The Handsworth Times

by Sharon Duggal

  THE HANDSWORTH TIMES

  by Sharon Duggal

  Imprint

  Copyright © Sharon Duggal 2016

  First published in 2016 by

  Bluemoose Books Ltd

  25 Sackville Street

  Hebden Bridge

  West Yorkshire

  HX7 7DJ

  www.bluemoosebooks.com

  All rights reserved

  Unauthorised duplication contravenes existing laws

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Hardback ISBN 978-1-910422-20-5

  Paperback ISBN 978-1-910422-19-9

  Printed and bound in the UK by Short Run Press

  ‘Handsworth Revolution’ (as written by Steel Pulse)

  © 1978 Blue Mountain Music Ltd

  Copyright Renewed. All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission

  All rights administered by Blue Mountain Music Ltd

  Dedication

  For Milan, Ruben and Varsha

  10 July 1981

  Chapter 1

  Mukesh Agarwal sits alone in the Black Eagle pub, unaware that a riot is brewing or that Billy, his youngest son, is still out on his bike with Joey McKenna and some older boys from Church Street. It is Friday evening, payday, and the pub is full of drinkers downing pint after pint, no thought for the week’s shopping or the mounting bills. There is a buzz pervading the smoky air – a good-humoured drone interjected with the occasional belly laugh or uninhibited belch. It is cut through by the sudden crash of doors swinging open and bashing against walls.The banter hushes and drinkers twist their bodies to see a middle-aged man stumbling in breathless, his maroon turban damp around the edge with sweat.

  ‘There is trouble at Villa Cross,’ he says. ‘Police all around, boys throwing things, smashing cars. It is bad, really bad. I advise you go home before the trouble comes this way.’

  The drinkers glare at him, shrugging their hunched shoulders before turning away, obviously underwhelmed by his news. Villa Cross is just a short distance away at the top of Lozells Road, they would have heard the trouble if it was that bad, even above Judas Priest on the jukebox.

  Propped up against the red flock wallpaper next to the cigarette machine is a large ginger man with a doughy face. He continues to gawp at the man who has stumbled into the pub and after a moment he speaks.

  ‘Who the fuck are you to advise me anything? You sod off home,’ he says, ‘…and I don’t mean to Soho Road.’ He continues to mutter indecipherably, spluttering into a cloudy pint of Double Diamond. Games of cards and football talk continue around him.

  Mukesh Agarwal recognizes the man in the turban as Surjeet Singh, a shopkeeper from the Lozells Road; the owner of a small, cluttered concern selling everything from the Sun to spaghetti hoops. Singh’s General Store is next to the Acapulco Café and just a few doors up from the entrance gates to Hardiman’s Sheet Metals where Mukesh has worked, grudgingly, ever since arriving in England over twenty years earlier.

  ‘Oi, Surjeet, saab, come and drink beer with me while this trouble sorts itself out,’ Mukesh says, slurring his words as he speaks. Surjeet Singh stares at Mukesh.

  ‘Mukesh, my friend,’ he says in their shared Punjabi dialect, ‘this is bad trouble, the police have weapons and shields and the boys are throwing firebombs at them, milk bottles filled with petrol. People are going to get hurt. Already the windows are broken in my shop. I had to get out quickly when a group of these hooligans smashed into it; they were taking the cigarettes and sweets. The police are making it worse by calling them bad names, ‘black bastards’ and other such things, but there are some of our boys mixed up in this too: Indian boys, Punjabi boys, Sikh and Hindu, and Muslim. And they are hitting all these young men with their truncheons, right in front of me. It is a terrible thing.’

  Mukesh slides down from the bar stool where he has been sitting since leaving work two hours earlier. His legs buckle beneath him as his feet make contact with the floor. He staggers across the faded red swirls of carpet towards Surjeet Singh and falls into him.

  ‘Sometimes Surjeet,’ he replies as Surjeet props him upright, ‘these things look worse than they are. Not to worry, I can get my cousin to sort out insurance for your broken windows. Let us go and see this trouble together, I have to walk through Villa Cross to get to home.’

  Less than a mile away from the Black Eagle, in Church Street, Anila, the youngest of the Agarwal girls, is reading Smash Hits as she sprawls across the bottom bunk in the small attic room she shares with her two sisters. Warm air drapes heavily across the room despite the open skylight. Anila pushes her thick black hair behind her ears, drags her body over so she is stomach down, bends her legs and crosses her ankles towards the sky. She follows the printed lyrics of Ghost Town with her index finger, mouthing them silently as the song squeaks out from a paint-splattered transistor radio on the floor beside the bed. ‘Boomtown to doom town’, the BRMB disc jockey had said just before the song started; the phrase sticks in her head like the Finger O’ Fudge jingle.

  Nina, the eldest of the five Agarwal children, is cross-legged on the other end of the bed. Her soft, shapeless body makes her seem younger and more childlike than her sisters. She is flicking through the ‘Handsworth Times Royal Wedding Lead-Up Special’, the second in a series of four.

  ‘How much can they go on about this bloody wedding? It’s like there’s nothing else going on in the world,’ she says. ‘All that money wasted. I mean, who cares about this stuff around here? It’s supposed to be a bloody local paper. It’s no wonder those kids in London are lobbing bricks through windows. How they can go on and on about the cake in a local paper when just on the next page it’s mentioning one of those Irish fellas starving himself to death in that H Block thingy – he had an aunty on Oxhill Road, apparently. Anyway, it’s bonkers, innit?’

  As the radio news bulletin ends, Nina glides her fingers over sketches of fantasy wedding dresses – white fairy-tale meringues next to faded photos of royal unions gone by. ‘Yuk!’ she says, pointing at a particular image, ‘That is not how a princess should look, all horsey in net curtains.’

  Kamela, the third sister, taller and sleeker than the other two girls, grunts a mumbled response from across the room where she kneels under the bright light of a red Anglepoise lamp. She holds a small compact mirror in one hand, plucking vigorously with tweezers at the tiny stubble beneath her pencil- thin eyebrows with the other.

  The girls don’t acknowledge their mother, Usha, as she nudges open the attic door with her elbow. She carries a tray of clinking tumblers filled with syrupy Vimto and a plate of yellowing half-moons of sliced apple.

  ‘Have you seen Billy?’ Usha says, as she sets the tray down on the nearest surface. ‘He isn’t in his bedroom. I thought he was with Kavi but Kavi doesn’t know where he is… I don’t know where he is.’ Her voice trembles slightly and Anila glances up; it is a momentary gesture. ‘He should have been here for dinner. Where is he?’

  The girls shake their down-turned heads. Usha quietly passes each a glass and then she is gone; the faint sound of her tread falls away down the wooden steps, while her disquiet lingers in the room for moments longer. Beyond the wide-open skylight in the attic bedroom a siren screeches by like a nail drawn down the blackboard of the evening air.

  Outside the Black Eagle pub the sound of sirens is deafening. A cloud of charcoal-grey smoke rises up above the houses and shops that separate the pub from the Villa Cross junction. Mukesh and Surjeet begin to cough as fumes of burning wood and metal engulf them, stingin
g their eyes and scratching at the backs of their throats. As they turn the corner into Villa Road they see a crowd gathering up ahead. The onlookers are watching nervously from the periphery as a brick is hurled into the large plate glass window of Woolworths. The window shatters into thousands of tiny crystals and a group of indistinct bodies disappear into the blackness of the store, emerging moments later with pockets full of cigarettes and arms full of fairy wings, socks, sweatshirts and nightdresses. One shadowy body lifts out a wire trolley from the window and passes it to a companion on the street below, before flinging out goods from within until the trolley is piled high with clothes, toys, seven inch singles and six-pack cassette tapes wrapped in cellophane. Anxious voices from the gathering crowd shout out towards the group of boys standing around the broken shopfront.

  ‘Chimmo, Rammi, Walter. You there boy?’

  Police officers are everywhere, more than either Mukesh or Surjeet have ever seen in England before. The officers stand in shirt sleeves, a zebra line of black and white. They form a barricade across the top of the high street where Villa Road meets Lozells Road, all the way from the Acapulco Café and across to Mr Lovejohn’s cage-fronted optometrists on the corner of Barker Street.

  ‘Lozells is getting brok down,’ a voice in the crowd sighs.

  ‘It ’as halways been brok down,’ says another, and others in the crowd nod and suck teeth in agreement.

  Lozells has long been a broken place. The Lozells Road runs through the heart of it and this is the most broken place of all. Cracks in shop windows are fixed with gaffer and parcel tape. Many shop windows are already boarded over, daubed with the words ‘Business as Usual’ in jagged spraypaint lettering. Uneven pavements along the sides of Lozells Road bear witness to the nocturnal lives of the drunks and the homeless who sleep in burnt-out cars or in the entrances and doorways which stink of urine and damp clothes, rotten with mildew. Empty bottles of cheap vodka lie discarded next to wrappers of burgers made with cheap meat. At night rancid half-eaten burgers are recovered from filthy bins and devoured by tramps full of bitter expectation after hours of hanging around late-night fried chicken joints and kebab houses. Any rare shoppers with money in their pockets walk hurriedly down the Lozells Road towards bus-stops to the livelier Soho Road and on towards the city centre. But there is another side to Lozells Road – the heart-thumping, roots reggae music that escapes from open windows and doorways all the way down it, bringing it to life. Music is the blood pumping through its arteries – heavy chuga-chuga bass beats and low mournful voices which keep the heart pulsating:

  My journey is far and so, so hard

  So far, so hard and so misty too

  I can’t see my way, no I can’t see my way

  But I know Jah will guide me through.

  Velvety smooth words drift out and mingle with the high-pitched birdsong of Indian playback singers and the grating, tinny rattles of Radio One on transistor radios. Combined, the sounds waft discordantly around a soup of smells: over-ripe plantain from Jimbo’s Caribbean Market, fragrant coriander, aromatic curry leaves, fresh, cool mint, stale cooking oil and the overwhelming stench of sickly, sweet goat carcasses hanging by their necks on giant butcher’s hooks above the blood-stained counter of Taj & Co. Next door to the butchers, Ashoka’s Textile House is a vivid rainbow of Technicolor silks and cottons folded over a neon-blue nylon washing line which is nailed to a sun-bleached canopy. The bright fabrics sway in the breeze, soaking up the surrounding odours. The Lozells Road spills over with colour and noise. Tonight the sounds and smells are changing.

  ‘They are destroying our neighbourhood,’ says Surjeet as the two men become part of the crowd.

  They are jostled by the group as people push ahead to get a better view of the mayhem unfolding in front of them. Mukesh feels a sharp nudge in the back from an anonymous elbow and he falls hands first into the road in front, which is blanketed in tiny shards of splintered glass. Within seconds minuscule droplets of crimson blood appear as polka dots speckling his palms. He wipes them away across his damp, sweat-covered shirt but they reappear in milliseconds. Surjeet pulls him back up to standing position. The men are wedged together, swaying in unison with the crowd. A policemen turns towards them.

  ‘Move along you lot or we will have to deal with you all too. Go home,’ he shouts roughly, pushing his shield up against them. ‘It’s not a bloody telly show. Move along.’

  ‘What is ’appening, officer? My boy is out there… Leroy, Leroy Murray, can you hear your mother? Can someone tell me what is ’appening?’

  This voice, which attempts to be heard above the crowd, is that of a small, middle-aged black woman named Violet. The policeman ignores her and stares instead at the growing group of young, mostly black teenagers in front of the barricade. They begin to charge away from Villa Cross down Lozells Road towards Church Street and beyond, arms full of the Woolworth’s bounty. Objects hurtle through the air towards the policemen and the crowd of onlookers who step backwards instinctively. Tiny metal Matchbox cars and chunky Tonka toys come raining down towards them alongside broken windscreen wipers, wing mirrors and the more ominous petrol-filled milk bottles set alight with cotton wool stoppers.

  At the Villa Road junction traffic is building up behind a stationary overcrowded bus. The upper-deck passengers press their faces to the steamy windows, mouthing muted comments with angry faces towards the crowd. Beyond the bus, an ambulance is jammed; its siren blares out above the noise as it tries desperately to budge through the traffic, unable to push forwards or move backwards. Cars, buses and vans all begin to honk their horns. Around the traffic the golden glow of fire bombs illuminates the sky into a spectacular incandescent sunset. Violet Murray cups her hands over her ears.

  ‘Let the ambulance through,’ she shouts, but the junction is gridlocked now. And then, all of a sudden, she screams and her voice is piercing. ‘Oh my god, oh no, Lord have mercy,’ she cries.

  The small crowd of onlookers all turn away from the traffic chaos to see what has caused this startling noise and they see a ball of flames moving towards them: an orange silk lantern floating on air.

  ‘Bloody hell it’s a person,’ a voice shouts and the crowd is suddenly silent.

  The flameball moves closer towards the police barricade but the police move forward to chase the rioters as they run towards Birchfield and the Aston Villa ground. The policemen seem unaware of the human torch burning beside them. Leroy’s mother begins screaming again, this time short, shrill screams that burst out of her in quick succession. Others in the crowd are screaming too, joining in the terrible noise until it becomes a constant, ghostly wail. Mukesh covers his face with his hands; the four pints of bitter from earlier press down on his bladder and he strains to hold on.

  ‘Lord have mercy,’ Violet shouts again. ‘It is no more than a child… Someone help him. Please help him, for god’s sake.’

  The burning figure crumples to its knees, flames rise up from his waist towards his chest and face. He is close enough for his petrified eyes to meet those of first line of onlookers. Two adolescent girls begin to cry and they bury their faces deep into each other’s shoulders as they hold on to one another.

  The churning alcohol in Mukesh’s stomach begins to rise up towards his mouth, scorching his throat along the way. He takes in a long, deep breath of the smoky air through his nostrils and it halts the acidic bile attempting to rise up through his body. Sobriety hits him suddenly and he too becomes transfixed by the burning boy just a few metres ahead. Without thinking he begins undoing the small, transparent buttons on his work shirt with clumsy fingers. Finally, the damp shirt is undone and he removes it fully before pushing his way through a small gap in the crowd. He strides towards the burning figure.

  ‘Mukesh, what are you doing?’ Surjeet Singh shouts after him in English. ‘You will get burnt too, come away bhai, the ambulance is coming through now!’

  M
ukesh carries on without looking back. As he approaches, the boy looks pleadingly into his face and Mukesh stares back, forcing a smile and trying desperately to look calm; a tiny glint of hope flickers across the terror in the boy’s eyes. Mukesh recognizes him as one of the older boys from the top end of Church Street. He has yelled at him often for hanging around, smoking marijuana and for wolf-whistling at his daughters. The heat around the boy is intense and as Mukesh gets within a few feet he reels backwards, tripping on a discarded Sindy doll still in its packaging. He forces himself on, inching forward, shaking out the sweaty shirt as he moves until he is close enough to smother the uppermost flames around the boy’s midriff with it. The ambulance edges towards them.

  Chapter 2

  Usha stares out of the living room window into the shadows that rise and stretch along Church Street towards the Lozells Road. The sky is a tangerine glow seeping into an almost opaque blackness where tiny specks of starlight fade away into infinity. Usha’s eyes are wide, she avoids blinking. One by one her daughters slip into the room, bored of the attic and intrigued by the sense of unease creeping through the house. They lounge across the rickety settee and sprawl across the floor. Then Kavi hurtles into the room.

  ‘Nine o’clock, Fantasy Island!’ he says, switching on the large black and white TV in the corner. ‘A plane, a plane,’ he shouts in a comedy voice as the opening credits begin to roll. He points up to the ceiling just as the diminutive Tattoo does the same on the screen.

  ‘Not this shit again,’ says Nina. ‘Isn’t it past your bedtime, kiddo?’

  ‘It’s not shit, it’s bostin,’ says Kavi, plonking himself on the floor next to Anila. ‘Anyway, it’s only just dark, and Billy is still out on his Chopper,’ he continues. And then after a pause, ‘Even I wouldn’t be allowed out this late.’

  ‘He isn’t allowed, you prat, that is the point. Can’t you see Mom is worried?’ says Nina.