there, about the endless days out to the zoo and to the seaside, the expensive dolls Mick used to buy us. About being allowed to eat candy floss and ice cream and toffee apple all in the same day. Only white people treat kids that softly, she says.
Aunty Akosua is tough with Effua, but quite gentle with me, offering me advice I didn’t even ask for, stroking my ego with compliments and encouragement. She even says she wishes I was her daughter. My mother, she says, was a ‘classy’ and ‘extremely intelligent’ lady and I’d do well to follow in her footsteps. I’m shocked anyone would have the nerve to suggest such a thing. Wouldn’t following in my mother’s footsteps entail beating people up and constantly letting them down?
‘What do you mean about following in my mother’s footsteps, Aunty?’ I ask warily.
‘Your mother was an accountant, my dear. Why don’t you go into accounting? You’ve got the brilliance. Unlike her,’ she adds, jerking her thumb at Effua, who sits there giving us screwface, pretending not to feel her mother’s disappointment.
I hadn’t realised my mother really had a proper job. Nanny had told me, often, that my mother’s so-called job in some grand offices up in London was probably just a figment of her imagination.
There’s Effy, Effy’s all-girl crew and me, me the strangely stiff, shaggy-haired girl from the country. I’m relieved that Effua’s friends don’t actually laugh at me. But then they daren’t laugh, because Effua approves of me and Effua, after all, is at the juicy epicentre of all that’s cool around here. You can’t fuck with her.
Jobless and broke and underage, we roam the streets of Catford and Peckham and Brixton, batting ideas back and forth, dreaming up new ways to nick things from shops without getting busted. Effua says I need to do something about the way I talk. So I try to. I try to spice my accent up and at the same time tone it down. Make it lazier and less crisp. Absorb Brixton speech patterns and remember to say nah instead of no and I’m vex instead of I’m fed up.
I continue to sound just like Nanny.
Eventually I relax and just work with what I’ve got. Here, at large in Lambeth, I have a natural edge when it comes to perpetrating petty scams, issuing rubbery cheques and making off without payment. People (checkout girls, store detectives, bank clerks) have higher expectations of someone who sounds like me. They’re likelier to give me the benefit of the doubt. I delight in letting each and every one of them down.
In Morleys and in Boots and the Body Shop, it is me who goes up to the till and asks endless inane questions to distract the checkout girl while the rest of the cr
ew stuff their pockets with the swag. We gloat over our latest spoils in Taneesha’s bedroom in Catford. We sit in a circle, passing around two bottles of Thunderbird. Everyone’s taking it in turns to rap a freestyle verse. Everyone apart from me.
I watch Effua. Her cheekbones looking like they’re constructed out of steel. Skin darker than Bournville chocolate. Hair greased down just right with Ultra Sheen. She spits out a rhyme about a local boy and how there’s no way she’s ever gonna get with him because he’s so dry.
I bop my head and quake inside, dreading my turn. Will I have to rap about the sheep and goats and cows in Fernmere? I swig Thunderbird and pass the bottle to Debra. I’m preparing to pretend I that I’m suddenly too mashed up to even speak, so that I can get out of this. But when it’s my turn to rhyme, everyone acts like I’m not really there.
This is how I dreamed life in London would be. It does not occur to me that there may be more involved in being black than tearing around south London, stealing. I am in love. Not in love with a bloke but with this lifestyle I’ve found where we speak our own language made up of Americanisms and phrases plucked from rap verses. Where we listen to hip-hop from a.m. to p.m., and we own twenty pairs of Nikes and Adidas each. And we make believe we have links to New York and talk about hip-hop’s birthplace, the South Bronx, like we’ve been there.
In years to come I will meet many of the men, and women, whose voices and stories, whose poetry, so inspired me and gave me such hope and meaning, such a rich sense of connectedness. Rakim and LL Cool J and MC Lyte and Run DMC and Big Daddy Kane. I will travel to New York to interview them for magazines and I will sit opposite or beside them, pretending to be cool and composed while inside I am silently screaming, I made it! I did it!
I still don’t look as fly as my peers and that’s mainly because of my hair, which I don’t have the money to get sorted out just yet. My nickname’s ‘Pickyhead’ – not really a good start. The rest of the girls in our crew wear asymmetrical straightened hairstyles like Salt-N-Pepa’s. I try to keep up. I’ve got the huge rectangular fake gold door-knockers dangling from my ears. And I wear the home-made trousers shaped like MC Hammer’s parachute pants that the b-girls all wear. The ones made from African material scammed from Brixton market that someone’s mum runs up on her sewing machine. Elastic bands looped around the ankles and then the trousers billow out in the wind.
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