I decided it was best to agree with her.
As I left the greasy spoon with the England napkins in my hands, I was cold and knew the central heating at home wasn’t working. Two days ago, the man who came to fix it said: ‘I officially condemn this boiler. The law says you’ve got to buy a new one,’ and then he winked and switched it on again and told us to give him a ring if it played up again — which it did, two hours after he left the house where Mom had made him a cup of tea in a mug that had the word ‘Amandla!’ written on it. Mom said, ‘Amandla is a Zulu word, it means POWER.’ The heating man said, ‘Well you should have a bit of power in your boiler for a few years yet.’
By the time I got to the Chinese take-away called HOLY, I pressed my cheek against the window and waited for my life to change. A large bag of bean sprouts was propped up outside the take-away which had a sign on the door that said it was closed.
A Chinese girl, also about fifteen, opened the front door and hoiked the bag of bean sprouts up from the pavement.
‘We’re not open till six o’clock,’ she shouted.
I stared at her jeans which had home-made flares stitched into the denim. Her ‘I Love NY’ T-shirt came to just above her belly button and she wore white stiletto shoes. She stared at my black straw hat and then lowered her eyes to take in the lime green platform shoes I was so proud of and which I believed would help me escape from Finchley, even if for the time being they just gave me a different view of things. A woman’s voice was calling to her, shouting out some orders. Like me she was a girl who had jobs to do.
When I arrived home (West Finchley), I was in despair. How was I ever going to escape from living in exile? I wanted to be in exile from exile. To make matters worse, Sam was now lying on the sofa in the living room thrashing a drum he’d wedged between his knees. When he saw me, he stopped drumming for three seconds and started to say profound things.
‘You know how chicken legs are called drum sticks?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Hhhhaa hhhhaa Hhhhha Hhhhhhaa.’
He was such a maniac. I started to laugh too. And then he told me to shut up because our au pair was in the next room and he was in a ‘mood’.
Two months after Dad left our first proper English house in West Finchley, our mother said she was going to get an au pair to ‘hold the fort’ while she was at work. Sam and I were expecting a pretty young woman from Sweden with a blonde pony tail. Instead, when our au pair arrived on the doorstep, he was carrying a huge book called The Sixth Plenary Session of the Sixth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China 1938. He was balding, pot-bellied, bad tempered, and explained his name was ‘Farid with an F’. We couldn’t work out why he bothered to tell us about the F and he didn’t even ask us our names, he just gave us orders. Farid told us he was writing his PhD and we were required to run him a bath regularly, also that he liked his tea with a slice of lemon and three sugars. He was so appalled by the standard of hygiene in our home that when he came back from the London School of Economics he shut himself up in his room and guzzled three bags of pistachio nuts rather than cook in our kitchen. Farid couldn’t understand why nothing in the kitchen had a lid on it. We didn’t understand either. Even the brand new pot of yoghurt, completely untouched because the silver foil was still unbroken, was now standing by the sink without a lid. Someone in the family has just ripped it off for the sake of it. The one time Farid cleaned the kitchen floor, he squashed a wet towel under his bare feet and walked across the lino scrunching his toes in disgust at the chicken bones and tops of ketchup bottles, yelling something about how his mother in Cairo would never have let her house get into this kind of mess.
We secretly agreed with Farid and wished we could all go and live in Cairo too. Yeah, we would shut ourselves up in our nice clean rooms and throw away the key and look out of the window at the pyramids and wait for someone to bring us sandwiches — which is what we did for Farid — who regularly told us he didn’t like peanut butter because it sat in his stomach like a bullet. But today, Saturday, our new au pair was beside himself. When Sam began drumming again, Farid marched in to the living room, furious, fat and shaking.
Did we not understand he was trying to WRITE in his bedroom? Did we not understand he had to finish his dissertation on Karl Marx by Monday morning? Did we not know the meaning of the word PhD, how it would put food into his little daughter’s mouth and send her to a good school? Our au pair had gone bright red and he was sweating. All around him were posters on the wall of black South African women marching against the pass laws — ‘YOU HAVE STRUCK WOMEN YOU HAVE STRUCK A ROCK’ splashed across the centre in angry capital letters. Next to it was an oil painting of an African woman with a box on her head walking barefoot alongside a man on a bicycle, two figures walking into dust and sky. On the kilim rug were three lids that had been thrown haphazardly onto the rug. Ketchup, Marmite, Branston Pickle.
‘WHY DON’T YOU KEEDS (Farid always said keeds instead of kids) EVER PUT THE LID BACK ON?’
He was on to something. Although we never talked about it, the whole lid thing was something of a mystery to us all. We secretly wanted to live in a house where everything had a lid on it. Not a day went past without one of us staring forlornly at yet another bottle or jar that now stood lidless on the shelves. We never asked each other to put the lid back on because we suspected we might be incapable of doing this ourselves. It was possible that leaving the lids off happened after Dad left the house, but we really couldn’t remember and didn’t want to think about it anyway. While Sam drummed wildly, his shiny eyes fixed on the wall opposite the sofa, I asked Farid if he knew where our mother was? Farid always knew where Mom was because she was his bread and butter. In fact, she was so nice to Farid we had started to resent him. ‘Your poor mother,’ Farid snarled, ‘has gone shopping.’
‘SHOPP-ING SHOPP-ING SHOPP-ING,’ Sam chanted over and over again, laughing and drumming at the same time. Farid lunged at Sam and snatched the drum out of his hands. And then he grabbed the bamboo stick as well and started to beat Sam’s leg with it. Above his head was a world peace poster showing three children playing happily in a field with a ball, a yoyo and a badminton racket. Farid was now out of control. He bent his fat knees so that he could strike harder. Sometimes he missed Sam and hit the wall instead.
‘DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS LIKE TO BE A STRANGER IN YOUR COUNTRY?’
Farid saying that made me laugh hysterically while Sam howled.
‘YOU KEEEDS’ — whack whack — ‘DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND’ — whack — ‘THAT I AM NOT FROM YOUR COUNTRY?’
The top button of his shirt had popped off and sweat dripped down his cheeks.
‘I DO NOT HAVE EVEN ONE PAIR OF SHOES THAT ARE RIGHT FOR THIS WET COLD PLACE.’
That’s what happened to us too. When we first arrived in England we never had the right clothes. In January we wore duffle coats and flip flops. February was the month of wellingtons and a sleeveless polka-dot dress. And June, which was supposed to be the beginning of summer, was the month we all finally got it together and wore thermal vests, boots, gloves and thick woollen hats.
I liked it that Farid had said, ‘Your country’. Yes, I said to myself, I am English. As English as they come. While Farid tried to beat my brother, I looked at the curtains my father had hemmed in blanket stitch one night after work. He had made them a week before he left the family house. Sam and I had stood on either side of him, leaning in to see his big fingers holding the tiny silver needle. When Sam tied a knot in the cotton thread and handed it back, Dad had said: ‘I think we are getting to know each other again aren’t we?’