Precious

by Precious Williams

  Every boy I bump into at one of Effy’s mates’ houses – or make shy eye contact with in the street – looks almost as dope as Big Daddy Kane or Slick Rick. The boys shine, literally, in white shell suits and glimmering shoulder-padded suits the colour of knife blades. They wear huge thick ropes of gold or fake gold around their necks and the proper bad boys have diamond-encrusted four-finger gold rings that stretch across their hands like precious knuckledusters. The whole vibe is sharp and jagged, right down to their hair which is shorn to grade-one at the back, shaped to a tall tilt in the centre and scored with tramlines at the sides.

  The most important emblem of all is a green, yellow, red and black leather pendant strung on a long black chord, bearing an outline of Africa. I buy mine (after an abortive attempt to nick it) from Four Star General on Oxford Street.

  The day I slip my Africa pendant around my neck, I feel more disconnected from Africa than I ever have before in my life. As a child my mother constantly droned on about me being Nigerian. Here, in the late eighties, in London, we UK-born Africans wear Africa pendants but don’t truly embrace the message. Speak with an African accent, show any African idiosyncracy at all, and hear your peers hiss ‘shame!’ But I feel black, I think. Whatever that is. According to the group the Jungle Brothers, black is black is black is black.

  One day something new stirs within me. Or perhaps it is not something new exactly, but rather an itch, a desire that has lain dormant for a time. I am missing the days in school, when my English teachers lavished me with praise. I’m craving that delicious tingle of smugness I’d feel when a teacher handed me back my homework with an A scrawled at the top of the page in red pen. I want to be seen, once again, as the foster-kid who just might have a surprisingly bright future.

  To hear Effua tell it, ‘A bitch is selling out.’

  My selling out begins with a job interview. I purchase a copy of the Evening Standard. I’ve been considering ringing up the editor of the Standard and asking him or her for a job as a trainee reporter. I picture myself writing features about hip-hop culture. Before I make the call, a job ad in the back pages of the paper catches my eye. A situation is vacant for an accounts clerk at a travel firm in EC1. Didn’t Aunty Akosua say something about my mother being an accountant?

  The company’s called Gulliver’s Travel Agency. At the interview I say, ‘I’ve always been extremely good with figures. I come from a long line of accountants.’

  ‘Is that so?’ says the man interviewing me – an accountant named Simon.

  I tell Simon I’ve just turned eighteen, which is true and that I’ve just passed A Level maths, which obviously isn’t. Surprisingly I pass an on-the-spot maths test.

  ‘Ever since I was a child, I’ve always been obsessed with numbers,’ I say. ‘You couldn’t get me to write anything or read a book. All I did was play with calculators, do sums in my head. People used to nickname me Figures . . .’

  The lies pour forth. I listen to myself as if from afar. I sit there thinking sell-out, sell-out, sell-out.

  Simon uses phrases the career advisor at my school used to use, such as ‘You’ll receive on-the-job training’ and ‘There’s room for growth and promotion.’

  He can start me on a salary of £8,000 a year. I’ll start on Monday. I’ll be able to put myself forward for exams, which, if I pass them, will transform me into something called an Accounting Technician. From there, apparently, the sky’s the limit as far as accounting goes.

  Life as a Junior Accounts Clerk in the City is so soulless and unchanging that it’s almost funny. And yet I turn up on time, day after day after day, breathlessly reliable like a ticking clock. I’m modelling myself after a nugget of advice Mick gave me when I first became a drop-out. ‘Holding down a job builds your character, dunnit?’

  But despite my extreme reliability, I feel constantly on edge as a Junior Accounts Clerk. Like something bad is about to happen. The numbers on my VDU screen make my head contract and ache. The figures on the sheets of paper I keep being fed look like code to me.

  Perhaps it’s my own fault I feel on edge. By the end of my second month at my new job, I’ve told my new colleagues so many lies about my life that it’s no longer possible to indulge in normal conversation even, in case I give myself away. I’ve claimed to have a mum and dad, who are married (to each other) and with whom I live. I said it all because I wanted to fit in. As the only black girl in the office besides the cleaner, I felt a need to seem ultra respectable and ultra likeable. And normal.

  Now that I’ve got a job, I’m able to get a room of my own: in a flat-share in Brixton, on Coldharbour Lane. I rent the room from a posh white woman called Jane. She’s older than me and from Chichester. I’ve no idea what she thinks she’s playing at living on the frontline in Brixton.

  At the interview for the flat-share, Jane says – her voice rich with surprise and delight – that I am ‘so well spoken’. She wants to know what my parents do and where I went to school. I claim to have attended a well-known Catholic boarding school. And my dad works in oil, I say. My mother’s a maths professor at Oxford.

  Jane tells me the room’s mine if I want it.

  Effy’s not impressed.

  ‘You’re fucking watchin’ Channel Zero,’ she screams. ‘You’ve lost it.’

  And our friendship fizzles out in much the same way it originally began, back when we were toddlers duelling for Nanny’s love. A vicious argument, then a punch-up and mutual hair-pulling and scratching outside Peckham Rye station, leaving me suddenly friendless and with a small bald patch on one side of my head.

  Jess, a friend from Fernmere Grammar School, moves to London to work as a PA in the West End. The two of us take up raving. Incredibly, nobody has the heart to openly laugh at our lame dance moves and we spend several nights a week in the West End, trying our hardest to dance, right through until dawn. And that’s when I meet the boy.

  The boy is swaggering to and fro outside the Limelight nightclub in Piccadilly. Handing out flyers for an upcoming rave in Deptford. He has fresh tramlines etched into the sides and back of his head and he’s wearing a white-and-yellow shell suit that reminds me of a parachute. He calls himself MC Hassan. He looks me up and down and inclines his head in such a way that it’s clear he thinks I’m attractive. Jess gives me that nudge in the ribs that means, ‘You’ve pulled.’

  ‘You. You look like Bola,’ says MC Hassan.

  ‘What’s Bola?’

  ‘She’s just a friend, innit. She’s pretty. Like you. You Nigerian?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘You guess so? You need to claim your culture! Igbo, yeah?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  MC Hassan winks at me.

  ‘You ever been back home? Nigeria?’

  ‘When I was a kid.’

  ‘How old are you now?’

  ‘Old enough.’

  He laughs a little and fiddles with the massive ring on his finger.

  ‘I knew you were Nigerian. Word.’

  For reasons I cannot explain I agree to accompany MC Hassan back to his council flat in New Cross Gate. He says we’ve got a lot to talk about. He says he can see that I need schooling about my culture. As far as I’m concerned my culture is hip-hop and I don’t need schooling in it. I know everything about it.

  I sit on his tatty sofa with my arms wrapped tightly around my body. There’s no heating, but I’m too shy to admit I’m cold.

  ‘You all right?’ he says.

  ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

  ‘I’ve seen you around.’

  I arch an eyebrow.

  ‘You hang out with that white girl, innit?’ Hassan says. ‘Yeah, what’s up with that girl? She’s been all over the estate.’

  He’s talking about Jess. Ever since she moved to London, Jess has become obsessed with black blokes. She seeks them out when we go raving – or rather they find her. Jess’s blond whiteness shimmers like a beacon on dance floors packed tight with black bodies. Black home
boys make a beeline for her, sauntering and doing the running man across sweaty dance floors to get next to her.

  As if Jess’s blonde beauty wasn’t enough, she also has me at her side: I’m, like, her visual affirmation, a walking, talking reminder to anyone watching that Jess is down with black peeps.

  ‘I couldn’t even get it up for a white girl, you get me?’ says Hassan.

  I don’t get him actually. I hear what he says but I don’t see how it can be true. So far I’ve not met a black guy who didn’t, on some level, seem to rate white girls higher than black ones. It’s not clear to us black girls why this is but it is just how it is. And the black boys who can’t pull white chicks often go for mixed-race girls instead, the ones with tea-toned skin and long bubbly hair.

  I’ve heard it’s different in America. I’ve heard that LL and Kane only go out with black girls. But here in England, it seems girls who look like me, we’re the boobie prize, the bottom of the barrel. Nobody’s first choice, ever. But Hassan swears he only fancies Nubian sisters, which means that by default he must fancy me more than he fancies Jess. I try to take this all in. It doesn’t seem to add up. I feel like I just won the pools, like a prize I don’t deserve and didn’t even compete for just dropped into my lap.

  Hassan hands me a bundle of flyers depicting Alsatians’ heads superimposed onto human bodies wearing raincoats. The dog-headed bodies in the picture are jostling along a train platform carrying briefcases.

  ‘It’s white people, innit?’ Hassan says. ‘Blue-eyed devils.’

  ‘The things in the picture are dogs. Alsatians.’

  ‘It’s what white people are, innit.’

  ‘You’re saying that white people are actually dogs? You’re a fucking nutter, man!’

  Hassan says he belongs to an organisation I’ve never heard of, called The Nation of Islam.

  ‘White people,’ he says, ‘are devils.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Blue-eyed devils.’

  I giggle.

  ‘This ain’t no joke.’

  ‘Why would you say such evil things?’ I’m ready to get up and leave.

  ‘Don’t ever. Don’t ever call a black man evil. Whites are evil. Blue-eyed devils. They’re snakes. You can’t trust any of them. They’ll trick you. They’ll always betray you.’

  His deep, hypnotic voice begins to coax and persuade me. I start to think Hassan perhaps, maybe, possibly has a point. The way I see things, white people have let me down, assaulted me, ruined my life. I don’t think of my mother as having abandoned me; I think of Nanny as having stolen me from my mother. Images of white people flash before me: the white soldier in the gents’ toilets. Nanny telling me to run away when my stepfather came to collect me for a visit.

  This, I decide, is surely what I came to London for; to be a part of something exclusively black.

  ‘I want to join it,’ I say.

  ‘Join what?’

  ‘The People of Islam.’

  ‘You mean The Nation, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You’ve got a lot to learn before I can take you to the mosque.’

  Hassan never does take me to the Nation of Islam mosque. Presumably I never learn enough. Eventually he drops out of the Nation himself. A decade later, fresh from a postgraduate journalism course, I approach the Nation of Islam and tell them I’d like to write an article about them. I am not the only journalist interested. There is a high-profile inquiry underway into Stephen Lawrence’s murder. Men from the Nation of Islam show up at the inquiry, immaculately turned out in black suits and red bow ties. National newspapers are running headlines asking, ‘Nation of Islam – who are they?’

  My interview request will be denied: a Nation spokesman will ask me, ‘Why should we care what the white media thinks of us?’

  I decide then to join the Nation of Islam, under an assumed name. I spend about a week in the Nation. I ring up The Times’ features desk and say, ‘You don’t know me but I’ve got a story I think you might want to have a look at.’ The media’s been slating the Nation as wholly sinister and racist but I explain the strong elements of self-discipline and self-respect they teach. The Times will bite and even though I have no cuttings to prove I’ve got what it takes, they publish my 3,000-word piece about life and training for women in the Nation in their Saturday magazine a couple of weeks later.

  ‘So what ends you from? Where’d you grow up?’ asks Hassan.

  And what do I do? I only go and mess everything up by letting it slip that I was brought up by a white woman. In West Sussex. I presume Hassan will jump to his feet and usher me out of his flat. Instead he becomes (even more) animated at this news.

  ‘Is it?’ he says. ‘My cousin Kemi was fostered by whites innit? In Horsham. She was lost, so lost. Lost! They’d brainwashed her into thinking whites were better than blacks. You remind me of her, innit? She came to London, hooked up with me and her other cousins and now she’s rejuvenated. Re-educated. Rejuvenated. Re-educated.’

  I find myself wanting to be rejuvenated and re-educated too.

  ‘I was fostered myself by a white woman in Essex, you get me?’ he reveals suddenly.

  ‘Don’t take the piss.’

  ‘Word is born, I was fostered. Only for a year though innit.’

  ‘What was your foster-family like then?’

  ‘Not that bad as far as things go. But I was miserable. Miserable. I was so sad and felt so isolated that I couldn’t stop eating sweets. I got so fat. I put on so much weight. By the time I was ten I had a thirty-six-inch waist!’

  There’s a spark, a connection made. I feel as though I’m a jigsaw puzzle, made of fragments, and that only now are the pieces of me being slid into place. I’m finally, in this moment, at ease. And I mistake shared experience for instant love. This is the man I am going to marry, I think to myself.

  I return to Hassan’s flat three days later wanting more, but not at all sure what I’m wanting more of. He asks me what I think I know about hip-hop. As well as owning over a hundred hip-hop LPs, he also does a bit of rapping at raves, and presents a community radio show. Hassan’s favourite group is Public Enemy. I say I like NWA better but that ‘Don’t Believe the Hype’ is one of the best tracks I’ve heard in my life.

  He begins firing questions at me, about rappers and the true meanings of their names.

  ‘D’you know what KRS-One stand for?’ he asks.

  ‘Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone.’ I fire back.

  ‘What does the KANE part of Big Daddy Kane stand for?’

  ‘King Asiatic Nobody’s Equal.’

  Hassan looks impressed.

  ‘All right, all right. Who invented hip-hop?’

  ‘Kurtis Blow.’

  ‘Wrong!’ he says, leaping up from the sofa. ‘It’s DJ Kool Herc!’

  At seventeen, Hassan’s six months younger than me. Like me, he started his A Levels but quickly dropped out. The white education system couldn’t teach him nothing. His parents moved back to Nigeria without him when he was only sixteen and that’s when he got his own council flat. We’ve been chatting for about an hour when I tell him that I think I am in love with him.

  ‘Nah,’ he says. ‘How can you be? You hardly know me.’

  Soon Hasssan’s entire tower block, and other blocks surrounding it, will be condemned by Southwark Council and bulldozed into dust. All I notice about his flat is that it is dark and that there is no bed, only a mattress on the floor. I’m on that mattress, laying flat on my back. Unmoving.

  ‘You wanna do, you know – thingie? Yeah?’

  ‘I dunno. I guess so.’

  ‘OK then,’ says Hassan.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Big girl, innit,’ he says, trying to pull my jeans down. I lay there, unwilling to part with any of my clothes. I’m not necessarily against having sex with him but I hang on tightly to my clothes, too ashamed of my body to want it to be seen naked. Like he said, I am a big girl. I’m tall, just over five foo
t nine now and I weigh nearly eleven stone because I eat at least five packets of crisps a day, not to mention the heaping plates of fried plantains I consume for breakfast and dinner.

  I close my eyes. Hassan strokes my face and my hair and fumbles underneath my sweatshirt in search of my breasts. I lose the jeans but keep the sweatshirt on. It’s a blue hooded sweatshirt with the Coca-Cola logo emblazoned across the chest. Nanny bought it for me for my seventeenth birthday and she spent half a week’s pension on it.

  I lie still. Clench my jaw. Why is this taking him so long? A year and a half ago the soldier can’t have taken more than three minutes. I was showing a reaction then though; that must have been it. I was screaming and trying to get away and not just lying still like a corpse.

  This feels like a trip to the dentist. Being eased back till you’re horizontal. Laying there waiting for the dreaded thing to begin. Teeth gritted. And it’s uncomfortable but not quite as horrid as you’d feared. In the end, it’s over much quicker than you’d imagined it would be.

  Later, Hassan provides a commentary on my non-performance. ‘You needed to, you know, open your legs more. Or move around more.’

  ‘Yeah. Sorry.’

  All I keep thinking is: Hassan didn’t force me. I made the decision to do it with him. If I’d said no, he’d have respected that and let me go.

  So does this mean that from now on I have a say in what happens to my body?

  Contraception isn’t discussed. I know that the Pill exists but all I’ve been told about it is that you only need to go on it if you’re a married woman or you’re an unmarried scrubber. I know about Durex, aka ‘rubber johnnies’. Learned about those from an embarrassed Mr Farrell, my Biology teacher at school. The day he tackled the facts of life and showed us slides of wombs and childbirth, the boys sniggered so loudly that nobody could hear much of what was being said.