Precious (25 page)

To be honest, I have little respect for the law now. I don’t believe the law even applies to me anymore – it’s never protected me, so why should I follow it? I have this malice and fury curdling inside me, making me see everything in a crude and simplistic way. I feel like lashing out. I’ll never let anybody trample
me
like road kill again. It’s my turn to hurt somebody, anybody,
everybody
. I want others to feel as frightened, as vulnerable, as
robbed
as I feel. As I have felt.

So, perhaps I really can and should do this, now – while the opportunity presents itself. Surely it’s no coincidence that Keith has found me. I imagine the ring-ring of a till flying open. The fear in the shopkeeper’s face. Keith’s remorseless laughter as he realises we’ve pulled it off. Launching ourselves into a getaway car. A thick bundle of fifty-pound notes. Freedom. Redressing the balance.

‘So, you up for it or not?’ says Keith

I want to say yes. I want to say, ‘Let’s do it. Let’s fucking do it.’

But I hesitate. Finally I squeak, ‘But, why me?’

‘Don’t stress yourself, mate,’ Keith says. ‘I can find someone else. Just thought you might be up for it.’

Behind the abandoned car there’s a tangle of blackberry bushes and then a drop down to a measly trickle of dirty shallow water that’s supposed to be a stream. I look down into the filthy water. I look up at Keith, without quite meeting his gaze.

‘I’d better not do it,’ I say.

‘I’d better not,’ he mimicks, thrusting his hands in his jeans pockets, squaring his shoulders and walking away.

I shrug and put my headphones back on: Public Enemy – ‘Rebel Without A Pause’. It’s not that I’m against being – or continuing to be – a badgirl crim,
per se
. It’s just that I want to keep all my options open.

It’s just that I want to go to London.

Paid In Full

I EMERGE FROM BRIXTON tube station carrying an Adidas holdall containing an LL Cool J cassette tape, bras, knickers, a spare tracksuit and a toothbrush. I have twelve pounds in my pocket, and no plan at all, other than to hang around with black people and maybe find a way to get into journalism.

I’m met at the station by Effua, my former foster-sister. Effy wrote to me, sending me her address and a recent photo. I have written to her telling her I’m coming to London. Here I am.

There’s a record shop by the tube station exit. A Rastaman in a camouflage jacket leans in the doorway of the shop. His dreadlocks are impenetrably thick, spiralling from his head in a gravity defying brown and black mane. His eyes sweep over me, lingering on the picky ends of my matted hair. When he looks away, into the flowing rush-hour crowd, I stand there transfixed, unable to move past him and his hair.

‘I
love
his hair,’ I whisper to Effy. ‘How do you get it like that? Is that, like, hair extensions?’

‘Man,’ says Effua, shaking her sleek head. ‘You’ve got a lot to learn.’

Effua’s mum, Aunty Akosua, has a shop in Brixton market. There’s African material hanging up in sheets. Wrinkled brown ladies sitting in fold-up chairs – chattering and slurping down mashed boiled plantain. Through the open door I feel reggae playing so loud it makes the pavement shudder. I try to etch the hustle of the market into my memory because I know Wendy will ask me about it, the way she always does when I see something she doesn’t get to see.

Then I remember. I don’t live in Fernmere anymore. I’ve said my goodbyes. I called Wendy from a phone box at Waterloo and said, ‘I know you won’t understand but I’ve got to go. I’m sorry. I do love you.’

‘It’ll break Nanny’s heart,’ Wendy said. ‘It’ll break Mick’s heart.’

Why didn’t Wendy say it would break her heart too? I’d asked myself, as I bought a tube ticket and slipped underground.

Half an hour in London and I feel alive, I’m shaken awake by the sights and sensations I’ve been longing for all my life without even realising how hard I was longing. Everywhere I turn there are b-boys clutching ghetto blasters, black kids in Adidas shell-toes with fat white laces. Stalls selling hair-grease, plantains, yams, 12-inches of LL Cool J and Lisa Lisa tracks. Even the shuddering London buses enchant me. In Fernmere our buses come once every two hours and only go to Hampshire, Surrey or deeper into Sussex. Here the bright red buses appear every second and shoot off to Notting Hill, Oxford Street, Victoria, Peckham . . .

‘How is your mother?’ Aunty Akosua asks.

‘I’ve no idea,’ I say, my voice a monotone.

‘Is she still living in Belsize Park?’

‘I don’t know.’

My mother has kept the promise she made when I was eleven. Aside from the two-minute conversation at Agnes’s wedding, she has had absolutely nothing to do with me. She’s washed her hands of me and moved on. Agnes has followed her lead.

Aunty Akosua gives Effy and me a tenner to spend at McDonald’s. As we munch Big Macs, Effua says, ‘We’ve got nuff catching up to do. Can you stay the night with us?’

I’m staying much longer than that, I think.

I stay at Aunty Akosua’s council flat, on the twelfth floor of a Catford high rise. Weeks drift by. I’m an uninvited but constant presence. Aunty Akosua doesn’t seem to mind me, but she screams all day and night at Effua, criticising her virtually every time she moves or breathes. Effua says she wishes she’d been allowed to stay in Fernmere with Wendy and Mick for ever. She reminisces daily about her time there, about the endless days out to the zoo and to the seaside, the expensive dolls Mick used to buy us. About being allowed to eat candy floss
and
ice cream
and
toffee apple all in the same day. Only white people treat kids that softly, she says.

Aunty Akosua is tough with Effua, but quite gentle with me, offering me advice I didn’t even ask for, stroking my ego with compliments and encouragement. She even says she wishes I was her daughter. My mother, she says, was a ‘classy’ and ‘extremely intelligent’ lady and I’d do well to follow in her footsteps. I’m shocked anyone would have the nerve to suggest such a thing. Wouldn’t following in my mother’s footsteps entail beating people up and constantly letting them down?

‘What do you mean about following in my mother’s footsteps, Aunty?’ I ask warily.

‘Your mother was an accountant, my dear. Why don’t you go into accounting? You’ve got the brilliance. Unlike
her
,’ she adds, jerking her thumb at Effua, who sits there giving us screwface, pretending not to feel her mother’s disappointment.

I hadn’t realised my mother
really
had a proper job. Nanny had told me, often, that my mother’s so-called job in some grand offices up in London was probably just a figment of her imagination.

There’s Effy, Effy’s all-girl crew and me, me the strangely stiff, shaggy-haired girl from the country. I’m relieved that Effua’s friends don’t actually laugh at me. But then they daren’t laugh, because Effua approves of me and Effua, after all, is at the juicy epicentre of all that’s cool around here. You can’t fuck with her.

Jobless and broke and underage, we roam the streets of Catford and Peckham and Brixton, batting ideas back and forth, dreaming up new ways to nick things from shops without getting busted. Effua says I need to do something about the way I talk. So I try to. I try to spice my accent up and at the same time tone it down. Make it lazier and less crisp. Absorb Brixton speech patterns and remember to say
nah
instead of no and
I’m vex
instead of
I’m fed up
.

I continue to sound just like Nanny.

Eventually I relax and just work with what I’ve got. Here, at large in Lambeth, I have a natural edge when it comes to perpetrating petty scams, issuing rubbery cheques and making off without payment. People (checkout girls, store detectives, bank clerks) have higher expectations of someone who sounds like me. They’re likelier to give me the benefit of the doubt. I delight in letting each and every one of them down.

In Morleys and in Boots and the Body Shop, it is me who goes up to the till and asks endless inane questions to distract the checkout girl while the rest of the crew stuff their pockets with the swag. We gloat over our latest spoils in Taneesha’s bedroom in Catford. We sit in a circle, passing around two bottles of Thunderbird. Everyone’s taking it in turns to rap a freestyle verse. Everyone apart from me.

I watch Effua. Her cheekbones looking like they’re constructed out of steel. Skin darker than Bournville chocolate. Hair greased down just right with Ultra Sheen. She spits out a rhyme about a local boy and how there’s no way she’s ever gonna get with him because he’s so
dry
.

I bop my head and quake inside, dreading my turn. Will I have to rap about the sheep and goats and cows in Fernmere? I swig Thunderbird and pass the bottle to Debra. I’m preparing to pretend I that I’m suddenly too mashed up to even speak, so that I can get out of this. But when it’s my turn to rhyme, everyone acts like I’m not really there.

This is how I dreamed life in London would be. It does not occur to me that there may be more involved in being black than tearing around south London, stealing. I am in love. Not in love with a bloke but with this lifestyle I’ve found where we speak our own language made up of Americanisms and phrases plucked from rap verses. Where we listen to hip-hop from a.m. to p.m., and we own twenty pairs of Nikes and Adidas each. And we make believe we have links to New York and talk about hip-hop’s birthplace, the South Bronx, like we’ve been there.

In years to come I will meet many of the men, and women, whose voices and stories, whose poetry, so inspired me and gave me such hope and meaning, such a rich sense of connectedness. Rakim and LL Cool J and MC Lyte and Run DMC and Big Daddy Kane. I will travel to New York to interview them for magazines and I will sit opposite or beside them, pretending to be cool and composed while inside I am silently screaming,
I made it! I did it
!

I still don’t look as fly as my peers and that’s mainly because of my hair, which I don’t have the money to get sorted out just yet. My nickname’s ‘Pickyhead’ – not really a good start. The rest of the girls in our crew wear asymmetrical straightened hairstyles like Salt-N-Pepa’s. I try to keep up. I’ve got the huge rectangular fake gold door-knockers dangling from my ears. And I wear the home-made trousers shaped like MC Hammer’s parachute pants that the b-girls all wear. The ones made from African material scammed from Brixton market that someone’s mum runs up on her sewing machine. Elastic bands looped around the ankles and then the trousers billow out in the wind.

Every boy I bump into at one of Effy’s mates’ houses – or make shy eye contact with in the street – looks almost as dope as Big Daddy Kane or Slick Rick. The boys shine, literally, in white shell suits and glimmering shoulder-padded suits the colour of knife blades. They wear huge thick ropes of gold or fake gold around their necks and the proper bad boys have diamond-encrusted four-finger gold rings that stretch across their hands like precious knuckledusters. The whole vibe is sharp and jagged, right down to their hair which is shorn to grade-one at the back, shaped to a tall tilt in the centre and scored with tramlines at the sides.

The most important emblem of all is a green, yellow, red and black leather pendant strung on a long black chord, bearing an outline of Africa. I buy mine (after an abortive attempt to nick it) from Four Star General on Oxford Street.

The day I slip my Africa pendant around my neck, I feel more disconnected from Africa than I ever have before in my life. As a child my mother constantly droned on about me being Nigerian. Here, in the late eighties, in London, we UK-born Africans wear Africa pendants but don’t truly embrace the message. Speak with an African accent, show any African idiosyncracy at all, and hear your peers hiss ‘shame!’ But I feel black, I think. Whatever that is. According to the group the Jungle Brothers, black is black is black is black.

One day something new stirs within me. Or perhaps it is not something new exactly, but rather an itch, a desire that has lain dormant for a time. I am missing the days in school, when my English teachers lavished me with praise. I’m craving that delicious tingle of smugness I’d feel when a teacher handed me back my homework with an
A
scrawled at the top of the page in red pen. I want to be seen, once again, as the foster-kid who just might have a surprisingly bright future.

To hear Effua tell it, ‘A bitch is selling out.’

My selling out begins with a job interview. I purchase a copy of the
Evening Standard
. I’ve been considering ringing up the editor of the
Standard
and asking him or her for a job as a trainee reporter. I picture myself writing features about hip-hop culture. Before I make the call, a job ad in the back pages of the paper catches my eye. A situation is vacant for an accounts clerk at a travel firm in EC1. Didn’t Aunty Akosua say something about my mother being an accountant?

The company’s called Gulliver’s Travel Agency. At the interview I say, ‘I’ve always been extremely good with figures. I come from a long line of accountants.’