Anila glances up at the television from the exercise book where she has completed her scrawl of the lyrics of Wordy Rappinghood in blue ink. She looks anxiously at her mother standing in the window.
‘Do we have to?’ she says.
Usha looks at the four children. All except Kamela are now lying across the faded, rust-coloured carpet. She hates that carpet. She scrubbed it with Dettol at 6 o’clock that morning, just as she does every week-day morning since reading about the incontinence of mice in a copy of Reader’s Digest at the doctor’s surgery two years earlier. The article triggered recurrent nightmares where dozens of scrawny rodents scurry around the house while the family sleep, scrambling through tiny gaps, leaving undiscovered sticky, black stools in large transparent containers of rice and pulses. In one dream the mice sneer at her with the faces of her neighbours, Marie O’Connell and Elsie Meeson, as they dribble urine across the laminated kitchen worktops where the girls butter bread for their packed lunches. So, each morning Usha crawls out of bed and scrubs away the mouse piss before the rest of the household awake. At first the children complained about the damp squelch underfoot and the stench of disinfectant rising through the house, stinging their nostrils as they tumbled downstairs for Ready Brek with jam before school. Usha has banned them from the living room on weekday mornings. On Saturdays she sets the alarm for 5am, giving the carpet an extra hour to dry before Tiswas.
‘You want some tea, Mom?’ says Anila gently.
Usha doesn’t speak; instead she stares into the night, watching the last fragments of sunset disappear beyond the sky. An amber glow still flickers over one section of the Lozells Road, just visible from the front room window. Anila looks from Nina to Kamela for a steer, but both stare back at her and shrug their shoulders. The melodramatic theme music signals the end of Fantasy Island. It is ten o’clock.
‘Go to bed, Kavi, before Dad gets back. It’s bad enough with Billy still out,’ Nina says.
‘Sod off, Nina, you can’t boss me,’ says Kavi.
‘Go to bed, Kavi!’ Kamela says, backing up her sister, ‘Can’t you see Mom is worried about Billy? It won’t help if Dad comes in all pissed up and you are still awake.’
‘What difference will it make?’ says Kavi. ‘He’ll find some excuse to kick off, like he always does when he’s had a drink. He won’t be pleased about any of it… you lot still down here, Mom in a daze, Billy missing…’
Anila glares at Kavi as he leaves the room, then she looks at Usha, hoping her mother hasn’t heard the word which has remained unspoken this evening, until now. Kavi thuds up the stairs towards the bedroom he shares with Billy. As the bedroom door slams upstairs, a framed photo of Usha’s parents topples off the brick mantel downstairs, smashing onto the corner of the unlit gas fire – the glass breaks into three triangle shards.
A renewed silence in the house is broken a moment later by a jangle of keys and a creak at the front door. The girls stare at each other, holding their breath as their father closes the door behind himself. A wisp of smoky air seeps into the living room as Mukesh drifts past it towards the kitchen. Momentarily relieved, the girls let out their held breath in sharp exhales and Nina speaks in a hushed voice.
‘Deff this, I am going up… I can’t be arsed with a scene,’ she says.
‘Don’t worry, Mom, Billy will be fine, he’ll be at the McKennas’ house,’ Kamela says, following her sister out of the room. Nina whispers over her shoulder into the room as they leave,
‘Don’t bother saying anything to Dad, let him think our Billy is in bed – he’ll be back in the morning before Dad is even up.’
The two girls creep up the stairs on tiptoe. Anila stays fixed on the floor, scrawling in her tattered exercise book and occasionally glancing up at her mother’s slender back as Usha continues to stare into the night. Eventually the noises from Lozells Road begin to subside and the night outside appears to settle.
Mukesh heads straight through the kitchen and into the tiny bathroom concealed behind it. He picks up a musty blue flannel from the side of the bath, rinses it under the cold tap of the sink and begins to wipe away at the grey film of ash which coats his skin. The coolness of the cloth is fresh against his scorched skin and he places it flat across the whole of his face for a second until the smell of singed hair rises up from his chest and through the cloth, evoking the bitter stench of burnt flesh. He flings the cloth into the sink, leaves the bathroom and collapses onto a chair next to the small table in the kitchen. He looks around as if seeing his family kitchen for the first time: it is a narrow oblong room of mismatched units, some nailed to the wall, others free-standing. A chipped teapot sits next to the kettle and next to that are jam jars, three in all, filled with sugar, teabags and loose change. Above them are the shelves he built and painted himself when they first moved into Church Street, soon after Nina was born. The upper two shelves are stocked with over-sized plastic containers full with pulses, dried beans and rice; the lowest one is a garish mixture of bright plastic-framed prints and glittering ornaments, all depicting a range of Hindu deities. Mukesh stares at the stack of unwashed crockery sitting beside the sink; the rest of the kitchen is spotless as always. School photos of the children stick to the window frame with drawing pins; a milk pan, full to the brim with thick, mustard-coloured chicken curry, sits on the gas cooker and beside it buttered chapattis are rolled up in tin foil like a Christmas cracker. Mukesh feels light-headed so he holds on to the side of the chair to steady himself and he closes his eyes. The image of the burning boy is imprinted on his eyelids and he blinks several times in succession, trying to dissipate the pixels that make up the image of terror in the boy’s eyes but it is set firm in his mind, burning into him as if he is still standing amidst the red-hot flames. He begins to weep. His crying quickly becomes uncontrollable and he starts to rock back and forth, tears streaming down his face, stinging his red-raw skin.
Just after 6.30 in the morning there is a loud, unambiguous knock on the front door. Usha moves towards it slowly with the heavy weight of sleeplessness behind her, aware that she is forcing herself away from the etherealness of night towards the stark reality of dawn. As she opens the door a gentle lilac hue shadows the faces of two young police officers standing in front of her. She closes her eyes and when she opens them again the faces are still there, looking back at her expressionless.
‘You might want to sit down,’ the female officer says.
‘No!’ Usha says abruptly. An instinct deep inside her has kept tears suppressed throughout the night but now they well to the surface. She struggles against them with sharp gulps of air, knowing that to succumb would be to open a flood gate.
Anila is jolted from a fitful sleep by the prolonged howl of her mother. It slices through the morning hush of the house and echoes beyond into the street. It is a terrible sound that transcends the parameters of humanity to ally with anguished mothers across the range of animal species. Anila pulls herself sleepily towards the front door and reaches it just in time to catch her mother as she crumples to the floor. They both slump down on the cold linoleum of the hallway – Usha is a heap on her daughter’s lap while Anila is paralysed by the weight of her mother across her thin legs. Behind the two slumped bodies, Nina, Kamela and Kavi sit rigid on the stairs. Mukesh hovers above them, dishevelled in pyjama bottoms, looking down on the scene unfolding below him. He shivers and a low groan expels itself from a deep place within him. The sallow-faced WPC looks up at him – his eyes are dark, puffy and ringed by a bluish shadow as if he has been in a fight. She says words that make no sense to any of them: accident… ambulance… riot… bike. Mukesh leans against the banister as his knees begin to give way beneath him.
‘I am sorry,’ she says in a slightly louder voice, ‘it was an accident.’ She shuffles from foot to foot as she speaks, like a child admitting to a misdemeanour. ‘He just cycled out in front of the ambulance. It couldn’t stop in time. There wa
s a burns victim on board from the riot, they had to get him to the hospital as soon as possible and your lad… Billy… well they just didn’t see him until it was too late. There were no lights on the bike. It would have been very quick they said. He wouldn’t have known anything. He had…’ she pauses, and then says more quietly, ‘gone by the time they got to him. I told your wife that too…’ Her words trail off.
‘Alone?’ Mukesh says, but he says it so quietly no-one hears.
‘Shit,’ whispers Kamela to Nina, ‘what is she saying?’
‘Mom won’t get through this,’ her sister replies.
Anila looks at the police officers as they stand awkwardly in the doorway, neither of them attempting to move closer to the threshold. She is still not completely sure if she is awake or asleep.
Chapter 3
Billy was born in the lift,’ Usha tells her friend Brenda Kelly a week after Billy’s death. Brenda dips malted milk biscuits into sweet masala tea, catching the soggy biscuit with the tip of her tongue as it melts into her mouth.
The two women have been friends since meeting some years earlier on the edges of the Bomb Peck, an expanse of waste ground behind Church Street where the children have dens in derelict houses amongst a playground of tyre-swings and climbing frames made out of stained mattresses, discarded factory pallets and oil cans. Like the other mothers from the area, Brenda and Usha had often stood beside one another shouting the kids in for tea as the sun began fading from the sky. One day Brenda broke the silence.
‘We ought to have a cuppa sometime, bab. Our kids look about the same age.’
Brenda was the first white friend Usha had made since leaving Lozells Girls School in the 1950s.
Anila kneels silently behind the kitchen door, her ear pressed against it, listening to her mother talk in hushed tones to Brenda in a way that makes her wonder if she really is their mother and not some other mother from some other family. It is the first time she hears her mother talk about giving birth. Brenda manages to coax memories out of Usha in a way she and the rest of the family cannot.
‘It was July 1969, almost exactly twelve years ago,’ Usha tells Brenda. She describes how the lift in question became suspended between floors D and E of the red-brick Victorian workhouse that had become Birmingham’s Dudley Road Hospital. The building remained shabby and looming decades after its transformation to a general hospital and usually Usha crossed the road when walking past it, afraid it might conceal shadowy malnourished waifs waiting in dark corners to grab her bags of potatoes and cheap white bread.
Billy was born twenty five minutes before midnight. A trickle of hot, bloody liquid seeped from Usha’s womb, staining the bed sheets rose-petal pink. She woke to an empty bed and looked anxiously around the room for the snoring body of her husband but Mukesh was still at the pub. Usha pushed off the soiled sheets and piled them in the corner of the room, felt under the bed for her hold-all packed with nightdresses and sanitary pads and scrawled a note to Mukesh.
Gone to Dudley Road to have baby. Don’t come to the hospital until the children are sorted out. Take them to Bibi’s house. Give them cereal first. Kavi prefers Ready Brek but the girls eat anything. There is no Ready Brek. Clean sheets for the bed are on top shelf of wardrobe. I could not reach.
Downstairs, Usha whispered urgently into the phone.
‘Come quickly as possible – the baby can’t wait.’ And, before she put down the receiver, ‘Please, don’t use the siren, the children will wake up, the whole street will wake up.’ Then she gently placed the receiver down and slipped out of the front door, leaned against the hard brick wall and pulled her shawl around her swollen body, shivering in the chill of night air.
Usha tells Brenda how she was lowered from the ambulance into a waiting wheelchair and abandoned just beyond the hospital entrance.
‘Hold on here, someone will be with you in a mo,’ the young paramedic told her before disappearing back into the night.
It was a Friday night and the hospital reception was oozing with sickness: urgent-faced orderlies pushed around trolleys of bandaged patients while stiff-faced nurses yelled orders at each other across corridors; meanwhile men, young and old, sprawled across waiting room benches while nervous parents clung on to floppy babies, shifting awkwardly away from the beery breath of the drunks.
‘Hello, I’m Sister Olga,’ announced a small, neat nurse as she grabbed the handles of Usha’s wheelchair. ‘And you must be mom-to-be.’ She pushed Usha along a maze of lime coloured corridors towards the lifts, talking incessantly on the way. ‘Stupid having Labour on the top – all these poor ladies, fit to burst, expected to walk up stairs or wait for the stupid lifts. Labour Ward is on the fourth floor. Floor E1 – why they don’t just say fourth floor I don’t know. Be there in a tick though – not to worry. What’s your name, lovey?’
‘Mrs Agarwal.’
‘Listen, lovey, it won’t be Mrs Agarwal when that baby is pushing itself out of you but if that’s what you want I’ll just call you Lovey, okay dear? You Injun ladies are so proper sometimes.’
One of the two large lifts was vacant, its doors open wide. Olga pressed the green button marked Floor E as the doors clunked shut behind the two women. Inside, the constant low murmur of the mechanism was welcoming after the din of the entrance lobby and Usha breathed in a sigh of relief, knowing that her baby was only minutes from arriving. But the quiet hum of the lift was broken by a sudden jolt and a loud thud as it came crashing to a halt – jamming in its rickety shaft just moments after it had begun its ascent. The only movement now was the intermittent flicker of the fluorescent strip light.
‘Oh my god,’ said Sister Olga, her voice rising a level in pitch. ‘I don’t like these lifts. Not a good time to get stuck now – not with you so close and all. Come on you stupid bloody thing.’
Usha felt dizzy. She wanted to close her eyes and disappear but the burning crush in her belly meant fading away was not an option. She clenched her hot, damp thighs and moaned long and low until the noise echoed off the metal walls. Five seconds passed by before the strip light stopped flickering, plunging the lift into complete darkness except for a tiny hint of illumination from the dwindling display panel above the door. Sister Olga gasped and between the twists and stabs in her belly, Usha yelled at her, ‘This baby isn’t going to wait for the firemen or whoever else fixes the lifts here. You are the nurse, help me!’
Sweat poured off Usha’s swollen body and the limited air around the two women quickly became sticky and humid. Olga removed her glasses and wiped the moisture from her nose with the hem of her skirt before replacing them. Usha gripped her buttocks together, trying to hold back the incredible urge to push out the baby and empty her bowels at the same time. The searing pains were frantic and uncontrollable. She managed to raise herself out of the chair and collapsed on to the floor on all-fours, her bare knees scratching against the harsh matting. In the dark, she felt around for something stable to grab hold of and found Olga’s thick, nylon-covered ankles so she squeezed them as tight as she could. Olga gasped just as the baby’s head began to appear at the opening of the cervical channel.
‘Mrs Agarwal, you alright?’
Olga kicked an ankle free just as the strip lighting flickered back into life. She stepped forward and reaching into Usha’s hold-all, pulled out a brushed cotton nightie, the same pale yellow colour as a baby chick.
‘Let me go,’ she said softly to Usha. ‘Hold on to the wheelchair instead – I have to deliver this baby and I can’t do it while you’re holding me legs.’
Usha did as she was told while a breathless Olga clambered over her and, with only a second to spare, caught the waxy, pink baby in the folds of her apron as it slipped out of Usha’s vagina towards the unforgiving lift floor. The women stared incredulously at the tiny creature until Olga spoke.
‘Mrs Agarwal, you have a boy, healthy, I think. Here…’ She handed
the squawking yellow bundle to its mother and the baby stopped crying.
Usha stared into her baby’s face. The eyelashes on his left eye were stuck under the eyelid beneath a cluster of mustard-coloured mucus. She licked the tip of her little finger and carefully wiped at the eyelid, flicking away tiny moist crumbs and freeing the long, dark lashes before tracing a gentle finger down the new, wrinkled cheek. The baby opened his eyes for a split second, long enough to meet those of his mother before the stark light of the lift forced them straight back shut. Behind the wheelchair, Sister Olga gagged as the stale air became heavy with the sickly odour of birth and blood. She covered her mouth with her wrist and with the other arm guided Usha back up into the wheelchair.
On Floor E, a small audience of midwives and nurses gathered outside the entrance to the lift waiting anxiously for it to restart, aware that one of their own was stuck inside. When the lift finally shuddered back into action and as the doors clunked open on Floor E, the small congregation clapped and cheered with such enthusiasm that a junior doctor remarked it was as if Apollo 11 had landed for the second time that month. Sister Olga burst into tears as the doors slid open and two nurses rushed to console her, shunting the wheelchair out of the way as Usha sat cradling her new baby – a tiny, sparrow-like creature, still connected to her by the cord. The baby twitched with the noise; he was no bigger, Usha thought, than the bags of lemon Bonbons she bought for the children on the days the Child Benefit arrived.
‘That is one helluva story, Usha,’ says Brenda when her friend finishes speaking. Usha leans back in her chair, relieved. Outside the kitchen door, Anila has been joined by Kamela. Anila begins to snuffle into the back of her arm as the story concludes.
‘I’m never doing that,’ Kamela announces. ‘It’s disgusting all that blood and stuff – no babbies for me, no siree.’
The Handsworth Times Page 2