One Hundred Shades of White. Preethi Nair

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      Once inside the bedsit, Satchin heated up whatever Amma had made for us and we ate together, washed up the dishes, tried to do our homework and waited for our mother to come home. Sometimes the wait was just so boring that it was better to fall asleep. What Amma did at the factory, we didn’t really know, but she always came home very tired. On Fridays, she brought something back for us: a colouring book, a reading book or matchbox cars, so we always stayed up. We never asked her for things and, believe me, I wanted to; I would have loved some transfers or stickers but Satchin told me not to ask. He said that some nights he heard her crying, saying that she couldn’t give us the things she wanted to, and he said that asking for stuff would make things worse.

      On Sunday, Amma’s day off, we went to the park and she sat on the roundabout and watched us play or, on very special occasions, Tom would take us in his van to the seaside. They thought we would enjoy this but I hated the sea, it was a predator like the heavy rains, and predators took things away when you least expected, just like the rain. Satchin and I ran along the beach or played in the arcades and for those moments we could be children. Then on Sunday evening, we would crawl into bed, knowing that soon it would be Monday and the week began again. It could have gone on and on like that and we wouldn’t have known the difference had the seasons not changed.

      Despite the cold, winter was like a dream for us. Beautiful snowflakes covered everything that was grey, and temporarily we didn’t have to see the reality of where we lived because everything was painted a soft, fluffy white and we could distract ourselves by building snowmen and throwing snowballs at each other. Summer, in contrast, was difficult. Whilst other kids counted the days until the school holidays, Satchin and I dreaded them. In summer it got very hot and sticky inside so we had to be outside but were told not to wander far. We had six long weeks of being together, which meant endless hours entertaining each other. We didn’t have a television so we tried to re-create scenes and stupid dialogue from the Laurel and Hardy films that we had watched when we were rich.

      Hardy is entertaining some ladies and doesn’t have enough money for sodas for all of them, so he tells Laurel (me) to say, ‘No thank you, Oli, I’m not thirsty.’ And when Hardy checks the order with the girls, he says, ‘Soda, soda, soda and what will you have, Stanley?’

      Stanley says, ‘Soda.’

      He pulls him to one side. ‘Didn’t I tell you we only have enough money for three sodas?’

      Stanley smiles and Hardy begins again.

      ‘Soda, soda, soda and what will you have, Stanley?’

      ‘Soda,’ I reply. Then Hardy chases me around the room and we fall about laughing. Why we laughed so much, I don’t know, boredom and repetition do strange things. Sometimes we got Jatinder and Simon, two boys who lived on our street, to be the extras but they thought this was boring so Satchin told them about this idea he had to make a bomb.

      All four of us went out into the yard and began making a bomb from petrol cans we had found in the street and Satchin added some turps we found out in the yard. He doused a rag with the mixture and Jatinder lit the cloth; it went up in flames immediately and set alight the cardboard box that was next to it. Jatinder panicked and threw the box against the fence. Before we knew it, flames were everywhere and we couldn’t put them out. The Polish man saw us and fanned the flames with the buckets of water he was using to clean the windows. Maggie spotted the Polish man jumping up and down, shouting, and his suit nearly on fire, and came running with her extinguisher. Jatinder and Simon ran off.

      Maggie reprimanded us, telling us how dangerous and stupid it was and how we could have killed everyone.

      ‘Do you understand me, Satchin and Maya, do you understand what you could have done?’ she shouted.

      She said she would tell our mother unless we wrote a story about the consequences of fire. Mine was entitled ‘The Effects of Smoke Inhalation’. I don’t know what exactly I wrote as I copied it off the piece of paper attached to the fire extinguisher, but she was very impressed and said there were no two ways about it, I definitely had talent, but it was wasted on doing silly things like trying to burn the house down.

      Maggie could have shouted at us a lot more because we gave her much cause to. I think the last straw for her was when we almost became the centre of a hostage situation. One evening, there were helicopters patrolling above our house and policemen surrounding our street. We were playing in the yard and these two men shouted at us to open the gate. We were about to do so when the Polish man ran over, picked us both up, and dragged us inside. I kicked, bit him and screamed because that was what Miss Brown had told us to do if men unexpectedly picked us up. Maggie came running down to see what the commotion was all about and the Polish man told her that we were about to let some escaped convicts who had been on the news into the house.

      ‘You kids can’t go on like this. I know it gets boring but I thought you’d have more common sense than to let strangers in, especially armed ones,’ she yelled. ‘You know it’s not safe.’

      It wasn’t safety that we wanted, it was excitement, adventure, something out of the ordinary to happen, but it didn’t.

      After that day, she decided that we were definitely a hazard and thought it was probably better if we went up to her flat after school and the days she was there on our school holidays. We could only stay at Maggie’s until seven in the evening and then she would have to go to work. Sometimes, when we came home and Maggie wasn’t in, she would leave One Eye in our bedsit as a substitute, but when she was around she cooked us stew and played with us. Maggie became all things to me, I could talk to her about almost anything.

      Upstairs in her home, Maggie taught me how to sew and to knit. That birthday, she made me a rag doll named Kirstin. ‘Here you are, Maya, darling, to replace the one you used to have, Jemima, wasn’t it?’

      ‘Jemina,’ I corrected her.

      Maggie handed me a parcel. I unwrapped the package eagerly, waiting to find a rag doll with long blonde hair but found a creepy-looking thing with black button eyes sewn too closely together. Her black hair was everywhere and she looked like a mad woman who wanted to go out on the rampage. I made a comment about the hair but Maggie said that was fashionable and the current style. I didn’t take her to bed but left her on the sideboard where she stared evilly at me. Maggie insisted that we spend weeks just making different outfits for her. The first thing I made was a large pink hat that covered her eyes. ‘It’s too low, Maya, darling, you can’t see her eyes,’ Maggie said. Then I was resolute that she have a home of her own so she wouldn’t have to glare at us. We got her a cardboard box and made her a house that looked better than ours. I shut her up in there and allowed Satchin to use it as a garage and store all the cars he was collecting, turning Creepy into a parking attendant. He was ecstatic.

      Satchin and I also bonded further that summer through the raids we carried out on Mr Patel’s shop. We didn’t do it because we were poor; Amma often bought us the kind of things we stole. For me, it was the excitement of being Satchin’s young accomplice. I would distract Mr Patel by asking him to weigh a quarter of cola cubes, and then Satchin would stuff some Wotsits up his jumper and cough, which meant that I had to then change my mind about the sweets. We would then run out of the shop as fast as we could and laugh uncontrollably. If we were lucky, there would be a packet of Smarties up there too. My brother and I would never have got caught, but one day Maggie overheard us arguing over the stash. The brown Smarties were the source of much contention and, as I threw the whole packet at Satchin, she came in, made us put on our coats, and marched us both into Mr Patel’s shop to confess.

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