“We got to get rid of him, Sour,” whinged Yusuf one day after madrasa. “He won’t let me go to football no more.”
I agreed.
When we got home, Yasim was at the end of his tether, shouting to be heard over Mum’s music.
“Ruqqayah, these kids need discipline. They are a disgrace!”
“You’re not our dad,” we shouted after him. “Fuck off.”
The next week my brother and I came home to find the front room empty. His shoes were gone from the hallway.
“Where is he?”
“He’s been and gone,” Mum replied. “Me couldn’t take him nuh more. If rassclat make me choose between my pickney and him, di kids dem, dey haffi win every time.”
I was proud of her that day. But she could never be alone for long.
The first time we saw Derek he was fixing one of the curtain poles in the front room. “Alright, kids?” he said, noting our bewildered expressions. “Said to your mum I’d keep an eye on the place.” He seemed like a cool guy so we didn’t mind him helping himself to drinks in the fridge.
I noticed the spare house keys in his hand. Mum had been in and out of hospital. She must have asked him to come and check on us.
I recognised him. He lived in the same block. I’d seen him chatting to Mum on the stairwell a few times.
When Mum left hospital, she seemed happy – better than she had been in a long time. Derek soon started coming round the house a lot. He wasn’t strict like Yasim. He was like a breath of fresh air.
And yet, there was something about him I didn’t like. No reason. He just felt too familiar, too tactile. I’d catch him fixating on himself in the mirror, rearranging what was left of his sandy blond hair to cover a receding hairline.
I started wondering what was wrong with his flat. I think he had kids, grown-up ones, but if he did he never mentioned them. Soon he became a regular feature on the sofa.
Said his TV was on the blink, so Mum let him use ours to watch his endless hours of Formula One. That man could watch cars race around a track for hours.
I started focusing on him a little more closely.
Mum thought he was a kindly neighbour. I thought different.
He started taking liberties.
He used to draw penis pictures on Mum’s photographs. That’s it, I thought. He’s done it now. She’s got to realise this man’s an idiot soon. Instead, she walked in, saw the pictures and laughed. She found it comical.
Wasn’t long before he started trying to brush my thigh as we watched telly on the sofa, and began flashing himself at me on the landing as he came out of the bathroom.
Pretended his white robe just accidently fell open, to reveal his erection. In which case, why did he stick out his tongue at me at the same time? I would act like I didn’t see it and jump back to my bedroom, but my blood was boiling. How dare he come into my house and try to humiliate me!
He never physically touched me, not really, never anything more than a careful brush of the thigh, or pressing a little too close when we passed in the hallway. I didn’t say a word.
Althea might have moved out, but she still visited from time to time.
One evening, I passed her old room. The door was open just wide enough to see her comforting someone I recognised. It was her best friend, Suzanne. Suzanne’s cousin was the father to Althea’s little girl. She was crying.
I hung behind the door, and strained to listen.
“You need to tell my mum,” Althea was saying.
Suzanne was shaking her head, and wiped her nose with a tissue.
“No, I can’t. What am I going to say?”
“Just tell her the truth.”
She shook her head again.
“I knew I shouldn’t have told you. It’ll cause too many problems.”
I listened closer. Suzanne had met Derek a few times. They had exchanged a few words when she came up with Althea, that sort of thing. Later, he’d seen her at the bus stop and stopped to talk. She’s a chatty girl, Suzanne, thought nothing of it. It was only when he got on the bus too, she started feeling awkward. He hadn’t looked like he was waiting for the bus.
There weren’t many people sitting upstairs. Suzanne nodded a polite goodbye and went to sit at the back. He followed her. Sat down right beside her, even though the top deck was practically empty.
He started rubbing one hand up her leg as they approached the Elephant and Castle, feeling himself with the other.
“What you doing?”
“I see how you dress. I know what girls like you want.”
“Get your hands off of me,” she said, louder this time.
But he squeezed her leg tighter. Ragged fingernails laddered her tights. His other arm was hammering up and down like a piston. Hers was the next stop.
Suzanne missed her stop that night, and a few stops after that.
“I told him I’d tell your mum. He just called me a slag, and said she wouldn’t believe me.”
I went to my room that night, knowing I had to be prepared. I didn’t want my mum to go to prison. If I told her what he had done, to me or to Suzanne, she might just kill him.
I’d seen her physically attack him once already. We’d cheered her on, as she tried to strangle him on the sofa. “Yeah Mum, kill that fucker!” before it occurred that she might just do that, and we’d end up living with some bat-shit crazy lady like Ivy again. It had been against every natural instinct to pull her off him.
But now, things were different. If he’s that brazen, to do that to a family friend on the Number 133, what could he do to me? I sneaked down to the kitchen, slid open the drawer, and picked a knife. My hand hovered over the meat cleaver – nah, too big – then lingered by the bread knife. That’ll do. I slipped it up my sleeve and crept back up to my room, making sure the door was locked.
Then I slipped the knife under my pillow. I needed to get mentally prepared. I needed to defend myself.
That’s when I started sneaking the knives from the kitchen drawer. That’s when I realised I needed protection. Forget your knife at your peril.
I hadn’t always loved Cheenie.
She was Althea’s daughter. Real cute, with a button nose and curly hair, a beautiful little kid.
Real talk, I used to feel jealous when everyone was focused on this baby. There were times I used to imagine suffocating her in her cot, but I guess lots of people feel like that sometimes. Besides, I never followed up. That’s the important thing, innit? It was short-lived, and after a few months of her being around, we were cool.
Yeah, I learned to love Cheenie like she was my own. I used to plead with my sister to let me take her out.
“I only want to take her to the Pen. It’s only down there. Look, you can see us from the balcony.”
Althea relented.
“OK.”
I put her shoes on, pushed her arms through the sleeves of her jacket and took her down to the Pen.
Eventually, the council added two hoops to each end, but at that point it was just a rectangular patch of gravel. We