by Meera Syal
Which meant we were left with Karl and Kevin, the hyperactive twins, and their docile, long suffering sister, Susan, Natasha, Nathan and Nicky, the Keithley kids, and Tracey, Anita’s sister, their only qualification being they were all over five, under eleven, not fussy and most importantly, as pliable as putty. We established our headquarters in one of the old pigsties at the far end of the yard, nestled in between the various lock-up garages and potting sheds and surrounded by an angry expanse of waist-high stinging nettles. We did not devise an initiation ceremony, getting through the nettles without losing an eye was considered enough. Anita encouraged me to ransack our bike shed/bathroom and I came away with a couple of blankets, some cracked mugs and a few tins of tomatoes in case of a terrorist siege. Anita’s contribution was a pile of back copies of Jackie, a teenage magazine which formed the basis of my sex education for the next few years.
Up till then, I had been reading Twinkle, a comic aimed at those who considered Enid Blyton a bit avant garde, mainly concerned with the domestic tribulations of the elf and fairy population with an occasional risky foray into stories featuring cat fights between rival gymnasts or tuck box disputes in all-girl boarding schools. But Jackie was all about Boys; how to attract them, keep them, get rid of them (at least, the ugly ones), how to transform a boring denim mini-skirt into a wild disco outfit by using a few of your dad’s old ties and a tube of glitter, where highlighter actually goes, what Donny Osmond’s favourite colour was, what kind of chick attracted David Cassidy and why having spots was not a valid reason for suicide.
My favourite section was the comic strip story where the girl-gets-or-loses-boy theme was explored in a million different scenarios, all of them featuring a limpid-eyed, anorexic, blonde heroine (brunette if she was the independent type like a secretary or a champion showjumper) who cried as neatly as she kissed, which was often. On occasions they would feel morally obliged to feature a slightly unattractive girl who would get the guy (the same nymphet with a pair of thick glasses sketched-in which she would inevitably remove to reveal her true hidden beauty), but the girls still always looked like Sherrie or Anita to me.
Our gang, which we named the Wenches Brigade, soon established a routine of sorts; we would begin with a leisurely meeting in the old pigsty, the one nearest the park, in which Anita and I would leaf through the current issue of Jackie, doing the quizzes on each other, ‘How Do You Know If He Fancies You?’, planning our wardrobes and interior decor for the flat in London we would buy together when we reached eighteen, and eating sandwiches and biscuits that the Littl’uns had been forced to nick from their mothers’ kitchens. Then we would do the rounds of our kingdom, Anita leading, me at her side, and the rest of the minions in a disorganised chattering crocodile behind us. We would walk right to the end of the main village street, down the hill past Mr Ormerod’s shop (where Anita would stop off for supplies), the church, the red brick school, the Working Men’s Club, and back up the rise to Sherrie’s farm. There Anita and I would find a space in the long grass clear of dog shit and insects, and munch on sweets and talk, whilst our lackeys amused themselves with teasing the horses with ears of corn and conducting interesting experiments such as how far a two-day-old cow pat would travel when thrown by a small snottynosed child.
When I said that we talked, what I mean is that Anita talked and I listened with the appropriate appreciative noises. But I never had to force my admiration, it flowed from every pore because Anita made me laugh like no one else; she gave voice to all the wicked things I had often thought but kept zipped up inside my good girl’s winter coat. Her irreverence was high summer for me, it made me shed inhibitions like woollen layers until I felt naked and slightly embarrassed at the sound of my joy. ‘See er,’ Anita would drawl, watching one of the reverend old biddies from the Wesleyan Church Fairy Cake Committee trudge up the hill. ‘Er’s got a pouch under her coat full of shit …’ She was talking about Mrs Todd who never passed me without a radiant smile, and yet I giggled uncontrollably. ‘It’s true!’ Anita continued. ‘She had this operation, right, and her bum broke down so they had to move it outside her body. Into a bag. She knits pouches for it. The bag not her bum …’ I would gasp for air and wait enthralled for the next revelation, each one tilting my small world slightly off its axis so I saw the familiar and the mundane through new cynical eyes, Anita’s eyes.
Of course it was inevitable that Anita would get round to sex; it hung round her anyway like a faint perfume, what she gave off by the tilt of her thin hips, in the quizzical arc of an eyebrow, in her constant unhurried monologues about the boys in her school who all panted after her madly and whose desperation made her laugh. ‘There’s that David in 5C, he keeps sending me notes like…and keeps paying for me chips and buying me stuff.’
‘What stuff? Expensive stuff?’ I asked.
‘Oh yeah, rings, bracelets, last week he bought me a record…Judge Dredd…It goes, “Lie down girl, let me push it up, push it up, lie down…” Dead saucy he is but he’s gorra face like a cat’s arse so he ain’t gettin any off me…no way …’ And she would throw back her head and chortle whilst I pondered on the lyrics of the song and why they made me feel so uncomfortable and tingly at the same time.
Anita finally got round to explaining what those lyrics meant after the peeing competition we held one day when we were bored and feeling bad. It had started when Karl had declared he was ‘dying for a widdle’ and had picked his way through the nettles to find a convenient spot. Anita put her finger on her lips and beckoned the whole gang of us to follow him. I saw Karl holding what looked like a button mushroom in his right hand and aiming a steamingjet of pee at a clump of clover, making their purple leonine heads bend and dance. I squealed, Karl turned round and promptly sprayed Anita’s dog (I never called him by name), who must have thought his luck was in and attached himself to Karl’s leg, humping with unabashed gratitude. Kevin boasted he could hit the clover patch from ten feet and performed so impressively that we had to take shelter in the pigsty, marvelling at how versatile these boys’ mushrooms were. I did not feel embarrassed at all; I had known for ages that whatever boys had ‘down there’ was big trouble and not to be approached, but after seeing Karl and Kevin’s vegetarian-friendly offerings, I felt relieved and somewhat cheated.
Kevin was about to claim his prize of a remaining penny chew in our sweet hoard when Anita said, ‘Ay! Us wenches haven’t had a go yet, have we?’ Susan and I exchanged horrified glances; she was shy enough in normal circumstances and I reckoned the trauma of pulling her knickers down in mixed company could push her over the edge. Susan sidled off nervously, mumbling something like, ‘Me mom’s calling me, honest!’ and scampered through the undergrowth without a backward glance.
Anita called after her, ‘Chicken chicken! Yow better not come back again, Susan Archer!’ and roused us all into a halfhearted chorus of clucking which only served to make Susan run faster. Anita looked round at us, mockingly. ‘I’m gooing fust. I ain’t bothered.’ In one fluid motion she whipped off her panties, I caught a flash of smooth white thigh under her dress, and threw them at Tracey, who held them gingerly between a thumb and forefinger, unsure whether she was proud or mortified by her older sister. Anita squatted down near the clover patch and let out a little grunt before emitting a fireman’s hoseful of pee which, by arching her back and hips, she managed to direct squarely on target, laughing in triumph.
‘Yow’m nearer than I woz!’ shouted Kevin indignantly.
‘Well! I’m a girl! I’m allowed!’ said Anita, as if referring to paragraph three, section two of the Official Handbook of Mixed Pissing Etiquette, acutely aware that she had just defied nature and gravity as well as saving on a visit to the toilet. Karl and Kevin shook their heads in reluctant admiration, hands in pockets as they reassured their mushrooms that not all girls would show them up like this.
Anita slipped her knickers back on and pushed Tracey forward. ‘Your go, our Trace.’
Tracey snuffled quietly
, ‘I’ve got trousers on, Nita …’
‘Well tek um off then!’ yelled Anita, tugging at the waistband. ‘Don’t show us up!’
Tracey backed away and began fumbling with her buttons, trying to control the trembling of her lower lip. She opened the lop and edged her trousers down, the top of her legs looked like sticks of lard, thin without muscle tone, neglected. I shifted uncomfortably, I wanted to say, leave it, leave her alone, but she wasn’t my sister, was she? Tracey turned her back on the boys as she bent over to tug her trousers down further, and then Kevin and Karl began giggling manically, nudging each other and pointing.
‘What?’ called Anita, sniffing blood. ‘What?’
‘Her’s got a poo stripe!’ yelled Karl. ‘Her’s got kak round her bum!’
Tracey spun round, a faint but visible skid mark neatly outlining the crack of her cheeks. ‘I ain’t!’ she whispered. ‘Stop it! I ain’t!’
The boys glanced at Anita, wondering if they had gone too far, picking on the sister of their leader. Anita smiled at them and began the chant, ‘Poo stripe! Poo stripe!’ which they gleefully took up, doing a mad thumping dance around Tracey whose trousers had wedged themselves round her knees and were resisting all her frantic, tearful yanks. I did not join in, neither did I help her disentangle herself. I merely watched as she half hopped, half stumbled through the nettles, their green jagged edges pricking her bare flesh, leaving behind their stinging mottled red kisses. I had barely registered the state of Tracey’s underwear; I wished I had not seen what I was sure I had seen, the row of bruises around Tracey’s thighs, as purple as the clover heads, two bizarre bracelets perfectly mimicking the imprint of ten cruel, angry fingers.
I did not allow myself to dwell on this, I had to act quickly to prevent Anita turning on me. I squatted down, holding the leg of my knickers to one side, feeling my warm pee trickle down my leg, soak my socks and slosh inside my shoes. ‘Yow daft moo! Yow’m supposed to take yer pants off!’ laughed Anita, who was already eating her prize. The twins began hooting, I ran towards them making squelching noises, made a clown of myself to erase Tracey from all our minds. But they did not fool me. I had seen how in an instant, those you called friends could suddenly become tormentors, sniffing out a weakness or a difference, turning their own fear of ostracism into a weapon with which they could beat the victim away, afraid that being an outsider, an individual even, was somehow infectious.
As I wiped what I could off my legs with some dock leaves, I remember thinking that this group hostility seemed to be happening more and more in the yard recently not only amongst the children but around the adults too. They had begun whispering in corners whenever a stranger appeared, they had begun dividing themselves up into camps of differing loyalties, those who thought Mrs Keithley was a stuck-up cow, others who thought Deirdre was nowt but a fat slag. I had never noticed these undercurrents before forming the gang; all adults were open and helpful, all children potential playmates, all of us together in this cosy village idyll. This sense of suspicion had begun soon after the news that a new road would soon be running through the village, a motorway extension which would cut through the fields opposite the Mitre pub at the back of the posh detached houses and run parallel to the old mine railway.
This new road linking up the industrial estate some twenty miles away and the motorway to Wolverhampton had been discussed for years, even before we came to the village. I vaguely remember some hand-drawn protest posters appearing in Mr Ormerod’s shop window and Uncle Alan knocking on doors trying to whip up solidarity for a protest march which he had christened Tollington In Turmoil! Until someone pointed out that having T. I. T. emblazoned across your front might attract the wrong kind of support. There was a march, or rather a slow shuffle as there were not many participants who could make it up the hill without a motorised zimmer frame, letters were sent off to our local MP on church-headed notepaper with the usual arguments against destruction of the countryside and levels of noise and air pollution. The authorities did not exactly quake in their shoes faced with this polite provincial request and simply waited until everyone had almost forgotten about the motorway before moving the diggers in.
Besides, they wrote, in the only letter they ever sent back, didn’t we realise that Birmingham was about to explode with richness and vitality, Britain’s second city which would become the nation’s major conference centre once the NEC was complete, and wouldn’t everyone in Tollington want to be part of this Black Country Renaissance? It seemed to me that nothing was happening in Tollington, except children were turning into teenagers, teenagers were getting married and quietly moving away to where the jobs were supposed to be. Once there had been rumours that the old mine would be turned into variously a supermarket, a leisure centre, a baby clinic and a builder’s yard. But by now, most people had realised the old mine would remain exactly what it was, a crumbling monument to a halcyon past, and that the promised Renaissance had taken a diversion somewhere round Wolverhampton and missed us out completely.
Maybe it was the earth shifting under the motorway diggers that had brought all these tensions up to the surface. In any case, it certainly shifted something in Anita because after the Littl’uns had been called in for their teas and we sat together in the pigsty, huddled beneath an old bedspread, Anita told me the facts of life. I don’t remember her exact words, I was too busy trying not to seem surprised or appalled whilst awful, vivid pictures of all the people I knew with children turned cartwheels around my brain. ‘…And when he’s finished, he goes to sleep and yow have to wash in gin and vinegar if yow don’t want to have a baby.’
‘I ain’t never gonna have babies,’ I said quietly. ‘Not like that anyway. There must be other ways yow can have babies, using tubes and machines and stuff, ‘cos my parents …’ I could not finish the sentence. I had a baby brother at home, which meant they had definitely done It within the last few years and what was worse, I must have been in the house at the time. And then there were all my Aunties and Uncles, those women who would scream and blush at any Punjabi word which might vaguely be considered risque – items of clothing, any references to marriage, selected root vegetables, bedrooms…And my Uncles, those men who at the mention of childbirth or marital matters would harrumph self-consciously and gather in awkward huddles, clutching their whisky glasses like shields, silently praying for someone to crack a manly quip.
After a few nights of contemplation, when I suddenly became aware of every creak and shift in my parents’ bedroom next door and took to stuffing my quilt in my ears, I decided it was all a mass conspiracy. If this sex business was all wrong and dirty and they found it so embarrassing, why did they end up doing it? Everyone from Auntie Shaila to Mrs Worrall next door had managed to do it without throwing up so, I concluded, along with all the nasty bits, there must have been something good about the experience. Armed with this knowledge, a few days after Anita’s chat, I stole mama’s powder compact from her dressing table and begged Anita to make me up like Babs, the blonde pouty one, from Pan’s People. She used the whole pressed circle of Honey Beige on my face, and finished it off with a smear of Deirdre’s strawberry-tinted Biba lip gloss. Then we stood outside the Mitre pub and watched Sam Lowbridge and his gang down half-pints of sweet cider and flick ash at the tame geese who waddled around the pub garden, hissing like dying balloons. A couple of the lads noticed Anita and winked at her, one of them even gave her his half-eaten packet of cheese and onion crisps which she later pressed inside a copy of her mum’s Woman’s Own and kept in a biscuit tin in our den. Only Sam noticed me; he did a double take and shouted over, ‘Am yow feeling alroight, chick? Yow look a bit peaky.’ If only he had kissed me, he would have tasted summer strawberries on my lips.
Then I began wondering if any boy would ever notice me, the way that they always noticed Anita. I turned to my oracle for an answer, Jackie magazine I knew would tell me what to do. I feverishly scoured the ‘Cathy and Claire’ column to see if any of the other readers share
d my dilemma. The Jackie problem page was a revelation and somehow a relief; I had no idea there was so much suffering out there. But after a few weeks, during which I could not find one letter specific to my particular dilemma, I decided to write in myself. I composed the letter in our bike shed – I did not want Anita to know anything about it – helped myself to an envelope and stamps from papa’s supply which he kept in a carrier bag under the record player, posted it off all the way to London, and then waited.
My letter was published some three weeks later. ‘Dear Cathy and Claire, I am brown, although I do not wear thick glasses. Will this stop me getting a guy? Yours, Tense Nervous Headache from Tollington.’ The reply was not quite as detailed as I would have liked, but reading it in the gloom of the pigsty away from Anita’s prying eyes, I felt thrilled that Cathy and Claire had even bothered to write back. ‘Dear TNT from Tollington, You would be amazed at what a little lightly-applied foundation can do! Always smile, a guy does not want to waste his time with a miserable face, whatever the shade! P. S. Michael Jackson seems to do alright, and he’s got the added problem of uncontrollable hair! Most of all, BE YOURSELF! Love, C&C …’
But after the initial excitement of seeing myself in print, albeit anonymously, had worn off, it was replaced by a strange new feeling for which I yet had no name. I knew that all those Desperates from Darlington and Moodys from Manchester would grow out of whatever it was that was impelling them to write, or rather that they would eventually grow into the bodies they presently despised. I had never wanted to be anyone else except myself only older and famous. But now, for some reason, I wanted to shed my body like a snake slithering out of its skin and emerge reborn, pink and unrecognisable. I began avoiding mirrors, I refused to put on the Indian suits my mother laid out for me on the bed when guests were due for dinner, I hid in the house when Auntie Shaila bade loud farewells in Punjabi to my parents from the front garden, I took to walking several paces behind or in front of my parents when we went on a shopping trip, checking my reflection in shop windows, bitterly disappointed it was still there.