When I was three, the grownups kept telling me I was real pretty.  I was gonna be this hot, beautiful woman when I grew up. No doubt about it.  Wasn't till I was almost four that I learnt about what being pretty meant. Mama's boyfriend showed me. He said, You look just like your mama but you prettier, fresher.

Mama and Joe - that's her boyfriend - spent a lot of time giggling.  I'd hear them, behind their always-locked bedroom door.  D'you tell my mama jokes in there, Uncle Joe?

Uncle Joe said he was gonna show me what was so funny but when he got round to it, when he unzipped his flies and stripped his Levi's off, I didn't laugh. I just stared up at him.  Waiting for him to say or do something funny. Then he curled my little hand around the base of his pecker and his pecker twitched in the palm of my hand and finally I got it.  I giggled.  Ewww, it feels disgusting, I said, ripping my hand away.  Uncle Joe snickered, placed my hand back on his squirming pecker and caressed my chin.  He told me, You're a natural.

But my cousin was watching through my bedroom keyhole and later he said, What your mama's boyfriend's doing is unnatural. A baby girl with an old man?  Hell naw, he said.  That’s not right at all. 

My cousin, who was twelve then, said he was just gonna have to step to my stepdad and stop him doing it to me. First, he needed all the details.  Had randy old Joe had it in me yet?  Had what in me? I said. You know, my cousin said, has he poked around in your privates with his thing?  I giggled, out of nerves.  Well, said my cousin, has he or not? Are you gonna tell my mama? I said.  He said, No.

My cousin, being twelve, didn’t hurt me as much when he poked around in me himself.  He needed to know exactly what mama’s Joe had done to me, so that he could confront him about it later.

But before any confronting could happen, mama’d kicked old Uncle Joe out, on account of his slapping her one time too many.  She'd found a new man, one who had an office job and read books and all.  Her new man told me how pretty I was. A little replica of my mama, he said, but sweeter.  And I waited, the dread pinching at the membranes lining my belly.

When I was five, I took action.  My mama had passed out again on the sofa, a bloody syringe in her lap and a syrupy stream of drool edging out her open mouth.  Her boyfriend, who’d still not poked me, was in the armchair, flipping through this book called The Other Side Of The Game.