The two women took it in turns to walk Suki and me across the road to the local infant school. I loved school. I was one of only a handful of Muslim girls but I was treated exactly the same as everyone else. My schoolmates saw beyond my religion. Friendship was the most important thing to us and I was sure that Suki and I would stay friends forever.
When Suki’s family went to visit the Sikh temple I often went with them. The temple was a tall and imposing building. The outside was painted bright yellow – the colour of sunshine – and it had an Indian flag hoisted high in the air, which flapped around proudly in the breeze as if it was in the hands of a brave soldier. There were ornate carvings on the outside, and a domed roof on top. I thought it was beautiful.
The Sikh temple was very different to the mosque where my father went every Friday. For a start, the women I knew didn’t pray at the mosque, only men, but the Sikh temple was open to everyone. It was a large open room with white sheets covering the floor, like a bigger version of Suki’s garage back at home. As with a mosque, everyone would have to remove their shoes at the door and cover their heads. We would then have to bow to the holy book, and make an offering of money. I never had any money but I would pretend, along with Suki. It reminded me of playing shops.
You could sit wherever you wanted but the women tended to sit together so they could all have a good gossip. Everyone knelt on the sheets to pray and the holy book was held high above our heads on a plinth.
My strongest memory of the Sikh temple is that it had a very happy atmosphere. The man at the front sang as he recited prayers and the worshippers would sing back and join in with him. I found it thrilling that we all got the chance to sing out loud, which we could never do in the mosque.
Members of the congregation brought food from home with them, and once the service was over they stood up and began to lay it out. It was served by both men and women. I thought how much Habib would hate it that the women and girls were treated the same as men and boys. For me it was fantastic, because not only did I get to sing and eat, but I also got to sit next to my best friend. I thought how much fun it would be to be a Sikh. After going to the temple, all I wanted to do was learn how to become a Sikh. Their lives seemed so pure and good. I loved being at Suki’s house because there I could pretend to be one of them.
Then one day all that changed. Dad had been working long shifts back to back and the lack of sleep was getting to him. He realised that he couldn’t go on working all day as a butcher and all night as a labourer. Something had to give, and that something was our home. By selling the shop and our old home, he would have enough money to buy a cheaper but bigger house somewhere else. He would keep his job as a labourer, but this way he would have more time to spend with us.
‘Nabila, get your shoes on. Your father is taking us all to see a house,’ Mum announced one evening.
‘A house? Where?’ I asked suspiciously.
‘It’s not far,’ she explained, without giving too much away. No doubt she sensed that trouble lay ahead.
‘But I’m not moving. I’m not leaving Suki and her family,’ I wailed.
‘We’re only going to look at it. Now do as you’re told, put on your shoes and get in the car.’
Dad never lost his temper but I could tell that he really wanted us to see this house, so I agreed to go.
Ten minutes later we arrived outside a huge Victorian house on a main road in a different area of town. It was smelly, noisy and dirty because the rush-hour traffic ran straight past outside. The patch of front garden underneath the window was tiny, not much bigger than a postage stamp.
‘Let’s go in,’ Dad said enthusiastically, as my brothers and I stood on tiptoe, trying to peer through the dirty bay window at the front of the ramshackle house. A filthy torn net curtain hung limply in the grotty window as if it was trying to conceal the horrible contents within. The whole building looked broken and unloved, as if it had been deserted for years. It looked like a haunted house from one of the cartoons on telly. It made me feel scared just to be there.
‘Who lives here?’ my brother asked.
‘No one,’ Dad replied. ‘That’s why we’ve bought it!’
‘Bought it!’ I gasped, my mind racing with fear that I’d never see Suki or her family again.
Dad turned to give me one of his looks, so I fell silent. He put his hand in his coat pocket and pulled out a couple of large metal keys I’d never seen before; they were the keys to this haunted house. I wondered how long he’d had those keys in his pocket and how long ago he’d bought this awful building.
He placed the largest metal key in the lock and turned it. The front door creaked open to reveal a dark and damp interior. It smelt musty but it also smelt of something else – grass or plants. I was confused. As my eyes adjusted in the half light, I spotted the reason. There was a bush growing in a corner of the front room! The plaster had fallen from the walls and there were big chunks of it all over the floor. Instead of plaster, the walls were covered in twisted brown roots where a tree was sprouting from the middle of the wall! The windows at the back of the house were as grubby as the big bay window at the front but, unlike the bay, they were all cracked and broken.
‘It’s got a garden inside,’ I whispered confidentially to my brother Asif, who was standing by my side, his mouth hanging wide open in horror.
The front room had no ceiling. Instead there was a huge gaping hole and daylight shone in. One of the upstairs bedrooms had a similar open-roofed arrangement. How could Dad even bring us to such a dangerous and horrible place, never mind buy it?
‘It needs a bit of work,’ he agreed, sensing our shock. He stroked the bristles on his chin thoughtfully as he contemplated the huge task that lay ahead. I looked back at him in astonishment. Dad was a builder but he wasn’t a miracle worker!
My brothers were still wide-eyed, surveying the wrack and ruin that surrounded us.
‘But I reckon with a bit of hard work I can do it!’ Dad concluded. ‘Look at all the extra room we will have.’
He told us later that it had been empty for almost nine years and I wondered why it had been so unloved. Was it haunted?
I hated the house from the moment I saw it. It was true there was going to be plenty of space for us there but all I craved was the comfort of our cramped terraced house back in lovely Sikh Street. I felt sad to be there and moving away from Suki. I wandered glumly to the window at the back of the house, which overlooked a huge back garden. I thought what an unhappy garden it was – unloved and abandoned. It was so full and overgrown that it reminded me of a jungle. I convinced myself that the grass was so long there must be snakes hidden in it.
I was still daydreaming, looking out at the long grass and the messy, entangled shrubs, when I saw something move between the leaves. They shifted and parted as a weight brushed against them. I rubbed my eyes and continued to stare hard through the filmy windowpane. At first I thought I was seeing things, that it was a trick of the light, and then I spotted it – a wolf! I screamed in horror.
It had a pointy nose, beady eyes and a long pink tongue, which dangled limply down from the corner of its mouth, covering razor-sharp teeth. To me, recently turned six years old, it looked vicious and hungry. I was convinced it was a sign – a sign that we shouldn’t live in this horrible scary house.
‘I’ve just seen a wolf!’ I shouted dramatically. My heart was beating so fast I thought it would leap right through my chest wall.
My brothers came running into the room just in time to see the little ‘wolf’ slip back through a bush and disappear out of sight.
‘You idiot, Nabila,’ Asif said. ‘That’s a fox, not a wolf.’ They sniggered amongst themselves, saving it up as one more thing they could tease me about.
I didn’t believe him. I ran upstairs to find my parents and tell them all about the wolf,