Precious (28 page)

All at once, I am treated as if I’m spun from rare silk. Not only by Wendy and Nanny but also by our neighbours and friends on the estate. Between them, the folks around me get me kitted out, materially, for motherhood. They donate Babygros, a cot and bottle sterilising kits and buy me baby blankets and quilt sets with a generosity that astounds me. My bedroom fills up with Mothercare accessories and I am caught up in a whirlwind of shopping and support and acceptance. Never in my life have I felt so loved and so approved of. Getting knocked-up young is what girls on our estate do. Finally, I fit in.

During the day, we shop for prams and baby baths and cots and Babygros. At night, I have a recurring nightmare where I find myself in the middle of a swamp, sinking. I scream for help and Nanny and Wendy wade in and stand there, holding my hand as we’re all sucked in by the swamp. ‘We are here with you, Neet,’ Wendy says.

‘I won’t ever leave you,’ Nanny says.

I remain sullen and sulky and overwhelmed. Wendy and Nanny make plans on my behalf. There seems to be an unspoken assumption that my baby won’t be wholly mine – he or she will be
ours
. My main role, perhaps, is to be the vessel doing the delivering, bearing the fruit. Wendy suggests I take in a short-term African foster-child for a bit, to learn hands-on how to hold and bathe a baby, how to change nappies and how to mix up formula.

‘Babies aren’t something she’s ever shown an interest in, Mum,’ she says. ‘She’ll have to at least do some of it herself. How’s she gonna cope, Mum? I won’t be able to do
everything
will I?’

Nanny refuses to let me foster any babies. Not in her house. She doesn’t approve of short-term fostering. Why bring a dear little baby in your home, invest time and love in it, only to have to give it up to its own mother as soon as you’ve grown attached?

In July, on the afternoon when the contractions come, I lock myself in the loo and refuse to come out. Nanny tries to reason with me and coax me out. I scream ‘I’m scared, Nanny! I don’t know how to have a baby!’

I hear Nanny shuffling away to pick up the phone and ring Wendy. Then she’s back outside the bathroom door.

‘Darling, Wendy’s said Mick will have to come round and take the bathroom door down if you don’t come out. We’ve got to get you to St Richard’s. Be a big girl, Nin. Open the door.’

I open the door a crack and peer out at Nanny who is smiling gently at me. Sweating, I stagger out towards her.

‘Come here, darling,’ she says, reaching out to me.

I try to fall into her frail arms but my enormous belly bounces against her like a beach ball.

Two and a half hours later, I am a mother.

I open my eyes. Wendy is holding her – my daughter. She has a soft crop of curly black hair, skin the colour of roasted coffee beans and she is looking up at Wendy as though expecting something from her.

‘Isn’t she beautiful!’ says Wendy.

She hands me the baby gingerly, as if afraid I might drop her.

The first thing I say is, ‘Does my mother know she’s here?’

Wendy says yes, that she’s already slipped out and phoned my mother. That my mother had had nothing to say but ‘This is a disgrace.’

My stepfather, Uncle Abejide sent his love, apparently. He wishes me luck.

I name the baby Alice, after Alice Walker.

I hold my minutes-old daughter and feel a magical, infinite store of love glimmer down on me. Like sunbeams warming my skin. Nothing else matters but this moment, this sensation. This feeling lasts for all of two hours. Reality then sets in. Like: Who the fuck am I? Anita Williams, Professional Dropout.

I’ve got ten pounds in my bank account. My academic qualifications are few and far between. I’ve shown no ability, so far, to hold down a nine-to-five job. I can barely think straight, even. No home of my own, of course. My most valuable possessions are my Nike trainers. Actually,
no:
my most valuable, precious possession as of now is this blameless freshly born beautiful baby girl. I feel sorry for her, my brand-new baby girl. I’m ready to collapse on my knees and apologise to her. I can’t even keep house plants alive.

I leave St Richard’s – Nanny picks me up. We go out for tea on the way home and we pretend that this was the future everybody had mapped out for me. That this is my destiny.

I go home to Nanny’s bungalow and we set Alice’s hand-me-down cot up in the corner of my bedroom.

Hassan somehow obtains my address at Nanny’s. He sends a letter, asking me to ring him up straight away. The day after receiving his note, I leave Alice asleep in Nanny’s arms and I go to the phone box and ring Hassan.

‘I heard you had a baby,’ he says.

‘Who did you hear that from?’

‘Did you have a baby or not?’

‘I want to know who said I did.’

‘Either you had a baby, or you didn’t.’

Silence.

‘I need to know if I’m a father or not,’ says Hassan.

The pips go and I don’t bother to put another in ten pence. I let the call disconnect.

I don’t get it. So, yeah, Hassan got me pregnant, but so what? What does that have to do with anything? It doesn’t occur to me that a father might want to see his child.

I’m sure it went down this exact way between my own mother and my father. From what I can fathom, my father heard ‘on the grapevine’ that I’d been born. After his maybe four-month marriage to my mother had already dissolved. My mother wasn’t saying anything and, anyway, she was seeing somebody else by then. My father returned to his native Sierra Leone, never knowing me.

Ten years later Hassan, who I will have been trying to trace for years, writes to me again, at Nanny’s bungalow. By chance I will be visiting Nanny and she will hand me the letter. ‘I need to know whether you had a baby or not,’ he will write. ‘You never reply to my letters, but I pray you are reading this.’ By the time I read those words, I will have developed a greater capacity to behave in a functional way – and Hassan will finally meet and get to know his daughter.

I am not a proper mother. I feel love, confusion and terror in equal measure. I go through the motions and my movements are robotic. I cradle baby Alice, I speak to her softly. But that’s not enough, is it? I’ve even grown proficient at changing nappies – but so what? I feel numb, as if I’m fumbling and swishing around underwater. It’s like motherhood is a language that cannot be translated.

‘What am I supposed to do?’ I ask Wendy, one afternoon.

‘What do you mean,
do?
’ says Wendy.

‘Aren’t I supposed to get a job or go out with my friends or do something?’

‘You
are
doing something,’ says Wendy. ‘You’re a mum now. You’ve got a beautiful little girl to look after and to love you.’

Wendy smiles at me. Or is she smiling at Alice?

August comes and my mother rings to say she’s coming down to Fernmere to ‘take a look at’ my baby. Back in 1982, she vowed never to set foot in Fernmere again unless it was to dance on Nanny’s grave.

But Nanny’s still alive and so my mother will not come to the bungalow her granddaughter and I share with Nanny. We meet on relatively neutral ground – in Wendy’s sitting room. My mother arrives with three of my uncles, and with Uncle Abejide. My new daughter is gorgeous, Uncle Abejide says.

My mother says, ‘Why is the child so dark? How has my beautiful Precious given birth to this Idi Amin lookalike? Is the child’s father one of those black-as-tar Ghanaian men?’

It is like being kicked backwards in time. I look at Wendy, willing Wendy to say something, to stick up for me, to slap my mother around the face or order her to leave. Instead – silence. I hold Alice tight, hoping she has no awareness yet of her grandmother’s knife-like words.

‘Well?’ demands my mother. ‘Who
is
the father? What is going on here? Doesn’t this stupid girl know who made her pregnant? It must be some “Kofi” from Ghana. The child is so dark!’

I ignore her and so does everyone else in the room.

‘I think Alice’s hungry,’ I say to Wendy.

‘Well, feed her then love,’ says Wendy, grinning as goofily as any newly minted grandmother.

‘Feed her!’ my mother repeats.

‘Can I feed her up in your room, Wendy?’ I say

‘Course you can, love.’

Wendy understands my shyness about my body, my reluctance to breastfeed in public. And Wendy’s daughter, Kelly also understands – when we’re out and Alice gets hungry, Kelly shields me with her body and keeps an eye out to make sure no pervy old men are trying to sneak a look at my tits.

‘What is this rubbish?’ my mother says. ‘Feed her here. Feed her!’

Wendy’s adopted son Andrew watches my mother with awe and fear in his eyes, like he’s watching the hard nut on the playground, happy he’s not the target.

My mother chases me up the stairs and into Wendy’s bedroom. Leaning dangerously against Wendy’s wardrobe she says, ‘Well you’ve flushed your future down the toilet now, haven’t you? This is ridiculous and it makes me so angry! How can you become a mother when you’re not even a grown woman?’

‘I am grown! I’m nineteen now.’

‘Exactly,’ my mother says.

Before she leaves, my mother hands me a fat wad of notes ‘for the baby’. I end up frittering away the cash on faddish, foolish baby clothes – a tiny lilac puffa jacket and a pair of baby Nike Air Jordans.

September passes by, humid. I sit in my bedroom cradling Alice, staring into space, sweating, swollen and immobile. On my bedroom floor is a bin liner filled with the day’s dirty nappies. I’ll walk it up to the public rubbish bin outside the shop in a minute. I can’t dispose of too many nappies (or any other rubbish) in our bin because Nanny feels unable to let me handle the bin much any more, in case I forget to wash my hands afterwards and then spread germs around the bungalow.

Wendy says the situation’s not satisfactory; that no doubt I’d qualify for my own council flat, now I’m a single mum. But in order to get one Nanny would have to write to the council saying she didn’t want me living in her bungalow. Then I’d technically be homeless, forcing the authorities to provide housing. Nanny says, ‘Not over my dead body.’

Nanny
does
want me here. The outspoken, rebellious, theiving teen I had become has receded, disappeared even, as far as Nanny’s concerned. I’ve borne redemptive fruit. I’ve brought home a brand-new Nin. Alice, Nanny says, is the ‘living spit’ of me.

Alice is asleep in my arms. Nanny and I are watching
The Bill
.

‘Isn’t our little angel beautiful?’ Nanny says.

She is. Alice has masses of soft black hair now and she can’t seem to stop smiling. And yet, and yet . . . I feel almost afraid of her. It’s as if she is somehow silently accusing me of something. I look at Alice and I remember myself when
I
was a child, when I was a scared little girl. I’m reminded of how unkindly I treated myself, how I hated myself and blamed myself for the bad things that happened to me then. And now, being Alice’s mother seems to be forcing me to confront
me
and my own past and I don’t feel ready to do that yet. Maybe not ever. It’s like the rabid ghost of my childhood is chasing me, and the more time I spend masquerading as a mother, the more I feel compelled to try to run away.

One morning Wendy comes into my bedroom and finds me sitting at my desk, staring at my sleeping baby, crying so hard that my entire face is drenched.

‘You need a break, love. I think you’ve got post-natal depression,’ says Wendy. ‘I’ll take Alice for the day and you get some rest.’

I take Wendy’s advice, and set off for Chichester for the afternoon, alone. When I return several hours later, my eyes are shining with adventure.

‘I’ve decided to go back to college!’ I announce. ‘I start next Monday!

Indeed I’ve convinced the principal who kicked me out of college three years ago to reinstate me. I’ve promised him I’ll be the most impressive A level student the college has ever seen and he’s let me enrol for A levels in English, Film Studies and Law. Alice can come to Chichester with me each day; I’ll entrust her to the college crèche from Monday to Friday. I’ve got it all planned out.

I half expect Wendy and Nanny to dissuade me but then I realise that, perhaps, they are so sick of seeing my morose face that they’ll be relieved to see the back of me.

Wendy says she thinks it’s a great idea. Nanny says she’s proud of me.

‘Alice’s such a tiny baby,’ Wendy says. ‘I wouldn’t feel comfortable with her being carted in to some crèche where the people there don’t know her. How are you gonna manage with her and her buggy on the bus, love?’

‘I’ll manage,’ I say, sounding more confident than I feel.

‘Listen, love,’ says Wendy. ‘I’ll child-mind her during the day for you, while you’re at college.’

‘Really?’ I say. I run up to Wendy and hug her. ‘Thank you!’