Anita and Me - Meera Syal

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love, imagining my mother as I had seen her in those crumpled black and white photographs hoarded in a shiny suitcase on top of her wardrobe. She was skinny and dark then, all eyes and stick insect limbs protruding from a white pyjama suit with paper-sharp creases in the legs. She retained this image, of a country girl lost in the big city, throughout her teens and early twenties, only the costume changed. Here was mama in a school play, a coat hanger for a home-sewn robe, mama winning a race as All Delhi College Champion, running in full length salwar kameez, mama as a lecturer, standing in front of a class of bored Delhi teenage girls, looking younger than all of them. On paper her achievements were remarkably impressive—actress, athlete, teacher—incarnations from other lives, trumpeting talents I would never see fully realised. But I still found it comforting that in every face she wore, I still saw the incredulity and bewilderment she so often turned on me. I liked knowing I could still surprise my mother.

      But gradually I got bored, and then jealous of this past that excluded me; she had milked goats, stroked peacocks, pulled sugar cane from the earth as a mid-morning snack. She had even seen someone stabbed to death, much later on when the family had moved to Delhi and partition riots stalked the streets like a ravenous animal. A man in a rickshaw, she said. The driver gave him a bidi, took one himself and indicated he needed a light. As the customer fumbled in the pockets of his ill-fitting suit (and this memory seemed to upset her greatly, remembering how his shirt sleeves protruded from worn linen elbows), the driver reached into his dhoti and brought out a knife which he plunged into his fellow smoker’s head, a lit match still in his victim’s twitching hand.

      That was my favourite, but she would not repeat it more than twice. The last time I had asked her to tell me the Rickshaw Story, she looked at me much as I imagine Damien’s mother looked when she gave her smiling baby his first shampoo and found three sixes curled up like commas behind his tiny pink ear. But the story did not fascinate me because of the violence, what obsessed me was this meeting of two worlds, the collision of the epic with the banal. A shared cigarette and a hidden knife, a too-small suit, probably borrowed from a brother who was expecting it back that evening, and a bloody betrayal. I listened to this tale and heard huge boulders moving somewhere, my centre of gravity shifted and I saw the breath of monsters gathering on the horizon. Terrible things could happen, even to ordinary people like me, and they were always unplanned.

      I recognised this feeling; it was the same feeling I had when I had almost asphyxiated in the back of our car, that a birthday treat could end with a screaming headline in the Express and Star, TOT CHOKES ON UNCOOKED SAUSAGE! BIRTHDAY RUINED, SAY WEEPING PARENTS! Death itself did not frighten me; I had grown up examining the crushed slippery bodies of baby sparrows who had fallen prematurely from their nests to land under our gables, filmy eyes and bloody beaks open with surprise, maybe with their last thought that mama had made flying look so easy. We local kids regularly gathered round the mangled corpses of cats, foxes and badgers left at the side of the road, their fur patterned with tyre marks, their bluey-white entrails trailing the murdering vehicles’ exit like accusing fingers. What frightened me was the excitement I felt when death became possible, visible, bared its teeth and raised a knife in Indian moonlight. There was so much more I wanted that I could not name, and brushing mortality, all those hot dog moments, helped me name it. Was this all there was? When would anything dangerous and cruel ever happen to me?

       3

      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

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