by Meera Syal
‘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 with both women being held back by some passing menfolk whilst they exchanged wild swinging blows and spat out words I did not understand but knew somehow I should not 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 pi
nny 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 and knows no one is going to believe her. I’d seen a similar moue on the face of the mad soothsayer in Frankie Howerd’s Up Pompeii on the telly. The soothsayer was depicted as an old wild-eyed woman dressed in rags who began every entrance with the litany, ‘Woe! Woe! And thrice Woe!’ This never ceased to crease me up because Wo Wo was our family Punjabi euphemism for shit, ‘Do you want to do a Wo Wo?’ and ‘Wipe properly, get all the Wo Wo off …’ The first time I’d heard the soothsayer’s lament I’d said, ‘I think she must have constipation!’ which made my papa laugh proudly and my mother hide her smile under an expression of distaste. When I repeated the joke in the playground the next day, I realised it lost a lot in translation and vowed I would swot up on a few English jokes before I undertook challenging Vernon Cartwright again for the title of school wit.
Glenys wrung her hands a bit more and began chewing the ends of her bottle blonde hair, a sad dishrag of a haircut, but I guessed she’d long given up trying. I’d always assumed she was about fifty, in her shapeless sweaters and crimplene trousers with the sewn-in crease on each leg. But mama informed me, rather proudly I thought, that Mrs Lowbridge was not even forty, and that smoking and bad luck had chiselled all those weary dragging lines around her eyes and mouth. ‘That’s why you must always count your blessings, bed, and never think negative thoughts. If your mind is depressed, your body will soon follow. Me, I don’t even dye my hair.’ I went around for days after that, smiling so much that my cheeks ached and Mrs Worrall next door asked if I’d got wind. I was terrified that my body would betray my mind and all the anger and yearning and violent mood swings that plagued me would declare themselves in a rash of facial hives or a limb dropping off in a public place.
‘Meena chick, have yow seen our Sam today?’
‘No, Mrs Lowbridge,’ I answered. ‘Maybe he’s gone up the shops,’ I added helpfully.
‘He shouldn’t be up the bloody shops, he should be here. He knows I’m gooin
g up bingo tonight …’ She sighed and chewed a bit more hair. ‘Ey, yow’m on the corner, int ya? If yow see him gooing past, give us a knock will ya, chick?’ She trudged back inside her yard and propelled by the growling waves of hunger cascading around my stomach, I ran home.
Mama was rummaging about in what we called the Bike Shed, one of two small outhouses at the end of our backyard, the other outhouse being our toilet. We’d never had a bike between us, unless you counted my three-wheeler tricycle which was one of a number of play items discarded amongst the old newspapers, gardening tools, and bulk-bought tins of tomatoes and Cresta fizzy drinks. Of course, this shed should have really been called the bathroom, because it was where we filled an old yellow plastic tub with pans of hot water from the kitchen and had a hurried scrub before frostbite set in, but my mother would have cut out her tongue rather than give it its real, shameful name.
‘Found it, Mrs Worrall!’ she shouted from inside the shed. Mrs Worrall, with whom we shared adjoining, undivided backyards, stood in her uniform of flowery dress and pinny on her step. She had a face like a friendly potato with a sparse tuft of grey hair on top, and round John Lennon glasses, way before they became fashionable, obviously. She moved like she was underwater, slow, deliberate yet curiously graceful steps, and frightened most of the neighbours off with her rasping voice and deadpan, unimpressed face. She did not smile often, and when she did you wished she hadn’t bothered as she revealed tombstone teeth stained bright yellow with nicotine. But she loved me, I knew it; she’d only have to hear my voice and she’d lumber out into the yard to catch me, often not speaking, but would just nod, satisfied I was alive and functioning, her eyes impassive behind her thick lenses.
She would listen, apparently enthralled, to my mother’s occasional reports on my progress at school, take my homework books carefully in her huge slabs of hands and turn the pages slowly, nodding wisely at the cack-handed drawings and uneven writing. Every evening, when she came to pick up our copy of the Express and Star once my papa had finished reading it (an arrangement devised by my mother, ‘Why should the poor lady have to spend her pension when she can read ours?’), she’d always check up on me, what I was doing, whether I was in my pyjamas yet, whether I was mentally and physically prepared to retire for the night. At least, that’s what I read in her eyes, for she never spoke. Just that quick glance up and down, a slight incline of the head, a satisfied exhalation.
