Heartland (8 page)

See you Monday, she'd said, and turned and smiled as she went back to the girls filling out library membership forms. One of the girls was called Nasima; he'd seen her in basketball lessons and he waved over to them. When Jasmine got back to the table she said something and they all giggled. He found himself hoping she'd said something about him, about when they were kids, knowing the girls would try to tease her for talking to him.

He'd found a reading scheme on the internet for older kids and sent for a sample. It was great – boys always going off down the river to have adventures like Huckleberry Finn, each lesson on different phonic sounds. Structured, ordered. That's what you needed. Rob had learned things himself. The only problem was that it was an American system and cost a fortune. He'd been trying to suggest the school buy it but no one had seemed that interested. He could talk to Jasmine about it, find a way in.

Rob sat there at the window, watching the kids walk up the road. Some days he was timetabled to be on duty on the gates at the end of the day with the senior teachers and police, to keep an eye out for trouble, but not today. The idea was to keep a mix of people out there. This afternoon looked a good one to be doing it though, everyone going home calmly in their little gangs. There'd been a few bits of trouble lately, usually when adults or older brothers came down with some issue or the other. The arrests and now the election were hardly helping things.

He wanted to make a dash for it, as soon as the rush had gone, get up to the sports shop and buy a cheap pair
of new boots. His Kings – the last evidence of him once being a decent player – had disintegrated. Then he could get to Tesco before the after-work rush. He cooked for his mum and dad on Thursday nights. He'd always done that, even when he lived with Karen. He'd always liked cooking, would maybe have tried to do something with it if he hadn't tried to make it with his football.

He flipped vaguely through the snakes book Andre had found for him, then leaned back and put his feet up on the radiator and watched the last of the crowds go through the school gates. He was trying to think of how to start a new conversation with Jasmine. He could always, of course, just ask her out for a drink, but he feared that she might wonder what the teaching assistant who strutted around in his football kit all day was doing thinking he had a chance with her. He might be nice to look at and they might have sat in the same classroom twenty years ago but, come off it. It hadn't felt quite like that, though. Maybe she'd like to chat about what had happened to the other kids who'd been in their class, to get nostalgic about when she lived around here. He wondered if she knew about Adnan, if he should mention it. He could dress it up as a big tragedy then offer a shoulder to cry on, or something. Actually, that was probably the way to do it.

A mixed group of girls – headscarves and hair bobbles – hurried through the gates, giggling and holding cooking dishes covered with tea towels.

Working hard, Rob? The new Head strolled past towards the office and didn't wait for a reply.

When he'd seen the computer had gone from the corner of their room,
Zubair knew that Adnan meant to go for good. He'd been drifting. They hadn't been speaking to each other, but by that point Adnan wasn't really speaking to anyone. He'd do his taxi shift, always offering to work Friday and
Saturday lates, which brought in more money but more hassle too. Sometimes he'd stay to be dealt a hand in the perpetual game of cards that went on in the back of the cab office, but usually he'd just be home to the computer, eating at different times to everyone else, in front of the screen.

Zubair thought he had his own worries then. He'd been about to move out and get a flat with Katie. He hadn't told Adnan this, hadn't told anyone. He announced it one Saturday morning that autumn, with his bags already packed, his parents sitting there not saying anything, like they'd been turned to stone, wondering how they'd managed to lose two sons in the space of a couple of months. It bothered him now, that even amid the agony of his brother's disappearance his big concern had been moving in with Katie, not wanting to lose her. They could've waited, he thought now. It would've helped his mum and dad.

Weeks went by. His parents would look at him like he had the answers; his mother sitting rocking on the edge of the settee, his dad deflating, ageing in his chair. They tried the police and hospitals. There was a procedure for registering a missing person. If a man, boy, nearly twenty, with no obvious problems wanted to just walk away from his life, though, there was nothing much stopping him. Zubair knew his dad had tried stuff through the mosque. He wasn't sure anyone was that bothered, though. Some of them probably thought, bring your kids up as English, bad Muslims, then this is what you get.

In the summer before he left, Zubair remembered seeing Adnan flipping through an old London
A–Z
a couple of times. He'd almost asked him if he was thinking of going on a trip but they were barely speaking then. Adnan would've probably just grunted, shook his head, turned away. It was something to go on, though. The only thing they'd got to go on. Zubair bought an
A–Z
, closed his
eyes, tried to picture the position of the book when he'd seen his brother looking at it.

On that first trip he'd stayed on Seven Sisters Road in one of the dubious hotels opposite the park. When a big lorry lumbered past, as they seemed to all through the night, the electricity flickered in the building and Zubair thought of the rats eating their way through wiring and then the walls. He ended up sitting in a chair and dozing intermittently in the reddish light that passed for dark, the shadows of vehicles on the main road circling through the room.

When he woke for the final time and pulled back the dirty net curtain, there was Finsbury Park in the bleak morning light, the flow of traffic absent for a moment; he could hear a bird singing, and there in the corner of the park someone had lit a fire, smoke curling upwards slowly, three or four shapes shuffled around it. A man with a huge bushy beard, wearing what looked like a monk's habit tied with rope, pushed a shopping trolley filled with bits of wood down the path towards the fire. He took a swig from a can he'd rested in the trolley's child seat. Zubair shook his head, rubbed his eyes and then his back, sore from his night in the chair. He thought about the way life could swallow people up; he saw it all the time at work. He shivered, showered and dressed quickly and walked to find a café; he needed to drink coffee and make a plan about what to do next, a plan about what to say to his parents.

He got breakfast in a café in Highbury in among road workers in luminous jackets, people in suits shuffling papers and talking too loudly, a young mother trying to manoeuvre a pushchair. People lived on top of each other here. He could see a corner of one of the stands at the Arsenal ground through the window. The sun shone in across Zubair's coffee and scrambled eggs. The world seemed
suddenly more intense and fragile than he could ever have imagined. He thought he might cry.

Zubair had been around, and prided himself in fact on a cynicism that was beyond his twenty-four years. It was turning him into a good solicitor, and this in turn was feeding his cynicism. Every day he sat with kids who'd stolen cars, climbed down through warehouse skylights, cut somebody for looking at them the wrong way, and he had to think of ways to keep them out of serious trouble. That morning, in London, he was conscious of how little he knew about anything.

He rode buses back and forth across the city. The bus from Highbury struggled up the hill like an arthritic old woman and on the downhill felt like it might not stop at all. Out the window, a hotchpotch: crumbling terraces, blocks of flats, grand villas, massage parlours, delicatessens, a Turkish restaurant, a Georgian restaurant, an Ethiopian restaurant, the Inns of Court, Oxford Street, Knightsbridge; it was a ride that became increasingly outlandish. How would you find someone in this labyrinth? How would you begin to look? He stared out of the bus window, thinking about Adnan, about what might have happened – dead in the river, wandering around London like the vagrant he'd seen that morning, amnesia from a bang on the head, mixed up in something dodgy, run away to get married, run away with a man, run away, run away – something had to fill a vacuum; stories would fill the space he'd left. Zubair had to admit there was a certain temptation to let yourself be swallowed. If everything could be so suspect, all certainties and identities so fragile, where did that leave you, where did that leave everything?

The same ball again.
Walter Samuel hit it diagonally, in the air into the gap behind Cole again. There were groans. Rob took a gulp of his pint. His old man shuffled on his
seat, leaned back. Tode yer, he said, thass the ball. The beer made Rob feel cold.

In the game against the mosque, Carl Jones took a throw. Rob dropped off, like he'd done thousands of times before, nodded and blinked at Carl, palms out. He had to take two more strides, say, Yes, Carl, before he got it. He wanted to take a touch, look up, hit a ball towards Glenn's run, but Carl was too slow, and he just had to knock the ball back, one touch, instep, towards Carl – and Tayub was across him, nipped in, out for another throw, a flash of Tayub's red boots, young and quick. Young and quick, young and quick, rattled around Rob's head. He told Carl to put the throw down the line next time.

Yow've bin smoking in here again.

I ay.

Jim, yow have. Why dyer lie to me? Havin all the winders open ay gonna tek the smell away just like that, yer know. Iss a nice day an all. If yer must have one, have one out the back. I thought yer was out canvassing, any road. Thought that was the point of having these days off.

No leaflets, nobody to help with the loudspeaker till tonight.

Well, that was a waste of time, then. Dyer want a sandwich? I've onny got half hour. I've gorra two o'clock appointment.

Pauline pulled open the cupboard with a sense of purpose. Yer should o bin dahn the salon. I've had some o the women from dahn the old people's flats in wi me. They've med me head goo rahnd. If I'd known yow was sittin here I'd a phoned an yow coulda done a surgery. Talk abaht moan.

They'm all bloody Tories, any road, Jim said.

Tories? Fascists, I think. Ooh, they think there's a bunch o terrorists plotting out the front o the flats, cos there's a
carload of Asian lads that sits aht the front on a Sunday night smoking. It ay very pleasant, I spose, but young lads atta hang rahnd somewhere. Not that colour's anything to do with it. BNP's too left-wing for em. They just want everybody shot, I think. Oh, an they want the Merry Hill buses to stop tekkin schoolchildren, an they wanna know why the flats dahn Willow Road have had theer winders done again when iss meant to be theer turn. Dyer want this corned beef, the date's up today?

Arr, lovely. They might have a point about the winders, everything's gone in the wrong order after that row with the contractors.

Honestly, they moan abaht everything, though. Nothing's any good. I'm just surrounded by people moaning. How am yer, Gladys?
Not too good.
Lovely day, Olive.
Bit too hot for me.

All right, calm down.

Calm down? Yow ay the one who's had to listen to it all morning or every day more like. Then they got on to the mosque. What am I supposed to say to em?

There were plans for a new mosque and community centre to be built on the Cinderheath works site that had been derelict for twenty years because of endless planning rows. The papers had been calling it a Supermosque. It didn't help that the old church next to the site was lying empty too, because the Church of England was too tight to fix the roof and wanted to pull it down and sell the land for houses or, more likely, to the mosque developers. People were blaming the council for the church as well as the mosque. Jim thought there was enough to blame the council for without picking on things that they had no control over.

The current mosque was in the old Dudley Road school building, but that was way too small and Friday prayers had started spilling out on to the street. At least that was
in an Asian area, though. The roads that led up to the works site, furthest from the shops, furthest from anywhere, were the worst in the estate. Jim thought darkly that now they'd finally got a wrecking ball over the works site they could do worse than take the bloody church out and a few of the streets as well.

There was a roar of approval, laughter and jeering and banging tables.
Batistuta looked up at the yellow card being held aloft by Collina. Collina's eyes bulged.

He's a good ref, him, ay he, Mark?

The best.

Right decision, that.

There was a close-up of Batistuta's face on the screen, his long hair matted and his face hollow like that of a saint. Glenn jumped up quickly, leaped in front of the screen, made his fingers into a circle, moving his wrist back and forth.

Batistuta, you wanker!

He'd jumped in front of the projector and Glenn's shadow appeared across the screen, monstrous, to loud cheers and a couple of voices shouting, Sit down! Rob looked at his dad and rolled his eyes.

It was all about his standing foot.
People talked about the angle that Beckham ran up at, the speed with which he whipped his foot through the ball, the angle at which his foot made contact with the ball. Rob thought it was about his standing foot, his broken foot, the angle he planted it at, anchored himself. It was his foot that allowed the whip. It was all the other things as well, but it was his standing foot. Rob had been studying it. He reckoned you could prove it, work it out with maths and angles. He thought of Adnan, as always with things like this; you could work it out with a computer no doubt. Or you
could stand, hour after hour, day after day, rain and shine, whacking free-kicks on some bleak wasteland on the edge of east London and Essex with no one watching or caring, or at Carrington with Cantona and Ferguson looking on, until it was burned into your muscles, a rhythm you could find in your sleep.