Precious (17 page)

An apathetic-looking monkey is doing a wee on the ground near the edge of its cage and the animal stink mingles with the smell of clean rainfall and fills the air. We walk away quickly, to the next cage, before the monkey can show us its arse.

‘Aren’t you gonna say hello to the elephants, Nin?’ says Uncle Mick.

Feeling like a moron, I wave at one of the elephants. I look up into the elephant’s small, knowing eyes set deep into its huge wrinkly old head. The elephant looks down at me as though I am not even as important as a fly. I imagine its huge crusty foot crushing me into the damp ground and no one even noticing.

Looking at Aunty Wendy’s huge belly, I wonder if my life will change once her little baby’s born. How can I be one hundred per cent sure I won’t get forgotten? Sent back to where I came from? Or worse, because Mummy Elizabeth doesn’t seem to really want me, I’ll be sent to the children’s home in Cocking, where – I’ve heard – they feed you rank food that makes you puke and then they make you eat your own sick.

The caged animals seem sulky and they are nowhere near as exciting to me as Uncle Mick is as he drifts around the zoo, poking his fingers through dangerous animals’ cages and throwing his frizzy head back, laughing.

‘Mick, that thing could take your hand clean off,’ says Aunty Wendy.

Uncle Mick says, ‘And why do you think I’d give a toss if it did?’

I clutch Uncle Mick’s hand. I don’t want this day, this moment, to ever end.

It’s Aunty Wendy who has the idea of phoning up my mother – since we’re already in London – and inviting ourselves round for a cup of tea.

‘Why would she want to associate with the likes of us?’ Uncle Mick says, laughing.

Aunty Wendy ignores him. She squeezes her big belly into a phone box that smells of wee, and picks up the receiver.

‘What’s her new phone number, Neet?’ Aunty Wendy says, leaning out the door of the phone box.

‘I don’t know.’

‘What’s her new address then, love?’

‘It’s number nineteen.’

‘Number nineteen what, love? What’s the name of the road?’

I’m ashamed to not know my mother’s address.

‘I forgot,’ I whisper.

‘Lot of bloody good you are,’ says Uncle Mick. ‘Bright as everyone says you are and everything.’

The names of the different avenues, streets, roads and ways my mother’s lived on over the years swirl around inside my head and I can’t put my finger on a single one of them.

‘Let’s just forget it then,’ says Uncle Mick.

On the train back to Haslemere, I try to stop staring at Aunty Wendy’s huge belly – Nan’s told me it’s rude to stare at anyone, ever. I focus instead on the scene through the train window; the trees’ spiky silhouettes.

A question bubbles up.

‘Why didn’t my mum want to keep me for herself when I was born?’

‘I’ve no idea, love,’ says Aunty Wendy.

‘What about my dad?’ I say and my own voice surprises me; it comes out almost as a scream.

‘Your dad’s sittin’ right here,’ says Uncle Mick, pointing at his own chest.

But his words only remind me that I’ve got a real dad out there, probably still alive, who doesn’t care enough to come and find me. And Uncle Mick’s got a little girl or little boy of his own on the way.

We’ve managed to miss the last train from Haslemere back to Fernmere and because Nanny’s the only one in the family who can drive, we must beg her to come and fetch us. I hear Nanny’s annoyed voice filling the phone box.

‘I’ll be there in three quarters of an hour,’ she snaps.

‘How on earth can it take you that long? It’s only eight miles,’ says Aunty Wendy.

‘I’m not ready, am I? It’s not like I sit around just waiting for your phone calls, Wendy. I have to go and put my face on.’

Nanny turns up an hour later, with her lips painted as red as a clown’s. She revs the car and speeds ahead even before Uncle Mick’s closed the car door.

‘You all right, Mum?’ says Aunty Wendy. ‘You’re driving like the blazes.’

‘No, I am not all right,’ says Nanny. ‘I have been accused of murdering Gramps.’

‘You what, Mum?’ Aunty Wendy’s neck grows pink and inflamed.

Uncle Mick, sitting next to me in the back seat, elbows me in the side, chuckles to himself and twirls his finger against the side of his forehead, showing me he thinks Nanny is mental.

Uncle Mick has said Nanny’s got a disease called Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder which is why she washes her hands about a hundred times a day. ‘She wants fucking locking up, the old girl,’ he whispers in my ear now.

He wouldn’t dare say that to Nanny’s face. Nanny might be slightly mental but I reckon Uncle Mick’s slightly scared of her all the same. He never even swears in front of her.

‘If you want to know what I’m talking about,’ says Nanny, almost crossing a red light. ‘Ask Agnes.’

But before any of us has a chance to ask Agnes, Agnes packs her suitcase and runs away from home.

How To Levitate

IT’S A GLOOMY, STARLESS night and there are hardly any street lights where we are, which is just across the border from Fernmere, in a hamlet called Hop’s Corner.

‘There she is, Nanny!’ I say. ‘Over there!’

A few yards ahead of us is Agnes, carrying a small suitcase, wearing my rabbit fur jacket and marching fiercely along the dirt road in the dark like a little female soldier.

‘Let’s get her, the little bitchie!’ says Nanny, slowing the car down and stalking Agnes, the way Tom stalks Jerry. ‘Unlock the car door, Nin. We’ll make her get in the back with you.’

‘Get her, Nanny! Get her!’

It doesn’t occur to me that I’m betraying Agnes. I’m so charged up on adrenalin and outrage that she’s daring to leave that I do not think at all.

Agnes turns her head and her scared eyes are illuminated by Nanny’s headlights. We swerve after her as she turns off the dirt road and along a winding driveway. Nanny lowers her car window and chants, ‘Get in, Aggy! Get in!’

At the end of the driveway, there’s a large house in front of which Nanny screeches to a halt. Approaching our car are a girl from my year at school called Sasha, Sasha’s parents and Agnes’s really-quite-weird friend Christine, who is Sasha’s big sister. Four pairs of eyes peer at us through Nanny’s car window, making me feel like a guppy in a tank.

‘What do you want?’ asks Christine in her slow-motion giggly voice. Agnes stands next to Christine who squeezes Agnes’s arm and giggles. We all stare at Christine. She covers her mouth with her hand and looks down at the gravel.

‘Can I help you, Mrs Taylor?’ says Sasha’s dad, reaching out to take Agnes’s suitcase.

‘I’ve come to get Agnes and stop this nonsense,’ says Nanny.

‘We’re not making her get in the car with you,’ says Sasha’s dad.

‘Then I’ll call the damned police,’ says Nanny.

‘Feel free to,’ he says. ‘You’re not Agnes’s legal guardian, and she’s over eighteen. She’s welcome to stay here with us for as long as she likes.’

We watch Agnes disappear through the door of her new home, followed by Christine, Sasha’s parents and Sasha – who waves at me and grins. When the door slams shut, there’s nothing for us to do but drive away.

More than a quarter of a century later, I sit in this driveway once again, with Agnes and Agnes’s new husband, Wachuku. Agnes is giving Wachuku a guided tour of her past.

‘I was so sad when you went into that house and shut the door,’ I tell Agnes. ‘I couldn’t bear it that you were leaving me.’

‘Precious, really?’ Agnes says, genuinely shocked. ‘I never knew. I didn’t think you felt anything, the way you just sat there egging Nanny on like Nanny’s little henchman.’

‘What else could I do? If I didn’t do what Nanny wanted then I could have lost her as well as losing you.’

The house we’re sitting in front of is smaller than we both remember it. Its door opens and a middle-aged white man emerges and peers through the window of Wachuku’s car.

‘Can I help you with anything?’ he says, eyes roaming from Wachuku’s gold tooth to my dreadlocks. He takes two or three steps backwards. In this part of West Sussex, even in 2007, our presence – three black people in a jeep blazing Notorious B.I.G. – is like a vaguely menacing question mark.

‘We’re looking for a Christine Baker,’ Agnes says.

‘The Baker family left here in the 1980s,’ the man replies, incredulously.

Once it’s clear Agnes is not getting in the car, that we’ve lost her, Nanny drives me to our favourite haunt, Lily Pond, to see if we can ‘calm our nerves’ by taking a look at the heron that lives among the rushes. But when we get to Lily Pond, all we can see in the moonlight are the shadows cast over the water by the reeds growing at the edges of the pond. We sit in darkness.

‘You can’t really blame Agnes for being a bit confused,’ says Nanny. ‘Things haven’t been exactly easy for Agnes, thanks to your mother. Why do you think poor Else always made sure she was scarce whenever your mother turned up? The pair of them
never
saw eye to eye. It just wan’t fair on her, the way your mother dragged her here from Africa, from everything she knew and loved.’

Agnes never returns to 52 West Walk. I’ve no idea how long she stays in Hop’s Corner with the Baker family. Eventually I hear – via Sasha at school – that Aggy’s gone to London.

During the months that follow, Agnes – who loves gossip the way I love Wagon Wheels – appears to still be in touch with our mother. I overhear crumbs of increasingly melodramatic adult conversations and Agnes is at the centre of them all. Agnes has supposedly been told by my mother that Nanny tipped Gramps in his wheelchair down the stairs, killing him on purpose to release herself from the burden of looking after him. How on earth my mother would claim to know this is beyond me and, anyway, Gramps died after slipping on the floor while using the loo. His fall led to a heart attack and he died in hospital.

My mother’s also supposedly told Agnes she’s planning to remove me permanently from Nanny’s ‘any day now’. But my mother regularly makes similar threats and I’ve learned not to believe a word of any of it.

Much of this web of intrigue and threats evaporates once Aunty Wendy’s fat, pink baby girl Kelly is born. Kelly’s bald except for a stripe of blond hair down the centre of her head, which makes her look a little like Uncle Mick’s dad, Uncle Malcolm.

Kelly’s a miracle baby for two reasons – first because Aunty Wendy wasn’t even trying to get pregnant when she did, and secondly because Kelly isn’t handicapped – unlike Aunty Wendy’s first baby, Christian, who died soon after he was born.

Christian had an illness called Lees Disease and he died when I was about four. My memories of him revolve around a single image, a golden-haired gentle baby boy who never seemed to move.

Winter of 1980 brings a letter that instantly changes our lives. I recognise the large, spidery scrawl on the envelope at once – my mother’s handwriting. Nanny reads the letter out to me over breakfast.

The letter says Mummy Elizabeth wants to talk to Nanny about my future. She’s had enough of how boring and dull I am and she is finding absolutely no pleasure at all in interacting with me. Something’s got to be done. So she’s going to be removing me from Nanny’s care in the near future and sending me back to Africa.

The enclosed cheque, for my keep, flutters onto the kitchen table. I watch Nanny fold the letter in half and slide it back into its blue envelope.

‘I’m keeping this as evidence,’ she says cryptically. ‘There is no way I am letting that bitch take you to Africa again. I’m not having it. She’s given me no choice but to go a solicitor, Anita.’

I digest the contents of my mother’s letter – and I have questions, questions, questions. Excitement overlaid with dread. There’s an urge rising in me to speak up, to ask my questions, but Nanny’s face warns me to remain quiet. I want to know why Nanny’s so sure that going to Africa is automatically bad. Uncle Mick said once that it would make him sad if I ever went there for good but that he understands that, at the end of the day, I’m an African. Why does Nanny see it all so differently then?

And what about if I went to live with Aunty Wendy and Uncle Mick instead? Would Mummy Elizabeth then let me stay in Fernmere? I’d be happy living in Aunty Wendy’s house; I’d be allowed to go out and play with the other kids on the estate and I wouldn’t have to keep washing my hands all the time.

It takes Nanny mere minutes to find a solicitor, making me suspect she’s had one up her sleeve all along, in preparation for this moment. The solicitor’s name is Mr Braithwaite, a man Nanny calls ‘a hell of a chap’. We go to his office. He’s dressed in a pinstriped suit and sits at a desk the colour of milk chocolate that’s piled high with faded hardback books. He wears an enormous watch and his dainty wrist looks like it could snap under the weight of all that heavy metal – real gold, I think.

Nanny tells me I must put my best foot forward and we must ‘present a good case’ to a lot of very distinguished people who are going to be interviewing me and asking my opinions about things. There is no opportunity, it seems, for me to ask questions or to voice my fears. I am the one who will be questioned.