Chapter 4
On the morning of Billy’s funeral Usha gets out of bed at six o’clock. She removes the bottle of sleeping tablets from the bedside cabinet and places it under the pillow. Her head aches with a dull pain and, as she silently pulls an old knitted cardigan over her long cotton nightdress, she wonders if she has actually slept at all.
The dawn floods the room with coral-coloured light when Usha lifts a corner of the curtain. The new day adds another space between the life and the death of Billy and Usha feels a familiar hard lump develop in her throat. She sits down on the edge of the bed, sighs, and tries to remember what Dr Selvon had said as he scribbled out the prescription for sleeping pills: denial, anger, guilt, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. He described the stages of grief to her as though he was passing on a recipe. Beside her, Mukesh stirs in his sleep and the stale smell of tobacco wafts from his sweaty body.
Usha moves downstairs to the kitchen where she sets about cleaning the oven while the rest of the house continues to sleep. Baked-on black crusts cling to the oven walls and she sprinkles Ajax over the interior. Usha kneels on the tired linoleum in front of the oven, smooths down her faded floral apron to cover the lap of her old tunic, and begins to scrub with a rose of wet steel wire. She works up a lather, scraping up and down, side to side repeatedly until the caustic chemicals make the skin on the tips of her fingers wrinkle into tiny bloodless ridges; the white liquid drips down the sides of the oven and collects in a dirty, beige sludge at the bottom. The crusts are difficult to budge so Usha reaches into the nearby drawer and grabs a dinner knife which she wedges under the most stubborn crust then hammers against it with the edge of a wooden spoon, pausing to wipe her forehead with the corner of her apron. As she bangs away at the oven, Nina slips into the kitchen. She pops a slice of bread into the toaster and presses down the kettle switch.
‘Nothing gets clean,’ Usha says, closing the oven door and wiping her brow again.
‘Oh, Mom, it’s spotless,’ says Nina. ‘We aren’t living in a hospital, you know.’
Usha turns to look at Nina who stands in the doorway with a slice of unbuttered toast in her hand. Usha’s eyes follow the minute trail of breadcrumbs which float down from her daughter’s hand, dance in the shafts of early sunlight, and gather at Nina’s feet. Nina stares back as Usha rests her ashen face against the oven door.
‘I failed him. I didn’t protect him. A mother has to be able to protect her children,’ Usha says.
At eleven o’clock the hearse and funeral car slide up outside the Agarwals’ house on Church Street. Curtains twitch as the low roar of engines moves down the street. Outside the house opposite, Derek O’Connell stops soaping his prized Ford Corsair, places the sponge back in the plastic washing-up bowl beside the car and wipes his wet, frothy hands across his overalls. He stands in silence, head bowed as Usha, Mukesh, Kavi and the girls squeeze into the black limousine.
‘I can’t look at it,’ Kavi whispers to Anila, nodding towards the hearse without raising his head. ‘I can’t stand that our kid is really in there, all broken up and that.’
‘I know,’ says Anila. She bends her head towards her knees to halt the swell of nausea careering through her body.
The four-mile journey to the crematorium is made in silence. On arrival the family are ushered out of the car and they follow the small coffin into the pale-blue rotunda ahead of them. Inside the simple brick building sunbeams stream through stained glass windows, flooding the hall in unexpected patterns of colour and light. The family all squint as they enter.
‘Blimey, it’s like Villa Park on a Wednesday game with all the floodlights on,’ Kavi says. Kamela nudges him with her elbow.
People pour in behind the family and all but the front two rows of utilitarian benches are soon filled with the white robes and saris of community elders, some already wailing and snorting into large cotton hankies. Usha’s parents sit directly behind her alongside her only brother Ravi and his wife Shashi, who have travelled from Luton that morning without their children. Bibi, Usha’s mother, places a hand upon her daughter’s left shoulder and her father does the same to her right. Towards the front of the hall, two old men murmur disapprovingly as the family take their seats on the first bench, staring unashamedly at the uncovered heads of the teenage Agarwal girls.
Sitting alongside the elders are a number of West Indians, mostly middle-aged Jamaicans in their muted Sunday best, beads of sweat shining across glistening ebony faces. There are fewer white faces: Elsie Meeson from across the road, some of the O’Connell family and one or two others from the shops along Lozells Road. The white people are dressed in thick, black fabrics in spite of the warm weather, their garments accessorized by flushed faces and damp armpits. The Agarwals are dressed in black too, all except Usha in traditional white, punctuating the front row like a blank space between words in a sentence.
The ceremony is short, comprising a few perfunctory words from the presiding vicar followed by a few more in Sanskrit from Mr Mishra, the Hindu priest from the nearby Heathford Road temple. He chants hypnotically in monotone and mumbles indecipherable verses which all seem to begin and end with the words ‘Om’ and ‘Shanti’. Usha and Mukesh stand side by side with Mukesh on the aisle-end of the row. Usha leans into Nina who, in turn, leans into Anila, Anila into Kamela. At the other end of the row, Kavi is the bookend stopping them all from toppling over in a heap. Each of them stares ahead, meeting the gaze of no one. There are no eulogies and the service is abrupt, ending suddenly as heavy maroon velvet curtains close around the coffin, concealing its descent into the chamber below. Usha gasps as the curtains close, leaning even harder into the sobbing girls to prevent herself from collapsing onto the hard, stony floor.
As the mourners leave the confines of the crematorium hall for the stifling heat of the graveyard, Mr Brown, Billy’s maths teacher, appears flustered at the doorway. He searches out Mukesh, pushing his way through the mourners, and hands him a card from Billy’s classmates and Billy’s end of year report.
‘We thought you would like to have this,’ he says nervously. Mukesh nods at him.
‘Bloody hell,’ Nina says.
‘Too right,’ says Kavi. ‘What good is that now?’ He snatches the report from his father’s hands and tears it open, ‘It doesn’t sound anything like him,’ he says. ‘I bet they didn’t even know him. I bet they wrote it after he… after the accident.’
The mourners begin to shuffle about awkwardly as Kavi continues his rant.
‘Billy hated school. He didn’t even want to do the Eleven-Plus. He wanted to come to the shit school with the rest of us. The grammar school is full of posh white kids from the other side of town, that’s what he said.’
‘Shut up, Kavi,’ Kamela yells across the mourners, ‘it isn’t the time.’
‘I bet they have a special report for dead kids,’ he continues. ‘How can we tell now if it’s true, eh? And what the fuck does it matter anyway when all that’s left is a broken up body turned into a pile of ashes? What is it all about then? Shit all, that’s what.’ He screws up the paper in his hand and tosses it to the ground.
The mourners lower their heads. Only Usha and Mukesh stare directly at Kavi, their faces grey and desperate. Mr Brown steps backwards and stumbles on a wreath beside a fresh grave. He looks around, checking the quickest route away from the mourners, then turns and begins to walk quickly. Kavi shouts after him, ‘You didn’t even know Billy,’ and then turning to the crowd of startled mourners, ‘None of you even knew him. Where are his bloody friends? Where are Jacko, Joey and Bal and that weird kid from the Peck? They didn’t even get told about today, I bet.’
Usha walks away in the opposite direction.
‘I am sorry, Mom,’ Kavi shouts after her. He begins to run from the mourners who stare on helplessly. He runs past the headstones and the wilted flowers, pulling the neck of his tee-shirt up over his nose and mouth to
avoid the stench of rotting leaves and decay that rises up from around the graves. He runs out of the gates and passes Mr Brown scuttling towards the car park. ‘Wanker!’ Kavi shouts towards him and keeps on running, down Sandwell Valley and Hilltop towards Rookery Road, past the fragrant vegetable shops where he knocks over a tray of ginger roots and trips over them, crashing into a newspaper A-board outside the newsagents. Forty-five minutes later he is breathless and wet as he staggers into the open gate at the end of the alleyway which runs down the side of the house in Church Street. The back door is wide open and Kavi stumbles in and crumples onto the kitchen floor. He begins to cry.
Brenda is in the Agarwal kitchen preparing cheese cobs and bowls of Ready Salted crisps for after the funeral. She stops what she is doing when Kavi appears and kneels down beside him. She strokes his damp hair as she would a puppy and wipes away the sweat dripping down around his forehead and neck with a tea towel.
‘There, there, bab, let it all out,’ she says. ‘Go on, bab, it’s good to have a proper cry.’
Kavi clutches on to Brenda’s purple smock top, crying and coughing into her lap until that too is damp. He stays fixed there, comforted and enveloped in Brenda’s embrace like a much smaller child, unable to pull himself away until the sound of cars arriving at the front of the house just a minute or two later disrupts Brenda’s gentle maternal purrs and forces him up. He darts out of the back door and conceals himself in the bush at the end of the garden, away from the strangers who have returned to the house to stand in the cramped hallway and living room, making small talk whilst eating the cobs Brenda has made. Sweat and snot mingle with tears in streaks across Kavi’s face and he pulls off his tee-shirt to wipe the secretions away before flinging it to the ground. He searches in his trouser pocket for the two-inch-long nub end of a cigarette rescued from the ashtray next to Mukesh’s bedside earlier that day. He wipes away more snot with the back of his hand and lights up the cigarette, blowing out bitter smoke.
Chapter 5
Billy’s ashes sit in a brass urn locked away in Usha’s yellowing melamine cabinet next to her side of the bed.
‘He might as well be sat on top of the telly,’ Kamela says to Kavi as they all stand around to watch as the urn is placed there by Usha.
In the days that follow, a succession of older Indian women from the temple come to the house dressed in the white saris and salwar kameez suits they wore to the funeral. They sit in the small living room glancing at the framed family photos and collection of cheap ornaments and statuettes that line the mantelpiece. When Usha leaves the room to prepare masala tea the quiet is broken by Punjabi whispers under the breath.
‘Such a shame! Too many girls to worry about and all so modern. It will be difficult to find suitable husbands for them, especially with this trouble.’
‘My husband would be ashamed to let me live with such ragged old curtains where guests will sit.’
‘They are old perhaps but she keeps the house clean at least. Look, even the photo frames are shiny.’
‘Maybe, maybe. It is a terrible thing to lose a child so young. What was she thinking, letting him ride around on a bicycle in the night-time like this?’
‘Hush now. You can’t control these children born here. And so many children to keep in order. Poor woman.’
As she prepares cloves and cardamom for the tea, Usha reminds herself to sweep beneath the settee and dust along the curtain rail before more visitors arrive the next day.
When she returns to the front room the older women say, ‘Thank you, beti’ and put their arms around her shoulders. They wail loudly between gulps of hot, sweet chai and their uninhibited noises pierce through the house past Kavi’s room, where he lays with his head buried under the pillow, and up to the small attic room where Anila, Kamela and Nina drown out the noise from below with the jangly banter of Peter Powell on the radio, the volume turned up to full.
On the sixth day after the funeral Usha addresses Mukesh. It is the first time they have spoken directly to one another in days.
‘Brenda’s husband Eugene, Mr Kelly, said we can use his van tomorrow,’ she says.
‘Brenda, Eugene… why do we have to ask favours from these people?’ Mukesh replies, slurping hot tea from a saucer.
‘We didn’t ask – Brenda is my friend, and she wants to help us. We help each other. Besides, we have to take Billy to the sea… she knows that the funeral isn’t finished until the ashes go into the sea. I told her this before.’
There is a pause.
‘She says Rhyl is the nearest place. It is in Wales and Eugene said we could borrow his van.’
‘What are these people, Irish?’
‘What does that matter?’
‘All bloody foreigners here, at least we have this in common,’ says Mukesh.
The van is a rusty white Transit. The space in the back is sucked up by the expanding bodies of the four teenagers as they jostle for leg and elbow room. Each of them is dressed in at least one article of white, as requested by their mother. Kavi shares a spare tyre as a seat with Anila.
‘Shit,’ Kavi says as black oil from the wheel soils the edge of his white PE shirt.
Nina and Kamela sit opposite, perched on a blue metal toolbox, trying to prevent the oil stains from marking their cheesecloth tops. Usha sits in the front passenger cab staring blankly ahead and clinging on to the black and gold urn while Mukesh, unused to the van, drives nervously, leaning forward over the steering wheel and keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the grey parallel lines of the M6 ahead.
Along the sides of the motorway, monotonous steely landscapes drag by, blending into one long, horizontal line of spewing chimneys and bland industrial buildings separated by stretches of flat, drab Midlands countryside, uninviting even in the vivid July sunshine.
Two hours seem like six in the van but eventually the family emerge past a sign to Mold and into Wales. The children sit up from hunched positions and scramble for a glimpse of this new country through the windows in the back door. It is a transformed view: a gently undulating landscape of vibrant pea-green hills set against a backdrop of majestic trees and punctuated by creamy sheep, like buttered popcorn roaming high on the sloping banks above the dull hum of the dual carriageway.
Mukesh continues driving, meandering through the splashes of colour until they reach Rhuddlan, a small town of indistinct beige bungalows topped by a castle ruin. Mukesh pulls the van to a stop in a neat little cul-de-sac as they enter the town, marked by a red X on the map by Eugene. The children shift about in the back, stretching out their legs and swapping places between tyre and tool box. Usha continues to stare blankly out of the front passenger window, unaware of the crinkled, white faces peering back at her from behind dull lace curtains. After a minute or two of trying to make sense of the map, Mukesh slips the van into reverse and screeches backwards out of the cul-de-sac. He continues to drive through the high street, closely following Eugene’s route, and before five minutes have passed by they are leaving the town through the other end.
The light is different on the north side of Rhuddlan. The sky is a clean, crisp blue and the sun seems brighter than the sun above the motorway. Usha relaxes her shoulders for the first time on the journey, sensing that the sea is now not too far. Anila breathes in a loud, exaggerated breath of the unfamiliar sharp, salty air. One by one each of her siblings does the same. After a few minutes they pull off the main road and head down a slip road. Mukesh pulls the van up on to a muddy lay-by next to a faded caravan park sign and one by one the children climb out of the back of the van, stretching their arms and legs back into life. They have emerged next to a small meadow, deserted except for a cluster of butterflies flitting about wild, cerise-coloured flowers which seem shockingly bold against the bleached summer grass. To the far side of the meadow is a clump of trees obscuring the view beyond.
‘I think the sea is just past there,’ whisper
s Nina, pointing towards the trees. Her sisters both nod enthusiastically. The smell of the sea is strong now, like the fishmongers at the Bull Ring market.
It takes longer than they anticipated crossing the meadow. They make their way down a narrow, partly concealed footpath and eventually reach the trees to find it is not the sea which is hidden behind but a wide river mouth, joined on the far side by a thin tributary. Long branches cast unexpected shadows on to the river bank and Usha shudders, pulling her white shawl tight around her diminishing frame. The family walk slowly and instinctively towards a small clearing beneath an overhang of trees, where it is cool in spite of the strength of the midday sun. It is here the Agarwals stand, all six of them side by side, in silence for a sombre half an hour on the deserted bank of the River Clwyd, throwing handfuls of vermilion rose petals after a trail of grey ash which snakes its way down the silvery river towards the faint sighing of the sea. When the last red petal has finally drifted out of view, Usha rummages in her shoulder-bag and pulls out cans of Cherryade and packages of cheese sandwiches wrapped in tin foil. The children eat, heads bowed as lumps of thick dry bread and cheese stick in their throats, difficult to swallow without swigs of metallic pop.
After an hour back on the road Anila breaks the silence.
‘Do you think we should go back to school? I mean it’s going to be the last week of term by the time we go back. What d’ya reckon?’
‘I can’t be arsed with that,’ says Kavi. ‘They’ll all be pretending to be sorry for us like they really give a shit. I won’t be able to stand it. And anyway, it’ll be weird doing normal stuff without Billy. It won’t feel right.’
‘No-one will be going anywhere not until after the Kriya. It isn’t thirteen days yet!’ Mukesh says abruptly. He has to shout above the whirring of the traffic to make himself heard.
‘What the fuck’s that?’ Kamela asks the others. Nina shrugs her shoulders.
‘S’pect we will light another fire and eat more rice balls,’ Anila says.
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