Precious (5 page)

Nanny began clenching and unclenching her little fists. Mummy Elizabeth told Nanny she’d have to spread the money she received for me between the two of us newfound sisters. Nanny’s face suddenly glowed like one of the fake embers on our electric fire. She kicked at the carpet with her poorly, water-inflated right foot, and then she caved in.

We borrowed Aunty Wendy’s folding bed, cleared my toys into a huge box and set Agnes up in the box room, which was sandwiched between Nanny’s bedroom and the staircase. Later, when Agnes was shut inside the box room, sobbing, Nanny told me she’d rather go bankrupt than have me taken away from her. That the only way I could ever be taken from her was over her dead body.

I asked Nanny, ‘Is Agnes really my sister?’

‘I don’t blinking know, Nin. Her skin’s a lot darker than yours, darling, and she seems ever so African in her ways.’

‘Aggy the nigger lion’ is what the kids at Fernmere Grammar School call this new sister of mine. In Biology, she says, they ask her if her blood comes out black. On the rare occasion that Agnes speaks to me, she pulls me into the tiny box room and fills me in on the ‘racialist’ names she’s been called that day.

‘I bet nobody’s ever called you a Nigger Lion, little miss perfect,’ she says, holding me by the elbow, forcing me to face her so I can’t escape the impact of the words. She sounds almost triumphant, like she’s desperate for me to know, to experience, how much she is suffering.

Nanny says Agnes and I don’t see eye to eye. That Agnes is jealous of me and that it was unfair on Agnes to prise her away from her own people back in Africa, where she lived happily with my mother’s mother and father.

To me, Aggy is the grooviest-looking person I’ve ever seen – that Fernmere has ever seen – apart from on TV. She looks cool, like those coloured girls you see in flares and midriff-baring halter-neck tops, getting on down in the audience on
Top of the Pops
, glistening with sweat and hair-grease.

Despite our hushed conversations in the box room Aggy doesn’t seem to like me much. The first proper conversation we ever had went like this: ‘Look at how you act, Anita! Listen to how you talk! You think you are white!’

‘So what? At least I’m not an African cannibal like you!’

Two years after all this happened, Aggy’s still reluctantly living with us.

‘Run upstairs and see if that sulky bitch Agnes is in her room for me, will you?’ says Nanny.

I tear up the stairs and knock on the door to the box room. I press my ear against the wood. No response. I knock again. Silence. Agnes is very light on her feet and can slip down the stairs and through our front door without being heard; she could be anywhere. I envy her freedom. She may be out eating ice-cream or drinking Pepsi in a café – or, for all we know, she’s smoking fags in the bus shelter.

Or perhaps she’s gone round to Aunty Wendy’s for one of her showers. Agnes goes there nearly every day now because Nanny finds it impossible to let anyone touch her bathroom unless she’s right in there, supervising them. Agnes demands privacy and claims she needs to wash her body every day. She calls the shower a ‘bath’ and she pronounces it ‘batt’. It’s like a ritual. She uses a special bundle of beige fibrous twigs that Mummy Elizabeth gives her, to clean her skin.

‘Aggy’s not in there, Nanny!’ I shout from the landing.

The phone rings downstairs and I tiptoe down to eavesdrop. I hear Nanny speaking in her special phone voice. The very posh voice where it sounds almost like she’s singing; or reading the
Nine O’ Clock News
.

‘Oh, but Lizzy!’ sings Nanny. ‘My Wendy was planning on taking Neety to the Isle of Wight this weekend.’

I am horrified to hear that it’s Mummy Elizabeth. I feel my familiar world collapsing in on me.

‘Nin! It’s your mother on the telephone! Neety – it’s for yoo-hoo!’

Nanny opens the sitting-room door, which nearly smacks me in the face.

‘Good God,’ says Nanny. ‘You almost made me jump out of my skin. What are you hiding behind the door for, my little pickanniny?’

‘I’m not speaking to her,’ I whisper, afraid Mummy Elizabeth might hear me and reach through the phone and get me.

Nanny had told me that my mother was in Africa again. One of her relatives had died. She didn’t tell me which one. It’s been months and months since I’ve seen my mother and I’ve started pretending she doesn’t exist. I told my friend Becky at school that my mother died, that I’m an orphan.

‘Do I
have
to speak to her, Nanny?’

‘Neety, you know you have to speak to your mother. Now stop being silly and take this phone.’

Nanny wipes our phone with kitchen towel smothered with Jif, leaving a powdery residue on the receiver. Gramps is in his wheelchair with his eyes closed. I wish I was him. No one forces him to speak to people he hates on the phone.

‘NITTY? Is that you, Nitty?’ screams Mummy Elizabeth.

Who on earth does she think it is? Of course it’s me. Hearing my mother’s heavily accented voice fills me with dread. I don’t want this weird, unkind, loud, constantly disappearing woman to be my mother. I feel pinpricks of tears forming behind my eyes.

‘It’s me,’ I force myself to say.

‘Nitty!’

‘Yes, mother?’

‘Nitty, darling, it’s your mummy!’

Does she think I’m three years old or something?

‘I’m back in London, Nitty.’

I hate being called Nitty. Why can’t she pronounce it Neety, the way everyone else does? Nitty just makes me think of the nit comb at school and the scalding humiliation I feel when Mrs West, the school nurse, calls my hair ‘woolly’ and complains that she can’t get the nit comb through ‘hair like this’.

‘How are you, darling?’

‘I’m fine, thank you.’ Nanny’s taught me to always say that when someone asks. Regardless of whether I’m fine or not.

Nanny nods now, showing me I’ve said the right thing. She’s standing next to me, rubbing her hands together again and again.

‘Tell your mother you’ve been ill with a nasty cold and a sore throat,’ Nanny instructs.

‘I’ve been ill with a nasty cold and throat,’ I mumble.

‘Oh, sorry, darling! Is your throat still painin’ you?’

‘No.’

‘Tell her it was probably the change in the weather that did it,’ says Nanny.

‘It was the change in the weather that gave me the cold.’ I say dutifully.

‘Tell your mother you’ve nearly grown out of your school uniform.’

‘Tell Nanny to stop telling you what to say,’ says Mummy Elizabeth. ‘Tell Nanny to just shut up.’ She pronounces this ‘shot up’.

‘I can’t. I’m not allowed.’

‘What? Hold on, OK. Your aunty wants to talk to you.’

‘Anita!’ screeches this nameless aunty. ‘Do you know who this is?’

‘No.’

‘This is your Aunty Onyi!’

‘Wow! Hi, Aunty Onyi.’

I had feared Aunty Onyi, my mother’s baby sister, was the relative who’d apparently died in Nigeria last year. Aunty Onyi’s the only coloured grown-up I’ve ever met who I liked. She is giggly, has an American accent and two-inch-long red nails.

‘Anita, we’re having a party tonight and I’d like you to come,’ says Aunty Onyi. ‘We’re celebrating my graduation.’

My mother comes back on the phone. ‘We’ll come and pick you up later, Nitty.’

‘What does graduation mean, mother?’ I ask.

I hear the paper boy drop our
Daily Mirror
through the letterbox. Judy barks loudly.

‘What is that sound?’ says my mother. ‘It sounds like a dog barking.’

‘It’s Judy.’

I see Nanny shaking her head and mouthing the word ‘no’.

‘Give me Nanny,’ says my mother.

I hand Nanny the receiver.

‘It’s not
our
dog,’ Nanny says, smirking. ‘We’re just looking after it, for our next-door neighbours. They’re . . . on holiday. All right, I’ll put Neety back on.’

‘Stupid white people, and these disgusting animals crawling everywhere,’ moans Mother.

‘Sorry, Mother.’

‘It is not your fault, darling. Now, Nitty. Tell me, how is Agnes?’

I shrug.

‘Are you deaf ?’ my mother shouts. ‘I asked you, “how is Agnes?” Give me Nanny again.’

Nanny tells Mother that Aggy’s gone out. Then she says, ‘All right. Yes, all right. Yes, we’ll be expecting you.’

Nanny puts the phone down and hurries into the kitchen to wash her hands. I follow her and hold out my own hands obediently so that she can massage a squirt of Fairy liquid into them and then rinse the germs from the phone safely down the plughole.

‘Your mother told me she wants our Judy destroyed. Arrogant bloody bitch. Thinks she can tell me what to do in my own house.’

I feel light-headed with fear at the thought of my mother breaking into our house in the night and killing Judy. ‘Can I have a Wagon Wheel please Nanny?’ I turn to food, the way I always do when I am afraid.

‘Help yourself to a bit of kitchen towel and use it to open the cabinet and take one. Make sure you don’t get your dirty little mitts all over the inside of my cabinet, Nin, won’t you?’

When I amble back into the kitchen having eaten three Wagon Wheels, Nanny is still washing her hands and she looks deep in thought. I open the kitchen bin to toss in the contaminated piece of kitchen towel.

‘Nin, don’t you dare touch the lid of that bin with your hands!’

‘Are we going to be allowed to keep Judy?’ My voice comes out high and thin like Donna Summers’.

‘I don’t know, Nin. I don’t know.’

Nanny sends me to my room to write a short story to read out to her after our tea. ‘You know how I love to hear your stories,’ she says.

I will write a story about my mother, designed to make Nanny and Gramps laugh – or shudder.

I sit at my dressing table with a blank writing pad in front of me, staring at my reflection in the three-way mirror. I’m shocked once again at how ugly I look. My lips are as fat as satsuma slices and my nose so flat it looks like I got hit with a hammer.

I look away in disgust and gaze instead at the state of my room. Nanny’s going to go spare when she sees it. She boasts constantly about how neat and tidy I am. My shiny pink eiderdown is draped across the floor, where I left it after I used it earlier as a cloak when I dressed up and pretended to be a queen. There are piles of books all around my bed.
101 Dalmations
.
James and the Giant Peach
. A Collins Gem dictionary. Nanny’s BT phone book.
Little Red Riding Hood
.
Grimm’s Illustrated Fairy Tales
.

‘Once upon a time . . .’ I write in my exercise book. ‘There was a lady called Lizzy who was . . .’

Who was what? I don’t know anything much about my mother, do I?

I close my eyes and think of all the stories inside my huge stash of overdue library books. I picture my mother as Cruella de Vil and I see her parading into our sitting room, lips shining with the blood of freshly killed cairn terrier puppies.

And then I hear a whoosh of crackly music, coming from the box room.

I sprint along the hall and rap on the door again and again. No answer. I turn the handle and peer in to the semi-darkness of an un-aired room. There’s a smell of singed hair and Charlie perfume.

‘Excuse me, madam,’ I say, copying words I’ve heard Nanny use. ‘But would you mind terribly turning this racket down? You’re ruining my short story.’

‘Come here, you cheeky little monkey,’ says Agnes. She drags me by the arm further into the darkness. Her curtains are shut as usual, just as they are all day and all night.

‘Why did you pretend to not be in just now?’ I say.

Agnes ignores my question and sits me down on the bed and stands in front of me, hands on hips. She’s wearing a white polo neck and bell-bottom jeans that make her thighs look massive. Her hair is in the umbrella style. She flips a 7-inch on to her dusty jumble-sale record player and a man begins singing ‘Love Me Tender’ in a horrid slow-motion voice and she begins to dance, slowly swaying her round hips and slim shoulders. She clicks her fingers right in my face and laughs.

We don’t know exactly how old Agnes really is (Mummy Elizabeth’s given us two completely different years of birth for her) but she’s definitely in her teens and
should
be studying hard for her CSEs. Instead she puts all her energy into disco dancing and has become the most accomplished dancer in the whole of Fernmere.

I’d love Agnes to teach me to disco dance, but even if she wanted to, there’s no room for two of us to dance at the same time in the box room. My own bedroom’s big enough for us to practise in together but Agnes’s not allowed in my room. Nanny says she’s got orders from Mummy Elizabeth that too much ‘mixing’ with Agnes is banned because it might taint the way I speak and make me sound African. After all, what would be the point of giving your daughter the advantage of speaking and acting white if only to have it all undermined and Africanised? Later my mother will claim it was Nanny who had banned Agnes from my bedroom for fear of me becoming ‘a full-blown African’.