Housegirl Read online

  The soft fabric smelled of the expensive creams in Nana’s cabinets. Belinda concentrated on something moving between blades of grass and heard Nana let out a little, thoughtful puff.

  ‘I know, OK? You feel ashame.’

  Belinda’s eyes scooped up. Her voice wavered, ‘Yes. Yes. That is too real. I am ashame.’

  ‘Why? We can all get … get carry away.’

  ‘Carry away?’

  ‘I think … I think yesterday you became too excited with everything, isn’t it? You get sweep up in all of it. I understand. Truly, I’m telling you I understand. Amma is a very … persuasive. She used to getting her way. She, she probably take you off to, to, see a white classmate? Or, no, I bet, I bet you visited to one of these galleries she always goes, to stare at these paintings and things. And is so quiet in those, so this explains is why you cannot call to let us know you are safe. Even though you wanted to, because you care about my feelings and how I worry. For you both. I was so relieve when I get home and see you both sleeping in your rooms. Like two black angels.’

  Belinda let Nana readjust the gown around her shivering frame.

  ‘I am right, eh? Gallery? Is fine. So I was happy to excuse you at Ghanafoɔ. Adjei! Those poor Yeboah twins keeping on asking if they should be a search party. But I didn’t mind. Belinda? OK?’ Belinda felt Nana put a finger beneath her chin and raise it. ‘Did you hear? I didn’t mind.’

  ‘What will be the punishment? I – I will take all, any.’

  ‘Memory Lane! We are in Form 3 again! You want to bend over? To fetch the cane?!’

  ‘Do you have one? Or I can take branch from a –’

  Nana laughed. ‘Esther Rantzen has created a Child Line in this country, you don’t hear? Even though someone should tell the woman they need one for Mum Abuse also, me boa?’

  The light played off her velvety pyjamas, off her skin nearly as pale as the older Huxtable daughter from The Cosby Show. Belinda watched Nana brush aside silliness and gather herself.

  ‘You are a woman. A good woman, Belinda. Women like us? We don’t need for a big person to come and dish out the punishment. We ourselves know our own wrongs and how to fix them. We, we not sitting down: we take the chances to fix when the chances come. Wa te?’

  ‘Aane?’

  ‘Dazzit. We move forward. That’s how to nicen it again.’

  ‘I would like that very much, please.’

  ‘So I have thought about it. How you can redeem it up. But you have to make out to Amma as if is your own plan.’

  ‘Plan. My – plan?’

  ‘Yes. So you start studying in few days. Maybe you tell her you not sure of the route home from this school. You think you will get lost. Or you are frightened to go through Streatham solo. Or whatever good reason you can come up with that’s feeling right for Belinda and seems real as your own. Make it as if you need her and so every day she has to take you from this new Abraham College or whatever, and come with you back here. Every day.’

  ‘Abacus. Abacus College. And, madam, it seem –’

  ‘If you can see her, spend more time … Maybe. Just maybe.’

  Belinda watched the windows of the Otuos’ house flash up in the golden colours breaking through the cloud. Was that a figure moving on the top floor? A dark body definitely turned. Doctor leaving for work? Or, why would Amma be awake and not enjoying one of the last late risings of the summer holiday? Nana focused Belinda again.

  ‘Is this, exactly. This is why she will come to you in time. The gentleness. The little gentle way your eyes are watching. When you look at something or someone, is like your eyes giving them a kindness. And that’s what she needs. That will bring out whatever the sadness truly is in her.’

  ‘Gentle? I never think to call myself as this word before.’

  ‘Yes. You much more … how they put it … refine than me. Not too harsh and big and in the face as me.’ Nana sighed. ‘But can I help it? I am sorry that I cannot. How can I change to become something new now, old like I am, old like Methuselah?’ Nana crossed her arms and tutted. ‘Perhaps when I get to His gates I will get why I have been given so many curses to bear.’

  ‘Please, madam, don’t. A great like you cannot have a badness upon them. I feel is for sure.’

  ‘And I nearly believe you, Belinda. That’s this special power you having. You, you are special, OK? Very special. Sometimes I’m thinking you don’t even see how much good you can do with this special. If you let yourself. Eh?’

  Belinda wanted to believe that, too. As she reached to scratch an earlobe, she was gathered into a hug from all sides. It pulled her up, stood her on tiptoes, tipped her onto Nana’s shoulder. Though its soft force seemed to reduce her to Mary’s size, she didn’t mind. She leant her weight into it and felt Nana lightly roll the water glass over her spine. That was nice too. The skin on Nana’s collarbone was soft, difficult to distinguish from the fabric, somehow like the hydrangea’s petals. Nana purred. In that embrace, Belinda had time; she understood what Nana meant about herself and change. However quickly she had come up with Mary’s Cynthia, it was a struggle for Belinda to think of herself as anything other than she had always been. But the embrace – that closed, opened, and closed again – promised that as Belinda slipped into other ways to find the answer for Amma, when inevitable failure came she would be caught and protected. She had no idea what those other ways might be. But the embrace was sure that eventually she would find the right one.

  Belinda wanted to speak. ‘I need to work as never before.’

  ‘Of course, Belinda. Of course.’

  Belinda lifted her head, looked up. She was certain the curtains up there were shifting.

  * * *

  Amma had been disturbed from sleep, in her room. There was silence, except for familiar voices. She scraped rogue plaits from her forehead and tiptoed along the corridor. Through the lonely sash window on the back wall ahead, she saw Mum and Belinda, down in the garden, surrounded by flowers like doilies. Amma moved closer: Mum’s dressing gown flowed around a stooping Belinda. Amma slumped too, as she thought back to yesterday. It had been wrong to do it to Belinda, sitting in the park and watching the poor girl’s awkwardness rise. She had been cruel; sometimes it was no more complicated than that.

  Amma rested her forehead on the window’s glass as Nana softened her stance in a manner rarely seen. Except when Amma had been younger, and especially on their Sundays: out they’d go, Mum and her, necks tied with identical scarves from M&S. First to Bookends on Coldharbour, where the smelly Afghan hound harrumphed in the corner, and Amma was allowed two picture books, Mum buying herself something with embossed lettering, a swooning damsel and man in breeches on the front. Then through the market and Granville Arcade, her tiny hand still in Mum’s pocket as Mum teased butchers and fishmongers to get the best deals on cow foot, mutton, red snapper.

  Amma’s bitter, early-morning mouth tried to remember the slippery feel of cow foot. And while it did, down in the garden, Mum lunged Belinda into the kind of hug that the Dulwich College boys probably did after sporting success, or even defeat, when only the crush of bodies would do. A large and important part of Amma regretted putting Belinda into a situation where solace from Mum was the best option. An even larger and more powerful part simply felt sad.

  The exposed backs of Amma’s knees caught the cold. She watched Nana rub Belinda’s back.

  Getting an A for an essay was pleasingly straightforward. There were rules to be followed, well-selected places in paragraphs where untaught flair was required. Hiding her feelings in order to turn into the kind of daughter Nana Otuo wanted presented a greater challenge. A daughter accepting of a dressing gown draped over shoulders; one who, as Belinda was then, was happy to be led back into the house by Nana’s arm. Happy to be led, full stop. Amma pulled on the curtain and the rings on the rail overhead strained. She heard the easing of locks.

  Quickly, she padded back to her bedroom, shut the door and pressed her back against it as i
f someone would soon demand to come in. For thirty seconds she stood, readied. But no one would come for or to her. She straightened up like nothing had happened and stepped around oil pastels. She turned on the lamp at her desk and sat. The trinket box occupied the edge of her line of vision, as did the hand mirror. She caught a glimpse of herself: dry skin, masculine sideburns like an Asian girl’s, the gap between front teeth that others would have banished with braces. If she had possessed a better, lovelier face, perhaps all her troubles would have been avoided.

  How weak the pre-caffeinated mind could be! How weak! She grabbed at papers and dumped them over her reflection.

  It had been ages since the Saturday when she had put away all the important things from the Brunswick Manor Gifted and Talented Residential into the trinket box. On that day, it had rained appropriately and persistently. Amma had waited for weeks and weeks to hear anything, anything at all, but there had been no replies to her texts, voice messages. That Saturday, after closing the box with a definite, final click, she promised herself she wouldn’t touch it ever again.

  She had had a good run of nearly five months now, so even if it would blight any chance of enjoying these last sunny days before the start of her A2 year, the pressure in her stomach said she needed to do it. She scrabbled at the bottom of her pen pot, fingering tampons and coins and the condom and stamps and sequins, for the key. Her hand trembled as she opened the lock. She pushed the box away.

  After a moment, she pulled the lid back further and moved the lamp closer. In the box’s first drawer were the smaller items. The ‘Programme of Events’ for the week at Brunswick – long lectures on Ulysses and Medea and Diego Rivera. The paper crunched as she moved it to inspect a feather from a dead pigeon that Amma and Roisin had picked up. Then two Pearlstein nudes Roisin had given to Amma, with interlocking legs. Postcards that, all through Dad’s driving her home on the final day, Amma was certain would fall out, bringing shame and an unconvincing explanation. Roisin. The best of the new names learnt that half-term week at Brunswick. Ro. Sheen. That name, like Amma’s, impossible to forget among the Edwins and Tillys who’d found their way to that boot camp for the brilliant.

  Amma kept sifting through the box’s contents. Travelcards: 13 March 2002. Then the mixtape she had played and played, Mum coming in every evening with the same ‘joking’ instruction that Amma ‘turn down the white music. No – come again, the white noise! Won sere?’ Amma teased the cassette’s silky innards, torn when anger stopped her seeing later regret. The first three on the B-side were the songs she had listened to most: ‘Girl Afraid’, ‘Coo Coo’, ‘Wuthering Heights’. Amma started humming ‘Panic’, tapping the cassette – until the sun splashed over her too much and she came close to something like contentment.

  She gave herself a moment, the cassette limp in her grip now, its ribbon dripping. Though the tape was ruined, the writing remained on the thin white label above the two wheels. ‘All for Amma to Take!’ She flipped it over. On that side: ‘Take the All, Amma!’ So typically Roisin: both odd and oddly profound. Thinking about Roisin’s savage moving of the nib to write those slapdash capitals brought a smile, a smile Amma guessed was less attractive than the one across her mouth when Roisin had held her face under the sycamores. While everyone else slept soundly in Brunswick’s dorms, in darkness Roisin had stared at Amma for what seemed like an hour, before Amma broke the mood with a giggle that soon disappeared, shushed by Roisin plunging her lips at Amma’s neck. Amma shot up from the desk, rocking the trinket box, returned to her bed, threw up the duvet, pulled it back and crouched beneath, like she was praying in the dark.

  The first time they talked at Brunswick was straight after the horrid icebreakers and watery squash. On arrival, all fifteen of the elite specially selected for seven days of ‘prestigious intellectual challenge’ were forced to sit in a circle on the newly varnished parquet floor. They were called upon by the ‘coordinator’ and her dangly earrings to ‘share’, to bleat out vital statistics, a hope for the stimulating week ahead and something ‘quirky’ about themselves. After that embarrassment, Amma – ‘17, SCGS, interested in Toni Morrison and Nella Larsen, can vibrate her irises’ – had left to sit on the cold steps and be anti-social. She wasted time there by pursuing a snail’s shell with her toes. And then Roisin – ‘18, Godolphin & Latymer, headed to New Hall, keen on the workshop about jazz, knew lyrics to most winning Eurovision entries’ – was standing in front of her. Auburnish hair; a nose ring that irritated the surrounding skin and turned it a floral red; black waffle knit, silver rings, hobnails; an academic witch.

  ‘You like to smoke, I think?’ Roisin had said, her tone clipped.

  ‘I do. Sometimes.’

  ‘Let’s, then. Let’s make this one of those, then. Let’s make this a time.’

  Roisin had kicked the snail shell away, sat, and produced the necessaries for rollies. Amma had watched Roisin’s precise handling of paper and grinding of tobacco with an intensity she assumed came from both her own inexpertise at this and from finding a diversion from the grim, gargoyle-greyness of the place. But when Roisin’s tongue darted along the white edge of the paper, Amma was grateful that her skin hid blushes. The perfection of Roisin’s motions did it. The pink of the tongue, the pearl of spit at its end. The pallor of Roisin’s concentrating face. Amma wanted to touch that face, to check its reality. The waving sensation inside Amma as she kept staring was like lying next to Helena during Sleeping Lions at Prep School. During that pre-home-time ritual, a secret peace came each time Amma inhaled and got more of her oldest friend’s almondy odour. Like when their little fingers brushed. But that first encounter with Roisin was much more.

  Amma was frightened by the wringing knowledge that she could never tell anyone about her body’s response. Because Amma knew the unwieldy truth: no one likes a black girl who likes girls. Friends would wriggle: their liberalism tested by something they couldn’t quite get on board with. Mum would die. Ghanafoɔ would explode in a shower of Jollof.

  That first day at Brunswick, on the wet stoop, Amma had been incredibly impressed by herself. First, at her ability to actually animate her mouth to say ‘Thank you’ for the proffered cigarette and to the slate eyes evaluating her. Secondly, at not stroking the long fingers that proffered; fingers whose peatiness, saltiness, Amma had missed for five whole months, but could almost smell then, filling the air beneath the duvet.

  Throwing off the duvet and darkness with it, Amma flipped onto her back, hoisted up her knees and yanked down her knickers. She pressed the heel of her hand hard between her legs at the heat and roughness there. She moved, did the same grinding to the inside of a thigh, then stroked the damp lips, gently, like they were a discovery to her. She rubbed her thumb against her clitoris in tense circles until her breath leapt. She stopped and growled. Her fist thudded into the mattress again and again and again.

  15

  The next Tuesday, Belinda was opposite Streatham Hill Station. The door she stood at was a thin blue one, pressed between a shop where mobiles became ‘unlocked’ and one where trainers and flip-flops were sold from wire baskets. Other people stood outside the door too, with the same printed sheet and concerned expression Belinda had – apart from the hunched black man with an itchy, brown hat squashed on his head. Unlike the rest of them, who were confused, his huffing suggested anger that Abacus Educational Centre lacked a proper sign.

  At the end of a climb up a flight of dark stairs that reminded her of going to Ghanafoɔ a classroom appeared. Everyone scrabbled to find seats and unloaded rucksacks on tiny desks. She looked around: a computer, almost as massive as the ones back home, fat and grumpy on the teacher’s table. An empty bookcase gaped. There were green felt panels on walls studded with gold pins and wads of chewing gum. Small flames of Nana’s encouragement flickered in Belinda’s belly. Minutes passed before a headscarved Somalian woman entered the room and stood at the front with her hands placed together as if in prayer. Her quiet smile undid the scrunchin
g of Belinda’s forehead. The woman turned, showed the class the flowery back of her flowery front. She hummed as she pressed her marker across the board’s streaked whiteness. The letters of her name were given tall, thin limbs. So neat.

  ‘Mrs Al-Kawthari … easy enough, I think – I think – but somehow its fate is to be mispronounced forever … so … let’s try saying it together, shall we? Pronounce it properly and you’ll all get As for your first assignment.’

  Belinda hoped her laugh was polite enough.

  ‘So, so after three … one, two, three? Three? Reluctance. I see, I see. We’ve got to start somewhere, haven’t we, eh? And so…’ the woman jogged on the spot, as though about to launch into a run, her little breasts nudging her shift. ‘… let’s try again. One, two, three…’

  ‘Al-Kawthari.’ Belinda rang out loudest. Her armpits felt sticky.

  ‘Super. Really super start. Some Crayolas and coloured paper are whizzing around now for our first little exercise of the course…’

  School meant sitting up, so Belinda did: straight and proud like she had been taught and as appropriate for a student of her potential. She had always been in positions 1, 2 and 3 when test results were called out back in Adurubaa. There was no imagining being one of those – Anang, Amoako, Saakye – who reliably turned up at the end of Mrs Mensah’s league. Mary would probably have spent her life in the duller ranks of that list too. Although, Belinda admitted – accepting a green, an orange and a blue pen as instructed – not necessarily. Because there were times when Mary was an excellent pupil. Like when it had taken her only a matter of seconds to understand how to fold hospital corners. Or when she had learnt how to remove the candle’s dripped wax from the tablecloth without damaging the fabric forever. Or when they had prepared dinner together on Nana’s first night in Daban.

  In Aunty and Uncle’s vast kitchen, using a tea towel, Belinda had gripped half of an avocado and Mary had observed. With her free hand, Belinda tapped the knife against the pear’s stone and twisted the blade into the surface. Lifting the knife, sure enough, the pit clung to the serrated edge and left behind a clean space in the fruit. Belinda remembered tossing the pit between her palms.