‘Oh bloody hell,’ Nina sighs before stubbing out her cigarette and standing up.
‘Piss off, Paki cows,’ one of the skinheads shouts as Kamela approaches them, hot-footed by her sisters. The skinheads turn their attention to the girls and the young wicket-keeper grabs the opportunity to escape, scooping up his handkerchief from the ground and running away as fast as he can. Some of the other boys do the same, dispersing in all directions, but one or two of the less daunted ones hang around on the periphery to watch the confrontation unfold. Kamela walks straight up to Gary O’Connell.
‘You idiot, Gary, you used to be alright once – what do you think you’re doing picking on little kids? Even your mom and your sisters are ashamed of you these days,’ she says.
‘Do you know this bitch?’ one of the other skinheads says. Gary shakes his head.
‘Listen, we’ve known him and his family since he was running around in a nappy with the rest of us on Church Street so don’t bloody pretend to not know what I’m talking about, Gary,’ Kamela continues. ‘In fact, he used to fancy my sister over there, didn’t you?’
‘Fuck off, Kamela,’ Gary says turning scarlet.
‘Yes, shut up, Kam,’ Nina adds, embarrassed as the skinheads all turn to look at her.
‘Let’s go,’ Anila says but one of the skinheads picks up a brick and holds it out towards her threateningly. She takes a step backwards.
‘Leave it,’ Gary says, and the others gawp at him.
‘I’m not letting some Paki bitch talk to me that way even if you are,’ says the Harrington-wearing boy to Gary as he shoves him aside to stand face to face with Kamela. She doesn’t flinch, instead she stares directly at him as he snarls at her.
‘C’mon, Kamela, leave it,’ Nina says, grabbing her sister’s arm.
‘Yes, come on Kam, they’re just idiots,’ Anila adds, grabbing Kamela’s other arm.
‘Oi, rasclaat baldheads.’
A holler comes from the distant side of the Bomb Peck and all four skinheads and the Agarwal girls turn to see a short line of Rastas stomping towards them.
‘Fuck this,’ Gary says, and starts to walk off.
‘You wanker, Gaz,’ the Harrington skinhead says.
‘Exactly!’ Kamela adds mockingly.
‘Bitch!’
As the Rastas get closer the skinheads glance at one another, unable to hide the panic in their eyes. The boy with the brick allows it to tumble out of his hand.
‘Go on,’ Kamela says gesturing towards Gary, ‘run away after your mate, back to your mommies and daddies before the big, bad, black men come and get you.’
The skinheads begin to run towards Gary and Kamela sniggers, ensuring it is loud enough for them to hear. She then turns to the approaching Rastas and raises a thumb towards them. The man at the front of the line nods reassuringly and changes direction, back towards the spot where the reggae music is still pumping out.
The girls light up fresh cigarettes and watch as the skinheads retreat into the distance and some of the young cricket players begin to emerge from behind trees and crumbling walls to resume their game.
‘Let’s get back, Jim’ll Fix It will be on soon,’ Anila says.
The girls head towards the alleyway that runs between Villa Street and Church Street and as they approach they hear a rustle behind a hedge of flowering bindweed in an abandoned garden adjacent to the arched entrance.
‘What’s that?’ Nina says and the others shrug their shoulders as they all instinctively link arms again. As they get closer, Nina points out a dark silhouette at the edge of their path and within seconds a bulky figure moves out of the shadows and into view.
‘Ah, it’s only an old bloke, probably the tramp that sleeps on the bench back there,’ Nina says, gesturing towards the Bomb Peck, and the girls carry on walking.
‘You didn’t really fancy that idiot did you, Nina?’ Anila asks, but before Nina can respond the old man is directly in front of the girls, opening his ragged coat and revealing himself to them. Anila screams. Nina grabs her hand and all three girls push past the man, knocking him sideways into the hedge.
‘Dirty old bastard,’ Nina shouts behind them.
When they reach the other side of the alley and are in the open, the girls lean with their backs against the wall of Elsie Meeson’s house and catch their breath.
‘Oh my god, did you see it?’
‘It was horrible… You’re right, Kam, some blokes are so disgusting!’ Nina says and all three girls start laughing. ‘C’mon then, let’s get home,’ she continues when they have composed themselves. ‘There’s too much going on out here and anyway, we don’t want to miss Jim’ll bloody Fix it.’
Chapter 8
Kavi can’t work out how the scent of a dead person can still exist, hanging in the air weeks after they have been burnt like an old box on a bonfire. How can it cling to clothes and waft out unexpectedly as if that body might still be alive, existing in the threads of the fabrics, trapped, invisible and without a voice? He thinks of his brother floating around, lost in space, alone and scared like Major Tom in Bowie’s A Space Oddity. He slams the wardrobe shut. It is ten weeks since Billy died.
Beyond the bedroom, the house stinks of Jeyes Fluid and bleach. In the kitchen, Usha is scrubbing the inside of a saucepan with a Brillo Pad. Pink soap suds ooze from the wet steel wool scourer and lurid froth bubbles across her bright yellow Marigolds. Her hands look like they should be on the cover of Never Mind The Bollocks – garish, Day-Glo punk hands – Kavi thinks as he brushes past her. She doesn’t look up. Beyond the cleaning products and the smell of sorrow that hangs about her like a shadow he detects a very faint hint of the coconut and cold cream he remembers from when he was young enough to bury his face in her bosom. He leaves by the back door, glancing at the back of the house which is wedged between other houses, stuck in the middle of a row of tiny red-brick dwellings on Church Street. The houses have one long zigzag roof and the same washing-filled back gardens – scrubby lawns and wild, unkempt bushes toppling over cracked brick border walls, marking out small stakes of territory.
Kavi makes his way through the narrow alley between the Argawal family house in the centre of Church Street and the Farooqis’ next door. He walks quickly towards the Lozells Road, avoiding piles of dog shit and discarded litter along the way. There is a dull ache in the pit of his stomach that somehow seems to be connected to the empty day that stretches ahead of him. Kavi crosses Lozells Road after reaching the top of Church Street and glances through the glass windows in the intricately carved wooden doors of the Royal Oak pub. Inside he sees the faces of jobless men sitting in groups of two and three, drinking cheap ale from chipped glasses. In the snug area of the pub at the side of the larger room, he sees older white women in faded clothes clustering around glasses of port and lemon, putting the world to rights. As Kavi kicks a crumpled Coke tin across the street, he hears a sharp sucking of teeth behind him.
‘Hey Kavi, man, what you doing hanging about here? You not going to school?’
It is Marcus, the older brother of a boy in his class.
‘Don’t ignore me, man.’
‘Fuck off, leave me alone.’
‘Listen, man, we all know you been through some shit yeah, but you going to get yourself into some serious trouble talking like that. I was just being friendly like, you know.’
‘Yeah… alright, sorry. I’m just not in the mood, okay?’
Marcus is suddenly side by side with Kavi. His short afro juts out from beneath his red and black tam hat and he smells strongly of patchouli oil.
‘So, how’s them pretty sisters of yours doing, man?’ Marcus says cheerily.
Kavi glares at him. Marcus’s body has teetered over an edge between adolescence and manhood and Kavi is a much younger child next to this wiry, square-shouldered boy.
‘Look man I’m g
oing down the Acapulco. Clive’ll be coming in a bit, after school and that. Wanna come? I got a bit of weed in my pocket – we can have a toke in there – you look like you need to chill out.’
Kavi shrugs his shoulders; he has nowhere else to go. He follows Marcus up Lozells Road towards Villa Cross, pulling his jacket collar up around his face as they pass Hardiman’s factory.
Inside the Acapulco the air is heavy with smoke. Kavi breathes in the familiar, muddy scent of marijuana as they enter: it is an ubiquitous smell in the cafe and some days the whole of Lozells smells like this. As the pungent smoke rides up his nostrils an undertone of cooking odours – chilli and juniper berry – travels down his nasal passage, burning the back of his throat. He splutters out a dry, hoarse bark and has to bend double to suppress the cough. An old Rastafarian man stands behind the counter and when Kavi coughs he turns and stares, flipping his thick, waist-length dreadlocks away from his face and over his shoulder. He fixes bloodshot, glazed eyes unflinchingly on Kavi and Kavi wavers on the threshold, allowing the cafe odours to dissipate into the street.
‘Shut that bloody door,’ someone shouts from the back of the room behind the pinball machine.
Marcus grabs Kavi by the elbow and ushers him to a Formica table at the far right of the cafe, away from the main window. The table is stained yellow with tea and coffee spills. The door swings closed behind them.
‘It’s alright man,’ Marcus looks directly towards the Rasta at the counter, ‘he is a friend, the one whose brother was killed in the riot,’ he adds and Kavi winces. The Rastaman nods respectfully in their direction, turns back to the crossword on the counter and slowly stirs his black tea with a dinner knife.
‘I shouldn’t be in here – you don’t want one of us in here,’ Kavi says when they sit down.
‘Don’t listen to that shit – this cafe is for all of us. There isn’t a colour bar, man. Look around.’
Marcus rolls a spliff. He tears a strip of cardboard from the edge of a Swan Vesta matchbox and curls it tight into a roach and shoves it into the narrow end of the joint. He lights the opposite end and draws on it, sucking in his face until it is so gaunt his cheekbones protrude as if two ping-pong balls are stuck up into the sides of his cheeks. He blows a huge plume of smoke behind him and passes the joint discreetly across the table to Kavi.
‘Listen Kavi, man, Clive said you haven’t been back to school this term. Does your mom know? It’s been nearly a month now since school started up again, man.’
‘It’s none of your business, Marcus.’
‘What do you do all day, Kavi… kick cans around? Hang around the record shops? Ain’t going to bring your brother back.’
‘Don’t talk about my brother,’ Kavi says as his face turns a shade of purple.
‘Look Kavi, man, I have brothers too, including a baby one, and I can only imagine how hard this is for you but you have to go on living. Make the most of your life.’
‘Make the most of it – make the most of what? What have we got here in Lozells or even in Handsworth? What have I got to look forward to, or you? Bloody teachers who decide we are thick before we even open our gobs just because our dads have an accent? And then what, the dole? A dead-end job like my dad who is already miserable enough for the whole family? Fuck off, Marcus, there is nothing here for me.’
‘Exactly – that is the point,’ Marcus pauses to sip his stewed tea. ‘Get a grip Kavi man, your brother wouldn’t have died that night if there was no riot – and there wouldn’t have been a riot if they hadn’t forgot about us, leaving us to live and die in shitholes like this. Leaving old women like my nan to sit in the launderette all day ’cos she can’t afford to have the gas fire on.’
Kavi hands back the spliff across the table. He feels giddy.
Marcus continues speaking.
‘He wasn’t just unlucky – THEY let that happen to him. If you want to get justice for your brother you better stop feeling sorry for yourself and set about trying to change things.’
‘What, like throwing a brick through Woollies and nicking all the paper plates and other useless shit?’
‘No, like standing up to be counted, man. Like joining the fight against those white baldhead bastards that are allowed to march past our houses and spit in our faces and tell us to go home like we have less right to be here than they do, or worse like the ones in suits and uniforms who decide we aren’t up to their stinking jobs as soon as they see us. Like not just hanging around getting stoned and moaning about it all.’
After a long pause, Kavi replies,
‘Nah Marcus, it’s more complicated than that. It’s not just a black and white thing. Look at my dad, do you know who he hates the most? People from somewhere called Mirpur, where our next door neighbours come from. He can’t even bring himself to look at them because they come from some village less than fifty miles from where he was born, which just happens to be in Pakistan. He is more racist than any of them. And whatever you say, you black guys don’t like us Indians. You think we have it cushy cos we work fifteen or twenty hours a day running crappy little shops that make no money. In a place like this everyone hates each other ’cos we all need someone to blame.’
Kavi gets up to leave. Marcus keeps talking.
‘When they say us black guys are pissed off with you lot – that is just divide and rule, man, and that Mrs Thatcher is making it all worse now by taking what few jobs there are away from areas like this so we turn on each other. We have the same enemies, Kavi – the system that allows this to happen and makes us feel so fucking useless. We have more important fights than fighting you skinny Indian dudes. You get it? We are all in this shithole together and some of us want to change that situation.’
Kavi stands up and heads for the exit, swaying as he walks.
‘Grow up, Marcus,’ he says as he tugs the heavy door open.
Marcus’s voice rises in volume,
‘Look, we are making a group, Handsworth Youth Movement, young people standing together against the Pigs and against the fascists like in other places – Brixton, Liverpool, even some of your guys up in Bradford, man. My uncle works in the factory, he is a shop steward and has got us some Union money to photocopy leaflets and that. Come to the meeting next week. Here,’ he says handing Kavi a crumpled leaflet from his pocket, ‘we are going to organise ourselves so we can make them listen to us.’
‘Nah’, says Kavi from the doorway, turning the leaflet over in his hands, ‘not for me, I got my own battles to deal with.’
Outside the Acapulco, Kavi screws up the leaflet and tosses it to the ground as a police car screeches towards Wheeler Street Comprehensive. The school bell has just rung the end of the school day.
Chapter 9
Hardiman’s Sheet Metals has had a presence on Lozells Road since the latter days of the Industrial Revolution. The main section of the building is Victorian and is the only part of the original structure remaining. It houses the makeshift canteen, toilets and offices all leading off dirty, grey halls. Originally the factory engaged in moulding metal into corrugated sheets for the new industries which were springing up all over England’s rapidly developing second city. However, since 1905 almost all the contracts agreed by the company have involved the huge Longbridge car plant on the other side of Birmingham. Hardiman’s was renovated in the 1950s, as part of the huge post-war expansion. Now the factory floor comprises windowless concrete blocks where over 400 men labour on assembly lines, welding stations and presses, each involved in his own section of work, never quite sure how his bit of metal will connect to the person’s next to him.
Mukesh began on the assembly line at Hardiman’s the year he came to England. The job had been lined up for him by a contact of his father’s younger brother before he had even arrived. He soon moved on to a more sophisticated machine where his job was to form small metal rectangles into coils and cones. For Mukesh, the action
of guiding metal through elongated rollers on this new machine evoked childhood memories of playing in the courtyard of his grandparents’ house in their village on the edge of Jullendur City. Dadhi-Ma would squeeze excess water from Baba Ji’s shirts by feeding the garments into the rollers of a mangle whilst he and his brother ran around her barefoot and mischievous, pulling at the clothes. For nine years he approached the forming machine with a reluctant anticipation brought about both by the monotony of the work and the random nostalgia it provoked. For the subsequent ten years, Mukesh’s role was to operate one of the factory’s huge soldering irons and, since 1979, to oversee the new apprentices as they got to grips with the heavy machinery. The time after Billy’s death was the longest interruption to this routine he had had since beginning work at the factory in 1960.
The beginning of Autumn is cold, not the Indian summer that has been promised. The foggy air in the morning hangs heavy and Mukesh has to drag himself away from the warm, musky smells of the bed long vacated by Usha. The bedroom is as cold as the bitter morning outside.
‘Bloody woman,’ Mukesh says, cursing Usha for not switching on the gas fire.
He rubs his brow with his thumb and forefinger and makes his way down the stairs, shivering in his vest and pyjama bottoms, his body still clammy from a restless sleep. He stumbles through the kitchen towards the bathroom, all the while propping his head up with the heel of his palm.
‘Anyone seen my bag?’ Anila hollers through the house from the top of the stairs.
‘Do you have to shout so loud all the time?’ Mukesh yells back up to her. ‘No bloody peace and quiet in this house.’
In the bathroom, Mukesh stares at the stranger in the mirror. His once handsome face is now worn thin and his deep set eyes sag around dark rings of sleeplessness. Behind his reflection he notices eruptions of blistering paint in the doorway.
‘Everything falling apart,’ he mutters, staring at his crinkled reflection.
The Handsworth Times Page 5