by Meera Syal
I was breathing so fast that the green mask over my mouth panted up and down like a diaphragm and I suddenly felt foolish in this medical garb. I became aware of the bones in his hand and the rough edges of his bandaged fingertips and was gloriously complete for the time it took to gather up my crutches and heave myself to my three feet. ‘I’ll be in soon for physio, yeah?’ my voice sounded coated and subdued through my mask. ‘Mind the road!’ he called to my back.
I was still smiling as we drove up the one main road leading into Tollington. The familiar fields were brown moon surfaces coated with ice, the trees stark against the dark sky like charcoal skeletons, but as we turned around the corner upon which our house stood, my smile faded. The horizon glowed a sticky neon yellow, the fields opposite our house had been marked out with white sticks and tape which snagged in the breeze and there were motionless yellow diggers in what was the old mine yard next to the Big House. The crumbling low-roofed office was gone and slabs of concrete ripped from the yard lay in a haphazard pile like slices of old Christmas cake, even though there were five days to go.
‘What’s been happening!’ I cried, furious that neither of my parents had mentioned that Tollington was being carved up in my absence.
‘What?’ said papa, confused and then cottoned on as we drove past the violated fields towards the entrance to the communal yard. ‘Oh, well the motorway is open now, you knew about that didn’t you?’
‘But,’ I stammered. ‘Everything else …’
‘Oh, right,’ papa continued. ‘Apparently Mr Pembridge has sold some of the land opposite us, don’t know what for…There’s been talk about new houses but it’s just a rumour …’
Anita’s back gate was shut and barely recognisable, a few slivers of paint remained clinging to the exposed wood and I noticed that the back upstairs window was cracked and held together with sellotape. Sam Lowbridge’s moped stood in its usual space, but looked unused and rusty, its Union Jack flag was just a rag which drooped morosely from the aerial at the back. A few items of frozen underwear hung stiffly from a washing line and Blaze, the mad collie, sniffed at a pile of old newspapers, his orange and white fur the only slash of colour in this black and white landscape.
I never remembered it all looking so shabby, so forgotten. There was not even any evidence of the usual Christmas fripperies, no flashing lights at anyone’s window, no tinsel trees squashed into back porches or holly wreaths hammered into back gates. It was as if everyone had given up, or was waiting for something to happen.
‘Glad to be home, Meena beti?’ papa said, helping me out of the car and handing me my crutches. Before I could answer, Hairy Neddy’s back gate swung open and he appeared shivering in the doorway, buttoning up his sheepskin jacket whilst Sandy handed him a pack of sandwiches wrapped up in silver foil. They both saw me and waved excitedly. ‘Meena chick! Noice to see ya!’ Hairy Neddy called over, and then kissed Sandy absentmindedly before getting into his three-wheeler and backfiring out of the yard.
‘They are married now,’ papa said, reading my confusion.
‘Oh. When?’ I was getting less surprised at each new revelation.
‘About two months back.’ Papa was supporting me as I balanced myself, taking infinite care. ‘Neddy’s working in a shop now, he’s stopped the band. See what happens when you get a wife?’ papa joked.
‘Huh!’ called mama from the driving seat. ‘It was about time he grew up!’ and reversed expertly into our parking space near the pigsties.
The whole village had aged behind my back, I decided, as I struggled up the entry, noticing the litter and the dog shit and the bomb site which made up the Mad Mitchells’ back yard. I could see Mrs Mitchell sitting at her kitchen table slowly peeling an apple, staring into space. The door to their outside loo was flapping open, a smell of urine and stale cigarette smoke hit me like a hot gust and made me gag.
‘Okay Meena?’
I nodded, careful to not put the rubber tips of my extra legs onto any mossy patches.
‘Oh, by the way,’ papa murmured. ‘If you see Mrs Mitchell, don’t ask about Cara. She’s um…she’s gone to some home for treatment. I’m sure she will be back but…they’re upset, obviously…it wasn’t their decision …’
The thought of poor daffy Cara pacing around a padded cell brought a sudden spill of tears which froze immediately on my eyelashes. If anyone needed the open road it was her, even if it was only to wander along the broken white line singing Methodist hymns.
I finally reached our back gate and paused, hearing mama’s light quick steps coming up the entry, waiting for her to catch up. I was sniffing in all the old smells I missed from the kitchen, hot, buttery, smoking griddles, potatoes frying in cumin seeds, onions simmering in garlicky tomatoes. I could taste my dinner in the air and felt ravenous. But papa was far away for a moment, taking in the cobbled yard, the padlocked bike shed, the grainy wooden door to our outside loo. ‘It’s home, it really is, but we can’t stay here forever, Meena …’ he said quietly, and then welcomed mama inside with a protective arm.
Later that evening, when I was trying to get changed, cursing as I juggled crutches and armholes and trousers over my cast, I heard the loud vroom of an engine screech past my window.
Sam was on a brand new motorbike, a proper motorbike not a moped, with a large fat engine and mirrors with a wing span of five feet across and a big leather saddle with enough room for three people to sit comfortably. Sam drew up under the street light next to the phone booth, his hair was now so short that he looked almost bald and I fancied I saw a scar running from his eye to his cheek which glinted under the neon. He turned round to his passenger whose skinny arms were wrapped firmly round his waist and gave her a long aggressive French kiss. Anita responded with gusto, not resisting as he slipped one hand under her jacket, and when they drew apart, Sam was wearing her lipstick.
In the limbo days between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve, papa drove me back to the hospital where I spent a useful hour trying to pick up a pencil with my plaster-encased toes. The second the session ended, I made my clumsy way down to the isolation ward like some heat-crazed, long-legged insect. Robert’s bed was empty; Sylvie told me he had gone for more tests, this time to another hospital, and would not be back until tomorrow. I spent half an hour composing a lighthearted letter which I left on his pillow with a Wolves Annual and a book I had tried to read and found too dense, but which had recently won some big prize in America and was supposedly a great learning experience. Papa waited patiently in the corridor as I finished off with a P.S. – ‘Hope you like To Kill a Mockingbird. I will test you on chapters four, five and six when we meet next year. Meena. X.’
When I still had not received a reply by January the fifth, I telephoned the hospital to find out where Robert was. I did not manage to track down Sylvie and some weary receptionist told me she could not give out such information over the phone. But I was never worried, I knew for certain that Robert would get in touch when he was ready, and was thrilled when a few days later, a letter arrived bearing an Aldridge postmark. I ventured out by myself for the first time and sat on the swings in the deserted, chilly park where I tore it open and read, ‘My dear Meena, We are sorry to tell you that our dear son Robert left us on the last day of December. The hospital sent your sweet letter to us. We wanted to thank you for making Robert’s time in hospital so happy. We know you will miss him too. With many thanks again, God Bless You, Yours faithfully, Mr and Mrs Robert Oakes.’
13
I spent a lot of time on my own that year. I had the perfect excuse, that I was recuperating, that I needed peace and rest, that I was often worn out from travelling to and from physiotherapy, and people understood and mostly left me to it. My days as a yard member were over. In fact, those days when hordes of children hung around the dirt arena looking for companionship and diversion were effectively ended by the closing of the village school. Now, all those children who used to have lazy hours to fill after lessons were finished, following a sprint
down the hill from classroom to back gate, spent those same precious hours stuck in buses and cars, travelling from the new combined infants and junior school that had been built in the middle of the steadily growing Bartlett estate.
I saw them arriving home in weary groups, dragging school bags and shoes on the ground. In the winter months there would only be a few hours of daylight left, and most of my old friends preferred to spend them defrosting in front of their television sets. With the children otherwise engaged in this commuter hell, the village turned into the Pied Piper’s Hamelin; without the children around wreaking havoc with bikes and balls and skipping ropes, playing ‘Tick’ between our corner and Mr Ormerod’s shop, the streets were empty and unloved, populated only by old widows on church duties and unemployed men on secretive errands.
It was not, however, any quieter; before the motorway opened, the village had its own soothing background noise – never silent, it was an uneven tune full of birdsong and women’s voices and the odd car rumbling through, sometimes the wind in the trees around the Big House played percussion and in summer, there was always the somnolent undertone of meandering bees. But all these notes became indistinct and fuzzy when pitched against the constant low roar of the motorway traffic which now rose each morning above the fields and hung over our houses like an unwanted, stifling cloud. Even the stars had changed; I used to be able to look out of my window and trace the studded curve of the Milky Way, point out the Pole Star and Venus as bright and clear as headlights. Through hours of sitting with my elbows propped on the window sill, staring into the night, I learned that darkness is not one colour, that there are shades upon shades within black—midnight-blue black on the horizon, pearly opaque black encircling the moon, the heavy wet green-black of a stormy night sky. But against the yellow lights of the motorway which stitched up the horizon like a cheap seaside necklace, the subtle washes of the sky and the diamond clarity of the stars simply faded away. Only the most gaudy constellation survived the neon fallout, and against it, black was no longer a colour in its own right, but simply an absence of light.
I began to notice more strangers hanging round Tollington now. The park, once the domain of the under-tens and curious stray dogs, became a hang-out for various groups of teenagers who took over the swings and roundabouts, smoking and flirting together in separate clans. Mrs Worrall told me about how the Bartlett estate had now spread as far as the edge of the cornfields and that ‘all these townies get on the bus to come and sniff our fresh air.’ One of my earliest memories was of standing with papa at the edge of one of these fields; I must have been tiny, as my arm was at full stretch holding his hand and the corn stalks were high enough to tickle my nose with their hairy ears. And all we could see, both of us, was miles and miles of unbroken green, and far in the distance, if we squinted, we could just make out the tower of the ballbearings factory. Now the cornfields were the only stretch of land separating us from the ‘townies’ we so often mocked, the day trippers, the girls in their high heels which kept sinking into the muddy edges of the pavements and the lads all swagger and brash, jingling their loose change and scaring the birds.
Sam and Anita were often in the park, their gang was not difficult to pick out. Most of the other youths were dressed in panelled flares, flapping in the wind like elephant ears and huge platform heels which left square craters in the grass. The girls favoured midi skirts and crocheted waistcoats, or flowery maxis, peasant blouses and big floppy hats. They brought sandwiches and portable radios and passed round plastic bottles of sweet cider. But Sam, and I suppose now Anita’s, gang were always in denim and leather and braces and laceup Doctor Martens, heads shorn like summer sheep, chewing gum like cud, swigging cans of lager and crushing them in clumsy fists, smoking with attitude and deliberately sitting apart and above everyone else – a colourless, humourless island in this sea of change. I never stopped for more than a cursory glance. I would just back pedal my bike for a second, long enough to absorb those familiar profiles, and continue my wheelies around the dirt yard, knowing they would not approach me and did not expect me to trouble them.
I was not the only one watching their display; whenever I glimpsed Sam and Anita, Tracey was always there, somewhere in the background keeping a silent vigil. She had not spoken to me since the first day I had ridden my new bicycle, which had been languishing in the now appropriately named bike shed next to our outside lav. It had been sometime in early Spring, the tops of the trees had just begun to sprout a fine green stubble when papa drove me into the yard and I got out on two legs instead of four for the first time in seven months. The cast had been removed in mid-January, a traumatic experience as I had not been back to the hospital since Robert died and thought I had finally got over the sickness and grief which overwhelmed me every time I had tried to recall his face. But as soon as I smelt that hospital cologne of disinfectant and cabbage, he came back to me and stayed for hours.
Papa audibly gasped when the cast was finally peeled off my leg like an old crusty pod; my poor limb looked withered and unused to sunlight, a skinny brown stick streaked with dirt and tiny white flakes of plaster, like dandruff. ‘My God…they are two different sizes!’ papa said. It was true; I pushed my legs together and saw that my previously confined foot was a good inch smaller than its partner. ‘So what are you going to do about it?’ demanded papa, seeing a promising dancing career fly out of the window. ‘Oh, it always happens with kids,’ the nurse said airily. ‘They grow so fast you see, the other one will catch up, don’t worry.’ It never did.
But nevertheless, despite mama and the doctors’ advice to wait a few weeks before attempting anything more strenuous than a walk, a week later I wheeled my not so new Christmas bicycle into the yard for a first try-out. Maybe a good few months of pedalling would make me symmetrical again. I managed a wobbly, careful circuit of the yard and as I passed the entry next to the Christmases’ abandoned house, I almost fell off my bike when I saw the ghost hovering in the dark maw of the tunnel. On closer inspection, the thin white figure was Tracey. The last time I had seen her, she had been a shadow in Anita’s wake, now she was nothing less than transparent. Her hair was as fine and see-through as gossamer, her body a cobweb hung out on bones, her skin so pale I thought I could see the blood pumping slowly through her veins.
‘Oh hiya Trace! Yow bloody scared me half to death!’ I said jovially.
She just stared at me, I was waiting for her to do the polite thing and ask where I had been for most of the last year but saw at once that she was beyond social niceties. ‘Our Nita’s gooing out with Sam,’ she said blandly.
‘Yeah?’ I said, a little too defensively I thought.
‘Her’s gonna turn out just like me mom. Fucking bitch.’ It was chilling to hear this bile come out of that sweet cupid’s bow, and the mundane tone she used. ‘Yow are her best friend. Yow tell her to stop it now.’
‘Was,’ I corrected her, annoyed that this word stabbed me somewhere soft.
‘So yow ain’t gonna do nothing then? He’s a pig. A thick shit-eating pig.’
‘Yeah, so what?’ I said, beginning to wheel my bike away. I could not listen to much more of this. ‘I don’t give a toss what your sister does, Tracey. Yow can tell her that from me.’ But when I turned round, the alley was empty and she had somehow walked the length of it without the trace of an echo.
Spring bloomed into an early hot summer – by May everyone was wearing sunhats and shorts and the children began taking over the yard again, making the most of the lengthening evenings. But the park was out of bounds after sunset as it became the unofficial haunt of every teenager within a five-mile radius, and they turned every evening into a noisy outdoor party. Everyone in the yard felt their privacy invaded and there were several complaints, both in writing to the council and verbally to the offending youths. But the letters were never acknowledged and the youths merely hurled back obscenities and turned up their radios even louder. Apart from the nuisance of stationary cars and bikes
outside our house and snatches of music drifting in through our open windows, we were not too badly affected, being on the corner of the road and furthest from the park.
Mama and papa, who I thought would kick up a big fuss, seemed completely unconcerned by this new invasion, as if they had already mentally moved into the four-bedroomed bungalow mama so often sighed about whenever they talked about ‘the future’. They also did not seem to notice the brand new building that had sprung up next to the Big House, windowless still but structurally completed, nor that the fields opposite our house were regularly marked out with triangles of white tape by faceless men in cheap shiny suits, picking their way distastefully through the abandoned soil. Nothing escaped me, however; I saw all these metamorphoses and more. I knew that Sherrie’s family had already moved away and that their farm was up for auction, that the bomb site left after the demolition of the village school had already been acquired by a supermarket firm and that as a result, Mr Ormerod had developed a grumbling, if not a bloody angry appendix.
But none of these changes touched me. I was in my own cosy world, my days divided up between solitary bike rides, my eleven-plus studies and quiet evenings in front of the television when I read stories to Sunil or pottered about the kitchen with mama, chopping and tasting when I could. But if my parents had noticed that their wayward tomboy had suddenly become a walking cliche of the good Indian daughter, they did not remark on it to me, fearful perhaps that by naming their good fortune, they would break the spell. Or more likely, that I would be so horrified to have something in common with my cutesy cousins, Pinky and Baby, I might run naked through the village screaming ‘Bugger!’ just to prove them wrong.
I did once overhear them discussing me in guilty whispers in the kitchen whilst I was putting my bike away in the shed, my T-shirt stuck to my back in Friesian patches and my healing leg tingling with renewed hope.‘…used to be such a happy child!’ I froze at papa’s urgent tone, carefully leaning my bike against the wall and deadening its slowly turning spokes. ‘She is happy, Shyam!’ mama hissed back. ‘You still expect her to jump onto your lap and pull on your nose hairs? She’s not a little girl anymore, of course she’s going to get a bit more serious about things, and so she should! We should put the house on the market now …’ ‘Let her pass the exam first!’ papa said, his voice getting louder. ‘She will pass it, no problem. She’s my daughter,’ mama replied. I could hear the grin in her voice. There was a brief pause, some movement and a sigh, I realised with amazement that they had just kissed. Was it like Sam and Anita kissed, mouths clamped together, tongues drilling each other’s cavities? Was it this that endured through fifteen years of marriage and welded people together?
