Anita and Me

by Meera Syal

  ‘What …’

  Nanima shushed me and carefully lifted Sunil’s wrist and tied the thread around it, murmuring a Wake Guru for good measure. It was almost lost in the bracelets of plump rolls, and glistened in between them like a knowing, slitty eye. I decided that this must be another of Nanima’s spells and trusted her brand of magic too much to question her further. But mama noticed it the next morning when she bathed him and said, ‘Mama! Tusi e Kala Dhaga Paya Si?’ Nanima harrumphed a ‘yes’ and mama rolled her eyes.

  ‘What?’ I pestered her.

  ‘Oh, these silly habits!’ mama sighed. ‘People think if your child is too beautiful or clever and gets praised too much, this thread protects you from the evil eye. Something on the body to make it less than perfect, you see? I never knew your Nanima was so superstitious …’

  But I noticed she did not take it off, and later on, feeling mortified at my own vanity, I raided mama’s needlework basket and tied some black cotton around my own wrist, as no-one else seemed to think I needed one.

  Mama and Nanima were also blessed with good influences, and rolled the long summer into a ball which they tossed between them lazily, going on outings nearly every day to the shops, the gurduwara, friends’ houses, wherever their whimsy led them, leaving me, I was overjoyed to discover, to entertain myself. The first time the two of them set out in the Mini on a major expedition to Wednesfield, my heart skipped a beat, seeing my poor unsuspecting Nanima squeeze herself into her seat, unaware of the ordeal she was about to suffer as a passenger in mama’s car. I comforted myself with the thought that mama never went above the average speed of a bullock cart and Nanima might actually enjoy getting a long careful look at the stunning industrial scenery. However, when they returned some five hours later, it was mama who was flustered and fatigued whilst Nanima fairly skipped out of the car, her trousers barely creased by the ordeal. ‘Your Nanima is a very naughty lady,’ said mama breathlessly. ‘Always telling me to go faster …’ Nanima rattled off a rapid Punjabi reply which I thought mentioned ‘angry people’ and ‘big hill’, and then repeated the new phrase she had picked up today, I feared, through constant repetition through a side window. ‘Bloody women drivers!’ she said.

  As for me, the summer had never seemed so deliciously long, so wonderfully hot, so blissfully carefree. I spent practically every day at Sherrie’s farm with Anita, and Tracey when Anita was in a good enough mood to let her attend, and learned how to groom Trixie, what tacking meant, how many ‘hands’ she was, where her withers were, why you had to stand up in the saddle when she stopped for one of her gushing steaming pees, and how to call her from the other side of the paddock with a soft sibilant whistle. In fact, I did everything for that horse except ride her; I don’t know why I had suddenly got cold feet, maybe it was a lingering memory from the last time I had got as far as the stirrups, just at the moment when the piddly poodle had met his messy end. But I was in no hurry to force myself into the saddle, I was quite content to watch Sherrie and Anita trot, canter, jump and gallop their tensions away. I could not even feel jealous of Anita; my contentment had made me benevolent, and so poetic was she on a horse, watching her was almost an act of worship. I don’t remember us quarrelling at all that summer, in fact we hardly talked at all, preferring to share a companionable silence as we raked hay or attended to Trixie or simply lay on our backs, chewing grass stalks and watching the larks perform their scimitar swoops of joy.

  I had expected Anita to undergo some sort of emotional crisis since Deirdre’s departure but she remained as brassy and belligerent as ever, somehow managing to delegate her trauma workload to her little sister, Tracey. Whilst Anita grew taller, browner and louder, Tracey became shrunken, hollow-eyed and silent, seeming less like a sibling and more like a fleeting shadow attached to Anita’s snapping heels. Whilst Anita took any opportunity to be out of her house – she’d been spotted eating toast on the swings as early as half past seven in the morning – Tracey began to prefer alcoves, entries and staying inside whenever her father was home. Her body clock adjusted to Roberto’s timetable, she would only venture outside after she had seen him onto the bus with the Ballbearings Women, and would suddenly excuse herself from whatever we were doing when it was time for him to return from work. She did not need to use a watch, she sniffed the air or checked the position of the sun and would march off without as much as a ‘see ya!’, duty and instinct pulling her home.

  I had assumed that Tracey and I had established some tentative bond, recalling how she sobbed into my shoulder in the back of Hairy Neddy’s van when we drove home after the farm incident. But she shyed away at my jolly attempts at conversation, and my offers to let her hold Trixie’s reins when I groomed her. Whilst I was a happy spectator, secure in my role as Trixie’s beautician, Tracey never enjoyed her sideline vigil. She stood apart from us resentfully, a silent, wet blanket ready to douse our flames, her eyes never leaving Anita’s sunkissed, fiery face.

  Everything started falling apart the day mama discovered that her diamond necklace was missing. She and Nanima had decided to spend a day clearing out the bulky suitcases that had sat on top of her bedroom wardrobes for as long as I could remember. I had always assumed this was some kind of ancient Punjabi custom, this need to display several dusty, bulging cases overflowing with old Indian suits, photographs and yellowing official papers, as all my Uncles and Aunties’ wardrobes were similarly crowned with this impressive array of luggage. Once, after I had heard papa and the Uncles getting very angry over someone they referred to as ‘That Powell Bastard with his bloody rivers’ and had added, ‘If he wants to send us back, let him come and damn well try!’ I had asked mama if the cases were ready and packed in case we had to escape back to India at short notice. She had got very upset, not with me but with papa whom she took to one side and hissed at. ‘You should not discuss all this politics-sholitics business in front of her,’ and then sat me down and explained, ‘We just keep all the things in the cases that do not fit into these small English wardrobes, that is all.’ However, I had noticed that everything in those cases had something to do with India, the clothes, the albums, the letters from various cousins, and wondered why they were kept apart from the rest of the household jumble, allotted their own place and prominence, the nearest thing in our house that we had to a shrine.

  But it was only when mama had been through all the suitcases that she realised what she had assumed was missing, was in fact lost. When she asked me if I had seen her diamond necklace, ‘…the one your Nanima gave to me when I got married …’, all I could do was shake my head dumbly. Out of all the bad, mad things I had done, losing mama’s necklace had been the worst, and the one I had dwelt on the least. I could handle being a thief, a liar, even a ruthless exploiter of my timid female cousins, for in all these scenarios, I had little sympathy for the victims of my crimes, but losing something that meant so much to mama, which I knew I would never be able to replace, cut me deeply. ‘You don’t think …’ Mama was slowly sifting through a snake’s nest of necklaces spread before her on her bed. ‘You don’t think…that night Anita was here …’

  ‘No!’ I answered, a little too quickly. ‘She wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘She tried stealing almost everything else in your bedroom,’ mama said softly, and then sighing said, ‘No. I am being unfair. She is a naughty girl, but not a wicked one. So it’s gone. Bas.’ Bas. The Punjabi word for finished, over, the end. Mama said something to Nanima who shrugged her shoulders resignedly, and then fixed me with a baleful stare. Nanima is a witch, I reminded myself, She knows. She knows.

  So it did not surprise me when the room began vibrating. Nanima is growling, I thought to myself, now she will grow until her head crashes through the roof, pick me up in a fist the size of a cow and shake the truth out of me until it hurts. But Nanima was looking beyond me, through the bedroom window at the sky. Now we could all hear it, a far-off rumble, as distant and rolling as thunder, but unbroken, and getting louder. We
were expecting to see heaving grey clouds heralding the start of another sudden summer storm. But all we saw was the clear blue canopy above us, suddenly filled with the flapping of hundreds of starlings who had taken hurried flight from the woods round the Big House. The Big House, in whose grounds somewhere, a diamond necklace adorned the feet of a pot-bellied god with an elephant’s smiling face.

  The grumbling sound seemed to come closer. Mama rushed to the window with Nanima following, scooping up a dozing Sunil from the bed on her way and gasped, ‘My god…what’s happening?’

  Nanima sniffed the air unconsciously, then muttered a silent ‘Wahe Guru!’ to herself as they appeared over the crest of the hill, the yellow motorway diggers as shiny and solid as tanks, a whole convoy of them whose caterpillar tyres seemed to chew up the road and spit it back out as they ate their way towards the centre of the village. ‘The school!’ mama breathed and I pushed past her and rushed downstairs.

  In less than a minute, it seemed the whole village had congregated on street corners, in gardens, hanging from windows and leaning on doorposts, to watch this unannounced metallic invasion. Everyone knew where the diggers were headed and there was no welcoming committee, just this awful silent resignation marked by folded arms and closed-off faces. Mr Topsy/Turvey spat on the pavement as the diggers rumbled past his gate. One old woman whom I rarely saw out and about, who was so ancient she looked like a pickled walnut with a white mop on her head, clapped and waved at the machines with great excitement. ‘Go on our boys!’ she shouted, and began a reedy warble of ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary!’ ‘She thinks it’s the army, poor old biddy …’ said the Ballbearings women to each other. ‘Still stuck in the war. Her old man never came back, you know …’

  Then another note joined the mechanical symphony, a buzzing staccato which counterpointed the diggers’ ponderous bass, and Sam Lowbridge’s moped gang phut-phutted into view, accelerating until they caught up with the diggers, weaving in and out of them like lazy horseflies, making the faceless drivers in their cabs shake their fists and mouth voiceless obscenities. Some of the villagers began cheering this showy sabotage, Mr Topsy/Turvey shouted, ‘Goo on, lads! Make em crash!’ Others, like Glenys, Sam’s mother, and some of the Ballbearings women, tutted and looked away in shame, unsure which of these two evils they ought to boycott. Then Anita was jumping and yelling herself hoarse next to me. ‘Kill em, lads! Put the boot in!’ And then halted momentarily and whispered to me, ‘Where’s Sam?’ I had been thinking the same thing; I recognised all of the other shaven heads, Craig and Baz and the ferret-faced one with the earring, but where was their leader?

  As if in response, an exhaust backfired spectacularly as Sam rode into view. He had souped up his moped with extra wing mirrors and Union Jack stickers, and had cut off the end of the exhaust pipe so it looked like a sawn-off shotgun and made an ear-splitting angry honk every time he accelerated. Anita had given up on the cheerleading, instead she was completely focused on the girl sitting on the back of Sam’s moped, the girl who had her arms firmly around his waist. I did not recognise her, she looked too groomed and posh to be from one of the surrounding villages, with her shiny auburn hair and pink pouty lips and skin-tight tailored jeans. However, she had obviously picked up some tips on local customs as she continually blew huge chewing gum bubbles which burst in sticky pops onto her face, and which she licked off with a pointed agile tongue. ‘Who’s the tart?’ enquired Anita.

  I shrugged. ‘Dunno. Don’t care neither.’

  ‘Come on!’ said Anita, shoving past me. ‘Let’s go and see what’s happening.’

  I shouted an explanation to mama who shouted back that I was to ‘keep right away from the machinery and stand by a grown-up!’ and joined the growing throng of curious villagers trudging down the hill.

  The tiny redbrick school building, still with its former pupils’ drawings taped unevenly to some of its windows, had been cordoned off by a barrier of white tape. There were quite a few bystanders, not just from Tollington, lots of mothers with prams and toddlers, some openly upset with hankies at the ready. There was a sprinkling of men also, some I recognised as the unemployed husbands of the Ballbearings women, who seemed to be unused to the bright sunlight and blinked rapidly like creatures emerging from hibernation.

  And then I saw the television camera, a bulky awkward contraption on its unsteady tripod legs, which stood next to a van with BBC OB written on the side. ‘Look!’ I nudged Anita. ‘That’s Gary Skip from the telly!’ Gary Skip was one of the reporters on Midlands Today, our BBC regional news programme. He was wearing a smart sky blue suit with huge lapels and a high-collared shirt, open at the neck.

  ‘Ooh, he’s dead short. He looks bigger on the telly,’ whispered Anita.

  ‘That’s probably why he’s wearing platforms,’ I whispered back, noting his heavily stacked cowboy boots which were already caked with grey-green mud. Gary was lighting a cigarette and offered one to someone I presumed was his cameraman, who declined and busied himself with checking his tripod and donning a pair of earphones.

  Then I did a double take; behind the white tape stood several burly workmen in donkey jackets and bright yellow hard hats; their foreman, a stocky jolly man, was deep in conversation with a bespectacled bank manager type in a suit, who was holding a clipboard. And he was Indian. He looked a little like my Uncle Amman, the same stooped body, slightly hooked nose, but much more hair, a surprisingly luxuriant quiff which was too rock and roll to be matched with a threepiece suit. There was a moment when he looked up and seemingly straight at me, although I could not be sure as his spectacles caught the sun and turned his eyes into fiery balls. But there was a sniff of recognition, a curious acknowledgement of passing strangers who might have once been friends.

  I turned round to tell Anita, but she had gone. I scanned the crowd quickly and spotted her picking her way across the mud towards Sam Lowbridge and his gang, who were all parked on a nearby street corner and making themselves comfortable on someone’s garden wall. ‘Nita!’ I shouted over the rumble of the diggers. ‘Come here!’ I was furious; she knew how I felt about Sam, hadn’t he been the cause of our first and only falling out? If Anita had heard me, she did not care, for she was already holding a semi-shouted exchange with Sam. But he heard me alright; he looked up towards my voice and I just caught the beginning of a broad smile when I jerked my head away. I had not looked at him properly, I had still kept my promise.

  Sam was calling me now. ‘Meena! Ay, Meena! Over here!’ A few of the mothers stared at me, unimpressed. I did not want them to think I had anything to do with the gang so I moved further away, closer to where Gary Skip was lining himself up in front of the camera lens, adjusting his fringe in its round unblinking eye. ‘Ready, John?’ he called to the cameraman who was now looking through an eyepiece, his brow furrowed in concentration, and gave him a thumbs up. ‘I’ll do me opening piece and then we’ll cut to the building being crushed or whatever. Get some weeping women if you can, yeah?’

  The Indian Bank Manager was leaving. He passed Gary Skip with a polite nod and began walking down the narrow leafy lane which ran down the side of the school. I wondered where he was going, and then remembered the bus stop about half a mile down that road where the fast double-deckers to Wolverhampton stopped. Why didn’t he have a car when he owned a suit? I did not like the idea of him sitting on a manky bus seat, getting discarded bubble gum on his pristine trousers. If papa had been with me, he would have gone up and asked him his name, where he was from in India, thrown out acquaintances they might possibly have in common. I had seen papa do this with many Indian passers-by on the street. But I did not have the language or the courage to carry on this ritual, so I let the Bank Manager go.

  Sam and his gang paused their shoving and horseplay for a moment whilst they watched the Bank Manager turn the corner and disappear from view. Something caught in my throat, a dust mote, an insect maybe, for a second I could not swallow. And then I jumped as the diggers’
engines started up with a muffled roar and the onlookers herded together instinctively, pulling their children closer to them, hunching their shoulders against the increasing decibels of noise. Gary nodded to the cameraman and began talking to the lens, muffling himself up exaggeratedly against the bellowing machines. He paused as Sam’s gang started up their mopeds. Their noise was a mere annoying buzz against the roar of the diggers, and he shot them a hard warning glance. ‘You get in the way lads, and I’m not going to be a happy bunny, okay? In three, John…three, two…I’m standing here in the little village of Tollington, a picturesque former mining village which today, becomes another victim of the local authority’s drive towards streamlined education …’ He paused dramatically as the diggers began rolling forward, their huge shovelling arms raised in a mock farewell salute. Gary quickly stepped sideways, knowing the camera would follow him and capture the drama unfolding behind him. He raised his voice, his tone urgent and alert,’…And as I speak the machinery is moving in to raze the Primrose Primary School to the ground, a school that has been standing in this lovely spot for nearly a hundred years…for many of the local parents, who have been waging a ten-year campaign against the closure, who now have to send their children to another school some nine miles away, this is a sad, if inevitable day …’

  His words were obscured by a gigantic crunching thud as the first digger made contact with the school and a whole wing crumbled in slow motion to the ground, throwing up mushroom clouds of grainy red dust. At precisely the same moment, the sound of revving moped engines seemed to encircle us, it was impossible to tell through the haze and flying stones where it was coming from, and suddenly, emerging through a dustcloud like a divine apparition, albeit on a scooter, Sam Lowbridge rode roughshod over rubble and mudslides, skidding and screeching and sounding his horn. He drove right at Gary Skip, making him leap for cover, then manoeuvred close up to the camera lens and yelled, ‘If You Want A Nigger For A Neighbour, Vote Labour!’ before hurtling away, the rest of his gang in his wake like midges following a storm.