Anita and Me. Meera Syal

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СКАЧАТЬ saggy belly straining at her pinafore, the belly which even then had been growing something other than the child she said she had always wanted but never had, and I had wondered how she had looked when she had worn all these frocks and whether I would have recognised her.

      Mrs Christmas had rummaged in the front pocket of her pinny and brought out a furry boiled sweet which she popped wordlessly into my open mouth. It tasted sooty and warm. Then she suddenly leaned forward and kissed me. She did not have her teeth in and I felt as if she was hoovering the side of my cheek. ‘You’ve always been a smashing chick, you have.’

      My face felt damp and I wanted to wipe it but realised that would be rude, and at the same time, suddenly felt desperately, bitterly sad. I managed to mumble ‘Thank you, Mrs Christmas,’ through the sweet and stumbled out of the yard, tugging my now heavy cart behind me. I had not wanted to look back but I had to, and she was still watching me across the yard. She had waved her massive red hand and I had not seen her since.

      

      Before I could ask out aloud if Anita had seen sight or sound of Mrs Christmas lately, Anita chucked the packet of sweets, still half full, to the ground and began running down the entry, whooping like an ambulance siren. The echo was amazing, deep and raspy and rumbling like a dinosaur’s cough, it bounced off the high entry walls and made me shudder. She stopped, panting for breath at the far end of the passage, a stick silhouette, seemingly miles away. ‘Yow do it. Goo on then.’

      I took a deep gulp of air and began running, gathering speed, opened my lungs and bellowed, no pattern or tune, just pure sound swooping up and down the scale, so much of it I felt it was pouring out of my nose and ears and eyes. The echo picked me up and dragged me along the slimy walls, the harder I shouted the faster I moved, it was all the screams I had been saving up as long as I could remember, and I reached sunlight and Anita at the other end where we both laughed our heads off.

      Suddenly a gate scraped open beside us and Mr Christmas emerged in his vest and braces, his face blue with fury. His hair stood on end, straight up like he’d put his finger in a socket, and there was drool gathering on one side of his mouth. ‘Yow little heathens! What yow think yow’m playing at?’ he hissed. ‘I got a sick woman inside. Yow think she wants to hear yow lot honking around like a lot of animals?’ He was pointing a shaky finger at his sitting room window, the one that overlooked the yard. Through it, just visible, was the top of Mrs Christmas’ snowy head. It seemed to be propped at an awkward angle, it looked like she was watching the tiny black and white telly sitting on top of the sideboard.

      I felt mortified, more for not going to visit Mrs Christmas than for shouting down the entry, forgetting that its walls were also the walls of half of the Christmas’ home. ‘I shall tell your mothers on you, that I shall,’ Mr Christmas continued. My belly contracted. That wasn’t good news, not today, when I’d already been exposed as a petty thief and a liar. My mother let me get away with mouthy behaviour and general mischief around my Aunties, she never had to worry about policing me because guaranteed, one of them would raise a fat hand jingling with bangles and cuff me into place, no questions asked. Scolding each other’s kids was expected, a sign of affection almost, that you cared enough about them to administer a pinch or nudge now and then. But to be told off by a white person, especially a neighbour, that was not just misbehaviour, that was letting down the whole Indian nation. It was continually drummed into me, ‘Don’t give them a chance to say we’re worse than they already think we are. You prove you are better. Always.’

      ‘Don’t tell, Mr Christmas,’ I pleaded pathetically, only just realising with shock that he had not got his V-neck on today. ‘We’re really sorry, aren’t we Anita?’

      Anita had not moved or spoken. She was twirling her privet switch round and round in the dirt, her eyes unblinking and fixed. She sighed and said in a flat, bored voice, ‘Tell me mom. I don’t care.’

      I gasped. This was treason. Why hadn’t I said that?

      ‘Right. I will then, I’ll go round right now…No, not now, Connie needs her medicine first, but after that …’

      Anita was already strolling away, dragging her feet deliberately, a wiggle in her thin hips. ‘Goo on then. I dare ya. Soft old sod.’

      The sky did not crack. It was still clear, blue, unbroken. Anita Rutter, the cock of the yard, had not only answered back a grown-up but sworn at him and invited him to tell the whole thing to her own mother. Mr Christmas’ shoulders sagged slightly. He turned his gaze to me, a hard look, unforgiving. ‘Nice friends yow’ve got now, eh chick?’ He shuffled back into his yard and slammed the gate. A moment later I heard the TV volume go up to full blast.

      

      Anita was now outside her own back gate. Her little sister, Tracey, was sitting on the stoop, looking up at her with huge red-rimmed eyes, a plastic toy basket lay on its side next to her feet, spilling out a few scrawny, unripe blackberries. If Anita was a Rottweiler, Tracey had been first in the whippet line up in heaven. She was a thin, sickly child, with the same cowering, pleading look you’d get in the eyes of the stray mutts who hung round the yard for scraps, and soon fled when they discovered they would be used for target practice in the big boys’ spitting contests. Whereas Anita was blonde and pale, Tracey was dark and pinched, the silent trotting shadow whimpering at her big sister’s heels, swotted and slapped away as casually as an insect. Her dress hung off her, obviously one of Anita’s hand-me-downs, a faded pink frilly number which on Anita must have looked cheerful, flirty, and on gangly, anxious Tracey gave her the air of a drag queen with a migraine. ‘What’m yow dooing sitting out here, our Trace?’

      Anita poked Tracey with her switch as she talked. Tracey edged further away along the stoop and wiped her nose with the back of her purple-stained hand. ‘Mom’s not here,’ she said, resignedly. ‘I went blackberrying with Karl and Kevin and when I came back, she wasn’t here.’

      ‘Probably gone up the shops, love,’ Hairy Neddy called over from his car.

      Hairy Neddy was the yard’s only bachelor and, as Deirdre put it, just our sodding luck, the only available man and we get a yeti. When Hairy Neddy first arrived he looked like a walking furball, one of those amorphous bushy masses that the yard cats would occasionally cough up when the weather changed. As legend has it, the day he moved in he roared into the yard in his Robin Reliant, which at that time had NED DEMPSTER AND HIS ROCKIN’ ROBINS painted on one side, and on the other, WEDDINGS, PARTIES, THE HOTTEST RIDE THIS SIDE OF WOLVERHAMPTON. Except he’d miscalculated how long Wolverhampton was going to be and the TON was small and wobbly, squashed hurriedly against the side of the windscreen. Everyone came out to see who their new neighbour was going to be and was confronted by this vision of decadence, a plump, piggy-eyed man in tattered jeans coughing through the dust he’d churned up: at least they could hear the cough but couldn’t quite make out where his beard ended and his mouth began, as his flowing locks and facial undergrowth seemed to be one huge rug interrupted slightly by his eyes and nose.

      Since then of course, The Beatles had come into ‘vow-gew’ as he used to say, and Neddy’s facial fuzz had disappeared, revealing underneath a surprisingly pleasant, blokey kind of face topped with a sort of bouffant hairdo that respectably skimmed the back of his collar. But inevitably the name Hairy Neddy stuck; first impressions were the ones that counted in Tollington, and he even adopted it into his stage act when he formed yet another band with which to set the West Midlands a-rocking. The Robin Reliant now sported the slogan HAIRY NEDDY AND HIS COOL CUCUMBERS, which of course gave the bored women in the yard lots of unintentional pleasure. ‘Come here our Ned, I could do with a good cucumbering today!’ Or ‘It’s hot today, Ned, make sure yowr cucumber don’t droop!’ or usually, just in passing, ‘Goo on, get your cucumber out, Ned, I could do with a laff.’

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