Anita and Me

by Meera Syal

  Anita side-stepped her angrily, catching her arm and twisting it round her back. ‘Yow go home now or I’ll kill yow!’

  Tracey ran a little way off and then picked up a large stone and hurled it at Anita, missing her by inches. ‘Right!’ screamed Anita and ran after her, which is just what she had planned, judging by her whoop of triumph, and they disappeared into the bushes, their cries becoming fainter and further apart.

  Sam flicked his cigarette butt into the water where it died with a sharp hiss. I began inching my way from the tree stump, already calculating how many hours of sleep were left tonight, because Tomorrow I Have An …

  ‘Meee-naaa!’ Every hair on my neck stood up one by one in a long, lazy prickle. ‘I knew yow was there, Meena! Come out! I ain’t gonna hurt yow, promise!’ I stood up slowly, my arms felt numb now and I remembered that Tracey had gone off wearing my sweatshirt. Sam beckoned me over with a nod. I stumbled automatically down the slope of the rise and climbed another to join him on the overhang. He would not hurt me if I showed any fear. Tomorrow I Have …

  I sat down casually although my knees shook slightly, so I drew them together, a prissy maiden aunt pose — he would expect that. ‘So where you been, Meena?’ he asked in that soft drawl, as familiar as if we’d been chatting over the garden fence this morning.

  ‘I still live here,’ I said, and then I added, ‘You haven’t driven me out yet.’

  Sam arched his eyebrows, genuinely surprised, ‘Me?’ he asked. ‘Wharrave I done?’

  ‘Oh, I got your notes,’ I spat at him. The cold was gradually dulling every sensation including fear. ‘Supposed to frighten me away, were they?’

  ‘No,’ said Sam. ‘To bring yow back. I only wrote half of ‘em, the nice ones mind. Anita did the others, wouldn’t let me send mine on me own. She’s dead jealous you know. About us.’

  Sparks of recognition momentarily flew between us. I knew that weary bewilderment in his face, the resignation in his voice — all the consequences of getting involved with Anita, wondering why you hung around for more when every sensible part of you was saying get the hell out. But Sam under Anita’s spell? Surely it was the other way round? There were still traces of his weird magic in the droop of his eyes right now, in the curve of his scarred cheek, but with every passing second, the illusion faded, revealing strings and sleight of hand. For all his bluster, I had the feeling that Sam was truly nothing more than a puppet and the knowledge that he would never have the character to cut the wires made me furious, for the waste, for his cowardice, for both of us.

  ‘Those things you said at the spring fete, what were you trying to do?’ I tasted grit, maybe I had ground my molars into dust.

  Sam shrugged and dragged his heel along a muddy edge. ‘I wanted to make people listen,’ he said finally.

  ‘You wanted to hurt people, you mean!’ I yelled at him. ‘How could you say it, in front of me? My dad? To anyone? How can you believe that shit?’

  Sam grabbed me by the wrists and I sucked in air and held it. ‘When I said them,’ he rasped, ‘I never meant you, Meena! It was all the others, not yow!’

  I put my face right up to his; I could smell the smoke on his breath. ‘You mean the others like the Bank Manager?’

  Sam looked confused.

  ‘The man from the building site. The Indian man. I know you did it. I am the others, Sam. You did mean me.’

  Sam gripped my wrists tighter for support. ‘Yow’ve always been the best wench in Tollington. Anywhere! Dead funny.’ His face darkened, maybe it was another shift of the moon. ‘But yow wos never gonna look at me, yow won’t be stayin will ya? You can move on. How come? How come I can’t?’ And then he kissed me like I thought he would, and I let him, feeling mighty and huge, knowing I had won and that every time he saw another Meena on a street corner he would remember this and feel totally powerless. It lasted five seconds and then we heard the splash in the water behind us, then another, then a rock hit my recently broken leg and I gasped in pain. Anita was standing below us near the water’s edge, mechanically picking up rubble from the ground and hurling it wildly at our heads. Sam pushed me out of the firing line and I slid halfway down the overhang on my bottom towards the ground.

  ‘Nita,’ he shouted. She was muttering to herself scrabbling round urgently for more missiles. ‘You wanna chuck me for her? Her! Yow like her better? Her! Her?’ A rock hit Sam full in the face, he staggered back slightly, his boots slipping over the gravel, holding a hand to his nose and registering the warmth of his own blood. ‘NITA!’ he roared and raced towards her with his fist raised. And then there are only freeze frames: Tracey appearing from nowhere, leaping at Sam like a terrier; Anita following her up towards the overhang; Sam backing towards the edge, laughing at this absurd challenge; Tracey flying through the air, suspended in the moonlight, arms outstretched like wings, Sam dodging sideways; and then that terrible splash which sucked in half the night with it — and silence.

  ‘Trace?’ Anita said softly, after a pause. ‘Trace?’ Then frantic watery leaps, wading through mud and bulrushes, Anita’s harsh sobs, muffled as she fought off Sam. ‘Get her, Sam! She can’t swim!’ ‘Nor me! Nor me! Where’s she gone?’ ‘Trace! Our Trace!’ ‘Somebody!’

  I was already running, cracking my head on branches and snagging my bare arms on brambles. Where was the path, who was nearest, phone the police somebody, which was the way out, every moment on dry land is another one underwater, I Have An Exam Tomorrow …

  I reached the front door of the Big House, retching for breath, spasms gripping my leg. There were no lights on but I put my finger on the doorbell and kept it there and even if a woman with a warty chin and a broomstick opened it, I decided I would still ask for help. A soft glow appeared somewhere behind the huge oak door, I could see it approaching through the stained glass panel just above my head which depicted a mine with a pithead behind which a red sun was rising.

  ‘Oo is it?’ A witch’s voice, strangely accented and croaky.

  ‘Please! Please, a girl’s fallen into the pond! Please help!’

  There was a fumbling, then a series of about ten different locks being unbolted and eased back stiffly, then a pause and the witch’s voice demanded, ‘Oo are yoo?’

  ‘Meena…Meena Kumar! I live …’

  I could not speak any more, but the last bolt slid from its casing and an apparition appeared – a tiny woman who barely reached my shoulders was holding an old-fashioned oil lamp in her delicate hand. She looked eternal rather than old, carefully styled blue hair, spots of rouge on the still prominent cheekbones, a dainty mouth which bled pearly pink lipstick and those eyebrows, not her real ones, they had obviously been shaved off years ago, but two heavily-drawn lines which swooped right up to her hairline like two ironic question marks. ‘Ah, Mee-naa.’ She sang it rather than said it. ‘You live in the corner house, is it not? ‘ow is your leg, better?’

  I was too dumbfounded to reply, it was too much to take in, this designer witch who seemed to know everything about me.

  The house in which she stood which was now taking shape in the shadowy gloom behind her.

  The nearest equivalent I could think of was a house we had once visited in Ironbridge which had been preserved as a museum, with all the original fittings and decor from the turn of the century, and bad actors in suspiciously modern costumes and too much make-up, pretending they were the original Ironbridge family, and serving us tea and biscuits. The witch’s house was a veritable time warp; old, clumsy wooden furniture cluttered every available bit of floor space, ancient oil paintings and tapestries adorned the walls and the floors were dull wooden parquet which gave off a faint lavender smell. I did not see one electrical fitting anywhere, just occasional lamps standing on sideboards and a massive, ornate chandelier with unused candles sitting in its golden cups. No television, no radio — that meant no telephone.

  I began hyperventilating again. ‘Please, we have to get some help! Phone the ambulance, the police …’
The witch was walking away from me, taking the light with her. I stood in the dark of the doorway and wondered if I should just run home now, remembering that there was a phone booth opposite the house. And then I heard her talking in low tones to someone, there was a heavy click and I turned round to see her replacing an old-fashioned bell receiver into its cradle which hung on a wall. ‘They are coming, emer-gency I told them.’ She walked across to the foot of a large sweeping staircase which appeared to rise up in a graceful arc into thin air. “Arry!” she called up, beckoning me to come into the hallway and close the door behind me.’ ‘Arry! Accident at the pond! Bring Belle with yoo! Just like that other girl, what was her name,’ she muttered as she set off towards me.

  Jodie Bagshot. The name had been spinning around my head for the last, how long had it been, ten minutes, ten hours? Poor little Jodie who was pulled dead from the pond to the clicks of cameramen and the howls of her waiting parents who moved out of the village the very next day. That was when the rumours started, about the lifeless, mysterious Big House and the ghouls who haunted it, waiting for the next child they could pounce on and drag down to a watery grave. Now I really did want to leave. I inched backwards feeling along the grain of the door for a handle, touching only steel bolts and heavy link chains. ‘’Arry! ‘urry!’ the witch ordered, and I looked up and saw him, emerging from the shadows of the hallway.

  He must have been the former mine owner, he must have owned a lot of something as he walked erect and slowly, exuding an air of authority and gravitas, but the crags and jowls of his face showed he was also connected to the earth, a miner made good perhaps. He had a workman’s face and philosopher’s eyes, and in his shovel-sized hands he held the lead of a jumping spaniel. But all of this became secondary when he finally spoke. ‘Ckup Kar Kure, Thahar Jao Ik Minut! Get me a torch, Mireille.’

  My miracle was complete. The Big House boss was an Indian man, as Indian as my father, and he spoke Punjabi with a village twang to his dog. He was brown as a nut and possessed that typical North Indian Roman nose, and the gold signet ring on his little finger sported the Hindu symbol ‘OM’. ‘Namaste, chick,’ he said as he passed, patting me clumsily. He let the spaniel off the lead which shot off into the night, and he followed in lumbering pursuit like a grumpy bear.

  Mireille, a rather elegant name for a witch I thought, snapped into action and led me into a side room in which a hearty fire crackled and spat. She forcibly sat me in a highbacked leather chair and tucked a blanket around me which smelt of wet canine coat. I could make out that we were in some kind of study as a vast mahogany desk sat in a corner, piled high with papers and letters, some of them air mail blue, and an ancient typewriter sat in the middle of the mess, a half-finished memo in its jaws. And then I saw the books, thousands of them lining the walls from top to bottom, an armoury of paperbacks, hard covers, some leather-bound with cracked spines, others cheap and cheerful off an airport stand. Every one of them wore their dog ears and thumbed covers with pride because this was proof that they had all been read and appreciated.

  Envy and admiration swept over me; so this is what it was like to be rich. I had never been in such an opulent house before. I did not count my parents’ business friends whose detached show homes we sometimes visited; they had money alright, but it was spent on gold bathroom fittings and imported village objets d’art. Their books were glossy, on display and untouched. But this was how I would spend my money, hoarding books greedily in a quiet room where I could go and gorge myself without being disturbed, enjoying the privilege of never having to return a cherished, newly-discovered book back to a library again. ‘Yoo like the books? My ‘Arry is mad on them,’ Mireille smiled, placing my hands around a cup of hot cocoa. Harry did not sound a very Indian name to me; then I spotted the soft shiny briefcase propped up against the typewriter, the gold letters on the side caught the fingertips of the fire. ‘Harinder P. Singh.’ So ‘Er ‘Arry was a Sikh like mama.

  I jerked open my sleepy eyes. Mama and papa would be back now, they would be frantic with worry. To my shame I had not thought of Tracey since I entered the library. I had to get up, I had to get back to the outside world and face all the consequences of this terrible and strange evening. But when I tried to move, my body refused to co-operate; shock and cold had closed it down for the night and however loudly I shouted at it, it simply blew me a raspberry and turned over for a doze. And there was also Mireille’s voice, she had launched into a sing-song monologue which soon became a lullaby, she rocked me gently with her stories which came spilling out after so long with no one to talk to except ‘Er ‘Arry.

  ‘’Arry, he was so happy when your family moved here. ‘E said he was tired of being the only local colour …’Arry is so witty, yoo know. He did law at Cambridge, I was over from Paris studying Chemistry, we met and that was that as they say …’

  I wondered drowsily why this glittering international couple had ended up running a mine in the Midlands, and the mention of Cambridge reminded me that Tomorrow I Had An Exam …

  ‘Poor ‘Arry, ‘e was so brilliant and no one wanted him here, he got offered clerical work, can you imagine it?’

  Then I remembered that I still did not know what my papa did for a living, and that I really ought to be getting home.

  ‘And then his mad uncle, some maharajah type died, we went fou with the money, mad, cars, trips, furs for me, books and theatres and parties for him. Then ‘Arry and me we drove through this place one day, we were lost looking for Stratford-upon-Avon, and for us it was paradise.’

  How long ago that must have been, for Tollington to seem like heaven.

  ‘The mine was almost dead anyway, the owner saw us coming. ‘Arry tried to make it work but it broke him, and me also. But we did not want to go back to our families, we ‘ad travelled too far, we could not go back as…as failures. So we stayed.’

  Her voice was an echo at the end of an entry now. I wanted to prise open my eyes and ask her was it just shame then, that had kept them so hidden for all these years, wasting their gifts and zest for life instead of sharing them with people whom they could have inspired and entertained, for whom they could have been living proof that the exotic and the different can add to and enrich even the sleepiest backwater.

  ‘We ‘ave lived you know, through all of you, so fascinating, the tiny things that happen every day. We felt proud, like parents. There are not many places left like this now…And in here, we only needed each other. ‘Oo else would have understood us, strange creatures like us?’

  ‘Meena! Meena! Meena…Meena …’ Mama was shaking me so hard that I could feel my eyeballs banging against their sockets. She looked more angry than I had ever seen her, wild madwoman’s hair and scarlet-rimmed eyes, and then she broke into low moaning sobs and crushed me to her, wanting to absorb me back into her body where I was safe, where she could find me. I heard snorting from somewhere. I saw papa slumped onto a chaise longue, he was wiping his face with a hanky, bowed like an old old man, drained with relief. I was still in the library chair, but it was daylight, now I could see the faded flowers in the wallpaper and the dust motes rising from the thick velvet curtains. ‘Tracey,’ I said. ‘Have they found her?’ Mama nodded and burst into fresh weeping, burying her face in my shoulder now. ‘She…she was wearing your sweatshirt…oh my god, your sweatshirt …’

  Tracey had been pronounced clinically dead by the ambulancemen when they arrived at hospital. They had found her by following a single flashing torchlight beckoning them through the undergrowth, and discovered a strange brown man standing over his soaking wet spaniel and Tracey’s sodden body. She had been so insubstantial somehow, the current had rejected her like a piece of litter and she had snagged in the bulrushes, waiting to be dragged out by a dog’s strongjaws. ‘But they put her on this machine …’ You heard the same story being broadcast on every corner, over every wall and fence, every intimate detail shared out even to strangers, this near tragedy reuniting Tollington for one last brief affai
r. ‘And you know, gave her shocks like, electric ones, and her heart started up again. They thought there’d be like brain damage, but the water was so cold, it like shut her down for a bit. Like when you pop a joint in the top bit of the fridge. All they did was thaw her out.’

  Even if the village gossip had already reduced Tracey’s brush with death to a recipe card in the People’s Friend, the press saw it as nothing less than a modern-day miracle. ‘Tot Comes Back From the Dead!’ ‘Tracey Died For An Hour!’ ‘Tollington “Angel” Refuses to Die!’ By the time my parents had got me home, the village was already crawling with reporters and photographers who had set up camp in the Mitre pub, ordering lavish fried breakfasts and kidnapping any passing body for some juicy quotes and anecdotes about Our Tracey, as she was now known by everyone, especially those who had written her off as one of Deirdre’s no-hope daughters.

  I saw the whole giddy parade from my window, saw the Ballbearings women rush indoors when they spotted the reporters coming, and rushing out again, having quickly done their hair and slapped on some make-up, and then taking up casual poses in their gardens or on their front steps, as if they always did the dusting or weeding in their eyeliner and best frock. It seemed that the whole village had an opinion or theory as to what had happened, everyone stood around waiting to be asked or simply providing an audience to the lucky few who were chosen to comment.

  I heard snatches of these sound bites as I lay in bed, waiting for the violent shivering that had plagued me since I had realised that today I was supposed to have been sitting my eleven-plus.

  Mama and papa became alarmed at these shakes that began to rack my body. ‘It’s delayed shock! Get the doctor!’ mama had whispered to papa, but I could have told them it was blind, incoherent fury. I hated Tracey for coming to my door, hated Anita for speaking to me all those years ago when I sat on my front step eating stolen sweets, hated Sam for not being cruel to me so that I could have dismissed him long ago, and mainly hated myself for having completely forgotten all about it. How could I have been so stupid, to forget the chant that had carried me through last night, to miss this only opportunity to completely change my life? I saw everything crumble around me, every single daydream of wandering through the grammar school cloisters citing poetry, of my parents wiping tears away as I went up on a platform to receive yet another prize for Debating Skills or Most Graceful Netball Player, of sitting in the garden of our new bungalow being applauded by my Aunties and Uncles as the first family member to win a university scholarship and meet a future husband on the same day—all that potential, all that hope, all gone because I made friends once with Anita Rutter.