Anita and Me

by Meera Syal

  As he finally pulled back the gates, he was almost knocked over by the rush of villagers who shouted and laughed at full decibel as they pushed their way through, purses already being snapped open at the ready. I felt giddy with indecision, there were so many stalls that I did not know where to start. Tables groaned under mounds of lovingly-presented cakes, ‘Chocolate, fruit or fairy, dear?’, homemade jams, pickles and wines battened down beneath stoppers and corks, seasons of summer fruits and hedgerow flowers compressed into their little glass worlds, bric-a-brac galore, old war medals, Coronation mugs and plates, chamber pots filled with pansies, twenties costume jewellery heavy with chunky paste garnets and emeralds, miner’s lamps polished up to become coffee table conversation pieces, crocheted doilies in pastel shades (‘Lovely for the dressing table or vanity case’), old gramophone records as big as dinner plates, lacquered powder compacts with pressed flowers petrified under their glass lids, huge vegetables, cartoon-like in their size and colouring, marrows like rockets, tomatoes like small red planets, cauliflowers as bumpy as the surface of the moon.

  We found ourselves in front of Sandy’s soft toy display where quite a few of our neighbours had gathered out of a sense of loyalty as this was Sandy’s first year as a stallholder, and we all wanted one of our own to do well. Sandy stood shyly in front of a collection of stuffed toys which, at a distance, were charming, multicoloured fluffy shapes each with its own price tag attached. But on closer examination, I realised it was hard to tell exactly what each animal was supposed to be, as if they’d decided to play a joke after lights off in the Ark. This one could have been a giraffe, it had the markings, but its neck was too short and it had the snout of a pig. This one definitely looked like a horse, except for the bushy tail and pug face. There were several ears missing or extra paws attached, and Sandy stood nervously guarding her precious mutations as, gradually, the excited chatter of the Ballbearings women subsided into soft whispers.

  ‘It’s a bloody horse…in’t it?…Nah, it’s a lion, look at the feet, yer daft cow…Ooh, I wouldn’t like to cuddle up to this one, mind you, anything looks good after my Stan …’ Sandy licked her lips and patted down her hair, keeping up a fixed friendly smile. I guessed she had got up in a hurry because she had not got any make-up on, I hadn’t realised how many freckles she had as they were usually hidden under a matt finish of foundation. They were the colour of what I supposed her real hair must have been, shiny copper. From a distance she looked as if she was sprinkled with pennies. But without make-up she looked vulnerable and younger, for the first time I saw the downward tilt of her large blue eyes which gave her face a soft, bewildered expression. She glanced behind to check on Mikey who was slouched in a chair pretending to read a Whizzer and Chips comic which he held deliberately in front of his face.

  I ached for him; I knew the shame that was contracting his muscles and constricting his throat, the worst kind of shame engendered by having to hang around your parents when they were turning social embarrassment into an art form. I tugged at papa’s sleeve, but he had already guessed what I was going to ask him and shook his head. ‘We don’t need more clutter in the house,’ he whispered. Please, I silently asked him, don’t put Sandy through any more of this rejection. Uncle Alan breezed past, sending a shiver of delight through the Ballbearings women and called out, ‘Come on then ladies! Let’s support all our brave volunteers! We’re the hot tip to make the most money this year!’ Anything Uncle Alan said was taken as a saucy double entendre and Hot Tip was too good an opportunity for them to miss, so they began nudging each other and breaking into snorting laughter, Sandy’s stall already forgotten. But then a familiar voice boomed over their heads, slicing the laughter into slivers. ‘I’ll tek them two…no, mek it them four at the front, Sandy chick!’

  It was Hairy Neddy, or a neater, washed version of him, as he was wearing a jacket and tie with his jeans which he had ironed from the knee downwards. He ostentatiously waved a ten-shilling note above the ladies’ heads as he reached through them to claim his four unloved orphans. Sandy had sense enough to swallow her gratitude and look unsurprised at this gallant gesture, but Hairy Neddy was on a roll now. ‘Ey Sandy, yow’ll mek a packet today with these Space Gonks. Yow cor get em for love nor money down Wolverhampton. Even Beatties is sold out, they’m having to send down to London for more supplies!’

  Sandy nodded uncertainly, the beginnings of panic flitting over her face. But the Ballbearings ladies’ ears pricked up at this information.

  ‘What yow mean, Space Gonks? Am they famous or summat?’

  ‘Oh yeah!’ enthused Hairy Neddy. ‘Them am like these new educational toys, right. They look like lots of different animals in one, meks the kids use their imagination when they play. Me brother’s kids have been killing me over getting some, still, no worries now eh, thanks to Sandy …’

  The women digested this for a moment and then they began a flurry of purse-opening and grabbing at the toys excitedly. ‘Better get one for our Lorna, what with her birthday coming up…Well, that’s Easter taken care of. Pass us that dog thing, the blue one…Hey! I saw that un fust, gerrof!’

  Sandy just stood and watched this a moment, her eyes brimming. As she took the note Hairy Neddy was holding out towards her, he grabbed her hand and I lip-read his words as if in slow motion, the words I had lately been dreaming that some shadowy man would one day say to me. Hairy Neddy whispered, ‘Will you marry me?’ and Sandy, in response, burst into tears. As the women cottoned on to what was happening, they broke out into squeals and applause, bringing curious punters from all corners of the grounds, wondering what exciting bargain they were missing. My heart was pounding against my chest and I felt as if my lungs were full of hot thick air. I had witnessed one of the most romantic moments ever in my short life and I knew Anita would be pig sick when she found out she had missed it.

  I looked up at papa to see if he was similarly affected but he was concentrating on the apparently heated discussion going on between Uncle Alan and the Reverend Ince by the Raffle and Tombola stall. Mr Ince, our church vicar, a thin erect man with a shock of fuzzy salt and pepper hair, had a hands off approach to his flock. He confined himself to one sermon a week, on Sundays, and occasional outings to events such as the Fete where he could swan about in his hardly-used robes and take credit for all the backbreaking work his assistant, Alan, had put into our community. It was Uncle Alan who raised funds through sponsored events and door to door collections, who ran the Tiny Tollington’s Youth and Sunday clubs, who swept the pews and arranged the flowers in the church and encouraged various groups around the village to use the draughty church hall for their dances, bingo or parties. It was part of the accepted order of things, that Uncle Alan got his hands dirty and Reverend Ince kept his clean to shake with various dignitaries, but as Alan seemed cheerful enough with this arrangement, we never thought of passing judgement.

  But today, Uncle Alan was red in the face and veins stuck out in his temples, his fists were clenched at his side as he talked rapidly to the Reverend who simply kept shaking his head in response. I had never seen Uncle Alan with anything but a chipper grin on his face, and to see him so contorted with anger made him almost unrecognisable. Eventually the Reverend turned his back on Alan, whilst he was still talking, and walked over to join the Pembridges at the Homemade Wine stall. Uncle Alan took a moment to steady his breathing and then strode purposefully towards us to shake papa’s hand. ‘Mr Kumar! And Meena! Great to see you here today!’ His voice was the same bouncy back-slapping voice he always used but there were still sparks glinting in the corner of his eyes. Papa greeted him warmly; he always seemed to relax in Uncle Alan’s company and I once heard him telling mama what a ‘sensitive and educated fellow’ he was.

  ‘What did you think of Mr Pembridge’s speech then?’ asked Uncle Alan casually.

  ‘Oh, very um impressive. As usual,’ papa smiled back. ‘Although Mr Churchill is not particularly one of my heroes. But anyway …’

&nb
sp; ‘Why not?’ pressed Uncle Alan, suddenly alert, searching papa’s face as if wanting confirmation for something still forming in his head.

  ‘Well,’ paused papa, feeling slightly uncomfortable, ‘no doubt he was a great leader …’

  ‘But?’ pressed Alan.

  ‘Well, when Mahatma Gandhi came over here to visit, your Mr Churchill described him as “that half-naked little fakir”. But still …’

  Uncle Alan interrupted papa, a bitter smile twisting his lips, ‘Mr Kumar, he is not my Winston Churchill, and I thank God for that.’ And then he stalked off and disappeared amongst the crowds.

  Papa was pulling me gently away from Sandy’s stall around which a sizeable group had gathered, mainly female, all chatting animatedly and teasing the hot and sweaty Hairy Neddy who seemed to be in shock, the realisation of what he had just done freezing his face into a dumb smiling mask. I could tell papa felt uncomfortable amongst the Ballbearings women; whenever we came across them in the village he would always come up with some lame excuse to get away with the minimum of small talk, during which the women would flirt with him unashamedly, enjoying his obvious discomfiture. ‘Ooh an’t he got lovely eyes, Brenda…Yeah, just like that Omar Sharif…Ooh yeah, your missus is a lucky woman, yow tell her that from us, Mr K!’ Papa would always nod and smile politely but if he happened to be holding my hand, he would squeeze it so hard that my knuckles cracked together, and once we were home, he would retell his experiences to mama as if recounting a near miss in a nasty accident.

  ‘And then that one with the big teeth and purple hair winked at me! Of course, they are nice women and all that but honestly, are there no limits? And in front of Meena as well …’ Mama always listened to these close encounters with a satisfied possessive expression, secure in the knowledge that not only was her husband tasty enough to flirt with, but that the incident proved how lucky he was to have his own Indian wife whom he knew would never exhibit such loose behaviour in a public place. ‘They are harmless, Shyamji, just having fun,’ she would soothe him. ‘That is just their way of being friendly.’ And then papa would nod and kiss her cheek and she would wrap her delight close to her like a shawl.

  Papa was jingling his loose change in his jacket pocket and I knew he wanted to make his way over to the skittle stall. Papa loved gambling; I had watched him playing rummy with my Uncles, everyone sitting cross-legged in a huge circle on our carpet, their coins and tumblers of whisky at their knees, throwing down cards with whoops of triumph or dismay. Or I had followed him into penny arcades during shopping trips, when he would slip away whilst mama was taking too long over a purchase, and would watch him feed the one-arm bandits carefully, holding his breath as the tumbling oranges and lemons spun to a halt as if expecting a jackpot win every time. Whilst papa thought of himself as a rakish risk taker, I could see how hard it was for him to gamble without guilt by the way he reluctantly handed over notes for change at the penny arcade booths, or how hesitantly he would place his bets on the carpet whilst my more flamboyant Uncles would be flinging shillings and sometimes notes onto the floor with optimistic battle cries.

  Actually, papa won quite often. Uncle Amman was always saying that ‘Lakshmi mata must be sitting on your right hand, Shyam saab,’ as papa raked yet another heap of winnings into his lap. But for papa, every win was tainted by the memory of all those other times he had gambled and lost; this little war of sacrifice and gain plagued him every time, and I wondered why a man who had risked so much by setting foot in a foreign country with five pounds in his pocket and no friends to call on, could not simply throw caution to the wind and just let go. Later on, when mama had begun to treat me like a grown-up and had released nuggets of information about her and papa’s experiences in India that would have given me nightmares as a child, this battle between desire and duty made perfect sense.

  Of course, papa courted chance like an old friend; as a seventeen-year-old in a refugee camp who owned only what he wore, he could afford to decide anything on the flip of a coin because, at that point in his life, there was nothing left to lose and any gain, even the smallest anna, would be a victory. However, papa was not a recreational gambler, a rich man playing with his wealth for whom poverty was an unimaginable and distant maybe; he had lived, breathed and smelled it, and the prospect of returning there due to a miscalculated bet must have haunted him. It sat on his shoulder whilst he fed change into a Lucky Waterfall machine, shook its head and tutted every time he picked up his hand of cards and scanned the diamonds and hearts. And whilst his peculiar brand of fiery caution often irritated me, it was only because I had not yet realised how he, and everyone else of his generation, had taken enough risks already to last a lifetime.

  But today, he felt lucky, I could see it in the spring in his step and the way he kept patting his pockets, reassuring himself that he had the money to back up his ambitions. Besides, papa had won a bottle of whisky at last year’s Fete. ‘Coming, beti?’ he asked. I shook my head and pointed over to the fortune teller’s stall, ‘I’ll be over there,’ I said, hurrying off before papa cottoned onto the fact that Anita was already waiting for me, tapping her foot.

  I was surprised to see that this year’s fortune teller was not our usual Madame Rosa, alias Mrs Goodyear, a plump, ruddy newsagent’s wife from a neighbouring village. Mrs Goodyear considered her job as soothsayer to be similar to that of a jolly missionary; all single girls were told they would be marrying into unimaginable wealth with a handsome upright Christian man, all married men were reassured that next year would bring them promotion, status and a batch of sturdy sons, and anyone in between was advised to ‘keep working hard, read your scriptures, and all that you wish for will come knocking at your door by this time next year.’ Last year Sandy had complained to her that the only thing that came knocking was ‘the sodding rent man and the woodworm in my lav’, but none of us could have guessed that twelve months later to the day, someone would finally make an honest woman out of her, again.

  Although Mrs Goodyear had a polished, convincing patter and a few admirers who swore that she knew the most uncannily intimate details about them (strangely enough, all these punters were her best friends from the W I), she always had a bit of a hiccup when she came to read my future. As soon as she saw me approaching, she would clutch nervously at her upside down goldfish bowl and muster up a genial, almost convincing expression. ‘Meena duck! I was just about to knock off…My psychic energy’s running a bit low right now …’ However, she never turned me away and her prognosis was always the same; ‘Ooh yes, you are a decent obedient girl, although your dad’s a bit strict isn’t he? He’s only worried love, wants you to marry well …’ (I was all of six and a half when she first trotted this one out…) ‘But you will…I see a tall man, coloured like yourself, in a white coat …’ (Well it had to be a doctor, or the long shot could have been the director of a mental institute. And the nearest she could come to imagining a mixed relationship was a Methodist marrying a Catholic…) ‘You will do well at school, love, I see you in an office, or possibly on a bus …’ (I like to think she had once met an Indian conductor on the single decker into town…) ‘And you’ll make a lovely home for your husband and five children …’ (She must have read that in the paper, that we all bred like rabbits…) But in her limited terms of reference, Mrs Goodyear was only telling me what she thought I longed to hear, the future I deserved, and by golly she was going to give it to me because she thought of herself as a fair-minded woman and leaving me out of her act would have been plain bad manners.

  But the woman with whom Anita was chatting animatedly was a stranger, a mysterious stranger, I breathed to myself because she was dressed as if she had looked up fortune teller in the dictionary and chosen her wardrobe accordingly. She wore a floor-length purple robe decorated with silver stars and crescent moons, her wrists jangled with thin silver bracelets and tied around her head was a black bandana shot through with silver thread from which a fringe of dyed black, wiry hair protruded.
She had shiny olive-toned skin and small beady brown eyes and although her craggy hands revealed she must have been in her fifties, her face was as smooth and unlined as a young girl’s. She made me feel nervous, and then I realised that this was because she looked Indian enough to be one of my Aunties and it made me want to trust her.

  Anita did not seem to notice me as she was in mid-argument with the Mysterious Stranger. ‘Ow goo on, missus, you can give me a little go,’ Anita whined. ‘I’ve only got sixpence, honest!’ The woman shook her head and spoke in a weird lilting accent which seemed so foreign, she sounded like one of the sloe-eyed villainesses who popped up regularly in ‘Batman’ on television. ‘No darlink, I only work for a shillin’, you see? No more, no less.’

  Anita shot me a glare which made me fumble in my cardigan pocket; I only had sixpence for the whole Fete but she already had her hand outstretched, expecting it. Anita slammed down both our coins onto the ricketty card table, her voice high with excitement. ‘See? A shilling! See? Yow can do us both for that ey? We’m only nippers, after all.’

  The woman motioned us to sit, there was only one chair, which Anita took, and then in a fit of uncharacteristic generosity, motioned me to squeeze alongside her. The woman cleared her throat and suddenly took my hands in hers, turning them palm upwards and examined the clear dark lines, some of which, I was ashamed to note, were grooved with dirt. She nodded to herself and began, ‘You hef to watch your momma’s health, is not good. But there will be help soon. Help from over the seas, yes?’ I swallowed, my mind racing. I had not noticed mama was ill, just tired perhaps and ‘over the seas’ was a pretty safe prediction to fling around me. I began thinking of all the other things I could have been doing with my sixpence when she continued, ‘Success is written here, darlink, a good mind and a strong heart, but sacrifice too, you see, and guilt. You are under a bad influence, but you cannot break free. Soon you will hef to choose, darlink, and you will lose everythink before you can begin again. But it is for the best. Only you know what is the right think to do, you see?’