Precious (21 page)

The last we heard Agnes was doing something called ‘sleeping rough’. I say nothing. I want my mother to hold me, the way she must hold her new son.

‘Well,’ she says. ‘I wanted to tell you that, after this, I’m washing my hands of you. I can’t believe you chose that woman over me.’

She rubs her hands together briskly, and she walks away, across the field, her high heels stabbing the marshy soil.

Book Three

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers’ names.

Alice Walker,
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens

Who I Am

I’M SITTING ON A scarred wooden bench, with condom wrappers and broken Diamond White bottles at my feet. Chewing gum’s stuck to the graffiti’d walls around me. An obscured, faded bus timetable, dotted with fag burns, advertises the sluggish, infrequent passage of buses to and from Haslemere, Pompey, Chichester and Bognor.

Sitting next to me: Tom. Just about the coolest, best-looking boy in my year at school. Unbelievably, his arm is draped around me. I pretend, in this delicious second, that he fancies me. Even though I know better. Truth is, when the two of us hang out like this, Tom talks non-stop about other girls – the girls he fancies. White girls. Blond girls. And I just listen. Or sometimes I give him advice about his love life. Like I know anything about romance.

A car cruises the perimeter of the bus station; a white car that’s as rusty and insubstantial-looking as an ancient Diet Coke can. It inches towards us and its windows slide down on the passenger side. Wendy leans out. ‘What do you think you’re doing, you idle little devil?’ she yells.

‘Can’t I stay?’ I look at Tom who’s staring at Wendy.

‘We’ve been driving all over the town looking for you,’ she screams. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing in this disgusting bus shelter? You’re coming grocery shopping with us, my girl. It doesn’t hurt you to give Nanny a hand.’

‘I’ll see you later, Tom, yeah?’ I whisper, inching apathetically towards Nanny’s car.

Nanny turns in her seat and narrows her crinkle-rimmed eyes at me. She purses her matt-scarlet lips. And then she revs the engine.

‘Mick said he saw you with that little waste-of-space Debbie earlier,’ says Wendy.

‘So?’

‘My Mick said you refused to tell him where you were off to. God I don’t know how you can go around with that Debbie. Dunno what germs you might pick up from being around her.’

‘Well I’m not having sex with her am I?’

‘Will you shut up, for Pete’s sake, you insolent little slut! This is the second week in a row you’ve tried to skive off coming shopping. I’ve got my spies. I know what you get up to.’

I may be insolent but I’m definitely not a slut. In theory I could have become one. I value my body so little that I’d probably let absolutely anyone do absolutely anything to it. But I don’t put it about, I don’t get around. Because the intense disgust I feel at the very thought of sex overrides
everything
. And so I am laughably chaste. Never snogged a boy, never gone on a date.

Not that anybody’s queueing up to get off with me anyway. The only guys who find me at all pretty are not my peers but rather the grown men who occasionally sidle up to me at the bus station or at my part-time waitressing job, calling me a ‘sexy little jungle bunny’. Telling me, ‘You ain’t half exotic.’

‘You know what they say,’ says Wendy. ‘Hang around with dogs and you’ll wake up with fleas.’

‘You’re so fucking sad,’ I hiss.

‘
What
did you say?’

‘Forget it.’

‘That was that Tom you were with, wasn’t it? What were you doing with him then? Slow down, Mum.’ Wendy pokes her finger through the open car window as we crawl up Chichester Road. ‘That’s where that Tom lives, isn’t it?’

Craning her neck and peering through the car window, Wendy takes in the details; the large detached house set back from the main road, the unblemished white Mercedes parked in front, the beautifully tended flower beds. Wendy turns to look at me, a curious smile on her face. ‘What are you doing knocking about with someone like him then?’ she says.

‘What’s it got to do with you who I go round with?’

‘You don’t half have an attitude, my girl,’ says Wendy. ‘You don’t half think highly of yourself. I love you and I always will, but I don’t know who you think you are.’

Who I am is a thoroughly English girl. The colour of my skin doesn’t mean a thing. I’m as white as the next person.
Inside
. I know nothing about Africa. I care nothing about Africa. And everyone in Fernmere is so used to me now, so friendly with me, that they see me as one of their own. This is the fantasy, Nanny’s fantasy, of how my life is.

Then there’s my reality. Someone’s spray-painted a message for me across one of the garage doors on Woodview. ANITA GO HOME, YOU WOG. The message was probably left by the same National Front boys who sometimes follow me home from school, throwing stones at me, hissing, ‘What you got to say for yourself then,
Sambo
?’

My social worker, Barbara, has been to the police station to report the ‘racialist abuse’ but the cops can’t do anything unless one of the stones thrown at me actually hits me. Or unless one of the NF boys himself hits me.

Life would be a lot easier for me if I didn’t act so stuck-up, Barbara says. Or if I didn’t keep ‘going on all the time about being black’, Wendy says. Barbara disagrees with Wendy and says my ‘ethnicity’ can’t be ignored. Barbara talks about it – my colour – like it’s a disease and over the years has advised me that I need to accept it, deal with it, overcome it, live with it, get to grips with it, adapt to it and stop being so sensitive about it.

Barbara comes to visit Nanny and me at six-monthly intervals, to talk to me about my ‘situation’, and to interview us both so that she can draw up an evaluation report that she shares with the other senior social workers. According to her latest evaluation report, the situation looks like this:

Mrs Taylor needs to examine her own motivation for fostering Anita and to learn to ‘let go’ and allow her to develop her own identity. Mrs Taylor is not always able to act clearly in Anita’s best interests, owing to her own emotional need for the child. She lacks understanding of the need for Anita to be aware of and to accept her own cultural background.

Nanny reads this report and calls it ‘poppycock’.

I don’t care what the grown-ups say: I don’t feel like blending in any more. I’ve no inclination to continue apologising for the colour of my skin. I want to be allowed to be me. But then, can I really be me when I am not a hundred per cent sure who
me
is yet?

At school, I belong to every social subset going. I am an outcast in outdated Marks and Spencer get-up and at the same time I hang out with the clever, the popular and the trendily dressed kids. I’m a teacher’s pet, at times, but when I feel like it, I transform into the lippy thorn in the teachers’ sides – I become the kid who sits at the back of the classroom, lobbing scrunched-up paper at the teachers’ backs as they write on the blackboard.

I’m a great admirer of the kids who smoke puff and of those who get arrested and the ones who get expelled. I worship the boys who carry flick knives in their rucksacks and the girls who give blow jobs in the bus shelter to boys they’re not even going out with. But me, I just teeter on the precipice of delinquency; I never fully make the leap. Something – the risk of disappointing Nanny? My pride? – prevents me diving in.

I’ve got ambition. I want to escape to London and get my own flat and write stories for magazines and find a posse of black friends who – hopefully – will teach me how to stop being a laughing stock among other blacks.

Other black people mesmerise me but I only see them on TV – sprinting, doing the long jump, singing, dancing, rioting, stealing cars and sometimes stabbing or shooting at one another.

Last time I saw young black people – in real life and en masse – was when I went on a school trip up to the National History Museum. There they were: a crew of black kids in Adidas trainers, standing outside the museum chatting, posing, larger than life. Unmistakeably Londoners because of their sharp accents, their swagger. I stood there, in my navy school skirt and my lace-up Clarks shoes, staring at them like they were images on a cinema screen, sucking in the sweetness of every detail. One of the crew, a girl with thin, tight cornrows, stared right back at me, and yelled, ‘Picky head!’ and her mates looked me over quickly and erupted into rounds of chainsaw-like laughter.

At Fernmere Grammar, which is in fact the local comprehensive, there are only two other black kids – one of them’s fostered over in Petworth, the other one lives at a nearby childrens’ home. Being Fernmere blacks they’re not what you’d call authentic. Like me, they’re well versed in playing the ‘please accept me’ game; a game that’s about subtly hating yourself and silently apologising all the time. And if you don’t play the game, white people will write you off as threatening. The key to surviving in Fernmere, when you’re black, is making whites believe that deep down you wish you were white yourself.

I’m growing up. I’m absolutely full of myself, I’m told, which I think is a good thing. I’ve always had opinions. But now, for reasons I think have to do with me recently devouring
Their Eyes Were Watching God
, I’m speaking up. Sometimes.

Wendy and Nanny say I’m growing out of control; that I’m growing more and more unbearable every day. The two of them bring out baby pictures of me and say, ‘Wish you were still like that, eh?’ holding them up to me as though holding garlic up in the face of a vampire.

The summer I turn sixteen we go to Hayling Island where we rent a beach-front house. Me, Nanny, Wendy, Mick, Kelly and Andrew. I buy a black hat with a wide brim from Tammy Girl and I wear it nearly every day of the holiday. I even wear it when I plunge into the choppy sea.

‘I don’t know how you can go about like that in that hat. It’s like you
want
to look different from everyone else,’ Wendy says. ‘Don’t you wanna just fit in? We’ve done everything to make you blend in. I don’t understand how you could do that. Wear a hat when no one else is wearing one, for no reason.’

‘She’s tryin’ to look like that Mel and Kim,’ says Mick.

On the second-to-last day of our holiday, we go on a family trip to Havant Hypermarket where I pick up a copy of a magazine it’s rare to find outside of London,
Black Beauty & Hair
. I’m sitting in the passenger seat of Mick’s Ford Escort, flicking through the magazine, running my eyes over the glossy lips and glossy hair-dos.

‘Black beauty and bloody hair. What’s all that then?’ says Mick, trying to peek at the shiny pages. ‘Why’re you tryin’ to be something you’re not, then?’

Mick’s the one who actually paid for the magazine after Wendy coaxed him into treating me. So why’s he complaining?

‘I’ll do what I want,’ I say. ‘I’ll wear what I want.’

‘You’re getting ever so arrogant, Neet,’ says Wendy. ‘Just like your mother.’

‘Good.’

On our final afternoon at Hayling Island, a white woman perched not far from us on the pebbly beach asks me, ‘How did you get your hair so damn curly?’

‘It grows like that doesn’t it, Neet?’ says Wendy. ‘It’s not easy to look after it, poor kid. We’ve been all over the place trying to find the right products.’

‘I love my hair actually,’ I say suddenly. ‘White people are allowed to like their hair just the way it is. Why shouldn’t I?’

Wendy stares at me and I put my black hat back on, get up from our beach blanket and tiptoe into the sea.

Driving home from Hayling Island, Nanny and I get as far as Chichester before there is an explosion. Ever since she had to have stomach surgery when she was in her forties, Nanny’s bowels have caused her problems. When she’s nervous, like she is driving on the motorway today, Nanny’s bowels grow irritated; to her horror and embarrassment, there are rare occasions when she can’t quite make it to the toilet in time.

The diarrhoea smell lingers, even with the car windows open. Nanny sits there stoically. She doesn’t make eye contact.

‘I’m sorry, love,’ she says.

I turn and look through the window, fighting back tears.

Nanny pats my arm.

I turn to her, and have an explosion of my own.

‘I hate this,’ I sob. ‘It’s disgusting.
You’re
disgusting. I hate you.’

Nanny is silent for a long time.

‘After all I’ve done for you, Nin,’ she says, eventually. ‘I’ve been your biggest defender. All these years.’

‘I’m just sick of this,’ I sob.

‘And I’m sick of
you
,’ says Nanny, her voice dangerously low. ‘I’m sick of your little outbursts, you spiteful, ungrateful little bitch. I spent all of my savings on you, on that court case. And nothing’s ever good enough for you, is it?’