Heartland (5 page)

Adnan saved a girl's life once, at a swimming lesson at Dudley Baths. They were all stood on the edge of the deep end, shivering and shouting in a line, not listening to the teacher's instructions. Suddenly Adnan, standing next to Rob, dived in. Dived properly, God knows how he knew to do it, like someone in the Olympics. Rob remembered his body stretched out like a smooth brown frog's, suspended in the pool's blue light just before the moment of impact. Rob saw him kick his legs under the splashing water and, next thing, he was back out on top with an arm around a tiny, silent girl called Deborah Taylor, dragging her to the side. She was heaving and spluttering, had fallen in with such little splash when they were all making a noise that no one had noticed.

Adnan did everything like that, better than you'd ever seen anyone do it before, then he'd just brush it off like it was nothing. He breezed through school work, read piles of books, back and forth to the library, interested in things, ideas, people. He was fascinated with computers and made tapes with little games on that he'd written himself, things that involved chasing spiky monsters or steering a car around a track. He was good at sport, tall and willowy, and when he'd played football he'd ran and swerved with the ball at his feet like Mark Walters at the Villa, whose sticker they'd plastered up and down the lamppost by the shops. He'd fight if he had to and he had to a lot – he didn't go looking for trouble but never backed down.
When they were kids Rob thought Adnan would end up as prime minister or something. Rich, at least. He didn't think he'd be a taxi driver.

When they moved on to Cinderheath High, back then especially, all the Asian boys were meant to know their place, really. They could sit and do their work and get involved with sport, but as far as fighting and messing about and hanging around with the white girls went, that was something else altogether. Rob heard there were schools near by that had things the other way round. When he was growing up, for instance, Cinderheath kids called the school up in Dudley the Ape House, scared of black boys taking their money when they went into town. Somebody always had to be on top, he supposed, some group or other. It was the way the world worked.

He and Adnan grew apart as they got older. Rob concentrated on his football; Adnan on his school work, turning in on himself, sitting at the computer that school had given him when they were getting new ones. He went on to sixth form when Rob went to the Villa: they didn't see each other much while Rob sat miserably in his digs in Wrexham, pretending to be a professional footballer. Adnan drifted along when he finished sixth form – his family assumed he'd go to university like his brother – doing the odd day's work in warehouses and factories, inevitably ending up driving a taxi for Joey Khan. Then one morning he just drove off, disappeared.

Yer cor just vanish into thin air, though, mate, Rob said to Zubair.

He'd had a drink with Adnan's brother every week now for the near ten years he'd been missing. They'd meet at Zubair's office on Wolverhampton Street or sometimes down at the magistrates' court now it had moved, have a couple of pints in Dudley or at Merry Hill, before dumping the car and ending up back in the Lion.

Zubair would shrug, not look at Rob properly. Maybe he knew something more, maybe he didn't. There was family stuff that Rob couldn't really get at, felt he couldn't ask or wouldn't understand, didn't know where to start. Muslim stuff, maybe; things seemed more complicated than they used to.

You couldn't just disappear into thin air, though. You couldn't become nothing.

Rob knew the truth was probably mundane, and tragic, but stories crept in to fill the gaps. Adnan the mujahedin. That was one of the stories. Rob reckoned Zubair knew more than he let on.

A couple of years after he'd gone, Rob read something about the routes into Bosnia, stories of young British Muslim men travelling there to sign up. Get a holiday flight to Italy or Corfu. There were middlemen to sort out a boat across to Albania. Hang around the harbour in Tirana and wait for a bus to a training camp and then the front. So maybe that was it; he was trudging through the mud with an AK-47 or rocket launcher. Or living like a bandit in the dusty mountains of Afghanistan. Or sneaking through the winding alleyways of Gaza. And you had to admit, Rob thought to himself, and only to himself, that there was something in that, something a bit more exciting than sitting here watching it all unfold on the telly, watching everything, your own life included, slide away, turn to rust. Then he wondered exactly who it was he was thinking about.

Nowadays he pictured Adnan bearded and hollow-faced in a cave or dead, under the rubble somewhere, sinking in the mud. Wild fantasies filled the silence. He found himself scanning the faces of al-Qaeda terrorists when they flashed up on the news; the bland, sinister head-shots reminded him of the ones on the football stickers he and Adnan had swapped as kids.

Rob thought about Zubair sitting in his office, watching the television he'd rigged up for the World Cup, chain-smoking through matches, leaning back on his chair against the frame of the open window. Thinking about Adnan, his missing brother. Zubair was lonely, Rob thought. But he didn't know how lucky he was: he'd married Katie, a legal secretary he'd worked with; they'd bought a nice house by the park, had a little girl. Rob had bumped into Katie once at a bar at The Waterfront – he'd shagged her mate, but nothing came of it – Zubair had been at home with the baby.

Mills made a run up the right.
Scholes tried to find him with a pass. England looked in, but the move came to nothing. Rob heard his dad mutter, Unlucky son, to Mills, or more likely to Scholes for spotting the pass.

Suddenly Simeone hit it diagonally, the same kind of ball but in reverse, into the space behind Ashley Cole for Ortega to run on to. Not quite. Another scare. The ball ran out of play.

Thass the ball. Thass the ball they'll atta watch. His dad tapped his arm and leaned towards him as he spoke. They'll atta watch that space in behind Cole, he pushes up way too far, forces it. I doh care how quick he is, I've tode yer.

His old man leaned back then, as if he'd solved a tricky crossword clue.

Rob was suddenly scared that his dad would clap if Argentina scored using that ball inside the full-back, would look around nodding his head, saying, I tode yer, they deserve it.

He wondered what Glenn or some of the others would do then. Maybe they'd just indulge him, maybe not. He wondered what he'd do in return. He'd served that lot with plastic beakers, given himself a glass.

Jasmine always thought she'd come back to Cinderheath.
Even getting together with him – and everything that this had caused – had been a kind of return. Looking back on the past year, she knew she wouldn't have lost all sense, the way she did, if it hadn't all somehow led back here. She would never have hurt Matt in the way she had, although maybe it had done him some good, if there hadn't been the idea of some kind of return to Cinderheath, some kind of homecoming, at the back of her mind. That's what she told herself now; anyway, it was too late and the damage was done.

There was work to do here. She lifted a pile of folders from a box, but realized there was nowhere to store them and dropped them on a table. The tables were all rejects from other classrooms, engraved with the obsessions of generations of pupils, hearts and tag names. Jasmine was startled for a moment to see a bloom of swastikas tattooed into a desk in the shape of a flower. There was a lot to do here.

At first, she thought Helena had invented the job for her. You'd be perfect, she'd said. Ethnic Minority Achievement and a reading recovery programme: a variety of clunky job titles they still hadn't decided on.

What do you think your job title should be? Helena asked.

Teacher? she said, bemused.

That's why I think you'd be perfect.

Helena had been Assistant Head at Riverway, the school in London where Jasmine had taught English. She'd moved to be Deputy at a school in Aston – she was from Birmingham originally – and she and Jasmine kept in touch. She'd phoned to say she'd got a Headship, at Cinderheath, and asked if Jasmine knew it. She'd paused for a long time before replying.

It's where I grew up.

I knew it! I thought I'd heard you mention it before.

Or rather, when I say I grew up there, my mum's family are from there. We lived there for a couple of years when I was a little girl.

Helena had offered her a job outright. Jasmine was in no condition to think about anything then, after the summer she'd gone through, betraying Matt, leaving him, then being left, betrayed, herself. It was September 11th, the day Adnan let her down, and for her it would always mean that: sitting blankly for hours in front of the television. If he'd done what he'd promised he wouldn't even have been in New York. They'd have been together.

It was at Christmas that it became clear what she was going to do, back at her parents' for the holidays, curled up in the warmth, sleeping and eating finally, reading even, getting some kind of rest, not leaving the house except for a walk into Bridgnorth to pick up some presents, and then along the river with her parents on Christmas morning. It wasn't that she knew what she should do, or even what she wanted or ought to do, but that she knew what she was going to do: the inevitability of it all.

Which left her now, nearly six months on, trying to organize this bare annexe room off the library in Cinderheath High School into some kind of classroom, putting her life back together. In most jobs they'd have asked her to teach right from the start – before September and the new school year – whereas here all she had to do was make sure this space was ready, do pupil assessments, try to meet with parents and do some staff training. She was lucky, even if she didn't feel it.

Jasmine pulled a box towards her and took out some display work she'd saved from Riverway. It amazed her how she'd been aware enough last autumn to pack up these boxes and label them neatly, put them away in hibernation like they used to with the class tortoise when
she was a girl, packed away and waiting for the spring, for a new start.

There was a dubious wisdom in decorating this room with reminders of her old classroom – these masks made for the Capulets' ball had hung on the wall next to the door, this
Oliver Twist
poster had filled the space between the two big windows that looked across the docks and down the river. It would have been nice to have some windows here. All she had was this partition of reinforced glass (someone had still managed to smash it into a cobweb of little breaks; they'd replace it before they got children in here) that let her look murkily across a library of unread books and new computer terminals.

She wanted windows, light! She'd had enough of being shut away, buried. Sudden thoughts of the first Mrs Rochester came to mind, she'd read
Jane Eyre
over and over, hidden away as an unhappy adolescent, and then
Wide Sargasso Sea
as a happy student in London a few years later. She wanted light.

The windows of her old classroom opened on to the spaces past Canary Wharf where the clouds broke up, as the river slowly became sea, over the new skyscrapers and crumbling dock buildings. Sitting here in her penitent's cave, she smoothed the edges of the reclaimed posters and thought about those windows. She remembered her shock as a new teacher on looking from her classroom on an unseasonably warm, sunny September afternoon and seeing bodies, framed against the glinting skyscrapers, paused for a moment, arms raised, before leaping from the bridge over the dock into the water below.

She'd walked down there after school that day. There was a scrap of shingle beach at the cambered end of the dock, and kids playing there, in and out of the water, shouts of, All right, miss? from a couple of those she'd started to teach, whole families down there as well, people
holding ice creams and cans of lager, spilling over the dockside concrete. There was a sign warning people about the water, prohibiting swimming, and behind that a tattooed man teaching a girl in armbands to swim and a dog with a tennis ball in its mouth chopping the water with its paws.

And in the background there were the jumpers, strange and beautiful, with that pause before falling, arms raised in a salute, a body tumbling with sunshine and skyscrapers beyond, planes descending for City Airport. Skyscrapers, planes, falling bodies.

The next day there'd been an assembly about the dangers of swimming in the docks. The pupils were banned; there was a letter going home. Matt gave the assembly. He spoke to them quietly about how it was tempting, exciting, to go down to the water. How people older than them, even maybe mums and dads, uncles, cousins, might say there was no harm in it, and that there didn't seem to be any harm in the sunshine, in the cool water, the ice cream van pulled up alongside the dock, but that it was more dangerous than they thought. Someone had died a couple of years before with the shock of the water after jumping in from the bridge. Some of the kids in that room knew the family. He knew the family. The boy had been a good boxer, had a part-time job on the market that helped his family out, he'd gone down there one summer afternoon, gone off the bridge and never came up. It was a couple of weeks before they found his body. Nobody told you about the rubbish and the rats that were there in the water, nobody told you how dangerous it was. But he was telling them now. They weren't banned for the sake of it, to stop them having a good time. He was asking them to think. They sat there silently, a hundred and fifty Year Elevens, listening intently, some of them nodding slightly. She hadn't seen them like this before, not quite so engaged when someone spoke to them. They were like it whenever he spoke to them.

The weather changed the next day anyway, but Jasmine would watch them the following summer and the summer after that. No one paid any attention to letters or bans, no matter how hard they listened to Matt Johnson when he spoke to them, no matter how much they loved him. It was one of the things he worried about. One of the many. After they got together, it was one of the worries she tried to soothe for him.