The Handsworth Times

by Sharon Duggal

  In the kitchen, Usha stands in the open back doorway. She listens to the familiar rhythms of The Clapping Song and Skip To My Lou as they trickle towards her from gardens further down the street. The singing is accompanied by the fresh, lively sound of young girls giggling. On the street in front of the houses, Joey McKenna and another boy race their Chopper bikes from St Silas’ Square to the bottom end junction with Nursery Road. Usha watched them for a moment earlier as she put a bag of rubbish out for the dustbin men to collect. The boys were wearing capped-sleeve tee-shirts and they gripped the handlebars tight, backs against the uprights, legs akimbo, freewheeling down the hill, whooping just like they had many times before with Billy in tow.

  ‘Furr…king nora, whahayeee…’

  They are still whooping now.

  Usha leans against the back door frame to steady her sleep-deprived body as she listens to the sounds around her. The day is startlingly light after the long grey days that have preceded it. The sky is a crisp and stark blue and seems as though it has been freshly painted onto the world.

  Kamela enters the kitchen and stares into the blank space, not noticing her mother at the back door. She has hardly been out of the house since the attack in the underpass a few months earlier. Her scar has faded and now resembles a small knotted rope across the edge of her cheekbone quite close to her ear. To conceal the scar she keeps a tress of hair pulled forward, twirling it habitually with her thumb and forefinger. She opens the biscuit drawer but finds only crumbs and a broken edge of a digestive at the bottom of an airtight Tupperware box. Back in the living room Kamela shoves Kavi’s legs off the settee, making room so she can sit down.

  ‘Get off, I was here first,’ Kavi snaps at her.

  ‘Get off yourself, you lazy sod. All you do is sit on the settee all day.’

  ‘And what about you? All you do is look in the mirror, picking at your scabs and feeling sorry for yourself.’

  ‘Fuck off, Kavi, you are so cruel these days. Anila is right – you are just cruel and bitter and instead of doing something to change your life, you just sit around having a go at everyone else.’

  ‘Kamela, do not use this kind of language in my house.’ Mukesh shakes out the paper and lifts it from his lap where it has lain as he snoozes. Kamela gives him a dirty look. Both children ignore him.

  ‘You fuck off, Kam. At least I can go out if I want to. At least I’m not scared of stepping out the front door.’

  Usha stands at the back door listening to the bickering which has now drowned out the external sounds of a sunny day. She returns to the kitchen, pulls on her rubber gloves and begins to rub at the steel pots and pans she has pulled out from the back of a cabinet. She thinks about Billy as she washes, remembering him as a toddler, pulling at her legs for her attention while she stood at the sink or the cooker.

  In the living room, the bickering continues. Kavi has increased the volume on the television and the theme tune to Pebble Mill at One blares out.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand, Kavi – not that you are bloody interested – it’s not my choice,’ Kamela shouts above the din.

  ‘Yeah but you are just letting them win by staying in the house all the time.’

  ‘Yeah, well I’m gonna go out in my own time. Anyway, take some of your own medicine,’ she says as she clips Kavi across the side of his head with the heel of her hand.

  ‘Ow, you cow! Fuck off out my space.’ He clips the top of her head back, careful to avoid her scar.

  ‘Your space?’ Mukesh says, edging the newspaper down a few inches, ‘Actually, this is my house and you are disturbing me. Can’t you see I am trying to read the newspaper?’ He raises the newspaper back up to obscure his face.

  The siblings begin to shove each other – Kamela prods Kavi with her elbow, he flicks her bare arm with his thumb and middle finger.

  In the kitchen, Usha stares at her own grey reflection in the dishes she has been washing and then, without thinking, she pulls off the rubber gloves and flings them to the floor before marching into the living room.

  ‘Shut up all of you. Shut up, shut up, shut up. I can’t hear myself think, I can’t hear anything except your voices swirling around in my head.’ Kavi, Mukesh and Kamela all stare at Usha as she continues her outburst. ‘Actually, you are in my space all of you. Kavi, you should be at school, Kamela, you at college and as for you…’ Usha turns and stares as Mukesh cowers behind the newspaper. She pulls the newspaper out of his hands, screws it up and throws it to the floor. ‘You,’ she continues, ‘you are no use whatsoever. All you do is drink and shout and sit around. Why aren’t you crawling back to that factory to ask for your job back? Have you no shame? What kind of example are you to these children?’

  ‘I am still being paid some of my wages,’ Mukesh says meekly. ‘Anyway, I have to wait for the tri… tribun… union thing in a…’

  Usha interjects before he has time to finish. Kavi and Kamela stare at her, both are speechless.

  ‘I can’t stand it anymore. I can’t stand you all lying around doing nothing, waiting for me to cook you food and clean up afterwards. And with what? There is no money, Mukesh. I have to scrabble around for discounts at the shops and wait until it is almost closing time so the vegetables are cheaper. I have even spoken to Brenda about getting some work in the sewing machine factory. Have you no shame?’ She repeats the question directly to Mukesh. ‘All you do is spend what little money the factory gives you on whisky and cigarettes when I can barely feed the children. It is embarrassing.’ Usha pauses for breath before carrying on. ‘I can’t stand it. And none of you even think to help with the housework. It is like something has died in each of you… and in me too,’ Usha sits on the arm of the settee. Her voice becomes softer, ‘I miss him so much,’ she says. Kamela links her arm through her mother’s arm as Usha carries on speaking, ‘This is stupid – I cannot allow this to carry on,’ Usha stands up, shaking her arm free. She turns to Kamela, ‘Kamela – you are going back to college on Monday otherwise term will end and you will never go back. You have already missed too much. Kavi, you are going to school even if I have to drag you there myself.’ She then turns to Mukesh again, ‘And you,’ she says, ‘well you know what you have to do.’

  ‘I’m not going,’ Kavi says and he walks out of the room slamming the door behind him.

  ‘I will try,’ says Kamela gently.

  ‘Thank you, beta,’ her mother replies.

  Mukesh says nothing.

  Usha leaves the living room, picks up the gloves from the kitchen floor and throws them into the sink.

  Chapter 19

  On the first anniversary of Billy’s death, Usha cleans out the wardrobe where Billy’s clothes still hang as if he might walk in one day and reach in to grab a tee-shirt or a pullover from the back hangers. Kavi sits hunched with his back against the wall, hugging his knees close to his chest, watching as his mother gently removes the clothes, folds each item and delicately places it in a neat pile on Billy’s now coverless bed. The faint smell of an ephemeral life seeps out, pervading the room as the clothes are disturbed. Usha lingers on Billy’s favourite garments, running her long fingers across the fabric and allowing fleeting memories of Billy to waft through her mind as if he only ever existed as part of her own being. Kavi stares blankly as Usha weeps, burying her nose into the musty wool of a misshapen Dennis the Menace jumper which she had knitted in stolen moments for Billy’s eleventh birthday. It has hardly been worn. Kavi pushes open the sash window, letting a damp breeze flush out the final sensorial elements of Billy from the house. Usha folds the last faded tee-shirt and places it on top of the small pile on the bed. And then, task completed, she cups her hand over her trembling mouth. Her startled face is like that of a small abandoned bird. Kavi looks on helplessly.

  Anila walks out of the school gates for the last time. All around her high spirits resound off the hysterical and sentimental good
byes.

  ‘See you at the baths in the holidays.’

  ‘I’ll phone you when we get back from me Nan’s caravan.’

  ‘Or-right – let’s meet up to on the Ramp this Saturday.’

  ‘You going down the Springford Disco this Friday? See yous there if you are.’

  Flour and eggs are tossed in the air. They combine with the summer drizzle and descend, clinging temporarily onto blazers and hair, before plopping to the pavement in clumps of sticky glue.

  Anila drifts past the shirt-signers, ignoring the conversations about keeping in touch and meeting up. She walks on towards Soho Road, beyond Lozells and into the heart of Handsworth without as much as a backwards glance. Her destination is an old warehouse on the corner of Grove Lane. It is ten weeks since her first encounter with Kash Ram and the other men from the Handsworth Youth Movement. She has been to every meeting with the group since then and it is to them that she now heads.

  Over the last few weeks the meetings have become more regular, particularly in the period leading up to the end of school. They now take place at least once, if not twice, a week. Slowly new people begin to attend – some because of the leaflets they hand out on the corner of Soho Road or outside the local libraries, others because they have heard about Kash on the grapevine. Some of the new recruits are girlfriends and sisters of the men but also other girls who, like Anila, have come out of a compulsion to do something proactive rather than wait for someone else to do it for them. After just a month the meetings got too big for the room at the back of St Silas’ and the warehouse, known as The Shoe, has become the headquarters for the Handsworth Youth Movement.

  To reach The Shoe, Anila walks past the synagogue, Guru Nanak Gurdwara and gaudy Hindu temple which all cluster around the grammar school on Rose Hill Road. Beyond the places of worship, the shops fall out colourfully onto the main high street that is Soho Road. As she passes the first set of shops Anila sucks in the smell of the garam masalas and ripe breadfruit that fill the air. Soho Road is full of life: down-at-heel men fester around pubs, suppressing the desperation of worklessness with cheap whisky and stale crisps, while older white-haired Pakistani men reek of the sharp-smelling beedies they puff in small groups around the benches in front of the library; behind them a group of young black teenagers sit on the library steps drinking Vimto. Older girls of all faiths and races drag younger ones in and out of shops while their mothers prod and sniff plump vegetables, looking one another up and down as they pretend to be checking out the produce. Soho Road is ablaze with colour – bright cotton dresses, shimmering salwar kameez and saris, African print dashiki and head wraps. The sounds of a hundred languages mingle with jangly bhangra and bassy reggae, filling the air with surprisingly congruous sounds. Beyond Soho Road on Grove Lane, the red-brick Edwardian houses look as if they still belong to a more affluent bygone era, but behind the unspoilt facades the affluence has dropped away as the former middle-class, white residents have retreated into the suburbs and smarter areas, wary of the new immigrants with their optimistic, anticipatory smiles, strange sounds and exotic clothing.

  ‘You know…’ Marcus says as he meets Anila on the way up to Grove Lane – their chance encounters have now become weekly arranged assignations – ‘… my mom told me that the year she came to Handsworth the white people marched down Soho Road with banners and shit ’cos Grove Lane school was getting too many ‘coloured’ kids. They thought all their little white babbies were going to turn black overnight or something, man.’

  Each time she approaches The Shoe, Anila imagines it busy with the labour of the immigrant mothers and fathers and other relatives of many of the young people who now attend the meetings alongside her. Now, most of the former footwear packers are on the dole, except for a few lucky ones who have found factory work beyond Handsworth around Hockley and Perry Barr. These days The Shoe is an empty shell, except for the Pentecostal worshippers who hold makeshift church services each weekend and the Handsworth Youth Movement’s increasingly regular meetings. Inside, the building is a wide, dim cavernous hall, cheered up with a coat of whitewash by the weekend worshippers. On one side of the large, corrugated doorway is a small table where Anila sits at the beginning of meetings collecting 10-pence pieces, names and telephone numbers from all those that attend. She marks down the information in a foolscap notebook and answers questions about future meeting dates from new recruits.

  Mid-way into the long, dull summer the atmosphere at one Wednesday meeting suddenly shifts from the determined, convivial camaraderie to something more urgent. There is a buzz in the room and when Anila enters, Kash catches her eye and smiles a half smile in her direction. Anila lowers her head coyly. Olive Benjamin, one of the few new female recruits touches her elbow. Anila looks up; Olive is almost dancing with excitement.

  ‘They are letting that NF baldhead scum march around here through town and down Constitution Hill next month. It’s too close, past Hockley Hill, It’s almost to the crossroads with Soho Road,’ she says.

  Kash begins to speak from the makeshift pulpit.

  ‘Now is our chance, we’ll show them we won’t put up with this on our doorstep.’

  The next day, Anila slips the hairdressing scissors out of Kamela’s make-up bag and into the back pocket of her jeans, pulling the bottom of her baggy sweatshirt down to conceal them. She makes her way downstairs to the bathroom, locks the door and stares at herself in the mirror. She begins to snip at the long tresses of hair which fall around her face. The hair falls into the sink in black swirls, cascading down the chipped ceramic bowl towards the plughole. For a moment, Anila has a memory of herself standing behind a three-year-old Billy, catching his fine, curly first hair in a white tea towel as it is systematically shaved off by a fat, jovial priest in his Mundan ceremony. She remembers Mukesh whispering to her sister Nina that this meant Billy could start a new life, free of previous incarnations, liberating him from the past lives which can remain with us as a burden. Anila chops away more and more of her hair until all that is left is a patchy crown of short cropped hair – a coarse black blanket on the top of her head. She removes the clumps from the sink, throws them in the toilet and pulls the chain before turning on the tap and directing any stray hairs towards the plughole. Then she stares at herself in the mirror; her eyes look wider and her nose is bigger than she’d thought. She is slightly alarmed with this new face that stares back at her. She sits on the closed toilet lid for a few seconds before opening the bathroom door and peering around the corner towards the kitchen.

  ‘Oh my god,’ Usha screams, when she sees the cropped head. She drops the saucepan lid she is holding and it bounces on the lino, spinning like a top before coming to standstill.

  ‘What have you done, Anila? You have made my beautiful daughter ugly.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Mom, it’s how we have it these days. You’ve seen Top of the Pops and that. Anyway, it’s a political statement.’

  Usha calms slightly and recovers the lid from the floor.

  ‘What do you know of these things? Going to meetings doesn’t make you a politician, Anila. You are just a follower, like the Hare Krishnas, shaving your hair and following what other people tell you.’

  ‘No, I’m doing something I think is right for once. Anyway, it makes me feel strong, not all weak like I am not expected to do anything for myself, like some housewife. I feel like I can do anything with my hair like this.’

  Usha moves towards the sink.

  ‘I have failed to protect you,’ she says, ‘and now you are all slowly drifting away one by one.’

  ‘I’m not drifting away, Mom. I am trying to change things around here, including myself. You’ve got to agree it’s no good as it is. And now the skinheads are back. We need to make it better or it’s all going to get a lot worse.’

  Usha turns her back on her daughter and rinses the pan lid under running water.

  ‘You too hav
e become a skinhead, Anila,’ she says.

  Chapter 20

  On Tuesday, the curtains are still drawn in the main bedroom well after 10am. The room is littered with the clothes Mukesh wore to the Black Eagle the night before and the garments smell of beer mingled with stale tobacco. The odour hangs in the air, trapped in by the closed door and windows. Usha enters and flings open the curtains which allow a flood of sunshine into the room. She opens the sash window but the air is warm and still and there is no breeze to dispel the smell so she waves her chunni to create one. The breeze is momentary and not enough to clear away the lingering odours.

  ‘Amrit is on the telephone, you need to get up Mukesh,’ she says, shaking her husband gently by the shoulder.

  ‘Go away,’ he says in Punjabi and Usha responds in their shared language.

  ‘Get up Mukesh. Speak to Amrit and make it right with work. Then you can start being a father and a husband again and not this thing you have become.’

  Mukesh pulls the cover over his head and sighs. Two minutes later he staggers reluctantly downstairs in the underpants and vest he has slept in. Usha stands by the bottom step with the phone receiver held out.

  ‘Huh?’ Mukesh grunts into the phone as Usha stands next to him.

  ‘Mukesh, how are you?’ The booming voice on the other end says, Listen, I have some good news.’

  ‘Good news?’ Mukesh repeats, rubbing his forehead with two fingers – not yet fully awake and his brain still fuzzy from alcohol-induced sleep.

  ‘Well, actually first it is bad news really,’ Amrit says more solemnly.

  ‘Huh?’ Mukesh says again.

  ‘Colin Boyle died.’ Amrit’s voice has now reduced to a whisper. ‘Heart attack in the Barton Arms last week. Pay day. He drank six pints of Ansells and fell to the floor, but it didn’t have anything to do with the drink according to his missus. It was the collection of dust in his lungs, she says, always coughing and complaining of chest pains he was. Anyway, he didn’t make it home that night.’