“Gülden”
First published in The Good Journal
HOME
Home is a two-bedroom flat on a council estate, in a cluttered bedroom she shares with her mother. There are mounds of clothes in each corner; Coca- Cola rugby shirts and Karl Kani denim, Click suits and NAF-NAF threads.The room has a single bed, where beneath it Cabbage Patch, Barbie dolls and several Fisher Price toys collect dust and wait on a second life as collector's iters. The unused cot beside the bed is filled with stacks of CDs, cassettes and 12-inch records: Five Star, Guv and Bananarama.
None of this stuff belongs to Gülden. She owns nothing, She wants nothing, She isn't a particularly demanding three-year-old. She sleeps easy within suffocating surroundings, nestling beside her mother's clammy midriff, sensing that life will remain this way an endless surf on her mother's circadian rhythm.
Today her mother's sudden movement jolts her from her sleep. She's dazed and disorientated, but when her mist clears she recognises the deep leathery face of Grandma beneath a headscarf, standing over the bed in her nightdress. What she witnesses between the two women is foreign at first — Grandma waving an empty glass, asking if only we could all just sleep around, her mother sitting up in bed shaking of her shock and wiping at her face. It's not until her mother erupts that things feel familiar, the household's first tongue.
2. SILENCE
There are times when her mother spends most of the day in bed. When Gülden, even at six, knows it's best to leave her alone.
One day, when it feels like Gülden is losing her mother, she opens the bedroom door and lets light from the passageway pour inside. I love you mum, she says and when the silence after turns frightful, she adds promise me you won’t leave me.
Her mother is curled in bed. She is awake, but doesn't speak. She smiles. Years later, when the time is right, she will explain the smile, the bed, the darkness and the silence. Years later, when the time seems right, she will tell her daughter about her father Mehmet. How his intelligence had charmed her at the student union bar for a semester. She will explain how he talked a great deal, mollified her as she reached her second trimester. Promised he'd return from Turkey before the end of her third.
This is why she will tell her daughter, she hates a clause just as much as she hates a promise.
3. TWISTED
She has this walk, a stride where each step is worth two. She is told she has wings, a sprightly kid who spends years nine and ten trying to force words from her mother. She is eleven when she realizes her mother doesn't talk much. Barely twelve when whatever little her mother has to say is directed towards her.
Take, for instance, the day Liz Caroll's mum escorts Gülden home. The woman doesn't make it past the doorstep, so from there she begins to explain how she did not know Gülden had spent the night without permission. As a mother also, she can only imagine Gülden's mother's worry. She is so sorry. She should've checked first. Gülden's mother says nothing, and interrupts only when her daughter attempts to explain herself. Shut the fuck up, she says, who asked you to talk?
Gülden lowers her head and bottles her embarrassment. When she lifts it again, it is just in time to catch the tail end of Martha's mother's reaction, a subtle shudder. She dismisses this. Sets aside her mother's words. They are twisted, conjured for effect, an outburst uncharacteristically levelled at her. But Gülden isn't given much time to hold onto this belief. She is the same age when she comes home from school and finds her mother at the kitchen table. She recognises the sketchbook in her lap — the pages turned to where she'd once doodled a pod of mermaids with glamour-sized tits. Her mother makes her burn the pages on their balcony. There are better ways to ask for a real bra, Gulden thinks she hears her mutter.
4. REDBONE
There are things Gülden wishes the two of them could talk about. She attends the secondary school her mother graduated from and believes, at first, that some experiences will be the same. She wants to bitch about the same teachers, or search for the desktop that a young version of her mother once defaced with her initials. But school is different for her, if only because she is different. Slightly overweight and a Roman nose but what of it? Nana Mensah tells her she's got golden skin. Alana Thompson calls her "redbone." Jason Brown asks if her green eyes are real. She doesn't object when the second toughest girl in Year 9, Jasmine Richards, plays in her hair like they are in Year 4. She has no choice really. In secondary school she learns what it means to be envied and how to neuter this envy, how to play down the attention she receives, how to endear herself to others. She acknowledges the popular black girls at school, slips out of invitations to hang out with the popular white girls, and spends her time instead with students that seem to fall between the two groups. She makes friends with boys, and the less popular girls, with kids of Indian and Asian descent, with the overweight and the underweight, the emo and the kawaii. She corrects the pronunciation of her name amongst her new friends, Gülden Adesanmi. Gaul-Den Add-e-san- me. The first name is Turkish; the surname is Nigerian. She explains this only once per person. She is happy to find that most people's appetite for something novel does not extend beyond this.
5. ERUPTION
There are things Gülden wishes the two of them could talk about. Bunking off school. Smoking fags on the stairwell of a nearby high-rise. Wrestling the boy who Liz leaves her with when she takes her boyfriend's hand and leads him up a flight of stairs. That boy's name is Jerome. He is Liz's boyfriend's friend. His face is shaped like a vertical ellipse, and he has a middle part in his hair. His faintest touch disgusts Gülden, and try as she can, she cannot shake her shudder. He does not stop when she politely asks him to, and then attacks when she is more forceful about her wishes. He pulls her towards him, and slaps her. Punches her when she fights back. Kicks her once she's on the floor. He keeps her pressed to the ground, and pulls her uniform skirt up. He tugs at her underwear and she screams louder, hoping that people in the neighbouring flats can hear.
Liz's boyfriend, Victor, races down the stairs. It's only then that Jerome stops, and Gülden is allowed to scramble to her feet. Her underwear is at her ankles, one eye is swollen shut. Her skin is on fire, and she feels every kind of emotion, from fear to relief and anger. Victor laughs, and she silently wishes he wouldn't, but maybe it's because he doesn't know what else to do. Liz descends from the stairwell above. She does not look Gülden in the face.
Gülden walks home alone, highly attuned to her recent string of failures. The sketchbook pages. Then, just days after she burned them, when she rose from the grass area at school, the discovery of a patch of blood on the pullover she lay beneath her. And now Jerome. All in the same month. She needs no more reminders of how dirty she can be.
Her mother is in the living room when Gülden returns home. She drops her book and springs towards her for a closer inspection — the plum red of a recently bruised eye, the congealed gel of blood on her cut lip. Gülden says it was girls from a nearby rival school but knows, even as she says it, she will have to hide the larger bruise that runs down her entire left side. There are some violent hues that cannot be passed off as the work of any girl.
They cry together that evening, in the living room, in the back seat of the mini-cab that takes them to the hospital, in the emergency room waiting area, during and after triage; and because there has been so much crying, Gülden knows that she can never tell her mother the truth.
She never misses another day of school. Liz and she no longer talk, but at times she cannot avoid Jerome or Victor. They force casual conversations as though nothing has changed. Sometimes they touch her, a hug, a light hand on the shoulder, arms that they believe she might still find endearing placed around her waist. She tries not to think about how she might erupt. She reminds herself that they are in Year 11, on the brink of final exams. Soon they will be honoured, maybe even celebrated, but also done with school and gone.
6. STUDENT
She stiffens when she hears the key in the lock. She closes her eyes and falls back onto the couch, one arm hanging off. She lets some drool slip from her mouth. She can hear her mother and grandmother as they enter the flat, as they close the front door behind them and come down the passageway towards her. She hears them as they step into the living room. Grandma is lecturing her mother about not delaying her return to university for any longer. There is no excuse anymore. Excuse? She hears her mother repeat the word. The silence begins to lengthen, but she can still feel someone in the room. She springs upright when the water hits her face. The reflex is like her body has betrayed itself.
Her mother stands over her, arms crossed with a gravy boat in hand. Towards the back of the room her grandmother is removing her cardigan and hanging it on the back of the sofa armchair. Her mother reminds Gülden that she is in college. Says she is sure she must have essays to finish. She reminds her that she didn't get to sleep during the day when she was taking her A-levels.
7. PHOTO
She is 21 when she says the words No more assignments ever! The ceremony is over and they are gathering for photos. One of these photos captures Gülden as her gown slaps against the wind, as she uses one hand to keep her cap in place, the other to push her eyeglasses up her nose bridge. The family assembles. She can feel the mist of the university's water fountain behind her. Her mother stands to her right. Her grandparents to her left. She has not seen them in almost a year. Liz Caroll, who has only recently come back into her life, takes the photos with her phone. Her grandmother directs proceedings. Her mother grows impatient.
They walk back towards the car, a used 1995 Renault Clio, a newly presented graduation gift from her grandparents. Her grandmother falls in line with her and floats the idea of a Master's degree. She invites Gülden to come and live with them at the three-bedroom house they retired to in Penge, the suburbs, the city overspill, the working class made good.
She does not take long to consider the offer. What with the nights when her mother can go days without leaving her bedroom, when she brings trays of food into the dark and returns hours later to retrieve them, untouched. I can't Grandma, she replies. She knows that she is going to need to be home if any magic between her and her mother is going to happen.
8. ORCHESTRA
Michael hops out of her grandma's old sofa chair when her Mother walks into the living room. He smiles. His Hello Mrs Adesanmi is stiff but genuine — with as much grace as you're going to get from a South London boy. It's all in vain. Her mother has never been a Mrs, and she has never cared to entertain any of Gülden's former darlings. There haven't been that many, but she sets them apart according to how her mother treated them. The boy who her mother went slamming doors around until he left. The boy who never spoke to her again after her mother told him not to call. The girl who her mother thought was too full of herself. The boy she never bothered to invite over because of her mother. And now Michael, who might be the boy whose hand her mother refused to shake.
Michael lowers his arm. Gülden is sitting on the coffee table. Michael backs towards her, she stands and places a light hand on his forearm. She could've warned him. She could've told him he was the wrong kind of boy — that there might not even be a right kind of boy — but she brought him here to see what men like Mehmet, boys like Jerome and maybe even guys like him, are capable of orchestrating. She thinks it might make a difference.
Her mother's eyes narrow, a vein surfaces on her forehead, her dark nasal crease gathers in the twisted skin along her nose. Her chest draws in. She is not looking for words. She is splicing them. She is reducing every emotion, everything she feels into as few words as possible. And when he gets bored of you, and then what? Her mother drops the carrier bag, some of the groceries spill across the carpet. Her mother turns on her sandals and heads to her room.
They are silent, until they hear the bedroom door slam. Shit, Michael says, your mother is hardcore. You should've warned me.
He says the same thing twice over, different words but a variation on the same theme. But when he laughs, Gülden presses her fingers into his elbow pit and he stops.
9. DENT
She continues to invite Michael over, and they continue to argue every time he leaves. He is a list of things that drive her mother apoplectic. Hood. Street. Unemployed. So much older than Gülden. Not much younger than her. Gülden scoffs at the latter but, one day, lets her mother continue without interruption. Michael is probably a smoker and a drinker, and all his vice, her mother says, will eventually rub off on you.
It's because he's black, is what you mean, Gülden says, and her mother balks before she replies that that's unfair.
The next time they discuss Michael, she brings it up again. It's because he's black, Gülden repeats. And her mother asks: so what am I then? Gülden shrugs, you're not Grandma, you're not Nigerian. You shouldn't pretend to be. Well, Gülden's mother says as she reclines in the sofa chair her mother used to sit in, if you want to see it that way, then yes, it is because he is black. And it's because I'm not black, or Nigerian or grandma. And maybe it's because you're not woman enough yet, and shouldn't pretend to be.
At twenty-three, the words not woman enough yet rock Gülden. She wants to add another dent to the credenza, she wants to toss her mother's mobile phone across the room, and tear her latest issue of Pride into shreds. But she doesn't move. She promises her mother she will find a way to leave her, and her mother points in the direction of the front door and says, I can show you the way.
Maybe, in some tenuous fashion, this is the moment when Gülden stops giving a fuck. When she releases the tight hold with which she held the rules — the way she thought things should be (or maybe it was the way her mother thought these things should be) — things like contraception, punctuality, her sleep schedule.
And when she releases this hold, she feels it for a moment, in her fingers, in her temples, in her midriff.
10. DISTANCE
She leans on the steering wheel, her hand between her face and the car horn. Her mother’s words stepping on her throat. The wind whistles and the side windows rattle. The wall beyond the smeared windscreen is riddled with graffiti. She could look for tags, monikers of childhood friends that have grown distant, guys she has never cared for, guys that didn’t really have that much to say. She turns and reaches for the backseat, and noses through the first of many carrier bags she filled in haste, a dishevelled mix of plastic bags brimming with possessions that lay within a scoop’s reach. There’s a pair of Reebok Freestyles, her iPod classic, a La-La Teletubbies doll atop the pile — a gift from her mother for her sixth birthday. She brushes aside underwear that her mother could label her a whore for owning on any given laundry day. She retrieves her glasses from her handbag and settles back into the driver’s seat.
The short length between her home and the building Michael lives in troubles her, a space separated only by a large parking area. She is troubled about what is such a small distance might say about her. She has had the chance to go far. University. Manchester. Durham. Canterbury. Leeds. But she’d remained in London. No breaks, and no gap years. She is troubled about what this might say about her too. From her driver’s seat she can see where Michael lives in the building across the way, on the other side of the car park, she can see the flat’s smashed window and the cardboard that Michael used to cover the missing pane. She can make out the mauve curtains, the ones she knows are riddled with mould. His mother is too old to attend to the small details and Michael is too young at heart to recognize them. She texts him. She tells him to meet her at the bottom of his building. That she’s going to need help with her bags. The clock set in the dashboard reads 0.09 and yet another of her mother’s maxims comes to her:
Nothing good ever happens after midnight. She throws the gear stick into reverse, backs out of her parking space and then begins to make the short journey to the other side of the parking area, towards the building where Michael appears out of the dark entryway. She cruises. She stays in first gear.