One-Way Ticket

FOR FILM STUDIES A Level, we are doing coursework on modern African-American cinema. First, we watch and analyse New Jack City, Straight Out of Brooklyn and Boyz N The Hood. Then the film tutor delivers a lecture about a new black American director called Spike Lee and unveils Do The Right Thing on the huge projector screen in the lecture room. During the scene in the movie where Mookie turns his back on his racist white employers and helps trash their pizzeria, I feel as if each and every member of the all-white film studies class is watching me, and mistrusting me.

For the majority of students in the film class, black cinema is just a course module, but I am spellbound. Each time the film tutor asks the class a question – ‘Why does the Ice Cube character pour alcohol onto the ground after his brother is shot?’ or ‘What were the factors motivating the elderly man to shoot Wesley Snipes’ character at the end of the film?’ – mine is the first hand to shoot up.

I screen and re-screen the films obsessively at home, on the rental TV and video-player in my bedroom. Never before have I seen black people of my own generation depicted in the movies and I feel almost as if I’ve made a discovery nobody else in Fernmere knows about. In fact, I probably have.

Alice is spending more and more nights as well as days at Wendy’s. It’s an unspoken agreement. A silent agreement that I’m so maternally incompetent that this move is for the best. Obviously I don’t really go out in the evenings, because, if I’ve got time and energy to spare it should be spent on Alice, not on gallivanting around with my mates. So I stay home with Nanny. Usually I’m in my bedroom, glued to the TV screen, watching films. By the end of my first year of A Levels, I’ve watched Boyz N The Hood more than fifty times and I’m still not done. One evening I ask Nanny if she’d like to watch Boyz N The Hood with me and she sits through it, almost jumping out of her armchair every time there’s a gunshot.

‘Isn’t it brilliant? What do you think of it, Nanny?’ I ask.

Nanny says that Angela Bassett’s character’s ‘ever so pretty for a coloured girl’ but that she didn’t understand why the boys in the film kept shooting at each other.

 

I launch myself into student-hood with an almost deranged zeal, handing my essays in days before they are due. I stay up all night to study, just for the sheer joy of studying, and in the afternoons after college I stagger to my part-time job, half-asleep. Then I rev myself up with coffee and Korean ginseng capsules so that I can do yet more studying, deep into the night.

Nanny tells me I am doing a good job at juggling being a mum and being a student, but I know she is lying about the mothering part. I am the most distracted, inadequate mother that ever lived.

At the end of my first year of college and my first year of motherhood, I win the college prize for academic achievement. Alice stays home with Nanny while Wendy and my former social worker, Barbara, accompany me to the awards ceremony.

My English and Film tutors don’t ask me whether or not I intend to go to university; they ask me which universities I’m applying to. I’m predicted three A grades at A Level. I play along and fill out an UCCA form just for the hell of it. Just because everyone else on my course is filling out UCCA forms. I try to keep things at least slightly realistic by only applying to universities relatively close to home – UCL, Sussex, Royal Holloway and Southampton. Then I throw caution to the wind and apply to Oxford.

The news of my Oxford application does not impress anyone. In fact, everyone I tell has the same query: what on earth do I think I’m playing at?

Nanny says, ‘Oxford? The university?’

Nanny’s son Dave and his wife Julia say that this is the most preposterous idea us lot in Woodview have come up with yet.

My English tutor, who’s recently marked my coursework on Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison, warns me that Oxford is not a progressive institution, that it’s mired in the dark ages.

 

‘Aren’t A levels enough then?’ says Wendy, one afternoon, when I arrive at her house after college to pick up Alice.

‘Enough for what?’ I ask.

‘To get a good job and that.’

‘I don’t know really,’

No one in our Woodview family has gone anywhere near university and I doubt university will really happen for me either. But I don’t let go of that delicate little thread of possibility.

I unfurl the scrap of paper that has my mother’s latest phone number scrawled across it and I head to the phone box to ring her. It’s been months since we’ve spoken – my mother never deigns to phone me.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she says.

I ask her what she thinks about the idea of me going to university and specifically to Oxford and she livens up slightly.

‘You’re hardly the first person in this family to be going to Oxford,’ my mother says. ‘It will be a piece of cake for you. You’ve always been brilliant.’

But she used to call me dull. ‘Why would it be like a piece of cake for me?’ I ask, wanting to prolong this unexpected affirmation.

‘Don’t you understand what people you come from?’ my mother says.

‘Not really,’ I say.

My mother proceeds to remind me. She recites again, the family history and the phone box swallows up my coins and I feed more and more coins in. I listen and listen, but this time it’s not just a fantastical story, it’s a connection to my past, it’s a window into where I came from.

Three quarters of an hour later, my head’s filled with anecdotes about my great-grandfather, the eze or King from Igboland. He transcended the limitations his peers tried to impose on him. My great-grandfather came from a very ordinary family, made a fortune, lost a fortune, made his fortune again and became a local king at the end of the nineteenth century.

 

A few weeks later, at Vogue, I find a phone message waiting for me on my temporary desk there. ‘Your foster-sister Wendy called to say “remember to buy more nappies for your daughter”.’

I shudder, suddenly feeling horribly exposed. My mother has warned me never to reveal to any employer that I’m a single mum. ‘Just because you’re black, people are already making up their minds about you without even knowing what you’re capable of,’ she’d said. ‘If you tell them you are an unmarried mother as well, don’t expect any doors to ever be open to you.’

I put on a brave face and strut along the corridor like it’s a catwalk, wearing my pum-pum shorts and faking confidence, calling out a peppy good morning to everybody. And later that day I tell the managing editor I need an afternoon off next week because I’ve got persistent toothache and need to get to the dentist. It’s a lie. I’m really attending Alice’s second birthday, held at the Grange leisure centre in Fernmere, organised by Wendy.

 

‘Look at those gorgeous legs!’ says a staff writer called Mimi. I beam at her and flush with pride. For somebody at Vogue to compliment your legs can only mean one thing. That your legs are what Nanny calls ‘horribly thin’. This delights me. I actually feel like one of the models who grace the hallowed pages of Vogue. I’m down to eight stone, and I pride myself on eating only one meal a day and that meal invariably consists of a packet of crisps and a black coffee.

My task today is re-typing an editor’s address book. It’s a thick, luscious Mulberry filofax filled with names and home phone numbers of famous people whose work I’ve admired, like Martin Amis and Hanif Kureishi. I toy with the idea of scribbling Kureishi’s number in my own filofax and ringing him up. But then I realise I’ve no idea what I’d say. Would I giggle nervously, say ‘I loved the Buddha of Suburbia’ and then hang up?

My work at Vogue is lowly, but I love it. Typing up other people’s articles is the only written work I get to do. I’m a dogsbody, picking up fashion samples from fashion houses, making coffees, running errands for a very emotional fashion editor named Isabella Blow.

An oily young man named Rory, who looks like a sort of bloated Matt Dillon, hovers over my desk. His soft body spills over the waistband of his enormous Levi 501s. He asks me a whole lot of questions. It’s like he doesn’t believe – in fact, can’t believe – that I am here. Rory won a writing competition and a week’s work experience at Vogue is his prize.

He asks me where I went to school. I tell him and then ask him where his school was. Rory went to Harrow.

‘Really? My cousin went to Harrow too,’ I say, remembering Chinua Eze, the rather camp and startlingly posh cousin my mother used to sometimes bring to Fernmere to visit me.

Rory looks at me with renewed interest. And confusion.

I try to picture myself through Rory’s eyes. A girl who looks like a Lewisham rude-girl and speaks like a Sloane. A black girl presumptuous enough to pitch up at Vogue, and sit here quite happily, amidst a sea of spoiled white faces, drawing further attention to herself by dressing like she’s on her way to a rave.

‘Where are you from?’ Rory asks.

I know what he means – where are your parents from?

‘I’m from Fernmere in West Sussex,’ I reply.

Rory hovers, his eyes seeming to penetrate me.

It’s a look I’ve encountered before. A look I will encounter again and again and again over the years. The look that comes when people’s manners evaporate and their nosiness takes over and they start grilling me in a frankly rude way. As if they have the right to probe. As if they expect me to justify my presence, whereas theirs should be taken for granted.

‘How long will you be at Vogue?’ Rory asks.

‘A month.’

His eyes seem to be asking, why are you here? Who are you?

I sit there smiling, thinking, ‘I’m Anayo’s great-granddaughter. That’s who I am.’

 

I’m hiding in the loos, reading the Cliff Notes for Paradise Lost. I peer at my reflection in the mirror. I’m wearing far too much lipstick. And my hair – relaxed, tonged and greased – looked fabulous in the smeary mirror in my bedroom but in this mirror, inside the toilet on a British Rail train headed to Oxford, it suddenly appears wispy, see-through, embarrassing.

‘Who are you trying to kid?’ I ask my reflection. ‘Why not quit now before you really humiliate yourself?’

It’s not even as if I’ve prepared anything constructive to say to the professors at the interview. They’re bound to grill me about Paradise Lost, as that’s what I’m studying right now. And what can I say? That I’m not feeling Milton at all. Can I just rant at them about precisely why and how much I hate Paradise Lost?

I shove my Cliff Notes into my jacket pocket. I’m wearing a Next blazer, over a black lycra catsuit, with black patent Chelsea boots. Who on earth wears a catsuit to an interview at Oxford University? What was I thinking?

Someone hammers on the toilet door. I ignore it. I can’t come out and reveal my presence on this train because I don’t have a ticket and I don’t have a reasonable excuse for not having a ticket. It’s not as if I always travel like this. I did actually pay my train fares to my interviews at UCL and Sussex and Royal Holloway and Southampton. But now, I’m all out of cash. I’ve exceeded the fifty-pound overdraft limit on my bank account and I’m a hundred pounds in arrears to Wendy for childminding fees.

Another knock. A male voice. ‘I know what you’re up to in there.’

‘Oh really? What am I up to in here, then? Besides going to the toilet?’

‘Open the door,’ the man says. ‘Or I will open it myself.’

I reluctantly open the door.

‘Yes?’ I say, with mock indignation.

‘Let’s see your ticket then,’ the outraged ticket inspector says.

I mumble a lie about losing my ticket.

‘If you do not have the correct ticket,’ says the inspector. ‘I will have you arrested at Oxford station, by the British Transport Police.’

The railway has its own police force? Fuck. I think of the time earlier in the year when I was commuting to Vogue, when I wrote a cheque in payment for a train ticket, knowing the cheque was very likely to bounce, which it did. The transport police might even have a dossier on me. I’m finished.

The train pulls into Oxford. I open the train door tentatively and peer out. I see the inspector pointing at me, talking to a uniformed officer on the platform. I shrug resignedly and walk towards them. I walk slowly, as if I’ve got absolutely nothing to hide. And then I suddenly accelerate. I sprint past them both, past the ticket kiosk and through the exit, sail round the corner, and into Oxford.

 

I return to Woodview, from my round of interviews, elated and in love with what I’ve seen and heard at the universities, the scent of old books, the hushed voices. Institutions where reading and learning are not only taken seriously but are treated as a vocation. I am eager to tell Nanny about this new world I have just seen. I want to share with her how intimidated I felt when I arrived but how a surge of confidence appeared from nowhere once I was actually called into each interview.

I am greeted with near-silence from Nanny. She does not ask me all that much about how the interviews went. It’s like I died and came back to life and Nanny’s trying not to hear too much about what the other side looked like.

A few days after my return from my university interviews, I come home from college to find Nanny, who’s now seventy-eight, weeping as she sits in front of the TV with Alice in her lap. Her entire countenance seems to have slackened since I’ve started talking about university. Her fondant pink flesh hangs wearily from her bones. The only things about Nanny that still seem fully alive are her gleaming silver hair, still styled in 1940s waves, and her pale, bright eyes.

‘I knew it! I knew it!’ she says. ‘I knew all those universities would try their damndest to sign you up. I knew you could do it, Nin. But promise me, promise me you won’t leave me, Nin.’

‘Keep your hair on, Nanny,’ I say, plucking Alice from her arms. ‘None of the universities have actually accepted me yet.’

A few weeks later, my first offer letter arrives, from Sussex University. Followed by an acceptance from UCL. Then Royal Holloway. Then Southampton. Then University College, Oxford.

I ring my mother. It’s the third time I’ve called her in two days. I’m becoming rather like a toddler clutching at a mother’s sleeve, saying ‘Look at me, Mummy! Look what I can do!’ I dash to the phone box and ring up my mother every time I achieve anything. If this carries on I’ll soon be ringing her up just to announce I’ve passed a bowel movement.

‘Oxford has accepted me,’ I say.

I imagine this is all I’ll need to say for my mother to accept me too. She will finally consider me worthy of being her daughter.

‘Accepted at Oxford for what?’

‘To read English.’

‘What?’

‘English. It’s always been my favourite subject. It’s what I’m best at.’

‘You’d better ring them up and ask them if they’ll let you switch to medicine or law,’ she says. ‘What is the point of studying English? You already speak flawless English. What is a degree in English going to do for you? You have to be smart and make smart choices and work the system. Anyway, I’ve got to go. My sons have just come home from school. Later.’

 

My results arrive. I have an A in English. An A in Film Studies. And a C in Law. I run to the phone box to call my mother.

‘You got a C in something,’ she says. ‘How did that happen? What subject?’

‘The C’s in Law. It just means I’m definitely not cut out to be a lawyer, I guess. I got As in the other two.’

I laugh. Feeling drunk on my success.

‘I doubt Oxford will take you with that,’ my mother says. ‘You’d better call University College London and Sussex University and beg them to give you a place. Call me back if you manage to get any university to take you.’

‘But Oxford asked for ABB, this is the same thing. It’s the same number of UCCA points.’

‘Same number of what? Call me back if you manage to get any university to take you now.’

Silence.

‘Hang on a minute! How many A Levels exactly did you get, while raising a baby? Oh, wait a minute, you didn’t raise most of your babies, did you?’ I say suddenly, surprising myself.

‘You don’t know anything about me or what I’ve been through,’ says my mother.

‘I would if you’d tell me.’

‘Focus on your own life. Make something of yourself. Just make something of yourself.’

‘How do I do that?’ I ask. ‘What about Alice?’

‘Leave her with Wendy,’ says my mother. ‘Let Wendy deal with the bother of training her. Alice will come back to you when you’re ready for her, just like you came back to me, once you came to your senses.’

 

I sit in the blue armchair, opposite Nanny, waiting to hear from my mother. She has promised to drive me to Oxford.

‘Do you mind me using the phone, Nanny? I’ll only be on there for, like, two minutes.’

Nanny, who’s feeding Jaffa Cakes to Alice, nods.

I ring my mother.

‘What time are you getting here Mum?’ I ask.

‘Oh. I meant to ring you about that.’

‘Are you running late?’

‘There’s something with my leg.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘It’s paining me, Neety. I can’t drive you today. But maybe by tomorrow it will feel better and I should be able to come then. I’m behind with everything. My sons are starving hungry. I haven’t cooked yet. Talk later.’

 

Mick’s parents have helped him invest in a nearly new Ford Sierra. Me, Wendy, Alice, my suitcases, my books, my kettle, stereo, hip-hop LPs and twelve pairs of trainers are packed into the new car. It’s a sunny day but Oxford feels cold. Ghostly grey buildings casting out the sunlight, looming over the street. Traffic seems to dawdle, the cars moving in slow motion, slower than the bikes that weave up and down the streets.

Through the car window there’s the sound of imperious footsteps on a quaint street. The baby girl in my arms is as warm as a little oven. I smell the hair grease I’ve rubbed into her soft puff of hair. Her skin smells of cocoa butter. I rub my face against her face and feel tears not just pricking at my eyelids but welling deep inside me.

When we left Woodview this morning, Nanny’s eyes were blank and red. She sat looking longingly at Alice and at me.

‘You can’t go to Oxford in that horrible old pair of jeans,’ she said finally.

Then she curled a five-pound note into my jeans pocket and said, ‘Here. Buy yourself something decent to wear when you get there. You never know who you might meet.’

While she was talking to me and putting the money in my pocket, I looked at the ground and then out of the window. I couldn’t bear to meet Nanny’s eyes. I had forgotten that I loved her until it was time to go. Before I left, the last words Nanny said were to Wendy. ‘Make sure you don’t let Oxford take my Alice away from me as well. I couldn’t bear it. You make sure you bring at least one of my girls back to me, Wend.’

 

At Oxford, you have to live in college for the first two years and no children are allowed to live there. I’m not old enough to qualify as a ‘mature student’ and get a flat off-campus.

Wendy has offered to look after Alice during term time, although I’ve no idea how I’ll contribute significantly towards Alice’s keep as Oxford bans undergraduates from having part-time jobs during term-time and encourages us not to work during the holidays either.

Even as Mick’s Ford Sierra hovers along the High Street, inching ominously towards University College, I am not sure that I can go through with being away from Alice for months at a time. I am not sure if there is even any point in getting out of the car.

I speak silently, maybe to God, maybe to myself.

Please don’t make me have to make this decision.

There has to be another way to forge a future for us both. Alice looks so serene in my arms, so sure of me, sure of everyone in this car. We, collectively, are her life. She loves and trusts each one of us. I squeeze her so tight that she looks up into my face questioningly. Will I turn back and become a proper mother to her, or will I become somebody else?

 

I will become a journalist. I will spend six years working in New York. I will have articles published in the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times, the Evening Standard, Elle. I will find that you can run before you even know how to walk. I will spend years kicking open doors people would swear were shut to me. I will fight, fight, fight. And I will end up crippled, in a way. Never learning how to slow down. How to love. How to feel. There is room for only one in my parachute. I am not able to snap out of survival mode, at least not before it’s too late.

I always wanted to be a journalist, but that wasn’t my only goal. I had set out to become a sweeter, saner, more nurturing person than my own mother. For a while I imagined I’d achieved this and then some, simply because I did not beat up, deride or instil fear in my daughter – or in anybody else. I guarded my insecurities, my confusion about motherhood, my guilt, my self-doubt, my self-hate and I did not share any of it with anyone. I held absolutely everybody at arm’s length. But I didn’t see that as a problem. At least I wasn’t hurting anyone. Or so I told myself.

It didn’t occur to me until I was years older that in withdrawing, in being genial enough but closed, I was in fact inflicting cruelty – I was neglecting those I love and those who love me. I did not see this until I tried to slip into Alice’s shoes. Until I tried to imagine how it must hurt when the woman who brought you into the world, the person who should love you more than anyone, remains indifferent and untouchable. How must that feel? And then I realised that I already knew precisely how that feels and that I had repeated a pattern without meaning to, before I had even come to understand that there was a pattern to repeat.

 

And thus by the time I have grown enough to have at least a vague idea of what being black and being a woman and being a mother might mean, it is too, too late. By the time I am emotionally mature enough and healed enough to step up to the plate and become a mother, my daughter is nearly the age I was when I gave birth to her; and by then she has a new mother. Wendy.

Wendy and Mick will save up, get a Right To Buy from the council, sell their council house and move to a middle-class cul-de-sac across the road from Woodview. Alice will have her own large bedroom there.

‘They are never ever going to give that child back to you,’ my mother will tell me, sounding at once bitter and smug. ‘You’ll never get her back now. This is what they wanted all along.’

I never do take Alice back. At first, Wendy said, ‘I’m just not sure you’re ready yet to be a mum, love.’ And she was not wrong. But years tick by and Wendy and I begin to make excuses for my continuing incapacity: it’s not fair to take Alice away from Fernmere, away from all her friends at the primary school. Away from everything she’s ever known.

So it becomes a sort of slow-drip adoption. Alice gradually becomes Wendy and Mick’s daughter, without any of us sitting down and having a deep conversation about what’s happening. When the four of us are out together, Alice will call Mick ‘Dad’ and when she says ‘Mum!’ both Wendy and I will respond at the same time. Eventually, deciding I’m pointless, I’ll stop showing up for sports days and other outings, leaving Mick and Wendy to take charge and leaving Alice feeling rejected.

 

In the years to come, Alice and I will reach a point where we only see each other for stilted dinners and occasional weekends away. With her and me, it’s like the umbilical cord was never snipped, but rather left to fester, siphoning poison into our relationship.

One day, Alice will say to me, ‘You make me sick. If I was a mother, I’d never choose a career over my precious child. You write all these articles and never once have you mentioned me in any of them. You disowned me. I think you’ve been a crap mother.’

‘I agree,’ I will say. ‘And I am so, so sorry that I wasn’t a better mother. I just want you to know that it wasn’t because there was anything wrong with you – it wasn’t anything you did at all, so please don’t think that. It had to do with some stuff about me, and my past, that you don’t know about.’

‘I don’t care,’ Alice will say. ‘I don’t care about what happened to you in your life or what your mother did or didn’t do. That’s got nothing to do with me.’

 

On my first night at Oxford, fellow students, some of whom will become lifelong friends, want to know a bit about me.

‘Who were those people?’ they ask. ‘That white couple? Who was that gorgeous little baby?’

And I will say, at first, ‘Oh that’s my little girl. Alice. Those are my sort-of parents. They’re looking after my daughter for me while I’m here.’

‘Yeah, right,’ one of them will say. ‘Tell the truth – she’s your kid sister! Are they your adoptive parents?’

‘Yes, I’m adopted,’ I lie. It sounds tidier, more respectable. I’m adopted – and Alice is my baby sister.

I place a framed photo of Alice, wearing a white dress, on the antique desk in my oak-panelled room.

‘She’s sooo cute,’ says the man who will become my boyfriend.

And this is the image of Alice I will carry with me. A two-year-old with glowing ebony skin and huge liquid brown eyes that are still soft, still trusting. I shut this image of my baby away inside an imaginary box tucked inside my heart and I truly believe she will remain there, suspended in time until I am ready to mother her.

 

Mick pulls up outside the porter’s lodge, opens the car door and looks around him.

‘This is the real thing, innit?’ he says. ‘Oxford bleedin’ University.’

The look on Mick’s face reminds me of the expression I’ve seen him sport on the rare occasions he’s required to go to church, for a wedding or a christening. Reluctance and reverence and a flicker of resentment. Mick looks about him warily. He sees old, tall grey buildings everywhere and the one where I’m going is one of the oldest and greyest in the town.

Alice is growing sleepy. I kiss her on the neck.

I have never reached out to somebody and asked them for help and wholeheartedly expected them to give it before. I’ve always assumed people wouldn’t be there for me. But now I reach out to my daughter. Please Alice, I tell her silently. Don’t ever stop loving me.

There’s a kebab van parked just ahead of Mick’s Sierra.

‘At least you won’t starve or nothing,’ Mick says, nodding approvingly, laughing. ‘Oh I forgot, you don’t eat nothing do you? Bloody weirdo.’

‘I do eat now.’

And I am eating, finally: I eat two proper meals a day, sometimes three. My weight’s stabilised at nine stone.

‘She don’t want to end up looking as fat as us two, do you Neet?’ says Wendy, shutting the car door with her hip. ‘Don’t wanna end up like us, do you?’

I can’t answer her. There’s so much to say. I do want to be like Wendy and Mick, in a way. In fact, I’d like to go back to Fernmere with them. I’d like to climb back into the Ford Sierra and sit there holding Alice as we cruise back to Fernmere.

But isn’t it already too late to go back? Doesn’t Wendy already think that I think I’m better than her? That I am expecting far too much from life; that I’m childishly, stubbornly, refusing to accept my lot? I am pretending to myself that I am leaving Woodview only for the duration of each eight-week term at Oxford. But this isn’t true. Fernmere will never really be my home again. Nanny will go into a nursing home. The bungalow on Woodview she and Alice and I used to live in will be rented to another old lady.

 

Mick’s apprehensive laugh seems to echo as we approach the Porters’ Lodge.

A grim-faced porter looks at the four of us with open curiosity.

‘Precious Williams,’ I say.

Alice giggles at this because Little Precious is the nickname I occasionally use for her when we’re out on one of our Saturday afternoon trips, eating tea cakes in tea shops in Chichester. ‘Do you want Mummy to get you another tea cake, my little precious,’ I sometimes say, hoping that she will say ‘No, I’m full, Mummy,’ because I have so little money.

‘You all right, love?’ says Wendy, rubbing my arm with hands roughened-up by years of hair-dressing.

‘Calling yourself Precious now, are we?’ says Mick, smirking.

 

Precious: that is my name. But my foster family will always call me Anita. Doesn’t matter that my birth certificate and my passport say Precious. Wendy, Nanny, Mick – they won’t seem to accept Precious. In months to come, my new Oxford friends will phone me during the holidays.

‘Hi, can I speak to Precious, please?’

Nanny will say, ‘I’ll get Anita for you.’

‘Hi Wendy, it’s me, Precious.’

‘Oh, hello, Anita.’

Precious will be the writer, the grown woman, the adventurer. Anita, in my eyes, was the baby given away, the teenager raped on a toilet floor. Anita is the elephant in the room and while I pretend she doesn’t exist, my foster-family will interact with Anita and only with Anita. They don’t understand that I killed Anita off years ago. And I do not understand yet that the me I once was is still waiting for her mother to love her the way she wants to be loved, so that she can love her own daughter the way her daughter needs to be loved. So that she can be present.

 

The porter is now staring. We are a spectacle.

‘I’m Precious Williams,’ I say again.

The porter nods.

My name is on the list.