My Daughter, My Mother (12 page)

There were villages where fathers, to defend the honour of their women and stop them falling into Muslim hands, took up their
kirpans
, their long knives, and beheaded daughters, wives and sisters. Another where the women of the village had committed acts of communal suicide by throwing themselves and their small children into the village well. This would be their future if they did not get away.

Meena sat, still rocking herself, remembering, fiddling with the hem of her
kameez
. She found herself agitating at questions which could now never be answered, which didn’t matter, except that they kept her thoughts away from confronting what actually happened that night as they fled their district of Gujranwala, a place that neither she nor any member of her family had ever seen again.

Whose was the bullock cart? There had only been a dozen or so Sikh families in their small community, all Jat farmers, living on the western edge of the town. What had happened to the cart? Because the next thing had been boarding the train: where? Gujranwala? Lahore? A bullock cart was a valuable thing. And not everyone who had been in the cart with them was on the train – certainly not everyone, because . . . Because . . .

Her thoughts were sucked towards the events of that night – or rather to the shame of not being able to remember, because as a little child she had been asleep, and that sleep had betrayed her.

Somewhere on the journey, while it was still dark, her mother, Jasleen, had asked them to stop so that she could relieve herself. A number of the other women got down also (not Meena who was asleep), among them their aunt Amarpreet and Meena’s sister Parveen, clinging sleepily to their mother. They took themselves a modest distance away, to the rocks and scrub at the side of the road. Had her mother strayed further than the others? She had been an excessively shy, modest woman, and was eight months into a pregnancy.

Meena was woken by her father’s cries. ‘Jasleen? Jasleen? Wife, where are you? Come back now – don’t move so far away from us! JASLEEN!’

His cries, becoming more hoarse and frantic, would echo forever in her head. Some tried to silence him, but Nirmal joined in the shouting for his sister. There was confusion, then utter panic. The other women were weeping hysterically, crying out that they had seen nothing, only darkness around them. Meena began to cry as well, terrified, not understanding what had happened.

The men searched every possible spot. Then they found her pink
chunni
a little distance away, as if she had thrown it down as a marker. But of mother or child there was no other sign.

Meena’s father was distraught, twisting the pink scarf round and round in his hands, crying out, running this way and that.

‘We must move on,’ the others said fearfully. ‘If they come back here they will kill us all.’

Meena remembered the sound of muffled weeping, of being forced to lie back down against the thighs of her
Bhabi-ji
Amarpreet, her aunt’s hand unusually firm on her head as if holding her down, as they continued the journey without her mother and Parveen.

And then they were on the train, crammed in in the oppressive heat, squatting on the floor, pressed against the wall, faces of strangers all around them. For hours there was no water. Amarpreet, who was a timid, passive person, her legs spread wide to accommodate her belly, let out little moans of terror that her baby would start coming here in this crush. Meena sat clenched up, her chin on her knees, eyes staring blankly in shock. No mother, no sister. Only Nirmal beside her, his arm around her as they tried silently to comfort each other.

Meena rocked herself harder now, her head bending right down to her lap, hands over her face, the tears running out between her fingers.

Fourteen

Two weeks passed.

Joanne faced each day as if it were a mountain, glad only if she could get up and over it and safely down the other side before tackling the next one. Gradually, everything had come to depend on Dave’s moods, so that she had to think hard to remember anything different. What had happened to the man she used to know and love?

When she opened her eyes in the morning, she was immediately tense. She usually woke first, roused by a cry from Amy. Sometimes it was difficult to ease herself out of bed without waking Dave, as his arm would be lying heavily across her. She would inch up into a sitting position and slide out, to find Amy standing in her cot, warm and adorable.

‘Don’t wake Daddy,’ she’d whisper, lifting Amy out, smelling her sweet, yeasty smell. As long as Dave was asleep, peace could reign. ‘Let’s go and get you some milk, shall we?’

Most mornings she warmed a bottle for Amy and made cups of tea, carrying one up to him, hoping desperately to begin the day on a good footing. Quite often he was all right first thing, as if sleep had washed him clean of whatever had made him snarl at her the day before. Now and then, though, he woke in an ugly mood, his face clouded and aggressive even before his eyes were open, and she was tiptoeing around from the very start. Nothing she could do was right. If it was raining, it was her fault; if he couldn’t find the shirt he wanted, she was the one to blame.

‘Why can’t you put anything away in the right place?’ he’d growl. ‘I’m out at work all day – just a shirt, that’s all I ask.’

She had learned that it was not worth arguing.

The times when he hit her were almost always in the evening, as if all his rage and suspicion had built up through the day like gas under pressure. Afterwards she would try not to think about that, either – about anything. Just get up, face the next day, the next climb. See if you can get down the other side without disaster. Keep Amy safe. To start thinking would be too frightening.

As soon as he had gone to work, she could breathe. Her day revolved around Amy, her meals and naps and taking her to the park. Instead of dwelling on Dave, on what he had done or not done, she banished him from her mind, almost as if he didn’t exist.

‘This is our day now – our lives,’ she sometimes whispered to Amy. ‘And he can’t do anything about it.’

Sometimes, when he was there in the evening, watching TV and caught up in the football and wouldn’t notice, she looked carefully at him. She saw a strong, good-looking man with a head of thick, cropped hair, which had darkened slightly, but was still blond. In those moments she might see something else that twisted her inside: his tension and bitterness. She could sense it in the way he sat, in the way his eyes looked out at the world.

The boy she had first known, when they were teenagers, had been bright-eyed, full of it, keen and bouncy as a spring. He was going to be a footballer, had been selected for training with the Juniors at the Villa; he was
good
, he was going somewhere. He’d gone through life with a force that had carried her with him, away from her A-levels – ‘What d’you need them for?’ – into work and a life with him. He’d been the leader then, the lad taking life by storm. She’d adored him. And now, at times, she felt heartbroken for him.

Still, mostly she had to look at him with detached, wary eyes. Anger was like a demon in him. He was starting to drink more now as well, and to bring home a rack of cans on a Friday night and get stuck into them and end up asleep, snoring on the sofa so that she had to go up to bed without him. All these things increased the distance between them. Trying to talk to him about it was impossible. He had shut down.

In the daytime when he was not there, though, she didn’t want to think about it, about what might happen or what she should do. She just kept climbing, one foot in front of the other, looking out for pitfalls and trying to avoid them.

Sooky had come to the toddler group both of the next two times. The first time Joanne felt a big smile spreading across her face when she arrived, and Amy ran to Priya, squealing with excitement.

‘That’s nice!’ Tess remarked. ‘She really remembers her, doesn’t she?’

‘Hello,’ Joanne said shyly. ‘Amy, give Priya a chance!’ Amy was trying to throw her arms round her little friend.

Sooky laughed. ‘Let me just get her out, darling.’

The two little girls ran off together, holding hands.

‘She really missed her last week,’ Joanne said.
And I missed you
, she thought, but didn’t say it.

Sooky looked pleased. Pushing the buggy tighter in against the wall she said, ‘I know – I wanted to come. It’s just, there’s all the trouble in India and my mom was a bit upset.’

‘Oh, I see,’ Joanne said as they wandered across to join their daughters. She racked her brains. She watched the news every day. It was full of the miners, pickets and police – and, yes, India. ‘The . . . is it . . . the Golden Temple?’

‘Yes.’ Sooky looked suddenly uncomfortable, as if it felt wrong talking about it. She seemed tense.

‘It must be upsetting,’ Joanne said. She knew she had barely taken in what was going on, but that the Sikhs were very angry and upset about it all. Phrases from the news were coming back to her: ‘. . . the Sikhs’ holiest place . . .’, ‘. . . leader of the rebels found dead . . .’, ‘. . . angry demonstrations in London’.

‘It is,’ Sooky agreed. Sensing that Joanne was not sure what to say next, she went on, ‘Let’s go and see the painting, shall we?’

After that they talked easily about day-to-day things, the children and how they were eating and sleeping. They drank cups of tea together, standing at the kitchen door. Sooky told Joanne she was a big fan of
Star Trek
, and asked her if she’d ever seen a UFO.

‘No, I mean I’m not sure they really exist, do they?’

‘Oh yes, I think so,’ Sooky said. ‘There must be something out there, mustn’t there? There’ve been all those lights and spaceships seen in America – there’s got to be something behind it. In fact there was one seen over Smethwick, in 1962. Apparently it looked like a cigar. My dad was there then.’

‘Did he see it?’ Joanne asked.

‘No, but everyone was talking about it. One of his friend’s cousins says he saw it.’ Sooky hugged herself. ‘I always look out for them; and I’d love to go up in a spaceship, wouldn’t you?’

‘
No!
’ Joanne said. ‘Oh no, I don’t think I’d like that at all.’

‘Oh, I would – go and explore other planets, see what’s on them, like in
Star Trek
. It’d be really exciting.’

Joanne laughed. ‘You’ve got a pretty funny idea of exciting!’

‘I know . . .’ Sooky shrugged. ‘But life’s boring most of the time, isn’t it? You know last week, when there was that storm?’ There’d been a thunderstorm with dramatic lightning and torrential rain.

‘Yeah?’

‘Well, I went out in the back garden and held my hands up.’ She showed Joanne her wrists, gold bangles tinkling on each. ‘I thought, as they’re metal and everything, I might get struck by lightning—’

‘
What?
’ Joanne started to laugh, especially because she could see Sooky was being serious. ‘You’re a proper case, you are, aren’t you? What the hell did you do that for?’

‘I thought it’d be exciting.’

‘What – being burnt to a crisp? You must be
really
bored!’

Both of them were laughing now, so much that everyone was looking at them.

‘Don’t tell anyone,’ Sooky hissed, half-smiling, half-serious. ‘I s’pose it is a bit strange.’

The time flew past. As they were packing up Sooky said, ‘Would you like to come round one day: bring Amy to play?’

‘Oh, I’d really like that; and Amy’d love it, wouldn’t you? And you could come to ours – we only live round the corner from here.’

Sooky promised that she would, though neither of them had got round to it yet.

The next week they nattered away again. To their surprise, just as everyone was getting settled in, the door of the hall opened again and a buggy appeared, pushed by a man. Tess went forward to welcome him.

‘Seems funny seeing a bloke, doesn’t it?’ Joanne said to Sooky. ‘Good for him, though. You wouldn’t catch my husband coming down here.’

The man had quite a young baby in the buggy and another small child walking alongside. Both he and the little boy had bright-ginger hair in a similar state of chaotic waviness. All the time he carried the baby in his arms and produced a bottle to feed him, and guided the toddler round to play with the toys. Tess told them quietly that his name was Kieran and that the children’s mother was going through a difficult patch, so he had taken time off to help out.

When he worked his way round to where Joanne and Sooky were with their girls, on a slide, the little boy shyly came and joined in. The girls looked suspiciously at him at first.

‘You let him have a go,’ Joanne told Amy. ‘What’s his name?’ she asked the father.

‘Billy,’ the man said, gently pushing the boy forward with his free hand. He nodded down at the baby. ‘And this is Charlie.’

He seemed a friendly, gentle person and soon the children were playing happily. The man told them his name. He was a primary-school teacher and had asked for leave to help support his wife.

‘She’s not been too good since Charlie was born,’ he said. ‘But she’s getting help. We just have to get through it.’

They chatted for a while. The conversation moved on to what had happened the day before, at Orgreave coking plant, and the mounted police and riot gear used against the picketing miners.

‘When they did it at Saltley, back in ’76, they won,’ Kieran said. He explained that then the workers had managed to stop the coke deliveries to the gasworks. ‘But they’re not going to win this time – not the way the police are carrying on. It was really shocking.’

Joanne agreed. It had been chilling, seeing the violence of the police, the charges on horseback.

‘He’s sweet, isn’t he?’ Sooky said when he moved away.

Joanne was cheered as well. Kieran seemed like another nice person to talk to. It was a good feeling to be making friends.

Fifteen

That Friday evening Joanne was cooking dinner: liver and bacon, one of Dave’s favourites. Standing at the cooker, she could hear Amy murmuring to herself happily in the next room and smiled. But every second that passed made her feel more wound up. What mood would he be in? How the whole evening would go depended on that.