Precious (22 page)

‘It’s your fault!
You’re
the one who took me away from my mother.’

‘
Took you away from your mother?
’ Nanny spits. ‘
Took
you away from your mother? Don’t you go getting any delusions about
her
: that woman didn’t want you, Nin. She threw you away like a piece of rubbish. She advertised you in a magazine. She never even
liked
you, Nin.’

‘She’s my mother! It’s your fault she won’t have anything to do with me!’

‘There’s only one person in this world who’s ever been a mother to you, my girl. Here was I thinking I was doing something nice for a little girl who needed me,’ says Nanny, weeping. ‘And you go and throw it all in my face.’

She may not think much of my personality these days, but Nanny’s confident I’ll sail through my O Levels. I can’t imagine why. My English teacher may well call me ‘extraordinarily skilful and colourful’ but the rest of my teachers have all but written me off, using phrases like ‘scatty’, ‘in a dream-like state’ and ‘obviously very able but idle’ in my school reports. Plus I regularly forge Nanny’s signature on sick notes and bunk off school so that I can sit alone in the town library, staring into space, daydreaming, pretending to be revising.

My O Level results, when they arrive, stun everybody except Nanny and perhaps Wendy. I’ve passed all eight exams: I got As in English Language and in English Literature; Bs in the humanities. I can’t help wondering whether the examinations board has assigned somebody else’s results to my name in error.

Here’s Mick, carrying his snooker cue, looming out of the darkness like an apparition, his shoulders stooped forward as he saunters across the road. He sees me loitering by the entrance to the Duck Pond, spotlit by a street lamp.

‘Hark at the state of you!’ he says. ‘All done up like that! Where you off to then?’

I’m wearing a purple bat-wing jumper and matching eyeshadow with a pale violet rah-rah skirt and electric blue leather-look ankle boots.

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ I say.

‘What you doin’ then, little idiot? Walkin’ around in the dark on your own?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I want to.’

‘Walk down the town with me, then.’

Mick’s on his way to the pub to play in a tournament. We take a shortcut around the Duck Pond, towards the centre of the town. There is silence, aside from the eerie rustle of the ducks passing through the foliage.

Mick says, ‘Why are you always lookin’ so miserable lately then? I heard you passed all your exams and that – what’s the matter with you? Those racialist pillocks been picking on you again then at school?’

‘No. I mean, yes. But it’s not that’, I say and I begin to cry. ‘It’s just that I haven’t heard from my mother or Agnes for four whole years. I don’t even know my own mother’s address or phone number. Why doesn’t anybody love me, Mick?’

‘All of us love you, don’t we?’ says Mick. ‘You knows we do.’

‘Do I?’

‘Course you do.’

‘I really hate my life.’

‘I dunno why you always seems to expect so much out of life, Neeta. I hate my bloody life as well, Neet, but there’s no use keep complainin’ about it.’

Precious

NANNY CALLS ON HER clever grown-up son, Uncle Dave, to take me out for a cup of tea and talk to me about my career choices. Uncle Dave has a degree, a good job and a four-bedroom, detached house. He was even a graduate student once. So he must know what he’s on about.

‘My English teacher’s said I’ve got what it takes to be a reporter or an author,’ I blurt out. Then I want to kick myself for seeming arrogant. Uncle Dave smiles at me fondly. He says, ‘Look, love, we know you’d like to pursue something creative. But those types of jobs don’t grow on trees. It can be very difficult to get your foot in the door.’

Uncle Dave talks to me about the possibility of going to college or university and then beginning as a secretary or PA within a media company. I sit there thinking ‘I’m going to become a writer and nobody – not even you – can stop me.’ I cock my head as if acquiescing and I silently I decide to do exactly what Uncle Dave’s just said I can’t do; I’ll get my size seven foot in the door just like that, thanks.

After my chat with Uncle Dave I ring up the
Fernmere Observer
, ask to speak to the editor, tell her about my O Level results and offer my services as a trainee reporter. The editor’s voice bubbles with amusement. She tells me I’m welcome to apply for unpaid work experience during the holidays, and she warns me that to become a journalist, I’ll need A Levels ‘at least’. Which is why I sign up to take three of them, at Chichester College of Technology.

I presume Chichester Tech will be a cross between a funfair and a university campus. That I’ll hang out with new friends in an oak-panelled canteen, discussing Charles Dickens and Maya Angelou and my brand-new love, hip-hop. But this is not to be. I spot only one black student. His blue overalls and the tool-box he carries suggest he’s studying Construction. I try to strike up a conversation with him and he walks straight past me, avoiding eye contact.

My A Level English class is mainly made up of local Sloanes from Chichester and Lavant. Several of them are alumni of Lavant House, the girls’ boarding school where Mick’s mum works as a dinner lady. They hate hip-hop and they love miserable old Morrissey. Most of them have never spoken to a black person before in their lives. Worse still, they seem to
live
to take the piss out of the few council-estate dwellers audacious enough to have enrolled for A Level English.

I make an earnest effort to blend in with the Sloanes – by immediately pretending not to live on a council estate. Poppy and Flora and Tabitha and Pippa seem neither to like nor dislike me. They watch me closely, like I’m someone who can’t necessarily be trusted and I watch them just as closely. I notice how they constantly sweep back their shoulder-length manes and how they all wear the same uniform of faded Levi 501s, white T-shirts, leather penny loafers, Benetton sweaters and blue or red paisley bandanas. I wonder if it’s time to throw away my rah-rah skirts.

Eventually I grow so sick of not fitting in again that I write to
Black Beat International
magazine, asking for pen pals. My letter says, ‘I’m a Nigerian girl fostered by white people in a West Sussex village and I’m looking for pen pals who can give me information about my cultural background.’

As I read through what I’ve just written I feel for the first time a sense of rage about my history, about the unanswered questions it presents. A single, angry word percolates then erupts up into my irritated mind:
Why
?

Why was it deemed OK for this to become my story? Why does it make the news when a little white girl is molested or beaten or neglected, when in my case it didn’t even make anybody raise an eyebrow or demand an investigation? And why, if I had to be fostered at all, did it have to happen in such a makeshift way and in all-white West Sussex?

My letter’s published in
Black Beat International
and I receive more than fifty replies, including a parcel from Lagos containing a voluminous scarlet and gold wax-print kaftan.

A fifty-year-old man from Ghana writes, ‘I want you to know Anita Williams that your people here in Africa love you and I really feel for you after reading your wonderful letter in a magazine. I am sure your parents love you too and are longing for your touch.’

I soon have thirty pen pals, forming a link to something that feels very far away from me and yet essential to my survival: a black community.

Mick finds a plastic and wood-veneer record player in the Lost & Found cupboard at the Grange, the leisure centre where he works as caretaker. He presents it to me as a gift, to cheer me up. I begin to spend evenings hiding from Nanny, shut inside my bedroom, dancing around to the tinny sounds of my record player, listening to Stetsasonic and Masta Ace, the Cookie Crew and the Wee Papa Girls. Hip-hop captures my imagination and delights and nourishes me in a way no other medium ever has, or could, or ever will. Hip-hop burns away my apathy, to an extent. And it’s my own discovery. Discovered via reading
Black Beat International
, the magazine no one else in Fernmere reads, the one the newsagent orders especially for me.

I picture them – black guys and black girls from the New York projects, standing on street corners, rattling off riveting rhymes, just like that. MC Shan. Kurtis Blow. LL Cool J. Roxanne Shante. Thrusting themselves into verbal duels, street-battles, the likes of which haven’t been seen or heard since Shakespeare. Like Mercutio battling Tybalt. And these black men and women, these street poets, they don’t even need to write their shit down. It’s like their stories, words and verses are tattooed into their consciousness.

I sleep wearing headphones and spend all of my wages from my part-time waitressing job at Our Price, foregoing new clothes to own the latest US import LPs.

One night, just before Christmas, the Sloanes surprise me by asking me to hang out with them at the Hole In The Wall pub. I’m flattered, but there’s a problem: the last bus home to Fernmere leaves Chichester at 8.30 p.m. and since the journey’s twelve miles, it’s too far to walk. But then Mick, who’s recently learned to drive, says, ‘Go on, go out with your mates. I don’t mind drivin’ in and picking you up.’

And so I finally have a social life. The Sloanes still know nothing about hip-hop but it’s someone to go around with, isn’t it? It’s something to do. And so, every Thursday or Friday night I knock back pint after pint of cider with the Sloanes in the Hole In The Wall, then I ring Mick, who drives me home to Nanny, who’ll hiss, ‘Don’t think I can’t smell the alcohol on your breath you sneaky little bitchie.’

One evening Poppy asks, ‘Who’s that, like, middle-aged white guy who picked you up the other night in a blue car?’

I’m certainly not about to reveal to these Sloanes that I’m a foster-kid who lives on a council estate.

‘He’s, like, my uncle,’ I say. ‘His name’s Mick.’

The Sloanes immediately christen him ‘Cruising Capri Mick’ – even though my Mick drives a Ford Escort, not a Ford Capri. They say Mick reminds them of the stereotypical boy-racer who has fluffy dice dangling in front of his car windscreen and Go Faster stripes running down the sides of his car.

I try to see Mick through their eyes: his nicotine-yellowed fingers, the way he sits in his battered Ford Escort smoking rollies and smiling mysteriously to himself through his car window. I laugh along with them but secretly I despise them for mocking him. I love Cruising Capri Mick who’s more like a father to me every day. He’s interested in my life and he’s amused by my posh new friends.

‘Who was that stuck-up little blonde then?’ he says one evening. ‘That that Poppy you keep goin’ on about, is it then?’ He peers quickly at his reflection in the mirror. ‘These stuck-up birds like a bit of rough, don’t they?’ Mick laughs at his own reflection and I laugh too.

‘You like it at college then do you?’ he says.

‘No. Not really. Why?’

‘Just asking. You still listening to that rap music crap then?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I don’t see how you can understand what they’re going on about. Must be some kind of black thing then, is it?’

‘They’re rapping in secret code,’ I say. ‘They’re rapping about how much they want to kill all white people.’

We both crack up laughing.

I’m at the Hole In The Wall with a small bottle of gin tucked in the pocket of my new black bomber jacket. I’m with Pippa and four of the other Sloanes and we’re on our way to a nightclub called Thursday’s which is three miles outside of Chichester, in a village called Oving.

I am being chatted up by a man who looks old, old, old; he’s got to be at least twenty-five, even thirty. The man keeps buying me drinks even though I’m already drunk.

He’s a soldier at the army barracks in Chichester and he seems to have money galore. I don’t fancy him at all but he’s clearly interested in me and I’m kind of enjoying flirting with him. I’m trying on ‘sexy’. It’s unlike me to flirt. But suddenly it is making me feel powerful to be desired, even if the person doing the desiring looks like a cross between Freddie Mercury and Bruce Forsyth.

Poppy taps me on the shoulder.

‘Stay away from that squaddie,’ she whispers. ‘He’s married, and he’s a right old lech.’

‘Whatever,’ I say.

I wonder whether Poppy’s just jealous because I’m being chatted up by a mature, sophisticated dude.

The squaddie tells me his name and I instantly forget it. He tells me a joke that I don’t get. Something about a girl taking it up the arse.

‘Let me buy you another drink,’ he says.

The gin has unlocked a new version of me, confident and full of herself. I’ve only ever drunk Diamond White, white wine or Bulmers cider before. I knock back more gin and watch myself becoming a different person. Throwing my head back, laughing when his jokes aren’t all that funny.