Anita and Me. Meera Syal

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СКАЧАТЬ lying in various stages of disembowelment in the yard. (I suppose Neddy was the one who ferried everyone around, but he’d tried to take the big hill on the way to Cannock at fifty miles per hour in second gear with all the equipment in the back and the ‘poor old bint’ had just died on him, mid-splutter.) On that day (it must have been last summer because I remember my hands were sticky from the Zoom lolly I’d just ingested in one gulp), a purple Ford Cortina entered the yard on two wheels and came to a halt beside Hairy Neddy’s back gate. I could make out two men in the front seats: they were laughing, each had an arm casually hanging out of the open window beside them, two male arms, hairy with surprisingly long, nimble fingers, and as they laughed, clouds of cigarette smoke billowed from their mouths.

      The man driving sounded his horn: it played a tune I vaguely recognised, a rumpty tumpty, jolly sort of marching sound which made Mrs Lowbridge’s cat yowl and scarper into the innards of Hairy Neddy’s autopsied car and inevitably set the back gates a-swinging as various yard inhabitants poked their heads round to see who was bringing their bloody noise into their space. Hairy Neddy emerged a moment later, staggering under the weight of his Bontempi organ. He was wearing a smart blue jacket with a tiny string of a tie, ironed trousers which were supposed to go with the jacket but were obviously older and therefore a few shades lighter, and weird shoes, as long as clown’s shoes, but which ended in a kind of point. The two Cucumbers got out of the car and made whistling and ‘Wor!’ noises as Hairy Neddy did a mock pirouette.

      ‘It’s pure Troggs, Ned,’ said Cucumber one, a tall skinny, ginger man who did not seem to have any eyelashes.

      ‘Aar,’ said Cucumber two, a small fat man, blond and ruddy, his belly straining at his buttoned-up jacket.

      ‘Yow got to look the part, in’t ya? The wenches wet their knickers over a bloke in a suit, aar? Yow got to dress up before yow even get a feel of their tits nowadays …’

      Hairy Neddy shushed him, indicating the crowd of kids, including me, who were now standing round them in a semi-circle, waiting for something to happen. ‘Giz a hand with this, lads,’ said Hairy Neddy, straining and puffing as they pulled the Bontempi between them to the boot of the car. Ginger opened it up with his keys and the three of them spent at least five minutes trying to wedge the keyboard into what looked like an impossibly tiny space.

      ‘Wharrabout the back, Keith?’ grunted Hairy Neddy.

      Keith, blondie, shook his head, the veins standing out in his temples as he turned redder, shifting the weight around fruitlessly. ‘Got me Fender back there, and Wayne’s drumkit. Took us three hours to unscrew that, and all.’

      Sandy looked up from hanging her lacy bras out on her line and shouted, ‘Ey Ned, yow shouldn’t have such a big organ, should yow?’

      Suddenly. Kev lost his grip and the Bontempi slipped lower, Hairy Neddy grabbed at it and the yard was suddenly filled with the pulsing electronic rhythm of a bossa nova. All of us kids gasped a moment and instinctively jumped back, then a few of the older lads started laughing. Sam Lowbridge, the wild boy of the yard (he’d already been up for shoplifting and nicking bikes), started doing a mock sexy dance, thrusting his hips and making boob shapes with his hands round his chest and pretty soon, all of us were gyrating around to the fabulous sound of Bontempi. Little did I know this was the nearest I’d get to a disco for the next ten years.

      Hairy Neddy left the sound on whilst they tried various kamasutra positions for his organ. Whilst they pulled, pushed and swore, we jumped and jiggled to what seemed like a hundred different beats, the waltz, the samba, the jazz riff, the African drums, until we and the Cucumbers were all out of breath and still nowhere near getting to their gig. ‘We’ll have to drive with the boot open. We ain’t got no choice, lads.’

      ‘Got some rope then?’

      Hairy Neddy shook his head sorrowfully and sunk to the dirt floor.

      ‘Bugger. I ain’t missed a gig in ten years, not even that time I had that infection and I was coughing up stones …’ He looked as if he was going to weep. All us kids fell silent. It wasn’t fair, I thought, a man with so much talent, so much to offer, who lived for giving people the kind of pleasure and release he’d just given us, and he couldn’t get to his party because of a stupid bit of rope.

      ‘Hee-y’ar, try these.’ Sandy, the divorcee, was standing over Hairy Neddy smiling wickedly. She was dangling a pile of old stockings over his head. ‘They’re extra long, I’ve got a thirty-four inch leg, see,’ she said silkily.

      Hairy Neddy suppressed a gulp and wordlessly took the stockings off Sandy, hurrying to the boot. He and the other two men began lashing the Bontempi into the open boot, securing nylon to metal, tucking it in carefully like a child at bedtime. Halfway through, Hairy Neddy looked up at Sandy who was still standing near his gate with a strange expression on her face, amusement maybe, tender certainly, almost motherly. ‘Yow er…yow sure yow don’t need these, Sandy love?’ he stammered.

      Sandy shook her head and continued smiling. In less than five minutes, the Bontempi was in and secure, Hairy Neddy clambered into the back, squeezing himself between large black instrument cases, and with a sound of the horn, which I later found out was a tune called ‘Colonel Bogey’, the purple Ford Cortina chugged carefully out of the yard. We all waved Hairy Neddy off, the boys giving him thumbs up signs as if he were off on a mission. But he didn’t see us. Hairy Neddy’s face was squashed up against the back windscreen and he was staring helplessly at Sandy.

      Since that incident, we had all noticed that Hairy Neddy had sort of avoided Sandy, as much as you could when you lived next door to each other and could hear each other’s toilets flushing in your respective backyards. Sandy’s response to these tactics had been somewhat confusing: for a few brief weeks, she had taken to wearing make-up and a frilly peach housecoat when hanging out her wash, instead of the grey moulty slippers and towelling dressing gown she usually threw on for such brief public appearances.

      One morning, I had caught her doing something very peculiar; I watched her pour a nearly full bottle of milk into her outside drain, and then run and drag Mikey out of her kitchen. He looked moon-faced and sullen and was still clad in his Captain Scarlet pyjamas, and Sandy thrust the empty bottle into his hands. ‘Now goo on, ask Ned for a pinta. Say we’ve run out …’ Then she looked up and visibly jumped when she saw me hovering in the Yard. ‘Oh hello Meena chick…yow’m up bloody early…go on then Mikey …’ she muttered, scurrying backwards and shutting the gate in my face.

      Whilst this strange one-sided tango was going on, the Yard gossip was that Sandy and Hairy Neddy might be getting married, although it seemed to me that no one had told Hairy Neddy about this. Sandy was making monumental efforts to impress him which we all enjoyed from a distance. Not only did her dressing gowns become shorter and fluffier by degrees, her hair changed colour every few days; she moved from simmering redhead through to mahogany brown whilst her eyebrows got progressively thinner and more arched until they reached an expression of extreme alarm. Maybe this was because Hairy Neddy did not seem to notice her at all; his response was to lock his back gate whenever he was in, and to spend the rest of his time with his head stuck inside the innards of his apparently permanently sick car. And then, quite suddenly one day, Sandy gave up. The next morning, she was back in the towelling dressing gown, acting as if nothing had happened.

      There were sniggers and whispers after this of course, but if Sandy did hear them, she never showed that she cared. No one in the Yard, particularly the women, ever showed that they were upset or hurt. There was once a dreadful fight between Karl and Kevin’s mum and Mrs Keithley, in which Mrs K (the fecund divorcee), had told the twins’ mum that her boys were no better ‘than sodding bloody heathens! What kind of little bastards leave turds on people’s back stoops, eh?’ It began venomously and ended СКАЧАТЬ