Housegirl Read online

  ‘So is that simple, OK?’ she had said.

  ‘Confusionist! Con-fu-sion-ist! Is exact same like what I did, and it never did come loose for me. Is very frustrating, oh.’ Mary threw her arms up.

  ‘But you need to be a little more firm and tight. Else will never work.’

  ‘I was firm and I was tight – I, I want to kill the avocado and Ninja it with my knife.’

  ‘One more, you hear? Then that’s last. We cook for four, not four hundred.’

  Mary skulked to the fruit bowl, bare feet moving wetly. She stretched her neck and arms like Belinda had seen boxers do before the bell. ‘You can’t hide from me, Mister Pipstone. The champion will get her winning and tonight is your nightmare day.’ Mary put her victim on the chopping board, cut, twisted the halves apart and high-fived herself. ‘Hallelujah and hooray – the first of winning.’ It took three more attempts, each time Mary pushing away the guidance of Belinda’s hands. But when she did it herself, Mary produced a tired handkerchief from her pocket and twirled it like a rejoicing elder at a wedding. Mary bent her knees, humped her back, hobbled, strutted around the granite-topped island. Belinda had howled and suddenly Mary wanted the two of them to go to the garden to celebrate with handstands.

  ‘And don’t be a shy or a scared: it doesn’t matter because no one is here to see if the skirt falls a bit and then the knickers show. Only me and you.’

  Now, Belinda nearly giggled to herself as the man next to her with the hat announced to the group that he was called Robert, and he spoke about what he would do after he had achieved this GCSE in English Literature.

  ‘And you’re?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes. Come on. No one bites.’

  ‘I didn’t mention any biting thing.’

  ‘Your name, love?’

  ‘Belinda.’

  ‘Belinda … Belinda…?’

  ‘Otuo.’

  ‘Like the phone?’

  ‘Otuo?’

  ‘0-2-0?’

  ‘Otuo. It means gun, in my language.’

  ‘Crikey.’

  ‘I’m only revealing what it is.’

  ‘That’s … fascinating, Belinda, really. Tell us what language that is then.’

  ‘Twi?’

  ‘Ah. From Ghana. I could tell by the cheeks.’

  Belinda coughed, scratched her central parting, didn’t like the sweetness the pomade left on her fingertips.

  ‘Any other Ghanaians here?’

  The girl two ahead in a denim jacket raised her white hand. Belinda splurted out a surprised noise, then scrabbled to push the noise back. ‘Sorry, I –’

  ‘Nah, ’scool, listen. It ain’t me, course, it’s my first-born. His daddy’s from Ghana. Said ’e’d take me there one day. See Labadi, get Kente. All that. Thing is, he fucked off back, didn’t tell me nothing about where he was. Oh well.’

  ‘That is a very sad tale,’ Belinda heard herself say.

  ‘Nah, ’scool. You just gotta get on with livin’. Get me?’

  ‘Black men!’ a female voice added from the row behind Belinda, ‘and West Africans ones, they are worst, I’m telling! Nigerians, Ghanaians: our men: They behave so up, up, up, and pompous; even if they came here with only two cedis in their pocket and have only add some twenty pounds since their arrival. Every day every day talking themselves up.’

  ‘Seen,’ said the white lady.

  ‘Yes,’ said the black lady behind.

  ‘Let’s not forget names, p–’

  ‘Alice,’ said the white lady.

  ‘Sylvia,’ said the black one.

  ‘I mean, we’re definitely covering some slightly dodgy ground here with our generalisations.’

  ‘But they are not wrong, Miss, are they? And Robel, I am call Robel … I see it all the time. They have no care for women. Women is like things. In my country, women is like goddess. You must look after, protect. You know this, Mrs Al-Kawthari, I bet it, from you own country, right?’

  ‘Hey, this is all about you guys, Robel.’

  ‘Come on, miss, you can’t go on like that,’ Alice started.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘All, like, you ain’t got a view. It’s bait. You blatantly do –’

  Mrs Al-Kawthari wandered down an aisle between tables: ‘You’ve been quiet. Yep, you over there?’

  Like the rest of class, Belinda shifted her attention to this older woman with smoky, creased eyelids and wispy hair held up by fancy gold shields. She pointed at her chest in disbelief.

  ‘Ask grandchildren if Mahdokt quiet. Laugh at you. Tell you I’m never knowing when to stop.’

  ‘We got wisdom to give,’ Alice offered, and Belinda liked that she was trying to make friends.

  ‘Is Mahdokt. My one. Name.’

  ‘Mah-dokt … beautiful … and what does it mean? I bet it means something beau-ti-ful…’

  ‘It is. It means like what I am: daughter of the moon.’

  Belinda wondered if Mary might prefer that to Cynthia. It sounded even more wonderful. Belinda and Mary could practise its pronunciation together carefully, repeating it to each other down the line until they got it exactly right. The thought warmed her all the way through the list of ‘Synonyms for the word “Scary”’ that they had to come up with in pairs, and when they started the difficult first scene of Macbeth. Until her phone vibrated. She knew what the text would remind her to do. No kindness and fun from the teacher pulling excellent monstrous faces for the witch-characters could soften Belinda’s forehead now.

  * * *

  That same afternoon, Amma contemplated the similarities between her surroundings and the set of the ‘… Baby One More Time’ video. In English Lit., watching the clock, Amma listened to each tick, as hollow as every tock, and rapped her pencil against the desk. Worst luck: none of Britney’s backing dancers somersaulted between the desks to provide entertaining respite from ‘the horrors of World War One’.

  ‘So, folks, why might Faulks have used this narrative technique in the extract we’re analysing? Can we all remember what we mean by the term “narrative technique”? Who can remember?’

  To emphasise ideas in desperate need of razzmatazz or to lend important questions greater jeopardy, the little man at the front of the class stretched his hands out, up, to the side. Mr Stevens – although ‘Titch’ was more informative – sat on the edge of his table, kicking his legs like a child on a swing. Each of the fifteen girls under his tutelage were destined for As and Russell Group universities regardless of his efforts. The prospect, the certainty of success, dispirited Amma. She cast a glance around the class. A troupe of patient, medieval princesses in forest green; Rapunzels in a tower. As ever, Helena was doing a much better job at appearing attentive. Her chin was forward, hair arranged over one shoulder just so. Amma pushed lower into the seat and the chair squeaked. Once the resultant glares drifted away from her and back to Titch, Dead Nina With The Spots slid Amma a note from someone. With precision, Amma peeled it open in her lap and a revealed a scrawled cock. The penis had been drawn with exuberance, the shaft generously wide and topped with a pointy Ku Klux Klannish bell-end spraying buoyant droplets. To the left, an arrow as thick as the shaft, indicating the direction of the dick. An explanatory caption, in Helena’s looping script, ‘Titch is a knob’. Amma winked at Helena, who winked back. The note was a funny, silly thing to have done. But Amma immediately thought of Roisin and the rave and then felt terrible. That rave was where, in a sense, Amma had encountered her first, proper cock. She wondered if it would be her last. A Garage rave, early March, in an industrial estate in Battersea, a few weeks after Brunswick. The final time Amma had seen Roisin before the messages stopped coming; no more trenchant texted lines that Amma would copy out and stick on her bedroom walls. They completely stopped, no matter how much Amma tried for a response. Amma worried the grey corner of the novel’s cover as Titch went on and on.

  Roisin had never been to South London, and insisted that they go to a Big Nigh
t she had heard about on some pirate radio station. They both hated Garage, but Roisin was ‘curious’. And she had said that word so wryly that they had both laughed, and it seemed enough to stop Amma’s itch that Roisin’s planned trip was about wanting an ethnographer’s look at how the black half lived; Amma was to be her helpful native guide. The itch was not new. Even after Roisin had first fingered her in the toilets at Brunswick, Roisin had also said something incongruous about how Amma was ‘different from other black people’, and Amma had agreed emptily. But it would have been unfair to press those issues during that conversation when Roisin was bouncing. Amma didn’t want to dull the gleam of future excitements. As Amma agreed to the plan, she did, however, tell Roisin they’d have to be really careful about kissing and touching one another and stuff. Roisin laughed again, this time on her own.

  So they went, dressed authentically for the occasion in slinky Adidas halter-necks and hooped earrings, getting the bus from Clapham Junction with the Travelcards Amma now stored in the trinket box. After freezing in a queue for an hour, they entered the rave and quickly got the gist. Green lasers gridded the smoky air. On the stage MCs who were very cross with their microphones shouted over blippy beats. They said ‘Oh my gosh!’ and ‘Good God!’ which Roisin found particularly amusing. Much of it sounded like speeded-up tongue twisters, like drama warm-ups gone wrong, Roisin had observed. Down on the sticky dancefloor, boys lined the walls of the huge cave. They mimed gunshots at the MCs, whispered into the sides of each other’s hoods, slipped packets up their sleeves, picked their teeth with cocktail sticks. All this and always, always monitoring the pool of girls in the middle of the warehouse who simulated many different kinds of sexual positions. Here, female dipping was so low that frayed hot pants could split. The same squatting girls pulled themselves up from those difficult bends with a kind of grace.

  Sucking on her Breezer, Amma had wanted to say something about how she loved the intelligence of women’s bodies, because it seemed like the kind of thing Roisin might suggest. Amma swallowed the Bacardi harder. While she was gulping, one of the boys decided he had taken a liking to Amma’s bottom so he ground at it with all his strength. The pressure against Amma’s arse became urgent. First there were hands on her hips. And then there was the cock. Crude and blunt, like it had the conviction to tear through her jeans. She had desperately wanted Roisin to come to her rescue and cut the hooded stranger down to size with an exquisite one-liner.

  Sweating, Amma had felt guilty at her revulsion. She was supposed to like this? He a big black man, and she a sexy young sista: this grinding pairing was as the universe should be. She wondered if any chivalrous, protective attempts from Roisin might be correctly understood. The cuss was usually batty boy, but wasn’t batty gyal as easy to shout? There was no telling what else a room full of hundreds of black people – black people not like Amma, not like Amma at all – might do, with lesbians in their midst. If that was even what they were. So Amma wriggled away from the erection with a deft dance move. She sidled up to Roisin and chatted like nothing had happened, like she hadn’t been ignored, like she didn’t mind the strange passivity in Roisin’s open face, at odds with the lights flecking it with colour. They’d finally left, the big and sceptical Nigerian bouncer eyeing the two of them when they staggered out, clutching each other. She felt like that man’s fixed stare carried such meaning. As if he knew. But he couldn’t have known. Could he? That uncomfortable wondering kept Amma silent on the night bus as drunks crooned and Roisin slept on her shoulder, her lips beautifully parted.

  Amma looked down at the frozen soldier on the cover of Birdsong again. She chewed on the pencil’s rubbered end and searched the classroom’s long Victorian windows. She wanted space, silence and a fag.

  ‘A fantastically sensitive response from Natalie there about empathy – I can imagine that’s precisely the kind of anxiety the prose is working out. Yeah. Can we all applaud Natalie’s excellent interpretation there, please?’

  Amma clapped and smacked her knees together under the desk. The acrylic skirt rubbed.

  ‘The bit we all love, then, ladies. Your toils will continue elsewhere.’

  The girls did pantomime groans at Titch; Amma watched him chuckle and write ‘Homework’ on the board. Amma picked up her ‘Homework’ planner. Titch wrote ‘Handouts on Language, Form and Structure’, and, just like that, three coloured sheets of paper appeared on her desk. He shouted a reminder about UCAS references and they all hummed. The buzzer buzzed and green coats, green bags and green folders became alive, as did Amma’s 3310. Even though it wouldn’t be from Roisin, hope still pulsed in her throat. A little envelope flashed on the phone’s tiny screen. She pressed buttons and the envelope flew open.

  ‘Really, Belinda? Really?’

  * * *

  On the other side of the road, by a red Threshers and yellow Pharmacy on Streatham Hill, Belinda watched a van crawl along in a ‘sinister’ way – the word Mrs Al-Kawthari had most liked when they all gave their answers to the first task. The van reminded her of the bubbles for the old shopping women, but was similar to an ambulance too, and was also like a metal beast with orange lights for horns. Sometimes, it bleeped. The van rested on two huge, swirling brushes, swivelling through a fuzzy, watery smoke. The driver looked a serious man, only moved to pull levers that brought more bleeping and watery smoke.

  Amma was too busy ignoring Belinda to ask about it, piling her plaits up and trying to secure them with pencils – which looked dangerous, messy and hard work. Belinda wondered if she might help, but Amma’s jaw and the bite around the pencils she held in her mouth suggested otherwise. Belinda took her Travelcard out of its blue holder. She then put it back into the holder. What was the English? Fighting Fire with Fire. She thought of the tie and the lighter and nearly enjoyed her own pun. Belinda put the holder back into her pocket and beamed at Amma. No response. Belinda took the holder out of her pocket again and ran a fingernail down its central fold.

  ‘Oh bloody hell, stop fidgeting or I’ll take the thing away from you.’

  ‘Sorry, I.’

  ‘Yeahyeah. Sorry.’ Amma said ‘sorry’ like a naughty boy might, then kicked the bus stop’s stand. A young woman tutted and checked the sleeping baby in her pram. The white must think the blacks had gone mad.

  ‘What did I do for this one?’

  ‘How can you not remember how to get home? Fuck! Me, you and Mum talked about it like seven times! I can’t even stand it. It’s so straightforward! This is ridiculous.’

  ‘I … had a mental blanks.’

  ‘And you couldn’t have like, I don’t know, figured it out yourself? What if I’d had other stuff to do … or like, like, somewhere to go, or whatever? Then you’d be fucked, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘You are angry because you had appointment I have inconvenienced? I assumed on school days you are quick quick to come back to Spenser Road straight after lesson to begin the home assignments as soon as you can. What was your appointment, I wonder if I can maybe ask?’

  ‘No. I, I didn’t have anything on today. But, I could have, which is the point. Really important point.’

  ‘I remembered that the whole number had a “3” in it, in some place, but not sure, completely so. I thought is best thing to ask, and for you to collect. Me: I’m never thinking I’m causing such massive commotion commotion. Imagine if I lose myself in this place. What would I do then, eh? Or you prefer it like that?’ Belinda saw Amma’s tension slowly come undone.

  ‘But I don’t get it: why not just ask my mum?’

  ‘I think you shouldn’t pronounce the word as that. Mum. Like is a curse. Be very very grateful for all that you have for a family.’

  ‘I bloody am, I don’t need –’ Amma pulled the straps of her rucksack. ‘I am grateful.’

  She yanked the straps again and the paler bits of her hands were turning red and Belinda worried.

  ‘It will break, stop that.’

  ‘I hate being called spoiled. It’s
the kind of thing she trots out too, like, twist the knife. Mum. All the stuff about her having to walk miles for water and then look at Princess Me.’

  ‘I don’t think of you as a princess. Princesses have a politeness and also a charm.’

  ‘Be!’

  ‘And also I never mention “spoiled”. That’s something you put in there all by yourself. I only ask that you remember what goodness God has given to you.’

  ‘I’ve got lots – you’re absolutely right.’

  ‘Yes. Much more than many others. Much more than me, for one instance. Have you thought on that?’

  ‘Please. Literally, I’m begging you, yeah? I can’t deal with that guilt shit and everything else.’

  ‘And what everything else? What else?’

  ‘Look, just because I’ve got, like, I’m lucky and privileged and all that – and I know it, I know it – it doesn’t mean I can’t wish what I had was better. I mean – Shit.’ Amma placed her left boot on top of her right. ‘Where’s this fucking 133? Note that, Belinda. 1. 3. 3.’

  ‘Thank you … Captain?’

  ‘That’s weird.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose is.’

  ‘I do quite like it though … Captain…’

  Amma smiled and sighed very loudly and the young mother was startled. The woman, who wore a big white coat that reminded Belinda of the man made from tyres, bent down to whisper something at the baby, stroke its chin and then pulled out the pram’s hood.

  ‘One thing I know for sure is this one. Your mum. She is loving you very much.’

  ‘Give me an example, of how you’ve seen that love. I’m not even being mean, like challenging you for the sake of it, or whatever. I might have missed something that you can see better than me. So like, any proof you’ve got would be great. I’m all ears, Be.’

  Belinda gently wrapped her fingers around the back of her neck to ease a knot there. The noisy traffic all came together in one dull drone. The child’s fussing cry and the beast’s beeping were absorbed and lost. The fact that Nana had brought her over from Ghana to London, mostly for Amma’s benefit, mostly in the hope of soothing and fixing Amma was, to Belinda, a big, obvious example of the care that Amma was blind to.