Levy Deborah - Things I Don't Want to Know

I was so pleased about the extra beans. I pierced one of them with my fork while I doodled on the napkins. The prospect of returning home to the house which no longer had Dad in it was unbearable. I counted the beans on my plate. Thankfully there were about twenty of them, so that would give me a bit of time to work out how I was going to get to my other life. The existential writers who I thought might give me some clues — I always got the letters of Jean Paul Sartre’s last name mixed up so it came out as Jean Paul Stare — probably didn’t have to clean ovens with evil Brillo pads.

They were evil because they were not just squares of scratchy material with pink detergent stuck to a piece of felt on the end. As far as I was concerned, they had been designed to waste the lives of girls and women. This thought made me so desperate that I ordered a slice of extra toast to slow the injustice of things down. Jean Paul Stare was French. Andy Warhol was half Czech but totally American and so was Liza Minnelli, who like Angie might be half Italian and all the rest of it. I wrote down some of the rest of it on the napkins with my leaky biro and it took quite a long time. When I looked up all the bus drivers and builders had gone back to work and Angie was asking me to pay for my extra toast. I hadn’t even noticed she had brought it to the table and I still had fifteen beans to get through. Worst of all, she was blatantly staring at the napkins I held in my right hand, the word ENGLAND biro’d into all of them.

‘Shall I hold those for you?’

I didn’t want Angie to hold my napkins because they were part of my secret life and they were also going to be my first novel even though they only had England biro’d into them and a few odd words and phrases. She watched me search for coins in my purse, all the while clutching onto the napkins as if something terrible would happen to me if I let go of them. Three of her teeth were completely rotten, the colour of the steaming teabags she scooped out of the urn with a spoon.

‘What did you do to your hand?’

‘I got stung by some bees.’

Angie screwed up her nose in sympathy and made her lips mime ouch, which was more than my mother had done.

‘Where were the bees then?’

‘They were in the washing machine.’

‘Ah.’ This time she rolled her eyes towards the nicotine-stained ceiling.

‘A pot of honey fell into the washing machine and the bees from outside flew in.’

‘Right.’ She smiled. And then she asked the question I knew she wanted to ask ever since I walked into the greasy spoon.

‘Where are you from?’

Now that I was fifteen years old, South Africa was the part of my life I tried not to think about. Every new day in England was an opportunity to practise being happy and to teach my new friends how to swim. I reckoned that if the council filled the pool with tea, everyone in England would be happy to put their heads under water. They would soon all become champion swimmers and win gold medals a go-go.

‘Where are you from then?’

Angie repeated her question in case I hadn’t understood it the first time.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well you don’t know much do you?’

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.