The Handsworth Times

by Sharon Duggal

  ‘Oi,’ the voice says, ‘you filthy bitches!’

  Anila about-turns as two of the girls from the earlier bus-stop incident run towards Kamela and the blonde girl, passing by Anila as if she doesn’t exist. Kamela’s friend begins running too, in the opposite direction. Anila stares at Kamela who seems frozen to the spot. Her sister stares back directly at her, she appears to be in a state of fixed panic.

  ‘Dirty slags,’ the voice is yelling down the underpass. The other girl joins in and it becomes a chant as they head towards Kamela.

  ‘Run! Shit, Kam, bloody peg it!’ Anila screams but it is too late.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ Kamela shouts at the girls who have cornered her. They are right up against her now. They push her between themselves like a ball and finally slam her against the cold, spray-painted wall. Anila sprints to try and reach her sister, but before she gets close enough to intervene Kamela has crumpled to the ground and the girls are running towards the exit of the underpass. Anila tries to pull Kamela up to a standing position but as she lifts her sister’s head she sees a wide red slash across the side of her face. Anila’s hand is covered in blood. She looks around for help as the echo of the two girls fades down the long, dark subway; the noise is accompanied by a pungent odour of urine and damp chalk and other smells Anila cannot place.

  ‘Bloody hell’,’ says Anila as she holds a barely conscious Kamela in her arms.

  ‘Swear you won’t tell.’ Kamela says weakly.

  ‘About the girl? You and the girl?’ says Anila.

  ‘Yes,’ says Kamela and she closes her eyes.

  ‘I swear.’ Anila whispers but Kamela’s body is limp and Anila knows she doesn’t hear. She props up her sister’s bloody face against her own chest and she waits, unsure of what to do.

  A copy of Seventeen magazine lies next to the bed. Anila picks it up and flicks through the glossy pages of flawless white faces towards the ‘Dear Jenny’ section at the back. The made-up misery of others distracts her for a moment or two but the problems are those of people that don’t seem to exist in her reality, or in any reality really. It is nearly 6am. She closes the magazine and watches as Kamela tosses and turns in the bed across the room. Anila buries herself into the peacock print pillowcase and pulls the bed covers taut over her head.

  Chapter 14

  A layer of thin dust covers the bottle green window sill of the classroom. Anila runs her index finger along it until her fingertip is coated in charcoal grey powder. She has an urge to lick her finger but she resists. Outside the window, beyond the school gates, a group of young men gather around the lamppost. A rather scruffy hatch-back car pulls up to the side of the small gathering and more young men emerge and begin unpacking a series of bulky items from the boot. From a distance, the men are indistinct in shades of khaki and taupe as they mill about, chatting to one another, seemingly jovial yet focussed on their task in hand. Anila watches the men and is mildly curious about the commotion they instigate until she becomes distracted by a pigeon in the middle distance. It is mangy and limps across the playground with one leg bent awkwardly beneath it. Anila wills it on as it somehow manages to struggle towards the thin border of hedgerow which provides the only hint of green in the concrete playground.

  ‘Anila, Anila, Miss Agarwal!’

  The voice is that of the English teacher, Mrs Tatton and as it rises in volume Anila is jolted out of her reverie.

  ‘Where are you Anila? You’re certainly not with Piggy and Simon and the rest of us, are you? You won’t pass your exams staring out the window the whole lesson. Page 151, read it out, now.’

  Anila thumbs through the pages of the tatty paperback in front of her. It takes a few slow seconds to find the page.

  ‘Simon’s head was tilted slightly up.

  His eyes could not break away from the Lord of the Flies hung in the space before him.’

  As Anila reads, there is shuffling and giggling all around her – just as there is every class.

  ‘Don’t know why I bother,’ Mrs Tatton mumbles under her breath.

  Anila reads louder in monotone, her listlessness enveloping each word.

  ‘What are you doing out here all alone? Aren’t you afraid of me?’

  The shrill sound of the school bell cuts the reading short and the noise level in the class rises to a din as the children clamber over chairs, jostling for bags and coats. Mrs Tatton turns to the wall and, with her back to the class, fumbles in her handbag and pulls out a packet of Embassy No.1’s. Anila closes the book with a sigh and straggles behind the other pupils out of the door.

  The group of young men outside have set up a trestle table by the wrought-iron railings. Laid over it is a red sheet daubed in black letters, the words read SELF DEFENCE IS NO OFFENCE. The shock of the words make Anila shudder – it is a thrill she does not recognise. The letters appear to be jumping out of the cloth and make for a bold splash of colour against the steely, impenetrable landscape that surrounds the school buildings. Anila is drawn towards the banner, pulled in like a paperclip to a magnet as she becomes part of the throng piling out of the iron gates away from the confines of the school grounds. As Anila joins a small group of others heading towards the trestle table, the men begin to chant.

  ‘Here to stay, here to fight.

  Handsworth Youth with all their might!’

  There is little difference between the ages of the men and that of some of the older school children and as the two groups move towards each other they blend into one amorphous crowd with only the variance in the uniform to set them apart. The chanting dies down and the men quickly shove leaflets into any receptive hands. The majority of the men are black but there are a few Asians too and Anila recognises at least two of the men including Aazim, a boy Nina’s age from the top end of Church Street, and Marcus, the older brother of Kavi’s friend Clive. Marcus nods in her direction and makes his way over to where she stands at the edge of the trestle table.

  ‘Alright,’ he says grinning, ‘how is your brother doing?’

  ‘So, so,’ replies Anila without meeting his eye.

  ‘I saw him not so long back, kicking cans, hanging out on corners on his own. Your mom know he is skiving all the time?’

  Marcus speaks in a sing-song voice, part patois and part broad Brummie like most of the younger West Indians around Handsworth.

  ‘None of your business really, is it?’ Anila shrugs.

  ‘You’re a feisty one, ain’t you?’

  Marcus smiles gently as Anila looks up, meeting his eyes for just a fraction of a second before she quickly averts her gaze.

  ‘What’s this all about then?’ Anila asks, snatching a leaflet from Marcus’s hand and staring down at it.

  ‘We are organising ourselves. Had enough of bloody Pigs stopping one of our youth every five minutes. The Government is ignoring the people of Handsworth and we don’t want to take this shit anymore, man. There are no jobs for us, no money and now they are allowing the NF to come into our areas and cause trouble – we need to organise or there will be another riot like when your Billy…’ He stops short of his full sentence.

  Anila stares at him coldly and flips over the leaflet. On the back is a rough pen and ink drawing of twelve black fists punching into the air. Anila likes the image. The ink of the photocopier is still smudgy and a dark residue seeps into the crevices of her fingertips.

  ‘Come to the meeting, we need some girls… maybe you can bring your mates, gobby ones like you? It’s West Indians and Indians together. Bring Kavi – I tried to get him before but he wasn’t interested, man.’

  An old man limps by. He walks past the school each day just as the school gates open and the children spill out around him. He barks at the small crowd with words that spray out a shower of saliva.

  ‘You lot should join the bloody army instead of hanging around here… you’re a bloody waste of space,
the lot of yous.’

  ‘Cha!’ Marcus mutters and winks at Anila. She walks away still holding the leaflet.

  Chapter 15

  Kavi strums the old guitar he bought for fifty-pence at a jumble sale two years earlier. It is still out of tune. He tries to perfect the chords to Layla after it plays out on the Mike Read Breakfast Show.

  ‘You shouldn’t play that shit, Kavi. That bloke was racist.’

  Nina is standing by the doorway of his bedroom. Kavi looks up and scowls.

  ‘What you on about, Nina? Sod off back to your fancy friends at that crappy university of yours,’ he says.

  ‘I’m being serious, Kavi. He’s a wanker that bloke. He said some proper shite things at the Odeon on New Street – you won’t remember – you were too young and that – but everyone talked about it at school the next day. He called us wogs and niggers and said we should listen to Enoch Powell and go back to where we came from – stupid prat – doesn’t he know that most of us would only have to get the number 83 back to Dudley Road Hospital? Anyway, it was all over the local news at the time.’

  ‘God, you are such a pain since you started uni, Nina.‘

  ‘I’m just saying! Listen to something good – The Specials, UB40, The Beat or whatever. Just not that racist git.’

  ‘Piss off, Nina, all your hippy black and white unite, rock against this and that crap isn’t for me. I like that song, and I like David Bowie too and isn’t he supposed to be racist as well?’

  ‘He used to be good, I suppose. He said sorry, didn’t he, for that? Said he was on drugs and it made him a bit mad, off his head and that. Not that it’s an excuse but at least he realised he was being a dickhead. Not like the other bloke – he never apologised!’

  ‘Study that at uni, did you? I don’t need one of your lectures, Nina. I like what I want to, so there. Anyway, what do you want? I thought you were out of here.’

  ‘I’m going back tomorrow, Kavi. That’s why I wanted to speak to you. You and Kam, well, Anila says you never go out the house anymore. Is that true?’

  ‘None of your business. You don’t really care about here when you are with all those students. They’re the sort that think they’re clever talking about people like us as though we are weird creatures in a zoo for you all to look at and discuss. I bet you don’t even tell them you’re from Handsworth, do you?’

  ‘Look Kavi, I can understand why Kamela doesn’t go out but you haven’t got an excuse and all I’m saying is you should be seeing your mates, playing football and that.’

  ‘No excuse? You might have forgotten, Nina, but see that bed over there?’ He points at Billy’s bare mattress, strewn with his own discarded clothes and school books, ‘Well,’ he says, ‘there isn’t anyone to sleep in that anymore. Billy has gone… dead! I don’t want to go out and pretend to be interested in football and shit when all I can think about is how he was here and now he isn’t.’

  ‘It’s been ages, Kavi. If you don’t want to go out fine, but can you at least try and get Kamela out? She needs to get out or she’ll go mad up in that bedroom. She might go for a walk with you – just to the Bomb Peck or something. I’ve tried and so has Anila but she might feel safe with you, you being a boy and that.’ She pauses for a response but Kavi ignores her. ‘And by the way, there isn’t a moment away from here when I’m not thinking about you lot – just because you leave a place doesn’t mean it leaves you, if you know what I mean?’

  Kavi picks the guitar back up and plays the opening riff to Layla.

  ‘Bloody hell, it’s Howard Hughes,’ Kamela declares as Kavi arrives in the attic.

  ‘What you on about, Kam?’ Anila says, looking up from her schoolwork.

  ‘Nothing, just you two should read a bit more, you know, something other than the Handsworth Times.’

  ‘What, like those crappy magazines you nick from Lavery’s?’ Kavi says. ‘Anyway, I know who he is, I’m not thick, I saw a thing on BBC2 and you can bloody talk – you’ve hardly been out this room for weeks. I just want a fag. Either of you got one? There aren’t any long enough nub ends – you two have had them all or Mom’s been and cleaned up already.’

  Kamela hands Kavi a cigarette from the half empty packet she had slipped away from Mukesh’s bedside table as he lay in a deep sleep the morning before. When her father awoke, he yelled through the house accusing Usha of throwing his cigarettes away to spite him. Kamela felt neither guilt nor remorse at this and instead pushed the edge of the chest of drawers against the door, teetered on the bed, lit up and blew out smoke-rings through the open skylight.

  Kavi mutters a desultory ‘morning’ to Usha as he passes by her whilst she is in the midst of dusting behind the television set. He goes out the back door and stands in the shadows of the alleyway smoking his cigarette and looking out onto Church Street. Across the road, Elsie Meeson is banging on the O’Connells’ front door. Derek opens it, naked from the waist up with a half eaten sausage in his hand. Before Elsie Meeson can utter a word he disappears back into his house and shouts loud enough for the whole street to hear.

  ‘Marie, it’s the old bag from next door for you.’

  ‘Soz, duck,’ Marie says as she arrives at the door.

  ‘Don’t soz me, lady! I’m sick of you gyppos making all that noise all the time. I can hear you all night shouting at each other and your brats screaming away. Well, I’ve come to tell you to keep it down or I’ll be going to the council about yous. And that lad of yours, can you tell him to keep it down when he comes in from his nights out boozing too? Sick of it I am. Couldn’t sleep a wink with all your noise.’

  ‘Now hang on you, just ’cos we’re Irish doesn’t make us gyppos, right.’

  ‘Bog Irish, that’s what you are. Tell that lad of yours to go and get a job, and that lazy old man of yours too. And tell them to stop nicking the milk from my doorstep while you’re at it. I know it’s your lot – thieving gyppos, that’s what you are.’

  Kavi moves closer to the alleyway entrance so he can get a better view of the women brawling. Up and down the street heads poke out of windows to witness the disturbance; some of the more brazen amongst the neighbours step out of their front doors and stand cross-armed watching as the commotion unfolds. Further up the road, Joey McKenna and the other boys stop their game of street-football to heckle and clap as the women become more heated.

  ‘Hey, don’t you call us bloody names, you old bag.’

  ‘My grandson, Martin, is the same age as your lad and d’ya know where he is? Well, I’ll tell you – he isn’t in the bloody pubs spending dole money on pints of Ansells. No, he is out in the Falklands defending our queen and country, like your boy should be. Shameful it is! Well hopefully Mrs Thatcher will sort you lot out – send you back to Ireland so you can scrounge there instead.’

  ‘Sheep are the only thing getting defended in the bleedin’ Falklands as far as I can see,’ Marie O’Connell says.

  Derek joins his wife on the doorstep. ‘Maggie bloody Thatcher? It’s because of her there aren’t any jobs,’ he says. ‘Do you think we want to sit around all day twiddling our fucking fingers without two pennies to rub together? Do you think men like me want to be idle? No we fucking don’t. Soul-destroying it is, not the bloody holiday you think it is.’

  Elsie Meeson drops the flickering end of her cigarette on the O’Connells’ doorstep and turns away.

  ‘Yeh, sod off back to your hole, you old slag,’ says Derek and then he addresses the rest of the street. ‘Show’s over you nosy bastards,’ he says before pushing Marie down the hallway and slamming their front door shut.

  ‘All the usual fun and games around here then,’ Kavi says to himself as he stubs out his own cigarette and emerges from the alleyway into the early summer sunshine. He makes his way up towards St Silas’ and Joey McKenna nods in greeting but Kavi ignores him. Instead, he veers left before he reaches the church an
d heads down the alleyway towards the Bomb Peck behind the houses on the west-side of the street. As he nears the waste ground, a voice behind him shouts his name. He turns to see Joey McKenna running to catch up with him.

  ‘Kavi, Kavi, stop a sec will ya?’

  ‘What do you want, Joey?’

  Joey is fourteen years old or thereabouts, a year older than Billy and a year younger than Kavi.

  ‘I haven’t seen you for ages, on the street or even at school and that.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I mean, since your Billy passed away and that last year, you’ve hardly been around.’