Camilla Way - The Dead of Summer

As I reached the corner I looked back and saw the skinny white kid from my street walking up to Denis. He was still wearing the anorak. Denis was flapping his arm up and down waving like a lunatic, his big plate of a face beaming like the moon.

That summer of 1986 was hot everywhere in England. In our corner of south-east London the days rolled by in blue and gold, the sun bouncing off the dustbins and burning into windscreens. It lit up our faces, bit at our eyeballs. And when I think about that summer I think of it as like a flaming meteor tearing through empty space. As my bus lurched and heaved through New Cross that first day, my school shirt was damp with sweat and I knew it was going to be a long few months until the holidays began. I wished I had a cigarette.

Seven years ago, that was. When I was a different person. When I was thirteen and still Anita. When I didn’t know Kyle.

When I was eleven my mother died suddenly of a well-kept secret. One minute she was stirring a pot of rice in our kitchen in Leeds, the next she was crumpled on the floor clutching her left arm. I’m no expert (or maybe I am), but it was a peculiar death, really. I remember at the time I felt a little embarrassed as I laughed, because it was such a strange joke for her to make, on a Monday evening at seven. ‘That was rubbish,’ I’d said, getting up from my homework for a better look. When it came to fake dying, my mother was clearly in need of advice.

And then I saw her face.

All the things people say about shock aren’t true. Time doesn’t stand still and you aren’t rooted to the spot. What I did do was scream the bloody house down while running like a moron back and forth between her body and the kitchen door. When my father and brother and sisters piled in they found me kneeling, screaming still, trying to shake her awake.

Angina, my Auntie Jam said later. A ticking time-bomb that heart of hers. I wish I’d known. Wish I’d known there were only a certain amount of ticks and tocks my mother’s heart had left: I’d have counted every single one.

In the months that followed, my family was laid waste. Sadness ate my dad up whole. It wrecked him, battered him, finished him. He walked around or mostly sat in a fairly convincing dad-shaped disguise but behind his staring eyes brain-eating zombies had clearly been at work. We could not reach him. He didn’t want us to. Mostly he wanted to drink beer and watch telly in the dark.

And it was easy then for me, Push, Bela and Esha to lose our grip on each other. It was simpler not to hang around the house she had loved us in, her ‘milk chocolate buttons’, half-Yorkshire, half-Bengali. It was easy not to notice our family unravelling if we were not there to watch.

The months passed and bit by bit Mum’s presence faded from the house and the absence of her filled it up. Gradually fewer and fewer envelopes addressed to her landed on the mat; somebody, I don’t know who, moved her coat from the hall, her make-up from the bathroom cabinet. With no one to insist on family meals or curfews, no one to keep an eye on what we did with our time, who really noticed when the others stopped bothering to come home at all sometimes or if I forgot to go to school now and then?

Finally, our Auntie Jam made a stand. Sari swishing with disapproval, Dad was swept into the kitchen for a bollocking. She’d seen Bela coming out of a pub in town, heard rumours that Push was out drinking in the park every night, that Esha was carrying on with the man from the kebabby. As for me, did he even know where I went during the day? Because it certainly wasn’t to school. Her scandalised voice hissed from under the kitchen door as I hung over the banister. Silly cow, I thought. With every outraged word, the subtext was clear. If Dad had done the decent thing and married a Bengali woman in the first place, none of this would have happened. Even in death my mother was an embarrassment and now her miserable half-white kids were dragging the family down even further. Enough was enough. Besides, she had plans for our house.

It’s fair to say, by the time Dad pulled himself together sufficiently to let Auntie Jam talk him into swapping our shitty council house in Leeds for her mate’s even shittier one in London, the Naidus were not winning any prizes for ‘Most Together Family of the Year’.

After that first day at Lewisham High, I came home to find Push and Dad watching telly in the lounge. They were each sitting on an unpacked cardboard box eating rice crispies, last night’s dinner plates and Dad’s empty beer cans round their feet.

If your mansion house needs haunting just call Rentaghost, We’ve got spooks and ghouls and freaks and fools at Rentaghost …

When he saw me in the doorway Push said, ‘All right Nittyno-tits? Saw you with your new fella today.’ He grinned into his rice crispies. ‘Got yourself a catch there, haven’t you?’

Hear the phantom of the opera sing a haunting melody, Remember what you see is not a mystery, but Rentaghost!

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Funny,’ I said, and went upstairs. In our room Esha and Bela were getting ready to go out. Picking my way through a fug of hairspray, over puddles of jeans and knickers, shoes and bras, I sat down on my bed to watch. ‘Mind out, Nit.’ Esha used my head to steady herself as she climbed up next to me. Her arms held out for balance, she looked at herself in the half mirror hanging opposite, giggling as Bela got up too, pretend-surfing as they wobbled about on my duvet in their white stilettos.

My older sisters are beautiful and so is Push. (‘Poor Anita,’ my Auntie Jam said once, giving me the evil eye.) Skin like Bourbon biscuits, they had black hair to their bums (I’d hacked mine off with the kitchen scissors when I was nine) and Mum’s wide, green eyes. Desperately Seeking Susan was their favourite film and they wore white lace fingerless gloves and black Ray-Bans and a shedload of red lipstick. Deadly, in other words: the blokes of Lewisham didn’t stand a chance.

I fiddled about with our pink radio-alarm clock, twiddling the knob between stations, listening to the static until Bela shouted at me to pack it in and I went to stare at myself in the bathroom mirror. I looked at my face a lot back then. Not because I thought I was pretty – I knew that I was not – but because eventually, if you stare long enough, you stop recognising yourself; you lose yourself. It’s like if you say the same word over and over again – gradually it becomes just a sound. Meaningless. If you stare at yourself long enough you begin to look like someone else entirely or like no one at all. Sometimes I could pass half an hour like that, scaring myself witless with my own reflection.

My face and eyes are small and brown, the sockets dark like I’ve been punched. Two bruises that match the ones on my father’s face. I have inherited his wounds. The backs of my hands, my knees and feet are also darker than the rest of me and like I’ve said, I’ve always cut my black hair short. In bright light, my arms look quite furry, like a spider’s. I was small for my age and skinny. When I was thirteen I wore Push’s hand-me-downs rather than my sisters’, and strangers, if they thought about it at all, would assume I was a boy.

Later, when my sisters had come back drunk, and my dad had fallen asleep on the sofa and Push had gone to bed, I lay awake and listened to Bela and Esha whispering in the dark. In the few weeks we had been here they had fallen in love with their new life. They were mad about London. They never talked about Leeds or their old friends, or Mum.

They threw themselves into trying out the pubs in Deptford and New Cross, starting college and planning their escape from our dad, our crappy house, and from me. They were sixteen and sick to death of death. They didn’t want sadness anymore. Didn’t want anything to bring them down. A soppy song on the radio? ‘DePRESSing!’ They’d switch stations. A tragic movie on the telly? ‘BORing!’ They’d kick Push to turn it over. Dad sitting in the dark, drinking beer? ‘Just ignore him, silly old bat.’ They weren’t having any of it. Life was too short. Turn up the music, cheer up, have fun!