Precious (14 page)

Agnes disappears into the back of the house, comes back and drops a brownish black squidgy lump with white specks in it into my hand.

‘I don’t know how to make the traditional soap yet. It’s made with cocoa leaves and paw-paw and all that,’ Agnes says, cramming a slice of plantain into her mouth. ‘Go and wash and get dressed. We need to get to the market early.’

We arrive at the market, and as we stroll through it, I feel suffocated by the smell of raw animal flesh mingled with decaying fish that fills the breeze-less morning air. I’ve been to the market in Chichester before, where local gypsies hawk dodgy kitchen appliances, knock-off perfume and bruised-looking fruit and veg. But nothing has prepared me for the explosion of colour and noise and the stomach-churning stench of this market in Chukaro.

Searching for a spot in the shade where we can sell our soap, Agnes and I pass rickety tables laid out with sinister-looking things to eat. There are dried bats that look like dusty black leather gloves and whole fishes that are so old they feel like cardboard when I poke at them.

Standing on a table, at the centre of a circle of ladies who are screaming, ‘How much? Give me, give me!’ is a goat. The goat’s skin has been torn off and blood drips from its raw pink flesh. The goat’s head lies next to it on the table, crawling with fat, brightly coloured flies. Agnes stops to examine the goat’s head and tells me about the delicious soup our grandmother could make with it. I shiver.

Basket of soap in hand, Agnes weaves her way through the crowd with her nose in the air, looking so snooty that I bet people think she could buy up the entire market if she felt like it. Maybe Agnes really
could
buy the whole market; she’s got a purse stuffed full of pound notes, after all. People in Africa go crazy for pound notes. When I was introduced to my great-aunt Edna, the first – and only – thing she said to me was, ‘Did you bring me British pounds-oh? Did you bring me US dollars, I beg?’

‘Let me buy you a nice cold Fanta,’ says Agnes. ‘Or you can have a Coke if you want.’

‘Can I really, Agnes?’ I say, shocked. I am not allowed Coke at home. Nanny says it turns your blood to poison.

I draw my shoulders back, copying Agnes’s self-possessed walk, and we push past other shoppers and sellers to get to the lady selling cold drinks. A red motorbike whizzes past us, making red dust fly up all around us and narrowly misses Agnes’s left shoulder.

As I turn to watch the motorbike speed off, I notice that I’m being watched by a boy about the same age as me who is trailing dreamily behind a very thin woman with white hair. The boy is wearing a brown shirt that’s hanging off his body revealing a belly button that pokes out a long way, like Pinocchio’s nose. The annoyed-looking woman reaches out her hand to the boy but he’s too busy looking at me to catch up with her.

The man on the motorbike swoops past again, but this time he catches the little boy’s shirt in the motorbike’s handlebars. I watch as the boy is dragged slowly towards the ground where his skull slams against one of the motorbike’s wheels. There is a series of thuds as the basket of vegetables the woman was carrying falls to the ground and then she herself falls to her knees in the orange dust, screaming and screaming. The boy’s head is laid to the side, his cheek resting against the earth. Thick, raspberry-red liquid oozes from the enormous split that runs from the nape of his neck to the crown of his head and onto the earth.

In slow-motion, feeling somehow as though I’m trying to run underwater, I fall onto my trembling knees and cover my temples with the palms of my hands and scream, OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD!

Agnes yanks my arm. ‘What on earth is wrong, Anita? Get up!’

‘Don’t you care about that poor boy? I think he’s dead.’

‘What boy? This isn’t funny, Anita; what are you going on about? I think the heat has got to you,’ says Agnes, trying to drag me to my feet. ‘No: I think you are actually going mad. I’m not joking, Anita. There’s a lot of madness in our family.’

‘Don’t touch me!’ I scream.

‘In all seriousness, you have gone mad,’ says Agnes, shaking her head.

I am lying on my grandmother’s bed with a sheet wrapped tightly around me, wondering how going mad will change my life. I feel trapped and uncomfortable: my tightly threaded hairdo won’t let me rest my head against the pillow and whatever position I lie in hurts.

I hear something that sounds like paper rustling and I spring from the pillow, feel my weird antenna hair standing up, and look around me. My grandmother is standing in the shadows in the corner of the bedroom, turning the pages of a thick white Bible. She sees me and walks slowly over to the bed and sits on the edge of it. She lays the Bible in my lap and smiles.

‘I love God very much,’ my grandmother says, in perfect English.

Holding her yellow wrapper up above her knees, she climbs onto the end of the bed and stands there, peering down at me. Her hairy legs are dotted with dark brown scars that were left behind by vicious mosquitoes.

‘Anita, you didn’t know I could speak English did you?’ she says.

In one smooth movement, my grandmother hops from one end of the bed to the other. She lands close to my head, with one bare foot on the pillow and the other foot balancing behind her in the air.

‘I bet you didn’t know I could jump like that, either, did you? I can do anything I want to,’ she says. ‘And no one can stop me.’

My grandmother’s yellow headscarf slides off her head onto the floor, revealing hair which is long and threaded in the same style as mine. She runs a honey-brown hand through her hair and down the side of her face to her neck.

‘Feel how soft my skin still is,’ my grandmother says, pushing her face towards mine. I reach my hand up to touch her skin and find that there’s nothing there but thin air.

‘Put your tongue out,’ someone whispers. ‘Open your mouth!’

‘No!’ I shout. ‘No!’

I feel rage boil inside me. I will not accept any more filthy nastiness into my mouth. I will stand up for myself. I will push away the body behind this whispering voice that’s telling me to open up. If this is madness, I thank the African gods for it because madness has opened my eyes and loosened my tongue.

‘No!’

I struggle to sit up.

‘Anita, do as you’re told. Please.’ It is Mummy Elizabeth’s voice. She places her hand in mine.

Gingerly, I poke out my tongue and feel drops of liquid slowly falling onto it. I open my eyes and see my mother hovering over me holding a plastic beaker to my lips. Her face is shining with sweat. I touch my mother’s face and this startles her, making her drip some of the water from the beaker onto my burning throat. She dabs the water away with a corner of the bed sheet.

‘You’re very, very sick,’ my mother says.

‘No, I’m not,’ I say, sitting bolt upright. ‘Agnes told me I might be going mad but I think she was just being spiteful and I think I just had a nightmare, that’s all.’

‘You look terrible. Terrible,’ my mother says. ‘I’m sending for the doctor.’

Within minutes of being sent for, the doctor waddles in: monstrously fat, damp with sweat and carrying a bulging black leather bag.

‘Are you my godfather?’ I ask the doctor. It comes out as ‘goodfather’. ‘My mother said my godfather’s a doctor.’

The doctor laughs, making a whirring noise that sounds like wahwahwah. I cringe and stare up at the wobbling layers of flab beneath his chin.

‘Well,’ he says. ‘You could say that I’m a good friend of your mother’s.’

The doctor’s light brown face has a slimy and raw look to it, making me think of a snail without a shell. In his high, girlish voice he asks me question after question until I start feeling woozy. Unable to look at him any more, I close my eyes.

The doctor’s voice is pleasingly, disarmingly un-scary, like a woman’s. My mother holds my hand. I flush with pleasure. My mother, the brilliant elusive hummingbird, has flitted to my side. Feeling her fingers interlaced so tightly with mine makes me feel that whatever the doctor says is wrong with me, I’m ultimately going to be all right. I squeeze my mother’s hand.

‘Have you been bitten a lot?’ the doctor asks.

‘Bitten by what?’ I murmur in a croaky voice. ‘A tiger?’

He laughs again: wahwahwah.

‘Mosquitoes!’ says the doctor. ‘In a way, we have a lot to thank mosquitoes for. Without them we’d never have got our independence: it’s the mosquitoes that finally drove the white man out of Nigeria. We should have an image of a mosquito in our national flag, don’t you think? How are you feeling? Where does it pain you?’

‘My tummy hurts.’

Using his fat fingers and the palms of his sweaty hands, the doctor presses down on my stomach, the same way you’d press the top of an apple pie you were about to shove into the oven. I flinch and begin to cry.

Each time he asks, ‘Does it hurt here? Or here?’ I nod. Everything hurts. My brain and even my heart hurts.

The doctor pushes a thermometer into my mouth and I gag and hold my breath. My fingernails dig into my mother’s hands. The doctor takes my hand and presses his thumb into my wrist for a minute or two and opens his black bag.

‘She must take these,’ he says to my mother, dropping a white envelope of pills into her hand. ‘This child almost certainly has malaria.’

Book Two

‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ said Alice.

‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the cat. ‘We’re all mad here.’

Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

The Bowler Hat Collector

‘STILL GETTING CHILLS, darling?’ says Nanny.

‘Yes,’ I lie.

I’ve been off school for weeks, supposedly near-death as a result of the malaria. Nanny has moved me into her bedroom so that she can keep an eye on me during the night. I sleep in the twin divan that was once Gramps’s. Aggy’s back too. She’s back in the box room and has even less to do with us than ever.

‘It was awful for Anita,’ Nanny tells my form teacher on the phone. ‘Thank God we got her home just in the nick of time.’

How is Nanny responsible for getting me home? It’s not as if she paid for my return plane ticket, and I do not believe my real family nearly let me die.

I have been waiting and waiting for a chance to tell somebody my stories from Nigeria. I have wanted to tell Nanny and Aunty Wendy about Chukaro and what I did there and what the people I met there were like. I try to spark up conversations about the family I met in Chukaro, about the ancestors I learned of who now feel like living people to me.

I want to tell Nanny all about the dusty old book called
My Africa
that my Aunty showed me and about the terrifying photo of my great-grandfather’s body printed inside the book, and about the epitaph beneath the photo: ‘Here lies King Eze Uche, the shrewdest politician I ever knew.’

Nobody asks.

‘Did you know black people could be kings, Nanny?’ I say one day.

‘You know we don’t use the word “black”, Nin,’ she says, and dashes off to get my lunch ready.

I am black now, actually. Since Nigeria, I’ve ceased being coloured. Aunty Nneka explained to me that only racist whites call us coloured now and we must never use that word to describe ourselves.

Back in Fernmere it is hard to continue to see being black as a good thing though. I test my new way of looking at myself on Aunty Wendy and Nanny. On the way to Sainsbury’s in Chichester in the car I say, ‘Guess what?’

‘What, love?’ says Nanny.

‘I’m black and I’m proud!’ I say, copying words I’ve seen a bouffant-haired, dancing black man say on TV. I giggle nervously.

Nanny turns round and look at me as though I’ve just announced that I am Lucifer. She stops chewing her little Scotch egg, her mouth drops open ever so slightly, and I can see the mashed up pink and yellow and white inside.

One winter afternoon, while I’m still off school, I am woken from a snooze by the sound of a human trying to imitate a cuckoo at the front door downstairs: it’s Aunty Wendy. Suddenly I hear Aunty Wendy actually
running
up the stairs.

Aunty Wendy sits on the edge of Gramps’s bed with such bounce that she almost lands on top of me. ‘Don’t you feel like getting up and going out for a bit of a walk? Get some fresh air, love?’ she says. ‘Can’t be doing you no good just lying there like an invalid.’

‘No,’ I say.

Nanny, who is perched at her dressing table, tweezing at a hair on her chin, turns around and smiles at us.

‘Are you going to tell her or shall I, Wendy?’ she says

Looking at Aunty Wendy’s lit-up face I can see what she must have looked like when she was my age.

‘You tell her, Mum.’

‘What?’ I say. ‘I mean,
pardon
?’

‘Wendy’s having a little baby of her own, Nin. Isn’t it wonderful?’ says Nanny.

Aunty Wendy squeezes my hand tight.

At the end of the month, I finally return to Fernmere Primary and kids who’ve never so much as said hello to me before, come up to me on the playground and go, ‘Hi. How’s it going?’