Anita and Me - Meera Syal

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the same for years: a huge cardboard cut-out of a Marmite jar dominated the space, bleached on one side where the sun had caught it, the Player’s Capstan cigarette display behind it, featuring a saturnine sailor’s face in the centre of a lifebelt. A few days earlier, Anita Rutter had told me that this sailor was in fact her father.

      I had been in my usual spot outside Ormerod’s window having a visual affair with his sweet display when she had sauntered past, arm in arm with her two regular cohorts, Sherrie, who lived at Dale End Farm and Fat Sally. As they came nearer, they began exchanging excited stage whispers and clumsy dead-arm punches. I had instinctively stiffened and busied myself with reading the small print on the Marmite jar, my heart unaccountably flipping like a fish. Anita stopped and looked me up and down, her top lip beginning to rise.

      She pointed at the Player’s Capstan sailor and said, ‘That’s my dad, that is. He wuz in the Navy. He got medals for blowing up the Jerries, like …’ I wondered why he had taken a particular dislike for men with this name but before I could ask, Sherrie and Fat Sally burst into side-hugging laughter. Only the big girls laughed in this way, malicious cackles which hinted at exclusivity and the forbidden. I knew they were all at senior school, I had seen them round the village in their over-large uniforms, customised with badges and cropped-off ties. I was nine but felt three and a half as this particular day, mama had had one of her ‘You Always Look Like A Heathen’ moods and had forced me into a dinky pleated dress, which despite my efforts at ripping and rolling in mud, still contained enough frills and flowers to give me the appearance of a bad tempered doily.

      I shot Anita a haunted look, I told her silently that this was not me. She paused and then spun round, scowling, the other girls’ smiles melted and slowly trickled out the side of their mouths. Then Anita broke into a beam of such radiance and forgiveness that my breath caught and my throat began to ache. They linked arms again and walked away, leaving questions buzzing around my head like a heat-hazy fly. It had been the first time Anita had ever talked to me and I had wondered what I had done to deserve it.

      The day after this encounter, I happened to see Anita’s dad, Roberto, standing at the village bus stop. He had his blue Dunlop tyre factory overalls on and was dragging deeply on a butt end. He did not look much like his photograph any more, but maybe it was the trauma of his wartime experiences that had caused his beard to fall out and his eyes to change colour. I ambled past and smiled at him. He winked back, ‘Alright, chick?’

      I stood before him for a moment, waiting for courage to open my mouth. He smiled at me again and dropped the butt into the road, squinting up the hill for any sign of the asthmatic single-decker which would take him to town.

      ‘Mr Rutter,’ I squeaked, ‘do you miss the sea?’

      ‘Ey? Rhyl you mean? Oh ar, was alright.’

      He did not want to remember. I could see pain and confusion contorting his face. I changed tack. ‘Have you got any tattoos?’

      He smiled proudly and rolled up the sleeve of his oily overall, stabbing a finger at his forearm. ‘Look at this, chick.’

      The flesh looked like the exam paper of an unhappy dyslexic; a row of names in blue fuzzy ink ran up his arm like a roll call, Brenda, Deirdre, Janice, Gaynor, just legible under unsuccessful attempts to cross them out with what looked like blue marker pen. He tugged the sleeve up further to reveal the name perched on top of an undulating muscle, still pristine and untampered with, three letters set in a faded red heart, MUM. ‘That’s who I miss, chick. No one could replace her. No bugger alive.’ He sniffed loudly and rearranged his Brylcremed quiff. Suddenly he raised a hand to his eyes, scanning the top of the hill, and shouted, ‘Bus, ladies!’

      All at once, several cottage doors flew open like airholes on a concertina and blew various women out of their houses adjusting headscarves, closing handbags, shouting at husbands, voices hoarse with cigarette smoke or muffled by herbal cough sweets but all dipping and rising in that broad Midland sing-song where every sentence ends in a rhetorical swoop. ‘What you done to your hair, eh? Dog’s dinner or what, aaar! Am you gooing up bingo tonight or what, eh? Mouthy wench, that Sharon, aaar? Ooh, yowm looking fit today, Roberto duck, getting it regular then, aaar?’

      These women were commonly known as The Ballbearings Committee as they all worked at a metal casings factory in New Town, an industrial estate and shopping centre and our nearest contact with civilisation. The factory had opened, by way of compensation, soon after the mine closure, and everyone had assumed that the jobs would be given to the ex-colliers. But it was not the men they wanted; they wanted women, women who would do piecework and feel grateful, women whose nimble fingers would negotiate their machines, women who, unlike their husbands, would not make demands or complain. So it was that in the space of a few months, the hormonal balance of Tollington was turned upside down. There must have been a time when women waved their men off on doorsteps with lunch boxes and a resigned smile, but I could not remember it. It seemed to me that they had always run the village and they had always been as glamorous and shocking as they were now.

      There was not much room for dialogue with these women, whose communal tone of voice said, I know the answer but I’ll ask you anyway but make it quick, chick. They appeared ensemble as coiffured maenads in belted macs and bright lipsticks who all worked together, lived together and played together, and bounced off the village boundaries like a ballbearing against the sides of a pinball machine. Too much energy and nowhere to put it, and though I knew some of their names, Mrs Dalmeny, Mrs Spriggs, Mrs Povey, they seemed to exist and function as a group.

      Indeed, their husbands were incidental; all I knew of them was what I would glimpse through half-open doorways on these regular morning panic runs from porch door to approaching bus, men in vests and braces, with rumpled hair who clutched half-read papers and fiddled absent-mindedly with their testicles whilst their wives flung them hurried goodbyes. I noticed there was never any show of affection, no hugs or kisses, not like my parents for whom every leavetaking was accompanied by squeezes, contact numbers on the journey in case of breakdown or terrorist kidnap and always a folded white hanky. Maybe, I told my mother once, they did not love their husbands, that was why we never saw them out together. ‘Oh no,’ my mother replied. ‘They do. They work so their husbands can eat. Their husbands must feel like ghosts. Poor men. Poor women.’

      I did not think they were impoverished, watching them teeter across the road, shouting and laughing until they met and merged together like mercury. The bus coughed to a halt and Roberto made a great show of holding the automatic doors open for the women. They all flew past me in a tornado of perfume and smoke and shiny snappy handbags, pinching my cheek, ruffling my hair, ‘Alright chick?…Ooh, she’s a little doll, in’t she?…Them eyes, eh? Ey Roberto, gooing to come and sit by me, aaar?’ They drew energy from me like a succubus and I deflated as the bus doors closed with a sigh and pulled away. I could see Roberto chatting and flirting with the women but only I knew how bravely he concealed his terrible tortured past. I envied him. I wished I was a tortured soul.

      

      My eyes travelled from the sailor’s grimace to the rows of sweetjars above his head. I knew my father was waiting for me to say something. I took in the plump, cloudy bonbons, snug in their glass jar, the cherry lips smiling back at me, the flying saucers whose paper surfaces dissolved into acid on your tongue, the humbugs and rainbow drops and Blackjack chews, adorned with the face of a grinning piccaninny. Wouldn’t anyone be tempted? I wanted to say, but I didn’t. ‘Well,’ said papa. ‘Are you going to tell me the truth? Or shall we go inside and ask Mr Ormerod what happened?’

      I glanced at the brass crucifix in the centre of the window display and then shot my father a look. We both knew this was an empty threat. No one instigated conversation with Mr Ormerod if they wanted to get home before their next birthday. A sentence as innocuous as ‘How much is the thicksliced Sunblest?’ would result in a chirpy monologue which took in Harold Wilson, global disaster and the price of peas, somehow always ending in a hallelujah chorus about the glory of God. Mr Ormerod was hyperactive in the local Wesleyan Methodist church, the only church in the village, the centre of over-organised events we laughingly termed a social life, and the best way he knew how to make us feel at home was to continually try and convert us to the ways of Jesus

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