A Little Piece of Ground (10 page)

“See what I mean?” said Hopper. “It'll be ages before we go back.”

“Karim!” someone called out.

Karim turned. Joni was hurrying down the hill towards him.

Karim felt awkward. What would Hopper think of Joni, in his smart private-school uniform? And what would Joni make of Hopper, a scruffy boy from the refugee camp?

“I've got to go,” he mumbled to Hopper, and, without looking back, he walked up to meet Joni.

Joni executed a couple of karate kicks, nearly lost his balance and grabbed Karim's arm for support.

“Didn't know you were back yet,” he said. “I'm going into town. Want to come with me?”

He was moving off already, down the hill past the school.

“OK, but let's go this way,” said Karim, turning away from Hopper.

“Why? That way's much further.”

“No, it isn't.”

“You know it is. We always go this way. What's the matter with you?”

Karim shrugged, irritated.

“Nothing. I don't feel like town anyway. And I've got to go home. I'm expected. Come with me.”

“No. Mama wants me to get some stuff from the pharmacy. What are you doing around here anyway? Who's that boy?”

“No one. I've been playing soccer, that's all.”

Joni glanced down towards the school's wrecked playground.

“Soccer? Where? Not down there.”

Karim opened his mouth, then shut it again. This was stupid. Everything was getting tangled up. He didn't know how to straighten things out.

Joni was looking insulted.

“Don't tell me, then. I don't care anyway.”

He tried to pass Karim. Karim dodged in front of him.

“Why have you got to go to the pharmacy?” he asked, trying to hold Joni back till he could put things right.

Joni wasn't mollified.

“Violette's ill. She's got the flu. She needs some stuff.”

This would have been the moment. This was the time to slap Joni on the shoulder, be all breezy and casual, man to man, and say something cool and amusing, like, “Speaking of Violette, you'll never guess what. My stupid brother has a crush on your crazy sister and he wants you to give him a photo of her.”

But there was no chance of that now. Joni was annoyed. He'd moved past Karim and was away down the hill, the very lines of his back looking offended. He passed Hopper without a sideways glance.

Karim kicked at a broken piece of pavement so hard that he thought for an agonizing moment that he'd splintered his toe. He squeezed his eyes tight shut with the pain, then opened them as it receded and shot a resentful look at Hopper, who was still leaning casually against the school wall, looking up at him.

Turning his back on him, Karim limped off for home, cursing under his breath.

Chapter Ten

Automatically, without noticing what he was doing, Karim took the long way home, dragging his sore foot for a few minutes, until the pain wore off, heading down the road that led past the smart new villas of the government men. Israeli tanks had trashed this part of town. The tall metal streetlights, installed only recently, were bent into strange shapes, some toppling right over. They looked like vast, wounded insects. Parts of the pavement were smashed up. In other places, regular diamond-shaped chips had been sliced from the curbstones by the tanks' tracks.

Karim hardly noticed the destruction. His head was full of his own stupidity.

What does it matter, he thought, if Joni meets Hopper? What am I making such a fuss about?

He could see Joni in his mind's eye, as clearly as if he was standing right in front of him. They'd been best friends for so long he never bothered, usually, to think about him at all. Joni, with his round face, his plumpness, his perfectly ironed clothes, his not-very-good karate kicks, his jokey talk and clever ideas—Joni was as familiar to him as the red furry blanket on his bed, closer than Jamal, more necessary even than his parents.

How could he possibly have quarrelled with Joni?

But it was Hopper he could see now, the boy from nowhere, the sharp one, the unpredictable, secret, forbidden friend. He wanted to be friends with Hopper too.

He tried to imagine the two boys together, side by side. He couldn't. They were as different from each other as an eagle from a rooster, or—or a cactus from a sunflower.

Hopper would think Joni was soft, he thought. Joni would think Hopper was rough.

He was still lost in thought when he arrived home.

“Karim!” He came to with a start as he registered the sharpness in his mother's voice. “Where on earth have you been?”

He was surprised by her intensity.

“Out.”

“Where? Who with? What have you been doing?”

“Playing soccer,” he said truthfully, holding the ball out as proof.

She pushed up the sleeves of her heavy brown sweater, crossed her arms and stared at him suspiciously.

“Where? Not in the usual place. I went down to look for you. How can you do this to me, Karim? You know how worried I get.”

He was beginning to feel cornered.

“I met a guy from school. We played near his place.”

“Oh.”

She hesitated, and seemed about to say more, when a crash from the kitchen followed by a wail from Sireen sent her hurrying off to investigate.

Karim parked his ball behind its usual chair and went to his bedroom. Jamal was sitting on the edge of his bed, strumming inexpertly on the battered guitar he'd acquired in a swapping deal with a friend. He was crooning tunelessly:

Don' break my heart, baby,

Don' tear my mind apart.

He looked up, saw the astonished disgust on Karim's face and hastily put the guitar down.

“What's got into Mama?” Karim said, flopping onto his own bed. “What's she yelling at me for?”

Jamal grinned.

“She thought you were a) dead, b) carted off to an Israeli prison, c) blowing yourself up in martyrdom, d) unconscious in the hospital with a broken skull, e) dead.”

He was ticking the points off on his fingers.

“You said ‘dead' twice,” Karim pointed out.

“That's because she said it twice. That she thought you were dead, I mean. More than twice. About 150 times, actually.”

“But I've only been out a couple of hours. Three at the most.”

“Join the club.” Jamal stood up and stretched. “Be warned. You are now entering the peak maternal worry zone. I've been inhabiting it for years, or haven't you noticed? It's the price you pay for the approach of manhood. Our dear mother, from now on, will pester you endlessly every time you go out and come home again, and Baba probably will too.”

Karim was torn between pleasure that Jamal realized he was approaching manhood and irritation at the prospect of increased parental interference.

“What a pain,” he said, trying for a sophisticated lightness of touch.

“It is, my son, it is. But there are dodges. Ways and means. A little ingenuity is all that is required. You'll learn.”

The patronage in his tone irritated Karim. He looked around for something cutting to remark on, and saw the gift-wrapped package lying on Jamal's pillow.

“Thanks for the present,” he said, reaching over to snatch it up.

Jamal's hand closed as quick as a whiplash on his wrist.

“Don't you dare touch that, you little animal!”

“Ooh,” said Karim, shaking him off. “Temper, temper. What is it, then?
Violet
-scented soap? A
purple
scarf? A picture of
flowers
?”

Jamal cuffed him back down onto his bed.

“Mind your own business, baby boy.”

“It is my business. I'm supposed to be getting ahold of her photo, remember?”

“Mm.” Jamal looked uncertain. “Well, if you must know, it's a necklace. And I know she likes it because I overheard her friends discussing it when they were looking into the window of Fancy Stores. I'm going to give it to her tomorrow. She and her gang are all going to the movies. So keep your dirty little hands off it till then, if you please.”

“You can save yourself some trouble,” said Karim, enjoying his moment of superiority. “Her friends may be going to the cinema, but Violette won't be, as I know to my certain knowledge.”

“What? Why not?”

“She's got the flu. Her eyes are all red and her nose is running and she's coughing up disgusting gobs of—”

His sentence finished in a squeal as Jamal sat on him. He managed, after a violent struggle, to shake him off and sit up.

“How come you can afford to go around buying necklaces, anyway?” he panted. “We haven't had any pocket money for months. Not since the uprising began.”

“I told you,” said Jamal, not meeting his eyes. “Dodges. Ways and means.”

“What ways and means? You didn't—you couldn't have stolen it!”

Jamal frowned.

“Do you mind? I'm not a thief. I sold something to a friend, if you must know. Got a good price for it, actually.”

“What did you sell? What was it?”

“Only an old computer game. We've played it so often it's gotten really boring. We don't want it any more.”

A chill was running down Karim's back.

“What computer game? Which one?”

Jamal backed away, took hold of a chair and put it between himself and Karim.

“Lineman. But look, it's just an old—it's boring, you know it is. It's out of date. It's—Karim! Stop it! Watch what you're doing. Karim!”

It was a miracle, Karim thought sourly twenty minutes later, that the noise of their fight hadn't brought their mother in to intervene. He wouldn't have minded for once. He'd have been quite prepared to tell her the whole story, the whole stupid business about Violette, and watch Jamal go purple with embarrassment, and squirm like a worm on a hook. But Mama hadn't come in. Rasha's mother had appeared at the front door, and the two women had been outside in the hallway, absorbed in their conversation.

Jamal seemed taken aback by the ferocity of Karim's anger.

“You had no
right
!” Karim spat at him again and again. “Lineman's mine just as much as yours. I hate you. I
hate
you!”

“Yes, OK. Yes, well, I'm sorry,” Jamal kept saying. “Look, I'll make it up to you. Just lay off, will you?”

“Make it up to me? How? I want Lineman back. I want it
back
!”

Eventually, they'd hammered out a compromise. Jamal would find something else to sell, maybe even his guitar, and he'd buy Lineman back, but only when the photograph of Violette was put into his hands. Once the deal had been done, judging, no doubt wisely, that Karim would be better left alone, Jamal hooked his finger into the loop inside the collar of his leather jacket and, affecting a casual whistle, sauntered out of the apartment.

Sore and bruised, Karim brooded on his bed.

Life's so unfair, he thought. Everything's so unfair.

He could feel a heaviness descending on him, a lowering depression. He'd half forgotten, in the turbulence of the last few hours, the events in the village, the humiliation of his father and the unpunished thefts of the settlers, but they were sharply present in his mind again, pressing down on him. The loss of Lineman made everything seem suddenly far worse. It had been a refuge for him when the curfew was down, a release when things got too bad, a place he could go to in his mind when his body was held captive. Jamal had snatched it away in a callous act of betrayal.

I've got to get ahold of that stupid photograph, he told himself savagely. I've just got to get it. I'll call Joni now. I'll make everything right with him, and go round to his place, and sort it out straight away.

He reached out for the cell phone lying on the table. His own was useless. The card had run out weeks ago and he had no money to buy another. Jamal's was still working, though. He took a deep breath and punched in the familiar number. He could see in his mind's eye the apartment at the other end of the line where the phone must now be ringing. Rose, Joni's mother, would be in the kitchen. She'd hear it, run her hands under the tap, dry them off and reach out for it. Or perhaps Joni would hear it above the noise of the stereo that he kept on at full blast in his room. On balance, Karim hoped that Rose would get there first.

She did.

“Hello,” Karim said, his voice sounding squeaky even to him. “It's Karim. Is—can I speak to Joni please?”

He heard Rose put the phone down at the other end and a sudden blast of sound as she opened Joni's bedroom door. He could practically see her plump, comfortable figure, her crown of permed hair and the fussy blouse she habitually wore. Muffled voices came next, then the slap of her slippers on the stone floor as she returned to the phone.