grey hair which was housed in a dark brown hat that looked like a tea cosy. She wore a green coat and boots that were two sizes larger than her feet and so as she moved forward her feet tried to make up the gap between the end of her toes and her shoes.
What empty, broken dreams did she carry in those bottles that clinked in her bag? We walked into the lift and she pressed the basement button. Panic filled me as I knew that there was nothing in the basement and I remembered a conversation I had had about bag ladies. Navi, my best friend, had told me to beware of the bag lady. She had heard many a story of men posing as bag ladies only to reveal themselves as knife-wielding maniacs.
We were in the basement and no black cabs were in sight. I could foresee the headlines plastered all over the Heathrow terminal car parks: ‘BASEMENT MURDER. DID YOU SEE THIS GIRL OR WOMAN?’
‘I just wanted to introduce you to some friends,’ said the bag lady.
Friends? I didn’t want to meet her friends, I just wanted to find a cab and face my Auntie Sheila.
Somewhere behind the huge metal bins, the happy gang sat, swaying their bottles and singing. I sighed with relief, thinking that they were totally inebriated and could not even pick up a Stanley knife.
‘This is Evita,’ shouted the bag lady.
How did she know that?
‘Evita,’ they sang together.
Their group was called ‘Resignation’. They were resigned to their fate as bag people; that life had dealt them a cruel set of cards. Life’s pathetic failures, bundled up in the basement, out of sight. I turned to walk away from them.
‘We heard you’ve seen him. We’ve seen him too you know,’ said a dead-beat version of Father Christmas.
I stopped in my tracks.
‘And we weren’t hallucinating,’ he added.
Is this what seeing the African dancer led to? A life of picking up passengers from Heathrow airport in a half-intoxicated state? Is this what the Gypsy meant when she said to follow a dream is to follow your fears?
The man read the horror in my face and laughed. ‘To achieve, Evita, is to be happy, to stay happy and to make others happy.’
Yes, but happiness for me wasn’t sitting in a basement, singing with the happy gang. I wanted more. ‘Although the cards have already been dealt,’ he continued, ‘people have a choice in the hand they play. It is all a matter of choices—make your choices with a full heart and an open mind and you will never go wrong.’
Right. So was this not going wrong?
Then the bag lady went into a monologue as if she were on Broadway. ‘Change your perceptions. Do this, and then you’ll change your reality. You’ve got your reality, I’ve got my reality. Who’s got objective reality? The lives of others are different from the perspective you have of them. See the whole picture. Take Mal here, a Forex trader. Pressure, recession, depression, gambled it all away, but he’s better than he’s ever been. The Ace of Spades—found his pack,’ she said slapping him on his back. ‘When you reach your height you have to make sure you’ve got some place else to go, move sideways and take things as they come. We’ve still got our limos,’ she said, looking over at the trolleys filled with plastic bags.
‘What happens to me now?’ I asked her.
‘Whatever you want to happen,’ she replied. ‘When you break it to your family, be gentle with them,’ she added. ‘All they have ever wanted for you is the best.’
‘I have come to realise this,’ I replied. And this was the saddest part of it; that it had taken me so long to understand this.
The happy gang no longer appeared to me as bag people but as a chorus of voices that would do battle with the preconceived ideas that continued to invade my head. I was escorted to the taxi stand to continue the rest of my journey.
The taxi driver lacked the passion of José Del Rey. He stopped diligently at each set of traffic lights. Waiting for the amber light to flash, he would slowly pull away. Every time he stopped, my stomach churned. This was the part I was dreading: returning home and facing the ‘Mob’—the extended family of aunties. The problem was the ‘best’ that they wanted for me wasn’t what I had wanted. As we drew closer to the house, all that had happened on that mountain seemed a distant memory.
I recollected leaving a message hastily on my Auntie Sasha’s answer-machine saying that I was going away for a few days and needed time to think. I asked her to inform my Auntie Sheila as I didn’t have the courage to do it myself. Asking my Auntie Sheila not to worry about me was like asking the Pope not to be Catholic and she would have somehow managed to persuade me not to go, to come straight back home, for that was the power she had: she could persuade anyone to do anything. Anyone except Sasha, her sister, who invented her own rules away from those of the Mob. She was somehow able to do this whilst pretending to participate wholeheartedly in their antics.
As the cab got closer to our street, my heart began thumping. ‘Breathe,’ I kept telling myself, ‘it will be all right.’ But I knew it wouldn’t. How could I tell her what. I had done; what I was planning to do—that I had no job to go to, that I was going to move out and be an actress? I thought about what the bag lady had told me, to see things from different perspectives, but the facts were clear. My Auntie Sheila would be truly mortified. And then there was the rest of the ‘Mob’ that she would have to break the news to. They had already been dealt a heavy blow six months earlier when Navi (Auntie Asha’s daughter) decided to go travelling for a year. Secret talks were conferred in a bid to dissuade her, a deposit for her own flat was even offered, but to no avail. Navi went. What I was now going to do, especially after my broken engagement, would most probably lead to Auntie Sheila’s downfall. Auntie Meena had her eye on the top job and was waiting for an opportunity to step in and take over.
Auntie Sheila was head of the Mob. She drove around in a tinted black BMW with a personalised number-plate that read SHEILA 1. My Uncle Bali had bought this car for her for their thirtieth wedding anniversary last month and the comment she muttered under her breath was ‘Sheila didn’t win anything.’ My uncle had very selective hearing and so he didn’t hear this and continued to undo the big pink bow he had put on it as he handed Sheila the keys. Shortly after, Auntie Meena pulled up in our driveway with a new silver Saab convertible—there was no way she could be outdone—and the outside of our house would have looked like a show’room had it not been for my Auntie Sasha’s clapped-out Mini Metro, which Sheila insisted she park on the road, although Sasha didn’t.
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