Worlds Apart (2 page)

I wondered if this feeling of freedom was what every English kid on our street had. The ones that were allowed to play rather than pray after school; the ones who looked different from me.

My thoughts were interrupted by a group of boys who appeared from around the corner of a concrete building. They wore monkey boots and green bomber jackets and had shaved heads. I couldn’t make out their faces because they were stuck inside small polythene bags that they were breathing in and out of.

One of them spotted me.

‘Paki!’ he shouted, making the others look round and head towards me.

I’d heard that word being directed towards people with brown skin like me but didn’t know what it meant, just that it wasn’t nice. Before I knew what was going on, they started running towards me with angry faces and veins bulging out of their necks. I didn’t know what I had done to get them so angry but decided to leg it away from them as fast as I could.

Tears sprang to my eyes. I clutched my trousers that kept coming down because of the loose elastic Mum had put in the waist. Perhaps this was the punishment the imam had kept going on about if we did something
wrong. This was my punishment for not going to mosque.

I ran across the netball court and, thankfully, the gate was open on the other side. I didn’t dare look behind. I had visions of a boy grabbing the hood of my coat and the zipper choking me to death. I looked around, losing sense of direction. All the buildings looked the same. Frantically, I searched between each one for the gate, for the boys, for a way out. Finally, I found a gate. I didn’t know if it was the right one and I didn’t care. Kicking hard against the bars, I lifted myself up. I didn’t care about the pain (nothing came close to the imam’s caning) – I just had to get out of there. I jumped down the other side of the gate and sprinted down to my street.

The skies darkened above. It felt later than the time I normally returned from mosque. My mind raced for excuses to give at home but I couldn’t think of any. I imagined Mum worried sick, thinking I’d been run over by a truck and getting Dad out of bed to go and find me.

It made me run faster, wanting to stop them worrying. I slowed down as I got close to the house, calming my breath, relieved to be on safe territory. I imagined them stood inside waiting for me and opening their arms for a hug, glad to see me alive.

I spotted Dad’s silhouette in the front room through the net curtains as I walked up the garden path. He was
sat with someone, which was strange for this time in the evening. Before I had a chance to knock, the front door was flung open. Mum’s face looked down at me like thunder.

‘I’m sorry, Amma,’ I quickly offered, following her inside. ‘The imam had us reading very late tonight and I ran back as quickly as I could—’

‘Where’s your scarf?’ she interjected with a stern tone.

I touched the crown of my head, racking my brains. It must have fallen off during the chase. I was not going back to find it.

‘You were reading so hard your headscarf fell off?’ Mum offered.

I opened my mouth to tell her I’d left it in the lobby of the mosque when I put my shoes back on but she got in before me.

‘You are so good at reading you don’t need your book any more?’

My heart skipped a beat as I looked down at my grazed hands. I must have dropped it when running across the netball court as I pulled the elastic up on my trousers.

‘I left them both at mosque, Amma,’ I blurted. ‘I’ll bring them back home tomorrow.’

Mum didn’t respond; she just stared at me. I couldn’t figure it out, then suddenly the front-room door opened and Dad came out, followed by the imam.
My
imam.

I couldn’t believe he was here with my dad putting up a united front against me. I wanted to tell Dad not to believe anything the imam may have told him about me not being at mosque tonight because it wasn’t true. But Dad didn’t even look at me. Instead, he turned his back on me and left the house with the imam.

Panicked, I ran to the kitchen where Mum had disappeared. I cared less what she thought, but she was the only way to my dad. I could hear voices inside and pressed my ear on the door. My heart slumped as I recognised Auntie Pataani’s voice. I couldn’t stand her. She was fat, loud and stank of coconut oil. She wasn’t my real aunt, thank God, but a friend of Mum’s who I had to call ‘Auntie’.

I imagined her sat on her big bum, feet up on the pouffe, stuffing her face with samosas and gossiping about everyone. Her nickname was ‘Telephone Box’ because she spent her days cruising around town looking for Pakistani girls wrongfully out of school, then she would dive into the nearest telephone box and ring their parents.

‘Thoba Thoba,’ I heard her say through the door. This was her way of warding off the ‘evil spirit’ that had got into me and was causing me to behave in such a way. ‘That is terrible news about your daughter. No parent should have to go through this. Where does she get it from?’

My mum began giving her a rundown of all the women in Dad’s family.

‘You always get one that takes after the mother and one taking after the father,’ she told Mum wisely. ‘Your other daughter has taken after you, of course. She is a very good girl.’

‘I don’t know what to do with this one,’ my mum said in crisis mode, ‘she’s trouble.’

I clutched the doorknob tight.
No, I’m not!

Mum carried on: ‘The school have already complained that she hit a boy on the head with a rounders’ bat…’

That’s because he called me curry breath
.

‘I buy her pretty clips to wear in her hair and she swaps them in the playground for sweets then comes home and tells me she lost them.’

How did she know that?

‘Thoba Thoba … you need to be careful she doesn’t get a boyfriend next,’ Auntie Pataani assisted.

I don’t like boys!

I wanted to barge in and tell them both that I’d heard everything but knew if I did it would only make Mum more angry for disrespecting my elders. Worse still, it would give Auntie Pataani more ammunition to get Mum fired up. I had never seen eye-to-eye with that woman in my short life and wished she would go away
or just die. Mum missed her family that she’d left behind in Pakistan, especially her sisters, and Auntie Pataani was a comfortable placeholder to share all her concerns with, especially those about me.

From that day on, things changed. Mum would take me to mosque every day and pick me up. Dad didn’t talk to me, but to be fair I was so embarrassed that I was avoiding him.

Soon after, when I got to primary school, we moved house into a very English area. In those days, ethnic festivities were not recognised in schools. We didn’t get a day off for Eid and nor did we get halal meat. If the school dinner was meat pie and beetroot, we ate the beetroot and left the pie. No big dramas were made, though it did put me off beetroot for life. The same went for prayers in assembly; everyone joined in. There was no big discussion about being from one faith or another, we all recited the Lord’s Prayer and believed that one day we would go to heaven if we were good.

Our parents never allowed us to take a day off school. The thought of their children ‘lounging’ in bed while others learnt something wasn’t acceptable in our house. The few times I became ill, Dad made me sprint up and down the stairs ten times, and then sent me to school. Perhaps it was that it got my blood flow going, but I did feel better.

To my dismay, I still had to attend mosque, but this time it was a Pakistani one a bus ride away. It was the pain of my life and turned out to be even worse than the previous one. The girls were cliquey. I was ostracised because I didn’t live in the community and they asked me loads of questions as a result. ‘Which mosque did you come from?’ the gang leader demanded. She was a tall, specky girl with a pale complexion.

‘The Bangladeshi one,’ I replied.

‘Pooooh!’ The girls pinched their noses and screwed up their faces to indicate that Bangladeshis smelt.

‘You look like a Bengali as well.’ They laughed their heads off.

I didn’t find it funny, especially because I knew they were right. I had similar problems at school, as I was the only non-white there. My parents didn’t see it as an issue, and if they did, they never showed it. It did bother the familiar skinheads hanging outside the school gate, however, which were growing in numbers. I once made the mistake of walking straight through them, still wondering why they’d chased me, why they didn’t like me and whether there was any way I could be friends with them. I smiled at one as I passed and, the next thing I knew, a beer bottle hit the back of my head, making me feel dizzy. I fled as fast as I could, the noisy traffic drowning out their laughter the further away I got.
I was hot and panicked, firstly because my legs were sweaty under the three pairs of woolly tights I wore to make my ankles look fatter under the frilly dresses Mum made me wear, also because of the horrible smell of alcohol coming from my fashionable side ponytail, which I hoped would be gone by the time I got home. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. My brothers had left home by this time and my sister was at secondary school. If I tried to approach Mum she would blame me for not crossing the road by the lollipop lady and walking on the other side.

Dad had now taken the plunge and left the factory, putting his minimal savings into starting up a halal butcher’s shop on the other side of town. He worked seven days a week and got home late in the evenings so I only caught a brief glimpse of him before going to bed. Soon he began to take half a day off on Sundays because he couldn’t take any more of Mum’s nagging to spend some time at home with us. So this was when I was able to see him, and on these days he taught me how to play chess. A strange way for father and daughter to bond in our community, but it was his way. After we moved, Mum became even more house-proud. She would buzz away on the sewing machine all day making curtains, cushions, tablecloths, quilt covers and anything else she could think of to make the place more stylish.
It looked like a showroom and for the guests it became a topic of conversation trying to guess what additions had been made since their last visit.

My main focus now was on settling into my new school. For some reason Mum became flustered over the lunch arrangements and kept switching from ‘home for dinner’ to ‘packed lunch’. School dinners was not an option, they were too expensive. Dad’s income from the shop came just over the threshold for subsidies on school meals. At school, a small table was set in the corner of the dining hall seating the eight pupils with packed lunches.

The first day I wedged myself between two girls at the table with my large Tupperware box and peeled the lid open. Suddenly everyone stopped talking and looked round. The smell of my mother’s fried onions and garlic in the spicy omelette filled the air. She insisted I had it every day because, according to her, the eggs would help me to grow taller. I insisted she put it between two slices of bread to make it look like a sandwich and more like the rest of the lunches around the table.

‘What’s that?’ the girl sitting beside me asked. She wrinkled her nose, staring down at the two slices of Sunblest white bread in my hand.

‘Sandwich,’ I replied quietly, clearing my throat and starting to feel my face burn. The sandwich was very
tasty. I loved my mum’s cooking, but right then I would have preferred to eat dry bread if it meant I could avoid this unwanted attention. A part of me wanted to offer the girl a bite, but knew it would raise more questions and I would have to explain its ingredients. I started eating the sandwich quickly, hoping the smell of boiled cabbage drifting from the kitchens would kill off the curry smell. The girl turned the other way and began talking to someone else.

My eyes wandered around the big hall. Each table was set out like a family; two monitors at the head acting as Mum and Dad and serving up and passing the plates of chocolate cake and mint custard down the table. I’d never experienced a family meal at home because Dad was always out at work and Mum was too busy. She’d recently got a ‘piece-work machinist’ job to do from home. The work came from the local textile factory and allowed her to get some extra money to pay the bills until Dad’s business got better. She would sit at the sewing machine after serving dinner until we went to bed.

To my surprise, the girl turned back to me and introduced herself as Julie Gordon. She had short, ginger, curly hair, very pale, freckled skin, a snotty nose and smelt to high heaven – as if she had never had a bath. She was a big, tough girl who played for ‘Team A’ netball.
Due to my height, I was put on Team B. I was a reserve for Team A, though I dreaded the day any member got ill and I had to take their place. The girls were massive and playing similar opponents was a scary thought.

Unfortunately, that day came and, worse still, it was a tournament. It was a crisp winter’s day and we were playing an away game against a local Catholic school. I wore two pairs of socks under my netball skirt, crinkled down to avoid the girls laughing at my skinny ankles. I scouted for my opponent in a matching ‘GA’ (Goal Attack) bib but in a different colour. I spotted her; she was twice my size – in both directions. She was built like the Incredible Hulk and I swear she was even blocking the sun when she took her position in front of me.

The whistle blew: we were off, and the noise began.

Julie was playing centre. She tried chucking the ball at me a few times but this girl didn’t need to move much to defend. I imagined her laughing over my head as the ball kept on coming my way and she caught it and threw it to one of her team. I was so cross I wanted to kick her bum but knew I’d be thrown off court and let my team down.

By some fluke, I managed to wriggle underneath one of her big arms and could finally see sunshine and my team again. She may have been bigger and stronger, but I could run faster.

There was a great buzz around the team, the momentum was up and I was getting smiles from Julie.

The girl muttered something at me under her breath that I didn’t catch. I replayed the muffled words back in my head and realised she had called me ‘stupid paki’. It felt like a punch in my stomach. She did it for effect and it worked. The ball kept coming my way, but I was too scared to catch it in case she said something horrible again. Eventually my team stopped trying with me.