Girl, Woman, Other. Bernardine Evaristo

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СКАЧАТЬ it was like when white men opened doors or gave up their seats on public transport for white women (which was sexist), but not for them (which was racist)

      Amma could relate to their experiences, began to join in with the refrains of, we hear you, sister, we’ve all been there, sister

      it felt like she was coming in from the cold

      at the end of her first evening, the other women said their goodbyes and Amma offered to stay behind to wash up the cups and ashtrays with Elaine

      they made out on one of the bumpy sofas in the glow of the streetlight to the accompaniment of police sirens haring by

      it was the closest she’d come to making love to herself

      it was another coming home

      the next week when she went to the meeting

      Elaine was canoodling with another woman

      and blanked her completely

      she never went again

      Amma and Dominique stayed until they were turfed out, had worked their way through numerous glasses of red wine

      they decided they needed to start their own theatre company to have careers as actors, because neither was prepared to betray their politics to find jobs

      or shut their mouths to keep them

      it seemed the obvious way forward

      they scribbled ideas for names on hard toilet paper snaffled from the loo

      Bush Women Theatre Company best captured their intentions

      they would be a voice in theatre where there was silence

      black and Asian women’s stories would get out there

      they would create theatre on their own terms

      it became the company’s motto

      On Our Own Terms

      or Not At All.

      2

      Living rooms became rehearsal spaces, old bangers transported props, costumes came from second-hand shops, sets were extracted from junk yards, they called on mates to help out, everyone learning on the job, ad hoc, throwing their lot in together

      they wrote grant applications on old typewriters with missing keys, budgets felt as alien to Amma as quantum physics, she balked at becoming trapped behind a desk

      she upset Dominique when she arrived for admin sessions late and left early claiming headaches or PMT

      they rowed when she walked into a stationery shop and ran straight out again claiming it had brought on a panic attack

      she had a go at Dominique when she didn’t deliver the script she’d promised to write but was out late night clubbing instead, or forgot her lines mid-show

      six months after its inception, they were constantly at loggerheads they’d hit it off as friends, only to find they couldn’t work together

      Amma called a make-or-break meeting at hers

      they sat down with wine and a Chinese takeaway and Dominique admitted she got more pleasure setting up tours for the company than putting herself in front of an audience, and preferred being herself to pretending to be other people

      Amma admitted she loved writing, hated admin and was she really any good as an actor? she did anger brilliantly – which was the extent of her range

      Dominique became the company manager, Amma the artistic director

      they employed actresses, directors, designers, stage crews, set up national tours that lasted months

      their plays, The Importance of Being Female, FGM: The Musical, Dis-arranged Marriage, Cunning Stunts, were performed in community centres, libraries, fringe theatres, at women’s festivals and conferences

      they leafleted outside venues as audiences left and arrived, illegally plastered posters on to billboards in the dead of night

      they started getting reviews in the alternative media, and even produced a monthly Bush Women samizdat

      but due to pathetically poor sales and, to be honest, pathetically poor writing, it lasted for two issues after its grand launch one summer’s evening at Sisterwrite

      where a group of women rolled up to enjoy the free plonk and spill out on to the pavement to light up and chat each other up

      Amma supplemented her income working in a burger bar at Piccadilly Circus

      where she sold hamburgers made of reconstituted cardboard topped with rehydrated onions and rubbery cheese

      all of which she also ate for free in her breaks – which gave her spots

      the orange nylon suit and hat she wore meant customers saw her as a uniformed servant to do their bidding

      and not her wonderful, artistic, highly individualistic and rebellious self

      she slipped free crusty pies filled with apple-flavoured lumps of sugar to the runaway rent boys she befriended who operated around the station

      with no idea that in years to come she’d be attending their funerals

      they didn’t realize unprotected sex meant a dance with death

      nobody did

      home was a derelict factory in Deptford with concrete walls, a collapsing ceiling and a community of rats that defeated all attempts at extermination

      thereafter she moved into a series of similarly squalid squats until she found herself living in the most desirable squat in the whole of London, a Soviet-sized former office block at the back of King’s Cross

      she was lucky enough to be one of the first to hear of it before it filled up

      and stayed upstairs when bailiffs set a hydraulic excavator at the main door

      which triggered violent countermeasures and prison sentences for the head-bangers who thought a bailiff down deserved a good kicking

      they called it the Battle of King’s Cross

      the building was thereafter known as the Republic of Freedomia

      they were lucky, too, because the owner of the property, a certain Jack Staniforth, living tax-free in Monte Carlo, loaded from the profits of his family’s business in Sheffield cutlery, turned out to be sympathetic to their cause once news reached him from his estate holding company

      he’d fought for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War

      and a bad-investment of СКАЧАТЬ