Someone like her? Someone like me? What did that even mean? Still pondering just what the hell she meant, I let myself be tugged over to the knot of girls who’d been staring daggers at us all evening. When we were standing in front of them, Yaz cocked her eyebrow and grinned at the bunch of them.
“What? What are you lot staring at? Got something to say?” she challenged, nudging me to silence when I would have asked her why she was being so aggressive.
One of the girls got kind of pushed forward (or maybe everyone else took a step back) and suddenly she was alone in front of us. She looked kind of scared, and I wondered why; it wasn’t as though Yaz was going to lash out… was she?
“Hi… hi Yasmin, glad you could come…” she quavered, “we… I… we… we were wondering… who… who your… date… is, just asking… never seen…” and then she dried up as Yaz just continued to give her the eyebrow and the sardonic smile, before smiling so wide I could see her fillings.
“Oh, so you want to know? As if it was any of your fucking business! What, got nothing to say? Right, you want to talk, now, after all these years? Now you want to talk and play nice? Then let’s talk. This is Ricky; say hello to Ricky, we live together, and isn’t he just gorgeous?”
What?
She grinned wickedly at me and licked her lips suggestively.
“Say “Hello”, Ricky, these… people are just dying to meet you!”
“You… live… with… you never said… how long…?” stammered the spokesperson, and once again Yaz arched that eyebrow at her.
“Oh, ages now, since my eighteenth birthday, in fact; you bunch of slags really should try and keep up, you know, but then you never gave a shit about me before, did you?”
She tucked her arm back though mine as the group of girls stood there with their mouths hanging open in astonishment.
“Well, nice to see you and all that or whatever, let’s not ever do this again, if you lot think really hard about it I’m sure you’ll understand why. Come on Ricky darling; let’s go home, I want to do things with you!”
We spun around and walked away as their collective jaws dropped open, and as we walked away Yaz with a triumphant smile pasted on her face, while my back itched between my shoulder blades, no doubt from the intense stares I knew we were getting, while my neck ached from the effort of not looking around to see what kind of havoc we’d wreaked in our wake. I was a little unsettled; she’d seemed to be almost baiting what looked like just a bunch of ordinary girls, and I could sense anger, lots of anger, and that was wrong; Yaz wasn’t the angry one, Shari seemed to have a pretty good lock on that. I felt we needed to clear this up before we went home, so I sat her down with her back to those girls, because something was going on here that wasn’t right and needed clearing-up. Yaz stared at me while I looked at her, trying to figure out what had made her kick off like that.
Eventually she caved in.
“OK, what, what’s bugging you, Ricky?” she asked.
I waved back the way we’d just come.
“What was that just now? All… that… angry, nasty stuff? Why? I didn’t come with you to see that, I thought we were just, I dunno, pranking some people, come in here like a lovey-dovey couple, fool them, have a secret laugh at them, leave; not that. Talk to me, Yaz, tell me what’s really going on here, you can tell me, I won’t judge, I can’t, but maybe I can help you sort this out. Please, Yaz; this is not you, that wasn’t you back there, you’re a nice person, you helped me when I needed it, you don’t do things like that. Please, talk to me…”
Yaz stared at me, her face pale and drawn and her nostrils flared; she was furious, even good old, non-perceptive me could see that; I just needed to know why.
“You want to know why, Ricky? Let me share a little history with you, Ricky; all our lives, we’ve been the butt of their racist jokes, their racist comments, their spreading racist lies about how people like us live in trees back where we’re from, sit on the floor and eat with our fingers and don’t wash, how badly we smell, shit like that every fucking day. This is East London, home of the British National Party and National Front, people like me, paki’s, are not white enough to be part of their group, we’re not supposed to live in white people’s houses, in white people neighbourhoods, none of that. You try living with morons telling you every day to go back where you came from; where’s that? I was born here, so was mum before me! What they mean is, I should get my non-WASP face out of their white country, and I’ve had that all my life from them. Way I see it, I was due that, payback isn’t marked ‘white only’ in my world, got it?”
Her voice took on a low, harsh note, throbbing with anger and pent-up hurt; she was bloody furious.
“We get this shit every fucking day from fat, sweaty, common little shitbags like them every time we show our faces, they drive home every day how superior they are to me because when they occasionally take a bath their skins are whiter than mine, so tell me, at what point am I supposed to accept that’s just how it’s supposed to be and just stop caring and be a good little second-class citizen? You want to know why they were so shocked? Because you’re white and I’m not supposed to be with someone like you, you’re too white for me, you’re supposed to be with one of them; I’m supposed to be with who they think I should, and it’s not some white boy like you, have you got it now, have I got through to you, can we fucking go now?”
Oh. My. God. I never guessed she could be so angry, and over something that made no sense to me, but had obviously hurt her deeply over and over again. I honestly didn’t know what to say, she was saying things I’d never heard of, or thought even made a difference, and I could only look at her in shock that her life here, in this place, had been so marred by all this stuff. All I could do was hug her, and at first she was stiff, unyielding, anger and outrage in every line of her at the remembered insults and exclusion, then she leaned into me, and I felt her trembling as she cried silently while I hugged her close, all this ‘phoney boyfriend’ stuff forgotten; now it was just me holding my little sister because she was in pain and she needed me.
After she’d calmed down a little, she fumbled out her phone and tried to call Shari, but she started crying again when Shari answered, so I took the phone from her and spoke to Shari.
“Shari, could you come and get us, please, Yaz is… not good, she needs you and your mum, can you hurry, please?”
Shari’s voice was full of concern.
“It didn’t work, did it? What actually happened?”
“It got… kind of nasty…” I admitted, “Yaz told me some stuff and it seems like she kind of had good reason to kick off like that, but I don’t know, there’s stuff I don’t understand; please hurry, we need to get her home as soon as possible…”
“On my way, wait outside, and Ricky? Thanks for looking out for her. Be there in five.”
*
Yaz was silent all the way home. Shari glanced at me when she picked us up, her eyes asking the question, but I shook my head; we needed to be at home for this, now was not the time or place. Yaz sat silently in the back with me the whole time, hugging my arm in a death-grip, with her face buried behind my arm, avoiding looking at Shari, and when we got home she kicked her heels off and ran straight up to her room, slamming the door hard enough to make the whole house shake. Ayesha questioned me with her eyes, watching as Shari followed her, before pulling me into the lounge.
“What happened, Ricky, it didn’t work, did it? Whatever she was planning went wrong, didn’t it?”
I drew a deep breath, wondering how to explain how I was feeling about this whole thing, still confused at how a simple prank had all gone so completely tits-up, when I heard Shari calling for me. Ayesha nodded, so I tore upstairs, not forgetting to knock and wait.
“Door’s open, Ricky, come in.” came Shari’s voice, so for the first time, I entered my little sister’s bedroom. Shari was sitting on a big, soft, frilly bed, all pink ruffles and plush toys, with Yaz huddled against her. She’d changed into a baggy sweatshirt and track-pants, and her eyes were two red blurs in her pale face. As I came up to the bed, Yaz jumped up and hugged me so tightly I swear I felt my ribcage creak.
I looked helplessly at Shari who just shrugged and mimed hugging her back, so I did, nudging her over to the bed so we could both sit down, me with my arm around her, holding her against me, and her with her face buried in my chest.
At first I wondered what she wanted me to do, but then I felt her trembling again, and my shoulder felt hot and damp; she was crying again, and suddenly a rush of insight, of compassion and family connection swept over me; she’d needed to cry, and she’d wanted me to hold her, not Shari, while she cried; I really WAS her big brother, and she wanted me to make it right again. Distressed as I was at her obvious distress, I was also elated at this first, tangible sign that I was one of them now; my days of being an outsider were coming to an end.
Holding my little sister, comforting her, was the single most satisfying, ‘blaze of light’ moment of my life so far; she needed me, she actually needed me, my strength, my presence, and it was so wholly satisfying I was actually blissed-out on the thought of it. The weeks of learning how to be a real person, how to fit in somewhere had paid off, and it was because of my sisters, two lovely girls who’d taken me into their lives and made me one of them and shown me how something so simple could be so profoundly special.
Shari looked at me quizzically; she could tell something had happened, that some sort of defining moment had occurred with me; maybe the way my arm around her had changed from a support to an embrace, but then she smiled and nodded, touched her finger to her lips and pointed at Yaz, mouthing ‘talk to her…’ before silently slipping out of the room.
Yaz seemed content to huddle against me in silence, and truthfully, it was OK by me; suddenly realising I really was her big brother, that that was how she saw me, and that’s what she needed me for, filled me with a warm glow I didn’t want to let go of anytime soon. We sat in companionable silence for a while, Yaz making no move to sit away from me just yet, and the room so silent I could hear Ayesha moving around downstairs, and the soft, regular flutter of her breathing. I’d just about decided she’d dozed-off when she spoke.