Housegirl: A Novel by Michael Donkor

Author:Michael Donkor [Donkor, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781250305176
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2018-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

20

In the dining room, Amma sat at the head and Belinda at the foot of the long table, with flouncy candelabras, uncapped biros and fat highlighters spread between them. Amma played with her pencil case, picking at the elaborate squiggles and hieroglyphs Tipp-Exed onto its plastic. Then she stopped and flipped down the iBook’s tangerine lid. Her sigh became a loud yawn, disturbing Belinda from her serious, squinted reading of Macbeth. Amma mouthed ‘Sorry, ma petite’ at Belinda’s sternness. How funny to think of that girl, a fortnight before, working her thang to Missy Elliott in synchronised sass. Belinda underlined something very firmly and scribbled on her notepad with an air of industry that implied she would not be receptive to Amma’s attempts to talk about their now famous performance. Instead Amma put her feet up on the scarred oak. A pattern of grinning pineapples danced across her socks. She peeled them off and flung them aside.

‘Weeeeeeee!’ she said, as they flopped to the floorboards.

‘Amma!’

‘Whatever. Sorry. I’ll stop. Sorry. Fuck.’

Belinda sighed. ‘To give a bit of encouragement to do more work for some more moments I can heat up the leftover okra thing as a snack for late lunch? Yes? In fifteen minutes? We eat then?’

‘Yeah, thanks … you sick feeder, you.’ Amma took another salty tatale from the saucer nearby. Belinda frowned and returned to her text.

Even though Amma had been pretty pissed when she’d said that thing about admiring ‘trying’ at Lavender’s, it was still on point. So, in the dining room, with Mum rattling around upstairs, sorting out some campaign at the charity shop or whatever, Amma had spent most of the bleak Sunday afternoon, now dragging itself out, doing her best to mimic Belinda’s diligence. As Belinda concentrated opposite, Amma grimaced and grunted at the iBook; her task was no meek adversary, nor could the battle with it run on and on. The bloody UCAS Personal Statement had to be finished that weekend ‘or else’, Titch had threatened. But each time Amma tore herself away from the delicious and distracting tatales, what she wrote sounded sometimes a bit Miss Jean Brodie, sometimes a bit business-speaky – and mostly awful. Amma flipped open the laptop and pressed some buttons to change the screen’s brightness.

Maybe the difficulty in writing about ‘herself’ came from the blandness of the ‘herself’ to be put on the page. The most interesting thing that had happened to her wasn’t appropriate for the box on the form allocated for luring offers from History of Art professors at Leeds, Sussex, Manchester, York … Amma felt a bit sick and scrunched her toes, not only responding to the draught or the flashing memory of Roisin’s pubes damp with sweat, but also because it was embarrassing and inaccurate to consider ‘that’ ‘interesting’. Amma let her head loll. The word ‘interesting’ and its friend ‘fascinating’ were problematic. Like when jolly-hockey-sticks primary schoolteachers had asked about her ‘ancestry’ for colourful displays on family trees. If Amma remembered boring details

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