Wild Tiger

‘Honour thy mother and thy father so thy days may be long!’

 

On Ash Wednesday, when I was getting ready for school, my dad shouted at me so loudly it hurt my ears. I tried to remember which words I shouldn’t have said but he was already charging across the living room towards me and there wasn’t enough time. I just heard ringing in my ears after that.

My dad used to iron my school uniform, but now that I am nine years old and ‘in-so-lent’, he says I can do it myself. Sol is not ‘in-so-lent’, so my dad still irons his uniform, even though Sol is in Year 6. When he wakes up, Sol just has to brush his teeth and wash his face and cream himself with cocoa butter. My dad hangs Sol’s uniform on a hanger so it doesn’t crease. Sometimes I have to wait for him to finish ironing Sol’s uniform before I can do mine. I like the hissing noise the iron makes when you pour water through its nose and it makes hot clouds. If I take too long, I will make everyone late and my dad will leave me at home, boolu. If I go too fast, the iron could burn me. It burnt me once on my wrist and made my skin sizzle, like when my mum puts bacon in the frying pan.

When I was three years old, my dad lifted me onto his shoulders and I almost touched the sky. That is the first thing I remember about being alive. We had to write about it at school: My First Memory.

 

In six steps: slow fast slow, the sky is brown. My dad’s fists take turns to punch my head. My mouth is screaming. The words I scream are not the words a Ghanaian child should say to her father. I must be ‘craze’, my dad tells me. Boolu! I close my eyes and imagine that he is playing the bongo drums with his fists. My dad plays the drums all over my body because I can’t keep still. I wriggle the parts of my body that are free and dance to the rhythm of the beat. I hope that one day in hymn practice, Mr Hill will let us sing ‘Tears on My Pillow’ from Grease.

The percussion only stops when my mum runs into the living room with toothpaste around her mouth. Her tears rinse the toothpaste from her lips and make a white waterfall down her chin. My mum asks my dad to stop beating me because I have to go to school. I don’t even know where Sol is. I am dancing on the carpet on my side when my mum says, ‘Please, please, please stop beating her.’ I pretend that I am at the school dance at Rydell High. I hope Kenickie will dance with me – or Danny, I don’t mind. Nothing even hurts.

‘Okay. We will continue when you are back from school,’ my dad says.

 

In the car, Sol is quiet. He doesn’t try to make me believe there is bird poo in my hair or a spider on my back. He doesn’t even talk to my dad about Crystal Palace or Pelé, the greatest footballer of all time. I am happy that the Ghanaian radio station is crackling and that the DJ is laughing loudly at his own jokes again. My eyes are stinging but I don’t want my blinking to make a sound. If I look in the rear-view mirror, I think they will be almost swollen shut, but I don’t want to look, in case I see my dad.

When I see Miss Wilks in the playground, everything starts to hurt. My eyes are blinking really fast. I can hear them in my ears.

‘What’s the matter, sweetheart?’

When she cuddles me, I shake like Sandy’s pompoms.

In class, I don’t put my hand up to answer Miss Wilks’s questions because ants are crawling all over me and they won’t let me think. I don’t know whether the ants are inside my head or on top of my head, or both. When I touch my head to make them stop, my arm is sore and tired. It’s even hard to do my best handwriting. My mum says that black children don’t get nits but she didn’t say if they can get ants. I want to ask Miss Wilks if she will save me, but if my dad finds out, he will be like a wild tiger that has escaped from the zoo. I think he will chase me until I can’t breathe, and my legs stop working. Strangers are not your family, so you have to be careful what you tell them.

At the end of the day, I want to go to Miss Wilks’s house, but I can see my dad’s car from the school gates. He is waiting.

 

In the car, I am still and quiet. Sol is looking through the X-Men cards that he traded with Theo at playtime. My dad asks Sol about his day. Sol says his day was good because he had chicken nuggets and chips with ketchup for lunch and he played football with Theo at break time. I accidentally look at my dad in the mirror. He is staring at me. My eyes are starting to sting again. I am really tired but I am also wide awake. I look at my shoes so that my dad will stop staring at me. I don’t know if it is working. I hope that my mum will be home from work before us.

The handbrake makes a cracking sound when my dad parks the car. I think he has broken it. My mum drives a silver Toyota car. There are four silver cars on our road but none of them is hers. I look up and down three times to check. My mum is not home. And there is no wood to touch in the car. I make the sign of the cross three times and blink so hard that I can see Jupiter and Mars and Pluto behind my eyelids when I say ‘Amen’. I ask God to please let my mum come home before my dad locks the car. He takes out his door keys but she is still not home. When I get to the front door my legs feel like jelly.

If I wash the dishes really quietly, my dad might forget what he said in the morning. My dad can’t wash dishes because he is tired when he comes home from work, so he needs to relax and watch TV. Washing dishes isn’t his job anyway. I open the hot tap and let the water run before I fill the bowl. It feels better when I make the water really hot, like it’s from the kettle. It makes the shaking move from my head to my hands. I put lots of Fairy Liquid in the bowl to make bubbles. If you look closely, you can see tiny rainbows inside them. When I hear my dad come into the kitchen, my tummy turns upside down. The ants are back. There are hundreds of them.

 

‘Do you know that you are in-so-lent?’

I don’t know what ‘in-so-lent’ means. I should have asked Miss Wilks or looked in the dictionary like she taught us.

I practise an answer in my head:

Yes, Daddy. I know that I am insolent. I am sorry.

No, Daddy. I do not know that I am insolent. I am sorry.

I don’t know the right answer.

 

He is going to explode like a firework.

I look at the ceiling. The bulb is flickering and a fly is flying in circles around it. I wish I could see the sky.

 

‘Do you know that you are in-so-lent?’

When he asks the second time, I want to explain that the only thing I know are the words to the funfair song at the end of Grease. I know them off by heart. I know that my dad loved me once too. There is a photograph of him carrying me on his shoulders at Auntie Baaba’s wedding. I am wearing a puffy peach dress and carrying flowers. My dad is wearing a suit and tie. My flowers are peach and yellow and white. In the photograph, my dad is smiling. I was three years old.

When I look up again, it is raining hot water from the washing up bowl. Hot water, palm oil and soggy spinach. The hot water feels like fire on my skin. I think it is going to melt me. I can’t move. I am stuck to the floor like wax from a candle. My dad holds the bowl in his hand when there is no more dirty water left to pour. The washing up bowl is grey.

‘Insolent child.’

 

I fall twice as I run.

I run as if there is a tiger behind me that has escaped from the zoo.

The tiger is chasing me.

If he catches me, he will kill me with his claws and his teeth.

My eyes are stinging.

I am blinking so hard.

 

There is spinach in my hair.