One Hundred Shades of White

I looked at her and told her about the fight and what Mark Fitzgerald said to me and how I beat him and I couldn’t stop. Tears rolled down my face.

Maggie picked me up and cuddled me. ‘I’m sorry, darling, not everyone is like him and by the sounds of it you won’t have any problems with him no more.’

She kissed my cheeks and made me feel safe, like I could believe what she told me.

‘Now, would you like something to eat?’ she asked.

Satchin and I nodded and Maggie took us upstairs and made us fishfingers and spaghetti hoops whilst we watched her black and white television and waited for Amma.

Amma came home later looking exhausted. ‘Did you have a good day, makkale?’

‘Good,’ Satchin replied.

‘It was really good and we made lots of new friends,’ I added.

Ammamma said sometimes you had to do things just to make other people happy and then it would make you feel happy, but I didn’t feel anything when I said that. Maybe it was because I felt bad about what I had done to Mark Fitzgerald.

Amma thanked Maggie.

Maggie said it had been no trouble and that we were really good kids.

We went downstairs and went to bed.

The next day Amma got up and went to work early and left us all the breakfast things prepared. Satchin served it all and then washed up and took me to school because Maggie was busy. It was a straight road, left at the crossing and then straight again. It wasn’t difficult, but we followed the other mothers and children just to make sure we got there. I don’t know why I expected it to be different. The children were much nicer to me but there was still sadness, a sadness which was built into the school walls. There were no pictures or singing in the corridors and assemblies were endless prayers and hymns that none of us could identify with, nobody brought in their toys to show the other children; maybe they didn’t have any. You couldn’t really sit assemblies out even if you wanted to. Fatima did, insisting her father would get angry as they were Muslims, and she was taunted regularly, but preferred this to what her father would do if she attended. I wanted to sit out with her but just got on with learning the Lord’s Prayer.

Assembly was Mr Mauldy’s time for imposing his authority with threats of caning for misbehaviour. He held the cane firmly in his hand as he spoke from the stage and lashed it against the podium, but nobody took any notice. What was another beating in the scheme of things? Then came the occasional morale-boosting song, introduced more as an afterthought that maybe this was the way to go:

‘I love the sun, it shines on me, God made the sunand God made me. I love the rain, it splashes on me, God made the rain and God made me.’

The bullies laughed at the absurdity that there could even be a God, let alone one sitting and making the sun and the rain, and glared at those who were heartily singing away. They had antennae to identify the weak: nobody could really blame them, for this is what they learnt at home. You had to pretend to be strong, even if you weren’t, or you had to find some way of keeping them at bay.

They never touched me, not since that episode with Mark Fitzgerald, and many of them even listened to me. One day Miss Brown had to go in for a blood test which she made such a big deal out of that I thought she might never come back and teach again. ‘She’s going for a transfusion that might not be a success,’ I said, preparing the class for the worst. She arrived back in class the next day, larger than life, to a pile of bereavement cards. ‘It were Maya, Miss, she said you were gonna die,’ informed Nicola Jory.

Miss Brown muttered something about wild imagination but you only had to look at the size of her plaster to know it wasn’t that.

I had to utilise the fact that I wasn’t touched by the bullies and find ways of keeping my status, so some playtimes I set up stories narrating colourful scenes and turned even the most hardened bully into a goblin or a prince. As I narrated, standing on the bench, they would turn their overcoats into fantastic capes and would vent their anger by slaying some dragon, or would make wishes to wizards that we knew would never be fulfilled. Never did I finish with a happy ending, always with a bizarre twist of fate, otherwise they wouldn’t have played. Fatima became my assistant and made some really good sound effects like the wind and torrential rain. Most times, she was made redundant by the real thing and on those days, I found her something else to do.

Satchin kept his bullies away by mimicking. He imitated his teacher really well, curling up his lip and speaking like she did. He was always full of bright ideas and if any of the kids had problems, he would find a way around it. One day when he saw Amma was struggling to pay for the electric meter, he suggested pawning the Silver Jubilee spoons that our old posh school had given us after prancing around a pole, country dancing. We had kept them safe for an emergency and so, one day after school, we took them to the pawnshop. The broker looked at us and then the spoons and repeated our demands for five pounds a piece. He laughed so hard that his belly shook. ‘How much then?’ Satchin asked authoritatively.

‘Five pence a piece and even then, I’m being generous.’

With his highly developed bartering skills, Satchin said, ‘Ten and you have a deal.’

The man paid him and we ran off, triumphant.

We had meant to put the twenty pence in the meter, but on our way home we loitered for several minutes outside Mr Patel’s sweetshop. We stood there grappling with the thought of a couple of packets of crisps each, a few boxes of sweet cigarettes, four sticks of liquorice and two packets of Bazooka Joe’s bubble gum, and succumbed to temptation and went in. Coming out clutching several brown paper bags, we made a pact to make them last and to share. Neither of us was sure of the terms of this agreement and I began secretly eating the contents of the bags and a few hours later, everything was gone. Satchin didn’t fight with me when he found out, he just looked at me, disappointed.

Our relationship changed when our father died and subsequently when Amma had to work. We knew we were fighting on the same side, so it was pointless wounding each other on purpose. Satchin became very protective towards me and although he would not overtly acknowledge me as his sister, he would wait for me near the school gates so we could go home together. He was the one who had possession of the door key and took responsibility for most things. I was in complete awe of my brother, the way he could do things and make things feel so exciting when they blatantly weren’t. We would run home chasing each other, or take turns to kick empty cans, but always in a world of our own, averting the glances of strangers, not giving them an opportunity to say anything or make gestures at us.

We were acutely aware that all around us, on the streets, a battle was raging. Poverty is a hideous thing, it fills people with a sense of injustice, frustration, inadequacy, even unworthiness, and from then on, a secret war begins inside them. The battle is to become someone, to prove something, and it never ends. Surrounded by derelict buildings crumbling like dreams, burnt-out cars and pavements stained with venomous spit, people fought themselves and each other. More often it was each other. Maggie’s simple home was a sanctuary from everything that lurked outside her battered blue door. An oasis in the middle of everything concrete and void.

Once inside the bedsit, Satchin heated up whatever Amma had made for us and we ate together, washed up the dishes, tried to do our homework and waited for our mother to come home. Sometimes the wait was just so boring that it was better to fall asleep. What Amma did at the factory, we didn’t really know, but she always came home very tired. On Fridays, she brought something back for us: a colouring book, a reading book or matchbox cars, so we always stayed up. We never asked her for things and, believe me, I wanted to; I would have loved some transfers or stickers but Satchin told me not to ask. He said that some nights he heard her crying, saying that she couldn’t give us the things she wanted to, and he said that asking for stuff would make things worse.

On Sunday, Amma’s day off, we went to the park and she sat on the roundabout and watched us play or, on very special occasions, Tom would take us in his van to the seaside. They thought we would enjoy this but I hated the sea, it was a predator like the heavy rains, and predators took things away when you least expected, just like the rain. Satchin and I ran along the beach or played in the arcades and for those moments we could be children. Then on Sunday evening, we would crawl into bed, knowing that soon it would be Monday and the week began again. It could have gone on and on like that and we wouldn’t have known the difference had the seasons not changed.

Despite the cold, winter was like a dream for us. Beautiful snowflakes covered everything that was grey, and temporarily we didn’t have to see the reality of where we lived because everything was painted a soft, fluffy white and we could distract ourselves by building snowmen and throwing snowballs at each other. Summer, in contrast, was difficult. Whilst other kids counted the days until the school holidays, Satchin and I dreaded them. In summer it got very hot and sticky inside so we had to be outside but were told not to wander far. We had six long weeks of being together, which meant endless hours entertaining each other. We didn’t have a television so we tried to re-create scenes and stupid dialogue from the Laurel and Hardy films that we had watched when we were rich.

Hardy is entertaining some ladies and doesn’t have enough money for sodas for all of them, so he tells Laurel (me) to say, ‘No thank you, Oli, I’m not thirsty.’ And when Hardy checks the order with the girls, he says, ‘Soda, soda, soda and what will you have, Stanley?’

Stanley says, ‘Soda.’

He pulls him to one side. ‘Didn’t I tell you we only have enough money for three sodas?’

Stanley smiles and Hardy begins again.

‘Soda, soda, soda and what will you have, Stanley?’

‘Soda,’ I reply. Then Hardy chases me around the room and we fall about laughing. Why we laughed so much, I don’t know, boredom and repetition do strange things. Sometimes we got Jatinder and Simon, two boys who lived on our street, to be the extras but they thought this was boring so Satchin told them about this idea he had to make a bomb.

All four of us went out into the yard and began making a bomb from petrol cans we had found in the street and Satchin added some turps we found out in the yard. He doused a rag with the mixture and Jatinder lit the cloth; it went up in flames immediately and set alight the cardboard box that was next to it. Jatinder panicked and threw the box against the fence. Before we knew it, flames were everywhere and we couldn’t put them out. The Polish man saw us and fanned the flames with the buckets of water he was using to clean the windows. Maggie spotted the Polish man jumping up and down, shouting, and his suit nearly on fire, and came running with her extinguisher. Jatinder and Simon ran off.

Maggie reprimanded us, telling us how dangerous and stupid it was and how we could have killed everyone.

‘Do you understand me, Satchin and Maya, do you understand what you could have done?’ she shouted.

She said she would tell our mother unless we wrote a story about the consequences of fire. Mine was entitled ‘The Effects of Smoke Inhalation’. I don’t know what exactly I wrote as I copied it off the piece of paper attached to the fire extinguisher, but she was very impressed and said there were no two ways about it, I definitely had talent, but it was wasted on doing silly things like trying to burn the house down.

Maggie could have shouted at us a lot more because we gave her much cause to. I think the last straw for her was when we almost became the centre of a hostage situation. One evening, there were helicopters patrolling above our house and policemen surrounding our street. We were playing in the yard and these two men shouted at us to open the gate. We were about to do so when the Polish man ran over, picked us both up, and dragged us inside. I kicked, bit him and screamed because that was what Miss Brown had told us to do if men unexpectedly picked us up. Maggie came running down to see what the commotion was all about and the Polish man told her that we were about to let some escaped convicts who had been on the news into the house.

‘You kids can’t go on like this. I know it gets boring but I thought you’d have more common sense than to let strangers in, especially armed ones,’ she yelled. ‘You know it’s not safe.’

It wasn’t safety that we wanted, it was excitement, adventure, something out of the ordinary to happen, but it didn’t.

After that day, she decided that we were definitely a hazard and thought it was probably better if we went up to her flat after school and the days she was there on our school holidays. We could only stay at Maggie’s until seven in the evening and then she would have to go to work. Sometimes, when we came home and Maggie wasn’t in, she would leave One Eye in our bedsit as a substitute, but when she was around she cooked us stew and played with us. Maggie became all things to me, I could talk to her about almost anything.

Upstairs in her home, Maggie taught me how to sew and to knit. That birthday, she made me a rag doll named Kirstin. ‘Here you are, Maya, darling, to replace the one you used to have, Jemima, wasn’t it?’

‘Jemina,’ I corrected her.

Maggie handed me a parcel. I unwrapped the package eagerly, waiting to find a rag doll with long blonde hair but found a creepy-looking thing with black button eyes sewn too closely together. Her black hair was everywhere and she looked like a mad woman who wanted to go out on the rampage. I made a comment about the hair but Maggie said that was fashionable and the current style. I didn’t take her to bed but left her on the sideboard where she stared evilly at me. Maggie insisted that we spend weeks just making different outfits for her. The first thing I made was a large pink hat that covered her eyes. ‘It’s too low, Maya, darling, you can’t see her eyes,’ Maggie said. Then I was resolute that she have a home of her own so she wouldn’t have to glare at us. We got her a cardboard box and made her a house that looked better than ours. I shut her up in there and allowed Satchin to use it as a garage and store all the cars he was collecting, turning Creepy into a parking attendant. He was ecstatic.

Satchin and I also bonded further that summer through the raids we carried out on Mr Patel’s shop. We didn’t do it because we were poor; Amma often bought us the kind of things we stole. For me, it was the excitement of being Satchin’s young accomplice. I would distract Mr Patel by asking him to weigh a quarter of cola cubes, and then Satchin would stuff some Wotsits up his jumper and cough, which meant that I had to then change my mind about the sweets. We would then run out of the shop as fast as we could and laugh uncontrollably. If we were lucky, there would be a packet of Smarties up there too. My brother and I would never have got caught, but one day Maggie overheard us arguing over the stash. The brown Smarties were the source of much contention and, as I threw the whole packet at Satchin, she came in, made us put on our coats, and marched us both into Mr Patel’s shop to confess.

We stood there defiantly, following the procedure that we had rehearsed many times, that was, to say nothing or claim complete innocence. After five minutes, the word police was thrown about a few times and Satchin, forgetting our pact, just broke down and cried. So then some slave labour arrangements were made and we had to help Mr Patel and his wife brush the floors and clean out their storerooms. Maggie made out like we had stolen the Crown Jewels or something, saying that she was extremely disappointed in us and didn’t think we’d sink to such depths. After going on and on she finished by saying that she would not tell our mother as it would break her heart to know that we had been thieving, but I wished she had, then at least Amma might have had some reaction towards us.

I missed Amma desperately, or maybe I missed the idea of having a stay at home mum who baked cakes and read stories, who shopped and gossiped. I felt sad in the mornings when I followed the other mothers taking their children to school and I wished mine was there too. Looking back, I never felt like I really had her and that she was mine, but then I don’t think I ever gave her a chance. It wasn’t because I didn’t love her, for it was hard not to want to love her, it was because I was terrified that she too might be taken away. So I used Maggie as my security and clung to her so she couldn’t throw us on the streets if anything happened. On the days Amma was around, I found it hard, as I also didn’t want to be reminded of India, the good times or our culture, because things were bad enough without all of that to deal with as well. I felt we were forced to make a choice and I chose the easiest route, which was to forget the place and the culture that I was from.

At prayer time, when Amma woke us to pray to the Goddess, she would just manage to say the first few words, ‘Aum, namo Guru Dev …’ when I would suddenly cut in with the Lord’s Prayer which Maggie was helping me with. It probably upset Amma but there was enough confusion without praying to some foreign God. When she prepared for Onam and told us some king story, I interrupted her with the story about the king who asked his three daughters how much he loved them. And as she decorated the bedsit for Onam, I made no comment at the intricate petal design she put on the doorstep and trod all over it with my dirty shoes. When she cooked Indian food, I insisted on something else. I wish I had never done these things but I was desperate for her to shout at me, to react, to tell me that she didn’t love me, that she couldn’t cope with it all and that she was going too, but she never did.