Chapter 6
Anila stares through the front room window as great slanted sheets of rain slide down and drench the street outside. This day, which started leaden, has descended into a black gloom and by mid-morning it is more akin to a winter’s evening than this high summer’s day. It is the sixth of August; not even a month has passed by since Billy’s death and Anila wonders whether anything will ever be normal again. As the lightning begins to throw great shapes against the sky Anila steps back into the room, pauses a moment and then, not sure what to do with herself, begins to wander around the house.
Five rooms make up the whole of each of the terraced houses on Church Street: two up, two down plus the add-on bathrooms with flat corrugated tin roofs. Some, like this one, also have an attic at the top of the house, accessed by a slightly curved wooden staircase hidden behind a door on the narrow landing. It is to the top of the house that Anila first heads.
In the attic, Nina is reading the latest copy of My Guy.
‘These blokes all look the bloody same, skinny and white. I mean they look alright and that but why don’t they ever have Indians or Jamaicans in these photo-loves too?’ she says.
‘Cos the moms won’t let the Indian boys do that shit – what about respect, beta?’ Kamela says in an exaggerated Indian accent from the other side of the room. ‘And as for the Jamaicans, they are too cool to do that stuff – and imagine what those gora parents would say if they found their Annabel or Tracey ogling some hunk of a black man? They’d close the crappy magazine down, that’s what!’ She pauses to catch her breath then continues speaking. ‘So what’ll it be, Nina… Pop Muzik or D.I.S.C.O? Ooo I know, let’s have that Chip Shop Elvis one that Anila nicked from Villa Cross Woolies the other week, I quite like that one.’ Kamela stands up and moves towards the red Dansette turntable; as she does so a small pile of seven-inch singles falls from her lap to the floor.
‘Be careful, won’t you?’ Nina snaps at her sister. ‘It’s taken us ages to get all those records together.’
Neither Nina nor Kamela notice Anila in the slit of the doorway before she turns and slips back down the narrow stairs.
Kavi’s and Billy’s bedroom is just big enough for two single beds and the tallboy wardrobe next to a south-facing window which overlooks the scraggy garden. Kavi lies on his bed with his face to the wall. John Lennon’s Woman plays faintly from a crackly radio concealed somewhere in the room. Kavi doesn’t notice Anila either as she hovers momentarily in the doorway picturing John Lennon lying cold on the pavement outside the Dakota building whilst she stares at Billy’s made-up bed. After a moment she disappears down the landing to where Usha and Mukesh have the biggest bedroom, a cheerful, sunflower-yellow room at the front of the house with a large street-facing sash window. On a more typical summer’s day the windows are flung open and the curtains fill with warm breeze and billow like the sails of a boat. Today the curtains in the front bedroom are drawn and the room is almost in total darkness.
Anila continues to move around the house detached, just as all the Agarwal children have been since the funeral. Sometimes the siblings brush against each other on the way up and down the stairs, other times they sit quietly in rooms together, knees touching, eyes averted, occasionally shifting their legs or arms as Usha cleans around them. Only Mukesh leaves the house on a regular basis, to drag himself to work or to buy coriander, ginger root and rice from the Indian grocer on the corner of Anglesey Street or fish fingers from Fine Fare as directed by Usha. The short hallway with its windowless landing is where silence is most gloomy. Once it was a space where a symphony of chatter, laughter and bicker melded together in an almost tuneful clamour, but this has now faded away and instead the hall and landing provide an empty chasm through the core of the house.
As Anila walks down the stairway to the bottom floor she notices a tiny loose edge of wallpaper and flicks it with her fingers. The action loosens it more, so she pulls at it until it tears a straight white strip all the way to the lower hallway ceiling. At the foot of the staircase a growing pile of the Handsworth Times remains unread by the front door. Usha sweeps around the newspapers each morning but she ignores the layer of powdery dust which gathers around their edges. Anila glances at the headline on the uppermost paper – the words that continue to dominate are ‘UNREST’ and ‘TRAGIC’ but she refuses to linger on them too long. Some earlier editions of the paper include a photo of Billy supplied by the school. His unkempt black hair flattened down with rapidly applied spit rubbed into palms just seconds before a blinding camera flash. In grainy monotone, Billy looks gawky as the flash startles him into a wide-eyed glare. The photo fails to capture his essence – his sparky youth and the laughter in his eyes. A small globule of saliva is visible on the fringe above his left temple, reflected in the sheen of the photographer’s lamp. The newspapers with the photo of Billy have been placed face down and buried in the pile, and Anila knows her mother won’t want to disturb them for fear of coming across the images of her boy, full of the life he no longer has.
After wandering through the other rooms, Anila makes her way to the kitchen where Usha is on her hands and knees scrubbing at a turmeric stain on the lino near the sink. Anila watches her for a moment before speaking.
‘What are you doing, Mom?’
Usha replies without looking up.
‘Cleaning this subji stain, it is where you father dropped his plate the other day after dinner.’
They both know the plate was not dropped but flung down by Mukesh in frustration when the food failed to fill the empty gap inside him – he’d said it wasn’t spicy enough but they all knew it was something else. The anger episodes were becoming more frequent since Billy had died. Anila stares at her mother as Usha pushes the scrubbing brush forwards and backwards, backwards and forwards in a rhythm.
‘Stop it,’ Anila suddenly shouts. Her voice quivers.
Usha looks up startled.
‘Just stop it,’ Anila says again. ‘Stop bloody cleaning things that don’t matter. Cleaning won’t make Billy alive again. It just makes me feel like we are all dead too, like you are trying to clean it all away. It’s all you do, you never talk. No-one talks in this bloody house. You just clean. Can’t you see the house is fucking spotless?’
‘Anila, that is a horrible thing to say.’
‘It’s like we are all corpses in the same house, no talking, just existing. It’s driving me bonkers.’ Anila slumps down to the floor and starts chewing at her stubby fingernails, pulling off a piece of loose skin with her teeth and then licking the tiny drop of blood that appears with a disproportionate stinging pain.
Usha wipes her hands on a tea towel tucked into the waistband of her trousers and stands up. She moves towards Anila and places one hand on her daughter’s head. Anila continues to look towards the floor and to gnaw at her fingers; her body is tense and the muscles in her neck and shoulders tighten until they hurt. After a wordless moment, Usha turns her attention back to the stain, kneels down and starts scrubbing away again. Anila looks up, cleans her dripping nose with the back of her wrist and glares at Usha.
‘Bloody hell, Mom, don’t you give a shit about any of the rest of us? Billy has gone, I am still here. We are all still here you know, stuck inside this miserable place… this miserable little existence.’
Usha pauses and without looking up she mumbles, ‘I have to clean Anila. I have to keep the house clean. It’s all I can do.’
The sound of the rain momentarily amplifies and a crash of loud thunder echoes off the corrugated bathroom roof before the noise dies down to a more steady, less distinct beat.
‘No you don’t,’ Anila says. She picks herself up, flings open the back door and teeters on the threshold for a fraction of a second before stepping out into the rain – knowing that if she stays in the kitchen she will say something awful to Usha. The wind hits her in the face, numbing the throbbing in her head as her heart
begins racing. She thinks of her mother, just a few steps away on her hands and knees, pushing the scrubbing brush back and forth like a robot. She wants to run back in, grab Usha by the throat and shake the private sufferings out of her. Instead she clenches her teeth and emits a loud, long moan towards the ominous grey sky above. Her voice is barely audible above the heavy pelt of the rain which envelops her until her hair and clothes are drenched. Raindrops run down her cheeks and mingle with her own tears creating flowing rivulets across her face. When she is completely soaked, Anila re-enters the house, shivering uncontrollably. Murky water drips from her rain-sodden clothes onto the kitchen floor and creates a brown water trail as she moves past her mother and reaches for a small towel hanging on a cupboard handle nearby. She wipes her face and flings the towel to the floor. She leaves the kitchen, taking the damp of the day with her through the living room and up the stairs. Usha picks up the discarded towel and soaks up the water on the kitchen floor before returning to scrub away at the stubborn turmeric stain.
Chapter 7
On Bank Holiday Monday, Bibi arrives at the front-door unexpectedly. Nina lets her in and allows her grandmother to pinch her cheek and give her a tight squeeze before the older woman disappears into the kitchen and pulls the door closed behind herself. Nina hangs about in the hallway, listening as Usha greets her own mother. They talk in Punjabi and Nina can understand just enough to make out the gist of the conversation. After a few minutes, Nina pops her head around the living-room door and reports to her sisters.
‘They’re going to stay with Uncle Ravi in Luton for a while, Aunt Shash is having another babbie, it sounds like. She’s chucking up all the time and can’t cope with the other kids so Bibi and Nanaa are going to help out. They’re going for a month or something.’
‘I wonder if she knew she was up the duff at the funeral,’ Kamela says, doodling spectacles on the faces in photographs in an old newspaper.
‘What difference does that make?’ Anila asks, lifting her head from the TV listings in the weekend’s Handsworth Times.
‘Indian people are just so bloody weird sometimes,’ Nina announces as she pops her head around the living room door a second time.
‘We’re Indian too, you know?’ Kamela says, ‘Even if we do forget sometimes.’
‘We don’t forget, Kamela, we just choose not to remember until we have a good enough reason to. Anyway, listen – Bibi just told Mom that Billy’s spirit will have entered the new baby that Aunty Shash is having and he’ll be reborn as our cousin. That’s why her and Nanaa have to go and look after her now instead of being around for Mom.’
‘Bollocks!’ Anila says and returns to the listings.
‘Bloody hell,’ Kamela sighs, shaking her head. ‘That’ll make everything alright then, I suppose. Perhaps we should be celebrating?’ She stands up, claps her hands together and peers out of the window to the street from behind the nets, ‘Honestly, it’s like we’ve never left the medieval age around here sometimes.’
When the back gate bangs shut fifteen minutes later, Nina gently opens the kitchen door. The stillness unsettles her but the quiet of the room is broken by a distant howl of a baby in one of the adjacent gardens. It takes Nina a few seconds to see her mother standing in the shadows of the bathroom entrance.
‘You alright, Mom?’ Usha doesn’t reply. ‘Bibi and Nanaa will be back before you know it.’
‘Yes, perhaps,’ Usha says, breaking her own silence before picking up a basket of wet washing from the table and heading down the side return.
‘Anyone want to come out? It’s lovely and sunny out there. C’mon Kamela, Anila, we can have a fag at the Bomb Peck. I don’t want to go on my own and I’ll go mad stuck in here – we’ve hardly been out the house in weeks.’
‘Yeah, okay then,’ Kamela says unenthusiastically.
Anila rouses herself from her prostrate position on the carpet, ‘Go on then, I’ll come if you’ve got any ciggies. Can we get back for Jim’ll Fix It though? There’s a special on for the bank holiday.’
‘I don’t know why you want to watch that soppy rubbish,’ says Kamela.
‘Everyone watches it and anyway, it’s Billy’s favourite, I want to watch it for him,’ Anila replies sullenly.
‘You’re as bad as Bibi, saying stuff like that.’
‘Piss off, Kam.’
Nina grabs her youngest sister’s arm, ‘C’mon on, we’ll be back loads before then – we’re only going for a fag. Let’s see what’s going on out there in the 20th century, shall we?’
Outside, the sunshine is striking and all three girls blink rapidly to adjust their eyes. The street is full of activity: games of football, rope-skipping in threes and fours, car and window-washing and the occasional doorstep conversation. Directly across the road the O’Connell twins play two-balls up against the wall between their own house and Elsie Meeson’s. They chant as they play.
‘Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, next door neighbour carry on.
Next door neighbour got the flu, so I pass it on to you.’
Marie O’Connell sits on her front doorstep close by, smoking and watching the children as they play. She nods at the Agarwal girls and they nod back.
‘Remember when we used to play that?’ says Nina.
‘Seems like we played it yesterday,’ replies Anila.
Further down the road, Gary O’Connell lurks on the street corner with three other boys, all of them around a similar age.
‘Have you seen his tattoo?’ Kamela asks, gesturing towards Gary. ‘It’s a massive horrible swastika on his arm. Think he’s trying to tell us something?’
‘Idiot – we should give him one of those calendars from the temple with the Indian swastikas on, that would really mix him up.’
‘He used to be nice to me when I was a kid,’ says Anila.
‘You’re still a kid, bab!’
‘Piss off, Nina.’
‘I used to fancy him when I was in fourth-year before he shaved his head and became a thug. He tried to snog me once at a school disco.’
‘Yuk, Nina, that’s vile. Look at him with his stupid drainpipes and braces, and his ridiculous mates – look at that one wearing a Harrington in this weather – bloody idiots!’
A car turns sharply into the street from Nursery Road and Gary and the other boys have to move swiftly to avoid it hitting them. The car windows are all wound down and a familiar Northern Soul song blares out. The group of boys on the corner raise their arms up high and each sticks up two-fingers towards the driver, except Gary O’Connell who gives a Nazi salute. The car-driver shakes his head and laughs and, as he passes Nina, Kamela and Anila, he turns the music lower, slows the car, puts his head out of the window and wolf-whistles.
‘I fucking hate blokes sometimes,’ Kamela says and the girls turn into the alley out of sight.
The girls make their way to the Bomb Peck, find a shaded spot beneath a silver birch on the edge of the waste-ground and sit down on the uneven ground beneath it. Young boys play cricket with a tennis ball and a plank of wood directly in front of them and beyond that, towards the opposite end of the Bomb Peck, a group of shabby, dreadlocked men huddle around a ghetto blaster. The music is deep, rootsy reggae like they play at the late-night blues parties in the back streets of Handsworth and that seeps through open windows as a soundscape to the darkest of summer hours.
‘Are you all going to be okay when I go to Leeds next month?’ Nina asks as she stares at a young cricketer; he reminds her of Billy. The sisters all light up cigarettes and scan the scenes around them, eyes darting about to clock any unwanted attention or unsettling activity.
‘What do you care?’ Kamela says eventually.
‘Of course I care, Kamela.’
‘You’re going whatever, so what’s the point even asking?’
‘I’m just not sure Mom is too happy about it, what with Billy
and that.’
‘Don’t be daft, Mom is proud of you. I’ve heard her saying so to Brenda. It’s a big deal around here to even think about university, never mind getting a place, and Mom and Dad allowing you to go – it’s massive. I wish it was me,’ Anila says.
‘It might be you in a couple of years, Nils.’
‘Well, it won’t make much difference to us around here if you go or not, except me and Anila can have a bit more space in the bedroom when you take all your shit with you.’ Kamela speaks light-heartedly and Nina replies in the same spirit.
‘You’re so friggin’ charming, Kamela. Anyhow, I know you’ll miss me really – go on admit it,’
‘I’ll be glad to see the back of you!’
At the far end of the Bomb Peck, towards Brougham Road, Gary O’Connell and the other skinheads appear. They play football with a tin can and spit nervously in the direction of the group of black men with the ghetto blaster, seemingly careful to maintain their distance. One or two of the Rastas turn and glare at them but soon lose interest. The skinheads circumnavigate the Rastas and instead lurk around the much younger boys playing cricket.
‘They better not come near us,’ says Nina, shuffling herself further back towards the tree as Gary and his friends begin hissing at the cricket players. They pick on one particular boy, the wicket-keeper who is about ten years old and has a handkerchief-covered top-knot on his head. Two of the skinheads shove the boy from one to another and as they do so the top-knot wobbles precariously.
‘Leave him alone,’ the other young cricket players shout but the skinheads continue to taunt the boy until he begins to cry and then they sneer and grab at the handkerchief, pulling loose the top-knot in the process.
‘Yeah, leave him alone, you dickheads, pick on someone your own size,’ Kamela yells.
‘Don’t bother, Kam, they’re not worth it,’ Nina says, but Kamela ignores her and is on her feet and heading towards the skinheads with Anila trailing behind her.
The Handsworth Times Page 4