The Eye of the Horse. Jamila Gavin

nodded. As he was escorted out of the cellar, he heard them chanting softly . . . Hanuman . . . Hanuman . . . Hanuman . . . They told him to scram. Until he was a gang member, he was not allowed to stay on for the meeting.

      ‘Cor! Wouldn’t like to be in your shoes,’ hissed his escort, at the top of the steps. ‘That church is haunted. I’ve heard of people who go grey with fright after spending a night in there.’

      ‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ declared Gordon stoutly, hoping that his shaking voice didn’t give him away.

      ‘Huh! Tell us that the day after tomorrow!’ jeered the boys, pushing Gordon on his way.

      ‘Right,’ said Jaspal, jumping down from the table and sitting on it. ‘Business. The Johnnie Cudlip gang attacked Ronnie, Teddy and Frank in Warley Grove last night.’

      Everyone turned and sympathetically examined the cuts and bruises of three younger boys who sniffed and wiped their noses across their sleeves and grinned sheepishly.

      ‘They’re cowards, that lot, picking on the little ones. Got no guts to face us. I think we need to show ’em. We must draw the whole Cudlip gang out; plan an attack – an ambush – and fight them into surrender. It’s about time Johnnie realised he can’t keep messing us about. I say we fight them after school . . . down at the tracks. Put out the word.’

FIVE

       The Prisoner

      It was Saturday. Maeve Singh came downstairs and stood in the doorway of her parents’ flat. Her body was still girlishly thin and undeveloped, as if she had grown up reluctantly. She held herself awkwardly stiff, like a tightly-coiled spring; her lips pressed together, her pretty face taut and defensive.

      Her paper-white skin looked almost translucent as the sunlight fell across her face.

      She was dressed to go out, though without much effort. She would have looked drab, except that the sun seemed to ignite the coils of red hair, which fell to her shoulders from beneath a panama-shaped green hat, and enriched the otherwise dull brown of her shapeless coat.

      Her little daughter, Beryl, stood half-behind her, knee-high, clutching her mother’s coat in one hand, while sucking her thumb through a tight fist, with the other. She wasn’t dressed to go out, and knew that she was about to be left. Her light brown eyes shifted uneasily round the room, settling first on Jaspal, her half-brother. She was frightened of him. He always scowled and looked angry. He didn’t like her, she knew that. He hardly ever looked at her.

      Marvinder was different. Beryl loved her. Marvinder seemed pleased to have a sister, even if she was only a half-sister. But Beryl would get used to being only half; half a sister, half-Indian, half-Irish . . . not as wholly Indian as their father, Govind, and not as wholly Irish as her mother, Maeve. Her skin was neither white nor brown; her hair neither black nor red. Only her eyes, her pale, flecked-brown eyes like the skins of almonds, were exactly the same as her father’s eyes and exactly the same as Marvinder’s. But she would not know this yet. She didn’t look in mirrors – at least not to assess herself. Her mirror was other people, and she saw herself the way they saw her.

      ‘Are you ready?’ Maeve asked. There was no enthusiasm in her voice.

      Jaspal, Marvinder and Maeve’s young sister, Kathleen, had been lolling in front of the fire, engrossed in comics. Marvinder got up immediately, and pulled down her coat from the door, and Kathleen went over to her little niece, to coax her into staying. Jaspal rudely ignored Maeve and went on reading.

      ‘Well, come on then,’ Maeve was impatient. ‘Get your coat on, Jaspal. We’ll miss the bus. Good grief, we only go once a fortnight and, after all, it is to see your own father.’ She almost spat out the word ‘father’ like a bitter pill.

      ‘Can I go see Dadda!’ wailed Beryl.

      ‘Yeah, take Beryl. I don’t want to go,’ Jaspal muttered.

      ‘Come on, bhai,’ urged Marvinder, and she chucked his coat at him.

      He reacted angrily. ‘Look what you’ve done, you stupid idiot!’ he yelled, dragging his comic out from under the coat. ‘That’s my comic. You’ve gone and wrecked my comic!’

      Marvinder looked pained. Jaspal never used to talk rudely to her. ‘It doesn’t looked wrecked to me,’ she retorted. ‘Here!’ She reached out to straighten it, but he whipped it away.

      ‘Leave off. It’s mine.’

      ‘I know it’s yours, silly! I was just going to smooth it out.’

      Maeve ran over impatiently and snatched at the comic. ‘For God’s sake, Jaspal, will you stop messing around and come. We’re going to miss the bus, I tell you.’

      There was a ripping sound.

      Jaspal gave a bellow of fury. ‘Look what you’ve done! You’ve torn it . . . you . . .’ He looked as if he would fly at her, but Marvinder grabbed his arm.

      ‘Jaspal, no!’ She begged, ‘Just put on your coat and come.’ She picked up his grey worsted coat and firmly held it out for him.

      Jaspal snorted angrily and broke into a stream of Punjabi, which he knew infuriated Maeve. ‘Why should I do what that woman wants? She’s not my mother. She’s nothing but a thief and a harlot, stealing away our father. Now she thinks she can lord it over us. Well, she can’t. I don’t have to do anything she says.’

      ‘Oi, oi! You being rude again, you little devil?’ It was Mrs O’Grady appearing at the door. Her plump face was red with effort. She was panting heavily with having hauled two vast bundles of other people’s laundry up the long flight of stairs. ‘You needn’t think I don’t know what you’re saying, just because you speak in your gibberish.’ She dropped the washing and strode over to Jaspal with her hand raised. ‘You get your coat on immediately or you’ll get a clip round the ear.’ She hovered over him, threateningly. ‘And if I hear you’ve given Maeve any of your lip while out, Mr O’Grady will get his belt to you.’

      That was no mean threat. One leg or no, Mr O’Grady was a powerful distributor of punishments, and even his strapping sons, Michael and Patrick, had to watch themselves when their father got mad.

      Jaspal sullenly thrust his arms into the sleeves of the coat which Marvinder still held out for him, though when she tried to do up his buttons he pushed her away.

      ‘I’ll do it,’ he growled. ‘I’m not a baby.’

      ‘Huh, I’m not so sure about that,’ snapped Mrs O’Grady, lowering her hand. ‘Now get off with you,’ and she herded them to the landing, checking their hats and scarves and gloves and warning them about the chill out there.

      If those who make up a family are like the spokes of a wheel, then Mrs O’Grady was both the hub and the outer rim. She held them all together; she fed them, nurtured them, washed and cooked for them and bullied them. She put up with her husband, with his drinking and temper and his fury at losing a leg in the war; she hustled her two boys, Patrick and Michael, making sure they got off to work every day – then taking half their wages at the end of the week, to store in the teapot which stood on the mantelpiece; and when Maeve had got pregnant by Govind – even though the man was a heathen and as brown as the River Thames, she insisted that the couple move into the household, taking the top-floor flat, which meant that the younger sister, Kathy, had to move down and sleep in the hall under the stairs.

      In due course, when Beryl was born, it was Mrs O’Grady who coped, for Maeve was a reluctant mother, distraught at finding her freedom curtailed; and only a woman as mighty an Amazon as Mrs O’Grady could have endured the shock of finding out that Govind already had a wife and family back in India; only a woman with shoulders as broad as a continent could then take on his two refugee children,