Born in the 1980s Read online

  Her arms around his waist, she felt something cold and hard behind him, pushed down the back of his jeans. Suddenly there was a gun in her hand. She thrust it back at him and backed off. His white teeth and the whites of his eyes smiled down at her. Scanning the crowd for Emily, she noticed almost all the guys had dark objects tucked into their belts. Cerys wasn’t naïve (though certain relatives disagreed); this was no South Wales market town and she’d seen people carrying guns before. But she had never seen so many, and had never, ever held one.

  Emily appeared at her shoulder and pushed a chipped tin cup into her hand.

  Next thing Cerys knew, it was seven a.m. and Emily was shaking her awake. She felt wretched. But half an hour later, there she was in the older kids’ dorm, just about managing to stay upright. Blessing, a boy of about six, had diarrhoea, and had pooed his bed. He was crying, and snot and tears made trails down his face. Cerys lifted him out and stripped his dirty clothes off. The smell made her retch. Then Blessing reached forward and put his two hands on his bed, hanging his head between them and sticking his bum out. A stream of projectile shit fired across the room and hit the far wall, where it made an impressive splat-mark. Cerys and Emily exchanged glances, and dissolved into giggles. Cerys tried to stifle her laughter – Blessing was a good kid, he really was – but she was helpless, and soon her face was as tear-streaked as his.

  ‘Stop it, I can’t laugh, I’ll be sick…’ she gasped.

  Blessing cried and cried.

  *

  Message sent: 14/07/06 21:32

  Granny died at 7.30pm. Mum and Mike were with her. Dad’s really upset.

  Nic

  *

  Cerys sat back in her chair, sweat dripping down her neck. She felt numb. She had known from the first email what the ending would be, but still she had forced herself to open each one in turn. Now that it was confirmed, she couldn’t feel anything at all. There was just a queer…emptiness. She couldn’t imagine Granny lying cold and dead in a hospital bed. That whole world was so far away. She opened her mouth to speak.

  ‘My granny died,’ she said, matter-of-factly. But it was as though someone else was saying it, and she didn’t believe the words.

  ‘What? Oh, no! I’m sorry!’ Emily turned to her immediately. There was a pause. ‘How…did she die?’

  ‘She fell…had a stroke…Are you nearly ready to go? It’ll rain soon.’

  ‘Yes, yes, two minutes…’

  The girls paid up and walked out into the daylight, where everything was whitewashed in the glare. Cerys put up her hand to shield her eyes. The sound of kwaito came from speakers a few doors down. Minibuses swerved in the road. A street-trader haggled with a customer. Emily waved down a number 67 and they jumped on, the vehicle picking up speed before Cerys’s back foot was even in the door. The door was broken and someone in front of her was hanging on to it in an attempt to make it at least look shut. She passed a ten-rand note to the front passenger, who didn’t give her any change. She was annoyed suddenly.

  ‘Hey! Change?…Watch where you’re going!’

  The driver, in craning his neck to look at her, had almost hit a pedestrian.

  ‘No change. You have to wait for someone else to get on.’

  How hard could it be to have a float? Or fix the door? Or keep your eyes on the road? Cerys felt like she was about to explode. There were at least ten big Zulu women in the minibus, each taking up two people’s space. They chattered to each other in shrill voices, the strange staccato clicks of the language flying over Cerys’s head like noisy grasshoppers. Normally she liked hearing people talk Zulu, but right now she couldn’t bear it.

  Cerys got off a stop early so she could use the payphone. She had a mobile, but it was without signal or charge much of the time. She half-walked, half-ran to Mrs Ndongo’s place. The old woman saw her coming and gestured to the little red phone on the counter. As Cerys pressed the receiver to her ear, it seemed hours before she heard it ring. It rang one, two, three times…Her heart beat faster. Four, five times. Her dad answered.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hi. It’s Cerys.’

  ‘Oh hello.’

  Silence.

  ‘I suppose you got the emails.’ He sounded tired, she thought.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Look Cerys, the funeral’s next Wednesday. I’d really like you to be here for it.’

  Cerys was momentarily taken aback, she hadn’t even considered that it would be possible to go back.

  ‘…oh! Well…it’ll probably be very expensive…’

  ‘Any idea how much?’

  ‘Well, I know someone who paid a thousand dollars for a last-minute ticket to France. So I guess it could be six or seven hundred pounds. It’s peak season.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘I’ll pay for it.’

  Her turn to pause.

  ‘Are you sure that’s what you want?’

  ‘Yes. I really want you here, Cerys.’

  ‘Well, I’ll have to check it out with the orphanage. But…if you want me to, I’d like to come.’

  ‘Okay, see what you can do. Hang on, Mum wants to talk to you…’

  Pause.

  ‘Hi Cerys.’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘It would be nice if you came home. Dad’s having a really hard time…it would mean a lot to him.’

  ‘Yeah I know.’

  ‘Cerys, why don’t you just come back here for good? You can’t really want to stay in Soweto. You’ve been there a year already…’

  ‘Mum!’ Cerys was cross. ‘I can’t just up and leave like that! I have a whole other life here! And…they need me at the orphanage!’

  ‘They managed without you before.’

  ‘Well, maybe I like it here!…I’ve got to go, the money’s running out.’

  ‘Okay. But do think about it darling.’

  Cerys marched back to the house and flopped onto her mattress, facing the concrete wall. Granny’s death still didn’t seem real. It was too far away; she couldn’t visualise it. As for going home! In the whole year, it had never occurred to her, not even once. It was almost as though while Cerys was here, her life back in Wales ceased to exist. But as she turned the idea over and over, memories flooded into her mind. In Granny’s field, throwing sticks for the dogs. Shopping in Cardiff with Nic. Mum’s roast dinners. Pints in the local. Nights out with her friends. Daisies. Ants that didn’t bite. Green. Real, living, thirst-quenching green.

  Cerys wanted to go back, now, more than anything. But then she thought about the one million Sowetans who didn’t have the option of going anywhere, and she felt selfish.

  Granny’s dead, she thought.

  ‘Granny’s dead,’ she said. I should cry, she thought. Maybe if I cry I’ll feel better. So she cried for half an hour, which made her feel terribly self-indulgent. She thought again about how lucky she was compared with so many people, compared with those kids she looked after every day. A violent crack of thunder split the air, followed moments later by the deafening sound of rain hammering on the iron roof. Cerys’s thoughts pressed in on her, and she closed her eyes.

  *

  The next day, Cerys tried and failed to corner Jessica in the office. Two new babies had come in, and several of the kids were sick. The baby room was fuller than ever, and babies were crying all over the place. Finally, when most of the kids were asleep, Cerys confronted Jessica.

  ‘My granny just died. My family want me to go back to the funeral.’

  Jessica said nothing for a moment, and Cerys saw she looked worn out.

  ‘Cerys, I’m sorry about your granny. But if you go, I don’t know what we’ll do…We’ve never been so busy. Maybe if I had more notice I could sort something out, but…’

  The green Welsh hills, the roast dinners, the chance to properly mourn Granny – all these things which had seemed there for the taking – all these things faded slowly in Cerys’s mind’s eye, until they were a mere dot on the horizon. She’d been stupid to
let herself be tempted.

  She should have known.

  *

  ‘Dad? It’s Cerys…I’m sorry, I can’t come home.’ Cerys hated herself.

  ‘I want to come, really I do. But I just can’t. Not at such short notice. Please, please understand.’ Please…Cerys felt tearful. There were all sorts of things her father could have said, about how family comes first, about all that they had given her over the years. But he didn’t, and she felt worse because of it.

  ‘I’m so, so, sorry…’ she whispered.

  Cerys hung up and walked home, head down. She threw herself onto her mattress and sobbed. She cried for Granny, who would simply have vanished by the time she next saw home, and for Granny’s house, which would be sold. She cried for her family, who were pulling together without her to support each other, and for herself, alone in another hemisphere. She cried in anger at her unhappiness, for she knew she was lucky; so, so lucky. For the first time she was homesick.

  What am I doing here? She asked herself.

  I’m helping, right?

  Brown Rice

  Sally Jenkinson

  The pan’s already hot on the stove, so I use a Tupperware box that’s on the side to bring some more water over from the sink. The rice I’m cooking has soaked up all the water I started with. Brown rice. I’ve been told it’s healthier than white. I’ve never really understood this cooking rice business; I can’t really tell when it’s cooked. How can you tell?

  It doesn’t matter if I don’t think I’m the kind of man who cooks rice (brown rice no less!); I’ve got to cook rice now and there’s no changing that. I’m a rice-cooker.

  I think back to earlier in the day, walking up the road to collect Emmy from school. The same mixture of dread and guilt that I get every week at this time, creeping up the backs of my legs. I’d drag my feet but I can’t bear to make myself late for her. Her class is just emptying out, and for a few minutes it’s just a sea of small people wobbling about in front of me. Suddenly her little amber face emerges from the surf, and she spies me at the gate, smiles, and waves. But it’s her mum waving back at me and I’m so sure that I’ll throw her across the playground with rage if she comes near me. Then she starts sidling over, shrugging her rucksack back onto her shoulder every seven or eight steps because it’s too big for her little frame; she’s got this grace that’s all her, and my heart just melts onto the hopscotched tarmac.

  ‘Hi, what’re we having for tea?’ she tweets, taking my hand. ‘Melissa’s having Coq au Vin because it’s Bastille Day.’

  I don’t answer for a minute, because I don’t know what we’re having for tea, I don’t know what Bastille Day is, and my six-year-old daughter just said cock. Melissa’s mum is talking.

  ‘…it’s not Coq au Vin really, just chicken stew. I try to make the things we do at home relevant to their school work, but it’s so hard to keep up. You know more than me, girls. We didn’t learn about Bastille Day when we were at school, did we Mr Spencer?!’

  When you were at school, I think, I probably wasn’t even born.

  ‘Ha ha, no, just how to do the bare minimum and keep out of trouble…’ She doesn’t say anything in response to my attempt at parent-humour.

  ‘So what are we having for tea?’ Emmy pipes up.

  ‘Erm, brown rice and…peas,’ I finish in a desperate attempt to emanate some kind of parental adequacy. It’s like word association. Salt; vinegar. Rice; peas. It just tumbles out. Mrs-Melissa’s-Mum smiles in recognition.

  ‘Oh, is that because of Emmy’s mother’s West Indian roots?’ she asks. Suddenly I’m validated, in her eyes, by Emmy’s little semi-fro.

  ‘No.’ I’m being short now, because I can’t be arsed with this. ‘Emmy’s mum is from Oldham. So anyway, we better get off and get cooking! Bye Melissa!’ I smile genuinely at them, because I think I’m funny, and stride swiftly away.

  ‘Dad,’ says my lovely daughter loudly, when I’m sure we’re still in ear-shot of Cock-O-Van, ‘I didn’t know you could get brown rice. Is it dirty?’ Emmy you shit.

  ‘You do know, Silly-Billy,’ I say just as loudly, faking a laugh.‘It’s the stuff we have with peas!’

  ‘Oh, right.’ She looks confused, and I can see images of Sunday’s special fried rice wobbling about in her mind. I scoop her off the path and carry her in my arms so we can get away from anyone else who might be listening as she reveals my failure at fatherhood to all and sundry.

  We have to stop at the shops on the way home, because she’s all excited about rice and peas now, and having lied to her at the school gates in order to save face in front of people I really don’t know or care about, I feel like I owe her a shot at it. Luckily they sell brown rice, and I also buy some kidney beans, because I know that much. Emmy asks me what the beans will taste like and I tell her honestly that I’ve always thought kidney beans taste like damp cardboard, but all manner of things can happen when you add a few spices, so we’ll give it a go.

  All the way home she’s chattering in my ear about cocko-this and brown-rice-that. When we get home, I’m glad she wants to play in the front room so that I don’t have to embarrass myself cooking it in front of her.

  At the stove, I look down to see that the rice has boiled dry again, and it’s all stuck to the bottom of the pan. I stare at it for a minute.

  ‘Emmy?’ I call into the front room.

  ‘Hmmm?’

  ‘Do you fancy going for tea this aft?’ I don’t really like McDonaldsy-type stuff that much, but luckily neither does she so we don’t have that generic ‘going out for tea’ dilemma. But I know what’s coming.

  ‘Dad, will they have rice and peas?’

  ‘Mmm hmmm, yes, of course…’

  How the hell has my daughter become obsessed with Caribbean cuisine in the last two and a half hours? This is what you get for lying to your daughter to impress snotty, Prozac-riddled middle-class mums.

  I seem to remember that there’s some kind of Jamaican restaurant somewhere along Oxford Road.

  ‘Okay hon, get your shoes and coat on,’ I shout, scraping my failed rice into the bin, which I notice is already overflowing.

  ‘Wait! Where are we going?’

  ‘Umm, I don’t know what it’s called, it’s on Oxford Road.’ I hear her scampering upstairs. ‘Emmy?’

  I shrug, and decide to change the bin now seeing as she’s arsing about. Five minutes later she clumps back down wearing her little City shirt, a pink tutu and some jelly beach shoes.

  ‘Erm, Emmy you…’ I trail off. It’s July so she isn’t going to freeze. Also, I notice that she’s put some clips in her hair and everything. I get the feeling it’d crush her if I told her she looks like a bizarre hybrid of Andy Cole and the tooth fairy.

  ‘Okay matey, let’s go!’ I’m pulling my coat on, but she gives me a withering look.

  ‘Dad, you can’t go out like that. There might be a nice lady or something.’

  I’m gutted that my daughter is already becoming ashamed of my ‘sense’ of style; but worse than that, she’s obviously noticed I’ve been lady-less for a very long time. However she’s right, there are bits of my doomed culinary adventure stuck to my t-shirt so I slope off upstairs to change it.

  ‘Put a nice shirt on, mucky-pup!’ she calls after me, giggling. She sounds so much like her mum that it scares me. For a few seconds I feel the beginnings of something resembling anger creeping up the back of my neck, then I remember that it’s a six-year-old girl at the bottom of the stairs, and she just wants her dad to look nice, so I oblige.

  On the bus, I tell Emmy to keep an eye out for somewhere Caribbean looking, because I can’t remember exactly where we’re supposed to get off. She sits on my lap with her fingers clenched tightly round the bell all the way through Didsbury, even though I tell her I don’t think it’ll be for a while yet. I notice she’s frowning, and ask what’s up.

  ‘I don’t know what to look for, for the restaurant.’

  ‘Oh, well maybe the colou
rs red, yellow and green like the flag. Or a sign saying Jamaican cuisiiiiine…’ I say in a silly voice, and tickle her a little bit under her arms, but she still looks serious.

  ‘What about brown skin?’

  ‘Umm, well, mostly the people living in Jamaica are black, but I…I don’t think everyone in the restaurant will be, really, umm…’

  I’m floundering pathetically, I’m shit at this. Why didn’t I see this coming?

  ‘I’ve got brown skin, but you haven’t, and you’re the dad’, she proffers, patting my face absent-mindedly. ‘I think I turned brown by magic.’

  ‘Emmy, no. You know it’s because your mum is black, and you’re mixed race.’ She’s staring at her shoes. ‘Your mum is black and English, and her mum is black and from Nigeria, can’t you remember her telling you?’

  ‘No,’ she says resolutely. Then, with heartbreaking decorum my baby girl exhales gently, stares pointedly out of the window for ten seconds or so, and starts talking about Balamory.

  ‘Emmy,’ I begin, but she battles on purposefully with her CBeebies chatter, and I can feel her little body is tense as hell against my chest so decide to leave it, for now. I wrap my arms tighter around her and kiss the top of her head, which feels pathetic but it’s all I can think to do.

  At the table, luckily they’ve got something vaguely rice and pea-ish, which I order a bit of for Emmy and some jerk chicken and salad for me. She decides she wants a cup of jasmine tea which I don’t seem to be able to talk her out of, so we order that too and a beer for me.