Jean-Luc looms over me. ‘I gave you my seat,’ he reminds me and tries to smile winsomely like he’s been picking up tips from Vic who’s giving me the first-gen version of the same smile. ‘Anyway, if I eat a hot wing, then it’s less hormones and er, les produits chemique for you to eat. I’m doing you a favour, non?’
‘Non! And you can non too, Vic.’ I snatch up a hot wing and wave it at him accusingly. He squeals at the thought of getting hot sauce on his white shirt, which is still doing a good job of staying blindingly white. ‘You said you only eat free-range chicken.’
‘I never said that. I just pointed out, as a friend, that the chicken here wasn’t free range.’ He sniffs plaintively. ‘It does smell rather good for non-free-range chicken.’
‘That will be the hot sauce with all les produits chemique in it,’ I say and the, er, lady with the beehive and her friends grin.
‘And she’s back in the room,’ she says. ‘I’m Shirelle, this is Ronette, Shangri-La and Vandella. We’re named after the four greatest Sixties girl groups.’
‘No Supremes or Chiffons?’ I ask because my mum hasn’t met a Sixties girl group that she didn’t love.
Vandella, who has a huge brown bouffant and has to be wearing two sets of false eyelashes, holds up one glittery-nailed hand. ‘Oh honey, please! Who cared about the other two Supremes when Diana Ross was up front?’
‘Actually, the reason that we don’t have a Chiffon is because then we’d have three names beginning with a sh- sound and one Ronette,’ Shangri-La, the platinum blond, explains. ‘That wouldn’t work.’
‘Well, there was The Shaggs, though I s’pose Shagg isn’t a very glamorous name,’ I say and they all shudder and agree and I decide that I’m not going to be judged for eating hot wings in front of them, so I do, while Jean-Luc and Vic and our new friends talk about Sixties girl singers and how there were lots of amazing French girl groups in the Sixties and that it was a sacrilege that the rest of the world didn’t know about them.
‘Un sacrilège!! ’ Jean-Luc shouts at intervals. He’s been dipping fries in hot sauce and I think the spice has gone to his head.
I catch Shirelle’s eye and we both giggle. ‘So, pretty girl, what flavour are you? I’ve got an Irish dad and a Trinidadian mum. Both Catholic. Lot of talk of hellfire when my grandmas get together.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘I used to dress up as a nun called Sister Eviline. Trinidadian grandma thought it was hilarious. Irish grandmammy, not so much.’
‘I’m Jamaican on my dad’s side. My great-grandparents came over in the Fifties. Then on my mum’s side, they’re very middle-class, middle-England types. My grandma had a fit when Mum got pregnant in her second year at university and when she found out my dad was black she took to her bed for a week.’
‘Oh God, no offence, sweetie, but she sounds like a bitch.’
‘Nah, she’s really all right. She lives in deepest Surrey so I don’t think she’d even spoken to a black person before. But then it turned out that my dad was studying law and apparently I was an adorable baby so she got over it pretty quick. Still not over the Afro though, but then neither is my black grandma.’
‘I’m loving the Afro. You make me want to grow out my hair too but, honey, there ain’t world enough or time,’ Shirelle says, and then she tells me that her non-drag name is Paul and when she was a teenager she had the New Kids On The Block logo cut into her hair.
‘Who are New Kids On The Block?’ I ask and I think she might cry because she gives this weird anguished moan but then we carry on talking about our hair.
We talk about the hair for ages. ‘I’m thinking of experimenting with a flat twist, faux hawk for when I go back to school,’ I tell Shirelle, and I’m showing her a couple of styles on my phone when it beeps.
U found Mark? We’re in Soho. Come 2 The Dive w’ us. U heard anything bout secret Duckie gig? Em xxx
Somehow I’d managed to forget about Mark for a good fifteen minutes. I’d even forgotten about Vic and Jean-Luc, who are explaining their haircare regime to Shangri-La and Ronette, who look repulsed because their haircare regime involves hardly ever washing their hair.
The three of us are a team now. We’ve been through stuff. Or rather, I’m going through stuff and Vic and Jean-Luc have stuck by me. I can’t just dump them to hang out with Emmeline and maybe see Duckie.
Also, what if Mark is still in Shoreditch? I immediately crane my neck to see if I can catch sight of a shock of floppy blond hair in the chaotic press of people at the counter.
‘What’s up?’ Vic asks. ‘Is that a text about the dastardly Mark? Sunny’s boyfriend’s done her wrong,’ he explains to our friends. ‘We’re on a mission to hunt him down like the dog he is.’
‘Oh, honey, no! You sleep with dogs then you’re always going to wake up with fleas,’ Shirelle tells me. My face heats up like it’s been slathered in hot sauce.
‘It’s not about Mark,’ I say quickly because Shirelle’s been great for hair talk but I don’t want to have to have a sex talk with her too. ‘It’s from Emmeline. She’s in Soho. Says that Duckie might be playing a secret gig.’ I try not to sound wistful. ‘Do you like Duckie?’
‘Oh yeah. Me and Jane from Duckie go way back,’ Vic says. He smiles a little smile that I don’t think he should smile when there are other people about ’cause it looks kind of rude. ‘Way, way back. But a gentlemen never kisses and tells.’
‘Any fool can tell you’re no gentlemen,’ Vandella says and Jean-Luc snorts in agreement.
Vic pulls out his phone. ‘I’ll text Jane. Find out what’s going on,’ he says, like it’s no big deal that he’s had, like, intimate dealings with someone in a really amazing band who have been on TV and played proper festivals and that he can just get in touch with her whenever he feels like it.
‘So when you went way back with Jane from Duckie, you didn’t pretend to be Jean-Luc and then leave without exchanging numbers?’ I ask.
‘Not nice, Sunny. Not when I might be able to get you into a secret Duckie gig.’ Vic stands up. ‘Right, we need a new plan. We can’t find your Mark, so all those in favour of going back into town, raise their right hand.’
‘I thought we were going to get up early to make pastries?’ Jean-Luc shrugs and raises his right hand. ‘No need to get up early if we don’t go to bed. D’accord, Sunny?’
I raise my right hand. ‘D’accord.’ I get up too, then glance down at Shirelle. ‘Do you fancy it?’
‘Darling, kind of you to ask but we’re heading into deepest, darkest Hoxton for a spot of karaoke.’
Shirelle and I exchange numbers. I even invite her to my gran’s on Monday because Grandma always has an open house for the Notting Hill Carnival weekend, though I don’t know what she’ll do if Shirelle rocks up in full drag. She’ll probably tell her she doesn’t have the legs for such a short skirt.
Vic blows extravagant kisses at the girls, but it’s Jean-Luc they sigh over when he gives them an elegant bow, then a mock salute. ‘Mesdemoiselles,’ he says, all deep and smouldery and French. ‘Ce fût un plaisir.’
Outside is just as humid and dense as inside. ‘We should get a bus then,’ Vic says decisively. ‘There must be a bus that goes from here to Soho. Doesn’t the 38 stop in Dalston?’
We look up and down the road for a bus or a bus stop. ‘We must walk back up Kingsland Road and get a 38 from the station,’ Jean-Luc says, after looking at his phone.
Even fortified with hot wings and my body weight in 7UP, the thought of walking back up the longest road in London makes me feel exhausted. ‘We could get another bus up the Kingsland Road,’ I point out as Vic gets a text.
‘No time! No time! Duckie are on stage in forty-five minutes. Doors close in thirty!’ He finishes on a shrill note. He must really like Duckie or else Jane from Duckie was the vixenish, superhero, Amazon, girl-goddess that got away and he was still pining for her. ‘Have we enough money for a taxi?’
We do but there’s a massive queue outside the dodgy minica
b office and as we start to argue about whether it’s safe to get in a dodgy minicab, the bus we need sails past.
It’s then I see them. The hoodies. The rude boys. The bruvas from before. They’ve not gone home but have got off their bikes to peer in at the window of the chicken shop and you can call it revenge, you can call it the meanest thing I’ve ever done, but I turn to Jean-Luc and Vic. ‘Let’s nick their bikes and catch up to that bus!’
‘Sunny, we can’t. It’s …’
‘C’mon!’ It’s a head-of-steam momentum that propels me forward to grab a bike, hop on and take off, with the broom wedged under my arm. ‘Come on!’
They come on. It’s stay there to face the wrath of hoodie or join me on my one-girl crimewave.
There’s a shout behind me. ‘Beeeeyyyyyaaaatttcccchhhhhh!’ and I stand up on the pedals so I can go faster and not get a knife in the ribs.
Jean-Luc and Vic catch me up and I’m laughing so hard that it’s all I can do to make my legs work.
I see the bus in front, getting ever closer. It pulls in to the next stop and I think we’re going to make it but as soon as we’re close enough to feel the hot kiss of its exhaust, it pulls away.
‘You’re a bad influence,’ Vic gasps but he’s laughing too. Even Jean-Luc is doubled up over his handlebars and we pause to catch our breath but there’s an angry bellow behind us. The hoodies are gaining ground.
‘Go, go, GO!’
We go. Cycling like bosses right down the centre of the road, getting beeped and sworn at by all the dodgy minicab drivers intent on doing illegal U-turns. I punch the air with the arm that isn’t on broom duties when we overtake the bus and nearly fall off, but we’ve made it.
We jump off the bikes and dump them, dash the last few steps to the stop and bundle onto the bus, squeezing our way in so there’s enough space for the driver to shut the doors as our three nemeses turn up.
My heart salmon leaps as they bang on the door. ‘Don’t let them on,’ Jean-Luc shouts. ‘They’re very bad people.’
‘No room, innit,’ the driver says.
And as the bus pulls away and they stand there gesticulating and mouthing obscenities, I stick my tongue out at them.
A HISTORY OF MY HAIR
Nought to two – the fuzz years
Nothing much to do with my hair but keep it lint-free.
Two to eleven – the pain years
My hair grows in. Back then it’s what my grandmother poetically calls the colour of mouldy hay. My mum would section and gather my hair into little Afro puffs. Not good enough for my Jamaican great-grandma. When they’d take me round for lunch every other Sunday, she’d cluck her teeth and shake her head.
‘What have you done to that poor child?’ she’d ask my mum, and Mum would say that that was how the other black girls at school wore their hair.
After lunch, Gramma would make me stand in the kitchen while she combed out my hair, which hurt. Then her friend Pat from next-door-but-one would come round and they’d braid my hair into tight cornrows. Really tight cornrows. They hurt too. On the way home, Mum would say that Gramma had no right to impose her will on my hair, but it would take a week of tantrums before she’d take out the cornrows because secretly she was scared of Gramma.
Eleven to fourteen – the relax years
Gramma goes back to Jamaica and my grandma, Dad’s mum, decides that she’s going to assume responsibility for my hair. This means that she straightens my hair with the same relaxer she uses on my cousins, even though my hair isn’t as tight and curly. It’s three years of hair breakage and her accusing me of washing my hair too much, until I’ve had enough. Drastic action is needed.
Fourteen and a half – the day of the weave
Deep into my Beyoncé phase, I beg and beg for a weave but Grandma says it won’t take on my hair and Mum says I’m too young. In an act of defiance I’ve yet to rival, I save up my allowance and the sister of Alex’s older brother’s girlfriend says she’ll give me a weave, but my hair is so broken from my gran’s extra-strength relaxer that she has to hot-glue it into place. It’s so heavy that it pulls out some of my hair at the roots and when my mum sees what I’ve done, she cries. She and Grandma bond over cutting the weave out of my hair. I am practically bald. There’s never a good time to be practically bald but when you’re fourteen that is definitely, totally the worst time to be practically bald in your life, ever.
I’ve been to a dark place.
Fourteen and three quarters to seventeen – the fro-yo years
Then my Uncle Dee, Dad’s older brother, marries Yolanda (or Yolly as we all call her) and she takes my big bald self under her wing. Turns out Yolly’d had a similar bad experience with a blond weave. Once my hair starts to grow back, Yolly is the first person to tell me how beautiful my hair is (especially when the ends turn gold in summer), and says that I should think about letting it go natural. She’s also the first person I’ve ever met who doesn’t think of my hair as a problem that needs to be fixed.
So, now I have a big, beautiful Afro, and though I sometimes get snide remarks and side-eye from girls with weaves, and both my grandmas tell me that my hair sends out the wrong message, haters gonna hate.
I love my hair.
1.45 a.m.
SOHO
Rumoured to have taken its name from a former hunting cry, until the mid sixteenth century Soho was full of sheep and cows grazing its pastures.
Henry VIII, during a break from wiving it, had it turned into a royal park, and later lots of posh aristocratic types built houses there. But by the nineteenth century Soho was a seedy neighbourhood full of prostitutes and theatrical types. In the early twentieth century, intellectuals, artists and writers turned up to get drunk in its many pubs and restaurants.
In the Fifties, though, the beatniks arrived and coffee bars opened up where the kids could listen to beat poetry and skiffle. The famous Marquee Club opened in 1958, where the Rolling Stones played in 1962, but mostly Soho was notorious as a place full of sex shops, strip clubs and brothels.
Soho is now home to a vibrant gay scene centred around Old Compton Street, and a thriving Chinese community in Chinatown where the street signs are in Chinese and English. Two words: steamed buns. Three words: amazing steamed buns.
The bus is so crowded that we only stop to let people off, then we’re at Dalston Junction station and we prise ourselves off the bus like peas popping out of a pod, just in time for a 38 bus to magically appear.
There’s enough room for the three of us to squeeze onto a seat upstairs. I get stuck in the middle. ‘A rose between two thorns,’ Vic says and I say, ‘Can you do something about your elbows before you end up puncturing one of my lungs?’
‘Do something with your own elbows,’ Jean-Luc says and then all three of us shove at each other to find a more comfortable position. I lose and with elbows pinned to my sides I text Emmeline.
Duckie gig is GO! This is not a drill! Repeat, Duckie is GO. KitKat club, Romilly St. Get there ASAP. Save us place in queue. Sunny xoxo
I rummage in my bag for powder, mascara and lipgloss and the boys do their hair. Then I get Vic to spray Elnett on my hands so I can do my hair too and the girls sitting in front of us ask if they can have a spritz. They’re from Canada, abroad for the first time, and Jean-Luc talks to them in French, slipping into English for the odd word: ‘Hampstead Heath’, ‘courgette’, ‘dickhead’. There’s a hen party sitting at the front of the bus, all of them wearing clip-on veils and L-plates. They shriek and giggle and every time a guy goes up or down the stairs, they catcall: ‘Oi, fitness! Where you going, fitness?’
Then someone at the back begins to play Pharrell’s ‘Happy’ on their phone and soon everyone on the bus is singing along and the ones who don’t, who huff and roll their eyes, they don’t deserve to be here right now in this perfect moment. Then we switch it up a gear and start singing ‘Uptown Funk’ and an older man in a suit stands up like he’s going to shout at everyone, but instead he con
ducts us so that each side of the bus has a different harmony to sing and Vic, of course – who else? – begins a Mexican wave and being on the top deck of the 38 bus is the best fun I’ve ever had on a Saturday night and we haven’t even got to the Duckie gig yet.
It’s five minutes before the Duckie list closes when we jump off the bus on Shaftesbury Avenue, which is so busy that it could be rush hour. People hurrying home after nights out, other people hurrying to the next party, the next bar, the next adventure.
We dart down Dean Street, weaving through rickshaws and black cabs, then onto Romilly Street, past where Kettner’s used to be with its posh champagne bar where Terry’s mum had her sixty-fifth birthday lunch and …
‘Do you know where this club is?’ I ask and Vic spins round.
‘Not really, no. But this is a tiny street. It has to be here somewhere.’
‘Sunny!’
At the other end of the street, blond hair reflected in the glow of the streetlight and waving frantically, is Emmeline.
All we’ve done since we left the chicken shop is dash but it’s one last frantic dash now that takes me to Emmeline and Charlie and some of the other roller derby girls and then we’re all hugging and jumping up and down and, ‘Oh my God! We’re going to see Duckie!’
We clatter down a flight of metal steps to join the end of a short queue. ‘They’re only letting in fifty people, but we should be all right,’ Emmeline says. ‘Why have you got a broom with you?’
‘Archie gave it to me.’ It’s all I need to say.
‘Oh, Archie …’ Emmeline sighs, then she anxiously eyes the people queuing in front of us. ‘I hope we get in.’
‘I know Jane,’ Vic says with that tiny, secretive smile again. ‘We’ll be fine. Or I’ll be fine. Don’t know about the rest of you.’
‘Although I could just say that I was you and then I’d be fine,’ Jean-Luc points out.
‘God, you’re never going to let that go, are you?’
‘Depends how many other girls you’ve treated abominably.’
London Belongs to Us Page 10