Preethi Nair - One Hundred Shades of White

I must have looked frightened as Maggie bent down and looked at me. ‘I’m sorry to be hard with you, darling, but it’s going to be a little difficult at first. That’s always the way it is, but it will get better, I promise you, it will get better, but you have to try and be strong and be good for your mother.’

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 sun and 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.