by Meera Syal
Although she always had a posse of ‘littl’uns’ tagging after her, all saggy socks and scabby elbows, her constant cohorts were Fat Sally, a shy lump of a girl from one of the posh semis, and Sherrie, the farmer’s daughter, lanky and gamine, who, it was rumoured, had her own pony. I would watch them strolling round the yard, arms linked, feet dragging along in their mothers’ old slingbacks, and physically ache to be with 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 wh
o 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 and waving their hankies to departing soldiers, like I’d seen on that telly programme, All Our Yesterdays. And then I had glanced at Mrs Christmas’ 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, w
hich 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.’
We only ever saw the other members of Hairy Neddy’s band, the Cucumbers themselves, on one occasion when the Robin Reliant had overheated and was 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.
