Free Precious by Precious Williams Page A

bedroom door swings open.
    The little room fills with voices and music. A woman in a gold lace wrapper, with her hair done up in a huge melon style, bounces into the room. I smell her yeasty champagne -breath. Barely looking at me or Eddie, the woman snatches up a golden handbag from the floor, reaches inside it and pulls out a lighter.
    Eddie winks at me. He wriggles back into his trousers and drags me through the now open door and into the group of grown-ups who are twirling and sweating in my mother’s parlour. The sweet, thick, oily scent of fried plantains hangs in the stale air of the parlour, mingling with the whiff of hot armpits, hot pepper and Sta Sof Fro spray. Making me want to puke.
    My favourite record is playing. Michael Jackson’s thin voice sails out of my mother’s speakers singing the track ‘I Want You Back’. I’m glad it’s dark. No one can look at me. I feel lumpy in my too-tight new clothes. And I feel I’m overflowing with filth.
    Eddie lowers his eyelids as he moves to the music. He spins around, lifts one knee, sinks almost to the ground, gets up, spins around and touches the Afro comb stuck in the back of his head.
    I move around on the dance floor just enough not to draw attention to myself among the dancing, swirling bodies. I stand opposite Eddie with my long arms held stiffly at my sides, concentrating hard on staying in rhythm with the music as I move one leg behind me and back to the centre and then the other leg behind me and back.
    I steal glances at Eddie. I wonder if the slimy stuff that must lurk inside his willie, the disgusting stuff that I know he wanted to empty out into my hand, will instead leak out inside his orange cords; staining them. Ruining them.
    Eddie stops dancing after a while, looks at me and says, ‘Don’t you know how to dance?’
    ‘I am dancing.’
    He thinks about this and then bursts out laughing ‘Yeah, right,’ says Eddie. ‘Dream on.’
    He touches the Afro comb in his head again and keeps dancing.
    Humiliated, I turn away from him and look at my Aunty Adaeze who is doing a dance my mother calls the ‘funky chicken’ and crooning, ‘Hey, hey’ in time to the music. I envy Aunty Adaeze’s lack of self-consciousness; her obvious joy in her own body. She curls a finger, beckoning me over to her.
    ‘Where’s my Aunty Onyi?’ I ask her. I want to feel Aunty Onyi’s thick brown arms around me, pressing me into her solid motherly flesh and hugging me and never letting me go.
    Then my mother cuts in front of me, swaying gently to the music and carrying a silver container filled to the brim with ice cubes.
    ‘Who let you out?’ she says. And with her bony knee in the small of my back she nudges me towards a row of brand-new dining chairs whose seats are still wrapped in plastic.
    ‘Sit down and stay down,’ she says. ‘And stop dancing like that. It’s an embarrassment.’
    I sit down, as instructed. I watch the party reach a crescendo and then wind down again before my eyes and I sit there through it all, feeling completely distanced from everybody in the room.

Racialism
    WE TURN RIGHT, ONTO Woodview, passing tall red letters, spray-painted across a garage door: WOGS OUT. PAKIS DIE. NF.
    And here I was, thinking I was home now, and safe. I’ve been longing to get home, to disappear inside Nanny’s puffy white arms. And now these words, blood-coloured words. Were they written as a warning specifically to me?
    There has – had – always been a sort of grudging tolerance of me on Woodview, or so I thought. No one – not even the handful of skins on the estate – has ever tried to kick my head in. The worst thing that’s happened was a drunken skin accosting me when I was walking home from Brownies one night with Aunty Wendy. ‘Mind yourself, nigger,’ he snarled.
    Aunty Wendy snarled back, ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, picking on a little girl, you racialist bastard,’ and the skinhead scuttled away without another