Precious (3 page)

Effua is sent to live with Aunty Wendy. A new social worker is dispatched to check up on us.

October 1974: I visited Mrs Taylor for the first time, expecting to find Precious Anita and Effua fostered by Mrs Taylor. However, Mrs Taylor and her daughter, Mrs Travis appear to have (to say the least) unorthodox views as to carrying out regulations. Effua had been moved to Mrs Taylor’s daughter, Mrs Travis. We had not in fact been notified of this change. I did feel that it was rather distressing the way these coloured children were passed about from hand to hand like this.

Effua seems to thrive at Aunty Wendy’s and I delight in my life at Nanny’s, savouring the hugs, the gentle words, the unlimited access to Wagon Wheels. An uneasy alliance between Effua and I gradually softens into a friendship. But we continue to delight in getting one another into trouble with the grown-ups.

‘Guess what, Aunty Wendy.’

We are upstairs on the double-decker back from Bognor when I begin to tug at the waistband of Aunty Wendy’s maxi-skirt.

‘What, love?’

‘At the arcade this afternoon, when you weren’t watching,’ I say, ‘Effua said that I was
black
and that I’ll
stay
black until the day that I die.’

Effua, sitting next to me, lowers her guilty eyes to the floor.

‘Aren’t you going to tell Effy off for calling me black, Aunty Wendy?’

‘What did you call her that for, love?’ says Aunty Wendy. ‘You know
black
isn’t a nice word. Christ, girls, how many times do I have to tell you both? You’re
not
black; you’re little coloured girls.’

Bognor is not far from our town, Fernmere, but unlike Bognor we’ve got no beach, no cinema, no arcade and no Kentucky Fried Chicken – we’ve just got loads of antiques shops and building societies.

Almost everyone in Fernmere is wealthy. But we’re not. Which is why we live on Woodview, the council estate, home to what the rich people call ‘the riff-raff and the gypos’. Some of the posh people are actually afraid to venture ‘up Woodview’ because they think they might not come out alive. Yet to me Woodview is the most magical place in the whole of Fernmere.

The road to Woodview is short and narrow and bursting with greenness. On either side of the road there are blackberry and rose-hip bushes and patches of wild grass dotted with poppies and dandelion clocks. Today the bushes are shadowy and I can’t see the luscious fruit hanging off them; it has grown dark early because it’s pouring down. Rain slams against the pavement, sounding the way a TV does before it’s been tuned to a channel; making me, Wendy and Effy run as if for our lives. Cars skid into and out of the estate, their headlights dimmed and blurred by the sheets of rain.

‘Am I having tea at your house tonight, Aunty Wendy?’ I ask, breathless.

‘Course you are, love,’

‘Yippee!’

We jog past the sign that reads Woodview Way, past the little shop that sells Cornettos and Twix bars and past West Walk, where me and Nanny live. Effua skips ahead, as always, stopping every three or four steps to splash her silly foot in a puddle, turn and giggle for no reason.

The houses we pass are all made of pale peach brick, two storeys high and joined to one another. Everything about them is perfectly square: the windows, the garages, the emerald-green portions of grass on the front lawns.

Well-to-do people, Nanny says, don’t live in little boxes like these: they live in rambling, asymmetrical and sometimes crumbling big houses with names instead of numbers on the door. Nanny grew up in such a house before she lost everything and moved to Woodview. I can think of nothing more frightening than living in a large, meandering old house that might have mice in it, or worse, ghosts.

Aunty Wendy’s back door opens with a squeak and then bangs shut.

Uncle Mick walks into the kitchen and over to the fridge. His corduroy flares hang down at the back and there’s a bunch of keys bigger than my whole hand swinging from his belt loop.

‘Hello,
Presh
,’ he says, smirking.

Uncle Mick is the only person who still refers to my real name, Precious, and he only calls me it when he’s making fun of me. To everyone else in Fernmere I’m Anita, Neety, Nin. To people outside our family, I’m sometimes ‘that little darkie’.

‘All right, Effy?’ Uncle Mick says and then he quickly turns his attention back to me. ‘What the bloody hell do you think you look like in that get up then?’

I’m wearing a pair of red nylon flares that are too short for me with a matching red shirt with the longest collar you’ve ever seen.

‘Just ignore him, Neet,’ says Aunty Wendy. ‘You look lovely.’

I know he’s only joking. Uncle Mick’s always made it clear that I’m his favourite, which is a big part of why I love him so much. I’d like to call him Dad but I can’t, because everyone at school knows he’s not my dad and they’d make fun of me for being such a loser.

One of the things I adore most about Uncle Mick is his huge collection of dusty LPs. The faces on almost all of the covers – Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, the Jackson 5 – are brown like mine.

I’m deep in thought, wondering if Uncle Mick is
really
going to buy me the new Jackson 5 album for my birthday.

‘What’s the matter, little girl?’ he says. ‘Need to go home to your Nanny, do you? Afraid Nanny’s worryin’ about you, are ya?’

Nanny
will
be worrying about me. She’ll be sitting in front of the TV wringing her hands and imagining that all sorts of bad things have happened to me. She hates not having me where she can see me. When I left her this afternoon and she stood in the doorway of our beautiful little house, watching me walk off hand-in-hand with Aunty Wendy, Nanny looked like she wanted to run up the garden path and prise me away from her daughter and take me back inside the house to sit with her all day. Not that Nanny will ever run down a garden path again. She is so full of nerves, so asthmatic and has such poorly legs that it is a great trial for her to walk. So Nanny drives almost everywhere.

When Aunty Wendy walks me back to Nanny’s later, the first thing Nanny will say is: ‘What did Neety eat? Did she have enough to eat?’ and Aunty Wendy will recount every little thing (that she knows about) that I ate.

The second question Nanny will
always
ask is: ‘Did Neety touch anything dirty?’

At this point, Aunty Wendy will lose patience with Nanny. She’ll mutter, ‘Get a grip on yourself, Mum,’ and refuse to answer the question.

Nanny is terrified of germs.

Uncle Mick takes a fat squishy bottle of Tizer out of the fridge as Aunty Wendy glowers at him. He pours some into a glass and then drinks it in one swallow. ‘Bloody lovely that is,’ he says, banging his glass down into the red washing-up bowl.

‘Give me some, give me some, Uncle Mick,’ says Effua, displaying the gap between her teeth.

‘No. Give some to me,’ I say, running up to him and grabbing him round the legs.

Uncle Mick smiles. ‘Plenty of water in the tap, girls,’ he says. He opens the cupboard over the sink, takes out two plastic beakers and fills them both to the top with lovely, bubbly, orange Tizer. He hands us a beaker each. Nanny has said that only people with ‘absolutely no breeding’ drink Tizer. But I gulp it down.

‘Don’t use it all up, Mick,’ Aunty Wendy says. ‘We’ve only got one bottle to last us till I go shopping.’

‘I might use it all up. I might not,’ he says. ‘What do you think, Neeta? Will I or won’t I?’

He takes a hearty swig from the bottle as I watch him admiringly.

‘What we got for tea then, Wendy darling?’ says Uncle Mick.

‘I thought we’d have fish and chips since it’s Saturday. That all right, kids?’

‘Might be, might not be,’ says Uncle Mick, before Effy or I can answer. He’s picking at the wallpaper under the windowsill, where a little bit of it is peeling off.

‘I thought you wouldn’t mind ridin’ your bike down the chippie, my feet are bloody killing me. I don’t feel like walking another step.’

‘It was your idea to get fish and chips, Wendy, so you’d better bloody well walk down there yourself.’

‘Come on, it wouldn’t hurt you, love.’

‘It won’t hurt
you
.’

‘You go, Mick. I’m not even hungry am I? Me and the girls had Kentucky for lunch.’

Uncle Mick suddenly takes Aunty Wendy into his arms. ‘I was only joking wasn’t I?’ he says, pressing his thin pink lips against hers and making a squidgy noise. ‘What’s all that eyeliner muck you got on your eyes then?’

Effua and I stand there, not sure whether to puke or giggle. ‘They’re in love, aren’t they?’ I whisper to Effy who just laughs like an idiot.

Without warning, Effy pinches my arm and skips away. I try to catch her and pinch her back but she is far more nimble than me. She appears behind me and pinches me again, on the back of the arm.

‘I hate you so much I could die, Effy,’ I say.

But I’m fibbing. I love her. Kind of. Grown-ups say we complement each other perfectly, Effy and I. They say that I’m the brains and Effy’s the cheek and that we’re just like real sisters.

And these are my memories of her. Fighting and giggling. Effy creating mischief, me trying to get her into trouble even on the rare occasion when she hasn’t done anything.

And then, on one Saturday that started out just like any other, our sisterhood crashes to a terrifying halt.

‘There’s some coloured lady just pulled up in a big bloody taxi outside,’ Mick says.

‘Stop pulling my leg, Mick,’ Aunty Wendy says.

A car door slams outside.

‘I’m tellin’ you,’ says Uncle Mick. ‘There’s some coloured lady gettin’ out of a big taxi. Come here and have a bloody look out the window then.’

I’m staying the night at Aunty Wendy’s.

As soon as Uncle Mick says the word
coloured
, Effua and I shoot out of her bedroom, where we’d been playing noughts and crosses.

Aunty Wendy’s standing by the front door doing nothing, just looking confused. Finally Uncle Mick opens the door and that’s when I see Effy’s real mother – Aunty Akosua – wriggling out of the taxicab and moving up the garden path like she’s dancing at a disco, her bottom rolling and shaking with every step. I look at Aunty Wendy; Aunty Wendy looks at Uncle Mick. Effua looks at me.

‘Long time,’ says Aunty Akosua. ‘I’ve come for my daughter.’

‘It’s a bit late,’ Aunty Wendy replies shakily. ‘The girls. The girls are about to go to bed.’

‘Ama-Effua,’ says Aunty Akosua. ‘Go an’ pack your things.’

‘Akosua! They’ve got school tomorrow,’ says Aunty Wendy. Her neck’s going pink and her eyes are moving around really fast.

‘Pack your things, Effy-baby, it’s time for you to come home,’ says Aunty Akosua.

‘You can’t just
take
her,’ says Aunty Wendy. ‘Mick, tell her she can’t just take her.’

Uncle Mick says, ‘You’d better come in, I s’pose.’

He closes the door behind her.

Aunty Wendy may have no phone, but news of a coloured foster-girl being snatched travels fast. Within minutes Nanny is at the door, her hair shining bright silver in the moonlight. She dives at me with an astonishing nimbleness and presses me to her until my breath feels trapped inside my chest.

‘Oh, darling,’ Nanny says. ‘Thank God it wasn’t you they took. Darling, are you all right?’

‘I’m fine, thanks, Nanny.’

‘Mr Tucker just rang me up,’ she continues, glaring at Aunty Wendy. ‘Told me a coloured woman’s been here and taken one of the girls with her. I thought someone had taken Anita.’

‘But, Mum!’ says Aunty Wendy. ‘You didn’t have to walk all the way over here. Look at you! You’re all out of breath!’

‘It’s just my nerves, stop making a big fuss, for God’s sake. And anyway, what was I supposed to do, Wendy? Send a carrier pigeon? It’s not my fault you haven’t got a phone. This is the last time I’m letting my Nin come out with you. Never again. Not after this. I’m not having my Nin taken from me.’

Nanny’s blue mac is buttoned up to her neck and it crackles as she hugs me.

She nods at Uncle Mick who is standing behind Aunty Wendy; he inclines his head slightly in her direction.

‘Who’s watching Dad?’ says Aunty Wendy.

‘He’s fine on his own for a few minutes. Being on his own for once is hardly going to kill him.’

Nanny grabs my hand. ‘It’s alright, Nin,’ she says. That’s her
special
name for me: Nin, short for pickanniny. I hate it. It’s dumb. ‘Come along, darling. You’re safe with your old Nanny. Come on, I’m taking you home.’

‘See you later,
Nin
,’ says Uncle Mick, chuckling to himself.

No one seems to be aware that all I am wearing are yellow pyjamas with sunflowers on them and a pair of pink fluffy slippers. I blow a kiss bye-bye to Aunty Wendy and Uncle Mick, and then Nanny and I walk, very slowly, to the end of Acacia Way and down West Walk.