Heartland (9 page)

Rob was testing his theory with Patrick Richards and Leroy Moses, the best players at the school. Leroy was on terms at West Brom, Patrick was still playing in the junior teams at Cinderheath, waiting for the scouts to knock. Rob thought Patrick was the better player, for what it was worth; the scouts didn't know everything. They'd taken a bag of balls out to the Astro. Rob laid out an imaginary wall with cones. He'd chalked an X where they placed the ball and drawn a line where he wanted them to place their standing foot.

Patrick's foot went from underneath him the first time; he went crashing to the ground, the ball knocking over the cones like skittles.

Cor I just kick it like normal?

No.

Yome mekkin me look like a tit.

Nobody's watchin, mate. Nobody cares. One day they will, though, which is why we'm doing this.

Rob hit one, not bad, curled it inside the far post. There was definitely something in his theory. They all hit a couple each, trudged together to collect the balls up, walked back to the chalk marks. They hit another set. It started to drizzle with rain, blurring the chalk. Patrick hit a peach, it clipped the bar as it went in. A car horn sounded. It was Jasmine. Rob raised his hand and waved, tried not to look too delighted.

As a teenager Adnan turned in on himself;
he had no choice, it seemed to him. He went through the motions
with his school work, sat in their little bedroom, staring at the computer that had begun to dominate his life, at a torrent of zeros and ones, poring over manuals and magazines, teaching himself Machine Code, teaching himself how to bend things to his will. Work hard, their dad implored them, delighted; work hard, and make something of yourselves.

He'd look at the television, though, at clothes and cars that one day, somehow, he'd make his, pulling on his hand-me-down school trousers, going shiny at the knees, that he'd sewn Farah labels on to himself. His dad told them that hard work made you something, but his dad worked hard, all the hours he could now, since being made redundant and all it made him was knackered. He even said he was lucky, with his new job in a galvanizing place behind the Roman Mosaic when so many were out of work. He picked up some extra cash every now and again driving a taxi for Joey Khan, out until all hours on a Friday night. Work sets you free, he'd felt like painting over their entry wall in a fit of adolescent drama, like in the concentration camp photo in Zubair's history textbooks. It wasn't only this question though, the mysteries of work and money and the lack of any correlation between the two, that nagged away at him. He'd look at Rob and some of the others he'd grown up with, and their everyday glamour – football, fighting, girls – and he wanted that as well. He could make something of himself all right, like his dad said, sit in the corner and do his school work and concentrate on his computer, his zeros and ones, and make something of himself, as much as he'd be allowed to, anyway. More than anybody else he knew, he understood that. He understood how things fitted together; he was starting to understand how the world worked. That was the problem. He didn't just want to make something of himself; he wanted to make everything of himself. He
wanted it all. Sometimes he'd look at himself in the bathroom mirror. Fuckin Paki, he'd mouth silently.

Zubair didn't get any of this. They'd stay up late talking across the narrow space between their beds. Zubair said he was going to do Law at university, become a solicitor. Their dad lapped it up. Adnan used to whisper in the dark that it was a good idea but what else, what then? They'd talk about cars and clothes and women, but he knew Zubair didn't mean it. To Zubair they were just dreams. He didn't realize that you could just go out and get what you wanted. Not if you worked hard enough but if you were strong enough. They'd get to the same point in the conversation and Zubair would say that he'd lost him, that he would settle for what he was doing thank you very much, now go to sleep. Adnan would never settle, he promised himself that.

If you were strong enough you could get things, but something was in the way, people who wanted to stop you, he knew that well enough. He read the books that Zubair brought back from college. They'd talk about them late at night. He didn't understand it all but he understood more than Zubair. He read about Germany in the twenties. All the rules the world made to keep the Germans poor. He read leaflets Zubair brought home about Palestine and the refugee camps in Lebanon, a badly copied edition of
The Elders of Zion
. He read about the camps and the ovens, about systems, about zeroes and ones, erasure, people turned into ash and smoke and clouds and then nothing at all. It was metaphor. It was code. People were in the way. It didn't matter who they were: Jews, Muslims, Aryans. It was the idea that mattered. There were people in the way who would stop him getting what he wanted. There were winners and losers, zeroes and ones.

Adnan turned in on himself. He read. He learned his code and practised this language, unadorned, pure, through
which you could remake the world in your own image. He thought about erasure, about the transformation that would bring him everything he ever wanted.

Rob parked on the wasteland at the side of the shops,
a meadow of rubble and condoms that ran down to the canalside wall. Zubair called it the Tourette's Wall. Rob glanced over to it. Someone had written
PAKI POWER
and painted a star and crescent on it, but at the other end he could see
VOTE BNP
and
NO TO THE MOSQUE
and
BOING! BOING!
It was all in the same red paint. The cans were probably on offer somewhere. Schizophrenia and Tourette's, he'd tell Zubair, try to raise a laugh. Underneath the red lettering and recently drawn tag names there were other fading hieroglyphics,
WWFC
and a misshapen wolf's head,
SHERE-E-PANJAB
. And underneath that, the lettering almost invisible but seemingly burned in there,
WHO KILLED YUSUF KHAN?

Rob shivered. Zubair had admitted to him that he'd sprayed it up there a couple of times, when he was a student and had a few too many to drink, but he hadn't done the first ones. It had been all over the place for a while, got covered on the local news, got a report in the
Star
. Yusuf Khan wasn't even dead, they'd just kicked him halfway to it, that was part of the story.

This was one of the places cars would go missing from and then turn up with smashed windows and no wheels at the flats or burnt-out down Juniper Close. Rob never usually worried about that kind of thing, but the stolen flag had really annoyed him. From right outside the house. It was probably just some kid messing about, but everyone down the street knew his car. He'd had it long enough, a black Calibra that he'd paid the deposit on when he got a signing-on fee at Hereford. Now it was a bit battered, there was a dent in the passenger door and the wing
mirror where he'd scraped a council van trying to park in Wolverhampton and a scratch mark where someone had keyed it. Standing looking at it, he thought he'd give it a wash over the weekend, wax and everything, see if he could get it looking like something. Then he'd put a flag back on.

A lot of the shops had seen better days. A couple of them were boarded up: the place that had been the trophy shop, and the baker's, complete with a rusting stopped clock above the yard gates. The post office had closed as well. There'd been a petition to keep it open that his Uncle Jim had organized. There were clusters of To Let signs on the flats above the shops, where Zubair had first lived with Katie, a couple of them had their windows bricked up. Three boys in Year 10 told him they'd got blow jobs in there from a girl in the year below for a tenner. Rob feared it had been Chelsey. What to say to that? He needed more training.

Was it a tenner each or for the three on yer?

For all on we, but onny Patrick was allowed to come cos her likes him.

There were signs of life as well, though. The pork sandwich shop and the chip shop were always busy. So too the halal butcher's and the launderette. In the middle of the row was Barrys' Shopping City, its sign glowing in red neon lighting that had been installed in the seventies and looked like something from the Vegas strip. The shop sold everything. When the new Tesco opened, everyone said Barrys' would close but it seemed to go from strength to strength, selling the stuff Tesco didn't, like giant inflatable George-and-Dragons, oil paintings of the Golden Temple, illuminated Qur'anic scripts and fireworks, cigarettes and bags of sweets to the schoolkids. Rob had to step into the road to get around the trestle tables sprawling across the pavement with their boxes of coriander and okra and sweet
potato garlanded with St George's flags. The family that had started the shop (the Barrys) had all been eccentrics. The last Mr Barry to run it had kept a leopard in a cage on the roof and half the downstairs shop had been a tropical fish aquarium. Rob's mum would bring him down here when he was a kid to look at the leopard and the fish, say it was better than getting on the bus to the zoo and laugh. Rob remembered gazing at harlequins and tiger barbs and angelfish (the tanks were neatly labelled) in among the toilet rolls and batteries and tins of beans. The whole shop had an underwater, marine light to it still, years after the fish tanks had gone. Mr Barry had sold up in the eighties to a Sikh family, but the spirit stayed the same.

He'd just reached the ordered window of Dudley Road Sports – posters of Shoaib Akhtar and Inzaman in among a display of Brazil football shirts – when he first heard the shouts. Little Rhys Woodhouse came charging past him, knees pumping and his shaved head turning every few strides to look behind him. The Woodhouses were always running to or from some disaster. It was as he watched Rhys dodge in and out of Barrys' display that he heard shouts echoing from the flats.

Over the road, from out of an entryway, a boy in a hooded top staggered like a drunk towards the launderette step. There was something dripping from his sleeve. He stood bent over for a moment, one hand on the door-frame, like an old man, stopped short of breath.

It was Andre.

Lee hacked it out of there towards their right back.
Rob trotted to his left, aware of Tayub alongside him, looked over his shoulder to get Lee and Kyle across with him but they were too slow. Always too slow. The ball went out again, so he could pull them over while they fetched the ball. Joey Khan was getting it. It had rolled in front of the
parked cars. Rob had seen the one with the blue strip lights before – trailing him round while he leafleted for his Uncle Jim in an Asian area. There were shapes inside the cars and clouds of smoke from spliffs coming through sunroofs and open doors. Joey was wearing jogging bottoms tucked into his socks, a wax jacket and a checked cap. He looked like a gentleman farmer. Whenever the ball went off the sounds of the helicopter got louder.

Her taxi driver from JFK was from Karachi.
When he asked her where she was from she said England, London, and that satisfied him for a while but she saw him studying her in the rear-view mirror when they stopped in traffic looking out across the Bedford-Stuyvesant projects, the people tiny on the sidewalks below, everything both strange and familiar, like in all great cities. Like in London, she thought, when she'd had to get a bus through Canning Town or Forest Gate, one foot in the West and one in Lagos or Dhaka. Usually she'd say that was great, such a mixture, a rich soup of people she'd tell her form class, but this brought about an unease in people as well; a kind of vertigo, like you didn't know where you were, who you were.

But your family? Where are they from?

I'm from England, she said, the Midlands, where Shakespeare was from. And Robin Hood. She stopped herself from laughing, that laugh that kept turning into a sob.

Robin Hood?

I live in London, now. My father's from Pakistan, she said. He works in a hospital in England.

Doctor?

A surgeon, a heart surgeon.

England's a great country, he said, like America.

As the traffic moved forward she became aware of the stars-and-stripes stickers in the corners of the taxi
windows and the gold Arabic lettering hanging next to the air-freshener dangling from the mirror. She felt the conversation loaded with both the weight of falling buildings and the potential for being quizzed on her dad's background. He'd grown up in Karachi but, as he'd be quick to point out if he said anything about it at all, as a
mohajir
, a refugee. His family lived in India before partition.

How long have you been here? she asked.

Five years.

Have you had chance to go back?

Yes, last year for three months. Two months each year before that.

Do you have family back there?

Yes, my parents, my wife, my children.

That must be hard. Not being able to see them all the time.

I send them money every month. Some time soon maybe my wife can come here with the children. It is hard. Right now, I share an apartment with some other men. When there's enough money, they will come. God willing, he muttered like an afterthought.

When the car stopped again he pulled a photograph from the flap of the sunvisor, leaned back to show her. There was a woman, young and confident-looking, wearing jeans, staring straight into the camera, holding a baby while sitting on some stone steps that went down to the beach. The sea glittered behind them. The eldest child, a boy of about seven, wearing a Big Apple T-shirt, stared toughly at the camera. Next to him, a girl who must have been the boy's younger sister, shielding her eyes with one hand and reaching for a little boy who was trying to crawl away, down the steps to where the concrete ended and the beach began. Across the bottom half of the picture was the long diagonal of the photographer's shadow.

What are their names? How old are they?

This is Imran, eight, Munira, seven, Asif, two years and the baby, Usman.