Heartland (18 page)

They were getting the driver out of there for a laugh. Or to drive off with the taxi, burn it out down by the old works. All the Woodhouses were there, including Alan, Kyle's dad, the one who died. They were all there. Later, going through it, over and over and over, it reminded Rob of when they pulled the Ayatollah's body out of its coffin and tore it into the crowd. Then the hands that were snatching at the driver let him drop to the floor and they were on him. They swarmed over him, kicks and punches. They were off him for a second and there he was lying still on the ground. Rob turned and caught Glenn's eye and they took off, ran away, and he didn't think he'd ever been as frightened as right then, across the car park and the uneven ground, thinking don't fall over and don't fall because they'd be on them like they were on him.

Glenn fell over, tumbled and did something like a forward roll and was up on his feet again almost and Rob grabbed his arm and they got to the end of the shops. They turned to look and they were back on him again, but there were others running away as well. Some lights from a car on the main road illuminated them all for a moment and then they were all running but Rob and Glenn had got a head start at least and were off, zigzagging away through the estate.

When they got to the canal they jumped it, didn't walk up to the bridge, pulled themselves up the embankment on hands and knees and stopped at the phone box by the Perry Street flats, asking each other if they were OK.

Rob had some change in his pocket. They agreed to get
an ambulance. Rob was shaking so much he dropped the coins as he got them out of his pocket, but Glenn remembered you didn't need money for 999 and he went in the phone box. Rob looked around wildly to check there was no one around, still hearing the echo of their footsteps against the flats, the light from a telly flaring from one of the windows. When he looked down he thought he was bleeding, his leg all hot and then he realized that he'd pissed himself.

It might be that they saved his life. That was one way of looking at it. There was another call as well. From the woman driving the car that had turned off the main road, but she might've made it after them because she drove to her mother's bungalow down Chestnut Avenue first. They might have saved his life. After they'd tried to kill him, of course.

Who killed Yusuf Khan?

They stopped running after the phone box. Just walked a big loop, coming out by Dudley Port, walked the long way up along the main road. A police van even passed them on the bridge, but they were walking the wrong way then, or looked innocent, or whatever, and they got back to Glenn's and stuck Rob's jeans in the washing machine and sat drinking tea with six or seven sugars in to stop themselves shaking, and talking about whether he was dead or not and how quick the police would come.

But the police never came. Not to anyone. Now they'd have CCTV and everything, but it was before they'd started doing that. They hadn't got anything to go on. No booking at the taxi office. No witnesses. Nothing. Rob didn't know at the time what he was more scared of – the police knocking the door or one of the Woodies or their mates, but nothing happened. Nobody said anything. Like it was a dream. Silence. Their own little law of
omertà
. Years later, occasionally, there would be whispers, rumours, about who
had done it and after he died people tended to say it was Alan Woodhouse, because he was dead and that was convenient, as if he could have done all that damage himself. Alan was already way gone by then. All skin and bones.

There'd been appeals for witnesses at first and reports on
Midlands Today
and in the paper, but that soon died away. His only family here were his in-laws. He'd only been here six weeks. That was why he pulled over. He'd come over from Pakistan with his new wife, a girl who'd been at Cinderheath High but who'd left a year early to go back. Rob kept forgetting her name. It all faded away more quickly than it might have.

Rob had chipped a bone in his foot somehow as they ran away, or when he was struggling and kicking to get out of the taxi, the second metatarsal in his left foot, same as Beckham's. At least he thought that was when he did it. It got sore during his first couple of months at Villa. They found it with an X-ray in November, said he must have done it in a pre-season game. He ended up in plaster for a month, started training again in Christmas week. He wondered sometimes if it might've been that that set him back, made the difference in the end. Plus the fact that it was on his mind all the time, of course, when the knock at the door was going to come.

Some time after Karen left, late, late one night, drinking and not able to sleep, drinking tea and a bottle of vodka that was left over from Christmas, he'd even phoned the police station, but it went to an answerphone, wasn't open at that time, and he chickened out or saw sense and he hadn't done that since. It was all about him, though, his own guilt, nobody else.

Rob pictured the girl – it bothered him that he couldn't remember her name – wiping the dribble from her husband's feeding tube or changing his nappy.

It was when Rob had come back from Wrexham, had
pushed it from his mind, and had got together with Karen, that he saw it on the wall of the old dairy.
WHO KILLED YUSUF KHAN
? And it was like it was almost worse because he wasn't even dead, just useless, pushed round the cracked pavements every now and again in his wheelchair with his blankets and feeding tube and woolly hat that guarded him against the Midlands cold he'd never got chance to get used to, by his still-teenage wife – and they'd done it, he'd done this, was part of it, anyway. Painted there in green spray paint. And it appeared all over the place for a couple of years after that. All over Cinderheath. Sometimes in Dudley, Tipton, Great Bridge. Still none of them said anything. Never would. Silence.

Corinthian Casuals.
As the name came to him he realized to him that Owen had dived. If he hadn't dived as such he'd bought the penalty, invited the foot forward so he could fall over it. They were different things. Diving was cheating. This was professional. It was why the hand had been such an affront. There was no pretence. If there was a hand, it was the hand of God. Beckham looked up at the keeper – a good sign – and down again. This was taking for ever now. The half itself had gone so quickly, disappeared, and now this was taking for ever. He looked up at the keeper, down again. That was how time went, life passed. Suddenly you were here. A point of no return. He would score or he would miss. This was clearer, though, of course, real life didn't really offer this, no matter what people said. Apart from the way it stopped now.

He stepped forward. Hit it. Terrible contact. Rob watched now. It went low. Everything speeded up. It hit the net. The keeper hadn't moved. It was in.

There was a pause, then a low roar that seemed to come from outside of them all, not the normal Yesssss! of a goal but fragmented, individual, a split second when people
were on their own, checking it really was in, it was there in the net. The keeper hadn't moved, just had his arm stretched out to his side, his weight all on the wrong foot, and Beckham running now towards the corner, on his own as well, arms held strangely down at his side, shouting from down inside himself. He got to the corner, leaped with clenched fists, the other players catching him up.

The shouts came all together now, beer flying everywhere. Jim's arms were aloft, Glenn was on his knees in front of the screen. Yes! Yes! Yes! Rob's fists were clenched in front of his face, doubled over almost, he turned now to his dad, still in his seat but his mouth open, his head going back and forward, as if shouting but not making any noise. Rob grabbed him, kissed his cheek, his dad gripped his arm, then he turned to the fruit machine, banged it with the flat of his hands and set it rocking, turned back towards the screen.

There was chaos around the room, the whooping of delight, a short-lived Eng-ger-land chant went up from the other end of the bar. Argentina were kicking off, but suddenly it must be nearly time, the whistle was going and Collina was pointing towards the tunnel and it was half-time and what a time to score.

What a time to score, eh! What a time to score! Jim and Glenn danced with each other around the tables.

The salon was on the corner of Dudley Road and Juniper Close
in a green dip in the road before it forked for Dudley and Tipton. Everyone called this row the little shops. There was a newsagent on the opposite corner and a council estate office next door. Over the road was a children's playground. Pauline had nagged Jim about getting a safe, springy surface laid in place of the gravel. Behind that were big ash trees, from where the crows flew back and forth between the park and their nests.

The buses to Dudley and Tipton and the new one that did a circle of the estate before going off to Merry Hill all stopped a short way up the road. That was one of the things they'd thought would make here such a good spot. It had been hard work, taking on the salon after her mobile business – she used to just get in her little van and drive to her appointments – and there'd been times since when she'd wondered why she'd let Jim talk her into opening a shop. You had to get on, move up, apparently.

It was worrying her this morning. Lisa, the girl who had worked with her for the last couple of years, had left to go to Karen Woodhouse's place. It was the third time this had happened, if you counted Karen herself, who'd driven around with Pauline in the school holidays and then come to train with her when she took the shop on. She wanted to feel angrier than she did but that was what it was all about, she supposed, getting on. Karen would pay Lisa more than minimum wage and she'd get to work with – and on – girls her own age. She'd get to do more cuts than pensioners' specials. Pauline had realized the other day, at Gornal crematorium in fact, that her clientele was in danger of dying off. She didn't know what she was going to do about getting someone new in. She'd started a new Saturday girl, who was no good, and she didn't know if she could afford anyone in the week. The extra work was going to kill her, though. It was hard
enough as it was, with Jim and Michael, and having to do more these days for her own mother and Jim's mum. She'd thought she should wait until after the election before saying something to Jim; now she thought she'd wait until she didn't know when, after the World Cup she supposed, after they'd got everything with Michael sorted out.

Sensing this, Kathleen had been helping out a lot in the last week. She had her own problems with Tom and Robert. You'd think things would get easier as they got older, with husbands and sons, but she wasn't so sure. Kath had been coming in, doing some cleaning, popping back later in the day to sweep hair up. Pauline was going to try to force some cash on her later, easier said than done. She'd become a good friend, her sister-in-law.

It was Kath who had suggested them getting together this morning. It had actually meant more work. Pauline had to drive to Gornal to pick her own mum up and then back round to the flats to meet Kath, and then the rigmarole of getting Evie into the car. Jim and Kath's mum had lost her leg, had it amputated after a blood clot during a series of illnesses a couple of years ago when it had looked like she wouldn't make it. They'd spent that Millennium New Year's Eve holding her hand as she drifted in and out of consciousness, thinking she was talking to her own parents, talking to people who were long gone. She'd had scarlet fever as a young girl; she kept calling out like she was in that soaked-sheet room in a long-demolished house among erased streets. It had been weird that night, fireworks and celebrations through the window, flickering images of the first moon walk and the Berlin Wall and the entry into Auschwitz on the television, and a monologue from Dudley in the thirties that none of them ever talked about except in moments like this, last days, last hours, from the hospital bed, time bleeding in different directions. Evie was a miracle, really, to look at her now, her hair freshly done, eating a
chocolate éclair, talking about David Beckham, swinging her one leg like she was taking the penalty.

Pauline had done three cuts so far today, but none of them for paying customers. She was doing her own mother now, had got her under the drier. Evie had actually given her a fiver. When Pauline had protested she'd grinned.

From that nice Mr Brown, she'd said. Yer wanna put yer prices up for these pensioners.

It was true about the pensions. Gordon Brown was as popular as David Beckham in the Cinderheath flats.

Kath brought a half-time cup of tea out for everyone. On and off through the morning they'd been talking about their sons, husbands.

He has mentioned someone lately. This was Rob, now.

Has he? Who's that then?

Kath leaned towards her, conspiratorially.

Yer know Pamela Thomas who become a nurse?

Who married Mr Quereishi. They said this together. The surgeon had achieved a kind of fame through keeping various family members alive. They liked him because they knew a little bit about the story of him marrying Pamela Thomas, a girl Kath had grown up down the road from, and because he wasn't always off playing golf when you tried to make an appointment like some of the consultants they'd had to deal with. They'd become experts, over the years.

I know how the heart works, he'd said to Kath, sadly almost, half-smiling and patting her hand when she got upset at the end of a chat when he'd explained the procedure he was going to perform on Tom.

Well, their daughter, Jasmine, who was at the school when they was little and Mr and Mrs Thomas was still alive, has gone back to work at the school. And I think Rob, yer know, might be keen.

I remember her, course I do. Lovely little girl. And what about her? Is her keen on him?

I think they might have been out a couple of times, only after work, for a coffee, yer know. I spose it might be nice for her to have someone her knew there at the school. London, he said her'd bin working at a school there, an abroad, I think he said.