Anita and Me - Meera Syal

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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

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