Anita and Me. Meera Syal

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СКАЧАТЬ them. But they were much older – ‘Comp wenches’ – and I never expected them to even notice me. Until today.

      We stood on the corner of the crossroads a moment whilst Anita rummaged around for another sweet, tossing a discarded wrapper to the floor. I knew my mother would be picking that up later when she did her early evening sweep of the front garden path and pavement. We walked slowly, me half a yard behind, past my front door and along one side of the triangle of houses of which my house was the apex, past the long dark alleyways which led into our communal dirt yard at the back of the cottages.

      I hesitated as we passed the first ‘entry’ as we called them; they always spooked me, these endless echoing corridors, smelling of mildew whose sides always seemed to weep and covered you with shiny scales and bullet black slugs the size of a fingernail if you bumped against them, running from daylight through night and then back into the safety of the yard. Anita suddenly veered off and turned down the entry next to Mr Christmas’ house, still chomping away.

      Mr Christmas always dressed like it was midwinter; it had to be at least a hundred degrees before you’d see him without his muffler and V-shaped cardigan, standing outside his back gate scattering old cake crumbs for the starlings, his wrinkles creasing into kind smiles as they pecked round his carpet slippers. I knew Mrs Christmas was ‘poorly’, the yard had talked of nothing else when the news first came out some months ago.

      I was not sure what was wrong with her exactly, but it must have been serious, the way the women huddled together over their washing lines, talking in whispers accompanied by much pointing to a general area around their laps, only referred to as ‘down there …’ I tried to listen in but it was as if there was an invisible volume knob which someone turned up and down at certain points in the conversation. ‘Course, they took her in and opened her up but you know, once they got to her, you know …’ Their voices would disappear, their lips would still be moving but only their hands talked, making strange circular shapes and cutting motions, which caused half the women to shake their heads and the others to cross their legs and wince in sympathy. Of course I asked my mum, the oracle, and she told me Mrs Christmas had got something called cancer, yes, she would probably die and no, it was certainly not infectious, poor lady.

      Standing at the mouth of the entry, I suddenly realised that I had not seen Mrs Christmas for a long time. The last occasion had been the Spring Fayre, when Uncle Alan, the youth leader from the Methodist church, had sent us hapless kids round to knock on everyone’s door in the yard and ask them if they had ‘anything spare’ for the bring-and-buy stall. None of our neighbours liked giving anything away, materially or otherwise, and by the time I had reached the Christmas’ house I remember feeling completely demoralised. After two hours of knocking and being polite, all I had had to show for my efforts was a bunch of dog-eared back issues of the People’s Friend, two tins of sliced pineapples, a toilet brush cover in the shape of a crinoline-clad lady, whose expression was surprisingly cheerful considering she had a lav brush up her arse, and a scratched LP entitled ‘Golden Memories; Rock’N’Roll Love Songs with the Hammond Singers’. (And even that had been difficult to prise away from Sandy, until she had remembered it had belonged to her ‘ex-bastard’, as she called him, and flung it at me with a flourish.)

      Worse still were the women’s expressions when they had opened up their back gates expecting to see Uncle Alan and found me instead. Uncle Alan was the nearest thing we had to a sex symbol in a ten-mile radius. He seemed ancient, at least twenty-eight, but he did have chestnut brown curly hair, a huge smile, an obscene amount of energy and a huge dimple right in the centre of his chin which looked like someone had got a pencil, placed it on his skin and slowly twirled it round and round on the spot. (I knew this because I had spent many a happy hour creating dimples in my arms using this very method.) We kids always braced ourselves if we saw him bounding across the yard from the vicar’s house, eager and slobbery as a Labrador, because we knew he’d be looking for volunteers for another of his good-egg schemes. ‘Well littl’uns!’ he’d gasp, rubbing his hands together in what he thought was a matey, streetwise kind of manner. ‘How about we get together and do something about this litter, eh?’ And the next thing you know, you’d be wearing one of his canvas aprons with ‘Tollington Methodist Times’ plastered all over it and picking up fag butts from underneath parked cars.

      But we never said no; though we would rather die than admit it, we actually enjoyed trailing after him, gathering blackberries for the ‘Jam In’, washing down the swings in the adjoining park with Fairy Liquid, even sitting in on his Youth Chats every Sunday afternoon, in which we’d have two minutes of talk vaguely connected to Jesus and then get on with making up plays or drawing pictures or playing ‘Tick You’re It’ in and around the pews. Frankly, there was nothing else to do, as many of us were not privy to the big boys’ leisure activities which were mainly cat torturing or peeing competitions behind the pigsties, and he knew it.

      ‘Oh I could give him one,’ Sandy had once said to Anita’s mother, Deirdre, as they watched Uncle Alan leap across the yard. ‘Don’t he wear nice shoes? You can always tell a bloke by his shoes.’

      ‘Gerrof you dirty cow,’ said Deirdre. ‘He’s a vicar or summat. Yow wouldn’t get to touch him with a bargepole.’

      ‘He could touch me with his bloody pole anyday,’ said Sandy, dreamily, before both of them collapsed into screeching guffaws.

      I had pretended not to hear this as I trailed after him with an armful of leaflets, but had mentally stored it away. At least I now knew what a sex symbol was supposed to look like, and could understand why I was considered a poor second choice when it came to donating bric-a-brac.

      So by the time Mrs Christmas had reached her back gate, wheezing her way from her yard door, her slippers slapping the cobbles, I did not expect much of a booty. But she had swung the gate back and all I could see was her shock of white hair peeking over a huge armful of clothes she held in her hands.

      ‘Meena chick, I’ve been expecting you,’ she said. ‘Where do you want this lot?’

      I had helped her pile the clothes into my wooden pull-along, parked at her gate (it had been an old play trolley of mine which used to be filled with alphabet building blocks. Perfect, my mother said archly, for door-to-door begging.) Mrs Christmas had straightened up carefully and I examined her face, rosy pink with delicate veins running from her huge nose like tributaries, surprisingly sparkling and deep blue eyes with an expression that made her look like she was always about to burst into laughter, or tears. She had looked healthy enough to me and I felt relieved.

      ‘You can have all this lot. I shan’t be needing it, chick. Not where I’m going.’

      I had knelt down and rifled through the cart; there must have been at least a dozen dresses, all one-piece tailored frocks with baby doll collars, darted sharply at the waist, many of them with belts and full pleated skirts. But the fabrics, I could not take my eyes off them, all delicate flowers, roses and bluebells and buttercups set against cream silk or beige sheeny muslin, ivy leaves snaking around collars and cuffs, clover and mayblossom intertwined with delicate green stalks tumbling along pleats like a waterfall. It was as if a meadow had landed in my lap.

      They were so different to the clothes my mother wore, none of these English drawing room colours, she was all open-heart cerises and burnt vivid oranges, colours that made your pupils dilate and were deep enough to enter your belly and sit there like the aftertaste of a good meal. No flowers, none that I could name, but dancing elephants, strutting peacocks and long-necked birds who looked as if they were kissing their own backs, shades and cloth which spoke of bare feet on dust, roadside smokey dhabas, honking taxi horns and heavy sudden rain beating a bhangra on deep green leaves. But when I looked at Mrs Christmas’ frocks, I thought of tea by an open fire with an autumn wind howling outside, horses’ hooves, hats and gloves, toast, wartime brides with cupid bow mouths laughing СКАЧАТЬ