The girl looked at the photograph. It was taken a long time ago, and if you looked at it really closely, after a long time, you could see that it was of her. She was wearing a bridesmaid’s dress and a tiara, and although someone had put makeup on her, it was clear that was just a child. She had dark hair, and her eyes looked dark too, in the photo, although they were actually green. Her hair was put up, with a few strands hanging down. Dark curls. Almost an afro, but not quite. A few generations away. She realised that she sort of missed that hair. It had been ruined now, by half a lifetime of bleach and a few years of relaxer.
“I can perm your hair straight, you know” her mate’s sister had said.
“Perm my hair straight? Fucking yes please!”
The girl hated her hair. Partly because it was a bit unmanageable, but also partly because it was the cause of an incident, which the girl never forgot.
The girl used to play football, at primary school. Almost all her friends were boys, although she was nearly twenty before she even noticed that about herself. And that was only because someone else pointed it out.
“I don’t mind if you’re a lesbian, you know” the girl’s mother said, when Michael’s mum dropped her back from football, after school once.
“What’s a lesbian?” asked the girl, because she was six, and if the word had entered her sphere of existence, it had sparked no interest in her.
“Never mind” said her mother. “You’ll work it out when you’re older.”
She got a lot older, but never managed to quite work out if she was a lesbian or not. She did work out that these things are not quite as clear cut as a lot of people think they are, though, when she was fairly young.
She would look back on the lesbian comment years later and be faintly amused. Anyway, she did dancing, too, for years. Her auntie paid for her to go to dancing lessons from when she was small, and she was good at that, probably much better than she was at football. But maybe her mum just thought she was doing it to please her auntie. The girl thought that was funny too, because she actually never did anything to please anyone else. Or she didn’t think so, anyway.
They put make up on her for the dancing shows as well, like in the bridesmaid photo.
It was because of the football that she ruined her hair. Or indirectly so, anyway. When she was in the juniors, most of the girls played netball, but if they wanted, they could choose football instead. She made it onto the school team, and there was one other girl on the team, Deana Glasson.
Deana was three years older than the girl, and about a foot taller. She was supposed to be harder than most of the boys, and a lot of people were scared of her.
Where the girl used to live, it was a large coastal town, with a bigger population than most cities, but it did not have city status, as it had neither cathedral nor university, although you could do degrees at one of the colleges. It wasn’t one of those backwater places where you only ever saw white people. There was a reasonable amount of diversity. It was rough, though. In more prosperous times, a lot of its wealth came from the docks, but most of that was finished now. One of the town’s heroes was a black guy called Mike Spiller, and he was the girl’s mate’s grandad. He was a boxing promoter, having been a successful boxer himself in his younger days, and he ran a few businesses, and everybody knew him or knew of him. There were also, though, a lot of die hard racists, mainly in the generation from before the girl’s mother’s generation. Proper EDL skinhead types. They had their own pubs, where people would get their heads smashed in if they looked like they might have some non white ancestry. In fact, you would probably get your head smashed in just if nobody knew you. These places had names like The White Warrior. It was very blatant. Everything was very blatant there. Whorehouses openly displayed pictures of girls and signs about massages all along the main road to get to the seafront. Years after all this, the girl was back in town with a friend, who’s band were playing there, and her friend couldn’t believe it.
“I’ve never seen so many whorehouses in my life!” he exclaimed. “Just obvious like that. Well – apart from in Amsterdam. How the fuck do they – fucking HELL!”
The girl roared with laughter. It was funny.
The thing about places like that is a lot of people think they can make their own laws, and to a great extent, they are proved right. Deana, the big girl who played football, her dad was famous in the town, because he was the singer in a racist punk band, who screamed about white power, and he had a rep for being hard. Looking back, the girl wasn’t sure whether he actually was or not, but he had a lot of friends who were in a biker gang, and they did bad things to people when they owed other people money for drugs, and even if he was all talk, they were definitely for real.
As far as she had ever considered it, which was actually not at all, the girl was white. She looked white, although she tanned easily and had frizzy hair. Her mother looked the same, in fact her hair was actually straighter than the girl’s. It wasn’t a thing she had ever really thought about. Perhaps Deana had been trained to sniff out people of non-white heritage by her dad was one of the thoughts that popped into the girl’s head as Deana pinned her up against the coat rails in the changing rooms, and this made her spontaneously burst out laughing, which made Deana get really angry.
Because she and Deana were the only girls playing football, they were the only girls in the girls’ changing room. Most of the staff and pupils weren’t around either, because it was after school.
The girl sat down on the narrow bench and started taking off her football boots. Deana was suddenly stood towering over her.
“You’re a bit of a nig nog aren’t you? Or you’re something.”
She looked up at Deana.
“AREN’T YOU? ANSWER ME!”
All of a sudden, Deana had her pinned up, and her face was between two coat hooks and one of Deana’s hands was around her neck.
“AREN’T YOU?” demanded Deana.
The girl couldn’t actually answer, because Deana was almost strangling her.
She tried to escape, but Deana was a lot bigger than her, and she couldn’t. It occurred to her that if she kicked upwards, she could probably do Deana some serious damage. She realised, though, that if that happened, then serious trouble would happen, and she wasn’t angry enough to have just done it in the moment, and she didn’t think that Deana intended to do her any actual harm. She just wanted to scare her. It was unjust, and it was only ever moments of injustice that made the girl really angry. But mainly that was when they happened to someone else. When they happened to her, she felt a lot calmer about it.
A lot of thoughts must have gone through her mind in a very short time, and one of these, after she decided not to kick Deana in the chin, was that maybe Deana’s dad had trained her to sniff out ethnic minorities. This made her laugh. She couldn’t properly laugh out loud, but it was obvious she was laughing.
“What the FUCK are you laughing at?” demanded Deana. “Do you fucking think this is FUNNY? I’ll show you funny, you disgusting little nigger!”
The girl was shocked by the language. Some old people said things like ‘the chinky’ when they meant the Chinese takeaway, but nobody called you that, and it wasn’t something the girl had ever considered she could be called.
“What are you LAUGHING at?” Deana demanded again. She eased her stranglehold a bit, but then bashed the girl’s head against the top of the coat rail behind. It was only a bit of wood, and not the wall, so it didn’t hurt as much as it could have.
“Your mates won’t hear this” said Deana “Nobody’s going to come and save you. Anyway, this is just a warning.”
And then Deana spat in her face and dropped her.
The girl’s hands reached the bench before her arse bones did, which prevented any further injury.
She wiped the spit off her face. She thought of all the things she could say about exacting revenge, and when she did tell her mates about it, what they’d do, but then she didn’t really feel like saying anything.
Deana walked away and started getting changed as though nothing had happened. Eventually, she spoke:
“I’m going to find out where you live, and my dad and his mates are going to come over and burn your house down. With you in it, in the middle of the night.”
The girl, afterwards, did not really think that Deana’s dad was going to come and burn her house down. She also, for some reason she could never quite fathom, did not tell anybody about what had happened. It wasn’t because she was scared, and it wasn’t because she was ashamed, but it bothered her in a completely different way to how anything had ever bothered her before.
Deana went to secondary school the following September, and a couple of years later, the girl heard that she’d had a baby. She never had a chance to pounce on the girl like that again, anyway, because a nice girl from the girl’s year called Celia also started playing football, and got picked to train with the team. But long after Deana’s footballing days were over, the girl remembered the incident, and somehow it burned.
It was a few years later, when the girl made friends with Jack, and it was Jack’s sister who was a hairdresser. Jack’s sister was actually saying to the girl how much she liked her hair, when the girl protested that it was awful, and she hated it.
“Can you bleach my hair too?” she asked.
“Course I can, I’m a fucking hairdresser. I’ll do it all for twenty five quid or a bag of weed.”
The girl had worked all summer, on her uncle’s food van, and she could easily afford the twenty-five quid or the bag of weed, and she knew she was getting a good deal.”
“That’s a good deal you know” said Hannah. “I’m doing it at cost. Cos I like you. You’re a bit bad, aren’t you? I like bad people.”
The girl had always felt a bit like she was bad, although she actually was very considerate most times, and got good grades at school.
Hannah was the next person to put make up on the girl, after the dancing, and her cousin’s wedding. It was after she’d straightened and cut and bleached her hair.
The effect was astounding.
Although she was small for her age, skinny, completely flat chested, and without the make up, her face was a child’s face, now she looked like she could probably get into a bar or a nightclub, in the right clothes. She was twelve at the time, and it wasn’t too much later that she tested this theory out, and found that she was right.
The other part of the effect, the part that she was really after, was the fact that now she did not look even vaguely mixed race at all. Nobody like Deana Glasson would ever be able to get the better of her again. She felt a great sense of victory, which in time she would question, and of relief, which she would never forget.
When she got home, her mother was horrified.
“What have you done to yourself?” She asked.
She didn’t usually mind much what the girl did, so the girl was momentarily silenced.
“Your hair!” said her mother. “Your beautiful hair!”
“I hated my hair” said the girl. “I hated it.”
Her mother looked vaguely sad.
“How have you paid for it?” asked her mother.
“From the food van” said the girl. “I worked hard all summer.”
She had as well, and her mother couldn’t disagree.
“Well, I suppose if it makes you happy” said her mother. “It’s not hurting anyone. Who did this to you, anyway?”
“Jack’s sister, Hannah” said the girl.
Her mother rolled her eyes.
“I suppose you do look nice. In a way” her mother conceded. “But – oh – your hair was beautiful. I liked it how it was. Now you just look like – oh I don’t know.”
“I don’t know either” said the girl. She was getting bored now, and itching to get out of the conversation, and the house, and to find some new adventures.
“Oh, one day you’ll understand!” said her mother.
“No!” she said to her mother, thinking of Deana Glasson. “No! One day you’ll understand!”
Years later, she was not sure that either of them ever did.