Читать книгу Anita and Me - Meera Syal, Meera Syal - Страница 8

A shadow fell over my T-bar sandals and I looked up to see Anita Rutter staring at me through squinted eyes ringed in bright blue eyeshadow. She broke off a twig from our privet hedge and thrust it under my nose, pointing at a part of the branch where the leaves were not their usual straight darts but were rolled up in on themselves, neat and packaged as school dinner sandwiches. ‘See them leaves?’ She carefully unrolled one of them: it came away slowly like sticky tape, to reveal a sprinkling of tiny black eggs. ‘Butterflies’ eggs, them is. They roll up the leaf to hide them, see.’

She stripped all the leaves off the twig in one movement and smelled her fingers, before flicking the naked branch at my ankles. It stung but I did not pull my legs back. I knew this was a test.

‘What you got?’

I held out my crumpled bag of stolen sweets. She peered inside disdainfully, then snatched the bag off me and began walking away as she ate. I watched her go, confused. I could still hear my parents talking inside, their voices now calmer, conciliatory. Anita stopped momentarily, shouting over her shoulder, ‘Yow coming then?’

It was the first day of the long summer holidays and I had six whole weeks which I could waste or taste. So I got up and followed her without a word.

I was happy to follow her a respectable few paces behind, knowing that I was privileged to be in her company. Anita was the undisputed ‘cock’ of our yard, maybe that should have been hen, but her foghorn voice, foul mouth, and proficiency at lassoing victims with her frayed skipping rope indicated she was carrying enough testosterone around to earn the title. She ruled over all the kids in the yard with a mixture of pre-pubescent feminine wiles, pouting, sulking, clumsy cack-handed flirting and unsettling mood swings which would often end in minor violence. She had the face of a pissed-off cherub, huge green eyes, blonde hair, a curling mouth with slightly too many teeth and a brown birthmark under one eye which when she was angry, which was often, seemed to throb and glow like a lump of Superman’s kryptonite.

Although she always had a posse of ‘littl’uns’ tagging after her, all saggy socks and scabby elbows, her constant cohorts were Fat Sally, a shy lump of a girl from one of the posh semis, and Sherrie, the farmer’s daughter, lanky and gamine, who, it was rumoured, had her own pony. I would watch them strolling round the yard, arms linked, feet dragging along in their mothers’ old slingbacks, and physically ache to be with them. But they were much older – ‘Comp wenches’ – and I never expected them to even notice me. Until today.

We stood on the corner of the crossroads a moment whilst Anita rummaged around for another sweet, tossing a discarded wrapper to the floor. I knew my mother would be picking that up later when she did her early evening sweep of the front garden path and pavement. We walked slowly, me half a yard behind, past my front door and along one side of the triangle of houses of which my house was the apex, past the long dark alleyways which led into our communal dirt yard at the back of the cottages.

I hesitated as we passed the first ‘entry’ as we called them; they always spooked me, these endless echoing corridors, smelling of mildew whose sides always seemed to weep and covered you with shiny scales and bullet black slugs the size of a fingernail if you bumped against them, running from daylight through night and then back into the safety of the yard. Anita suddenly veered off and turned down the entry next to Mr Christmas’ house, still chomping away.

Mr Christmas always dressed like it was midwinter; it had to be at least a hundred degrees before you’d see him without his muffler and V-shaped cardigan, standing outside his back gate scattering old cake crumbs for the starlings, his wrinkles creasing into kind smiles as they pecked round his carpet slippers. I knew Mrs Christmas was ‘poorly’, the yard had talked of nothing else when the news first came out some months ago.

I was not sure what was wrong with her exactly, but it must have been serious, the way the women huddled together over their washing lines, talking in whispers accompanied by much pointing to a general area around their laps, only referred to as ‘down there …’ I tried to listen in but it was as if there was an invisible volume knob which someone turned up and down at certain points in the conversation. ‘Course, they took her in and opened her up but you know, once they got to her, you know …’ Their voices would disappear, their lips would still be moving but only their hands talked, making strange circular shapes and cutting motions, which caused half the women to shake their heads and the others to cross their legs and wince in sympathy. Of course I asked my mum, the oracle, and she told me Mrs Christmas had got something called cancer, yes, she would probably die and no, it was certainly not infectious, poor lady.

Standing at the mouth of the entry, I suddenly realised that I had not seen Mrs Christmas for a long time. The last occasion had been the Spring Fayre, when Uncle Alan, the youth leader from the Methodist church, had sent us hapless kids round to knock on everyone’s door in the yard and ask them if they had ‘anything spare’ for the bring-and-buy stall. None of our neighbours liked giving anything away, materially or otherwise, and by the time I had reached the Christmas’ house I remember feeling completely demoralised. After two hours of knocking and being polite, all I had had to show for my efforts was a bunch of dog-eared back issues of the People’s Friend, two tins of sliced pineapples, a toilet brush cover in the shape of a crinoline-clad lady, whose expression was surprisingly cheerful considering she had a lav brush up her arse, and a scratched LP entitled ‘Golden Memories; Rock’N’Roll Love Songs with the Hammond Singers’. (And even that had been difficult to prise away from Sandy, until she had remembered it had belonged to her ‘ex-bastard’, as she called him, and flung it at me with a flourish.)

Worse still were the women’s expressions when they had opened up their back gates expecting to see Uncle Alan and found me instead. Uncle Alan was the nearest thing we had to a sex symbol in a ten-mile radius. He seemed ancient, at least twenty-eight, but he did have chestnut brown curly hair, a huge smile, an obscene amount of energy and a huge dimple right in the centre of his chin which looked like someone had got a pencil, placed it on his skin and slowly twirled it round and round on the spot. (I knew this because I had spent many a happy hour creating dimples in my arms using this very method.) We kids always braced ourselves if we saw him bounding across the yard from the vicar’s house, eager and slobbery as a Labrador, because we knew he’d be looking for volunteers for another of his good-egg schemes. ‘Well littl’uns!’ he’d gasp, rubbing his hands together in what he thought was a matey, streetwise kind of manner. ‘How about we get together and do something about this litter, eh?’ And the next thing you know, you’d be wearing one of his canvas aprons with ‘Tollington Methodist Times’ plastered all over it and picking up fag butts from underneath parked cars.

But we never said no; though we would rather die than admit it, we actually enjoyed trailing after him, gathering blackberries for the ‘Jam In’, washing down the swings in the adjoining park with Fairy Liquid, even sitting in on his Youth Chats every Sunday afternoon, in which we’d have two minutes of talk vaguely connected to Jesus and then get on with making up plays or drawing pictures or playing ‘Tick You’re It’ in and around the pews. Frankly, there was nothing else to do, as many of us were not privy to the big boys’ leisure activities which were mainly cat torturing or peeing competitions behind the pigsties, and he knew it.

‘Oh I could give him one,’ Sandy had once said to Anita’s mother, Deirdre, as they watched Uncle Alan leap across the yard. ‘Don’t he wear nice shoes? You can always tell a bloke by his shoes.’

‘Gerrof you dirty cow,’ said Deirdre. ‘He’s a vicar or summat. Yow wouldn’t get to touch him with a bargepole.’

‘He could touch me with his bloody pole anyday,’ said Sandy, dreamily, before both of them collapsed into screeching guffaws.

I had pretended not to hear this as I trailed after him with an armful of leaflets, but had mentally stored it away. At least I now knew what a sex symbol was supposed to look like, and could understand why I was considered a poor second choice when it came to donating bric-a-brac.

So by the time Mrs Christmas had reached her back gate, wheezing her way from her yard door, her slippers slapping the cobbles, I did not expect much of a booty. But she had swung the gate back and all I could see was her shock of white hair peeking over a huge armful of clothes she held in her hands.

‘Meena chick, I’ve been expecting you,’ she said. ‘Where do you want this lot?’

I had helped her pile the clothes into my wooden pull-along, parked at her gate (it had been an old play trolley of mine which used to be filled with alphabet building blocks. Perfect, my mother said archly, for door-to-door begging.) Mrs Christmas had straightened up carefully and I examined her face, rosy pink with delicate veins running from her huge nose like tributaries, surprisingly sparkling and deep blue eyes with an expression that made her look like she was always about to burst into laughter, or tears. She had looked healthy enough to me and I felt relieved.

‘You can have all this lot. I shan’t be needing it, chick. Not where I’m going.’

I had knelt down and rifled through the cart; there must have been at least a dozen dresses, all one-piece tailored frocks with baby doll collars, darted sharply at the waist, many of them with belts and full pleated skirts. But the fabrics, I could not take my eyes off them, all delicate flowers, roses and bluebells and buttercups set against cream silk or beige sheeny muslin, ivy leaves snaking around collars and cuffs, clover and mayblossom intertwined with delicate green stalks tumbling along pleats like a waterfall. It was as if a meadow had landed in my lap.

They were so different to the clothes my mother wore, none of these English drawing room colours, she was all open-heart cerises and burnt vivid oranges, colours that made your pupils dilate and were deep enough to enter your belly and sit there like the aftertaste of a good meal. No flowers, none that I could name, but dancing elephants, strutting peacocks and long-necked birds who looked as if they were kissing their own backs, shades and cloth which spoke of bare feet on dust, roadside smokey dhabas, honking taxi horns and heavy sudden rain beating a bhangra on deep green leaves. But when I looked at Mrs Christmas’ frocks, I thought of tea by an open fire with an autumn wind howling outside, horses’ hooves, hats and gloves, toast, wartime brides with cupid bow mouths laughing and waving their hankies to departing soldiers, like I’d seen on that telly programme, All Our Yesterdays. And then I had glanced at Mrs Christmas’ saggy belly straining at her pinafore, the belly which even then had been growing something other than the child she said she had always wanted but never had, and I had wondered how she had looked when she had worn all these frocks and whether I would have recognised her.

Mrs Christmas had rummaged in the front pocket of her pinny and brought out a furry boiled sweet which she popped wordlessly into my open mouth. It tasted sooty and warm. Then she suddenly leaned forward and kissed me. She did not have her teeth in and I felt as if she was hoovering the side of my cheek. ‘You’ve always been a smashing chick, you have.’

My face felt damp and I wanted to wipe it but realised that would be rude, and at the same time, suddenly felt desperately, bitterly sad. I managed to mumble ‘Thank you, Mrs Christmas,’ through the sweet and stumbled out of the yard, tugging my now heavy cart behind me. I had not wanted to look back but I had to, and she was still watching me across the yard. She had waved her massive red hand and I had not seen her since.

Before I could ask out aloud if Anita had seen sight or sound of Mrs Christmas lately, Anita chucked the packet of sweets, still half full, to the ground and began running down the entry, whooping like an ambulance siren. The echo was amazing, deep and raspy and rumbling like a dinosaur’s cough, it bounced off the high entry walls and made me shudder. She stopped, panting for breath at the far end of the passage, a stick silhouette, seemingly miles away. ‘Yow do it. Goo on then.’

I took a deep gulp of air and began running, gathering speed, opened my lungs and bellowed, no pattern or tune, just pure sound swooping up and down the scale, so much of it I felt it was pouring out of my nose and ears and eyes. The echo picked me up and dragged me along the slimy walls, the harder I shouted the faster I moved, it was all the screams I had been saving up as long as I could remember, and I reached sunlight and Anita at the other end where we both laughed our heads off.

Suddenly a gate scraped open beside us and Mr Christmas emerged in his vest and braces, his face blue with fury. His hair stood on end, straight up like he’d put his finger in a socket, and there was drool gathering on one side of his mouth. ‘Yow little heathens! What yow think yow’m playing at?’ he hissed. ‘I got a sick woman inside. Yow think she wants to hear yow lot honking around like a lot of animals?’ He was pointing a shaky finger at his sitting room window, the one that overlooked the yard. Through it, just visible, was the top of Mrs Christmas’ snowy head. It seemed to be propped at an awkward angle, it looked like she was watching the tiny black and white telly sitting on top of the sideboard.

I felt mortified, more for not going to visit Mrs Christmas than for shouting down the entry, forgetting that its walls were also the walls of half of the Christmas’ home. ‘I shall tell your mothers on you, that I shall,’ Mr Christmas continued. My belly contracted. That wasn’t good news, not today, when I’d already been exposed as a petty thief and a liar. My mother let me get away with mouthy behaviour and general mischief around my Aunties, she never had to worry about policing me because guaranteed, one of them would raise a fat hand jingling with bangles and cuff me into place, no questions asked. Scolding each other’s kids was expected, a sign of affection almost, that you cared enough about them to administer a pinch or nudge now and then. But to be told off by a white person, especially a neighbour, that was not just misbehaviour, that was letting down the whole Indian nation. It was continually drummed into me, ‘Don’t give them a chance to say we’re worse than they already think we are. You prove you are better. Always.’

‘Don’t tell, Mr Christmas,’ I pleaded pathetically, only just realising with shock that he had not got his V-neck on today. ‘We’re really sorry, aren’t we Anita?’

Anita had not moved or spoken. She was twirling her privet switch round and round in the dirt, her eyes unblinking and fixed. She sighed and said in a flat, bored voice, ‘Tell me mom. I don’t care.’

I gasped. This was treason. Why hadn’t I said that?

‘Right. I will then, I’ll go round right now…No, not now, Connie needs her medicine first, but after that …’

Anita was already strolling away, dragging her feet deliberately, a wiggle in her thin hips. ‘Goo on then. I dare ya. Soft old sod.’

The sky did not crack. It was still clear, blue, unbroken. Anita Rutter, the cock of the yard, had not only answered back a grown-up but sworn at him and invited him to tell the whole thing to her own mother. Mr Christmas’ shoulders sagged slightly. He turned his gaze to me, a hard look, unforgiving. ‘Nice friends yow’ve got now, eh chick?’ He shuffled back into his yard and slammed the gate. A moment later I heard the TV volume go up to full blast.

Anita was now outside her own back gate. Her little sister, Tracey, was sitting on the stoop, looking up at her with huge red-rimmed eyes, a plastic toy basket lay on its side next to her feet, spilling out a few scrawny, unripe blackberries. If Anita was a Rottweiler, Tracey had been first in the whippet line up in heaven. She was a thin, sickly child, with the same cowering, pleading look you’d get in the eyes of the stray mutts who hung round the yard for scraps, and soon fled when they discovered they would be used for target practice in the big boys’ spitting contests. Whereas Anita was blonde and pale, Tracey was dark and pinched, the silent trotting shadow whimpering at her big sister’s heels, swotted and slapped away as casually as an insect. Her dress hung off her, obviously one of Anita’s hand-me-downs, a faded pink frilly number which on Anita must have looked cheerful, flirty, and on gangly, anxious Tracey gave her the air of a drag queen with a migraine. ‘What’m yow dooing sitting out here, our Trace?’

Anita poked Tracey with her switch as she talked. Tracey edged further away along the stoop and wiped her nose with the back of her purple-stained hand. ‘Mom’s not here,’ she said, resignedly. ‘I went blackberrying with Karl and Kevin and when I came back, she wasn’t here.’

‘Probably gone up the shops, love,’ Hairy Neddy called over from his car.

Hairy Neddy was the yard’s only bachelor and, as Deirdre put it, just our sodding luck, the only available man and we get a yeti. When Hairy Neddy first arrived he looked like a walking furball, one of those amorphous bushy masses that the yard cats would occasionally cough up when the weather changed. As legend has it, the day he moved in he roared into the yard in his Robin Reliant, which at that time had NED DEMPSTER AND HIS ROCKIN’ ROBINS painted on one side, and on the other, WEDDINGS, PARTIES, THE HOTTEST RIDE THIS SIDE OF WOLVERHAMPTON. Except he’d miscalculated how long Wolverhampton was going to be and the TON was small and wobbly, squashed hurriedly against the side of the windscreen. Everyone came out to see who their new neighbour was going to be and was confronted by this vision of decadence, a plump, piggy-eyed man in tattered jeans coughing through the dust he’d churned up: at least they could hear the cough but couldn’t quite make out where his beard ended and his mouth began, as his flowing locks and facial undergrowth seemed to be one huge rug interrupted slightly by his eyes and nose.

Since then of course, The Beatles had come into ‘vow-gew’ as he used to say, and Neddy’s facial fuzz had disappeared, revealing underneath a surprisingly pleasant, blokey kind of face topped with a sort of bouffant hairdo that respectably skimmed the back of his collar. But inevitably the name Hairy Neddy stuck; first impressions were the ones that counted in Tollington, and he even adopted it into his stage act when he formed yet another band with which to set the West Midlands a-rocking. The Robin Reliant now sported the slogan HAIRY NEDDY AND HIS COOL CUCUMBERS, which of course gave the bored women in the yard lots of unintentional pleasure. ‘Come here our Ned, I could do with a good cucumbering today!’ Or ‘It’s hot today, Ned, make sure yowr cucumber don’t droop!’ or usually, just in passing, ‘Goo on, get your cucumber out, Ned, I could do with a laff.’

We only ever saw the other members of Hairy Neddy’s band, the Cucumbers themselves, on one occasion when the Robin Reliant had overheated and was lying in various stages of disembowelment in the yard. (I suppose Neddy was the one who ferried everyone around, but he’d tried to take the big hill on the way to Cannock at fifty miles per hour in second gear with all the equipment in the back and the ‘poor old bint’ had just died on him, mid-splutter.) On that day (it must have been last summer because I remember my hands were sticky from the Zoom lolly I’d just ingested in one gulp), a purple Ford Cortina entered the yard on two wheels and came to a halt beside Hairy Neddy’s back gate. I could make out two men in the front seats: they were laughing, each had an arm casually hanging out of the open window beside them, two male arms, hairy with surprisingly long, nimble fingers, and as they laughed, clouds of cigarette smoke billowed from their mouths.

The man driving sounded his horn: it played a tune I vaguely recognised, a rumpty tumpty, jolly sort of marching sound which made Mrs Lowbridge’s cat yowl and scarper into the innards of Hairy Neddy’s autopsied car and inevitably set the back gates a-swinging as various yard inhabitants poked their heads round to see who was bringing their bloody noise into their space. Hairy Neddy emerged a moment later, staggering under the weight of his Bontempi organ. He was wearing a smart blue jacket with a tiny string of a tie, ironed trousers which were supposed to go with the jacket but were obviously older and therefore a few shades lighter, and weird shoes, as long as clown’s shoes, but which ended in a kind of point. The two Cucumbers got out of the car and made whistling and ‘Wor!’ noises as Hairy Neddy did a mock pirouette.

‘It’s pure Troggs, Ned,’ said Cucumber one, a tall skinny, ginger man who did not seem to have any eyelashes.

‘Aar,’ said Cucumber two, a small fat man, blond and ruddy, his belly straining at his buttoned-up jacket.

‘Yow got to look the part, in’t ya? The wenches wet their knickers over a bloke in a suit, aar? Yow got to dress up before yow even get a feel of their tits nowadays …’

Hairy Neddy shushed him, indicating the crowd of kids, including me, who were now standing round them in a semi-circle, waiting for something to happen. ‘Giz a hand with this, lads,’ said Hairy Neddy, straining and puffing as they pulled the Bontempi between them to the boot of the car. Ginger opened it up with his keys and the three of them spent at least five minutes trying to wedge the keyboard into what looked like an impossibly tiny space.

‘Wharrabout the back, Keith?’ grunted Hairy Neddy.

Keith, blondie, shook his head, the veins standing out in his temples as he turned redder, shifting the weight around fruitlessly. ‘Got me Fender back there, and Wayne’s drumkit. Took us three hours to unscrew that, and all.’

Sandy looked up from hanging her lacy bras out on her line and shouted, ‘Ey Ned, yow shouldn’t have such a big organ, should yow?’

Suddenly. Kev lost his grip and the Bontempi slipped lower, Hairy Neddy grabbed at it and the yard was suddenly filled with the pulsing electronic rhythm of a bossa nova. All of us kids gasped a moment and instinctively jumped back, then a few of the older lads started laughing. Sam Lowbridge, the wild boy of the yard (he’d already been up for shoplifting and nicking bikes), started doing a mock sexy dance, thrusting his hips and making boob shapes with his hands round his chest and pretty soon, all of us were gyrating around to the fabulous sound of Bontempi. Little did I know this was the nearest I’d get to a disco for the next ten years.

Hairy Neddy left the sound on whilst they tried various kamasutra positions for his organ. Whilst they pulled, pushed and swore, we jumped and jiggled to what seemed like a hundred different beats, the waltz, the samba, the jazz riff, the African drums, until we and the Cucumbers were all out of breath and still nowhere near getting to their gig. ‘We’ll have to drive with the boot open. We ain’t got no choice, lads.’

‘Got some rope then?’

Hairy Neddy shook his head sorrowfully and sunk to the dirt floor.

‘Bugger. I ain’t missed a gig in ten years, not even that time I had that infection and I was coughing up stones …’ He looked as if he was going to weep. All us kids fell silent. It wasn’t fair, I thought, a man with so much talent, so much to offer, who lived for giving people the kind of pleasure and release he’d just given us, and he couldn’t get to his party because of a stupid bit of rope.

‘Hee-y’ar, try these.’ Sandy, the divorcee, was standing over Hairy Neddy smiling wickedly. She was dangling a pile of old stockings over his head. ‘They’re extra long, I’ve got a thirty-four inch leg, see,’ she said silkily.

Hairy Neddy suppressed a gulp and wordlessly took the stockings off Sandy, hurrying to the boot. He and the other two men began lashing the Bontempi into the open boot, securing nylon to metal, tucking it in carefully like a child at bedtime. Halfway through, Hairy Neddy looked up at Sandy who was still standing near his gate with a strange expression on her face, amusement maybe, tender certainly, almost motherly. ‘Yow er…yow sure yow don’t need these, Sandy love?’ he stammered.

Sandy shook her head and continued smiling. In less than five minutes, the Bontempi was in and secure, Hairy Neddy clambered into the back, squeezing himself between large black instrument cases, and with a sound of the horn, which I later found out was a tune called ‘Colonel Bogey’, the purple Ford Cortina chugged carefully out of the yard. We all waved Hairy Neddy off, the boys giving him thumbs up signs as if he were off on a mission. But he didn’t see us. Hairy Neddy’s face was squashed up against the back windscreen and he was staring helplessly at Sandy.

Since that incident, we had all noticed that Hairy Neddy had sort of avoided Sandy, as much as you could when you lived next door to each other and could hear each other’s toilets flushing in your respective backyards. Sandy’s response to these tactics had been somewhat confusing: for a few brief weeks, she had taken to wearing make-up and a frilly peach housecoat when hanging out her wash, instead of the grey moulty slippers and towelling dressing gown she usually threw on for such brief public appearances.

One morning, I had caught her doing something very peculiar; I watched her pour a nearly full bottle of milk into her outside drain, and then run and drag Mikey out of her kitchen. He looked moon-faced and sullen and was still clad in his Captain Scarlet pyjamas, and Sandy thrust the empty bottle into his hands. ‘Now goo on, ask Ned for a pinta. Say we’ve run out …’ Then she looked up and visibly jumped when she saw me hovering in the Yard. ‘Oh hello Meena chick…yow’m up bloody early…go on then Mikey …’ she muttered, scurrying backwards and shutting the gate in my face.

Whilst this strange one-sided tango was going on, the Yard gossip was that Sandy and Hairy Neddy might be getting married, although it seemed to me that no one had told Hairy Neddy about this. Sandy was making monumental efforts to impress him which we all enjoyed from a distance. Not only did her dressing gowns become shorter and fluffier by degrees, her hair changed colour every few days; she moved from simmering redhead through to mahogany brown whilst her eyebrows got progressively thinner and more arched until they reached an expression of extreme alarm. Maybe this was because Hairy Neddy did not seem to notice her at all; his response was to lock his back gate whenever he was in, and to spend the rest of his time with his head stuck inside the innards of his apparently permanently sick car. And then, quite suddenly one day, Sandy gave up. The next morning, she was back in the towelling dressing gown, acting as if nothing had happened.

There were sniggers and whispers after this of course, but if Sandy did hear them, she never showed that she cared. No one in the Yard, particularly the women, ever showed that they were upset or hurt. There was once a dreadful fight between Karl and Kevin’s mum and Mrs Keithley, in which Mrs K (the fecund divorcee), had told the twins’ mum that her boys were no better ‘than sodding bloody heathens! What kind of little bastards leave turds on people’s back stoops, eh?’ It began venomously and ended with both women being held back by some passing menfolk whilst they exchanged wild swinging blows and spat out words I did not understand but knew somehow I should not repeat at home when I recounted the incident. And yet, whenever the two women met, which was practically every day in such a small circular space, their instinctive reaction was to grow three feet in height, snarl and send death rays to each other through narrowed eyes.

I knew this was the expected Tollington stance, attack being the best form of defence, and never ever show that you might be in pain. That would only invite more violence because pity was for wimps and wimps could not survive round here. This made me very concerned for my mother, who I would regularly find in front of the television news with tears streaming down her face. ‘Those poor children …’ she would sniffle, or ‘Those poor miners…those poor soldiers…those poor old people …’

Papa seemed to enjoy these sentimental outbursts of hers and would smile fondly at his sobbing spouse, glad that he was married to someone with enough heart for the rest of the world.

But it irritated the hell out of me. I had to live amongst my neighbours’ kids, who were harder, tougher versions of their parents, and I needed back-up. I had already been in quite a few ‘scraps’, where I felt obliged to launch in with fists and kicks to show I was not one of the victims that would be chosen every so often by the bigger lads for their amusement. And whilst I hated the physical pain and the nervous nausea of these ritual ‘barneys’, what I hated even more was having to hide my bruises and tears from my mother. I knew I would end up with her sobbing on my shoulder, crying on my behalf, whereas what I longed for her to do was rush into the yard in curlers and a pinny and beat the crap out of my tormentors. But mama wasn’t a Yard Mama, so I learned early on there were some things I would have to do for myself.

It comforted me slightly when I realised that Tracey the whippet was a much bigger coward than me. She cowered in front of her sister, Anita, trying to control her quivering bottom lip. ‘But she’s supposed to be here! Where’s me mum? I’m hungry …’

‘Shut yer face, our Trace,’ snapped Anita, who was concentrating on aiming her switch right at Hairy Neddy’s backside.

He was still bent over his open bonnet, the gap between the end of his T-shirt and the beginning of his jeans revealing an expanse of very tempting builder’s bum. ‘Yow can come in for a piece at our house, if yow’m hungry, chick,’ called Hairy Neddy, a ‘piece’ being a peculiar Tollington word for sandwich which my mother had banned me from saying in the house. ‘Just because the English can’t speak English themselves, does not mean you have to talk like an urchin. You take the best from their culture, not the worst. You’ll be swearing and urinating in telephone boxes next, like that Lowbridge boy …’

But mama’s voice did not have its usual resonance today, this tinnitus of conscience forever buzzing in my ears the minute I even thought about doing anything she might disapprove of. Because today, everything was fuzzy and unformed except for Anita, what she looked like, what she did, the way she made me feel, taller and sharper and ready to try anything. She winked at me and edged her switch nearer and nearer to Hairy Neddy’s bum. She aimed the point of it right at his cavernous crack and raised her eyebrows, daring me to dare her. I was about to nod my head when a screaming siren sounded from the other end of the yard.

‘Anita Rutter! Yow put that down now before I give yow a bloody hiding!’

Anita’s mum, Deirdre, tottered into the yard on her white stilettos, her pointy boobs doing a jive under a very tight white polo neck sweater. She looked like she had been running; beads of sweat stood out on her upper lip and brow, her mascara had run slightly and she tugged at her lacquered helmet of hair with short fat fingers glinting with rings. Tracey threw herself at Deirdre’s legs but she pushed her off, irritated, pausing only to cuff Anita on the side of the head. Anita laughed.

‘Have these two bin driving you barmy, Ned?’ she asked him.

Hairy Neddy shook his head, not looking up. ‘Yow’m alright, love,’ he said from under the bonnet.

‘Where you bin?’ whined Tracey, who started to gather up her spilled blackberries from the dirt.

‘Shopping.’

‘What you got us?’ asked Anita.

Deirdre glanced at her empty hands and patted her hair again. ‘Window shopping. You want fishfingers for tea?’

‘Yeah!’ yelled Tracey, happy again, all those hours of anguish and abandonment instantly forgotten.

I was happy, too. I loved fishfingers, we hardly ever had them at home, mum somehow found it quicker to make a fresh vegetable sabzi than fling something from a packet into a frying pan. And of course I would be invited in for tea because that’s what all the yard mums did, if you’d been playing with their offspring and you happened to be nearby when the call to the table came.

Of course, you didn’t always strike it lucky; once I’d been at Kevin and Karl, the mad twins’ house, and their mum had put what looked like an ordinary white bread sandwich in front of me. I took a huge bite and promptly threw up all over her fortunately wipe-clean vinyl tablecloth.

‘What’s up with yow?’ asked Karl. ‘Don’t yow like lard sandwiches?’

When I told my mother what I’d eaten, she made me drink a cup of warm milk and ordered me to sit on the toilet for fifteen minutes, all the time muttering, ‘Bakwas lok!’, which roughly translated means ‘Bloody weird people …’

But actually, the food you ate was less important than being asked, the chance to sit in someone else’s house and feel grown up and special, knowing you weren’t just playing together, you were now officially socialising.

Deirdre unlocked the back gate of her house and handed the bunch of keys to Tracey who ran up to the back door and fumbled for the lock. Anita stood behind Deirdre and smiled at me, so I took a step forward. Deirdre looked at me for the first time. I had forgotten how scary the bottom half of her face was. The top bit was like everyone else’s mum’s face, soft eyes, enquiring nose, eyebrows asking a million questions. But the mouth was not right, not at all; those huge bee-stung lips always on the edge of a sneer and grandma, those big teeth, far too many and far too sharp, which gave what could have been a beautiful face an expression of dark, knowing hunger. Deirdre looked me up and down as if making a decision, then turned on her heel and tip-tapped into her yard. Anita let her pass, pressing her body away from her mother to avoid contact, then whispered, ‘See you tomorrow’ before closing the gate in my face.

I wandered slowly back through the yard towards my house, wondering what I had done wrong. The sun was just beginning its slow lazy descent and I could see the glittering sliver of a fingernail moon hanging over the rooftops near my house. I passed Sam Lowbridge’s back gate. There was an accusing space where his moped usually stood, a flattened oval of pressed dank earth.

Sam Lowbridge was generally considered the Yard’s Bad Boy. He’d managed to acquire a criminal record by the age of sixteen and supplemented it with wearing black leather and an obligatory sneer. Most of the littl’uns were scared of him and gave him a wide berth when he came out for one of his wheelie sessions in the adjoining park, but for some reason, he’d always been polite, even kind, to me. His mother, Glenys, had the distinction of being our oldest single parent (followed by Sandy, our most desperate, and Mrs Keithley, the youngest and most fertile with three children under the age of eight). None of us had ever seen Sam’s father, whoever he was he never visited, but the general opinion was good riddance to bad rubbish, ‘cos he must have been full of bad seed to spawn a sprog like Sam.

Glenys was standing on her stoop, wringing her hands, with her characteristic expression of someone who has sniffed impending doom and knows no one is going to believe her. I’d seen a similar moue on the face of the mad soothsayer in Frankie Howerd’s Up Pompeii on the telly. The soothsayer was depicted as an old wild-eyed woman dressed in rags who began every entrance with the litany, ‘Woe! Woe! And thrice Woe!’ This never ceased to crease me up because Wo Wo was our family Punjabi euphemism for shit, ‘Do you want to do a Wo Wo?’ and ‘Wipe properly, get all the Wo Wo off …’ The first time I’d heard the soothsayer’s lament I’d said, ‘I think she must have constipation!’ which made my papa laugh proudly and my mother hide her smile under an expression of distaste. When I repeated the joke in the playground the next day, I realised it lost a lot in translation and vowed I would swot up on a few English jokes before I undertook challenging Vernon Cartwright again for the title of school wit.

Glenys wrung her hands a bit more and began chewing the ends of her bottle blonde hair, a sad dishrag of a haircut, but I guessed she’d long given up trying. I’d always assumed she was about fifty, in her shapeless sweaters and crimplene trousers with the sewn-in crease on each leg. But mama informed me, rather proudly I thought, that Mrs Lowbridge was not even forty, and that smoking and bad luck had chiselled all those weary dragging lines around her eyes and mouth. ‘That’s why you must always count your blessings, bed, and never think negative thoughts. If your mind is depressed, your body will soon follow. Me, I don’t even dye my hair.’ I went around for days after that, smiling so much that my cheeks ached and Mrs Worrall next door asked if I’d got wind. I was terrified that my body would betray my mind and all the anger and yearning and violent mood swings that plagued me would declare themselves in a rash of facial hives or a limb dropping off in a public place.

‘Meena chick, have yow seen our Sam today?’

‘No, Mrs Lowbridge,’ I answered. ‘Maybe he’s gone up the shops,’ I added helpfully.

‘He shouldn’t be up the bloody shops, he should be here. He knows I’m gooing up bingo tonight …’ She sighed and chewed a bit more hair. ‘Ey, yow’m on the corner, int ya? If yow see him gooing past, give us a knock will ya, chick?’ She trudged back inside her yard and propelled by the growling waves of hunger cascading around my stomach, I ran home.

Mama was rummaging about in what we called the Bike Shed, one of two small outhouses at the end of our backyard, the other outhouse being our toilet. We’d never had a bike between us, unless you counted my three-wheeler tricycle which was one of a number of play items discarded amongst the old newspapers, gardening tools, and bulk-bought tins of tomatoes and Cresta fizzy drinks. Of course, this shed should have really been called the bathroom, because it was where we filled an old yellow plastic tub with pans of hot water from the kitchen and had a hurried scrub before frostbite set in, but my mother would have cut out her tongue rather than give it its real, shameful name.

‘Found it, Mrs Worrall!’ she shouted from inside the shed. Mrs Worrall, with whom we shared adjoining, undivided backyards, stood in her uniform of flowery dress and pinny on her step. She had a face like a friendly potato with a sparse tuft of grey hair on top, and round John Lennon glasses, way before they became fashionable, obviously. She moved like she was underwater, slow, deliberate yet curiously graceful steps, and frightened most of the neighbours off with her rasping voice and deadpan, unimpressed face. She did not smile often, and when she did you wished she hadn’t bothered as she revealed tombstone teeth stained bright yellow with nicotine. But she loved me, I knew it; she’d only have to hear my voice and she’d lumber out into the yard to catch me, often not speaking, but would just nod, satisfied I was alive and functioning, her eyes impassive behind her thick lenses.

She would listen, apparently enthralled, to my mother’s occasional reports on my progress at school, take my homework books carefully in her huge slabs of hands and turn the pages slowly, nodding wisely at the cack-handed drawings and uneven writing. Every evening, when she came to pick up our copy of the Express and Star once my papa had finished reading it (an arrangement devised by my mother, ‘Why should the poor lady have to spend her pension when she can read ours?’), she’d always check up on me, what I was doing, whether I was in my pyjamas yet, whether I was mentally and physically prepared to retire for the night. At least, that’s what I read in her eyes, for she never spoke. Just that quick glance up and down, a slight incline of the head, a satisfied exhalation.

I wondered if she was like Mrs Christmas, childless, and maybe that was why she was so protective of me. But mama told me, with a snort of disgust, that she had three grown-up sons and a few grandchildren also. ‘But I’ve never seen them! Do they live far away?’ I persisted.

‘Oh yes, very far. Wolverhampton!’ she quipped back.

It had seemed quite a long way to me when we had driven there for my birthday treat, but I guessed by my mother’s flaring nostrils and exaggerated eyebrow movements that she was being ironic, the way Indians are ironic, signposting the joke with a map and compass to the punchline.

‘But why don’t they come and see her then?’

My mother sighed and ruffled my hair. ‘I will never understand this about the English, all this puffing up about being civilised with their cucumber sandwiches and cradle of democracy big talk, and then they turn round and kick their elders in the backside, all this It’s My Life, I Want My Space stupidness, You Can’t Tell Me What To Do cheekiness, I Have To Go To Bingo selfishness and You Kids Eat Crisps Instead Of Hot Food nonsense. What is this My Life business, anyway? We all have obligations, no one is born on their own, are they?’

She was into one of her Capital Letter speeches, the subtext of which was listen, learn and don’t you dare do any of this when you grow up, missy. I quite enjoyed them. They made me feel special, as if our destiny, our legacy, was a much more interesting journey than the apparent dead ends facing our neighbours. I just wished whatever my destiny was would hurry up and introduce itself to me so I could take it by its jewelled hand and fly.

She paused for oxygen. ‘I mean, Mrs Worrall is their mother, the woman who gave them life. And she on her own with Mr Worrall, too. I tell you, if my mother was so close, I would walk in my bare feet to see her every day. Every day.’

She turned away then, not trusting herself to say anything more. There was still something else I wanted to ask but I knew it would have to wait. I had grown up with Mrs Worrall, I had seen her every day of my life, but I had never seen or heard Mr Worrall. Ever.

My mother emerged from the shed holding aloft an old dusty glass vase which she blew on, and then scuffed with the sleeve of her shirt before handing it to Mrs Worrall who took it with a pleased grunt. ‘Please, Mrs Worrall, have it. We never use it.’

Mrs Worrall nodded again and cleared her throat. ‘He knocked mine over. I was in the way, in front of the telly. Crossroads. He likes that Amy Turtle. So he got a bit upset, see.’

Mama nodded sympathetically. ‘How is he nowadays?’

Mrs Worrall shrugged, she did not need to say, same as always, and went back inside her kitchen.

‘Mum, I’m starved, I am,’ I wheedled. ‘Give me something now.’

She busied herself with shutting the shed door, not looking at me, her face drawn tight like a cat’s arse. ‘There’s rice and daal inside. Go and wash your hands.’

‘I don’t want that…that stuff! I want fishfingers! Fried! And chips! Why can’t I eat what I want to eat?’

Mama turned to me, she had her teacher’s face on, long suffering, beseeching, but still immovable. She said gently, ‘Why did you take money for sweets? Why did you lie to papa?’

‘I didn’t,’ I said automatically, blind to logic, to the inevitable fact that my crime had already been fretfully discussed while I’d been having the best day of my life being Anita Rutter’s new friend.

‘So now you are saying papa is a liar also? Is that it?’

I pretended to take a great interest in a mossy crack in the yard concrete, running my sandal along it, deliberately scuffing the leather. I knew how I looked, pouting, defiant in the face of defeat, sad and silly, but I could not apologise. I have still never been able to say sorry without wanting to swallow the words as they sit on my tongue.

Mama knelt down on the hard floor and cupped my face in her hands, forcing me to look into her eyes. Those eyes, those endless mud brown pools of sticky, bottomless love. I shook with how powerful I suddenly felt; I knew that with a few simple words I could wipe away every trace of guilt and concern ebbing across her face, that if I could admit what I had done, I could banish my parents’ looming unspoken fear that their only child was turning out to be a social deviant. ‘I did not lie,’ I said evenly, embracing my newly-born status as a deeply disturbed fantasist with a frisson that felt like pride.

After my mother had retreated back into the kitchen, Mrs Worrall came out and stood in her doorway, wiping her large floury hands on her front, watching me kick mossy scabs across the yard. ‘Come and give us a hand, Meena,’ she said finally. I hesitated at the back door; I’d seen glimpses of her kitchen practically every day, I knew the cupboards on the wall were faded yellow, the lino was blue with black squares on it and the sink was under the window, like in our house. But I’d never actually been inside, and as I stepped in, I had a weird feeling that I was entering Dr Who’s Tardis. It was much bigger than I had imagined, or it seemed so because there was none of the clutter that took up every available inch of space in our kitchen.

My mother would right now be standing in a haze of spicy steam, crowded by huge bubbling saucepans where onions and tomatoes simmered and spat, molehills of chopped vegetables and fresh herbs jostling for space with bitter, bright heaps of turmeric, masala, cumin and coarse black pepper whilst a softly breathing mound of dough would be waiting in a china bowl, ready to be divided and flattened into round, grainy chapatti. And she, sweaty and absorbed, would move from one chaotic work surface to another, preparing the fresh, home-made meal that my father expected, needed like air, after a day at the office about which he never talked.

From the moment mama stepped in from her teaching job, swapping saris for M&S separates, she was in that kitchen; it would never occur to her, at least not for many years, to suggest instant or take-away food which would give her a precious few hours to sit, think, smell the roses—that would be tantamount to spouse abuse. This food was not just something to fill a hole, it was soul food, it was the food their far-away mothers made and came seasoned with memory and longing, this was the nearest they would get for many years, to home.

So far, I had resisted all my mother’s attempts to teach me the rudiments of Indian cuisine; she’d often pull me in from the yard and ask me to stand with her while she prepared a simple sabzi or rolled out a chapatti before making it dance and blow out over a naked gas flame. ‘Just watch, it is so easy, beti,’ she’d say encouragingly. I did not see what was easy about peeling, grinding, kneading and burning your fingers in this culinary Turkish bath, only to present your masterpiece and have my father wolf it down in ten minutes flat in front of the nine o’clock news whilst sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by spread sheets from yesterday’s Daily Telegraph.

Once, she made the fatal mistake of saying, ‘You are going to have to learn to cook if you want to get married, aren’t you?’

I reeled back, horrified, and vowed if I ended up with someone who made me go through all that, I would poison the bastard immediately. My mother must have cottoned on; she would not mention marriage again for another fifteen years.

‘Shut the door then,’ said Mrs Worrall, who swayed over to the only bit of work surface that was occupied, where a lump of pastry dough sat in a small well of white flour. Otherwise, all was bare and neat, no visible evidence of food activity here save a half-packet of lemon puffs sitting on the window sill.

‘What you making?’ I asked, peering under her massive arm.

‘Jam tarts. Mr Worrall loves a good tart. Mind out.’

She bent down with difficulty and opened the oven door, a blast of warm air hit my legs and I jumped back.

‘What’s that?’

‘What yow on about? It’s the oven.’

I’d never seen my mother use our oven, I thought it was a storage space for pans and her griddle on which she made chapatti. Punjabis and baking don’t go together, I’ve since discovered. It’s too easy, I suppose, not enough angst and sweat in putting a cake in the oven and taking it out half an hour later.

‘Yow ever made pastry?’ I shook my head. I’d always wondered what the crispy stuff on the bottom of jam tarts was, and here was Mrs Worrall making it in her own home. I was well impressed. ‘Hee-y’aar,’ said Mrs Worrall, putting a small bowl in front of me in which she poured a little flour and placed a knob of lemony butter. ‘Always keep your fingers cold. That’s the secret. Now rub your fingers together…slowly. You wanna end up with breadcrumbs …’ I squeezed the butter, feeling it squash then break against my fingers, and started to press and pummel it into the flour like I’d seen mama do with the chapatti dough.

‘No! Too hard! It’ll stick! Gently, dead gentle …’ I slowed down, tried to concentrate on feeling each grain of flour, made my fingers move like clouds, and saw a tiny pile of breadcrumbs begin forming at the bottom of the bowl.

‘I’m doing it! Look! Pastry!’

Mrs Worrall grunted. ‘Not yet, it ain’t …’

She left me to it whilst she quickly rolled out the large lump of pastry into an oval and pressed a cutter over its surface, slipping the tart cases into a large tin tray. Her fingers moved swiftly and lightly, as if they did not belong to those flapping meaty arms. She then took my bowl off me and stared at the contents critically. ‘Not bad. Now binding. Use warm water, not cold. But the fork has to be like ice, see …’

She poured in a little liquid from a steel, flame-blackened kettle and handed me a fork from a pan of cold water in the sink. I pressed the crumbs together, watching them swell and cling to each other, until they gradually became a doughy mass.

‘It’s like magic, innit?’

‘No. Your mum does that,’ she said. ‘This is your one. Alright?’

I nodded, and she quickly rolled out my dough, which I noticed stuck to the rolling pin much more than hers, cut out a small shape and placed it onto the tray before shoving the whole thing in the oven.

As Mrs Worrall began washing her hands, a low uneven moaning drifted in from the room at the other side of the closed kitchen door. It sounded like an animal, wounded, like the time a juggernaut lorry had swerved right across the crossroads outside our house, and missing our gate by inches, had ploughed instead into the fields opposite, mortally wounding a chestnut bay called Misty. One of my earliest memories is of feeding old bits of chapatti to Misty, I must have been tiny as papa had to hold me up whilst I held out my hand, palm flat as he instructed me, and felt Misty’s soft whiskery muzzle lightly nibble and suck the bits off my hand. ‘Now she’s a real Punjabi horse, eh?’ nodded papa with satisfaction, patting her lightly on the neck before letting me down. He talked to her softly, in Punjabi, I presume, though I could not tell what exactly he was saying, and he smiled when her ears pricked up and she snorted, rolling her eyes, as if she now understood every word.

And the next time I saw her was from my bedroom window, when she was lying on her side in the grass as Mr Ormerod and my papa and a few other men ran wildly around the field, dragging the driver from his steaming cab. Mrs Lowbridge and Mrs Worrall stood nearby in the requisite Tollington pose for witnesses at a disaster, one hand cradling the cheek, the other on the hip, and a slow, disbelieving rhythmic shake of the head. No one seemed to notice Misty flung in a corner of the field, her muzzle just visible above the clover stalks, emitting this terrible, haunting moan for help. And now I heard it again and I knew who was making it and I was afraid.

‘Can I have lemon curd in my one, Mrs Worrall?’ I jabbered, eager to distract her. She did not answer but wiped her hands on her pinafore and said, ‘Come and say hello to Mr Worrall.’ She opened the door leading into the sitting room and I blinked rapidly, trying to adjust my eyes to the gloom. The curtains were drawn, split by a bar of red sunset light where they did not quite meet, and the small black and white television set sitting on the dining table was on full volume. Opportunity Knocks was on, one of my very favourite programmes where ordinary people who felt they had a great untapped talent could try their luck at singing, impressions, unicycling whilst juggling hatchets, whatever, and if the great British public voted them the best of the acts, could return again and again every week, gathering more acclaim, accolades and possibly bookings at dizzying venues like the Wolverhampton Grand until they were finally knocked off first place by the new young pretender to the variety throne. The unicyclist is dead, long live the fat man from Barnet doing Harold Wilson impressions!

From the first time I watched that show, I knew that this could be my most realistic escape route from Tollington, from ordinary girl to major personality in one easy step. But I’d never seen anyone who wasn’t white on the show, not so far, and was worried that might count against me. Hughie Green was doing his famous one-eye-open, one-eyebrow-cocked look right down the camera and he announced, ‘Let’s see how our musical muscle man, Tony Holland, does on our clapometer!’ An oiled, bulging bloke in micro swimming trunks appeared briefly and rippled his belly muscles into animal shapes as the audience whooped and hollered and the clapometer began at fifty and rose and rose, climbing slowly along until it nudged ninety and there were beads of sweat forming on Tony’s undulating diaphragm.

Mrs Worrall suddenly switched the TV off and another wail of protest came from a far dark corner. ‘Later. Say hello to Mrs K’s littl’un first, eh?’ She pushed me forward and I suddenly became aware of the smell of the room which seemed to be at one with the gloom, the smell of a sick room, unaired and lonely, of damp pyjamas steaming, sticky-sided medicine bottles, spilled tinned soup and disinfectant under which there hovered the clinging tang of old, dried-in pee. A shape took form before me, thin useless legs in clean striped pyjamas, the toes curled and turned inwards, passive hands with fingers rigid and frozen as claws, a sunken chest making a bowed tent of the pyjama top, and finally Mr Worrall’s face, wide blue-blue staring eyes and a mouth permanently open, asking for something, wanting to talk, with the bewildered, demanding expression of an unjustly punished child.

Mr Worrall moaned loudly again, nodding his head vigorously, a few drops of spit fell onto his chin which Mrs Worrall expertly wiped away with her pinafore hem. She took up his hand and placed it on mine, his fingers seemed to rustle like dry twigs but, amazingly, I could feel the pump and surge of his heartbeat throbbing through his palm. I wanted to pull my hand away but I looked up to see Mrs Worrall’s eyes glittering behind their bottle bottom frames. ‘Hello Mr Worrall,’ I said faintly. Mr Worrall jerked his head back violently and gave a yelp. ‘He likes you,’ Mrs Worrall said, the glimmer of a smile playing round her mouth. ‘It was the shells. In the war. He got too close. He was always a nosey bugger.’

I felt it was maybe alright to pull my hand away now, and I carefully replaced his back onto his lap, like replacing a brittle ornament after dusting. Mr Worrall jerked forward, I felt his breath on my face, it was surprisingly sweet-smelling, like aniseed, like Misty’s warm steamy mouth used to smell. ‘That’s enough now,’ said Mrs Worrall, pushing him back into his chair and gathering his blanket around his knees. ‘It’s nearly time for your wash. You want a wash, eh?’ Mr Worrall seemed tall, even sitting down. He must have been over six foot before the shells got him. Now I knew two war veterans, him and Anita’s dad. I felt annoyed that my papa had not done anything as remotely exciting or dangerous in his youth, or if he had he’d kept it quiet.

‘How do you get Mr Worrall upstairs? Have you got a lift or something?’ I asked as she busied herself with removing his socks. ‘Ooh, we never use the upstairs, do we? No. Not been up there for twenty-two years.’ My gaze travelled to the small door leading onto the stairs, the same as in our house, which fooled people into thinking there was another bigger room leading off from the lounge. It was padlocked from the outside, its hinges rusted.

All this time when I had run up and down our landing and imagined the Worralls ambling about on the other side of the wall, tutting about the noise, our adjoining bookends, I had never realised that next door were empty rooms, cobweb-filled, echoing, unused rooms. I felt queasy, my hunger had become nausea; Mrs Worrall was attempting to kneel, her fat knees cracking, and I suddenly saw what the last twenty-two years of her life must have been, this endless uncomplaining attendance of a broken, unresponsive body, the wiping of spittle and shit, the back-breaking tugging and loading and pulling and carrying, all the nights in front of the television whilst the Deirdre Rutters and the Glenys Lowbridges were putting on lipstick and waltzing off to pubs and bingo and dances and Mrs Worrall’s big treat was an extra lemon puff in front of Crossroads, whilst her husband dozed off.

Not all the English were selfish, like mama sometimes said, but then again, I did not think of Mrs Worrall as English. She was a symbol of something I’d noticed in some of the Tollington women, a stoic muscular resistance which made them ask for nothing and expect less, the same resignation I heard in the voices of my Aunties when they spoke of back home or their children’s bad manners or the wearying monotony of their jobs. My Aunties did not rage against fate or England when they swapped misery tales, they put everything down to the will of Bhagwan, their karma, their just deserts inherited from their last reincarnation which they had to live through and solve with grace and dignity. In the end, they knew God was on their side; I got the feeling that most of the Tollington women assumed that He had simply forgotten them.

‘I’ve got to go,’ I mumbled, backing away on Bambi legs, ‘Mum’s waiting …’

Mrs Worrall wordlessly helped me into the kitchen which now smelt like a bakery, yeasty and welcoming and warm. She retrieved the metal tray from the oven on which stood ten perfect tartlets and one which resembled a relief map of Africa. Nevertheless, she filled it with lemon curd from a twist-top jar, and threw in another two tarts for mama and papa, warning me, ‘Wait a minute, or that curd’ll tek the skin off yer tongue.’

I carried the three trophies on a napkin carefully to the door, and then paused to call out, ‘Bye Mr Worrall!’ as cheerily as I could manage. I did not expect an answer but I felt Mrs Worrall’s eyes gently guide me to my back door.