The girls were on the swings, the boys smoking, spitting and hanging from the metal uprights. The boys attempted to twang the girls’ braces against their breasts as they swung up and down, but mostly they were discussing the dance. It was up at Petts Wood and there’d be a reggae group. At the moment, they all loved Desmond Dekker’s music and were talking about whether they’d be let in to the dance hall or have to sneak in through the back way and get lost in the darkness. The girls would be allowed to slip past the doormen, but the boys were obviously too young. Ali knew he had no chance.
‘There’s nothing wrong with my family,’ Ali said to Mike.
‘You over ’ere now,’ said Mike.
The two of them looked uncomprehendingly at each other. Ali spat and strode away, but realised he didn’t want to go home. He would walk the streets until he was ready to see his father.
At the top of the road he noticed Miss Blake’s light on behind the net curtain. Sometimes he went in to see her on his way back from the young actors’ club or his Spanish guitar lesson. She always gave him sweets and half a crown. She lived with her brother, a porter at Victoria Station who was well known for fighting in the local pubs.
Miss Blake was blind and always at her gate when the children returned from school and the commuters from work. Some of the other kids would cry out at her — ‘She’s playing a blinder today!’ — but she would continue to stand there, a pure, inane smile on her lips. Sometimes, Ali walked around his bedroom with his eyes closed and his hands out in front, trying to know what it was like for her. He had visited her a lot lately, needing a few pennies. In return, she asked to hear what he’d done at school and what he thought of his friends. He had begun to enjoy his monologues; it was like keeping a diary out loud. Whatever he said, she would listen. It was odd, but he spoke to her more than he did to anyone else.
He tapped on the front window. ‘Hi, Miss Blake.’
‘Come on in, Alan, dear.’
She thought his name was Alan. He enjoyed being Alan for a while; it was a relief. Sometimes he went all day being Alan.
He followed her into the kitchen which had patches of curling lino over the bare floorboards. The kitchen couldn’t have been painted for twenty years and it smelled of gas. To keep warm, Miss Blake always kept the stove lit. She knew where everything was in the house, just by touch. The radio was playing wartime big-band music.
She got him a glass of water which he tried never to drink, the glass was so filthy, and he placed it next to the metal box in which she kept her change. She always seemed to have plenty of coins. She was meant to have paintings inherited from her family, and in the neighbourhood it was rumoured that, unable to see them, she had sold them.
She sat there, waiting for him to speak.
At first, he thought he would tell her about the visit of his family and the restaurants they’d all been to; how they’d seen the zoo, Madame Tussaud’s and Hyde Park. But he had never mentioned his Indian connection before. She didn’t know he was half-Indian; she was the only person he knew who wasn’t aware of this.
He had no idea of her real age. She could have been in her forties; she could have been in her early thirties. It was all the same to him.
‘Alan, light me one up,’ she said.
He pulled out a Players Number Six for her, and she took it and placed it in her mouth. She smoked heavily, and liked him to light her fags so she could hang on to his hand with hers.
‘Where you bin?’ she said.
‘Busy, busy, busy,’ he said.
She leaned forward. ‘It’s good to be busy. Doin’ what?’
He told her about the visit of his uncle, auntie and cousins. He told her the whole thing, dropping in the fact that they were from India. She listened attentively, as she always did, with one of her ears, rather than her eyes, pointed at him; he found himself speaking to the side of her head, to her wispy long hair and the lopsided smile.
‘Our father was in India for twenty years,’ she said. ‘’E was a tea trader. Said it was lovely. Better than ’ere in all this cold. Now your family are off.’
‘They’ve gone.’
‘You’re missing ’em.’ He didn’t say anything for a bit. ‘What?’ she said.
‘Yes. I do, and will.’ He added, ‘I’m going over there, when I’ve saved up.’
‘Won’t you take me?’
‘You?’
‘Oh, please say yes, you will.’
‘To India?’
‘Oh, take me, take me,’ she said. ‘My brother Ernie takes me nowhere.’ E just curses me. I beg ’im, just the day out, and why not? To smell and ’ear the sea, why not! They’ve got a blind school there.’
‘Where?’
‘Bombay. I’ve bin told of it! They might take me in to help the starvin’ sufferin’ children!’
What an extraordinary spectacle it would be in Bombay, the English Indian boy and the blind woman.
She was holding a chocolate. ‘Now, come ’ere, you poor boy. Open.’
He went to sit on the kitchen chair beside her. Her pinafore was stained. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, always half-closed. There was no reason, he supposed, for her to go to the trouble of keeping her eyes open. The dark moons of her eyes seemed to have become stuck to the top of her sockets.
‘Hot today.’
‘Where?’
‘All over.’ He was flapping his shirt. ‘I’m sticky.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Really? You need some talcum powder over you. I’ve got some somewhere. Let’s do this first,’ cause I know what you’ve come for.’
‘Do you?’
Ali opened his mouth in readiness. Then, he didn’t know why, he closed his eyes, as though expecting a kiss.
It was her other hand which reached up to his face; it was this hand which stroked his cheek, forehead and nose, and traced the line of his lips.
‘I’m only goin’ to feel ’ow big you are,’ she said, releasing the chocolate into his mouth. ‘’Ave you ’ad a birthday recently? You seem bigger. That’s what I’m trying to get at, Alan.’
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head, and thereby shaking off her hand at last. ‘No increase in size this week.’
‘Just a minute.’ Now she was holding up half a crown, which he took and pushed into his pocket.
‘Thanks. Lord, thanks, Miss Blake.’
‘Now keep still.’
She reached for his throat. Her hand was trembling. She was fumbling at something around his neck and then eased lower. Through his shirt she was feeling his chest as if she had never touched another human body and wanted to know what it was like. Her eyelids seemed to be twitching. He had never been this close to her before. He let the chocolate sit on his tongue without biting it, until it melted and dissolved in the heat of his mouth. He found himself thinking of writing to Zahida. When his father went to work tomorrow, he’d go into his room and take some of the flimsy blue airmail paper on which Dad wrote to his brothers. Ali always kept the stamps, and he’d write Zahida a love letter, the first of many love letters, full of poems and drawings, telling her everything. The letters, he knew, took more than a week to get there. He would start writing tomorrow and await her replies, which he would read on the school bus.
Miss Blake worked Ali’s shirt loose; it had come completely open. Nurses, like his mother, had to touch strangers all the time. Mother said it was natural; she had seen some rotten things, but no human body had disgusted her.
Ali was silently counting the money he’d make; at this rate he’d be able to stay with Zahida. There would be time for them to do ‘everything’, as she had put it. He would go where she went, to the club, to the beach, to parties, in the chauffeur-driven car. The family would welcome him as their own. In the evenings, he would sit around with the vociferous men telling stories and jokes, and talking politics. Maybe he’d get married over there and his parents would join him. He’d have to work out the details.