I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey (13 page)

He turned and bolted out the gate as fast as he could. He dashed back up the hill and, just as he was passing the entrance to the park, Dad nudged me and said, ‘Now!' I let loose the dogs, who went sprinting after him. They had been jumping up and down when I had the leads held tightly in my hands, but when I let go and they saw this figure running past they went completely mad. They chased him, slobbering and gnashing at Jawless' heels in a frenzy of barking and frothy spittle. He was almost tripping over his inebriated legs as Dad and I watched the dogs in hot pursuit.

He was panting by the time he'd got a hundred yards further up the hill when the third prong of the White Lady's master plan gloriously unveiled itself. Twinkly-lights bicycle-helmeted man thrust his head menacingly out from behind a parked van like an evil living-dead Christmas tree and loosed his much fiercer dog to join the pack. It was an incredible sight to see, and such an ungodly racket of dogs barking had seized our normally quiet, leafy little hill. Jawless was yelping in terror and it literally made my year when he stole a glance behind him. There was real fear in his big round blood-shot eyes as he jolted his head forward again (his lower lip playing catch up a second later).

He was starting to slow down by the time he reached the top of the hill but he must have thought he was in hell when suddenly the bush he was standing next to rustled and the crazy old woman joined in the fray. She let out such an unholy scream of infernal gibberish that Jawless must have leaped three feet into the air. He ran full tilt down the other side of the hill with the gnashing canine teeth of the three dogs still after him.

Making a row in public! Playing with wild animals! For a kid with conservative African parents this just never happened. I was whooping my head off at the bottom of the hill when Dad cuffed me hard on the back of the head. ‘Shut up, bastard! What would your mother say? Stop shouting!' I looked up at Dad, rubbing my head where he'd boxed me and he said, ‘A tiger does not need to proclaim its tigritude.'

The White Lady had joined us by now and soon bicycle-helmet man and the bush woman were standing next to us too. We were all laughing together when Marvin emerged from his house with a Thermos of tea. He couldn't stop thanking us each in turn as we stood drinking from a handful of billycans he'd brought out with him.

The Bush Woman brought out a little bottle of whisky and poured a shot in for herself, Dad, Marvin, the White Lady and Helmet Man, but when I pushed my cup up towards her I got nothing but a fiery look. The dogs were beginning to circle back down the hill as Dad and I made our way home to Mum who, when she heard the story, said we were totally mad and should be locked up. We were still giggling a bit as Dad tried to describe what the fleeing man looked like by pulling a face that simultaneously mimicked total terror and a lack of jaw. I can tell you that you need both hands to pull that kind of face.

W
HEN
I
WAS ABOUT
fourteen, Mum and Dad moved again into a big house in Balham. They still live there. Green house, red door if you're passing by. But when we moved in we only took the top floor, so it still meant only three bedrooms. To make matters worse, since coming back to England, Mum had started having kids again. We now had a new sister: Andrea. So it was Albert, Chris and I in one room and Stella, Cordelia and the newborn Andrea in the other. It was much worse for the girls because they had to help out with the youngest and a newborn baby is a pretty rubbish roommate. These days, lots of my friends have kids and some of them let the baby stay with them in their bedroom for months or even years on end. Not so in my family. A month in the marital bed and then into a crib next door they go. That doesn't mean that the baby stops crying half the night and I'd often see Stella going to school exhausted after a rough experience of screaming baby and frequent fly-by-night feeding visits from Mum.

When we first moved into that house, we shared it with a nasty old couple who lived downstairs. Mum and Dad used to say to us, ‘Go on. Jump up and down!' and, sure enough, a year or two later this poor harassed couple moved out and we bought the whole place. But to start with it was just as usual. Not enough bedrooms; too many children. The only benefit was that it had a huge garden.

Now, of course, we couldn't play in our own garden as it was jointly owned with the couple downstairs and every square foot that was allocated to us was immediately built up with sheds and huts, each of which was straight away filled with hoarded junk. Mum and Dad wouldn't let us go anywhere near them in case we damaged the precious carburettors and reclaimed kitchen units they'd carefully saved. But next door was different. The house next door to us had been derelict for years and although we never went inside the building we could climb the wall and muck about to our heart's content in their overgrown garden.

My base of operations was down the bottom of the garden around the overgrown brick foundations of what must have once been a big outhouse. On the weekends, I'd spend all afternoon doing army crawls and fending off imaginary attackers down there, with Stella looking on as if I'd lost the plot and occasionally joining in. Even though he was three years older than us, Albert also liked to hang out in the garden. He'd stay near the broken-down old house because there was a huge square concrete pit dug out from the basement down that end. It was a storey below ground level and, with its smooth straight walls going straight up ten feet on all sides, it was totally out of sight. He'd found an old table and some chairs and, due to the lack of privacy indoors, he'd hang out down there doing his homework or reading magazines. He was adamant that we were not allowed in.

I'd spend hours carefully avoiding imaginary snipers to sneak to Albert's pit where I'd throw pebbles and stones down at him. When he snarled back at me and stomped around, I'd shout down at him, ‘Ay! Ay! Anansi the spider is on the loose,' because even at the age of seventeen he already had very hairy legs. Only when it rained would he let me down to join him. I'd climb down the precarious sheer wall of his concrete pit using a tower of flimsy wooden boxes that Albert had stacked up to help him get in and out. Deadly enemies until bad weather struck, Albert and I would shelter from the rain under a huge tarpaulin and I'd tell him my plans of how I'd defend the garden should an intruder try and take over (as if they'd have the balls!).

Then one day an intruder did turn up to ruin my make-believe games. The house was suddenly bought by someone who started to do it up. A lot of builders were in and out, and a lot of gardeners came around too. We thought it would be a rich white family that would move in, but to our surprise it was a single black woman who could be seen coming in and out of the house at odd hours. She was always dressed in elegant clothes and I started peeping at her to try and figure out what she was up to.

To make matters even more interesting, she began to be seen outside in her garden dressed in a leotard doing odd sorts of weird exercises. She seemed to spend hours stretching and then she'd make odd poses and hold them for minutes at a time. As she was dressed in her skintight leotard, Albert was also extremely interested in what she was doing but together we couldn't figure it out.

And then one day we saw a van pull up outside and two men offload a piano into the house. She was out there with them, fretting and browbeating the men as they moved the huge instrument indoors. This was the late eighties and it was fun to see a single black woman out in the street talking down to white men. We thought maybe she was a queen or something because her demeanour was so regal.

After the piano was loaded in, we started to hear her singing. Except she didn't seem to be singing songs that we recognized. She just sang notes going up and down and up and down, again and again. Mum used to complain a lot, saying, ‘What is that racket? Is she killing a cat over there? Who is this bush woman with no husband?'

One Sunday, we were all at home, tearing down the house with our usual screams and caterwauling, when she came round to our house and banged on the front door. We thought she was coming to complain, but instead she came in and introduced herself to us. She was dressed in the kind of trouser suit that you would normally see on a man and she had a bag of sweets with her. All of us kids immediately stopped what we were doing and crowded around her – except for Albert who cowered shyly in the corner.

She said that she was called Fola and had just moved to London from Paris. When she revealed her Nigerian name, Mum immediately warmed to her and began to speak to her in Yoruba. ‘How now, sista!
Ekaro
(good morning).'

Fola was a little taken aback. ‘Oh sorry, dear. I don't speak the language.'

‘Neither can we,' piped up Stella.

‘Speak when you are spoken to! This is Stella, Stephen, Chris, Cordelia, Albert, Andrea and the baby is sleeping. Albert! What are you doing over there? Tuck in your shirt! And stop holding that book in front of you! Come and say hello!' Mum always said that she gave us English-sounding names because she wanted us to speak English and she was confused that this Fola, who had a Nigerian name, couldn't speak Yoruba. I always thought her decision to call me Stephen really had nothing to do with what language she wanted me to speak. I was born at St Stephen's Hospital in Chelsea so you can tell how hard she had to look around before deciding on my name. Not a lot of imagination. My twin sister should count herself lucky she wasn't named ‘Hospital'.

‘Not at all, sorry. I was born here.' Mum couldn't understand this.

Fola revealed that she was in London to work on a West End show called
Cats
. I was strangely intrigued by this, but my mum brushed it aside and was more interested in her personal life. ‘So do you have a husband?' It turned out she was married to a Frenchman who was still in Paris, but who would be arriving soon to live next door as well. Mum was shocked that Fola was married to a white man. ‘Oh well, my dear. At least you are married.'

She then explained that she would sometimes be heard practising scales next door with her piano and if it was too loud or disturbing to us then we should come round and tell her so. Now this really wrong-footed Mum who had spent the better part of seventeen years apologizing for her noisy brood. Fola then dished out sweets to all of us and Mum looked on disapprovingly. She had made firm friends with the kids, but Mum had taken an instant dislike to her.

And so the mystery of Fola was solved and we tried not to get in each other's way. She would practise her singing and her dance moves in the daytime when we were at school and by the time we were screaming and shouting in the evenings she would be out at work. I was impressed by this elegant black woman who would come home late at night and step out of a black taxicab and into her home as if it was nothing. Although I'd lived in London all my life I'd never been in a taxicab.

On Saturdays, when we were at home we'd watch from the upstairs window as she practised and exercised in the garden and we'd push our ears against the wall as she sang her scales. Sometimes she'd sing, ‘La, la, la, la,' and sometimes it was more like she was spitting: ‘Cha, cha, cha, cha.' It sounded a bit like she was kissing her teeth the way that Mum and Dad sometimes did when they were annoyed. But in a tuneful way. We weren't allowed to kiss our teeth at home and Mum would shout at us if we did. ‘Hey! Get to your room! Brush your teeth! Don't kiss them!'

After a few weeks of watching her from our upstairs window, she clocked us and gestured for us to come down and join her. We well knew how to climb over into her garden by now and so me, my sister and Albert easily scaled the wall and sat with her cross-legged on the grass.

‘What are you doing?' asked Stella, who was never embarrassed to ask whatever questions came into her head.

‘I'm practising being a cat,' Fola replied. ‘It's not easy, you know. You have to be able to think like a cat to be able to move like a cat.'

‘How do you do that?' asked Stella.

‘First, you start with the face. You have to twitch your nose like this.' And she twitched her nose. ‘Then you have to be able to preen yourself.' And she started to rub her cheek against her shoulder. We all copied her. ‘Ah! You're very good at it. I should have known you were such good cats since you are able to climb over the wall so easily. Maybe you have done it before?' She looked at us and Albert and I squirmed guiltily. ‘Don't look like that. A cat should be able to go where she pleases. A cat never asks for permission. She just does and everywhere she goes she is at home.' Stella smiled at this one. ‘Watch kittens. It's all about attitude!' And with that she rolled over and sprang up onto all fours but staying very close to the ground. Then she reached far ahead of herself with one arm and then reached far ahead with the other and slinked slowly along the ground extending each of her legs to the fullest before pulling them in tight to catch up with her body.

She really looked like she was lost in her own world as she prowled around all of us. Then suddenly she sprang ahead and clasped her hands together an inch in front of her face as if catching prey. ‘I caught it!' She shouted out triumphantly before making as if to eat whatever she had between her paws and licking her lips.

That night we maddened Mum and simply confused Dad by pretending we were cats at the dinner table, meowing and catching the food in our hands before gobbling it down until Mum said, ‘Ah! What are you doing! If you want to behave like an animal you can go and live outside in the garden. If I sent you back to Nigeria what would they say?'

‘They would say you have monkeys for children and you didn't give them a pair of shoes until they were thirteen years old!' said Dad.

‘Ah! Who bore monkeys?!'

‘Dad. Can we go and see
Cats?
Fola says she can get us tickets to the show whenever we want. We could get a taxi home with her afterwards.'