Precious (8 page)

‘What’s a stature?’

Aunty Onyi laughs and then says, again, ‘Precious Anita!’

‘Where’s the picture?’ says Aunty Adaeze

‘Go and get the picture,’ says Aunty Onyi

My mother slips into her bedroom and comes back holding a photograph in a gold frame, a photograph that she has shown me before. It’s of a girl with long, dusty-looking brown legs, in a very short white skirt and a white jacket so tight that it looks like her chest will explode. It is my mother as a girl. When she still lived in Africa.

‘See?’ says Aunty Onyi. ‘Your mother was modelling!’

I look at my mother’s image and my eyes linger on her hair, which is straight and shiny and hangs almost to her waist in the photo.

‘That was a wig,’ says Aunty Adaeze.

My mother sucks her teeth and makes no comment.

In the picture, my mother is pouting, just like she is now. I can’t see whether she had the gap between her teeth back then, or not. This must have been her when she was working for the Bank of America. I’m not surprised that a country as glamorous as America would hire somebody like her to represent their bank.

My mother has brought me a new outfit which she hands to me in an Army & Navy carrier bag. The outfit has that new clothes smell: a slight undercurrent of chemicals behind the fresh fabric. I wriggle into it while standing behind my mother, looking over her head into the huge gold mirror on her dressing table. I’m astonished and excited my mother has bought me new gear, but I don’t think she realised how much I’ve grown. My new bell-bottom jeans don’t reach anywhere near my ankles and the pale-pink and shocking-pink striped T-shirt ends above my belly button.

But Mummy Elizabeth doesn’t appear to notice there’s a problem.

‘Turn around,’ she says. ‘Turn back around. It suits you, Nitty!’

She is sitting at her dressing table, flicking a toothpick in between the teeth at the back of her mouth. Tossing the toothpick into the bin, she takes a gulp from a glass with a slice of lemon floating in it.

‘Mama,’ I say hesitantly.

I want to ask her a question but I do not know how to phrase it. I want to ask why sometimes she slaps me and other times she acts like she loves me. And I want to know what I can do to make her always love me and never want to slap me anymore.

‘Yes?’

‘I was just wondering . . .’

‘What?’

‘If you like me.’

She giggles.

‘Strange, strange child,’ my mother says, smiling at my reflection. ‘There’s a juicy fruit lip gloss I bought for you in the bathroom. You can find it in the cabinet above the basin.’

I take that as a ‘yes’ and skip off to the bathroom.

While I’m smearing sweet-tasting grease over my lips and looking in the mirror for a gap between my own front teeth, my mother’s friend Aunty Patience rushes into the bathroom unties the top of her halter-neck flared jumpsuit and peels it down past her thighs. I watch her in the mirror.

‘Hey baby,’ she says. ‘Ooh, I am dying to pee!’

She pulls down her knickers. I glance, horrified, at the forest of black hair growing between her legs and she watches me in the mirror and laughs as I look. I am disgusted. I knew that men had tufts of wiry hair growing around their privates but I didn’t know that women did too.

‘Never seen a grown woman naked before?’ she says, sitting on the loo, a cigarette in her hand, still laughing. ‘Eddie’s here. You two can hang out.’

Aunty Patience’s son, Eddie is stretched out on the bed like a cat in the sun, on top of dozens of leather jackets and fur coats and colourful handbags and shawls. Eddie’s skin’s the colour of milky tea. His big eyes are the green of unripe strawberries. His Afro is bigger than Michael Jackson’s. We’ve never met before but we’re shut into a room together.

Mummy Elizabeth doesn’t like kids running round, getting under grown-ups’ feet, getting up to no good and spoiling grown-ups’ parties. So she tends to shut me in the spare room, along with the coats and handbags. Even when I’m all alone, I don’t mind at all. In fact, I like being told to stay in a room, where I can stand with my ear pressed against the door, eavesdropping, memorising adults’ conversations, searching their handbags.

But today I am not all alone.

I’m all but ignoring the boy here with me though because I feel too shy to make eye contact. I am sitting at a gold-and-cream dressing table with my face so close to a small colour TV that I’m afraid I might end up blind. I pick up an already opened glass bottle, filled with what looks like water. There’s a dead fly floating on its back inside the bottle. I know that it might contain booze and although I’ve never dared drink booze before, I am willing to swig it now in order to impress this Eddie whose eyes I can feel on me.

‘
I’m
not afraid of no fly,’ says Eddie. ‘Give it here. I’ll drink it.’

His voice is low-toned and he lays his words out slooow, like he doesn’t give a shit whether or not you’re going to agree with anything he says.

‘Go on, then,’ I say, offering him the bottle.

‘I was only joking,’ says Eddie. ‘Come over here.’ He pats a space next to him on the bed, on top of a cream fur coat.

We lay side by side in silence, watching telly with the volume turned off. It’s this programme called
The Fosters
and I suppose there’s no need for words. We just drink in the mesmerising sight of so many faces like ours,
brown
faces, on the TV.

After a bit, Eddie says, ‘Do you like my jacket? It cost my dad two hundred quid.’

He’s wearing a chocolate-brown jacket with a long pointed collar and is smells like real leather.

‘I don’t believe you,’ I say.

Secretly, I
do
believe that Eddie’s jacket cost two hundred quid. I am also jealous of the fact that Eddie has a dad, and a dad who buys him cool clothes, no less.

‘How many times have you met your dad?’

‘I see him all the time,’ says Eddie. ‘But my parents are divorced, aren’t they? I live with my mum.’

‘How come you live with your mum?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘How long have you lived with her?’

‘Since I was a baby. My entire life. Everyone lives with their mum, don’t they?’

I’ve never heard of a coloured kid who lived with their real mum for their entire childhood. I didn’t know such a situation could exist.

‘How old are you, then?’ he says.

‘Seven and a half,’ I lie, hoping that the lip gloss my mother gave me to wear at least makes me look seven and a half.

‘You look older than that,’ Eddie says and I watch him looking at the way my bum sticks out behind me, as round as a football in my new too-small jeans. ‘You look eight.’

He is twelve, he says.

‘You know what?’ says Eddie. ‘You’re really pretty.’

It’s like being on a ferris wheel and the ride stopping suddenly, mid-air: my whole world shudders to a delicious halt the very second Eddie calls me pretty. I feel an urge to run to the nearest mirror and gaze at my myself in a new, rose-tinted light. Instead I just blush.

‘Wanna see something?’ he says.

I’m not sure whether I want to see what ever he’s offering to show me, or not; but I can’t just say no. Eddie’s words have control over me now. With one spiteful word he could wipe out the glow he’s planted inside me by calling me pretty, and make me feel ugly again. I’m not sure what, if anything, to do next.

‘Yes or no?’ he asks, yawning.

I feel the way I did when I was learning to dive and I was teetering on the edge of the swimming baths in Haslemere, watching and listening to the older kids who were treading water in the deep-end as they smirked and then chanted at me to ‘Jump! Jump! Jump!’

‘Ok then,’ I say to Eddie. ‘Show me.’

I close my eyes for a second, open them and see Eddie reach into the back of his head and pull out a silver-pronged comb that was completely hidden inside his Afro. At the very end of the comb’s handle is a black hand, clenched into a fist.

‘Wow!’ I say.

‘I’m telling you,’ he says. ‘This comb is righteous.’

‘It is really, really cool.’

‘So what’s happening then, pretty?’ Eddie says, sort of grinning.

I blush and shrug at the same time. I never know how to answer when the trendy kids ask, ‘What’s happening?’

Eddie’s wearing a heavy gold ring on his middle finger with a tiny lion’s head on it. His fingers – softer than I’d imagine a boy’s could ever be – start dancing along the side of my face. I feel the ring, chunky and hard, rubbing against my cheek. Eddie’s mouth is so close to mine that I can nearly taste the cheese and onion crisps on his breath.

‘So what should we do now?’ he says, resting the side of his head in the palm of his hand and breathing the question into my ear.

‘Whatever you want to do. We could play cards.’

‘You wanna see something else?’ he says in that easy voice.

‘OK then.’

Eddie flips onto his side and yawns and stretches, then smiles at me approvingly. He lays his hand on top of my hand which makes it hard to tell where my skin begins and his skin ends.

With his other hand, Eddie eases his orange corduroy flares halfway down over his hips in one long slow movement. Gently, he pushes my hand inside the waistband of his white underpants. I feel a hard, hideous-feeling wriggly lump beneath my fingers.

‘That’s my prick,’ he says.

I know, I think. I know, I know.

There is something deeply wrong with me.

Something ugly in the way I walk, smile, smell, talk, that makes men – and now, boys – want to do certain things. Show me things. Show me their privates. And not just show me their things and then run off, the way I’ve heard flashers do.

The grown-up men who trail after me want to make me dirty and disgusting. They want me to feel and become so dirty that I can’t tell on them, because if I did tell, no one I love would love me anymore.

When I was younger, before I started primary school, my mother had a boyfriend. Denny. He was the first one I can remember. She’d go out shopping and to the hair salon and Denny would babysit me. I’d sit there doing my colouring and he’d play Boney M records and read magazines filled with pictures of ladies.

I still see him. Denny. I see him all the time, especially at night. In my nightmares. Nanny has never understood why I wake up screaming at least once a week. And I’ve never told. I see Denny’s teeth, which are huge. I hear his laugh, which is surprisingly soft, like a sheep bleating or something, the sort of laugh you could wrap yourself up in. He has strange tastes. He likes to slice up cucumbers length-ways and dip them in salt before eating them. He likes to sit me in his lap and lay kisses all the way up and down my arms.

He kept saying, ‘You look just like a little version of your mother.’

‘Feel it then,’ says Eddie. ‘Touch it.’

‘OK then,’ I say. My voice sounds like it’s coming from far away, like it’s not coming from my own body.

I lie on my side, staring bleakly at the bedroom door behind Eddie’s head as he slowly manoeuvres my numb hand up and down and up and down the length of the thing inside his pants. I have not even a shred of willpower.

The feel of Eddie’s prick inside my hand, this rhythmic movement, makes memories of being much younger, much smaller erupt from where I had buried them long ago. Denny, my mother’s old boyfriend, wore these weird jeans that had buttons instead of a zip, which I found strange. When he pulled those jeans down and I saw – for the first time – the horribly wrinkly sacs hanging down against his thighs, everything started fading in and out of focus, like a flickering TV screen.

Fragments of images. A bush of wiry hair smashing against my mouth. Feeling myself choking. Hearing myself spluttering. All this happening in broad daylight right in my mother’s parlour, which meant, despite how disgusting it seemed, it must be normal. Normal, like a baby drinking milk from a bottle or sucking on its dummy, maybe. Normal like Dr Gillies putting one of those little wooden sticks down my throat so he can look at my tonsils. Normal.

I remember a scream caught in my throat like a too-big particle of food. I remember gliding into a dark place where I held my breath and clenched every muscle so fiercely that even my tongue was rigid. Then the little girl they still call Anita shattered into tiny bits and the broken pieces flew into space and nothing much was left of her at all. Except numbness. And nightmares. And the ability to pretend to be OK.

Now I think to myself: I’ll do whatever Eddie asks. But I won’t
do
anything: I’ll let him do whatever
he
wants to do. As long as I keep completely still and just lie here and do not take part in this, and do not think about what is going on, then this is not really happening to me. Not the real me, the precious and untouched part of me I keep protected inside like an unborn baby. My body’s a nasty dish-rag that I can evacuate whenever I want and return to only when I absolutely have to.