Anita and Me (4 page)

‘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 the yard (he’d already been up for shoplifting and nicking bikes), started doing a mock sexy dance, thrusting his hips and making boob shapes with his hands round his chest and pretty soon, all of us were gyrating around to the fabulous sound of Bontempi. Little did I know this was the nearest I’d get to a disco for the next ten years.

Hairy Neddy left the sound on whilst they tried various kamasutra positions for his organ. Whilst they pulled, pushed and swore, we jumped and jiggled to what seemed like a hundred different beats, the waltz, the samba, the jazz riff, the African drums, until we and the Cucumbers were all out of breath and still nowhere near getting to their gig. ‘We’ll have to drive with the boot open. We ain’t got no choice, lads.’

‘Got some rope then?’

Hairy Neddy shook his head sorrowfully and sunk to the dirt floor.

‘Bugger. I ain’t missed a gig in ten years, not even that time I had that infection and I was coughing up stones …’ He looked as if he was going to weep. All us kids fell silent. It wasn’t fair, I thought, a man with so much talent, so much to offer, who lived for giving people the kind of pleasure and release he’d just given us, and he couldn’t get to his party because of a stupid bit of rope.

‘Hee-y’ar, try these.’ Sandy, the divorcee, was standing over Hairy Neddy smiling wickedly. She was dangling a pile of old stockings over his head. ‘They’re extra long, I’ve got a thirty-four inch leg, see,’ she said silkily.

Hairy Neddy suppressed a gulp and wordlessly took the stockings off Sandy, hurrying to the boot. He and the other two men began lashing the Bontempi into the open boot, securing nylon to metal, tucking it in carefully like a child at bedtime. Halfway through, Hairy Neddy looked up at Sandy who was still standing near his gate with a strange expression on her face, amusement maybe, tender certainly, almost motherly. ‘Yow er…yow sure yow don’t need these, Sandy love?’ he stammered.

Sandy shook her head and continued smiling. In less than five minutes, the Bontempi was in and secure, Hairy Neddy clambered into the back, squeezing himself between large black instrument cases, and with a sound of the horn, which I later found out was a tune called ‘Colonel Bogey’, the purple Ford Cortina chugged carefully out of the yard. We all waved Hairy Neddy off, the boys giving him thumbs up signs as if he were off on a mission. But he didn’t see us. Hairy Neddy’s face was squashed up against the back windscreen and he was staring helplessly at Sandy.

Since that incident, we had all noticed that Hairy Neddy had sort of avoided Sandy, as much as you could when you lived next door to each other and could hear each other’s toilets flushing in your respective backyards. Sandy’s response to
these tactics had been somewhat confusing: for a few brief weeks, she had taken to wearing make-up and a frilly peach housecoat when hanging out her wash, instead of the grey moulty slippers and towelling dressing gown she usually threw on for such brief public appearances.

One morning, I had caught her doing something very peculiar; I watched her pour a nearly full bottle of milk into her outside drain, and then run and drag Mikey out of her kitchen. He looked moon-faced and sullen and was still clad in his Captain Scarlet pyjamas, and Sandy thrust the empty bottle into his hands. ‘Now goo on, ask Ned for a pinta. Say we’ve run out …’ Then she looked up and visibly jumped when she saw me hovering in the Yard. ‘Oh hello Meena chick…yow’m up bloody early…go on then Mikey …’ she muttered, scurrying backwards and shutting the gate in my face.

Whilst this strange one-sided tango was going on, the Yard gossip was that Sandy and Hairy Neddy might be getting married, although it seemed to me that no one had told Hairy Neddy about this. Sandy was making monumental efforts to impress him which we all enjoyed from a distance. Not only did her dressing gowns become shorter and fluffier by degrees, her hair changed colour every few days; she moved from simmering redhead through to mahogany brown whilst her eyebrows got progressively thinner and more arched until they reached an expression of extreme alarm. Maybe this was because Hairy Neddy did not seem to notice her at all; his response was to lock his back gate whenever he was in, and to spend the rest of his time with his head stuck inside the innards of his apparently permanently sick car. And then, quite suddenly one day, Sandy gave up. The next morning, she was back in the towelling dressing gown, acting as if nothing had happened.

There were sniggers and whispers after this of course, but if Sandy did hear them, she never showed that she cared. No one in the Yard, particularly the women, ever showed that they
were upset or hurt. There was once a dreadful fight between Karl and Kevin’s mum and Mrs Keithley, in which Mrs K (the fecund divorcee), had told the twins’ mum that her boys were no better ‘than sodding bloody heathens! What kind of little bastards leave turds on people’s back stoops, eh?’ It began venomously and ended with both women being held back by some passing menfolk whilst they exchanged wild swinging blows and spat out words I did not understand but knew somehow I should not repeat at home when I recounted the incident. And yet, whenever the two women met, which was practically every day in such a small circular space, their instinctive reaction was to grow three feet in height, snarl and send death rays to each other through narrowed eyes.

I knew this was the expected Tollington stance, attack being the best form of defence, and never ever show that you might be in pain. That would only invite more violence because pity was for wimps and wimps could not survive round here. This made me very concerned for my mother, who I would regularly find in front of the television news with tears streaming down her face. ‘Those poor children …’ she would sniffle, or ‘Those poor miners…those poor soldiers…those poor old people …’

Papa seemed to enjoy these sentimental outbursts of hers and would smile fondly at his sobbing spouse, glad that he was married to someone with enough heart for the rest of the world.

But it irritated the hell out of me. I had to live amongst my neighbours’ kids, who were harder, tougher versions of their parents, and I needed back-up. I had already been in quite a few ‘scraps’, where I felt obliged to launch in with fists and kicks to show I was not one of the victims that would be chosen every so often by the bigger lads for their amusement. And whilst I hated the physical pain and the nervous nausea of these ritual ‘barneys’, what I hated even more was having to hide my bruises and tears from my mother. I knew I would end up with her sobbing on my shoulder, crying on my behalf,
whereas what I longed for her to do was rush into the yard in curlers and a pinny and beat the crap out of my tormentors. But mama wasn’t a Yard Mama, so I learned early on there were some things I would have to do for myself.