Anita and Me (10 page)

Mama would nod, like a spy who has just been given the right coded password in a public park ‘…the daffodils are out in Gdansk early this year …’ and rev up all the way into second gear for a few yards, confident at least that the next stage of the trek had been accounted for. Usually we chattered constantly in the car, playing I-Spy or singing songs, but this time mama was in no mood for pleasantries. Her eyes never left the road and her knuckles, clamped around the steering wheel, never got beyond a pale yellow colour. But then we got to Coal Hill, a notorious junction just outside Wolverhampton where five sets of traffic lights and a one-way system met on the incline of an extremely steep slope. If you made the lights, you were laughing, straight down the hill the other side, a clear run to the dual carriageway stretching all the way to Birmingham. But if you didn’t, you knew you were stuck for at
least five minutes in a huge queue, doing an A-level in clutch control.

Of course, we would have made the lights had we got above ten miles an hour and if mama had not slowed down at the junction, waiting for the green to possibly change to amber and therefore catch her out, which is exactly what happened. We juddered to a halt to the accompaniment of several angry car horns and mama pulled up the handbrake with a grunt, flicking her eyes to the mirror to check the growing line of vehicles behind her. I decided feigned nonchalance was the best approach, and attempted a whistle as I scanned a facing billboard. On one side of it was a huge caption,
GO TO WORK ON AN EGG
! with a prancing lion beneath it, and on the other, a poster advertised the forthcoming pantomine at the Grand Theatre, Tinga and Tucker, everyone’s favourite koala bears, starring in
Babes in the Wood
, with Auntie Jean Morton and a host of TV favourites!

I was about to ask if we could go to see the show when I noticed that the koalas seemed to be moving forwards, and mama’s scream confirmed that actually, we were moving backwards. ‘Get out! Tell the bus driver to go back! Quickly!’ I had never seen mama so panicked before, her feet were slipping off the pedals, those strappy sandals were not a wise choice I remember thinking as I leaped out of the car and began a fifteen minute exercise in ritual humiliation. The bus driver was pragmatic enough, perhaps because he was Indian and had no doubt seen much worse back home, and I did preface my pleading with the word ‘Uncle’, which seemed to do the trick. But in order for him to move back, twenty other drivers had to be similarly charitable, and none of them looked like they wanted to be related to me.

The truck drivers, the taxi drivers, the fat men squeezed into small cars and the thin women rattling around in hatchbacks, all wore the same weary amused expression, as if my mother’s driving had only confirmed some secret, long-held opinion of how people like us were coping with the
complexities of the modern world. Putting the car into reverse was, for them, an act of benevolence, maybe their first, as well-intentioned as any of Mr Ormerod’s charity parcels to the poor children in Africa.

I had expected aggression, some name calling, the kind of hissed comments I occasionally endured from the young lads on the council estate near my school, the school where mama taught. But I believed by the end of the queue, I had won them over with my cheeky charm, a sort of Well, What A Mess But It’s Not My Fault expression, and my deliberately exaggerated Tollington accent, thus proving I was very much one of them, they did not need to shout to make themselves understood or think they could get away with muttered swearing and I would not understand, that I belonged.

By the time I reached the last car, a Hillman Imp containing a sweet-faced elderly woman, I was almost enjoying myself, swept up by the drama of the occasion, imagining how I would recite and embroider the story for my friends at school the next day. I tapped on the window and the old dear slowly rolled it down. ‘Sorry, but me mum’s at the top of the hill and she’s rolling down, ar…can yow move back just a bit? Ta.’

She blinked once and fumbled with the gear stick and said casually, ‘Bloody stupid wog. Stupid woggy wog. Stupid.’

I backed off as if I had been punched and began running up the hill to our Mini, where mama was waiting with the door open and the lights were green. I jumped into the front seat and mama shot off, from nought to thirty in five seconds in first gear, just as the lights changed to amber behind us, trapping the bus which tooted furiously at our retreating bumper. We did not speak at all until we pulled into the car park of the
gurudwara
, a converted church in an anonymous, treeless side street. Mama said, ‘Wipe your nose,’ and handed me a tissue and we went inside.

I don’t remember much about the rest of the day; there were lots of women, some of whom mama obviously knew, who
pinched my cheek and sang along loudly and sharply to the
bhajans
, led by a solemn turbanned priest. There was a draped canopy beneath which sat the Holy Book, the poles supporting the tented roof were spiralled with fairy lights, and portraits of the Gurus engaged in various bloody acts of martyrdom adorned the walls. There was a small anteroom with a sectioned, open cupboard which contained hundreds of pairs of shoes, which everyone had to remove on entering, and a small cracked sink where we washed our hands before leaving.

But I never left mama’s side the whole time and although she may have intended to talk me through every aspect of the worship, explaining the rituals, translating the elaborate Punjabi, teaching me one of the hymns, she seemed to be preoccupied. I knew she was already thinking about how she would handle the long journey back home, and my mind was too full of the old lady to think about God.

Later that evening, papa pulled me onto his lap and asked me what I had learned that day. I wanted to tell him about the old lady, but then I looked at his face and saw something I had never seen before, a million of these encounters written in the lines around his warm, hopeful eyes, lurking in the furrows of his brow, shadowing the soft curves of his mouth. I suddenly realised that what had happened to me must have happened to papa countless times, but not once had he ever shared his upset with me. He must have known it would have made me feel as I felt right now, hurt, angry, confused, and horribly powerless because this kind of hatred could not be explained. I decided to return the compliment. ‘I learned,’ I replied, ‘that mama is a really good driver.’

But today was our Christmas. My parents were celebrating it as they celebrated nearly everything else, with another
mehfil.
This was perfect for them but a major disappointment for me and all my other ‘cousins’ who wanted presents thrown in as
part of the package, at least a nod towards what Christmas meant for the English. But I wanted to give myself a present, as no one else would, I wanted to see the fair. I knew mama did not want me to go, especially with Anita Rutter, but she assented with a slight nod of her head, and added as I rushed out of the door, ‘Be back by five o’clock. I want you to help me cut the salad …’

Anita was peeking over my shoulder as she stood in the doorway, checking out the simmering pans and mountains of chopped vegetables crowding the kitchen. As we walked out of my gate, she said, ‘Is it someone’s birthday today?’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘It’s like our Christmas today. Dead boring.’

‘Yow have two Christmases, do ya? Lucky cow.’

I had not thought of it this way before and suddenly felt elevated.

‘I’m getting a pony for Christmas,’ Anita said airily. She was wearing one of her old summer dresses and a cardigan I guessed must have been her mum’s as it hung off her in woolly folds. I felt babyish and cosseted, wrapped up in my hooded anorak and thick socks and realised Anita must have been a lot older than I had previously thought.

‘I’m gonna keep it at Sherrie’s farm. In summat called a paddock. And then me and Sherrie am gooing to share a flat together. In London.’

I felt biindingly jealous. Sherrie was still her best friend then, and they had mapped out their life together already. I imagined them living in a penthouse flat in a place called the Angel (my favourite stop on the Monopoly board as it sounded so beautiful). They both wore mini-skirts and loads of black eyeliner and were eating toast whilst they looked out of their window. Before them stretched Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, the Houses of Parliament and several theatres, all lit up, throwing coloured flashes onto their laughing faces, and tethered to a post attached to the breakfast bar was a sleek chestnut bay that looked just like Misty.

We passed the Big House which, as usual, showed no signs
of life, save a thin twisting line of smoke curling up from its huge red chimney. Anita crossed herself quickly as we passed, muttering to herself.

‘What yow dooing?’ I asked.

‘Quick! Do this! Do the cross over your heart!’

I hurriedly copied her, and broke into a trot behind her. We did not stop until we’d passed the grounds.

‘Yow got to do that every time yow pass. Didn’t yow know a witch lives there?’

I shook my head dumbly. I should have guessed, it explained everything. The sense of menace surrounding the place, the fact no one ever saw visitors or inhabitants arriving or leaving, or any lights blazing at night.

‘It’s a woman. She killed her kids and husband, but they could never prove it, see. She wants kids, needs the blood to keep alive. Remember Jodie from up the hill?’

Jodie Bagshot was a four-year-old girl from the top end of the village who had gone missing for three frantic days a few summers ago, and whose body was found caught in the bulrushes round Hollow Ponds, the deep water-filled old mine shafts at the back of the Big House. While she was missing, the village seemed to hold its breath. Mothers stopped their children playing anywhere except the yard and the adjoining park, where everyone could see them from their kitchen windows. Police cars and officers scoured every field and hedgerow with long sticks and alsatians, even going on into the night where we could see their torches flashing through the cornfields, like cyclopic aliens calling to each other under the high-domed summer sky. The radio was on constantly in every home, waiting for the latest newsflash, aware as they listened that the news itself was being made on their own doorsteps, with a dumb sense of shame that Tollington had finally been put on the map in this tainted way.

When Jodie’s drowned body was discovered and the swift conclusion reached that she had tragically wandered off, a
horrendous accident, no one else involved, Tollington breathed again. Pity for the girl’s family was mingled with relief that it had not been some sick stranger roaming the village, an outsider bent on destroying the easy trust and unhampered wanderings of the village children. Those things happened to other people, people in cities, people who did not know their neighbours, not the good, reliable, nosey inhabitants of Tollington.

But soon afterwards, a rumour began, started by Sam Lowbridge who had made sure he was in the front row with the press when the body was hauled out of the water. ‘Her was blue,’ he said. ‘Like every bit of blood wore gone from her little body …’

I remembered his testimony now, and shivered, seeing the triumph growing in Anita’s face.

‘Ar, the witch is after more kids now. Shame she can see right into yowr bedroom window, in’t it?’

I swung my gaze across the fields and saw that our house was indeed directly, diagonally across from the Big House’s gates.

‘I don’t care!’ I blurted out. ‘My mom knows loads of prayers anyway. She says them every night in my bedroom, before I sleep.’

Anita laughed. ‘Them’s no good! The witch is English, in’t she? Yow need proper English prayers. Like Uncle Alan knows.’

The only one I could remember offhand from my Sunday sessions was the chant we uttered in unison which heralded the appearance of two plates of custard creams and paper cups of weak orange squash – ‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful. Amen.’ Me and Anita said it together, all the way to the Old Pit Head.

The fairground trailers were parked in what must have been the former car park attached to the old mine. A small brick office building near the base of the pit head had long crumbled away, and frost-withered hollyhocks and dandelions
had broken through the concrete floor. This usually desolate rectangle was now a hive of activity as various stubble-brushed, burly men yelled to each other in smokey voices as they heaved around large lumps of machinery which would eventually become the Waltzer, the Octopus, the Helter Skelter and several sideshow stalls offering such delights as a free goldfish with every fallen coconut.

A row of caravans was parked alongside the back fence where a fire burned in a metal brazier and children’s clothes hung stiffly on a makeshift washing line strung between two door handles. A group of pin-thin children were playing with some scrawny kittens near the brazier, whilst a tired, washed-out woman in a hairnet, stood leaning against her caravan door inhaling deeply on a cigarette. I was fascinated by these travelling people, envied them their ability to contain their whole home in a moving vehicle, and imagined how romantic it must be to just climb in and move off once boredom or routine set in. How many countries had they visited, I wondered, how many deserts and jungles had they driven through, setting up their rides and booths on shifting sands or crushed palm leaf floors. Maybe they had even been to India.

I suddenly had a vivid picture of all my grandparents, dressed as they were in their photographs, being sedately whirled round in their waltzer cars. Dadima holding a goldfish in a plastic bag, Dadaji sucking on a candy floss, whilst Nanima sang along to the thumping soundtrack of ‘All You Need is Love’ and Nanaji kept time with a tapping sandalled foot, holding onto his turban with long brown fingers …

‘Don’t goo up there,’ Anita warned me, indicating the caravans. ‘Them’s gippos, them is. Tinkers. Yow’ll catch summat. Mum told me.’ Then she waved and whooped at Fat Sally and Sherrie who were standing watching three young blokes putting the dodgem car floor down. They waved back and indicated we should come over.