Jubilee (7 page)

‘Yes, of course.’ He sniffs and shakes his head.

She’s looking at him, holding his gaze a fraction longer than he’s comfortable with. He rouses himself.

‘Why did you call Maya? What were you thinking?’

‘It’d be all right, you know. We’ve all grown up. Everyone’s different now.’

‘It will never be all right. We may have grown up. Whether we’re any different is another matter.’ Then he realises what she’s said, and he can hear his voice go higher as he asks: ‘What do you mean, “everyone”? Who else have you told?’

‘Well, I thought I’d just put out some feelers. See if people were up for it.’

‘
Feelers!
Who?’

She starts to turn away but he stops her, grabbing her by the shoulders. ‘Who have you told about this, Colette?’

‘Don’t, Satish!’ The fabric of her top snaps out of his grip and she retreats behind the counter. She doesn’t say anything for a moment. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘I know Dad can do it, and Cai might. They don’t count, do they, Dad and Cai?’

‘They do. Who else?’

She rubs at her arms. ‘I haven’t found Mandy yet.’

‘No Mandy?’ And there’s an unpoliced little fall of disappointment.

‘No. But I’ve found Sarah. I don’t know if she could even do it. Satish, she’s got this tiny baby and he’s ill, and she’s desperate about him, you can tell.’

‘Don’t even try it!’

But she does try it, palms up, all trust-me, leaning over the counter towards him to make her point. ‘But that’s what I’m saying. She’s different. Everyone’s different now.’

‘People don’t change.’

‘
You
have. Think about that.’

‘I’m going. Don’t mention this to me again, please.’

As he turns for the door, Oscar enters carrying a steaming mug, its faded design proclaiming: 1994: First Free Election In South Africa.

‘Tea, Colette,’ he says.

Colette ignores him and shouts after Satish. ‘
You
have changed!’

The old-fashioned bell at the top of the door tings as Satish leaves. He hears Colette shout out: ‘Living well is the best revenge!’

And he hears something else too, as the door bangs behind him and the next song begins. It’s the opening glissando of
Dancing Queen
.

The generations had tussled about the music for the street party. In the end, the adults had made a small concession. During the meal, music from the Fifties, the only
appropriate
music, insisted Miss Bissett, would be playing on the PA system. This seemed to galvanise the parents; Cai complained to Satish about an interminable Saturday afternoon spent listening to the 78s his dad had hauled down from the loft. But after the meal, when the tables were cleared away, the kids would be allowed to play their own tape. They were invited to make a suitable compilation for the occasion. Thrilled with the responsibility, they held their own Music Meeting the Friday before the Jubilee in Mandy’s sitting room.

David Soul had been an early, controversial choice; Cai had argued the case against by grabbing Mandy’s single, placing it in front of his face and whining, in falsetto: ‘Tomatoes and onions! Ooh, baby!’

‘What’s your problem? He’s Hutch! You
love
Starsky and Hutch!’ Sarah was fierce in her defence.

‘He’s not Hutch,’ offered Satish. ‘He
plays
Hutch.’

‘Yeah,’ agreed Cai. ‘And he’s not going to be on the tape.’

While Mandy recovered her record from Cai, Sarah loyally jotted the contentious name down, reading it aloud as she did so, a sideways shot Cai chose to ignore. Satish’s sister put in a word for the Dead End Kids (‘Thank you for that suggestion, Sima,’ said Sarah, her pen immobile). Mandy added Abba, and Cai countered with Roxy Music, while the Stranglers were put up against Bony M. When Sarah listed David Essex and 10cc without any reference to her companions, the fragile civility of horse-trading broke down once more.

‘Get it!’

Cai lunged across to Sarah, grabbed the notebook and flung it to Satish. As the girls headed for him, Satish ripped out the offending page and stuffed it in his mouth. His tongue worked against it as Sarah whacked him on the chest, overbalancing him onto the settee, but it was less soluble than he’d expected. Mandy grasped the protruding ends and started to tug.

‘What on earth?’ Mandy’s mum had come into the room. ‘What are you doing?’

The others straightened up. Satish pulled the paper out of his mouth. It peeled off his tongue dryly. Cai murmured, ‘Sorry, Mrs Hobbes,’ and she tutted at them.

‘I’ve done some flapjacks,’ she told them. ‘Ten minutes. In the kitchen.’

When she left, Sarah reached out to rescue her notebook. ‘Splat-eesh,’ she hissed.

‘Spaz,’ he returned.

‘Splatish’ wasn’t making so much of an appearance any more, and when the name did surface Satish found himself almost inured to its impact. Sticks and stones, he told himself. It was a nickname thought up by one of the Chandler brothers during his early months in Cherry Gardens. At first, Paul had called him ‘Diarrhoea’ – a little skid mark on the whiteness of Bourne Heath. Then Stephen, the younger and brighter of the two, came up with ‘Splatish’, and the pun had stuck for a long while, lingering until it was finally neutralised. In that sense it was like ‘Paki’, a term used so frequently in the daily hustle of the playground that Satish had been mystified when his casual mention of the term had seen his dad barrelling in to the Head’s office to complain. This tactless intervention, which threatened so much of the painstaking work Satish had done to shore himself up socially, would not be allowed to happen again. His job was to parry the blows, or absorb them. He didn’t need a protector.

Later they sat at Mandy’s kitchen counter, flapjacks in hand, glasses of milk lined up in front of them. Mandy’s mum’s flapjacks came soused in sweetness. Satish had once asked her what she put into them to make them so nice. ‘Golden syrup,’ she’d said. What else? he’d asked. ‘More golden syrup,’ she’d told him.

The can was still out on the side. Satish loved the picture of the lion and the bees, the old-fashioned look of the tin. He reached for it, dug his little finger into the notch around the lid and pulled it along, collecting a build-up of syrup. He popped the finger into his mouth and sucked. Cai was talking.

‘So I’ve got two more to get, Battleships and Rally Cars,’ he was telling Mandy. ‘And then I’ll have four gift cards, and then Satish will get one more, and he’ll give me his gift card. So that’s five, and I can get a free pack. I’m going to get World Record Holders.’

Sima dropped down from her bar stool.

‘I’m going home,’ she announced.

‘Top Trumps is brilliant,’ Sarah put in. ‘I’ve seen Cai’s Cars pack. It’s great.’

But Cai wasn’t looking at her. He was facing the other way, towards Mandy. ‘It’s fun,’ he told her. ‘You can play it with me, if you want.’

‘Yeah. Great. Maybe,’ and she winked at Satish as she turned away from Cai. ‘Which ones will you get, Satish?’ she asked. Under the counter, her knee nudged against his.

Out in the hall, he could hear his sister thanking Mrs Hobbes, preparing to leave. ‘Bombers,’ he said.

‘Fighters and Bombers,’ Cai corrected.

‘Same thing,’ said Mandy, but Satish made a mental note. There were so many things to remember, so many little details to keep hold of. You had to know which music to like, which sport to play, which words you could use to sound cool, and which ones made you sound like a spaz. But he’d bent his mind to it; he’d been doing that ever since he arrived in Cherry Gardens.

From the outset, displaced from Uganda, plunged into the cold shock of an English autumn, Satish had deployed his resources as quickly and as effectively as he could. He had an eye for detail, and a readiness to be flexible about things. He willed his body to get used to the latitudinal facts of life in Europe; gone was the reassuring rhythm of the equatorial day where the hours of daylight and darkness were measured with an even hand. Here, waking up in the dark, walking home from school at dusk, he could feel the night jostling him. Dampened by the drizzle – what mediocrity! – he thought sometimes of the rainstorms visited on them back home, passionate downpours that hammered the land, then were dried in an hour by the tropical sun. Later, in the aftermath, a cloud of grasshoppers would descend, the slowest of them grabbed by Satish and his friends and offered to the Africans as food. He’d watched, entranced, as they pulled off the wings and ate them straight away. Once, when she was old enough to feed herself but too young to tell their mum, he gave one to Sima.

These losses were to be borne, but there were good things about England, too. The afternoons might be gloomy, but at least he was allowed to play outside in the growing dark, not ushered in when his mum started getting worried for him;
these
streets were safe. And then there was the first time he saw milk money being left out: Mrs Brecon put a pound note under an empty bottle, and he watched her front porch, peeping through the hall window every few minutes until bedtime, waiting for it to be swiped.

‘It’ll be there in the morning, Sati,’ his dad had said. ‘We’re not in Kampala any more.’

In Kampala Miss Slater was a graceful oddity at Satish’s school, with her white skin and impeccable deportment. Courtesy had informed all her dealings with the class. Whatever she taught them – although Satish could not, once he had left, recall any specific academic gain – was shot through with politeness and respect.

The adult Satish looks back on this now with a jaundiced eye; he is intelligent enough to realise how chaotic, how uncivilised was the world in which Miss Slater believed herself to be, therefore how necessary the redress of her invincible
politesse
. But as a child, Satish just thought she was courteous, and she was one hundred per cent of all the white people he knew. When he was told his family was going to live in Britain, he envisaged a nation of such adults, cordial and refined in all their dealings. And on that particular evening Satish remembered Miss Slater, and then he knew: of course they could leave the milk money out at night.

Miss Slater’s legacy was short-lived. After he moved to Cherry Gardens, Satish wasn’t thrown by his peers’ behaviour; every kid is used to the casual cruelty of other children. However, sitting alone in Sarah’s kitchen one day, perhaps six weeks after his arrival in Cherry Gardens, Satish heard a whispered argument in the dining room, just the other side of the closed serving hatch.

‘What are you doing, Sarah? Why’s he here?’ That was her mum.

‘He came home with me after school. Can he …’ That was Sarah, speaking at normal volume. Mrs Miller shushed her. ‘Can he play?’

‘Absolutely
not
. Listen Sarah, Daddy and I think … I’m sure he’s a nice boy, but he’d really be better off with his own people.’

Satish thought: does she know Uncle Ranjeet? Does she mean my cousin? Mrs Miller continued.

‘So I’m going to say
no
.’ There was a brief silence, and a sigh. ‘He can’t stay. Are you going to ask him to leave, or shall I?’

Satish, listening, spilt an experimental bead of milk onto the work surface. He placed his glass on top of it and started moving it around.

‘He just came back with me after school,’ Sarah repeated. ‘I thought he could …’

‘Well, he can’t. And I’m not going to say it again. Now, you or me?’

Sarah, sullen: ‘You.’

Satish drew a milky ‘S’ across the counter with the base of the glass. A moment later Mrs Miller came into the kitchen, and he slid off the bar stool to greet her.

‘I’m so sorry, Satish, but Sarah has to have an early tea today. She didn’t realise. So you’ll have to go home, I’m afraid!’

Miss Slater had not prepared him for this, though she had prepared him admirably for the courteous exit he managed to make – ‘Thank you very much for having me, Mrs Miller’ – and, he sensed, she might even have been impressed by the unruffled way in which his hostess managed to dispatch Satish from the house. It was a shock, this loss of innocence. Adults could be wicked, even white ones: cruel and rude while appearing to be polite and welcoming.

His family stayed in Cherry Gardens, became a fixture, and Satish thought Mrs Miller had become more used to having him around. He didn’t go to their house much, but when he did he was allowed to stay. On Jubilee Day, in the rushed final moments before the street party, Sarah’s mum positively welcomed him into the kitchen, letting him take dishes out to the waiting table. When Sarah called him Splatish, he was reminded that she was not an adult yet; she said it to his face.

Back in Mandy’s sitting room, negotiations about the music continued. Sarah listed the tracks, and Cai volunteered to tape them over the weekend. It was a hotchpotch in the end, because David Soul got in, and so did the Stranglers. Boney M and the Ramones were both included, because nobody would back down.

When the two boys crossed to their side of the road afterwards, Cai told Satish, ‘I’ve got something to show you. Come over for a bit.’

Up in his room Cai pulled open a drawer, shoved stuff out of the way, and retrieved something from underneath. It was a paper bag, printed with the red scorpion logo of the local record shop. From it he pulled a square of royal blue cardboard with the familiar cameo of the Queen in its centre, the same oval which now decorated houses and car windows, petrol stations, mugs, soaps. But in this picture the eyes were blindfolded, and the mouth gagged with strips of words seemingly cut from a newspaper, ransom-note-style. ‘God Save The Queen’ it said. ‘Sex Pistols’.

‘Paul Chandler bought it for me on Saturday,’ Cai told him. ‘Mum and Dad would kill me.’

‘Yeah, they would. How are you going to listen to it then?’

‘I’ve already heard it, at Paul’s house. It’s brilliant. Don’t tell anyone.’

They looked at the single together. It was dangerous; you couldn’t hear it on the radio. But now Cai had it stashed in his sock drawer.

‘Better than bloody Boney M, eh?’

Satish nodded. ‘Yeah, but you couldn’t put this on with Abba and 10cc. They’d kill you.’

‘I’ve thought of something, though. My dad—’