Anita and Me - Meera Syal

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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

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