unmaskingthe title was bestowed on a sunday, over a roast.
it came the way everything came on a sunday: after the customary visit to my bedroom — a knock, a reminder to get up, dinner's nearly ready, and don't miss the telly.
eastenders at two, roast on the table just before. the whole nation did the same thing at the same time, and our house was no different.
that was when he noticed the feet. black, filthy, unmistakable. and he'd already clocked that i'd supposedly been home all night — after a long, cold saturday at the market with him, no less. the two facts didn't sit together, and my dad was not a man who let two facts that didn't sit together pass without comment.
“here she is. the mattress back king of the blackfeet.”
king, not queen. he never corrected it and neither will i. some titles you don't edit.
to understand how i earned it, you have to run the tape backwards.
sunday, 1pm. dinner. we ate and we got up — no lingering round the table, no long sunday chats. eat, clear, done. washing up by half past, telly on for two o'clock, the whole ritual timed around the square.
sunday, late morning. i am dead to the world. curtains shut. the house could have fallen down around me. this is the “mattress back” portion of the title — the marathon lie-ins that no teenager who'd spent a quiet saturday night at home could possibly need.
sunday, 7am. i am crawling into bed as the rest of the street is thinking about getting up. ears still ringing. heart still somewhere around 120 bpm. feet — well. the feet are the evidence.
saturday night. a warehouse somewhere in south london. you found out about it the way you found out about everything then — a phone number, a friend of a friend, a meeting point, a convoy. no mobiles. no socials. just word of mouth and blind faith that there'd be a party at the end of it.
and there always was. a wall of speakers, a concrete floor, and hours ahead of you that felt like they belonged to a different calendar entirely.
somewhere in the first hour, the shoes came off. they always came off. you cannot do eight hours on a warehouse floor in going-out shoes, and i wasn't there to stand around the edges. so off they went, into a corner or a bag, and i danced on bare concrete until the light coming through the high windows changed colour and somebody's sound system finally gave up before i did.
which is how i came home, week after week, with the soles of my feet black as tarmac.
one girl, two solutions
here's the part i didn't understand until about forty years later.
i thought i was living a double life. the front-row girl with the good marks by day; the barefoot girl on the warehouse floor by night. two people, one body, and a heroic effort to keep them from ever meeting.
but they were never two people. they were one girl solving the same problem two different ways.
i was the swot. top of the class, sat at the front, homework immaculate — and bored in a way that felt physical, the clock actually slowing down, my brain screaming for something, anything, to make the time move. school gave me nowhere to put that. so i built somewhere. i taught myself to mix records off one turntable, i walked miles of south london with headphones on, and on saturday nights i found a dark room with a wall of bass where nobody asked me to sit still and the restlessness finally had somewhere to go.
they'd call it adhd now. they'd call the front-row performance “masking” — the exhausting outer shell a certain kind of girl builds so nobody sees the engine running underneath. back then there was no word for any of it. there was just a clever girl who couldn't sit still inside her own skin, and a warehouse floor that felt, for eight hours at a time, like the only place the noise in her head went quiet.
and the feet? no metaphor. we were all in high heels and boots by then, and you cannot do eight hours on a warehouse floor in either – so the shoes came off in the first hour and stayed off, and i danced barefoot on filthy concrete till dawn. the black soles weren't rebellion. they were just what happens when a girl takes her heels off and refuses to sit down.
dads notice things
i thought i was being careful. the “home all night” story, the clean-ish rest of me. but dads notice things, and mine had been quietly building his case for months – the lie-ins, the appetite of someone who'd done a shift down a mine, and the forensic centrepiece: those feet. he never asked where i'd been. he never grounded me. he just gathered his evidence and, that sunday, delivered his verdict over the beef.
mattress back. king of the blackfeet.
everyone laughed. i laughed. and then we all passed the gravy and watched telly and never spoke of it directly again, in the great british tradition of knowing everything and saying nothing.
i've thought a lot about that title since. because it was the truest thing anyone said about me in those years, and he said it as a joke. he saw the join i thought i was hiding — the good girl and the 7am ghost creeping up the stairs with her shoes in her hand — and instead of a row, he handed me a ridiculous royal title and passed the roast potatoes. he saw me. he just decided to be funny about it. i didn't appreciate the genius of that at the time. i do now.
this is where i'm writing from
njremix is a blog about the records that raised me — a south london girl, a box of vinyl from a father who couldn't stay, a warehouse education, and a brain nobody had the word for yet. it's music, memory, and taking the mask off in public, forty years after i learned to put it on.
some of it's funny. some of it isn't. all of it's true, give or take the softening that memory does to everyone.
for now — pass the gravy. eastenders is starting.