Precious (24 page)

For a second I consider telling Wendy what’s really happening. That I’m free-falling and sinking and I have nothing to hold on to and no desire to hold on to anything anyway. Instead, I gaze listlessly out of the window. I can almost feel and taste Wendy’s confusion and embarrassment at the state of me – not the state of my appearance but the poor quality of my attitude.

At the wedding Agnes tells me I look very grown up. I’m wearing a black shift dress I shoplifted from the Chichester branch of Next especially for the occasion. My mother approves of the dress, sidles up to me and tells me I look ‘reasonably well turned out’.

My mother approves of Agnes’s new husband too – a light-skinned freckly Nigerian man.

‘I’ve no idea why he’d want to marry
Agnes
,’ she says, grinning slyly. ‘I bet the stupid girl is pregnant.’

I contemplate my mother as she says this, mesmerised by her heavily accented voice. I wonder what my mother looked like pregnant with me. I wonder whether she used to hold me and kiss me when I was a baby. Then I realise she didn’t have the chance to do so, because she gave me up so soon after I arrived into the world. I want to tell my mother that, if she’d known me then, when I was newborn and clean and pure and plump, she could have loved me. I bet she could. If she’d given herself a chance. If she’d given
me
a chance.

I grab a glass of wine off a tray and gulp it down in mere seconds. Wendy, who’s virtually teetotal, gives me a disapproving look so intense that I fear she might cry.

If Wendy’s words are to be believed, I’m a waste of space and I’m rapidly becoming a disgrace to society. Nanny’s far too indulgent, Wendy thinks. Nanny shouldn’t let me sit around all day, doing sod all.

My handful of Fernmere friends are at work or still in the sixth form so I have nothing to do and nowhere to go so I stay at home with Nanny all day. Nanny seems vaguely glad of my company but she spends much of her time asleep in her blue armchair, by the window.

Mick manages to get me a job at the Grange as a cleaner, sweeping a smelly mop along the floor. It takes me two hours to clean one short corridor and I barely deserve to get paid.

At work one day, someone steals a fiver from someone’s coat pocket in the men’s changing rooms. Clearly I come across as the kind of girl who’d commit such a crime because the manager tells me, ‘We can call the police and get the changing rooms fingerprinted.’

‘Aren’t valuables and cash supposed to be stored in lockers?’ I say. ‘If someone nicked his fiver, it’s his own fault.’

I get the sack. But that’s not a problem as Wendy’s friend Tracey can put me forward for another job. Tracey’s a huge woman with short, highlighted hair styled like Princess Di’s, a huge slab of torso, the long turnip-shaped nose that seems to runs in her family plus arms bigger than my thighs – and my thighs aren’t that small. Tracey works as a cleaner, sprucing up rich people’s homes and she’s so physically powerful that she can render a five-bedroomed house sparkling clean in forty-five minutes flat. She wants me to work with her as a sort of assistant cleaner.

Can’t wait, I think.

‘You know what your problem is?’ Wendy says.

‘No.’

‘You think you’re too good for a bit of honest hard work.’

I write to the
Fernmere Observer
asking for work experience. They write back asking me to come in for an interview. As I relay this news to Wendy, I’m stunned by the enthusiasm in my own voice.

‘Work experience?’ Wendy says. ‘What you need is a proper job, love, and you need to hold on to it. I was working full-time by the time I was your age.’

‘Good for you.’

‘What’s
wrong
with you?’

I shrug.

I honestly don’t know what it is inside me that prevents me from remaining interested in anything; not in waitressing, not in being a chambermaid, working as a sales assistant at the bakery or boxing up cakes on the production line at the cake factory. I always stop turning up. Or I get sacked.

I try for secretarial work next because Nanny says it might be more up my street. I set up an appointment at a Chichester temping agency called Manpower. I go in wearing a navy blazer I nicked from Next, and a fake carefree-but-professional smile. The recruiter plucks out a card from her little plastic card file.

I recognise in a detached way, my value: I speak nicely, I wear smart (albeit stolen) clothes; and I can type.

‘Let’s put you forward for this one. It’s temp-to-perm. They’re looking for someone unflappable and well spoken,’ the Manpower consultant says. ‘That one’s paying five pounds fifty an hour. You’ll be typing, answering the phone and making coffee for the executives.’

‘Great,’ I say. I am genuinely thrilled at the prospect of five pounds fifty an hour.

I tell Wendy about my new job.

‘Five pound fifty an hour doing what?’ she seems both amused and deflated. ‘What do you even know how to do? You barely know how to clean a sodding floor.’

‘I’d be, like, a PA.’

‘That’s more than my Mick makes to support a whole family.’

‘Well that’s his problem, not mine.’

‘I don’t know who you flipping think you are, but I do know that you need to get off your high horse, madam.’

I’m not on any kind of high horse. How could I be when I’m a drop-out? The first day of my five-pound-fifty-an-hour temp-to-perm job arrives and I can’t get out of bed. My legs feel so heavy that I’m unable to slide them out of bed and I remain there all day, staring at the ceiling.

Wendy comes around, enters my room uninvited and sits on the end of my bed for a talk. I can tell she’s consulted her fat blond social worker friend Andrea, because she uses the sorts of words Andrea uses.

‘I think you’re clinically depressed. I think you’re using drugs. Heroin.’

I begin to laugh. Heroin? I’ve never even smoked a cigarette.

‘What the bloody hell are you laughing like that for?’ says Wendy. ‘I’m worried about you, Neet. I love you.’

I don’t care whether Wendy loves me or not. I don’t care whether anyone loves me, or not.

I keep hearing voices and they keep me awake all night. My head is filled to tipping-point with mocking words:

‘I spent my life savings on you.’

‘I
know
you black girls: you love it.’

‘I wash my hands of you . . .’

‘Your own mother doesn’t even
like
you.’

I can only fall asleep at night if I knock back four or five or more cans of Special Brew at bedtime. Then eventually I’ll pass out on top of my bed. One night I have an epiphany: I’m hearing voices and I’m drinking like a fish so clearly I have nerves. I wait until Nanny falls asleep in her armchair and slip into her bedroom and open the bottom drawer of her gold-edged chest of drawers. Among the sea of silver foil packets and brown glass bottles I find what I’m looking for. It feels soothing to steal something. To steal
anything
.

I soon see – or rather, feel – why Nanny likes her nerve pills so much. They’re called Distalgesic and are part opiate and part paracetamol. I take thirty-eight of them, washed down with a lukewarm can of Special Brew. I dress in my African outfit and lay on my bed with my hands crossed over one another, on top of my chest. I don’t want to die. I just no longer want to live the life I’ve been given.

Mick’s got this button on his Atari computer that he can press and it shuts down and resets the machine’s entire system. That’s what I am trying to do to myself. This is not suicide. Suicide is surely wrought with melodrama and desperation, involving wrist-slashing or holding a gun to your head or hurling yourself off a tall building. But I just feel utterly at peace.

I fall into a velvety snooze, my mind feels like it’s been cocooned in delicious softness and I am suddenly insulated from the anxiety that’s been eating at me for months. For years, really. All of that friction, fear and worry evaporates, and I shut my eyes and let myself sink.

After ‘what happened’, as Nanny will come to call my overdose, she discovers what she fears is my dead body and rings Wendy. When Wendy rings 999, she’s warned that I might die before an ambulance has time to weave its way from Chichester to Fernmere to collect me. It’s quicker if Mick drives me into St Richard’s hospital in the Ford Escort. I’m placed on the back seat. Wendy’s in the passenger seat. Mick keeps taking his eyes off the road and turning round to watch me.

‘Don’t you go to sleep,’ he says. ‘Open your sodding eyes! Wendy! Make her open her eyes. I’m stoppin’ the car!’

Mick is more animated than I have ever seen him.

My eyelids drop. A huge sense of spaciousness and peace opens like a rainbow inside me.

‘Make her open her eyes Wendy!’ says Mick.

He pulls over. Wendy slaps me lightly around the face.

‘Neet, if you don’t open your eyes, love. You might not ever wake up again,’ she says.

‘That’s good,’ I say.

‘Why did you do it, love?’ says Wendy.

I’m in a bed at St Richard’s, with a tag taped round my wrist that says W
illiams
, P
recious
A
nita
. I’ve just had my stomach pumped.

‘I’m sorry,’ I try to say. My voice is faint, my throat feels battered, probably by the tube that was rammed down it last night.

‘I just wanted to feel something,’ I say.

The concerned smile slides off Wendy’s lips.

‘You what?’ she says.

Mick’s face slackens and crumples making him look like somebody who’s been cheated in a game of cards but can’t work out exactly how the deception occurred.

Nothing I am saying makes sense. Not even to me.

I can hear myself speaking and I can see myself thinking and trying to form the right words in my head but the words don’t filter down into my mouth. What streams out sounds like a string of dream-talk, the sort of stuff I scrawl in my diary at night.

‘I dunno,’ I say, altering my accent. Aware of how incongruously posh my voice sounds reverberating around that bright white hospital room. I sound like Nanny. ‘I dunno what made me do it.

I’m sent back home, and a couple of outpatient sessions with a psychiatric nurse are scheduled. I don’t bother to turn up to see the psychiatric nurse because I decide before even meeting her that she won’t be able to understand or help me.

‘I’m off out for a walk, Nanny.’

The only time my head feels unclogged anymore is when I go for long walks by myself.

I’ve got my headphones on, listening to Public Enemy. I pull the door closed and plunge into the dusk. Nanny and I now live on the very edge of the estate, by a little path that runs past the fire station. Ours is the last of a strip of faded little bungalows created for the estate’s elderly and infirm. Parked next to our bungalow, behind Nanny’s Datsun, is an abandoned yellow car with foliage shooting through its broken windows.

Leaning against the rusty car is Keith, the hardest man on the whole estate. As I near him, I see that he’s picking at the door of the car, and watching me. I try slipping straight past him but he follows me and stands in front of me, blocking my path. I pull off my headphones.

‘What are you doing?’ I say.

Keith smirks. He smells of dog’s piss and wet fur. His mum, who he lives with when he’s not in jail, breeds Jack Russells for a living. I try to step past him again and he jumps forward and blocks my path.

‘What do you bloody want?’

I can’t believe I’ve got the nerve to even look at this man, let alone argue with him. But something outside of myself is operating.

‘I’m waiting for you, aren’t I?’ Keith says.

I study his face, trying to figure out what he’s talking about and whether or not he’s taking the piss. He’d be almost good-looking if it wasn’t for the little mound of brown rot where one of his front teeth should be. He reminds me of Shakin’ Stevens, but with longer, curlier hair.

‘Why would you be waiting for me?’

‘I need some help, don’t I?’ Keith says, eyeing me sceptically. ‘We need someone nice-looking and that. As a sort of decoy. There’s money in it. Thought you might wanna be in on it.’

Nice-looking – that’s a bit of a stretch. Why would he single me out? Me, out of all the openly delinquent girls on our estate? It’s not as if my shoplifting prowess is common knowledge. Does he suspect that as Woodview’s only black girl I have a natural propensity towards crime?

Keith has been inside, for two long stretches, and he’s proud of this. He went down for armed robbery the first time, GBH and possession of firearms the second. For Keith, sticking a rifle in somebody’s face is all in a day’s work. So how come he’s talking to a nonentity like me?

I am flattered that he knows I even exist, that he knows exactly where I live. That he is standing here sizing me up, appraising me, and not in a sexual way but rather seeming to judge whether or not I’ve got the mettle to perpetrate crime at his level.