As soon as she’s gone I sink deep under my duvet.
We wanted jobs when we grew up. Not to escape Westhill Estate but because our teachers told us that if we worked hard enough, we could achieve anything, and we were stupid enough to believe it. Jonathan was going to be a meteorologist, you were going to be a veterinarian-cum-trapeze artist and I was going to write the new edition of the Oxford dictionary as soon as I figured out how (and if) this could be done. But nowadays you need a qualification to clean another person’s bathroom so what hope do I have? There’s no point even thinking about it. I look at Shiva. My world is in this bedroom, dancing the dance of destruction with no creation and no way out.
It’s then that I hear a clatter through the walls. I look towards the noise but there’s only silence. When I look back, Shiva has his brows raised, shoulders pushed into a shrug. I shuffle up in bed so I’m closer to the wall. In total I hear the toilet being flushed four times, the kitchen taps being turned on twice and the vibrating of a mobile phone.
I suppose it’s odd that the squatter next door has a mobile phone when I don’t. Amma tried to buy me one once but I had no one to call or text so, in the end, she kept it for herself. It wasn’t huge and brick-shaped like when we were little but slick and slender with a camera, games and the internet. The first time we used the internet at school, teachers were dashing between computers (one between three) as we watched the egg-timer symbol and an inch of colour dropping down the screen to reveal the homepage. It’s faster now, and everywhere. Even Amma uses her phone to watch housecleaning tips on YouTube.
I can hear the creaking of springs as the squatter shuffles around on what must be the Ahmeds’ old mattress. From the loud, clomping footsteps, I think the squatter is a man and, from the lack of voices, that he’s alone. I don’t know whether to be intrigued or afraid of this stranger but all the same, I don’t tell Amma.
I have a problem with secrets: once I have hold of one I can’t let go. It’s like our handshake of trust. Whenever we revealed something top-secret, we’d lock that secret away (wiggling fingers, clasping of palms), never allowing one syllable of it to pass our lips again. Since you’ve gone I’ve been doing that handshake so often that I’m virtually silent.
The noise of the mobile vibrates again. It’s only as it continues to buzz that I realize the squatter hasn’t answered it once since he’s arrived.
I’m not the only one hiding.
The Constellation of Clocks
For today’s exercise I’m made to sit up and down on the bed as Amma times me with a stopwatch. She’s drawn up a chart which she’s attached to a clipboard, logging my results at one-minute intervals.
I’m surprised at how easy I find the first two rounds. Already I can feel my strength building up, a buzz of adrenalin in my veins. Amma’s ridiculous exercises are actually working. But after the fourth round of sitting up and down, I begin to pant and the weakness returns to my legs. I tell her I’m tired.
‘Good!’ Amma says. ‘You must learn to cope with tiredness.’
I sigh. ‘What about the pain?’ I ask.
Her eyes widen. ‘You are in pain?’
I scan my body, feeling an ache in my legs. There’s a difference between exercise ache and pain ache, and I of all people know it.
‘Yes,’ I say anyway.
Amma tucks her pencil under the clip of her clipboard. ‘Then we must stop,’ she says.
I could tell her I’m not in any pain and therefore this whole business should stop, but I’ve just won a battle so I don’t want to push my luck.
After Amma tucks me back into bed she pulls out the morning letters from the waist of her petticoat. As she rifles through them she tells me she’s seen Mr Eccentric at the post office. She doesn’t call him that but that’s who she means. She then begins reading out a takeaway menu for a new Chinese restaurant. This from a woman who refuses to buy takeaway food, claiming she can make any dish more flavoursome than any restaurant could. The same woman who slapped a tray of chips out of my hand when she caught you and me eating them outside Poseidon’s fish and chip shop, yanking me home afterwards to demonstrate how ‘real food’ was made.
As Amma attempts to pronounce the various names of dishes she has no intention of ordering, I think about Mr Eccentric. I try to remember why we gave him that nickname. A hazy memory of Sandy Burke and Mrs Dickerson sitting at your dining table with an equally hazy fog of smoke surrounding their heads comes to mind.
Sandy Burke was a regular at your flat where she liked to a) talk endlessly with your mother, b) drink coffee, and c) eat all the biscuits. Although the two pretended to be best friends there was always an undercurrent of rivalry. Sandy had the loudest mouth in Bosworth House but whenever she was in front of your mother she’d be virtually yelling. Then, whenever Sandy left the flat, Jamaican hair bouncing in a fuzzy globe, your mother would release a torrent of abuse.
‘Skinny cow!’ she’d cry. ‘She’s got a mouth the size of the Millennium Dome. God help me if I don’t throttle the life out of her. God help me!’
On that particular day they were too busy discussing the faults of other Westhill residents to be quibbling over each other’s. When they came to Mr Eccentric your mother’s top lip curled up, calling him a ‘crazy old fart’.
‘He’s not crazy, Elaine,’ Sandy said, as grey clouds circled them. ‘He’s what you’d call eccentric.’
Your mother released a funnel of smoke from glossy lips.
‘He’s off his bloody rocker is what he is.’
She pummelled the butt of her cigarette into the ashtray as though squashing a cockroach. I remember pulling my mini dictionary out of my bag and skimming the pages until I reached the letter E.
eccentric adj. odd, unconventional, irregular
I showed you the explanation and together we decided it was accurate. We kept on calling him Mr Eccentric even after we learnt that his name was Reginald Blake.
‘So that is the news for today,’ Amma says, getting to her feet.
She stuffs the envelopes and takeaway menu back into the elastic of her petticoat, then points at the tablets on my breakfast tray. I pick them up before she scoops it from my lap. I keep the tablets tucked away in my palm as she glances over at the poll card sitting on the bedside table. When she looks at me again, she squeezes her shoulders tight and lifts her brows before she leaves.
When you’re in a lifebed for the majority of your day it’s the little things that people look out for. I haven’t even voted yet and Amma is as proud as if I’ve scaled Mount Kilimanjaro solo. I uncurl my hand and look down at the pills.
No pressure, then.
Mr Eccentric lived on the first floor of Tewkesbury House at the bottom of Westhill Estate but, unlike other residents, neglected to put curtains or netting in his windows. Whenever we walked by his flat on the way to the woods we could see him sitting – headmaster fashion – behind a huge oak desk, a mass of clocks mounted on each wall. Round clocks, square clocks, digital and analogue clocks; ones with pendulums, ones without; ones shaped like animals and ones that glowed in the dark. My favourite was the black cat with a dickie bow whose eyes rolled from side to side as its tail swung back and forth. Your favourite was the one shaped like a mushroom with a pensive fairy, chin perched on palm, sitting on top. Jonathan said he had no favourites but rushed home from the woods every Saturday to get a peek at the clock shaped like a raincloud on the back wall. When the hands hit midday, a grinning sun emerged from the side. The way Jonathan beamed at it you’d have thought that sun was smiling at him.
Mr Eccentric was peculiar in every way imaginable. Tall and gangly in body, he had large thick-framed glasses similar to Jonathan’s, with wide green eyes behind the lenses. His clothes were caught in a 1970s business-world time warp: pastel suits with flared trousers that were far too tight at the crotch. Whenever we caught him walking up the stairs he would take two steps at a time, with long strides that threatened to rip his trousers in half.<
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‘Twenty-two, twenty-four, twenty-six,’ he muttered, joints creaking with each leap.
Most of the time Mr Eccentric kept vigil at his desk, observing the other inhabitants of Westhill through the bare window of his flat, as though they were all murderers. Two years before we were born, his son Bobby Blake had been killed in the hideout he’d built in the woods. It was a decent yet amateur build: breeze-block walls with an open entrance and window, a piece of corrugated iron for a roof. Bobby had even painted the outside camouflage-green and placed a slab at the entrance with ‘BOBBY’S HIDEOUT’ written across it. Inside, the floor was covered with tarpaulin, some carefully selected logs distributed in a semi-circle to form a seating area, with a metal ashtray the size of my head in the centre (this was later verified when Jonathan made me lie down beside it to compare). Opposite the logs was a wall dotted with postcards from all across the world: tree-covered mountains, towering waterfalls, desert plains with rippling waves of sand. Although the images were faded, the card curling at the edges, they were symbols of Bobby’s dreams and soon became ours. We imagined ourselves climbing those mountains, running through those waterfalls, riding camels across the sand as the sun beat down upon our shoulders.
‘We were made for adventure,’ I said to you once.
‘We were made for adventure!’ you repeated theatrically, as though this was the slogan of our life.
We tried to stay clear of the hideout, not least because we thought it was haunted by Bobby’s ghost. He’d been found there with a knife in his gut, blood pooling across the tarpaulin. Jonathan found it hilarious to routinely collapse on the plastic and begin moaning, zombie-style, while swinging his clawed hands at our legs. We’d scream and tell him if he didn’t stop we’d never come back to Bobby’s Hideout. But when the clouds darkened and the air became particularly bitter, our promises were blown away in the wind.
For us the hideout was shelter from the rain, but for Mr Eccentric it was Bobby’s grave. He visited it regularly, placing flowers upon the doorstep before cutting back the weeds that circled its edges. If he ever caught us huddled inside, he’d shoo us out like unwanted birds in a cornfield, clapping his hands together and demanding we ‘get gone!’ Bitterness had shrivelled that man into a walking skeleton. Behind his desk he was a chilling figure, but in person he was Death.
Uncle Walter had yet to discover any of this the day he told us we were going to visit Mr Eccentric.
‘When I was a teenager, Bobby Blake was my best friend,’ he told us on the way to Tewkesbury House.
‘No way,’ you said as we scuttled beside his round belly.
‘Yes way,’ he replied. ‘We built a hideout together and practised survival strategies.’
‘No way!’ you cried.
‘Yes way,’ he replied.
I elbowed you in the ribs before you revealed our secret and you yelped so loudly I had to elbow you again.
‘Survival strategies?’ Jonathan said. ‘As if!’
Uncle Walter spun round, his hand extended in a karate chop that stopped just short of Jonathan’s neck. Jonathan froze so still I thought he’d wet his pants. He sulked behind us for the rest of the journey.
As your uncle banged on the peeling paint of Mr Eccentric’s front door we all shuffled to the side, hoping that the old man wouldn’t slap his hands together with orders to ‘get gone!’ But when his lanky frame eventually appeared, he only glanced down at us once.
‘What do you want?’ he asked, fixing his eyes on Uncle Walter’s grinning face.
Your uncle seemed confused. ‘It’s me, Reggie. It’s Walter.’
Mr Eccentric shook his head, the wrinkles on his face flapping like the saggy skin on a basset hound.
‘I know who you are, I’m asking you what you want!’
We all looked up at your uncle.
‘Well …’ His eyes tick-tocked from side to side. ‘I suppose I came to say hello.’
Mr Eccentric stuck his face out into the hallway, beady eyes skimming back and forth. ‘Is she with you?’
Uncle Walter forced a grin. His smooth cheeks bulged out like plump cherries.
‘Elaine’s on holiday.’
‘Good riddance,’ Mr Eccentric said. ‘The woman’s a goddamn witch!’
Uncle Walter’s smile dropped. He took hold of your hand, then mine. I remember the feel of his squashy palm enveloping my fingers, each digit feeling as though it were sinking into marshmallow.
‘Nice to see you, Reggie,’ he said before pulling us away.
For a moment Jonathan hovered behind before running up beside us.
‘Stay away from Bobby’s place!’ Mr Eccentric cried as we descended the stairs. ‘You don’t belong there. Any of you!’
The words echoed behind us as we left.
We should have listened, Marianne. We should have done what he said.
I’m testing my body with a series of pinches when Mr Chavda appears in my room. He doesn’t seem to notice what I’ve been doing, striding straight in with his briefcase clutched in hand. Mr Chavda is my tutor, though he hasn’t been over to teach me for nearly three weeks. I wasn’t exactly heartbroken about this. His lessons are dry, often dragging on far longer than the designated hour. Amma thinks this makes his services even more of a bargain. I think it makes them torture.
Today he stands at the end of my bed, with his briefcase propped on the footboard.
‘Good afternoon, Ravine,’ he says, as though calling out a school register.
Mr Chavda is a short man with a bald spot surrounded by thin wisps of white hair. When he speaks, his nose turns up to the sky and his eyes droop down at the corners. His face matches the way he speaks. Long, drawn-out words that roll out of his mouth, fringed with a faint groan of disappointment. His main motto in life is that good speech costs nothing. ‘A fact,’ he likes to add, ‘your neighbours could certainly benefit from.’
Mr Chavda is not a fan of our neighbours. Earlier, as I sat doing my window exercise, I saw him scurrying towards Bosworth House with his head held low, straightening his lapels and patting down his wispy hair as though just walking through the estate would make him scruffy. He picked his way through streams of single parents with pushchairs, men with tattoos, and teenagers walking Staffordshire bull terriers on loose leads, never looking these people in the eye, constantly jumping back in horror as he bumped into them. Each time this happened he quickly hurried on, pulling the cuff of his sleeve over his Rolex. He didn’t know the number-one rule of council estates: strutting around like you own the place makes you invisible while shuffling along with wide, frightened eyes makes you instantly suspicious. You could see the visible relief in the sag of his body as he reached the entrance of Bosworth House.
Mr Chavda doesn’t visit because of an altruistic need to teach the disaffected inner-city youth. Nor because I’ve proved to be in any way exceptional as a student (a fact that is evident from my not-so-brilliant GCSE results). Mr Chavda visits our flat for one reason and one reason only.
Love.
Mr Chavda’s love story began, like all great love stories, at the cash-and-carry on Melton Road. Amma had been squabbling with a cashier over the dents in a can of chickpeas when Mr Chavda had intervened. As multilingual Hindi speakers the pair began to talk and (after finally replacing the offending can) found themselves sharing horror stories about bad customer-service experiences. Mr Chavda had gone to a restaurant with no napkins; Amma had been refused a refund on a kettle even with a valid receipt. Mr Chavda was given no compensation for a delayed train, while Amma had been left waiting in the doctor’s surgery for nearly two hours without an apology.
When they met again the next week, Mr Chavda offered to carry Amma’s bags to the bus stop. During their walk he wangled out of her the details of my condition and how, at the time, attending school had become so painful and tiring that I could only manage to go once a week to collect homework. Amma had tried her best to coach me through the basics of the primary curriculum,
but when I moved on to secondary education, the sight of quadratic equations made her despair. My grades were flagging and she didn’t know what to do. Mr Chavda, seeing his opportunity, swooped in for the kill. He was a retired teacher of mathematics and would give his services for free.
‘Teaching is a reward in itself,’ he told her.
A statement he’s no doubt questioned since.
For as long as he’s been ‘teaching’ me, Mr Chavda has been simultaneously courting the love of my mother. He’s always probing for information about her hobbies, her favourite chocolates, whether her plans to never remarry are negotiable. His earnestness is enough to make a girl retch.
‘Your mother seems particularly happy this morning,’ he says to me today.
This is after approximately five minutes of teaching me the basics of probability.
‘She’s always happy when she’s plotting,’ I say.
‘Plotting?’ he asks, as though this is a new word to him.
‘She’s teaching me how to leave the flat,’ I say.
His wispy eyebrows rise high on his forehead. ‘You don’t know how to do this?’
‘Apparently not.’
He begins scribbling in his notebook as though I’m his patient and he’s taking medical notes.
‘Has she mentioned me at all recently?’ he asks.
‘She never mentions you,’ I say.
His eyes flicker up to mine, then return to his notebook.
I know this is cruel, but the prospect of Mr Chavda as my stepfather is enough to make me sabotage any of his efforts. He already nags me about my lack of Asian-ness, telling me I should be more reserved, more obedient like the women of my heritage (proving he knows diddly-squat about Amma). He says I’m too bold, that I’m a smart-mouth and have far too much to say about far too little. If he actually came and lived here I’d be turned into a mute.
Through the wall behind me I hear a clanking noise. I try not to flinch as Mr Chavda scrutinizes me. He keeps on looking at me for some time until I begin to wonder if he’s figured it out. Maybe my cheeks are more flushed, my body less tense, but somehow he knows I’m better.
The Things We Thought We Knew Page 7