Precious (27 page)

‘You wanna do, you know – thingie? Yeah?’

‘I dunno. I guess so.’

‘OK then,’ says Hassan.

‘OK.’

‘Big girl, innit,’ he says, trying to pull my jeans down. I lay there, unwilling to part with any of my clothes. I’m not necessarily against having sex with him but I hang on tightly to my clothes, too ashamed of my body to want it to be seen naked. Like he said, I
am
a big girl. I’m tall, just over five foot nine now and I weigh nearly eleven stone because I eat at least five packets of crisps a day, not to mention the heaping plates of fried plantains I consume for breakfast and dinner.

I close my eyes. Hassan strokes my face and my hair and fumbles underneath my sweatshirt in search of my breasts. I lose the jeans but keep the sweatshirt on. It’s a blue hooded sweatshirt with the Coca-Cola logo emblazoned across the chest. Nanny bought it for me for my seventeenth birthday and she spent half a week’s pension on it.

I lie still. Clench my jaw. Why is this taking him so long? A year and a half ago the soldier can’t have taken more than three minutes. I was showing a reaction then though; that must have been it. I was screaming and trying to get away and not just lying still like a corpse.

This feels like a trip to the dentist. Being eased back till you’re horizontal. Laying there waiting for the dreaded thing to begin. Teeth gritted. And it’s uncomfortable but not quite as horrid as you’d feared. In the end, it’s over much quicker than you’d imagined it would be.

Later, Hassan provides a commentary on my non-performance. ‘You needed to, you know, open your legs more. Or move around more.’

‘Yeah. Sorry.’

All I keep thinking is:
Hassan didn’t force me
. I made the decision to do it with him. If I’d said no, he’d have respected that and let me go.

So does this mean that from now on I have a say in what happens to my body?

Contraception isn’t discussed. I know that the Pill exists but all I’ve been told about it is that you only need to go on it if you’re a married woman or you’re an unmarried scrubber. I know about Durex, aka ‘rubber johnnies’. Learned about those from an embarrassed Mr Farrell, my Biology teacher at school. The day he tackled the facts of life and showed us slides of wombs and childbirth, the boys sniggered so loudly that nobody could hear much of what was being said.

Not that contraception is really needed in my situation. I’ve
had
sex with Hassan but I’m not going to be having it again. There’s no way I can ever see Hassan anymore because, I mean, what if I go round there and he expects to shag me
again
? It’s nothing personal against him, it’s just that now I’ve finally done it (voluntarily) I find the whole thing, the very idea of sex, unsettling; sort of frightening and frighteningly familiar all at the same time.

Less than three weeks pass before I realise something is very, very wrong. I keep crying for no reason at all. Aromas I adore, like freshly ground coffee and freshly laundered clothes, start to nauseate me. It feels like the weird symptoms I get the week before my period, but exaggerated. Plus my period due date swings by and there’s no period, just more mood swings, more aversion to nice smells and drama-queen tears.

I scrape together the cash to buy a Clearblue kit from Superdrug. Then I ring up Jess at her flatshare.

‘What are you gonna do?’ she says, holding my hand, staring at the plastic testing stick on my dressing table.

I shrug. ‘Nothing, I guess.’

‘So you’re gonna have the baby?’

‘Of
course
not.’

‘So you’re gonna have an abortion then?’

‘Ewww. No. Are you on
crack?
’

I tell myself it makes sense to just pretend this is not really happening. I can simply forget about it, like I’ve forgotten about other scary things, and it will go away all by itself.

One evening, on my way home from work, I bump into Effua at Brixton tube station. She sucks her teeth at me at first but eventually we both crack up laughing and we hug and my secret comes spilling out and I begin to cry.

‘Calm down,’ says Effua. ‘Have the baby, innit? Get on the housing list, get a flat. Then check the next guy.’

Nobody asks me who the father is. I wonder what Jess is thinking. I’ve never in my life had a boyfriend. I’ve shown so little interest in dating that I think some of my Fernmere peers fear I am a lesbian. Or is Jess assuming I’ve had a secret life all these years and that I’ve shagged so many guys that I’ve no idea which one it was?

I spend the first two hours of each working day in the loos puking up. I begin to show up at Gulliver’s later and later in the mornings until, several days later, I am sacked.

I keep picking up the phone and dialling Nanny’s number and when I hear her say, ‘Hello. Hello. Nin, is that you?’ I hang up.

Eventually, I ring Wendy. The words tumble out of my mouth.

‘It’s me. I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch for so long Wendy but I need your help. I think I might need to have an abortion or something.’

‘What are you on about, love?’

‘I’m pregnant, Wendy.’

‘You’re what? Blinkin’ hell, love. Are you all right?’

‘No.’

The next day Wendy arrives with Mick in the Ford Escort.

‘What you wearing then?’ Mick says, grinning and then kissing me on the cheek.

I’m wearing African print genie pants that puff out wildly at the ankles and big Fila trainers. My Africa pendant’s slung around my neck.

Wendy says, ‘You look awful, love.’

I’ve packed my tracksuits, LPs and my twenty-two pairs of trainers into three black bin liners. Mick won’t let me carry anything.

‘Can’t let a pregnant lady exert herself, can we?’ he says, hauling my bin bags into the boot of the car. ‘What you go and get yourself knocked up for then? Bloody idiot.’

Nothing more is said. There’s nothing to say. I turned my nose up at them, turned my back on them and now I’m asking Wendy and Mick for help and I’ve no idea how much help they’re prepared to give me beyond driving me back to Fernmere and depositing me in Nanny’s bungalow.

On the voyage home, Mick zig-zags to the wrong side of the road every now and then just to make Wendy scream and then get cross and go, ‘
Don’t
Mick,’ every time. I watch listlessly through the window as the car careens across the road. I feel ungrateful and afraid and relieved and confused.

We drive into Fernmere. It’s just past twilight and the streets are almost empty. I feel as if I’m being nudged gently into a warm tomb while still alive. There’s a sense of descending, of sinking and it’s making my stomach flutter inside. Then I realise the feeling in my stomach is my baby kicking.

Easy

‘EIGHTEEN WEEKS,’ SAYS THE doctor. ‘It’s not too late.’

I’m lying on my back with my legs spread and my feet high above me in stirrups, trying desperately not to throw up. The doctor’s contempt is palpable, rising from him like toxic vapour as he peers down at me, the latest in a long line of teenaged, unwed mothers-to-be to hail from Woodview.

I feel like a giant slug, lying there and taking it. Listening to other people talk about what I should do and shouldn’t do. Feeling strangely mute, unable to say or even decide what I want. I am eighteen, a woman finally. So why am I skulking around like a young child, craving Nanny and Wendy’s approval like an addict chasing a fix? Why am I waiting for somebody to save me, to take me by the hand or even grab me by the hair, and tell me what to do?

I listen intently to what Wendy and Nanny say. Wendy says it’s my decision what I do about the pregnancy but that she doesn’t see the point in me having the little darling only to have it adopted by strangers.

Nobody seems to want to broach the subject of abortion.

Until, that is, my mother finds out I’m preggers.

The entire time I lived in London, I didn’t look up my mother. I couldn’t anyway as I didn’t have her address. Then, when I am up in London with Jess, meandering along Oxford Street, there’s this black woman hovering outside Selfridges. She’s so lavishly built she could serve as a ship’s figurehead. She clutches bulging Selfridges carrier bags in one hand and waves for a taxi with the other. The woman stares and stares, so intensely that I to avert my curious eyes.

I tug at Jess’s elbow. ‘See that woman there? Why’s she staring at me like that? Oh my God, she’s fucking coming over!’

The woman glides over, hips rolling.

‘Who are you?’ she demands. ‘I know you!’

She has a heavy Nigerian accent, stirring a remembrance deep within me. A memory of my mother and the disparaging words she used to lob at me like darts.

I look at the woman and ask, ‘Who are you?’

‘Aieeeee!’ says the woman. ‘Precious! It’s my little Precious! Look at you! I’m your Aunty Onyi!’

It has been ten years. I have grown substantially taller. Aunty Onyi has grown substantially wider. She draws me into an Anaïs Anaïs-scented hug and then steps back to check me out.

‘Precious, you are looking
fine
,’ Aunty Onyi, eyeing the formidable bust-line jutting through my mac, the only outward indication of my condition.

‘I’m pregnant.’

‘Precious!’ she says. ‘Pregnant? How is that possible? How old are you now?’

‘Old enough.’

Aunty Onyi tells my mother, of course.

My mother rings me up at Nanny’s.

‘How did you become pregnant?’ she screams.

‘I had sex.’

‘If you take that attitude I am going to hang up this phone.’

‘OK. I
apologise
.’

‘I’ll pay for you to have an abortion at a private clinic. You can come to London.’

‘I don’t know what I want to do yet.’

‘Neety! What is going to happen to your life if you don’t get rid of this? I suppose those sick idiots in Fernmere are brainwashing you into keeping it, so they can have another Nigerian baby to add to their collection. Unless you have an abortion, you’re finished. I’ll wash my hands of you.’

Haven’t you already washed your hands of me? I think.

‘I suppose you’re scared of becoming a grandmother,’ I say.

‘I’m already a grandmother. Your sister had a daughter last year.’

Agnes. I ask my mother where my sister is. How old Agnes’s baby is. I ask her for Agnes’s phone number.

‘I don’t have any number,’ my mother claims. ‘But if I do find it, I will give it to you when you come up to London to come to the clinic.’

She hangs up.

‘My mother says I have to have an abortion,’ I tell Wendy and Nanny. I feel almost relieved that a grown-up has finally made a decision for me. ‘Do you think I should have one?’

Nanny says, ‘She’s got some nerve telling you to have an abortion, Nin. What on earth has any of this got to do with that selfish bloody bitch?’

Wendy tells Nanny to calm down and says that if I
do
want to have an abortion, it’s up to me. It’s my body. She’s not comfortable with the idea of it, neither is Mick. But it’s my choice, she says.

When Wendy’s not around to overhear, Nanny whispers anti-abortion rhetoric into my ears. She tells me a story about an aborted foetus that lived through the abortion and was found screaming, mangled and striving to draw breath on the hospital floor.

‘The nurses can’t stand being involved in abortions,’ she says. ‘They think it’s wrong and they’re none too gentle with the girls who go in for it. You can’t really blame them, can you, Neet?’

No, I can’t blame them. I can’t blame anybody but myself. I still don’t know what to do. My GP is more than happy to refer me for an abortion but I am afraid of making a choice. I don’t feel qualified to make such a portentous decision. Who am I to abruptly snuff out a potential life just because I am too stupid and too immature to really know what’s best?

I sit in the armchair opposite Nanny, wondering if Nanny would come and pick me up in her car after the abortion, should I end up having one. Or would that be it? Would Nanny want nothing further to do with me?

Would Wendy come to the hospital with me and sit there smiling bravely while I was spreadeagled with my feet up in stirrups? Would she hold my hand while I was scraped out extra-hard by a disapproving nurse whose eyes told me I deserved every second of pain. I think of blood spurting like a fountain. Of a jelly-like mass of butchered foetus slithering out onto the hospital floor.

Nanny sees me grimace.

‘Someone just walk over your grave, Nin?’ she says.

The weeks tick by. The pregnancy continues by default. I’m too dissociated to fully embrace what’s happening. There isn’t a moment where I say, ‘Nanny, Wendy, I’ve got something to tell you. I’ve decided to have the baby.’

Another day, another doctor. This one smears a sperm-like jelly across my belly. Wendy and Nanny grin down at me, their smiles exaggerated and ghoulish. ‘Look, Neet! Can you see? Look at the screen Neet! Can you see, love?’