Housegirl Page 20

  She walked out of Blackfriars Station. On the streets, vast glass windows repeated the vast glass windows opposite. Shops’ shutters were snapped up. Traffic stagnated. Her phone buzzed with a message from Helena: a demand to know her whereabouts, full of hysterical exclamation marks. Amma’s Converse scurried until she reached the Tate and the Turbine Hall. There, she looked up into echoing, gloomy nothing. A yelped instruction surprised her, rising high over the spiked chatter of schoolkids. Amma moved on, avoiding collisions with bleary tourists too fixated on maps. She felt like she was in a film and her solitude needed underscoring, as annoying couples appeared around her, kissing with a sensuality too intense for half past nine in the morning. She waited by the lift for a few minutes, stabbing at the button, but nothing magicked it up. She trudged up the stairs instead.

  On Level 4, three chatty American women were standing by the installation. Each of them wore a differently coloured version of the same shawl. They discussed what they saw in whispers, putting on and taking off reading glasses to check it and the impenetrable curatorial notes. Amma waited, turning her phone onto vibrate and feigning interest in the other exhibits. That shuffling eagerness and perhaps her unexpected blackness in that whitest of white spaces, eventually startled the women into awkward apologies. They receded so she could take their place.

  There were three other Calders around the building, but this, Antennae with Red and Blue Dots, was the one for her. She took five steps back from where it hung, accidentally thudding into businessmen behind her. She returned her concentration to the floating being, its wiry black limbs and elegant pops of colour, the forms dominating its centre. Shields. Or scales. Or shadows. Amma unzipped her rucksack, threw a Cherry Drop into her mouth, sucked and crunched. She hated to pin it down to anything specific, but possibly the clarity, the quietness of the great eagle-wing of a thing above, was what pleased her so much. The sculpture kept on wavering. Amma heard the attendant in the corner fiddling with the aerial of a walkie-talkie. She wondered what Belinda would make of the Calder, and the questions she would ask about it. Even if Belinda’s instinctive response was a critical one, that wouldn’t stop her trying to get to the bottom of its oddness by asking and asking, testing one possibility and then the next.

  Amma gave herself another gluey Cherry Drop, and sat on a bench next to two men in raincoats doing slow and inaccurate sketches. The attendant leapt up and scolded one of the businessmen for taking photos. A beaming, perhaps six-year-old girl, in a cute combo of Argyle vest, white shirt, festive bow tie and green corduroys entered the room, pushed in a wheelchair by a turbaned man. Amma watched the two of them assess the Calder dispassionately. The sculpture eddied and turned in the breeze. The girl applauded the motion. Again, the attendant twitched, then sat back on his stool. It might have been that or the memory of standing on the balcony at the Ritzy with Belinda, or a deepening, deepening boredom with herself that made Amma get her phone out from her pocket. The girl applauded the shifting Calder again as Amma scrolled through her Contacts.

  * * *

  Belinda wanted to start that Friday morning, the morning of her last mock exam, simply. Kippers – for brain power – bread and milky tea – to soothe after more bad sleeping. Since it was an important day, Belinda would use a matching cup and saucer from the ‘olden days’ set, the ones covered with the dark blue drawings of houses, trees and ships. Her revision flashcards would be spread over the table. Between bites of food she would glance over at those notes and be reassured by the sight of her own big handwriting. After eating, she would double-check the contents of her satchel, particularly the number of ink cartridges. Then make sure her black trousers were ironed well, her collar straight and her new Mary Jane shoes unscuffed. The walk to Abacus would be for last-minute running over memorised quotations and definitions of key literary terms which Mrs Al-Kawthari had drilled and drilled into them.

  After Amma had slammed the door without a word, Nana’s interruption of Belinda’s planned breakfast – Nana’s tapping of Belinda’s behind with a rolled-up Daily Mail, insisting she drive Belinda a clever shortcut, demanding Belinda had better hurry because she wanted to leave in three – set Belinda’s fingers racing. Her satchel’s buckles felt slippery. The bobbly coating of Sure on her armpits failed. In the Fiat, Belinda fixed on the windscreen and its spots, counting and recounting the six buttons running the length of her fitted white shirt. She started going over the best examples of pathetic fallacy in Macbeth, but at Brixton Water Lane had to stop, because Nana was shouting at a cyclist who had appeared from nowhere. Belinda flexed her knuckles.

  ‘Nerves?’ Nana’s laugh didn’t believe itself. Belinda’s knuckles kept on. Peaking. Flattening. ‘Girl, you going to be amazing today, trust me.’ Nana adjusted the mirror, adjusted her lizard brooch, adjusted the mirror.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘From one village girl to the next, that’s my advice to you. Chill-ax.’ The laugh again, this time more like a man’s.

  Belinda reached forward. ‘Shall I play the radio, Nana? You, you sometimes like to listen to that Irish man who is on now. Let me find him.’

  ‘No. I want to talk.’ The sentence was flat. Belinda pinned her shoulders back.

  ‘That is fine. Like, like good chatting will help me calm before my big test. You are probably right. Nice idea.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’

  They turned onto Tulse Hill. The light outside went between yolky and dirty. Belinda wished they could open the windows to get the safe, fresh smell of the dry cleaner’s they passed. A tiny Nigerian woman with a huge yellow headdress dragged her checked trolley over the zebra crossing. Belinda felt guilty at wanting to roll her eyes at how slow the elder was, about how much time she was taking to signal thanks to Nana, raising her walking stick. Nana was patient and still, bending her red lips into a gentle smile at the elder. Other drivers honked. The woman jumped and sped up. Amma would have been rude about it all.

  The car jerked and swung past the massive Allied Carpets and its zigzagged signs shouting prices on the windows. Driving away from the main road, Nana sniffed and cleared her throat. Belinda moved her damp bottom, her sanitary towel feeling three times its real size. The windscreen wipers began to deal with the arriving rain.

  They were finally on Streatham High Road. At least she could watch the stationery shop, the Greggs, the Superdrug, the Lidl, the Boots, the newsagent’s, the one with pictures of houses in the window, the one with the dead furniture on the pavement, the one for the Turkish, the one for the Polish, the one for the Somalis; at least they all meant she could jump out soon.

  Nana clutched the wheel and her pearl bracelet swung as her lips tried out different shapes. Belinda didn’t want Nana to speak but nothing was ever as Belinda wanted. ‘Eighteen years. Before she came. Imagine what I had to. What I endure in that time. What people were thinking about me for nearly two decades? Rotten womb. Evil. Twenty years of feeling, of almost feeling like, like my life was only standing on the edge of a circle. And even a light skin as this can’t save from so much whispering, whispering, whispering.’ Belinda saw a tear. ‘I can’t have my girl forced to stand outside like I had to. Eh? My Amma cannot. This way she is. This thing she has, this thing making her do public scenes to, to shame us and – No one will be able to protect her from – In our culture, we –’ Nana shook her head and drove them away from roadworks.

  ‘Belinda?’ They were pulling over on the corner beside Abacus.

  ‘Do Otuos only know the pronoun “I”? There are several others. You are all stuck on one. Constantly. All this of myself, myself. For one tiny blink of second, have you even had a thought to, like, ask me of my feelings?’ Belinda pushed the knuckles of her right hand into the palm of her left. ‘You know how is been for me having to deal with all of her nonsense and speaking whatever rubbish comes to her mind and her constantly changing and … whatever! Eh? You even know what I’ve had to put up with from her, how I keep trying to make it better and is j
ust getting worse? Eh? You even considering for a moment that is all giving me pains and maybe I’m hurting and you could think on me for a second? Eh?’

  ‘Maame?’

  Belinda opened the glove compartment, took out the Kleenex and threw them at Nana.

  ‘You should blow your nose. You have some mucus on you. Is not nice.’

  ‘What kind of behaviour or voice is this for you to use? Belinda? Wo yare?’

  Belinda undid her seatbelt. She tossed her satchel across her body. She met and held Nana’s gaze. Nana’s chest rose and her mouth kept opening and then closing like fresh tilapia in the market. Then Belinda saw that, on Nana’s lap where it rested, Nana’s phone was brightening, vibrating and doing its ringtone. ‘Walking on Sunshine’. The screen said that the caller was Doctor.

  30

  Later, letting herself into the house, Amma stopped in the doorway to perform an inexpert can-can routine. Rucksack slumped at her side, she kicked out, over and over again. She jiggled her foot, flapping the skirt she had hastily put back on during the train journey home, then kicked more in an effort to get rid of the tenacious leaf stuck to the sole of her shoe. Taking a momentary break from her demanding task, Amma looked up and saw her mother at the end of the hallway.

  ‘Fucking Jesus! Mum!’

  ‘Shh. Not so loud, eh.’

  After the shock had cooled, Amma noticed Nana’s inertia, the strictness of her posture and neutrality of her expression. No briskly brushed colour on her cheeks. Nothing glimmered over her lips. She was handsome, frightening. Amma felt herself frown.

  ‘Fuck, Mum. My heart fucking literally – Like, literally. Shit.’

  ‘Keep. It. Down.’

  ‘Mum, why are you wearing that?’

  Like some prodigious magpie decided to perch on Nana’s scalp, an enormous black headwrap topped her, rising in spikes and indulgent curves. Intimidating black rocks caught the light at her ears and throat. Beneath those, Nana’s dress was a great, iridescently black thing; puffing out at the shoulders, sneaking in at the waist, billowing over hips and thighs, sweeping the ankles. The fabric’s embossed pattern of wavy black lines spread endlessly. Velvety black court shoes squeezed Nana’s feet.

  Amma’s breathing and her heart fought one another. The rucksack began to weigh more but she could not or would not let it go completely. She swung her plaits, pushed her shoulders back and chest forward. Licking the salty, chapped skin on her lower lip, she spoke.

  ‘Why are you wearing that, Mum?’

  ‘Amma. Please. You have to come with me, please. I will tell upstairs, I promise you.’

  ‘Where’s Dad?’

  ‘On his way. From work. He’ll be here soon. Don’t worry on that.’

  Amma looked around her, redundantly. ‘And Be? What about Be?’

  ‘Safe and sound. She sleeps. She needed to. She will come to us soon, when she is ready enough.’ Nana’s voice flattened and softened more with every response. Amma didn’t like it.

  Nana reached her hand out. ‘In meantime come with me first, eh? Upstairs. So when she wakes we can both be in customary fashion. It will be right for her to see, I think. To show our respect.’ Nana took a step closer. ‘I won’t do you full in local attire like me, but maybe I can give you a wrapper skirt, like you had for Ghanafoɔ? Or something nice for the head. And you can add your own black T-shirt, or whatever. You like my design here, innit? I have some offcuts.’

  Nana pointed at herself then extended her hand again. There was an unmistakable urgency in her eyes. The gravity of the costume and the weakness of the pleading had a discernible tug to them. Amma watched her own shaky hands releasing keys, coins and a buzzing phone onto the tiled side table.

  ‘You’re being totally creeps. Totally.’

  ‘Maybe I am. But is a big news so you need to receive it slowly and calmly. All in good time.’

  Amma nudged the rucksack away, walked down the corridor with measured steps and let Nana hold her close. Pressing against each other, huddling into one another as though shielding themselves from unforgiving winds, they stayed that way as they climbed the stairs, going past the photos lining the duck-egg blue walls: the wedding, Dad’s graduation, her own christening and first day at school. Amma at prize-giving days wearing the ugliest spectacles known to man. Amma, flaunting a flute. Amma, aged twelve, immensely spotty, jutting out her hip and doing a peace sign on Labadi Beach. Accomplishment and abandon glowed out of each familiar image. On most days she walked by those awful pictures without thought. Now they pushed her even more firmly into the crook of Mum’s arm until the landing appeared.

  After unlacing herself from that grasp, in her parents’ room, Amma sat on the edge of the bed and waited, unable to ask anything else. Nana complained about her ageing back and unreliable hips before hitching up her long dress. She got down on her knees and unclicked the gaudy clasps of the silver trunk stowed beneath the bay window. The trunk – the stuff of family folklore – had held Mum’s belongings when she first travelled from her village to London in the seventies. Amma knew Mum now used it for storing her most ornate traditional material; expensive fabric bought either from innumerable trips to Peckham Market or – like the freaky akuaba dolls – from trips ‘back home’.

  Amma peered into the opened chest as Nana dug deep and unpacked cloth decorated with all manner of colours and shapes. One with turquoise and gold pyramids was dismissed. Then more, these covered with linear trees and parrots. Nana seemed particularly enamoured with a blue one, stamped with angular white shapes like those mini-windmills kids get from fairs, but it was thrown aside too. The colours of the cloth Mum pulled out became much darker. Black. Brown. Black. Purple. Red with black. Black. Black. Black. Mum stopped churning through the trunk with such speed. When she found one with a pattern similar to the print on her own outfit she stopped.

  After scrabbling up to full height, she clutched the material then flopped it wildly. ‘You see the repeating symbol here on this, eh?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We call it in our language Nyame Nti. N-ya-me N-ti. This is one of the easier Twi phrases, I think. It, it means something like you have to have a trust in God. That we should all put our faith in Him. To see us through all things, even when they so bad, even when they so painful. Yes.’

  Amma did not tut, sigh, kiss her teeth.

  ‘Now you go there to sit, please.’

  Enjoying the simplicity of following direction, Amma moved and waited at Mum’s dressing table.

  ‘Fix your plaits into a bun so is easier for me.’

  Nana stood behind her, holding out the fabric like some terrifying flag. Then, in a purposeful swoop, she brought the material around Amma’s forehead, beginning a process of subduing and sculpting it into stiff waves and peaks. As she continued, tucking errant corners and disciplining looser parts, she explained to Amma what had happened in Ghana earlier that morning, the news Belinda had had to hear. Nana delivered the facts with evenness and resignation, until the fabric was sufficiently manipulated and eventually resembled the crown she herself sported. Amma nodded through it all, being sanguine, being sage, even though it made no sense whatsoever. At the end of the explanation, Mum patted her flourishing masterpiece. Amma slid the chair back. She got up and left the room, not really caring if Mum shouted or tried to stop her.

  Amma knocked on Belinda’s door, her fist beginning with fast bangs but soon losing its certainty. With no response, she turned the knob, its metal cold against her palm. In the stark, ostentatiously tidy room, Amma had expected to find her friend as a small and shivering thing, pulling itself apart, shrieking itself into hoarseness. Instead, Belinda was standing directly beneath the bulb, light gilding her thoughtful profile. With her beautiful head angled up, it seemed to Amma like Belinda was searching for something in the cornicing.

  ‘Hi. I came to see if … I wanted to see how you were and if you needed. Anything.’

  Belinda turned, the rotation slow and deliberate, bef
ore pulling the scrappy hoodie hanging over her shoulders, drawing the stretched arms across her body. Then she seemed to notice Amma’s headwrap. And Amma watched Belinda fight to smile: jerking her pinched mouth, working her cheeks. Belinda worked hard, harder until she showed all of her teeth and then eventually froze like that. The sight of such struggling, with all of its stupid, fierce dignity, made Amma’s hot tears run and run and run.

  31

  Ghana – December

  The taxi smelled of Akpeteshie and bubble-gum. Belinda shifted beneath the car’s low, bashed ceiling. The spongy seats squeaked. Then the engine burped. Belinda flinched and the driver found it funny. Of course everyone would laugh at her: in the small mirror ahead she was a stiff brown puppet, done up in shiny black. A silly, frilly black collar at the neck. Black studs at the ears. Two black hairclips keeping picky braids in place. In the months over in London, had her face changed? That’s how Aunty and Uncle might begin. Aba! So different! We can’t even recognise you! Who is this one?!