Yrsa Daley-Ward
THE TERRIBLE
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published by Penguin Books 2018
Copyright © Yrsa Daley-Ward, 2018
Lyrics from ‘Dedicated to the One I Love’
© Lowman Pauling and Ralph Bass, 1957
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders.
The author and publisher will correct in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention.
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Cover design Grace Han
ISBN: 978-1-846-14983-2
For Little Roo.
in love with how it happened so far, even the terrible things.
and God, there were terrible things.
My little brother and I saw a unicorn in the garden in the late nineties. I’m telling you.
Neither one of us made it up; it was as real as anything else. Sometimes, when the world around us grew indistinct, when facts would blur into less certain truths and frightening things looked set to occur, the two of us could see clearly into the Fourth Dimension. So when Linford James was on a ladder at midnight, banging on the bedroom windows, shouting at Mum
and later, when the colour in his throat deepened and they were nose to nose, neither one of them spotted the unicorn. Adults went about their lives missing beauty all the time.
Little Roo was six. I was ten. The unicorn strode a couple of majestic laps of the garden, before vanishing completely into the rosebush. The Fourth Dimension was our only explanation for this. We weren’t dreaming.
That night, Mum called the police. The next evening, Linford was sleeping in her bed again, snoring the walls down in his frightening manner.
The unicorn wasn’t the only strange thing. Living in Chorley, up in the North, we were closer to the sky than most. What luck. Little Roo often saw things written in the stars. Signs, Facts and Other Things. I’m telling you.
He knew why adults said the things they said. And why they didn’t mean the things they said
and even less what they did. Sometimes it wasn’t answers that he found, but entirely perfect questions.
A genius, my little brother.
had a slim waist (in the very beginning),
soft hair
a gorgeous smile (pearly arcs, those teeth. Shining church doors).
Marcia had smiling eyes
loose hips
could dance as well as anyone on television
lived with her grandparents in Kingston, Jamaica,
and she was oh so kind,
had some art about her.
When told to go into the woods to choose a branch with which her grandfather would beat her little brother
(for some tiny offence) chose a weak branch that came apart in her grandfather’s hand
and earned a beating too.
Marcia
was fourteen and still skinny when she flew over to England, alone and terrified
with a baby in her belly. The boyfriend at that time was not the baby’s daddy
but none of that mattered, because everything was about to change. She had been sent for, finally, by her mother
and would be as far away from all of these men as God would allow.
She trembled when stepping off the plane. She was about to see her parents, for the first time in years. How would she tell them? How would she explain?
Marcia
is sixteen with screaming Baby Samson, in the North West of England.
What a mess
and he’s only getting bigger. A real-life mini-man; the sum of several fears. Growing and growing, faster than she can handle. She curses the Lord Above. Marcia’s parents step in. Especially when little Samson rides his small tricycle all the way to Grandma’s just to get away from Marcia and her mood swings. They raise him like a son;
never mind a grandson. He even calls them ‘Mum and Dad’
leaves Marcia’s title
blank.
Alone,
Marcia trains to be a nurse.
So
soon, Marcia, the student nurse, is twenty-six. The man she loves is a dark, beautiful scholar with some height to him, some education
and a wife and family in Nigeria. Guinness is his drink. He’ll be the last one to leave the pub. The last one home and, most every night,
he turns towards her with those irresistible, glazed eyes,
blackshining. So she can’t stay angry, even if she tries.
But his other home calls and the academic year ends
and their time will soon be up. He knows and she knows that he will not stay, but they make a child anyway.
Y R S A
she says. Yrsa. I like the sound of that.
Read to me! Mummy would say;
and boy, she and I read. We read our lives out. Right from the very beginning.
Hot, thick worlds with ladybirds and puffins on their spines.
Watery, cool-mountainous wholewideworlds.
Why didn’t anyone help the Little Red Hen make food?
or
Why was the cat so naughty?
And Mummy would point at the picture of the cat who
wouldn’t behave. The angry, frowning cat
sitting, arms folded, in the corner.
It’s because he needs love, she would say. It’s only because he’s frightened.
Why did the lion scream, ‘Over my dead body!’
when someone tried to give away his comb? Why did
he bellow,
frightening the entire jungle?
It’s because he needs things, she would say,
the lion is lonely and vain.
Mummy was soft. Warm-milk soft
and everything written in our paperworlds
made hot, small sense.
She lifts me up onto the kitchen counter.
The child is so, so gifted.
She’s reading already?
Well, hear for yourself.
And way before school?
Yes, quite. Kids can do anything, you know. It’s all in teaching them early. Just look and see how easily she forms the words.
She smiles at me. Her eyes, like honey. Bronzeshining.
You’re my supernova,
says she.
My thrilling, bright explosion.
Marcia is thirty,
loves Linford
but feels bereft of something. A friend (Sonny, his name)
stays overnight (again) and when her little girl comes to the door, she ushers her out, quickly.
‘Go back to bed.’ says she, ‘See you in the morning,
baby-girl.
I love you.’
Then she lays back, a hand on her stomach, wondering what time it will be this dark morning when Sonny the Friend will make his excuses and disappear off into the town.
Somewhere inside her, Little Roo is beginning
and nobody knows yet but God.
We moved house. Linford is Mum’s boyfriend and we are staying at his place right now. It is a two-up two-down in Warrington. Linford’s house is under construction, but getting there. At first it is exciting, moving to this half-built red-brick house with red, red floors. An almost-house. A house nearly on the corner of the street.
The kitchen floor tiles bother me because they are all scratched and uneven and I think there might be germs there.
I have a baby brother these days. I call him Little Roo because he is what older people call hyperactive and likes to skip hop around, kangaroo style. Linford is a travelling salesman and sometimes he has to go away for two to three days while Mum is still working nights at the hospital, so we have this babysitter called Bev. Bev the Babysitter smells of parma violets and has yellow wavy hair and long nails and lots of freckles, and talks a lot on the phone late at night. When I’m in bed I can hear her cackling up through the flooring.
My big brother Samson is away, fighting in the army. I miss him holding my hand and walking to school with me. I love my little brother, but he’s too small to know how to do things and he cries a lot.
Samson had to get away, he said. He is sorry to leave. But he can’t stand that guy Linford
and he had to get away. Mum tells all this to Bev the Babysitter while they are drinking tea in the morning and Bev tuts and sucks on a cigarette and calls him a ‘typical teenager’,
‘How old is he? Seventeen, eighteen? They’re all rotten at that age,’ she says
and Mum, still in her blue and white nurse’s uniform, looks down at her tea and says, quietly,
‘He isn’t rotten; they just don’t see eye to eye.’ And Bev shakes her head and says,
‘The army isn’t the thing, though, is it? Just teaches them to be violent, I think. Ruins ’em more, I say,’
and Mum gives Bev twenty-five pounds and slowly gets to her feet, holding her head,
and says,
‘Well, Beverly, I’d better be getting to bed. Thank you.’
and Beverly nods and puts on her coat.
I am only seven years old and already getting round in the wrong places. The swellings of my little breasts are showing through my clothes, growing into small protruding points
… so very fast, says Mum, getting nervous. She works night after night at the local hospital
and frets
and tells me to wear big T-shirts over my nighties – especially the long silky blue one, which is so low cut that it needs three safety pins.
Remember, Linford is not your dad, she says. Wear my orange gown at all times at night now. The one with the flowers. Be mindful.
What is mindful?
It means, use your head. You’re growing into something else now. All little girls grow and change
and …
look,
it is what it is.
It’s true. I feel like something new. Something uncomfortable. Aware of my largeness for my age, the things I have growing on my front and the one who is called Dad
but is not Dad.
Dad is something that I didn’t know that I had. Or needed.
Who is my dad, then? I ask one day.
He’s Nigerian. He’s from NIGERIA,
Mum states proudly, as though that answers the question.
Handsome as anything and he’s AMAZING. I still love him.
I do.
And he is a PRINCE, you know. Royalty. You have royal blood in you, you know. We write to each other, you know.
Do you want to see what he looks like?
I do.
Mum gets out a photograph from a large envelope marked ‘taxes’ in the bedside drawer. The Amazing Nigerian has a round smiling face and smooth dark skin. (Much darker than Linford and my grandparents.) He is wearing a square cap and a gown. Mum says it is his graduation outfit. Says he is the smartest man she knows.
The One, she says, looking off into the distance. God, and you look just like him, you know?
I don’t.
He’s a grown-up. He’s a stranger.
He’s some man in a cap and gown.
Some ‘facts’ are lies; that’s the truth of it.
I still have to call Linford ‘Dad,’
but my real dad is a university lecturer in Nigeria, who reads lots of books. Mum says that I am an African, which sounds pretty good. But Granddad says Africans are wicked
and sold us into slavery.
Samson is gone. Gone fighting, but for a good reason.
Soldiers die sometimes
but it won’t happen to Samson, because we say our prayers at bedtime.
There might be an issue with Linford, Mum says.
What is an issue?
An issue is a thing. It’s not that he’s not Good,
it’s just that he has no patience. It’s just that he growls a lot.
The lion is quite lonely;
the cat, he just feels bad.
He needs love and is frightened, and we must understand.
Love is a string: Mum loves me and Little Roo. Marcia loves Linford. I don’t know who Linford loves. Marcia says she has a lovely little girl, with a smile and eyes that are going to break the men apart. Marcia thinks her child will be a beautiful thing. Just like your dad, she says.
I loved him.
But he has a wife
and responsibilities.
Mum tells me my African name.
Dankyes,
she says
Dankyes Mikuk.
Dankyes means,
‘At last! An end to terrible things.’
The blue nightdress is coming apart. I wear the orange robe as I’ve been instructed, but one day, Mum says that I am moving out. She and Little Roo are staying at Linford’s
but I have to go. I have to Be Somewhere Else for a While. It’s better that way. I am going to live miles away at Grandma and Granddad’s, where I will have to eat a lot of rice and peas and go to bed early and go to church all the time and everyone else will get to stay in Warrington, eating KFC and having fun. It’s only four years, she says. Till Big School. And four years travels fast.
Marcia says,
‘I need to work nights and I need not to worry.’
Mum says it’ll just be a matter of four small years
over at Grandma’s. Marcia says,
‘It’ll be over before you know it, little one.’
There is something starting to go wrong. I don’t know what it is. Only that, according to Marcia, my nightdress is a wrong thing. Dark blue satin. A long, wrong thing. And the red house is dangerous
or
I am dangerous
or we are dangerous at the same time,
we are dangerous to each other.
My body is too big to stay home.
Body as trap,
body as trapdoor to a haunted unreal place.
Linford as almost-bad-thing
but not quite. Linford is a Halfling sometimes frightening sometimes fun sometimes he takes us for ice cream sometimes he roars when we don’t eat all of our mountains of rice and chicken/ fish/ dead animal and moats and rivers of gravy and stew – dinner can be an entire kingdom. Sometimes he shouts, I will smack you people, eat de food NOW or yuh gonna know about it! And he leaves us in the kitchen with the horrible red floor with the scratches and countrysides of potato and yam. Sometimes he gives us fifty-pence pieces that shine and sometimes he buys us cream soda for the ice cream and we make floats;
sometimes he does this,
sometimes he does that.