Anita and Me. Meera Syal

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СКАЧАТЬ repeat at home when I recounted the incident. And yet, whenever the two women met, which was practically every day in such a small circular space, their instinctive reaction was to grow three feet in height, snarl and send death rays to each other through narrowed eyes.

      I knew this was the expected Tollington stance, attack being the best form of defence, and never ever show that you might be in pain. That would only invite more violence because pity was for wimps and wimps could not survive round here. This made me very concerned for my mother, who I would regularly find in front of the television news with tears streaming down her face. ‘Those poor children …’ she would sniffle, or ‘Those poor miners…those poor soldiers…those poor old people …’

      Papa seemed to enjoy these sentimental outbursts of hers and would smile fondly at his sobbing spouse, glad that he was married to someone with enough heart for the rest of the world.

      But it irritated the hell out of me. I had to live amongst my neighbours’ kids, who were harder, tougher versions of their parents, and I needed back-up. I had already been in quite a few ‘scraps’, where I felt obliged to launch in with fists and kicks to show I was not one of the victims that would be chosen every so often by the bigger lads for their amusement. And whilst I hated the physical pain and the nervous nausea of these ritual ‘barneys’, what I hated even more was having to hide my bruises and tears from my mother. I knew I would end up with her sobbing on my shoulder, crying on my behalf, whereas what I longed for her to do was rush into the yard in curlers and a pinny and beat the crap out of my tormentors. But mama wasn’t a Yard Mama, so I learned early on there were some things I would have to do for myself.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ