The Go-Away Bird

So yeah, sometimes when I’m teaching I feel a right fraud. But when it came to Lola, I earned every penny.

‘What do you mean?’ She sat down again behind my flimsy metal music stand, which had seen better days since I bought it when I was learning the violin at school, and she rubbed her enormous calves, tired from the heels, I suppose, pursing her lips so hard that I thought the collagen would start oozing out any second from between the glossy too-brown-to-be-red-and-too-red-to-be-brown lipstick and the dark brown lip liner.

I called her ‘she’ because…well, she would kill me if I called her ‘he’, and because, although she was clearly a bloke dressed up like a woman, she did it with such conviction that you started to believe it yourself, I tell you. Lola needed no lessons in confidence. But she really needed them in singing.

‘I mean you’ll never make it to the ends of these lines with power unless you take a breath before each one, as I showed you.’

‘I was.’

‘Lola, if I can see your shoulders going up and down like they’re on strings then you’re not breathing from the diaphragm, you’re just taking shallow breaths.’

She started looking at her nails, looking out the window – you could just see her twenty years ago in the back row of a French class refusing to join in. Perhaps she would’ve paid more attention if she’d known she was going to be singing Edith Piaf songs and ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir’ for a living by the age of thirty. She didn’t take well to criticism; I was going to have to tread carefully here.

‘The lamé dress you told me about for this number sounds…’

Grotesque.

‘…grrrreat; but it’s hardly going to show off your figure if it keeps riding up with your shoulders as you gulp for air, don’t you reckon?’

She looked back at me, down her long nose, fiddling with the crucifix around her neck. I was getting through.

‘It’s just a matter of practice, until it becomes second nature. And it will, I promise you.’

She uncrossed her legs and stood up, smoothing down her pink skirt.

Result!

I rewound the tape a little and pressed play. The music of Barry Manilow jumped with jazz-hands from my speakers and I felt my face get a bit hot. Lola pushed her fingers into her diaphragm, just as I had taught her, and breathed in so that the muscle pushed her fingers back out again.

‘Good!’ I felt a buzz, a flash of pride even, and in my moment of optimism I stupidly added, ‘And remember to tell me a story.’

‘What do you mean?’ Lola let her hands flop to her sides and her bum flop back into the chair.

You idiot, Ash!

‘Nothing,’ I shouted over Barry, ‘I mean, don’t worry about that yet. Just concentrate on the breathing this time round.’

‘But I don’t understand. Why do you keep asking me to tell you a story? If I’d wanted a job on fuckin’ Jackanory I would’ve gone to the BBC not COME TO YOU.’

I stopped the tape again just before she finished and her last few words boomed around the suddenly quiet room, sounding more aggressive than even she intended them to be. I think she even rattled herself a bit, so she patted her black bobbed hair in case her rant had knocked something out of place.

‘OK,’ I said, as if I was talking to someone suicidal on the roof of a high-rise, ‘it’s just that with Barry Manilow, probably more than any other singer, his lyrics are telling a story, taking you on a journey. And this song is probably the most…story-like of all. So let’s hear in your voice and see in your face the story of the showgirl, every man’s dream, top of her game at first; then, by the last verse, she’s a tragic figure, lost her love, lost her mind…’

Actually, underneath all the cha-cha-cha and brass fanfares this is a bloody depressing song, don’t you reckon?

‘Go for it and you’ll knock ’em dead, trust me. And who knows, if there’s anyone from the BBC in the audience you could be the first drag-queen presenter on Jackanory.’

She almost smiled, but she sucked it away like she was eating a sherbet lemon. She stood up, though, and smoothed down her skirt. Tapped each stiletto, the same colour as her lips, into threadbare bits of the carpet and pressed her finger into her diaphragm.

Result!

I rewound the tape to the beginning of the song – must get a new deck, it sounds like one of those crappy scooters the kids burn up and down the estate on thinking they’re the mutt’s nuts. I pressed play. It’s going to start chewing the students’ tapes up soon, by the sound of it, and I don’t need to drive any more away.

Lola started singing about Lola, a showgirl with her hair full of yellow feathers and a dress cut down to…somewhere. It sounded like a cross between Mr T and Cilla Black, but at least she was starting to breathe in the right places and in the right way.

Perhaps I should invest in one of these new minidisc things. It’s bound to take over the world and I’ll get left behind as usual. Ten years ago when Brothers in Arms came out on the first CD I dismissed them as a fad…derr! And now I wouldn’t go anywhere without my CD Discman.

Lola followed Manilow like an echo in a haunted house as he crooned about Tony and the showgirl, working late nights in this cheesy club, where at least they had each other…Whoopee.

‘Good, keep it up, this is great!’

Oh my God, I’m looking at Lola’s tits! Or bra full of socks, or whatever it is she’s got stuffed down there. Ash, you’ve really got to get out more. Yeah? And we all know what happens if I ‘get out more’ – I keep a journal of my social life on my arm, written with a cheese knife.

But Barry and Lola loudly suggested that I should get myself down to the Copa, Copacabana. Music and passion are apparently always in fashion there. As long as I don’t go and fall in love, they warned in suddenly sombre tones.

‘Don’t fall in love…Well?’

‘I agree,’ I said, then quickly realized I was not having a conversation with Barry about relationships. ‘I…think we’ve nearly cracked it. Seriously, there was much more power in that, right to the end of even the long lines.’

Lola stood there, arms folded across her…chest; she raised her eyebrows and the stud through her right one shot up in the air like an antenna searching for bullshit waves. I thought for a second she had sussed that I could’ve been paying a little more attention during that run-through. But then I saw her surprisingly-white-given-all-the-cigarettes teeth for the first time today as her inflated lips peeled back like a horse’s into a smile, her eyelashes whipped her cheeks and she clicked her heels together like Dorothy wishing her way back to Kansas.

‘You think so?’ Her voice went from its usual foghorn bass to Mariah’s fifth-octave squeak in just those three words. ‘Do you think I’ll be ready for the show next week?’

‘We’ve got another lesson before then, haven’t we?’

Idiot!

Lola flopped to the chair and searched in her bag for a cigarette. ‘So you’re saying I’m not ready.’

‘I am saying that after our next lesson you will be completely ready.’

I started making a meal of putting away my folder of notes to signify it was time for Lola to go. She offered me a Marlboro so I couldn’t resist one more lesson for today.

‘No thanks, I don’t smoke – and neither should you if you want to improve your singing, especially the breathing.’

‘Oh fuck off, Mother Teresa!’

Nothing like respect for your teacher, eh!

‘Sinatra smokes, Robert Plant smokes, Edith smoked,’ Lola smoked. ‘It didn’t do their voices any harm, did it?’

I was dying to point out the slight difference in the quality of their voices and Lola’s at her age, and the fact that Piaf died of cancer, but I thought she might beat me with the sharp end of her stiletto. Besides, Lola’s attention was fixed on the ceiling now and other voices barking through it.

‘Jesus Christ!’ In her posh-camp bass you felt every consonant and vowel of a phrase like that. ‘What the hell are they up to?’

‘Oh, don’t worry about them, they’re at it all the time, sounds like they’re tearing strips off each other, don’t it? Usually it’s at seven in the morning, although what there is to argue about at that time of day is beyond me, I tell you.’

Lola blew her smoke at the ceiling in disgust. ‘Listen, Ashley, I’m not racist but…’ Here we go, that magic phrase that always comes before a racist comment. ‘With those kind, even when one of them says “hello” to another it sounds like he’s saying: “Your mother’s a whore.”’

‘Those kind’ are Africans. I couldn’t tell you what country exactly, but I’ve lived in London long enough to know a lot of people from a lot of countries and I know they are from Africa. And there was an element of truth in what Lola said, in her sledgehammer-subtle way, but I prefer to see it in terms of music. That’s what it is – just a different song, a different style. Heavy metal may sound aggressive to your gran, but it’s a beautiful thing to a metal-head. A different language, and the culture it has evolved in is just a different style of music – each to their own, I reckon.

But when they argue like that, the bloke with his booming tone to rival Lola’s and the woman like a Rottweiler with broken glass in its throat, it’s got nothing to do with the fact that I don’t understand the language – you don’t need a translator to know that there’s venom in those words. It’s like an alarm clock, most mornings at seven o’clock – as if I need to be awake at that hour! I don’t even function before ten.

They only moved in a couple of weeks ago. Perhaps it will die down soon – they say moving’s one of the most stressful things you can do. But in that weird world between sleep and awake, where what you hear in the real world forms the soundtrack of your dreams and where what you do in your dreams is acted out on your face in the real world, that vicious arguing sets off something in me. It triggers memories. I’m sitting at home, I’m six years old perhaps, stuffing my face with Space Invaders crisps and watching cartoons on TV. Upstairs, there’s arguing: Mum and Dad are at it again. Something gets thrown, someone stumbles, and I flinch, half expecting the ceiling to collapse on top of me. I cough up the Space Invader that got caught in my throat when I jumped – it makes my eyes water. I blink away the tears and try and fill my eyes with Road Runner instead, but my eyes are still watering. And the strangest thing of all, my parents aren’t arguing in English, but some African language.

So I give up trying to sleep, pull myself out of the crater in the middle of my bed where the springs once were, and put the kettle on. But the rude awakening has left my head in chaos again. I turn on the TV and turn it up to try and drown out the arguing. Breakfast news: ‘The Rwandan capital of Kigali descended into chaos yesterday as troops, presidential guards and gendarmes swept through the suburbs, killing the prime minister, United Nations peacekeepers and scores of civilians. Gangs of soldiers and youths kidnapped opposition politicians, and killed members of the minority Tutsi tribe, clubbing them to death with batons, hacking them with machetes and knives, or shooting them.’

Nice.

I flick to The Big Breakfast for something lighter – at least I would flick if this bloody remote was working properly, it can’t be the batteries already. So I turn the TV over to Channel 4 myself and stand in the middle of the lounge watching Chris and Gaby campaign for Barbara Windsor to join the cast of EastEnders, waiting for the kettle to boil.

Nearly there, Ash, not long now.

I’ll have this cup of tea and then get back to bed. Got nothing on till I meet Jimmy later. ‘Old Ford Lock, London, E3 2NN.’ Gaby gives out the address if you want to write to them. Where is that? Must be over in Hackney somewhere. What a cushy job they’ve got. What have I got in for breakfast? Oh, that milk better still be good, I hate having to go out before I’ve had a bowl of porridge. Especially in this weather. April showers, feels colder than a snowy day in December when it’s this grey, this wet. Madonna swore on the David Letterman show. New bassist in the Rolling Stones. Big Breakfast news. Tom Jones is now a Doctor of the Welsh College of Music and Drama. Thunder rumbling? No, it’s the kettle boiled. ‘…umuntu…!’ African, Nigerian? Road Runner, ‘…igicucu…’ clubbed to death, gangs of youths, her name was Lola, she was a showgirl, girl or bloke? Bloke or bird? Broken glass barking dog bedspring Jimmy hugged me last time I left Ah

Ah

Ah.

Peace.

The more it hurts, the more I press the old metallic kettle to my thigh. If someone could see me now! In my boxer shorts, bent over, head resting on the kitchen work surface, the kettle between my legs as if I was having sex with it. Well, in a manner of speaking I suppose I am. I keep the kettle in place, press a little harder and I don’t care what I look like, and I wouldn’t even care, wouldn’t even know if someone was watching. I’m nowhere. In a peaceful place, where all the adverts, the news, the arguing, the laughter that I’m not in on, the chaos, is silenced. I allow the rush that fills my body to escape through my mouth in a long breathy groan. That’s the first thing I hear, just the end of it. And my breath misting up the tin with TEA engraved on it is the first thing I see. And the smell of burning flesh is the first thing I smell – it’s like chicken being barbecued in a marinade of Radox shower gel.

‘We’re trying to have a lesson down here, keep it down!’ Lola bellowed at the ceiling.

I put my hand on my thigh, my folder of notes over my hand, and pressed gently. Ouch! Still tender. Lola stuffed her fags back into her handbag and grabbed her fur coat. ‘You shouldn’t have to put up with this: you need to make a stand before they think they can get away with it,’ and she marched out of my front door and trotted up the stairs, the sound of her heels ricocheting around the concrete stairwell like the slap of a teacher’s ruler on a schoolboy’s hand.

‘Lola.’ Trying to keep up with her was a sore mission as my thigh kept chafing on my combats. ‘Leave it, it’s just the way things are round…’

She banged so hard on the door of Number 62 that she nearly fell back off her stilettos and I swear I saw her fringe move an inch down her forehead. But the moment she did it, the arguing stopped. Lola put her hands on her hips and stared down the peephole like it was a makeup mirror. I knew what Lola looked like in fish-eye-lens view from the other side of those peepholes and I had to stifle a giggle.

‘Thanks, Lola, it seems like they got the point.’

Lola pounded on the door again. ‘Not so loud now, are you? Are you gonna answer the door or what? Some of us are trying to work round here, you know.’

I could feel eyes at peepholes and doors opening a fraction up and down the stairwell, but not the slightest sense that there was anyone inside Number 62 now.

‘Lola,’ I whispered.

She raised her antenna again, searching for signs of life. Nothing. So she slapped and clicked back down the stairs again. ‘Probably not even living there legally anyway.’

Aren’t we all!

‘I’m no racist, you know, Ashley…’

But…

‘…but those lot, they’re all the bloody same. Don’t let them get away with it. Keep an eye on them.’

I reached my doorway first and stood in it just in case Lola had any intention of coming back in, but she pressed the button for the lift. Somewhere below us was a sound like a giant toilet being flushed with scrap metal instead of water and I knew the lift was on its way.

‘Well, keep up the good work, make sure you practise…’

‘Will you come to the show next week?’ Lola was smiling again and fluttering her lashes.

The idea of going out on my own to a bar full of loud queens must’ve sent a dark cloud across my face – I saw it reflected in Lola’s and realized that it actually meant a lot to her to have her teacher see her performance.

‘Yeah,’ my mouth said, ‘I don’t think I’m booked up.’ Ha! ‘I might not be able to stay long after though.’ Lola clicked her heels again and the lift door screeched open as if it was petrified of what it was about to carry. ‘Oh, and can you put me on the guest list?’

The lift door scraped shut behind her. ‘No problem, sir!’

I closed my heavy front door and my mind was already in chaos imagining all the worst possible scenarios of an evening at a drag club in Soho. I looked round the kitchen door at the drawer where I keep the knives, but then the great metal throat of the lift shaft choked, pressing pause in my brain. I leant against the doorframe and laughed loudly as Lola’s voice drummed up the lift shaft,

‘Fucking lift! Help!’

Chapter 4

As I arrive home after my first day at school I am tired. More tired than I have felt before in my whole life, I think. But I am not sure that it is just the seven-mile walk that has made me this tired. I think it is also the worry and the fear with which my day began. My head aches, but not with lessons – I found them interesting and not too difficult, as I have always done. But doing those lessons under the terrible gaze of Claudius Kagina, my teacher – the one without a neck and with a wide head – this I feel is what has exhausted me.

Mummy is much brighter than she was this morning as I drag my heavy feet into our yard. She throws down the machete she is using to chop the firewood and pats the rock next to her for me to sit. Her face is light, it has an orange warmth to it, as if her shiny skin is a mirror for the red earth glowing in the evening light. I take a bit longer to get to the rock than I really need to, just so Mum will understand how tired I am. But I cannot help a smile bursting through my sour face because I cannot wait to tell her all about my day and I know she cannot wait to hear about it too – it was all I could think about since Jeanette and I parted as we reached Kibungo.

‘My baby, growing up and going to the big school! How was your first day?’ she says, squeezing me hard.

‘It was good, Mummy, really good.’

And while I tell her about all the new English words I learnt and my agriculture class I forget my aching head until she says,

‘And how are your teachers? Are they nice?’

Then I look up at my mum, but I feel I have to shut my eyes the moment they rest on her face, as if I have just looked into the setting sun – the pain behind my eyes returns.

‘Well…?’

‘Mum.’

‘What is it?’

‘Are you a Tutsi?’

The scrape of metal along the ground makes me look back to her. It is the sound of the sharp machete as she moves it out of the way so that she can gather up the pieces of wood safely.

‘What happened at school? What have they said to you?’ she says, looking serious, as she was this morning.

I feel disappointed with myself for sending Mum so quickly back into this mood, so I reach for some wood too and try and forget that I ever asked her the question. But she is not about to forget.

‘Clementine. Did someone upset you today at school?’

‘No, Mummy. Why should you being a Tutsi upset me?’

‘That is not what I asked, darling. Who told you I was a Tutsi?’

‘No one, but my teacher made all the Hutus in the class stand up, and then all the Twas and then all the Tutsis, and I did not know what I was. I did not know what to do, Mummy!’

I suddenly feel like crying, especially because Mum looks so concerned as I tell her what Claudius Kagina made us do.

‘And when did you stand up, Clem. Did you stand…?’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘when he asked all the Hutus to stand.’

Mum looks relieved now. She places the wood at my feet and rubs my arms slowly and firmly, as if she is kneading dough. It is a strange feeling. It is like she is trying to make sure I really am there in front of her and not a ghost, but at least I do not feel like crying any more. I want to tell her that I stood when all the Tutsis stood too, but I am so glad that she is smiling again that I do not want to do anything to change it.

‘I stood because Jeanette stood and because I have heard people say that Dad has Hutu blood.’

‘That is right, darling, that is good. Very good.’

‘But I have heard people say that you are a Tutsi. And I am like you, aren’t I?’

Mum stops the rubbing, but does not let me go. ‘Your father is a Hutu and I am a Tutsi. But it means nothing really…just that I come from a family of cattle herders and your father from a family of field workers.’

And a cow – perhaps one of ours – from somewhere beyond our house makes a great ‘Moo!’ just then, as if to tell me that Mum is right. She bends her head to gather the wood again, but I do not move. My arms are still stuck to my sides where Mum has pressed them – there is something I still need to know. Mum senses this and looks up. Now her eyes are questioning and I feel her face is a mirror again.

I say, ‘Sarah said in the schoolyard that Tutsis are more beautiful than Hutus. That they are taller and slimmer. That they have lighter skin. And Hutus are shorter and darker and have wide noses…’

Mum grabs my hand and leads me quickly round to the kitchen. She drops the wood into the fireplace and leads me inside to her bedroom. On top of the chest of drawers is a little mirror, which she takes, sitting me down on her big mattress.

‘Too dark,’ she clucks, looking into the glass, and grabs me again, leading me back out to the yard quickly, as if time is running out.

‘Look, Clementine!’ she says, holding the mirror in front of my face. ‘Look at yourself. Are you light-skinned?’

‘…No.’ I am darker than Jeanette anyway.

‘Are you tall?’

‘…No.’ I was always one of the shortest at school.

‘And your nose. How is it? Is it wide, like mine?’

I am excited and sad all at once. My nose is thin, it is a Tutsi nose, a beautiful nose. But for the first time I realize that my mum has a wide nose. Not like mine. She is tall and slim, but her nose is like Claudius Kagina’s – and he is the ugliest man I have ever met! But Mum is beautiful. Everyone says so. I think so. This is getting confusing.

‘But you are a Tutsi, Mummy. Your nose should be thin.’

She holds the mirror like a plate in her hand and drums her fingers on it. ‘If what Sarah says is true then my nose should be thin, but it is not. I do not think it is my imagination. This is my nose. I can feel it.’ She stops the drumming and uses her finger to squash her nose instead. She makes both her eyes look towards it – her cartoon face makes me laugh. She laughs too. ‘Many, many years ago, perhaps it was easy to tell a Tutsi and a Hutu apart by their looks alone. But many Hutus have married Tutsis and given birth to beautiful children, with wide or thin noses. We are not so different anyway. We speak the same language, sing the same songs, go to church and worship the same God. Your father is Hutu, so you stand with the Hutus at roll call. But you, my baby, you are lucky; for you have the best of both worlds – you are both Hutu and Tutsi, outside and inside.’ She presses her hand to my heart and I think she is a doctor listening with that metal disc, listening for my double heartbeat – the Tutsi and the Hutu beat. And I do feel lucky. With my Hutu skin and Tutsi nose, I feel powerful and beautiful all at once. ‘Now you must help me cook quickly before your brother and Daddy come.’

‘What are you staring at, Clem?’ says Pio.

I look down at my plate and fill my mouth with more of the isombe that Mum and I have cooked. I love isombe, because it has eggplant in it, my favourite vegetable. But my eyes keep wandering all through dinner. I cannot help it. I have to look at Pio and Dad, study their faces. Everything about Dad says Hutu – he is dark, not very tall, and everything about him is wide. His nose, his neck, his arms, his legs. But Pio is tall for his age, tall and slender. And his skin is lighter than Dad’s, lighter than mine. But his nose is thinner than Dad’s, thin like mine. Yet he must stand with the other Hutus at roll call. Sarah really does not know what she is talking about!