Authors: Meera Syal
It comforted me slightly when I realised that Tracey the whippet was a much bigger coward than me. She cowered in front of her sister, Anita, trying to control her quivering bottom lip. ‘But she’s supposed to be here! Where’s me mum? I’m hungry …’
‘Shut yer face, our Trace,’ snapped Anita, who was concentrating on aiming her switch right at Hairy Neddy’s backside.
He was still bent over his open bonnet, the gap between the end of his T-shirt and the beginning of his jeans revealing an expanse of very tempting builder’s bum. ‘Yow can come in for a piece at our house, if yow’m hungry, chick,’ called Hairy Neddy, a ‘piece’ being a peculiar Tollington word for sandwich which my mother had banned me from saying in the house. ‘Just because the English can’t speak English themselves, does not mean you have to talk like an urchin. You take the best from their culture, not the worst. You’ll be swearing and urinating in telephone boxes next, like that Lowbridge boy …’
But mama’s voice did not have its usual resonance today, this tinnitus of conscience forever buzzing in my ears the minute I even thought about doing anything she might disapprove of. Because today, everything was fuzzy and unformed except for Anita, what she looked like, what she did, the way she made me feel, taller and sharper and ready to try anything. She winked at me and edged her switch nearer and nearer to Hairy Neddy’s bum. She aimed the point of it right at his cavernous crack and raised her eyebrows, daring me to dare her. I was about to nod my head when a screaming siren sounded from the other end of the yard.
‘Anita Rutter! Yow put that down now before I give yow a bloody hiding!’
Anita’s mum, Deirdre, tottered into the yard on her white stilettos, her pointy boobs doing a jive under a very tight white polo neck sweater. She looked like she had been running; beads of sweat stood out on her upper lip and brow, her mascara had run slightly and she tugged at her lacquered helmet of hair with short fat fingers glinting with rings. Tracey threw herself at Deirdre’s legs but she pushed her off, irritated, pausing only to cuff Anita on the side of the head. Anita laughed.
‘Have these two bin driving you barmy, Ned?’ she asked him.
Hairy Neddy shook his head, not looking up. ‘Yow’m alright, love,’ he said from under the bonnet.
‘Where you bin?’ whined Tracey, who started to gather up her spilled blackberries from the dirt.
‘Shopping.’
‘What you got us?’ asked Anita.
Deirdre glanced at her empty hands and patted her hair again. ‘Window shopping. You want fishfingers for tea?’
‘Yeah!’ yelled Tracey, happy again, all those hours of anguish and abandonment instantly forgotten.
I was happy, too. I loved fishfingers, we hardly ever had them at home, mum somehow found it quicker to make a fresh vegetable
sabzi
than fling something from a packet into a frying pan. And of course I would be invited in for tea because that’s what all the yard mums did, if you’d been playing with their offspring and you happened to be nearby when the call to the table came.
Of course, you didn’t always strike it lucky; once I’d been at Kevin and Karl, the mad twins’ house, and their mum had put what looked like an ordinary white bread sandwich in front of me. I took a huge bite and promptly threw up all over her fortunately wipe-clean vinyl tablecloth.
‘What’s up with yow?’ asked Karl. ‘Don’t yow like lard sandwiches?’
When I told my mother what I’d eaten, she made me drink
a cup of warm milk and ordered me to sit on the toilet for fifteen minutes, all the time muttering, ‘
Bakwas lok!
’, which roughly translated means ‘Bloody weird people …’
But actually, the food you ate was less important than being asked, the chance to sit in someone else’s house and feel grown up and special, knowing you weren’t just playing together, you were now officially socialising.
Deirdre unlocked the back gate of her house and handed the bunch of keys to Tracey who ran up to the back door and fumbled for the lock. Anita stood behind Deirdre and smiled at me, so I took a step forward. Deirdre looked at me for the first time. I had forgotten how scary the bottom half of her face was. The top bit was like everyone else’s mum’s face, soft eyes, enquiring nose, eyebrows asking a million questions. But the mouth was not right, not at all; those huge bee-stung lips always on the edge of a sneer and grandma, those big teeth, far too many and far too sharp, which gave what could have been a beautiful face an expression of dark, knowing hunger. Deirdre looked me up and down as if making a decision, then turned on her heel and tip-tapped into her yard. Anita let her pass, pressing her body away from her mother to avoid contact, then whispered, ‘See you tomorrow’ before closing the gate in my face.
I wandered slowly back through the yard towards my house, wondering what I had done wrong. The sun was just beginning its slow lazy descent and I could see the glittering sliver of a fingernail moon hanging over the rooftops near my house. I passed Sam Lowbridge’s back gate. There was an accusing space where his moped usually stood, a flattened oval of pressed dank earth.
Sam Lowbridge was generally considered the Yard’s Bad Boy. He’d managed to acquire a criminal record by the age of sixteen and supplemented it with wearing black leather and an obligatory sneer. Most of the littl’uns were scared of him and gave him a wide berth when he came out for one of his wheelie sessions in the adjoining park, but for some reason,
he’d always been polite, even kind, to me. His mother, Glenys, had the distinction of being our oldest single parent (followed by Sandy, our most desperate, and Mrs Keithley, the youngest and most fertile with three children under the age of eight). None of us had ever seen Sam’s father, whoever he was he never visited, but the general opinion was good riddance to bad rubbish, ‘cos he must have been full of bad seed to spawn a sprog like Sam.
Glenys was standing on her stoop, wringing her hands, with her characteristic expression of someone who has sniffed impending doom and knows no one is going to believe her. I’d seen a similar
moue
on the face of the mad soothsayer in Frankie Howerd’s
Up Pompeii
on the telly. The soothsayer was depicted as an old wild-eyed woman dressed in rags who began every entrance with the litany, ‘Woe! Woe! And thrice Woe!’ This never ceased to crease me up because
Wo Wo
was our family Punjabi euphemism for shit, ‘Do you want to do a
Wo Wo
?’ and ‘Wipe properly, get all the
Wo Wo
off …’ The first time I’d heard the soothsayer’s lament I’d said, ‘I think she must have constipation!’ which made my papa laugh proudly and my mother hide her smile under an expression of distaste. When I repeated the joke in the playground the next day, I realised it lost a lot in translation and vowed I would swot up on a few English jokes before I undertook challenging Vernon Cartwright again for the title of school wit.
Glenys wrung her hands a bit more and began chewing the ends of her bottle blonde hair, a sad dishrag of a haircut, but I guessed she’d long given up trying. I’d always assumed she was about fifty, in her shapeless sweaters and crimplene trousers with the sewn-in crease on each leg. But mama informed me, rather proudly I thought, that Mrs Lowbridge was not even forty, and that smoking and bad luck had chiselled all those weary dragging lines around her eyes and mouth. ‘That’s why you must always count your blessings, bed, and never think negative thoughts. If your mind is depressed, your body will soon follow. Me, I don’t even dye
my hair.’ I went around for days after that, smiling so much that my cheeks ached and Mrs Worrall next door asked if I’d got wind. I was terrified that my body would betray my mind and all the anger and yearning and violent mood swings that plagued me would declare themselves in a rash of facial hives or a limb dropping off in a public place.
‘Meena chick, have yow seen our Sam today?’
‘No, Mrs Lowbridge,’ I answered. ‘Maybe he’s gone up the shops,’ I added helpfully.
‘He shouldn’t be up the bloody shops, he should be here. He knows I’m gooing up bingo tonight …’ She sighed and chewed a bit more hair. ‘Ey, yow’m on the corner, int ya? If yow see him gooing past, give us a knock will ya, chick?’ She trudged back inside her yard and propelled by the growling waves of hunger cascading around my stomach, I ran home.
Mama was rummaging about in what we called the Bike Shed, one of two small outhouses at the end of our backyard, the other outhouse being our toilet. We’d never had a bike between us, unless you counted my three-wheeler tricycle which was one of a number of play items discarded amongst the old newspapers, gardening tools, and bulk-bought tins of tomatoes and Cresta fizzy drinks. Of course, this shed should have really been called the bathroom, because it was where we filled an old yellow plastic tub with pans of hot water from the kitchen and had a hurried scrub before frostbite set in, but my mother would have cut out her tongue rather than give it its real, shameful name.
‘Found it, Mrs Worrall!’ she shouted from inside the shed. Mrs Worrall, with whom we shared adjoining, undivided backyards, stood in her uniform of flowery dress and pinny on her step. She had a face like a friendly potato with a sparse tuft of grey hair on top, and round John Lennon glasses, way before they became fashionable, obviously. She moved like she was underwater, slow, deliberate yet curiously graceful steps, and frightened most of the neighbours off with her rasping voice and deadpan, unimpressed face. She did not
smile often, and when she did you wished she hadn’t bothered as she revealed tombstone teeth stained bright yellow with nicotine. But she loved me, I knew it; she’d only have to hear my voice and she’d lumber out into the yard to catch me, often not speaking, but would just nod, satisfied I was alive and functioning, her eyes impassive behind her thick lenses.
She would listen, apparently enthralled, to my mother’s occasional reports on my progress at school, take my homework books carefully in her huge slabs of hands and turn the pages slowly, nodding wisely at the cack-handed drawings and uneven writing. Every evening, when she came to pick up our copy of the
Express and Star
once my papa had finished reading it (an arrangement devised by my mother, ‘Why should the poor lady have to spend her pension when she can read ours?’), she’d always check up on me, what I was doing, whether I was in my pyjamas yet, whether I was mentally and physically prepared to retire for the night. At least, that’s what I read in her eyes, for she never spoke. Just that quick glance up and down, a slight incline of the head, a satisfied exhalation.
I wondered if she was like Mrs Christmas, childless, and maybe that was why she was so protective of me. But mama told me, with a snort of disgust, that she had three grown-up sons and a few grandchildren also. ‘But I’ve never seen them! Do they live far away?’ I persisted.
‘Oh yes, very far. Wolverhampton!’ she quipped back.
It had seemed quite a long way to me when we had driven there for my birthday treat, but I guessed by my mother’s flaring nostrils and exaggerated eyebrow movements that she was being ironic, the way Indians are ironic, signposting the joke with a map and compass to the punchline.
‘But why don’t they come and see her then?’
My mother sighed and ruffled my hair. ‘I will never understand this about the English, all this puffing up about being civilised with their cucumber sandwiches and cradle of democracy big talk, and then they turn round and kick their
elders in the backside, all this It’s My Life, I Want My Space stupidness, You Can’t Tell Me What To Do cheekiness, I Have To Go To Bingo selfishness and You Kids Eat Crisps Instead Of Hot Food nonsense. What is this My Life business, anyway? We all have obligations, no one is born on their own, are they?’
She was into one of her Capital Letter speeches, the subtext of which was listen, learn and don’t you dare do any of this when you grow up, missy. I quite enjoyed them. They made me feel special, as if our destiny, our legacy, was a much more interesting journey than the apparent dead ends facing our neighbours. I just wished whatever my destiny was would hurry up and introduce itself to me so I could take it by its jewelled hand and fly.
She paused for oxygen. ‘I mean, Mrs Worrall is their mother, the woman who gave them life. And she on her own with Mr Worrall, too. I tell you, if my mother was so close, I would walk in my bare feet to see her every day. Every day.’
She turned away then, not trusting herself to say anything more. There was still something else I wanted to ask but I knew it would have to wait. I had grown up with Mrs Worrall, I had seen her every day of my life, but I had never seen or heard Mr Worrall. Ever.
My mother emerged from the shed holding aloft an old dusty glass vase which she blew on, and then scuffed with the sleeve of her shirt before handing it to Mrs Worrall who took it with a pleased grunt. ‘Please, Mrs Worrall, have it. We never use it.’
Mrs Worrall nodded again and cleared her throat. ‘He knocked mine over. I was in the way, in front of the telly.
Crossroads.
He likes that Amy Turtle. So he got a bit upset, see.’
Mama nodded sympathetically. ‘How is he nowadays?’
Mrs Worrall shrugged, she did not need to say, same as always, and went back inside her kitchen.
‘Mum, I’m starved, I am,’ I wheedled. ‘Give me something now.’
She busied herself with shutting the shed door, not looking at me, her face drawn tight like a cat’s arse. ‘There’s rice and daal inside. Go and wash your hands.’
‘I don’t want that…that stuff! I want fishfingers! Fried! And chips! Why can’t I eat what I want to eat?’
Mama turned to me, she had her teacher’s face on, long suffering, beseeching, but still immovable. She said gently, ‘Why did you take money for sweets? Why did you lie to papa?’
‘I didn’t,’ I said automatically, blind to logic, to the inevitable fact that my crime had already been fretfully discussed while I’d been having the best day of my life being Anita Rutter’s new friend.
‘So now you are saying papa is a liar also? Is that it?’
I pretended to take a great interest in a mossy crack in the yard concrete, running my sandal along it, deliberately scuffing the leather. I knew how I looked, pouting, defiant in the face of defeat, sad and silly, but I could not apologise. I have still never been able to say sorry without wanting to swallow the words as they sit on my tongue.