by Femi Fadugba
The girls next door giggled at that last one. I could see them watching through a slit in their kitchen curtains. One day Mum would describe her homeland as a paradise of palm trees and angels; the next day Bénin was Alcatraz, and if I didn’t behave I’d be on the next boat out there. But there was something about her voice this time, a new gullyness, that made me think she might actually do it. She had more greys in her hair now than anyone else I knew under forty, and we both knew who’d put them there.
‘Mum, it wasn’t even my fault, you know. It’s the stupid teachers at school. They’re always tryna get us in trouble.’
Since my voice broke and hair started showing up willy-nilly on my body, I’d picked up this wrong’un habit, where, when I was meant to be thinking about something serious, my mind would sometimes veer into filth.
So, in this moment where I was meant to be taking in Mum’s scolding, an old Nadia fantasy was playing in my head. The one where she’s holding two giant ice cubes and wearing a skimpy bunny outfit with pointy ears and night-vision goggles and –
‘Esso!’ Mum looked even more livid now. ‘First you have the audacity to steal my post, and now you’re not even paying attention when I talk to you?’ Once she started using big English words like audacity, things were about to escalate.
She took a moment to find the paragraph where she’d left off. The lenses on her glasses were thick enough for a telescope, and her GP had been begging her for years to see a specialist about her fading eyes, but what did he know, right?
Mum brought the paper closer to her right eye, then started listing all the offences that qualified students at Penny Hill for demerits, about half of which I’d done at some point that term, but not got caught for.
‘Esso …’ She sighed. ‘I thought we were past this.’
She was telling no lies. We’d had this exact same argument near the end of last year when I’d got suspended. And I made the same promises to her then. To stay out of trouble. To get better grades. To be better.
But every time I tried to stay out of trouble, every time I promised Mum from the trench of my soul to be good, trouble still found its way back to me – like a fox waiting outside my bedroom door with a rat in its jaws. Still, if Mum knew half the crud my friends got up to at school, she’d be congratulating me. It wasn’t possible to be what she wanted me to be. And in the jungle I walked into every morning, no one’s advice was more useless, more dangerous than Mum’s.
Her interrogation stayed on course. ‘I never got the letter for your first demerit. I’m guessing you stole it, just like you were planning to steal the one that arrived this morning.’
Lie. Straight up lie. There was no way she could have dug to the bottom of the skip downstairs to find Monday’s demerit letter. Plus, post goes missing all the time in London. No face; no case.
‘Mum, I genuinely don’t know where that letter is. I can look around the house to see if it maybe dropped between the –’
‘I wasn’t born bloody yesterday.’ She let the letter drop to her side. ‘You realize, if you get expelled, they’ll send you to Centre with those lowlifes on the second floor? You want your mugshot in the South London Press?’ She took in another deep breath. ‘I just wish you knew the kind of sacrifices I made so you could have it better than that. So that you could have it better than me. And yet you keep throwing your life away.’
Throwing my life away. That was rich. Suddenly I wondered why I was still standing there, with a life-or-death situation coming for me in the background.
‘I can’t be bothered with this, Mum – it’s not like you get it, or even want to get it. I’ll probably die before I ever win an argument with you.’
She covered her mouth, and her eyes multiplied in size. I knew what I’d said was crossing some line, but only after watching her face implode did I realize how far I’d long-jumped over it. It was like she was staring at a ghost that happened to be standing in my spot.
‘You’re turning into him,’ she said, shaking her head in disbelief. ‘I can’t believe I let this happen.’
My heart was hammering. ‘Turning into who?’
‘You know who,’ she said with a tone that had anger and pity in it. ‘And, if you don’t find a way to break the cycle you’re in, I can’t promise things will turn out better for you.’
The dead-dad card?
The walls got blurry and I almost lost my balance. That was a new low, even for her. My dad had died before I was born, and whenever I asked Mum about him she either lied, changed the subject or didn’t answer at all. And now she had the audacity to use him as a warning that she could wave in my face. Did she really think that was what I needed to hear? Did what I needed even matter to her?
‘Fuck off.’ The words came out on their own, surprising me as much as they did her. Whether on TV or on the estate, I’d always laughed when I saw how white kids swore at their parents. And yet here I was, dropping the F-word on my own mother.
‘What did you say to me?’ She didn’t wait for a response; she didn’t need to. Her palm went up and struck me flush on the cheek. K-TCH!
The slap echoed down the walkway, probably touching the floor below as well. Mum was heaving while staring up at my bald chin.
I refused to look down, and, the next time she tried slapping me, I parried it away. ‘Nah, I’m not taking this from you any more,’ I shouted, hawking down on her. ‘You’re always on my back. Always telling me what I’m doing wrong. Always making me feel like I’m dirt. Nothing I’ve done in my whole fucking life has ever been good enough for you.’
‘Esso.’ She cleared her throat, trying to add strength to it. ‘Esso, I won’t let you talk to me like –’
‘I don’t care!’ I snapped back. ‘Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror? What the hell have you done with your life? You say I’m getting bad grades and I’m not serious, but you’re the one who dropped out of uni, you’re the one who can’t hold down a job. You complain about me hanging around thugs, but it’s your fault we live in this hellhole!’ Tears were crashing down in pairs now, and I didn’t care if the girls next door could see. ‘I didn’t know Dad. And I have no clue what he did to make you hate him so much. Since you never bloody told me. But what I do know is that I never want to end up like you.’
She put her hand on her chest, blinking at triple pace. Whatever was stirring in her made her take a step back, and, once she got her balance, her hand went in her chest pocket and came out with a cigarette and a see-through lighter. A spark later and the stick on her lips was on fire – she even blew the first cloud into the corridor behind her. Unheard of. She never smoked in front of me. She never smoked in the house. And she’d never looked as disappointed and hurt as she did in that moment.
So disappointed that she couldn’t even look me in the eye. So hurt that, for once, she didn’t care about having the last word.
She shifted to the side. I didn’t know if her motivation was getting me out of the cold or making room so that she could finish her cig in peace. But the fact I didn’t hear her hair beads rattling after me, or feel her loading up another slap after my comments, meant we weren’t in normal territory any more. And we were both too proud to take back our words.
I stormed past the open door of the front room on my way to my bedroom. Mum must have had the news on when I’d got home, because the TV volume was close to max, just the way she liked it: ‘That’s right: minus five degrees Celsius tomorrow, with a massive hailstorm expected from 8 p.m.’
I was too focused on getting to my room – where I could be sulky and angry without dragging Mum further down with me – to properly reflect on the forecast. Not till I lay down did I remember that we’d had the hottest summer on record, plus flood warnings across London the past week. And now another hailstorm? Assuming Rob was wrong, and this global-warming ting was real, it needed a rebrand. Something like: Global … Surprise, Bitches! would have done a better job.
The first couple hours under my cove
rs I spent in that weird space where I wasn’t really sure if I was awake or asleep. If I was asleep, there was no way my body was counting these hours as rest. If I was awake, I wasn’t quite awake enough to react when my bedroom door creaked open in the middle of the night.
In came a gliding silhouette darker than the unlit hallway behind it.
Mum, I thought, keeping still. She placed something on my bed that was just heavy enough that the depression in the duvet tugged on my ankles. On her way out, she twisted the door handle slowly so it wouldn’t latch too loud.
More awake now, I reached for the spot where she’d dropped the thing and felt around with my fingertips. A Bible? I thought.
Nah – it was too thin. Maybe my biology notebook? I’d promised my teacher all week I’d remember to bring it to class, even though I was ninety-nine per cent sure I’d left it on the bus along with my earphones. More likely it was whichever self-help manual Pastor Rupert was forcing down the congregation’s throats this month. Maybe one with a ‘relevant’ message for ‘today’s youth’. Sure, I was hollowed out, but that didn’t mean I was ready to be filled with that garbage.
Lying back and closing my eyes, I decided that no book could change what I was going to have to face at school the next day. It was just a book. A book could wait till morning.
CHAPTER 4
Rhia · 15 Years Later
It had been my idea to have the tutorials on the Dons grounds – that way they wouldn’t eat into my training time. Clearly, I hadn’t thought it through. The light in the kit room on the top floor of the stadium was an eye-stabbing shade of white, and the little free floor space left for us – after you subtracted the broken hardware and gear that smelled like wet socks – was the size of a confessional. The makeshift desk we’d just wiggled into place was the only thing separating me from my ghetto-looking sensei.
‘Again, I’m sorry, but we’ve gotta do the full hour,’ Dr Esso said, shrugging. ‘And we’ve got a lot of stuff to get through.’ Instead of remorseful, he almost sounded excited. Even though he’d rocked up a half hour late and even though I’d told him I had to leave on time. It was infuriating.
I could already feel the girls’ stares sniping at me when I inevitably arrived late and excuseless to the venue. I could picture Maria – ringleader and captain – pretending not to gloat. I wouldn’t go back on my word and lose even more points. Whether I had to go round my new tutor or through him, I was going.
Something was definitely off about this guy. He’d mostly dusted off that initial nervousness and had grown into his smile and small talk. But the sight of his feet freezing up when we’d first met was still alive in my mind. Maybe he was just a bit odd? Or shy? Or maybe he was hiding something.
‘So, how’d you do in your last physics exam?’ he asked, unwrapping the manbag from his neck and hanging it on the desk corner.
I’d decided to keep my responses brief – partly because that was how I jived in class, but also because I didn’t want to give away my suspicions.
‘B,’ I replied.
‘And in maths?’
‘C minus,’ I said, telling the truth on the second go.
I’d always had a decent grasp on most of the topics that came up in maths. But still, whenever I saw an equation for the first time, I turned into six-year-old Rhia, who had to raise her legs above her mattress so the bed-goblins wouldn’t pull her underneath. It was amazing how doodles on paper could do that to you, so easily triggering that human reflex to fear first and understand later.
‘Makes sense,’ he said, biting the butt on his pen. ‘People who find maths hard don’t usually dig physics either, since it requires a lot of maths. Get me?’
‘Sure, Dr Esso.’
My social worker had referred to him as ‘Dr Adenon’ in her email, but he was clearly one of those teachers who thought going by his first name would make him look ‘hip’.
‘Personally I think the real reason people find both physics and maths difficult –’ he held a breath – ‘is that they both require imagination.’
As if he’d heard me mocking him in my mind, he carried on explaining. ‘Physics asks you to believe that just by looking at a few lines of maths scribbled down on a piece of paper, you can see a fuller version of the world – of other worlds, even. Things you would have sworn couldn’t exist. Physics asks you to believe in miracles.’ He chewed on his bottom lip for a second. ‘This probably all sounds a bit mad, but, like my old man used to say, maybe it’s one of those things you have to believe to see.’
I was pretty sure he’d got the phrase backwards. I waited just long enough to give the impression I was soaking in his nonsense about physics and his dad and other worlds. Then, in my most sincere voice, I asked: ‘Do you wax your eyebrows?’
He tilted his head back. ‘Whhh … what’s that gotta do with anything I just said?’
‘Nuttin. I just felt like giving your arches the credit they deserve. I mean, your attention to detail is impeccable.’
He was pretty annoyed when he responded, ‘No, Rhia. I don’t wax my eyebrows.’
In truth, the only thing I’d noticed about them was that they were bushier than my armpits in winter. This was my way of serving revenge cold and passive-aggressively. He’d doubly earned it by wasting even more of my time with this pre-tutorial philosophizing.
He took his time straightening his chair before resuming. ‘You know what? I think we both got a bit sidetracked there.’ Still rattled, he asked, ‘Why don’t you tell me what you lot are learning in physics at the moment in school?’
‘Ummm,’ I responded, thinking back to Mrs White’s class that morning. ‘Electricity and magnetism.’
‘Safe,’ he said. ‘Let’s start with electricity, then.’
Who the hell said ‘safe’ any more?
For the next twenty minutes, he forced me to read out every line of maths I wrote down, before having me summarize why each equation mattered. As if they mattered! The worst part was that, whenever I gave a vague response, he’d force me to reword it into a sentence that a ‘ten-year-old chimpanzee’ could understand.
‘When you pass electricity through a wire,’ I dictated, ‘a magnetic field forms around the electricity.’
‘Safe,’ he said. ‘And …?’
Given we’d gone through it minutes ago, it was taking me an embarrassingly long time to remember. I really did need this tutoring. The other crap part of switching schools mid-year (besides losing my old football team and all my mates) had been keeping up with a reordered curriculum and kids who brought in apples for their teachers. Full-on tree-fresh apples. Unbelievable.
‘And the reverse is true as well,’ I added, recalling the clip we’d watched in class that week on how power stations worked. ‘When you pass a magnet by a wire that’s coiled up the right way, you generate electricity in the wire.’
‘OK, so electricity generates magnetism and magnetism generates electricity. What’s the speed that one thing creates the other?’
‘How the hell am I supposed to know?’ I shot back.
‘Rhia,’ he said, a little sterner than I’d expected. ‘You’ve got all the numbers you need in the back of your textbook, innit. So please go ahead and calculate the speed of this electromagnetic effect. It’s the same speed in both directions, so I only need one answer.’
‘Fine.’ Into my phone’s calculator went the figures I’d jotted down. Out came the answer: ‘Two hundred and ninety –’fn1
‘Just round it up.’
‘Umm … so, around 300,000 kilometres per second.’
‘Yes, blood,’ he said, weirdly animated. ‘Now go on and punch that number into the search engine on your phone.’
I did. None of the results had either electricity or magnetism in their titles. Instead they all featured the same word: light. It felt out of place, like asking for rice and peas and getting jollof instead.
‘The Man is tellin me this is the speed light travels at.’
He sat back in his chair, grinning. ‘Ain’t that a coincidence?’
‘I don’t get it. Weren’t we learning about magnets a second ago? What’s all this light malarkey?’
It was an innocent question, but the grin that appeared on his face made me think, Oh no, what have I done? A minute-by-minute countdown to the end of class was already sounding in my head; my question was one more hurdle between me and the last train that would get me to the social on time. The maths that actually mattered to me unrolled in my head: if I wanted to get to the venue within ten minutes of the start time, train and bus wouldn’t cut it any more. Getting a Zuber was my only remaining option. But my debit card had precisely 18p on it, meaning I’d have to hope that a) the driver was cool with doing a cash deal off-app, and b) the coins I had in my pocket could carry me at least halfway.
As he peeled the textbook page, his phone started vibrating, a song I didn’t recognize humming from the back speaker.
‘Apologies,’ he said, angling the screen away from me while double tapping it. The ringing stopped and he resumed the lecture.
‘At the most basic level, physics is a simple dance between storytelling and equation-writing. It’s just metaphors plus maths.’
He pulled a silver gadget the shape of a Coke can out of his bag, then placed it on the desk. I’d seen adverts for it on the Tube: a Caster-5. It looked clunkier in the flesh.
‘We’ve patterned all the maths already.’ He pressed a glowing button on the side of the device. ‘So now we’ve just gotta come up with the right metaphor: a good story to help us see it and make sense of it.’
‘Sure,’ I responded at bullet speed, hoping he’d get the hint and talk faster as well. It was ten minutes to eight. Max five minutes before I had to head out.
‘Imagine Millwall is playing SE Dons right here at Dangote Stadium,’ he said. The device shot up a blue cone of light that, after a few seconds, condensed into a 3D projection of the stadium we were sitting in. ‘Now picture the two sets of fans sitting in small alternating blocks round the stands. There’s only a few minutes of the match left and it’s been a dry one, so one bored Dons fan starts a Mexican wave.’ The projection morphed as he described the scene, providing matching visuals with zero lag. ‘If my Caster-5 is doing its job right, you should be seeing a group of dark-skinned yutes springing up and sitting down; then, as the wave hits the next section, a bunch of white Millwall fans doing the same. And it just keeps going round and round the stands in perfect zebra harmony.