Precious (23 page)

The Sloanes make up excuses to leave for Thursday’s without me. I know why: I’m a liability. I look young for my age and I’m the only one in our posse of sixteen-year-olds who doesn’t have fake ID.

I ask the soldier what he thinks of the new LL Cool J single that, to my shocked delight is playing in the pub.

‘LL what?’ the soldier says.

I urgently need to pee, but the ladies loo is locked. The same girl has been in inside for forty minutes. I know this because I’ve been waiting to pee for all that time.

‘She’s probably in there with some bloke,’ says the soldier. ‘He’s probably givin’ her one in there.’

There’s another toilet. A grimy public toilet, adjacent to the Hole In The Wall, just across the road from the Marks and Sparks car park where I loaded up Nanny’s car with groceries earlier this evening. The soldier walks me out to the toilets. The building housing the toilets is made of dark bricks with a sign saying Gents on the left and one saying Ladies, on the right. He pushes me against the wall, in between the two signs, and he stares intently at me.

‘You’re fucking gorgeous,’ he says.

‘Really?’

I giggle and sway slightly as I approach the ladies’ loos.

‘You’re pissed,’ he says.

‘So?’

He leans into me and manoeuvres me along the wall until we are in the doorway of the gents’ loos. He keeps pushing me and I’m walking backwards, staggering really, until we’re both inside the gents’. Feeling disorientated, I look around for a stall. There’s one closed stall door and three urinals. A man wearing a long overcoat pisses into a urinal. The floor is strewn with dead cigarette butts and black smears of tar, and empty Durex and crisp packets.

The man in the overcoat glances at me, smirks, leaves.

I burp and the oily taste of the gin bubbles up into my throat making me feel nauseous and light-headed.

‘I’ve got to sit down,’ I say.

The soldier helps me sit down on the filthy floor and smooths my hair back with the palm of his hand and tips my chin up.

‘You’re fucking beautiful, do you know that?’ He says

‘Yeah I know it. Cos you already told me!’

I laugh. When I laugh my stomach churns up the alcohol coursing through my system and I feel not just light-headed now but quite out of control and out of my depth. It’s time to ring my knight in tarnished armour, Cruising Capri Mick, from the phone box in the pub and sit there sobering up with a Diet Coke, waiting for him to arrive.

‘Let’s walk back to the pub,’ I say. ‘If I don’t phone home soon my uncle’s gonna come looking for me.’

‘I thought you said you and your family lived all the way over in Fernmere?’ the soldier says, looking amused. ‘What’s the hurry?’

‘Can we just go back to the pub?’

‘You look like you can hardly walk, sweetheart.’

‘I’m fine.’

I scramble to get on to my feet and leave, but the soldier grips me round the waist from behind and pulls me to the lavatory floor. He clasps both wrists in one of his hands and pins me to the floor. He climbs on top of me and he stinks of sour BO and it feels like I’ve got a huge bundle of dirty laundry pressing down on me.

His voice is heavy in my ear, saying, ‘Just a bit of fun. Come on.’

‘I’m not really up for it,’ I say, in a very small voice.

‘Oh, come on,’ he says. ‘You’re well up for it, aren’t you? I know what you black girls are like: you love it.’ A knowing laugh.

He keeps trying to put his knee between my legs to spread them but I keep my legs firmly closed as I try to sit up and push him away from me.

The new black lycra skirt from Dorothy Perkins that I am wearing barely grazes my thighs. Wendy’s advised me to take the skirt back to the shop and exchange it for something decent.

My skirt’s rucked up around the tops of my thighs and the soldier reaches up and yanks my knickers halfway down. I feel the filthy damp tiled floor against my bare skin.

‘Fucking get off me.’

I try to sit up again and he knees me in the stomach and kneels on top of my lower body so that I can’t move. I hear a zip being pulled and his penis is poking through his open flies, jabbing at my bare leg. The tip of it feels slimy against my skin. It triggers a memory from long-ago that rips through my body and emerges as a scream. I find my voice.

‘NO! NO! I DON’T WANT TO!’

There are more words I want to say. I want to blame him for every time I’ve been manhandled and forced to perform acts I didn’t want to perform. I want to fight him. Hurt him. I’m certainly not going to let him hurt
me
. I’m sixteen and a half now. I can stand up for myself.

I wriggle out of his grip.

I’ll run to the phone box just outside the loos and ring Cruising Capri Mick. If I tell Mick about this bastard trying to hurt me, Mick will come to Chichester, find him and kick his head in.

The soldier drags me back across the floor, pulling me closer to the urinals. He presses me onto my back, where I lay with my arms and legs flailing trying to flip myself over, get up and run away. He grabs a handful of my hair and my head slaps against the lavatory floor.

The soldier grins down at me. He pins me to the floor by pressing down on both of my shoulders with his hands, putting all his weight onto me.

‘Get off of me!’

I feel his penis jabbing at my thighs, and then he is inside me and I cannot get away. My legs feel heavier than lead and I am not sure if I will ever be able to move from this lavatory floor.

‘Aaaargh,’ he says, grunting. ‘Oh my fucking God you are so tight.’

He claws at my breasts through my bomber jacket. I lay on the floor with my legs prised apart and my knickers around my ankles. Something inside me is dying. I will realise, a few weeks from now, that the thing that’s just died inside me on this lavatory floor is my will to live.

The scent of very stale piss, what smells like rivers of it, mingled with sharp disinfectant, fills my nostrils. I bring up a gut-full of vomit as he plunges into me again. I won’t notice until tomorrow morning, but my hair and the left shoulder of my bomber jacket are covered in my vomit.

I will myself to leave the scene, to become a spectator only, watching with detachment as this man whose name I did not catch thrusts again and again into the me that’s lying on the floor.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he says. ‘Jesus
fucking Christ
.’

His words come out in ragged spurts. I am lying beneath a urinal. My head smacks against the tiled wall behind me, jolting me back into my body where I categorically do not want to be. Now I feel the pain; I feel like I am being broken, and crushed. The pain’s not just in the part of my body he’s plunging into but rather a deep, splintering ache and revulsion that resonate through my entire being.

This wouldn’t be happening if I didn’t deserve it, I think. It just wouldn’t. I know I asked for it. By dressing like a tart and trying to look sexy. I shouldn’t have grown so full of myself.

I watch him shudder and watch his eyes close and his face take on the look of a death mask. There’s a sort of tortured grimace on his face. Like he’s dying. Like somebody just shot him. I wish they had.

He grins and looks at me like he’s expecting me to say something. What is there to say? In my world, this is what men do, and stupid me, buoyed up on gin, I had briefly forgotten this.

When the soldier leaves the men’s loos, he says. ‘I’ll see you around, all right?’

At some point, I manage to get to Thursday’s, smelling of vomit and gin. The bouncers demand ID and I just shove past them and run onto the dance floor. They’re playing Tiffany’s ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’. I whirl around the dance floor, looking for Poppy. I run to the ladies and lock myself into a cubicle where I down the rest of the bottle of gin I’ve still got in my jacket pocket. I slump forward on the toilet seat and begin vomiting again. A small sea of my vomit flows underneath the cubicle door. I close my eyes and drop the empty gin bottle onto the floor.

An echo-ing voice says, ‘Oh my God.’

Someone hammers on the cubicle door, then kicks at it.

‘Anita?’ Pippa’s voice.

‘Can you just open the door, love?’ someone else says.

The door seems to open by itself. I’m still hunched on the toilet. Crying. Someone in a uniform, a paramedic, I’m told later, says, ‘If you’d had any more to drink, you would have had alcohol poisoning. You mightn’t have made it.’

I wake up and I’m at home. And it’s morning. Eight o’clock. I’m fully clothed on my bed and I’ve no idea how I got home. Nanny’s left for her part-time job at the leisure centre, where she works in the crèche with Wendy as her boss. I fish out the pair of old gardening gloves that she keeps under the sink for the dirty jobs, like unclogging the drain. I put the gloves on and remove my clothes, item by item.

I toss my clothes into a bin liner, hide it in a corner of my wardrobe and lock myself in the bathroom. I run a bath, get in and immediately climb out again because I find that I can’t sit in my own filth. My body is polluting the bath.

Our bathroom’s tiny and I stand in the centre of it, in a trance, looking around me, jumping at my own shadow. The tiny window above the toilet is criss-crossed with cobwebs. I do not think I have ever disrobed in here before without Nanny needing to come in. She has to come in, because the water pills she takes force her to pee and pee and pee. Standing in front of the mirror, waiting for the bathwater to drain away, I look at my naked body and feel totally disconnected from it. When has my body ever felt like it truly belonged to me?

I slot in the shower attachment, grab my sponge and drag it repeatedly over my body as though I am scrubbing a filthy toilet. I toss the sponge into the bin, put my dressing gown on and sit in Nanny’s chair by the window. Being in her chair makes me feel secure; the closest thing to getting a hug from her. I cannot ever tell Nanny what has happened because I fear she’d say ‘Oh Nin,
no
,’ and sit in silent judgement, crying. I don’t think she’d hug me. I don’t think she’d want to touch me.

I gaze vacantly through the window. A postman walks along West Walk. I’ve never seen him before – he must be new. He sees me through the window and stares, unblinking, not bothering to look away when I meet his gaze. I sink into Nanny’s chair so that my head’s beneath the window and I’m invisible. When I rise up again, the postman is standing there, looking worried and staring. It’s not what you expect to see when you’re delivering the post on Woodview: a black kid sitting in the window of someone’s bungalow, clear as day. I sink down in the chair again and when I glance back up, the postman’s gone.

I catch sight of my legs through the opening in my dressing gown and I want to vomit again. Even though I’ve scrubbed my legs so hard they look more pink than brown, I think I can still see the filth from the toilet floor and the soldier’s semen seeping down them. I go to my room and put on a pair of opaque black tights under my dressing gown so that I won’t have to see my revolting flesh.

I spend all day every day now in the college refectory, alone, reading Maya, reading Chester Himes and eating crisps; sneaking sips from miniature bottles of vodka and listening to Prince and LL Cool J on my Walkman. I no longer attend lessons. I’m afraid of interacting with anyone. The Sloanes say I’ve ‘gone weird’. I feel safest when I’m alone.

A mixed-race student with beige skin and shoulder-length spiralling hair enrols and tries to introduce herself to me. When she asks what A Levels I’m doing, I tell her I’m doing English but that I can’t remember the other subjects. Maybe Sociology? Politics? French? I can’t remember. I’ve no idea.

Finally, I am called in to see the college principal. Nanny accompanies me, wearing her old cornflower-blue mac and a pair of navy leather driving gloves. The principal looks at me as though I’m a giant dog turd that’s inexplicably found its way onto one of his office chairs. Nanny glares at him defiantly. Things are said, but I can’t remember them now. I’m asked to withdraw from my course and I’m asked to stay off the college campus because my presence, my habit of wandering the corridors carrying a ghetto-blaster, my shameless boozing in the refectory, is distracting the other students.

One day, while I’m still using my free bus pass to lurk the streets of Chichester, I hit a new low. I’ve been sacked from my waitressing job at The Angel for not turning up for my shifts, Lloyds have retained my cashpoint card. I’ve been placed on some kind of blacklist by Littlewoods and Freemans and Kays for ordering jeans and jackets and trainers but failing to pay for them. No more clothes on the never-never. So I walk into a shop called Pilot, grab a bundle of clothes to try on, emerge from the changing rooms with an assortment of leggings and T-shirts hidden inside my coat and stroll out onto the High Street. I feel no remorse. I feel purposeful, in fact. Something precious was stolen from me, I’m stealing it back.

I’m seventeen when my mother and Agnes reappear. Aggy’s getting married and Wendy and I are invited up to the wedding.

On the train to London, Wendy says, ‘Don’t you dare let your mother find out that you’ve dropped out of college. I’m not having her blaming me for the state you’re in. I’m not having her running me down.’