Anita and Me (31 page)

When, one evening, my whole family descended upon me bearing gifts, a birthday cake and Sunil in a new outfit several sizes too large, I was temporarily dumbfounded. The logical part of my brain, the seriously underused section since I had been in hospital, told me that it must have been Sunil’s birthday and therefore Diwali tomorrow and so it must be somewhere around the end of October. But the rest of my body went into emotional shock upon realising that I had been prone in this bed for over six weeks, that summer had handed over to autumn and that winter was standing in the wings sucking a throat lozenge and waiting for his cue. A new school year had started, leaves had fallen, duffle coats and mittens on strings would now be the
de rigueur
yard-wear, and I was six weeks older and a lifetime wiser.

Nanima was not her usual ironic self; she sat huddled into the folds of her shawl on the end of my bed regarding me with moist mournful eyes. I knew there was something drastically wrong when she refused the sweetmeats and Milk Tray being waved enticingly under her nose. ‘What’s up, Nanima?’ I joked. ‘You’ve always beaten me to the caramel whirl …’ Nanima wiped her eyes with the end of her shawl and mama and papa swapped a You Tell Her Darling look over my head.

‘What?’ I said, patting the bedclothes to attract Sunil to me who was toddling now around the metal frame legs, singing some weird off-key song to himself.

‘Meena,’ papa began. ‘Your Nanima has decided to go back to India.’

I blinked rapidly for a few seconds and from the corner of my eye I thought I saw Robert look up sharply and heave himself to his knees. ‘When?’ I asked casually, a chasm cracking open somewhere.

‘Tomorrow,’ papa said gently. ‘She wanted to stay longer but now we’re …’ He was going to say, Now We’re Not Going To India but as that was all my fault, he changed it to ‘…now she’s feeling homesick, and the cold weather is coming …’

‘Well, keep her inside!’ I screamed in my head. ‘Buy her a fur coat! Leave the heating on all night! Strap a sodding hot water bottle to her bosom and force feed her rum!’ But I chose to nod understandingly and flash Nanima a bright, reassuring smile. I was a grown-up now, I had seen my parents swallow down anger and grief a million times, for our sakes, for the sake of others watching, for the sake of their own sanity. It was not so hard to do, this sacrificial lark, it came with the territory. ‘Anyway,’ I chirped, patting Nanima’s gnarled hands which I would mourn forever, I knew it, ‘we’ll be coming to India soon, eh? And next time, you can teach me how to sing this in Punjabi!’ and I launched into an overloud and unnecessarily bouncy rendition of ‘Happy Birthday, Sunil’ which made him stare at me with a frightened owlish face.

I wanted many more years with Nanima, more than that I passionately wanted back all the years I had already missed with her, all the other birthdays and accidents and door slammings and apologies that so many other children had at their disposal and treated as disposable. But I did not crack, even when she said goodbye and leaned over me, smoothing my hair back into the horrible centre parting she thought suited me, whispering her familiar prayer, ‘
Wahe Guru Satnam
 …’ And then, even more quietly, ‘Meena…jewel…precious…light…bless you …’ and she was
gone, shuffling after mama who held the swing doors open for her and touched her lightly, motherly, as she passed through.

I lay back on my bed and waited for the nurses to do their final rounds before lights off. I could not lift my head to look at Robert, it felt heavy and leaden, full of water and stones which swished about on an irregular tide. After so long of living in that dusk where my fantasies almost met reality, where longings could become possibilities, where I tortured myself sweetly with dramatic scenarios of near-disasters and doomed love affairs, I was having to learn the difference between acting and being – and it hurt. I had enacted loss and departure so many times and thrilled to the tears I could make myself shed, but now, I could not cry at all. Robert and I sent no messages that evening. We did not make eye contact although I knew he was watching me, even in the darkness. And I woke up comforted, my fist warm and curled where he had been holding my hand.

One day, the nurses dragged in a six foot high mock pine tree, with nylon branches and a bright red plastic stand, and I realised with a start that it was a Christmas tree. The Horse Face doctor entered with a wake of eager-eyed students, and at the same time I looked over automatically to Robert’s cubicle and saw that it was empty. I sat bolt upright as the flock of medics perched round my bed expectantly.

‘Hello Mary, how are we today?’

‘Where’s Robert?’ I demanded.

Horse Face cracked her first smile ever, I could tell she’d strained a muscle doing it.

‘Where is he?’ I asked again, sharply.

‘Robert’s having some tests today. He’ll be back. But what about you? Leg still hurts, does it?’

I slumped back in relief onto my pillow and regarded my leg spitefully, this alien, useless liability stuck to the end of my body. ‘It’s fine. Just itches a lot.’

Horse Face whispered something to her disciples who
looked over my leg with sudden interest, one of them tapped his pencil on the plaster cast which was no longer brilliant white but grey and mottled, with a dirty band like unwashed neck skin where my toes met fresh air. ‘Will Robert be leaving the same time as me?’ I demanded. The nurses paused at the now erect tree, arms loaded with bright red tinsel and tiny icicles hanging from their fingers.

I wanted Robert to see the tree and lobbed a half-eaten tangerine at his window which landed with a soft splat and inched down the pane like a sleepy snail. He did not look up; I could see the top of his tousled head, he was lying on his back with the sheets drawn right up to his neck, his arms slack at his sides. He was not asleep, I could feel him blink, so I eased myself up onto my elbows for the first time in weeks and was able to bring my head right up to his cubicle. The silly face I had started to pull slid off the end of my chin; his face was papery and chalk white, there were two bruised holes in the centre of each hand, his drip marks, which looked like stigmata, and he was crying. ‘Robert!’ I shouted. It was strange to have to use my voice for him. ‘Rob! Please!’ He deliberately swung his head away from me but his shoulders still moved in tiny judders. ‘Nurse! Quick!’ Nurse Sylvie stepped to my side.

‘What’s wrong with Robert?’ I gulped. ‘He won’t speak to me!’ Sylvie sighed, patted her paper hat into place and sat down easily on the bed. I liked Sylvie best of all the staff, with her oval boyish face, mad frizzy hair and perpetual air of bewilderment, she reminded me of a flickering lightbulb about to blow a fuse.

‘Robert had some very painful tests today. He’s feeling a bit low, sweetheart,’ she said.

‘What tests?’ I asked. ‘Good tests? I mean, to make him better?’

Sylvie chewed her lip and glanced over her shoulder to check whether the Staff Nurse was snooping about. ‘He’s not a well little boy at the moment, sort of two steps forward and one
back. He gets very tired, you know? Depressed. But we’re doing our best, don’t you worry.’

Robert and depression did not go together in the same sentence. I had a selfish desire to march in there, slap him round a bit and tell him not to be so stupid, because if he didn’t get better, neither would I.

On December the twentieth, I packed my spongy vanity case myself as soon as I got up, distributed my comics and magazines to various other patients and said my cheery farewells, gave away my remaining fruit and juices and was all ready to leave by ten o’clock. Sylvie appeared clutching a surgical gown, mask and one green wellie and said, ‘Come on then, I nearly got sacked for asking this favour for you.’ Sylvie handed me my crutches and stood back to admire her handiwork; I checked my reflection, a strange hunched figure swathed in shiny green grown-up clothes, a stupid smile stretching the mask across my mouth like a gag.

We entered an anteroom with a huge sink and several empty pegs where Sylvie made me wash my hands, and then she heaved open a door marked ‘Authorised Visitors Only!’ which opened with a vacuum-filled pop. I limped inside and automatically sat down on the metal chair next to Robert’s bed, the door closing with a sigh behind me. ‘Well, don’t you look fetching,’ said a voice I had never heard before, surprisingly adult, posh even, only a hint of Black Country twang which sat upon the last G of his sentence. ‘Hiya Robert…how’m you feeling?’ I said, lost. Robert broke into giggles, they sounded exactly as I had imagined, rude farty bubbles in a bath. ‘Ey up, yow’m a real Midland wench, our Meena! I thought you’d sound a bit more exotic than this!’ God he was thin, the length of his body stretched out like a flattened skin in the sun, interrupted only by his knees and elbows.

He propped himself up on his elbows, most of his fingertips
wore helmets of gauzey bandages, the two exposed to the air were dead and coming away from the skin. ‘I’m unwrapping like the Invisible Man,’ he said. ‘Seen that film, the old black and white one?’ I shook my head, as tongue-tied as if he’d cornered me on a sweaty dance floor and was trying his luck for a grope. (I’d never been to a disco, but this was what I always imagined happened to girls like me, the favoured beauties would get whisked away by the hunks, I would get landed with the guy with acne and tomato sauce down his tank top…)

‘Well, you’re better company with sign language, our Meena,’ Robert sighed. ‘But I suppose we already know everything about each other anyway. What else is there to say?’ I drew in a breath, he interrupted me, ‘I know. Before you go, we’ve got to tell each other something we haven’t told each other before. Something new, yeah?’

I nodded. ‘Um, I’m getting a bike!’ I said brightly.

‘Yeah?’ he said. ‘So you can fall off it and break the other leg? I’ll tell them to hold onto your bed, eh?’

‘Rob, when will you be better?’

Robert paused and then said carefully, ‘Now that’s something I don’t know. I’ve got my O levels next summer, so …’ It wasn’t an answer, but he had set himself his own time limit which I understood and respected. He continued, ‘Now, what don’t you know about me?’

I had nothing to lose. I could hear clocks ticking and see pages of a calendar being ripped away by a strong breeze, film titles like ‘Never Say Die!’ and ‘The Last Chance Saloon!’ inexplicably dancing across my vision. ‘Okay Rob, I don’t know if you’ve got a girlfriend or not,’ I said loudly.

‘Yeah, I have,’ said Robert quietly and took my hand in his.

I was breathing so fast that the green mask over my mouth panted up and down like a diaphragm and I suddenly felt foolish in this medical garb. I became aware of the bones in his hand and the rough edges of his bandaged fingertips and was gloriously complete for the time it took to gather up my
crutches and heave myself to my three feet. ‘I’ll be in soon for physio, yeah?’ my voice sounded coated and subdued through my mask. ‘Mind the road!’ he called to my back.

I was still smiling as we drove up the one main road leading into Tollington. The familiar fields were brown moon surfaces coated with ice, the trees stark against the dark sky like charcoal skeletons, but as we turned around the corner upon which our house stood, my smile faded. The horizon glowed a sticky neon yellow, the fields opposite our house had been marked out with white sticks and tape which snagged in the breeze and there were motionless yellow diggers in what was the old mine yard next to the Big House. The crumbling low-roofed office was gone and slabs of concrete ripped from the yard lay in a haphazard pile like slices of old Christmas cake, even though there were five days to go.

‘What’s been happening!’ I cried, furious that neither of my parents had mentioned that Tollington was being carved up in my absence.

‘What?’ said papa, confused and then cottoned on as we drove past the violated fields towards the entrance to the communal yard. ‘Oh, well the motorway is open now, you knew about that didn’t you?’

‘But,’ I stammered. ‘Everything else …’

‘Oh, right,’ papa continued. ‘Apparently Mr Pembridge has sold some of the land opposite us, don’t know what for…There’s been talk about new houses but it’s just a rumour …’

Anita’s back gate was shut and barely recognisable, a few slivers of paint remained clinging to the exposed wood and I noticed that the back upstairs window was cracked and held together with sellotape. Sam Lowbridge’s moped stood in its usual space, but looked unused and rusty, its Union Jack flag was just a rag which drooped morosely from the aerial at the back. A few items of frozen underwear hung stiffly from a
washing line and Blaze, the mad collie, sniffed at a pile of old newspapers, his orange and white fur the only slash of colour in this black and white landscape.

I never remembered it all looking so shabby, so forgotten. There was not even any evidence of the usual Christmas fripperies, no flashing lights at anyone’s window, no tinsel trees squashed into back porches or holly wreaths hammered into back gates. It was as if everyone had given up, or was waiting for something to happen.

‘Glad to be home, Meena beti?’ papa said, helping me out of the car and handing me my crutches. Before I could answer, Hairy Neddy’s back gate swung open and he appeared shivering in the doorway, buttoning up his sheepskin jacket whilst Sandy handed him a pack of sandwiches wrapped up in silver foil. They both saw me and waved excitedly. ‘Meena chick! Noice to see ya!’ Hairy Neddy called over, and then kissed Sandy absentmindedly before getting into his three-wheeler and backfiring out of the yard.

‘They are married now,’ papa said, reading my confusion.

‘Oh. When?’ I was getting less surprised at each new revelation.

‘About two months back.’ Papa was supporting me as I balanced myself, taking infinite care. ‘Neddy’s working in a shop now, he’s stopped the band. See what happens when you get a wife?’ papa joked.

‘Huh!’ called mama from the driving seat. ‘It was about time he grew up!’ and reversed expertly into our parking space near the pigsties.

The whole village had aged behind my back, I decided, as I struggled up the entry, noticing the litter and the dog shit and the bomb site which made up the Mad Mitchells’ back yard. I could see Mrs Mitchell sitting at her kitchen table slowly peeling an apple, staring into space. The door to their outside loo was flapping open, a smell of urine and stale cigarette smoke hit me like a hot gust and made me gag.