Anita and Me

by Meera Syal

  ‘Am yow gooing up there?’ she asked.

  I was pleased to hear the anxiety in her voice. ‘Yeah, I wanna see wharrit is,’ I replied, already leaving her behind.

  My socks and jumper sleeves caught on briars as I fought my way through the clearing, burrs and spiders’ webs latched themselves onto my fringe.

  And then I was in front of it, standing beneath the dome and flanked by pillars, and staring at the thing on its mount. I pulled at the creepers around it which came away with a soft ripping sound. My fingers became coated in green slime as I tugged and wrenched at the greenery until a face began emerging from the jungle. First appeared a low ridged forehead in the centre of which was a single perfect circle, then the eyes, almond-shaped and serene but sightless, and so familiar and old to me that I caught my breath. Was it him? And what was he doing here? And just as the final fronds came away in my hands and I saw the ears unfold like a handclap and the long trunk unfurl like a blessing, I heard the dog barking somewhere far away and did not have time to do as Auntie Shaila would have done, and raise my hands in Namaste to our smiling elephant god, Ganesha.

  ‘Fuckin’ ‘ell!’ Anita was already running when I realised the barking was coming closer, a mad, ragged barking which bounced off the trees so there seemed not one but hundreds of dogs ready to leap at me with snapping jaws. I stumbled after Anita, panic constricting my chest, twisting my ankle on potholes and hollows whilst thorny fingers whipped at my face and grabbed at my clothes, trying to make me stay. I could not see Anita, I simply followed the sound of cracking branches and felt the trait of flattened grass and bent bushes she had left in her wake. And then I hit a fence, or rather it hit me full in the face. I bounced backwards so fast that when I opened my eyes, I found myself lying in a thicket, looking at the stars through a cracked windscreen of twigs and wondering why my mouth seemed full of rust.

  ‘Meena! Here!’

  Anita was running on the other side of the fence, banging on the planks so I could follow her direction. I heaved myself up, aware that the barking was now nearer and louder, underscored by scrabbling feet and a calm snuffling. I used the fence as a guide, running with my arm against it, trying to keep upright until suddenly my hand hit air and I fell forward and into Anita’s arms. She set me on my feet and expertly replaced the softened plank and we were back on the pavement at the far end of the Big House, within sight of my own front door.

  ‘God, what yow done, Meena?’ Anita asked wonderingly.

  She put her finger to my lips, and when she brought it back, its tip was dark red. I gingerly felt my lips. I could trace a gash running from the inside of my bottom lip which spread halfway across my cheek. I looked down at my jumper, two great tears on one sleeve and the front of it flapping open, like I had been split from breastbone to stomach. Anita did not have to say anything, we both knew how much trouble I was in. We walked slowly together the last few yards to the crossroads. I knew it was late by the height of the moon, but strangely, all the lights in my house were still blazing and the same convoy of Aunties’ cars were still parked in the lane.

  ‘Meybbe they won’t have missed ya?’ Anita said finally, hopefully, knowing she would have to answer to no one.

  I shook my head. I knew it would not matter how many guests were still singing in the front room. I had sneaked out without telling, and worst of all, I knew, as soon as I had looked down at my ravaged jumper, that I had lost mama’s diamond necklace, which I imagined lying at Ganesha’s fat feet like an offering, a single glint amidst the ivy, a fallen star.

  ‘What was it, that thing you saw?’ was Anita’s parting shot before she turned into the entry.

  I shrugged my shoulders, suddenly weary and in pain. ‘Nothing, Nita. Nothing special,’ and began the long march home.

  I braced myself for howls of woe and gnashing of teeth when I saw my front door swing open and two of my Aunties appeared shivering on the doorstep. But instead they barely registered my presence, beyond a slight gesture of relief, and looked above and beyond me, scanning the horizon, waiting for something. Then one of them called inside, ‘Meena is here! Don’t let her see!’

  I heard the catch in their throats, they turned huge sorrowful gazes at me, I could tell they were frightened for me. Auntie Shaila appeared holding a stack of towels. Wordlessly she grabbed my arm and pulled me towards the kitchen; I caught a glimpse of my father, pale and taut, kneeling in a circle of Aunties, talking softly to someone.

  My Uncles were huddled together in the lounge, silent and embarrassed almost, not daring to look up. Then suddenly I was in the darkened kitchen and the door was firmly shut behind me. I stood rooted to the spot, trying to calm my breathing whilst the sounds of muffled, frantic activity continued outside. The street light on the corner outside filled the room with a sickly viscous glow, somewhere a cooling saucepan hissed softly. I heard running water and then the dreadful familiar wail of an approaching ambulance.

  I heard strange male voices entering the house, papa yelling, ‘Careful! For God’s sake …’ and I hurled myself at the door, yanking it open. Mama was lying on a stretcher covered with a red blanket, her eyes screwed up with pain. Papa walked beside her, holding her hand as the two ambulancemen negotiated their way through my relatives who had formed a macabre farewell committee at the door. A small pool of red lay like fallen poppies in the middle of the white groundsheet, and at the foot of the stairs, one of mama’s strappy sandals lay on its side in what looked like a portion of large, black liver. I dodged various jingling manicured hands which grabbed at the air above my head and ran to the other side of the stretcher, holding onto the blanket.

  Mama opened her eyes momentarily and laid her hand on my head. ‘Meena, look after papa,’ she said quietly. Papa rested his hand briefly on my shoulder. Then he clambered inside the ambulance which sped away, its siren wa-waaing in time to the distant fairground songs. Mrs Worrall, Mrs Lowbridge, Mrs Povey and Cara stood huddled on the corner, whispering quietly to each other, throwing me the occasional glance.

  Mrs Worrall gathered her voluminous woollen dressing gown around her and wandered over to my Auntie Shaila who was now standing next to me, sniffling into the end of her sari. She jumped as Mrs Worrall tapped her lightly, ‘We’ll have to do a rota. For Mr K. Mek sure him and the littl’un eat and that.’

  Auntie Shaila drew herself up, her triple chins wobbling in indignation. ‘Oh, don’t you worry. We will see to that, thank you so much. Oh bhagwan. What else can this bloody country throw upon our heads …’ she muttered, trying to drag me inside.

  I pulled away from her and went to stand next to Cara. I wanted to watch the ambulance until its tail-lights disappeared over the hill. Cara sang to herself, swaying with the chill wind, ‘Rock of Ages, cleft for me…turn te turn turn la la la …’

  6

  My brother had the distinction of being the tallest baby ever born at New End Hospital in Wolverhampton. ‘The child was twenty-one inches long, can you imagine!’ Auntie Shaila said excitedly on the telephone, whilst papa hid his head uncomfortably in a newspaper. ‘No wonder he nearly ripped poor Daljit apart…but it was worth it, for a boy eh? Now the family is complete, and Meena can be another little mother to her bhaiya …’

  I disliked him on first sight, a scrawny, yowling thing with a poached egg of a face, his long fingers clinging gekko-like to mama’s nightgown front whilst she held him up to me for a first sister’s kiss. I brushed his cheek sullenly with my mouth, it felt downy and damp, a strange smell of custard and roses made my nostrils twitch and for a second, he stopped crying and looked straight at me with wise old man eyes. The knowledge in them made me step back a moment. He had the face of a travel-weary prodigal, ancient dust and the maps of several continents lay on his brow, he had comet trails in his nappy and sea shells crushed between his toes. He was only a day old and I knew he had already seen places I would only ever dream of.

  Papa laughed. ‘Look at him! He already loves you, Meena. He’s saying he
llo to you.’ Mama offered him to my arms. She looked transparent, ethereal. A long tube ran from a drip into a needle taped to the front of her hand, surrounded by a livid green-blue bruise. She could barely shift position without biting her lip and closing her eyes, as if not seeing her body would stop the pain. I shook my head, afraid I would drop this terrifyingly powerful, chicken-legged bundle.

  Much later on, when mama had made every parent’s transformation from semi-divine icon to semi-detached confidante, she told me the real story of the birth. How she bent down to pick up a crushed kebab from the white sheet and felt a slimy mountain avalanche down her thighs. My brother’s placenta lay at her feet and in her shoes. The anaesthetic had not kicked in when they did an emergency caesarean to haul him out, already fearing that irrevocable brain damage had claimed this long-legged baby, and then when she cried out that she could feel every stitch when they were sewing her up, a sour-faced nurse told her to be grateful she was still alive and to shut it. ‘But they were the same when I had you, Meena. They left me alone in a room with a dirty blanket for ten hours. When I asked for drugs, the nurse said, “Oh, you Asian ladies have a very low pain threshold.” So I said, “You won’t mind if I slap you in the face and prove it…” But you know, I was grateful to be alive. She was right that time, the other nurse. I did not want to leave you alone yet.’

  But nothing was the same for me and mama once Sunil came to live in our house, his house. Before he arrived, papa and I spent a few glorious mad weeks together when we had tinned spaghetti hoops and biscuits for breakfast, fish and chips or jam tarts for supper, and in between I was sent to school in crumpled uncoordinated clothes, hyperactive from sugar overdose and a series of late nights of watching the television until the small white dot appeared to send us to bed with a wink. Papa let his stubble grow and spent hours in the outside toilet with his newspapers whilst I tried on all mama’s make-up and occasionally slipped into her wardrobe where I would sit amongst her cardigans and saris recalling her fresh, lemony smell.

  Best of all, papa never stopped me hanging around with Anita. Since the Big House incident, which thankfully had been overshadowed by Sunil’s birth and therefore had few punishing consequences for me, beyond a niggle of guilt when I thought about mama’s diamond necklace, Anita and I had spent every day together. One morning we met up on the park swings. I had escaped the house, already fed-up with Auntie Shaila’s constant clucking, her re-organisation of mama’s spice rack and her interminable five-course breakfast, most of which I had flushed down the toilet whilst she hoovered the stairs and hand-washed the blood-stained white sheet.

  Anita was sitting alone, in new jeans and a fashionable skinny-rib top. She looked older, maybe because of the purple shadows under her eyes. The hated poodle was sniffing about the metal posts near her feet, looking up at her occasionally as if expecting a command. I sat down on the swing next to hers and rocked in time with her. ‘My mum’s in hospital,’ I said.

  ‘So’s mine,’ Anita replied.

  ‘Is she having a baby as well?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid! She said my dad beat her up. He didn’t. She pricked her arm with a dart to make it look like that. Dad told me. He’s not picking her up. She can come home on the bloody bus, he says.’

  I did not need to ask what had led to this; I wondered how he had found out about Deirdre’s lustful assignation with the Poet, maybe Anita herself had told him. I did not know how I would feel if my mother pinched my boyfriend. But then I realised we did not have boyfriends, not under any circumstances, and having seen the chaos they created, I was rather glad.

  ‘Where’s Sherrie and Fat Sally?’ I asked casually.

  ‘That Sherrie’s a right slag. When I get my pony she ain’t riding it, no way!’ Anita spat fiercely. ‘Fat Sally’s mom says she’s not allowed out anymore.’

  I knew she meant ‘with me’. So Anita was a Bad Influence, that was official. And I was temporarily motherless and a proven liar and thief. It was, I decided then, a marriage made in heaven. We did nothing special, beyond strolling round the park with carefully cultivated bored expressions, exploring the abandoned pigsties with adult disdain, shimmying down to Mr Ormerod’s corner shop with unimpressed faces, always aware that we were simply too big and beautiful for Tollington and making sure that everyone else knew it as well.

  And then one day, when I had almost forgotten she was coming back, mama appeared on the doorstep with a cooing bundle. Monkey-face had changed into a chocolate box cherub, impossible curls, huge needy eyes and a desperate desire to be held by all and sundry whilst he deliberately toyed with their hearts. All past habits and rituals were forgotten, swept away with a swipe of a tiny fist. Days passed in a cyclone of feeds, nappies, scattered toys and endless visiting relatives bearing gifts and sweetmeats for the Kumars’ new son. Days even bled into night when I would awake with a jerk to his banshee wailing, unsure whether it was sunshine, moonlight or street lamp flare on the other side of my curtains, sometimes grateful to be dragged away from my now familiar nightmare where I pursued mama through endless winding cobbled streets, calling for her to look round. She sat in the back of a taxi, staring straight ahead, the set of neck told me she was willing the driver to go faster and every where I placed my feet, there was nothing but clinging wet clay.

  Tollington loved new babies, and Sunil became the latest local attraction; it would take us half an hour to walk to Mr Ormerod’s shop, having to stop several times on the journey whilst various Ballbearings factory women would ooh and aah into the pram, carefully blowing their cigarette smoke out the sides of their mouths. Mrs Keithley gathered a whole pile of Nicky, Natasha and Nathan’s old baby clothes and dropped them off one morning, three huge plastic bags full of romper suits and cardigans, telling mama, ‘If I have any more kids, it’ll be an act of God so you keep them, love.’ Mrs Worrall presented us with ten exquisitely-embroidered matinee suits and several knitted woollies, all of which she had been making over the past nine months. I could not imagine those fat hands casting on or manoeuvring round a crochet hook, but mama was so touched she kissed Mrs Worrall’s hairy cheek and later told papa, ‘She never sees her own grandchildren, that is why this means so much to her. Her kids should be shot.’

  I had never realised there were so many mothers in the village, and it seemed each one either came to our door or accosted us on the street, bearing gifts or full of advice, wanting to hold this scrap of new life and remind themselves of how their own babies once felt in their arms. Nobody thought beyond that reality, the snuffling body nestling at their neck, the open, searching mouth and uncontrolled, restless arms, no one wanted to think about the gangs of no-hope teenagers who already took over the nearby park all day, drinking lager and waiting for something to happen to them, trapped in a forgotten village in no-man’s land between a ten-shop town and an amorphous industrial sprawl. We still lived near enough to the seasons to be fatalistic; the corn grew every year, didn’t it? Winter was harsh but never stayed too long, and the spring, well it hadn’t let us down yet. Summers were still endless and by September, every single child was sunburnt, scabbed and sated with stolen blackberries and a sense of freedom. We will always have the children, the village mothers said, our only investment for the future, and then they sounded exactly like my Aunties.

  It was a mutual decision we made, mama and I, to forget each other temporarily and move onto other loves. She was too tired for me anyhow; she still came back from school and went straight into the kitchen, but now she came back later, having picked Sunil up from the nursery and did the cooking with him clinging onto her hip, handfuls of her hair in his hands. Of course she could not help but notice that Anita and I were now officially ‘mates’, as we called for each other every day; but beyond a purse of her lips and a resigned shrug, mama decided to let it go. And I was grateful to her for that.

  After some detailed discussions together on the park roundabout, Anita and I decided that we had to get a gang together. We both agr
eed there was no point putting so much energy into posturing and looking mean if you didn’t have some others around to applaud or take the blame when things turned nasty. Unfortunately, due to the existence of two other gangs in the yard, we were left with the dregs. We would all have liked to be part of Sam Lowbridges’ Tollington Rebels, a group of affectedly bored bikers (well, moped riders to be strictly accurate, but the helmets looked authentic), who divided their seemingly endless time between the park swings, their patch of yard in front of the Lowbridges’ back gate and the Mitre pub, near the old pithead. Favoured activities were spitting, swearing loudly, petting (there were always girls hanging around who chewed gum and laughed in coarse screeching guffaws, but they seemed to be on a rota system, changing from week to week), doing wheelies round the dirt yard and of course, stealing and vandalism, although no actual acts had been witnessed. (Except for the time Sam had been seen pissing in the red telephone box on the corner opposite our house but as Hairy Neddy had said, ‘That ain’t a crime. That’s a bloody local custom, ain’t it?’) But if anything went missing or was found broken, the finger of suspicion inevitably poked Sam Lowbridge in his skinny ribs.

  The other gang was made up of all the local boys who were too young to ride a moped and too old to hang around with us, all of whom went to Anita’s comprehensive school some fifteen miles away (there was a grammar school some twenty miles from the village but no one had passed the Eleven-plus for a whole decade.) The Footies were led by Chris Bailey, one of three brothers each born nine months apart to a couple we called the Ginger Nuts. Mr and Mrs Bailey lived next door to the church, their sober respectability completely incongruous with their shocking carrot-coloured hair which they had thoughtfully passed on to their children. They all looked like they were wearing those novelty wigs you could hire from the joke shop in the town, and every August, one or all of the boys would go down with severe sunburn. Chris’ gang were bike and football mad and you could always spot them hogging the park, the three Bailey boys were the boiled lobsters in the Wolves’ football strip, testosterone timebombs whose noise and energy levels only just kept them from exploding.