Precious (31 page)

Mick’s parents have helped him invest in a nearly new Ford Sierra. Me, Wendy, Alice, my suitcases, my books, my kettle, stereo, hip-hop LPs and twelve pairs of trainers are packed into the new car. It’s a sunny day but Oxford feels cold. Ghostly grey buildings casting out the sunlight, looming over the street. Traffic seems to dawdle, the cars moving in slow motion, slower than the bikes that weave up and down the streets.

Through the car window there’s the sound of imperious footsteps on a quaint street. The baby girl in my arms is as warm as a little oven. I smell the hair grease I’ve rubbed into her soft puff of hair. Her skin smells of cocoa butter. I rub my face against her face and feel tears not just pricking at my eyelids but welling deep inside me.

When we left Woodview this morning, Nanny’s eyes were blank and red. She sat looking longingly at Alice and at me.

‘You can’t go to Oxford in that horrible old pair of jeans,’ she said finally.

Then she curled a five-pound note into my jeans pocket and said, ‘Here. Buy yourself something decent to wear when you get there. You never know who you might meet.’

While she was talking to me and putting the money in my pocket, I looked at the ground and then out of the window. I couldn’t bear to meet Nanny’s eyes. I had forgotten that I loved her until it was time to go. Before I left, the last words Nanny said were to Wendy. ‘Make sure you don’t let Oxford take my Alice away from me as well. I couldn’t bear it. You make sure you bring at least one of my girls back to me, Wend.’

At Oxford, you have to live in college for the first two years and no children are allowed to live there. I’m not old enough to qualify as a ‘mature student’ and get a flat off-campus.

Wendy has offered to look after Alice during term time, although I’ve no idea how I’ll contribute significantly towards Alice’s keep as Oxford bans undergraduates from having part-time jobs during term-time and encourages us not to work during the holidays either.

Even as Mick’s Ford Sierra hovers along the High Street, inching ominously towards University College, I am not sure that I can go through with being away from Alice for months at a time. I am not sure if there is even any point in getting out of the car.

I speak silently, maybe to God, maybe to myself.

Please don’t make me have to make this decision.

There has to be another way to forge a future for us both. Alice looks so serene in my arms, so sure of me, sure of everyone in this car. We, collectively, are her life. She loves and trusts each one of us. I squeeze her so tight that she looks up into my face questioningly. Will I turn back and become a proper mother to her, or will I become somebody else?

I will become a journalist. I will spend six years working in New York. I will have articles published in the
Daily Telegraph
, the
Financial Times
, the
Evening Standard
,
Elle
. I will find that you can run before you even know how to walk. I will spend years kicking open doors people would swear were shut to me. I will fight, fight, fight. And I will end up crippled, in a way. Never learning how to slow down. How to love. How to
feel
. There is room for only one in my parachute. I am not able to snap out of survival mode, at least not before it’s too late.

I always wanted to be a journalist, but that wasn’t my only goal. I had set out to become a sweeter, saner, more nurturing person than my own mother. For a while I imagined I’d achieved this and then some, simply because I did not beat up, deride or instil fear in my daughter – or in anybody else. I guarded my insecurities, my confusion about motherhood, my guilt, my self-doubt, my self-
hate
and I did not share any of it with anyone. I held absolutely everybody at arm’s length. But I didn’t see that as a problem. At least I wasn’t
hurting
anyone. Or so I told myself.

It didn’t occur to me until I was years older that in withdrawing, in being genial enough but closed, I was in fact inflicting cruelty – I was neglecting those I love and those who love me. I did not see this until I tried to slip into Alice’s shoes. Until I tried to imagine how it must hurt when the woman who brought you into the world, the person who should love you more than anyone, remains indifferent and untouchable. How must that feel? And then I realised that I already knew precisely how that feels and that I had repeated a pattern without meaning to, before I had even come to understand that there
was
a pattern to repeat.

And thus by the time I have grown enough to have at least a vague idea of what being black and being a woman and being a mother might mean, it is too, too late. By the time I am emotionally mature enough and healed enough to step up to the plate and become a mother, my daughter is nearly the age I was when I gave birth to her; and by then she has a new mother. Wendy.

Wendy and Mick will save up, get a Right To Buy from the council, sell their council house and move to a middle-class cul-de-sac across the road from Woodview. Alice will have her own large bedroom there.

‘They are never ever going to give that child back to you,’ my mother will tell me, sounding at once bitter and smug. ‘You’ll never get her back now. This is what they wanted all along.’

I never do take Alice back. At first, Wendy said, ‘I’m just not sure you’re ready yet to be a mum, love.’ And she was not wrong. But years tick by and Wendy and I begin to make excuses for my continuing incapacity: it’s not fair to take Alice away from Fernmere, away from all her friends at the primary school. Away from everything she’s ever known.

So it becomes a sort of slow-drip adoption. Alice gradually becomes Wendy and Mick’s daughter, without any of us sitting down and having a deep conversation about what’s happening. When the four of us are out together, Alice will call Mick ‘Dad’ and when she says ‘Mum!’ both Wendy and I will respond at the same time. Eventually, deciding I’m pointless, I’ll stop showing up for sports days and other outings, leaving Mick and Wendy to take charge and leaving Alice feeling rejected.

In the years to come, Alice and I will reach a point where we only see each other for stilted dinners and occasional weekends away. With her and me, it’s like the umbilical cord was never snipped, but rather left to fester, siphoning poison into our relationship.

One day, Alice will say to me, ‘You make me sick. If I was a mother, I’d never choose a career over my precious child. You write all these articles and never once have you mentioned me in any of them. You disowned me. I think you’ve been a crap mother.’

‘I agree,’ I will say. ‘And I am so, so sorry that I wasn’t a better mother. I just want you to know that it wasn’t because there was anything wrong with
you
– it wasn’t anything you did at all, so please don’t think that. It had to do with some stuff about me, and my past, that you don’t know about.’

‘I don’t care,’ Alice will say. ‘I don’t
care
about what happened to you in your life or what your mother did or didn’t do. That’s got nothing to do with me.’

On my first night at Oxford, fellow students, some of whom will become lifelong friends, want to know a bit about me.

‘Who were those people?’ they ask. ‘That white couple? Who was that gorgeous little baby?’

And I will say, at first, ‘Oh that’s my little girl. Alice. Those are my sort-of parents. They’re looking after my daughter for me while I’m here.’

‘Yeah, right,’ one of them will say. ‘Tell the truth – she’s your kid sister! Are they your adoptive parents?’

‘Yes, I’m adopted,’ I lie. It sounds tidier, more respectable. I’m adopted – and Alice is my baby sister.

I place a framed photo of Alice, wearing a white dress, on the antique desk in my oak-panelled room.

‘She’s
sooo
cute,’ says the man who will become my boyfriend.

And this is the image of Alice I will carry with me. A two-year-old with glowing ebony skin and huge liquid brown eyes that are still soft, still trusting. I shut this image of my baby away inside an imaginary box tucked inside my heart and I truly believe she will remain there, suspended in time until I am ready to mother her.

Mick pulls up outside the porter’s lodge, opens the car door and looks around him.

‘This is the real thing, innit?’ he says. ‘Oxford bleedin’ University.’

The look on Mick’s face reminds me of the expression I’ve seen him sport on the rare occasions he’s required to go to church, for a wedding or a christening. Reluctance and reverence and a flicker of resentment. Mick looks about him warily. He sees old, tall grey buildings everywhere and the one where I’m going is one of the oldest and greyest in the town.

Alice is growing sleepy. I kiss her on the neck.

I have never reached out to somebody and asked them for help and wholeheartedly expected them to give it before. I’ve always assumed people wouldn’t be there for me. But now I reach out to my daughter.
Please Alice
, I tell her silently.
Don’t ever stop loving me
.

There’s a kebab van parked just ahead of Mick’s Sierra.

‘At least you won’t starve or nothing,’ Mick says, nodding approvingly, laughing. ‘Oh I forgot, you don’t eat nothing do you? Bloody weirdo.’

‘I
do
eat now.’

And I
am
eating, finally: I eat two proper meals a day, sometimes three. My weight’s stabilised at nine stone.

‘She don’t want to end up looking as fat as us two, do you Neet?’ says Wendy, shutting the car door with her hip. ‘Don’t wanna end up like us, do you?’

I can’t answer her. There’s so much to say. I
do
want to be like Wendy and Mick, in a way. In fact, I’d like to go back to Fernmere with them. I’d like to climb back into the Ford Sierra and sit there holding Alice as we cruise back to Fernmere.

But isn’t it already too late to go back? Doesn’t Wendy already think that I think I’m better than her? That I am expecting far too much from life; that I’m childishly, stubbornly, refusing to accept my lot? I am pretending to myself that I am leaving Woodview only for the duration of each eight-week term at Oxford. But this isn’t true. Fernmere will never really be my home again. Nanny will go into a nursing home. The bungalow on Woodview she and Alice and I used to live in will be rented to another old lady.

Mick’s apprehensive laugh seems to echo as we approach the Porters’ Lodge.

A grim-faced porter looks at the four of us with open curiosity.

‘Precious Williams,’ I say.

Alice giggles at this because Little Precious is the nickname I occasionally use for her when we’re out on one of our Saturday afternoon trips, eating tea cakes in tea shops in Chichester. ‘Do you want Mummy to get you another tea cake, my little precious,’ I sometimes say, hoping that she will say ‘No, I’m full, Mummy,’ because I have so little money.

‘You all right, love?’ says Wendy, rubbing my arm with hands roughened-up by years of hair-dressing.

‘Calling yourself Precious now, are we?’ says Mick, smirking.

Precious: that is my name. But my foster family will always call me Anita. Doesn’t matter that my birth certificate and my passport say Precious. Wendy, Nanny, Mick – they won’t seem to accept Precious. In months to come, my new Oxford friends will phone me during the holidays.

‘Hi, can I speak to Precious, please?’

Nanny will say, ‘I’ll get Anita for you.’

‘Hi Wendy, it’s me, Precious.’

‘Oh, hello, Anita.’

Precious will be the writer, the grown woman, the adventurer. Anita, in my eyes, was the baby given away, the teenager raped on a toilet floor. Anita is the elephant in the room and while I pretend she doesn’t exist, my foster-family will interact with Anita and
only
with Anita. They don’t understand that I killed Anita off years ago. And I do not understand yet that the me I once was is still waiting for her mother to love her the way she wants to be loved, so that she can love her own daughter the way her daughter needs to be loved. So that she can be present.

The porter is now staring. We are a spectacle.

‘I’m Precious Williams,’ I say again.

The porter nods.

My name is on the list.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Maya Angelou, Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker for opening my eyes; to Nanny for encouraging an early love of the written word; and to Alexandra Pringle, Anna Simpson and the wonderful team at Bloomsbury for encouragement, expertise, patience, support . . . for believing in me and in this book.

Thanks too to Arabella Stein. And with love to my niece. A special thank you to Wendy for opening up to me about my past, enabling me to shine some light into the dark recesses of my childhood.

Finally, writing this book was, at times, a terrifying experience. I’d like to thank everyone who supported me and gave me love and understanding during the writing process.