*
We’re on the bus, sitting there nice and quiet, the bus going along past the shops and people and the dole office when these bad things start to happen that I can’t explain. The seats in front of me, the entire top deck of the bus in fact, keeps rising up. I turn my head to the window expecting that the street at least will be anchored to the earth, but it’s not. The whole street is throwing itself up at my head and heaving about and bending like a high rise in a tornado. The shops are dashing at me, at an angle. The world has turned into a monster. For God’s sake, nothing will keep still, but I’ve made up my mind to have it out. So I tie myself to the seat by my fists and say to Nadia, at least I think I say, ‘You kiss him?’
She looks straight ahead as if she’s been importuned by a beggar. I’m about to be hurled out of the bus, I know. But I go right ahead.
‘Nadia. You did, right? You did.’
‘But it’s not important.’
Wasn’t I right? Can’t I sniff a kiss in the air at a hundred yards?
‘Kissing’s not important?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘It’s not, Nina. It’s just affection. That’s normal. But Howard and I have much to say to each other.’ She seems depressed suddenly. ‘He knows I’m in love with somebody.’
‘I’m not against talking. But it’s possible to talk without r-r-rubbing your tongues against each other’s tonsils.’
‘You have a crude way of putting things,’ she replies, turning sharply to me and rising up to the roof of the bus. ‘It’s a shame you’ll never understand passion.’
I am crude, yeah. And I’m about to be crushed into the corner of the bus by two hundred brown balloons. Oh, sister.
‘Are you feeling sick?’ she says, getting up.
The next thing I know we’re stumbling off the moving bus and I lie down on an unusual piece of damp pavement outside the Albert Hall. The sky swings above me. Nadia’s face hovers over mine like ectoplasm. Then she has her hand flat on my forehead in a doctory way. I give it a good hard slap.
‘Why are you crying?’
If our father could see us now.
‘Your bad behaviour with Howard makes me cry for my ma.’
‘Bad behaviour? Wait till I tell my father –’
‘Our father –’
‘About you.’
‘What will you say?’
‘I’ll tell him you’ve been a prostitute and a drug addict.’
‘Would you say that, Nadia?’
‘No,’ she says, eventually. ‘I suppose not.’
She offers me her hand and I take it.
‘It’s time I went home,’ she says.
‘Me, too,’ I say.
3
It’s not Friday, but Howard comes with us to Heathrow. Nadia flicks through fashion magazines, looking at clothes she won’t be able to buy now. Her pride and dignity today is monstrous. Howard hands me a pile of books and writing pads and about twelve pens.
‘Don’t they have pens over there?’ I say.
‘It’s a Third World country,’ he says. ‘They lack the basic necessities.’
Nadia slaps his arm. ‘Howard, of course we have pens, you stupid idiot!’
‘I was joking,’ he says. ‘They’re for me.’ He tries to stuff them all into the top pocket of his jacket. They spill on the floor. ‘I’m writing something that might interest you all.’
‘Everything you write interests us,’ Nadia says.
‘Not necessarily,’ Ma says.
‘But this is especially … relevant,’ he says.
Ma takes me aside: ‘If you must go, do write, Nina. And don’t tell your father one thing about me!’
Nadia distracts everyone by raising her arms and putting her head back and shouting out in the middle of the airport: ‘No, no, no, I don’t want to go!’
*
My room, this cell, this safe, bare box stuck on the side of my father’s house, has a stone floor and whitewashed walls. It has a single bed, my open suitcase, no wardrobe, no music. Not a frill in the grill. On everything there’s a veil of khaki dust waiting to irritate my nostrils. The window is tiny, just twice the size of my head. So it’s pretty gloomy here. Next door there’s a smaller room with an amateur shower, a sink and a hole in the ground over which you have to get used to squatting if you want to piss and shit.
Despite my moans, all this suits me fine. In fact, I requested this room. At first Dad wanted Nadia and me to share. But here I’m out of everyone’s way, especially my two other half-sisters: Gloomie and Moonie I call them.
I wake up and the air is hot, hot, hot, and the noise and petrol fumes rise around me. I kick into my jeans and pull my Keith Haring T-shirt on. Once, on the King’s Road, two separate people came up to me and said: ‘Is that a Keith Haring T-shirt?’
Outside, the sun wants to burn you up. The light is different too: you can really see things. I put my shades on. These are cool shades. There aren’t many women you see in shades here.
The driver is revving up one of Dad’s three cars outside my room. I open the door of a car and jump in, except that it’s like throwing your arse into a fire, and I jiggle around, the driver laughing, his teeth jutting as if he never saw anything funny before.
‘Drive me,’ I say. ‘Drive me somewhere in all this sunlight. Please. Please.’ I touch him and he pulls away from me. Well, he is rather handsome. ‘These cars don’t need to be revved. Drive!’
He turns the wheel back and forth, pretending to drive and hit the horn. He’s youngish and thin – they all look undernourished here – and he always teases me.
‘You stupid bugger.’
See, ain’t I just getting the knack of speaking to servants? It’s taken me at least a week to erase my natural politeness to the poor.
‘Get going! Get us out of this drive!’
‘No shoes, no shoes, Nina!’ He’s pointing at my feet.
‘No bananas, no pineapples,’ I say. ‘No job for you either, Lulu. You’ll be down the Job Centre if you don’t shift it.’
Off we go then, the few yards to the end of the drive. The guard at the gate waves. I turn to look back and there you are standing on the porch of your house in your pyjamas, face covered with shaving cream, a piece of white sheet wrapped around your head because you’ve just oiled your hair. Your arms are waving not goodbye. Gloomie, my suddenly acquired sister, runs out behind you and shakes her fists, the dogs barking in their cage, the chickens screaming in theirs. Ha, ha.
We drive slowly through the estate on which Dad lives with all the other army and navy and air force people: big houses and big bungalows set back from the road, with sprinklers on the lawn, some with swimming pools, all with guards.
We move out on to the Superhighway, among the painted trucks, gaudier than Chinese dolls, a sparrow among peacocks. What a crappy road and no fun, like driving on the moon. Dad says the builders steal the materials, flog them and then there’s not enough left to finish the road. So they just stop and leave whole stretches incomplete.
The thing about this place is that there’s always something happening. Good or bad it’s a happening place. And I’m thinking this, how cheerful I am and everything, when bouncing along in the opposite direction is a taxi, an old yellow and black Morris Minor stuck together with sellotape. It’s swerving in and out of the traffic very fast until the driver loses it, and the taxi bangs the back of the car in front, glances off another and shoots off across the Superhighway and is coming straight for us. I can see the driver’s face when Lulu finally brakes. Three feet from us the taxi flies into a wall that runs alongside the road. The two men keep travelling, and their heads crushed into their chests pull their bodies through the windscreen and out into the morning air. They look like Christmas puddings.
Lulu accelerates. I grab him and scream at him to stop but we go faster and faster.
‘Damn dead,’ he says, when I’ve finished clawing him. ‘A wild country. This kind of thing happen in England, yes?’
‘Yes, I
suppose so.’
Eventually I persuade him to stop and I get out of the car.
*
I’m alone in the bazaar, handling jewellery and carpets and pots and I’m confused. I know I have to get people presents. Especially Howard the hero who’s paying for this. Ah, there’s just the thing: a cage the size of a big paint tin, with three chickens inside. The owner sees me looking. He jerks a chicken out, decapitates it on a block and holds it up to my face, feathers flying into my hair.
I walk away and dodge a legless brat on a four-wheeled trolley made out of a door, who hurls herself at me and then disappears through an alley and across the sewers. Everywhere the sick and the uncured, and I’m just about ready for lunch when everyone starts running. They’re jumping out of the road and pulling their kids away. There is a tidal wave of activity, generated by three big covered trucks full of soldiers crashing through the bazaar, the men standing still and nonchalant with rifles in the back. I’m half knocked to hell by some prick tossed off a bike. I am tiptoeing my way out along the edge of a fucking sewer, shit lapping against my shoes. I’ve just about had enough of this country, I’m just about to call for South Africa Road, when –
‘Lulu,’ I shout. ‘Lulu.’
‘I take care of you,’ he says. ‘Sorry for touching.’
He takes me back to the car. Fat, black buffalo snort and shift in the mud. I don’t like these animals being everywhere, chickens and dogs and stuff, with sores and bleeding and threats and fear.
‘You know?’ I say. ‘I’m lonely. There’s no one I can talk to. No one to laugh with here, Lulu. And I think they hate me, my family. Does your family hate you?’
*
I stretch and bend and twist in the front garden in T-shirt and shorts. I pull sheets of air into my lungs. I open my eyes a moment and the world amazes me, its brightness. A servant is watching me, peeping round a tree.
‘Hey, peeper!’ I call, and carry on. When I look again, I notice the cook and the sweeper have joined him and they shake and trill.
‘What am I doing?’ I say. ‘Giving a concert?’
In the morning papers I notice that potential wives are advertised as being ‘virtuous and fair-skinned’. Why would I want to be unvirtuous and brown? But I do, I do!
I take a shower in my room and stroll across to the house. I stand outside your room, Dad, where the men always meet in the early evenings. I look through the wire mesh of the screen door and there you are, my father for all these years. And this is what you were doing while I sat in the back of the class at my school in Shepherd’s Bush, pregnant, wondering why you didn’t love me.
In the morning when I’m having my breakfast we meet in the living room by the bar and you ride on your exercise bicycle. You pant and look at me now and again, your stringy body sways and tightens, but you say fuck all. If I speak, you don’t hear. You’re one of those old-fashioned romantic men for whom women aren’t really there unless you decide we are.
Now you lie on your bed and pluck up food with one hand and read an American comic with the other. A servant, a young boy, presses one of those fat vibrating electric instruments you see advertised in the Observer Magazine on to your short legs. You look up and see me. The sight of me angers you. You wave furiously for me to come in. No. Not yet. I walk on.
*
In the women’s area of the house, where visitors rarely visit, Dad’s wife sits sewing.
‘Hello,’ I say. ‘I think I’ll have a piece of sugar cane.’
I want to ask the names of the other pieces of fruit on the table, but Wifey is crabby inside and out, doesn’t speak English and disapproves of me in all languages. She has two servants with her, squatting there watching Indian movies on the video. An old woman who was once, I can see, a screen goddess, now sweeps the floor on her knees with a handful of twigs. Accidentally, sitting there swinging my leg, I touch her back with my foot, leaving a dusty mark on her clothes.
‘Imagine,’ I say to Wifey.
I slip the sugar cane into my mouth. The squirting juice bounces off my taste buds. I gob out the sucked detritus and chuck it in front of the screen goddess’s twigs. You can really enjoy talking to someone who doesn’t understand you.
‘Imagine my dad leaving my ma for you! And you don’t ever leave that seat there. Except once a month you go to the bank to check up on your jewellery.’
Wifey keeps all her possessions on the floor around her. She is definitely mad. But I like the mad here: they just wander around the place with everyone else and no one bothers you and people give you food.
‘You look like a bag lady. D’you know what a bag lady is?’
Moonie comes into the room. She’s obviously heard every word I’ve said. She starts to yell at me. Wifey’s beaky nozzle turns to me with interest now. Something’s happening that’s even more interesting than TV. They want to crush me. I think they like me here for that reason. If you could see, Ma, what they’re doing to me just because you met a man at a dance in the Old Kent Road and his French letter burst as you lay in front of a gas fire with your legs up!
‘You took the car when we had to go out to work!’ yells Moonie. ‘You forced the driver to take you! We had to sack him!’
‘Why sack him?’
‘He’s naughty! Naughty! You said he drives you badly! Nearly killed! You’re always causing trouble, Nina, doing some stupid thing, some very stupid thing!’
Gloomie and Moonie are older than Nadia and me. Both have been married, kicked around by husbands arranged by Dad, and separated. That was their small chance in life. Now they’ve come back to Daddy. Now they’re secretaries. Now they’re blaming me for everything.
‘By the way. Here.’ I reach into my pocket. ‘Take this.’
Moonie’s eyes bulge at my open palm. Her eyes quieten her mouth. She starts fatly towards me. She sways. She comes on. Her hand snatches at the lipstick.
‘Now you’ll be able to come out with me. We’ll go to the Holiday Inn.’
‘Yes, but you’ve been naughty.’ She is distracted by the lipstick. ‘What colour is it?’
‘Can’t you leave her alone for God’s sake? Always picking on her!’ This is Nadia coming into the room after work. She throws herself into a chair. ‘I’m so tired.’ To the servant she says: ‘Bring me some tea.’ At me she smiles. ‘Hello, Nina. Good day? You were doing some exercises, I hear. They rang me at work to tell me.’
‘Yes, Nadia.’
‘Oh, sister, they have such priorities.’
For the others I am ‘cousin’. From the start there’s been embarrassment about how I am to be described. Usually, if it’s Moonie or Gloomie they say: ‘This is our distant cousin from England.’ It amuses me to see my father deal with this. He can’t bring himself to say either ‘cousin’ or ‘daughter’ so he just says Nina and leaves it. But of course everyone knows I am his illegitimate daughter. But Nadia is the real ‘daughter’ here. ‘Nadia is an impressive person,’ my father says, on my first day here, making it clear that I am diminished, the sort with dirt under her nails. Yes, she is clever, soon to be doctor, life-saver. Looking at her now she seems less small than she did in London. I’d say she has enough dignity for the entire government.
‘They tear-gassed the hospital.’
‘Who?’
‘The clever police. Some people were demonstrating outside. The police broke it up. When they chased the demonstrators inside they tear-gassed them! What a day! What a country! I must wash my face.’ She goes out.
‘See, see!’ Moonie trills. ‘She is better than you! Yes, yes, yes!’
‘I expect so. It’s not difficult.’
‘We know she is better than you for certain!’
*
I walk out of all this and into my father’s room. It’s like moving from one play to another. What is happening on this set? The room is perfumed with incense from a green coiled creation which burns outside the doors, causing mosquitoes to drop dead. Advanced telephones connect him to
Paris, Dubai, London. On the video is an American movie. Five youths rape a woman. Father – what do I call him, Dad? – sits on the edge of the bed with his little legs sticking out. The servant teases father’s feet into his socks.
‘You’ll get sunstroke,’ he says, as if he’s known me all my life and has the right to be high-handed. ‘Cavorting naked in the garden.’
‘Naked is it now?’
‘We had to sack the driver, too. Sit down.’
I sit in the row of chairs beside him. It’s like visiting someone in hospital. He lies on his side in his favourite mocking-me-for-sport position.
‘Now –’
The lights go out. The TV goes off. I shut my eyes and laugh. Power cut. Father bounces up and down on the bed. ‘Fuck this motherfucking country!’ The servant rushes for candles and lights them. As it’s Friday I sit here and think of Ma and Howard meeting today for food, talk and sex. I think Howard’s not so bad after all, and even slightly good-looking. He’s never deliberately hurt Ma. He has other women – but that’s only vanity, a weakness, not a crime – and he sees her only on Friday, but he hasn’t undermined her. What more can you expect from men? Ma loves him a lot – from the first moment, she says; she couldn’t help herself. She’s still trusting and open, despite everything.
Never happen to me.
Dad turns to me: ‘What do you do in England for God’s sake?’
‘Nadia has already given you a full report, hasn’t she?’
A full report? For two days I gaped through the window lip-reading desperately as nose to nose, whispering and giggling, eyebrows shooting up, jaws dropping like guillotines, hands rubbing, Father and Nadia conducted my prosecution. The two rotund salt and pepper pots, Moonie and Gloomie, guarded the separate entrances to this room.
‘Yes, but I want the full confession from your mouth.’
He loves to tease. But he is a dangerous person. Tell him something and soon everyone knows about it.
‘Confess to what?’
‘That you just roam around here and there. You do fuck all full time, in other words.’