The Handsworth Times

by Sharon Duggal

  ‘When we were first married he used to scream out in his sleep. I never knew what it was all about. They were loud screams – repetitive and distressing cries like a wounded animal needing comfort from its mother. He had been howling in his sleep like that every night since our first night of marriage. I thought I might go deaf from it.’

  ‘Did you ask him about it?’ Brenda asks.

  ‘I had never slept in the same room as a man before – it is stupid but at first I thought maybe it is just what men do – they are so different from us. My brother Ravi used to talk a little in his sleep when he was small so I just thought it was something to do with men. Anyway, then I realised that was silly and thought instead that maybe he was remembering a past life in his dreams. You know? Some kind of trauma from another existence.’

  Brenda raises her eyebrows.

  ‘This can really happen, you know? I know it is ridiculous to you white people but it was even on the BBC. Anyway, it’s what we believe.’

  Brenda nods, bemused. She is only vaguely familiar with the concept of reincarnation and any talk of it brings to mind the image of a tin of sweet, condensed milk.

  Usha continues to speak.

  ‘Then, when his friend from the village came to stay with us from India one winter and Mukesh was out at work, he asked me if Mukesh still had the nightmares about his dead brother, as though I knew what he was talking about. I made him tell me what he meant. I never knew Mukesh even had a brother, he never told me – no-one had spoken about him and I just assumed they couldn’t have more than one child. Anyway, Mandeep, that was the friend’s name, told me that the three of them, Mukesh, Naresh, the brother, and he were inseparable as boys. They spent every day together playing cricket after school and in the holidays they played it tirelessly, extending the same game, carrying over scores for days on end.’ Usha continues to tell the story to Brenda just as Mandeep had told her.

  The final summer that the boys spent together was even hotter than usual in the Punjab. The sun beat down so hard it felt like all moisture had been wrung from the earth – the grass was scorched and shrivelled and felt like a coir mat beneath their feet. The sky was a permanent shade of cobalt blue and the fields had turned from a luscious green to such an intense straw yellow that the young friends found it hard to look straight ahead without screwing up their eyes tight and blinking like they were seeing daylight for the first time. Their sun-blackened legs ached, while the soles of their feet and the flats of their palms were hardened by the endless climbing, running and kicking of those hot days. Naresh had taught the younger boys how to climb an old shisham tree like monkeys. He cupped his fingers into a step and then heaved the smaller boys on to the most accessible lower branches. The tree’s mid-height leafy branches had become their favourite den. From here they threw stones into the school yard behind the garden, hitting the brightly coloured educational murals on the exterior walls of the schoolhouse.

  ‘I think Naresh was just a year or two older than the other two but Mukesh looked up to his brother like he was a god,’ Usha explains.

  ‘It sounds wonderful,’ says Brenda, ‘just how childhood should be. What happened then, to Naresh?’ she asks.

  ‘Once at a village wedding, Mukesh bet Naresh he couldn’t eat six adult portions of ras malai – you know the sweet you ate at Nina’s birthday party? You said it was like eating sugary cheesy sponge, remember? Anyway, Naresh won the bet but later that evening his stomach bubbled until he threw up pale green vomit all over their bedroom. The stale smell of milky sick lingered in their room for so long that after a few days their father dragged the beds up onto the rooftop and the two boys slept in the open air from then on.’

  ‘You’d freeze to bleeding death if you slept on a roof out here,’ Brenda interrupts. Usha ignores her and carries on speaking. Her words become more urgent.

  ‘That’s when it happened. Mukesh was just nine years old so Naresh would have been eleven, like Billy. One night in his sleep, Naresh rose from his bed and walked like a… how do you say it? A zombie, across the rooftop. Mukesh woke when he heard a noise but by the time he was awake enough to realize that the shadow moving across the rooftop was not an illusion but his sleepwalking brother there was nothing he could do. He yelled at Naresh to wake up and his screaming woke the rest of the house but it was too late – Naresh had somehow managed to climb on the balcony wall and before Mukesh could get to him he had fallen.’

  ‘Friggin’ nora,’ says Brenda, gripped by the story. She covers her mouth with her hand and Usha ignores her.

  ‘Mandeep lived on the other side of the small village but he said even he was awoken by the howl that pierced the village that night. It wasn’t just Mukesh screaming but the dreadful moans of the father and mother when they saw their first born son broken to pieces like that. Mandeep says that their mother never got over it – she couldn’t bear to see Mukesh’s face as he reminded her of Naresh too much. I think maybe they blamed him for not saving his brother. After that, Mukesh was sent away to live with an aunt in Ludhiana, a big city over thirty miles away. He stayed there for ten years, working in the fields and on the railways until he managed to save enough money to come to England.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Brenda says, ‘so that is what the screaming at night is all about?’

  ‘The screaming stopped the night Billy died,’ Usha says. Her eyes are glassy with tears now, ‘I don’t think even screaming can help him with this nightmare.’

  Chapter 13

  You were always the beautiful one,’ Anila says to Kamela. ‘All the boys fancied you at school!’

  The fraying, tartan photo album is open on Anila’s lap as she flips through faded images set behind protective transparent sheets. She sits in a dark corner of the attic bedroom, her movements measured like the gestures of an actor in a film being shown in slow motion. Across the room, Kamela darts around in preparation for the day ahead, one minute rummaging through a drawer of clothes, the next plucking her eyebrows over the table lamp.

  ‘It’s a wonder you have any eyebrows left,’ Anila says glancing up at her sister.

  The bright light of the lamp leaves purple floaters – thread-like fragments that dance in the space in front of Kamela’s eyes as she skips over to peer across her sister’s shoulder. It takes a few seconds for her retinas to readjust. Images of Usha and Mukesh stare back at the girls from the plastic pages of the photo album – blurred, monochrome figures, only vaguely familiar, like distant relatives from a far off era. The soft-focus faces gaze innocently at the photographer; they are young, unmarked by the passing of time, untainted by the tragedy of loss.

  ‘Look at this one’, says Anila pointing at a wedding photo. ‘Look at all his wavy hair – how much Brylcreem is in that? And that sharp suit. He looks like a Mod. Did they have Mods in India?’

  ‘It’s not in India, stupid. It’s Antrobus Road, Bibi and Nanaa’s house, they got married in the front room, remember? Mom is stunning, and so young.’

  The young Usha is beautiful. Huge, almond-shaped eyes stare shyly into the camera, the lids are slightly lowered. Her head and shoulders are shrouded in a delicate embroidered chunni and she is resplendent even in black and white. Both bride and groom wear garlands, Usha a fresh flower necklace and Mukesh a shiny heart hanging down across his suit and tie from a twinkly tinsel and beaded chain.

  ‘You look just like her,’ says Anila, ‘and I look like him.’

  ‘He was quite a handsome bloke back then, alright for someone fresh off the boat.’

  ‘Yeah, but I don’t want to look like a bloke, do I? Even if he is my dad.’

  ‘Well you don’t help yourself do you, Anila? You could do something with that hair and let me do your eyebrows. You’ve got lovely thick hair – I could straighten it with the iron so it’s like mine. Maybe if you wore a skirt or a dress sometimes…’

  ‘I’m not talking about clot
hes, Kamela. I am talking about what is handed down to us that we have no choice about. His big nose, bulbous eyes, shape of face and that.’

  Kamela pulls out a colour image of her own sixth birthday party.

  ‘Hey, look at this one,’ she says.

  In it she stands with Nina and Anila, staring out eagerly towards the camera, birthday excitement sparkling in all their eyes. The Agarwal girls are beside a covered dining table, red and white gingham topped by the centrepiece – a luminous pink and peach coloured iced birthday cake. In the background, Usha is in purple paisley against a wall of psychedelic green and orange swirls. Her hair is backcombed into a high bun on the top of her head and she holds a plump, moon-faced toddler dressed in navy and white on her hip. The photo is vivid, streaming out different hues from every centimetre as if the world had only just discovered colour, each shade a nugget of gold panned from the bottom of a dull riverbed, glinting against the drab of greyscale tin.

  ‘It was when Baba-ji and Dadhi-Ma were here from India. It was the day Baba-ji died. It is the first thing I can ever remember,’ Kamela says, turning away from the photo.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ says Anila, disappointedly.

  ‘You weren’t in the room, and anyway you weren’t even five by then. They had only been here a few days and then she had to go back on her own with his dead body. He just did it without warning, dropped down dead on the cold kitchen floor – it was the worst thing ever… until Billy. It was just after this picture,’ she says pointing to another image on the same page, ‘Dad, made me line up with them McNamara twins in the kitchen door so it looked like we were outside.’

  Two identical pink-faced girls scowl into the camera. Frilly, pastel party dresses fill the frame and the twins wear their hair in pigtails – straw-coloured Qs jutting out like symmetrical jug handles from the sides of their heads. Kamela stands rigidly between them, her arms straight down her sides and her long, dark hair falling forward from a lowered head.

  ‘They lived next door for a while. Mom was trying to be friendly by inviting them but they didn’t like me. They called me names, Paki and that, and their mom sprayed me with Glade air freshener once when I put a foot over their kitchen step. Those dresses got splattered in blood when he fell over. He cracked his head on the sink. It was a mess, blood everywhere, and them two screamed and screamed like we were torturing them. I only wanted to be friends but they were spiteful. Jealous, Mom said.’

  ‘You were Baba’s favourite, you were everyone’s favourite. I do remember that he was always cuddling you, giving you sweets and that. Nina still says that you got all the sweets when we were little. Everyone likes a pretty little girl.’

  ‘I always think of him on my birthday.’ Kamela’s voice changes, ‘I didn’t like him. I didn’t want the sweets. I didn’t even really care when he snuffed it except for the mess at my party. I’d never had a birthday party before. I felt sorry for Mom having to clean it up. And for Dadhi-Ma having to travel home with a corpse. I thought she would have to put it in the seat next to her on the aeroplane. Stupid, or what?’ Kamela pauses and walks back to her own bed. ‘You know it isn’t always good to be the pretty one,’ she says while carefully drawing burgundy lipstick across her mouth.

  ‘I only remember as far back as Billy,’ says Anila. ‘Like everything started and ended that day. Before that everything seems all made up, like it exists in these photos but not in real life, if you know what I mean? I wonder if things would be different if Billy hadn’t died.’

  ‘Like what?’ Kamela asks impatiently, still unsettled by the photographs.

  ‘Like not so bloody boring. Like Dad not being rat-arsed all the time and Mom not in a constant daze, cleaning like there’s no tomorrow… and Nina maybe phoning occasionally or even coming home once in a while and Kavi, well, Kavi being a bit more, you know, interested.’ She goes quiet for a moment and then says, ‘It’s strange without Billy – it’s like there’s a space that needs filling but we can’t fill it without him.’

  ‘Get dressed, Anila, stop being all miserable, things carry on and we have to carry on with them. Things change – bad things happen but you have to make it all better yourself – no one else will.’ Kamela checks her lips in the compact mirror and wipes around the edges with the tip of her finger before rubbing them together, puckering into the mirror and slipping it under her pillow next to the tweezers.

  ‘What, like you?’ Skiving college to hang around town all day,’ Anila says. ‘Don’t think I don’t know. I saw Debbie O’Connell and she said you had hardly been in since Christmas.’

  ‘Sod off, Anila. Anyway, get a move on or you’ll be late for school.’

  Kamela leaves the room with her canvas satchel flung across her shoulder.

  ‘Where do you go?’ Anila shouts after her. ‘Is it a boyfriend or what?’

  ‘Fuck off, Anila!’ Kamela says, slamming the attic room door shut behind her.

  Anila is dressed and on her way out the front door less than ten minutes after her sister leaves the house. It is unexpectedly warm for March, especially after the long winter, and the sun startles her, scalding the back of her neck as she pulls the front door shut. Directly across the road Elsie Meeson stoops to gather up silver topped milk bottles from her doorstep. A burning cigarette end hangs from her crinkled lips.

  ‘Morning,’ she shouts towards Anila. Her voice is husky, weathered like her sloping body. She is the oldest resident on the street. ‘Almost seventy-odd years I’ve lived on this street,’ she tells anyone who will listen, ‘Ever since I was a babby. Not like this then, proper English then. Clean like. Proud we were of this street, even if we only had an outside bog.’ Mrs Meeson wears a lilac candlewick dressing gown, scruffy like the curtains that hang in her front window. ‘Some fella on the radio says it is going to be a bloody hot summer again, like ’76. Right up your street, you lot, innit?’ She glares at Anila. ‘Can pretend you’re back at home and that, can’t you?’ Her tone is deadpan and Anila ignores her – it is an old cliché and Elsie Meeson says it every spring.

  Anila heads up towards the bus-stop at Villa Cross, already having decided to miss school and head to the Bull Ring instead, to window shop and hang around the library where she can pretend to be studying if anyone sees her.

  At the number sixteen bus-stop, half a dozen girls lean against a cracked windowpane on the side of the shelter. They each have a lit cigarette and a cloud of collective smoke rises over heads dissipating into a thin white vapour. Anila watches unseen as Kamela stands just ahead of the group and reaches in her satchel for her own cigarettes; she lights up and nods at the girls seemingly in recognition. The girls do not nod back but instead suck their teeth and throw cutting looks in Kamela’s direction. Anila sees her sister shrug her shoulders, turn her back and look up the road for the bus. Next to Anila an old man is wrapped in a dirty mackintosh. He spits a globule of thick, green phlegm into the gutter, missing her shoes by a couple of centimetres and she steps back in disgust. Ahead of her the girls snigger and whisper under their breath into their circle. The bus arrives and the tallest girl pushes past Kamela, jutting a sharp elbow into her ribs.

  ‘Hey,’ shouts Kamela, ‘that hurt.’

  ‘Good,’ the girl hisses, ‘that’s for looking down your nose at us. You Paki girls are all the same like that – think you’re so nice, cha!’

  Anila pushes her way to the front of the queue in time to hear Kamela respond,

  ‘What you going on about? Watch where you are going, can’t you?’

  ‘Alright,’ says Anila just as the bus arrives, ‘what’s going on?’ All the girls turn to look at her and at that moment the bus doors slide open and Kamela jumps on in front of the others.

  ‘Grow up you silly cow,’ Kamela says, looking back at the girls. She grabs one of the few vacant seats on the bottom deck. Anila sits in the only other remaining empty seat. It is diagonally behi
nd Kamela.

  ‘What the hell was all that about?’ Anila asks.

  ‘What the fuck you doing here, Anila? You should be at school!’ Kamela replies. The middle-aged man sitting next to her looks from one sister to the other and shakes his head. Kamela turns to him and snaps, ‘And you can stop bloody looking too.’ The man moves seats and Kamela shifts herself to the aisle-side to deter anyone else from taking the vacated seat.

  Anila speaks to the back of Kamela’s head, ‘If you don’t go to college, why should I go to school? It’s all messed up anyway – the teachers don’t care about us so what’s the point? Anyway, I want to know what you do all day in town.’

  ‘Sod off Anila,’ Kamela says.

  Kamela jumps off the bus as it pulls into a stop on the outskirts of the city centre, just before Chamberlain Square. Anila tries to squeeze past a pregnant woman so she can also make her exit, but before she can manoeuvre through the tight space the bus pulls off again. Instead, Anila alights at the next stop just a few hundred metres up the road and searches the throng of people for Kamela. She doesn’t see her, so heads in the direction of the familiar Our Price Records at the top end of New Street. After half an hour or so, Anila thinks she catches a glimpse of Kamela up ahead on The Ramp. She quickens her pace to catch up but her sister disappears into the crowd. A few minutes later Anila catches sight of her again, this time in the shop window of Boots the Chemist slipping a pile of lipsticks discreetly into her bag, unnoticed by the security guard or shop assistants. For the next ten minutes, Anila continues to observe her sister unseen, watching as she dips in and out of shops, acquiring unpaid for items along the way until finally she stops outside the Wimpy bar, glances at her watch and looks up and down Corporation Street anxiously. Anila steps back into the shade of the C&A entrance to watch and before long another girl arrives and she and Kamela hug as they greet each other. The girl is petite, her hair is spiky, bleached blonde and she is dressed in black in spite of the sunshine. Anila doesn’t recognise her but, with nothing better to do to pass the time, she waits until the two girls head off and continues to follow them as they walk back towards the library via the main road. They stick to this route until they reach Paradise Circus at which point they begin submerging into the myriad of graffiti-covered underpasses that tangle beneath the Ringway. Anila keeps enough of a distance to remain unnoticed. The girls walk in the cool of the James Watt Underpass with Anila trailing behind quietly. The hustle-bustle of the world above-ground comes to a sudden, gloomy halt once they are in the depths and for a few seconds it is silent and seemingly empty apart from Kamela and her friend. Anila is bemused as the two girls appear to hold hands and edge towards the wall. The blonde girl looks around and Anila retreats to conceal herself in the shadows before Kamela also glances in both directions of the underpass. The two girls embrace as they did at the burger bar earlier but then that embrace becomes something more intimate and they begin to kiss. Anila gasps. She closes her eyes but the scene ahead remains the same when she opens them a second later – two girls, one her sister, kissing like the men and women in the My Guy photo-loves. She is stunned but before she can gather her thoughts there is a shout from behind.