Ibrahim & Reenie (19 page)

‘Kind of.'

‘But maybe that's just us accepting the definition of the majority.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Well, most of the people in Britain are Church of England, at least by default. If they stop believing, they get to decide who and what they are. But us? We
others
? It gets confusing, for them, for the majority, if we say we're no longer the thing they've labelled us. They don't know what we are. So we're still Catholic. Still Muslim. And we accept that. We go along with it.' She looked at her watch and sighed. ‘Anyway,' she said. ‘That's all a bit deep for this time of night. It's late, and I'm knackered. Are you okay sleeping there?'

He nodded. ‘I'll be fine. Thank you.'

‘Don't mention it. I guess you're just my good deed for the day, or something. I'll see you in the morning.'

She turned off the lamp before leaving the room and he listened to her climb the stairs, brush her teeth, and close her bedroom door. The house was silent now, but for the ticking of the clock on her mantelpiece, and with the quiet came memories of what had happened that night.

Worst of all was how wretched, how feeble he felt at not having fought back, but then he had never been much of a fighter. Despite his size, playground brawls had never ended in his favour. If anything, his height and build left him at a disadvantage; the oversized target of bullies, but slow and clumsy with it. He never had the instinct to punch and kick, something that seemed ingrained in those feral-faced kids with narrow, pugilist eyes and mouths curled up in permanent sneers.

Those years of taking hits built something up in him, the residue of an anger never vented. As a kid he would run home after fights, and sob into his pillow. Tell his mother he'd tripped and fallen if there were bruises to show. Hope his dad wouldn't see him crying. And each time he did this a trace of bile was left behind. Not enough to make him swing a punch, the next time he was confronted, but an anger, a resentment, that festered, day upon day, month upon month, year upon year, and when finally he'd mustered the will to hit back the instrument he and his friends chose wasn't the brute physical force of the playground bully but something infinitely more terrible. Their brothers, their
ikhwan
, in Pakistan and Somalia, in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, had already shown them the way, and they saw those men as heroes.

When their heroes made it onto the news, the violence seemed distant, the damage inflicted abstract. They measured the success of their heroes not in the number of dead, but in the hours of airtime they received. The world was paying them attention, and wasn't that the desired effect of every violent act? When those wiry, sneering, mean-faced kids threw punches or hurled abuse it was to get his attention, and the attention of others. It was to force – rather than earn – his respect. They'd taught him an important lesson, a lesson that was reinforced with every history book he read.

Diplomacy was a myth. Window dressing. No individual or nation had ever succeeded through decorum and kind words alone. The peoples of the world understand violence more than they will ever understand rhetoric. The bullies of his school knew this – on a deep, gut level rather than an academic one – and now he and his friends knew it too. Meeting those friends, talking about these ideas, poring over their well-thumbed copies of Qutb and al-Zawahiri, they felt empowered by this discovery.

Violence was power.

But now he saw that violence for what it was and always had been – an acute kind of helplessness, fashioned into an epic fantasy of
jihad
. The imams, sheikhs and amirs – those his friends admired, rather than those at his family's mosque – spoke and appealed to him directly. They were, almost without exception, young men. In the
halaqah
they talked about the modern world, about economics and politics and Keynes and Marxism and Orientalism, and when Ibrahim's friends mocked him for studying history, the sheikh scolded them, because history, he said, was ‘vital', history was ‘everything'. And when Ibrahim heard the sheikh talk about the struggles of
jihad
, he believed they were
his
struggles; that his life was linked, umbilically, to every other Muslim in the
ummah
. If he felt like a victim, so must they. If he wanted to fight back, so did they. The
halaqah
taught him he had a place in this
jihad
. He could be more than just the graceless, chubby victim of the playground.

Some
Jihadi
. That night, the first punch floored him, and from then on he had curled up in a ball and prayed – yes, prayed – that they would stop. But he was now more than seven years past the days of his schoolboy
jihad
, and the night when all those adolescent daydreams came crashing down around him like so much broken glass.

17

They had a full house that night, the first night of Eid. Both sides of the family gathered in their little house on Harold Road. His father and uncles talking about their businesses in the living room. His cousins in the dining room and hallway, the boys talking football, the girls talking clothes. The women, his mum and aunties, in the kitchen, listening to Ahmed Rushdi on a portable stereo so old it had not one but
two
cassette decks, while in the dining room the table practically creaked beneath the weight of bowls filled with pastries and sweets.

It had always tickled Ibrahim and his sister. Aisha, watching his mother and their aunties compete with one another through the medium of food. Everyone brought what they thought of as their speciality;
Bhua
Yasmin with her
balushahi, Tayee
Samira with her
sohan papdi,
and their mother with her
laddu
, and of course they would all claim they'd simply rustled up ‘a little something' the night before when days, and perhaps weeks had gone into their preparation.

Even before the sound of the helicopter and police sirens, that night felt different to any other Eid. There seemed to be a silent realisation, among everyone there, that this could be the last time the whole family, on either side, would come together in one house. The cousins were growing up and moving away; Rashida to Canada, Iqbal to Dubai. Marriages would inflate the family further, and Ibrahim's grandmother, his
dadiji,
joked that any future get-together would have to happen at the football stadium on Green Street.

As such, the mood in their house that night was celebratory but seasoned with something wistful. Or perhaps that was how Ibrahim remembered it with hindsight. Perhaps everyone had been having a wonderful night until then, and it was only what happened next that changed everything.

Hearing the noise and commotion from the street Ibrahim's father, Nazir, rose from his chair and padded out into the hall, almost tripping over the piles of shoes on his way to the front door. For a moment he stood there, his short, thin frame silhouetted against the flashing blue lights. The sound of the helicopter grew louder, the downdraft from its blades rustling through the trees lining the street.

‘They're outside number fifty-eight,' his father said. ‘They've got guns.'

Ibrahim was seventeen, and considered himself streetwise enough to be unimpressed by a few sirens and a helicopter, but with those words he felt a dropping sensation in his chest, as if his heart had fallen, followed by a wave of nausea.

A brief silence fell over the party, then the chattering began again, but more excitedly, and Ibrahim was almost carried to their front door by the sudden surge of houseguests.

‘What is it?'

‘What's happening?'

‘What's going on?'

Elbowing her way past nieces and nephews, Ibrahim's mother joined them on the doorstep, muttering something in Urdu; always her first language when shocked or surprised. Then came Aisha, standing on tiptoes to peer over their father's shoulders and saying, ‘Who is it? Mum? Dad? What is it? Who is it?' The aunts and uncles from Sparkhill, his mother's family, were laughing and saying how
this
was why they lived in Birmingham, you never had
this
sort of thing happen in Birmingham, but Ibrahim's parents were silent, expressionless.

Three police cars and two vans sat on the junction of Harold Road and Thorngrove Road, and there were uniformed officers with machine guns, real machine guns, not the stuff of movies or TV shows, but real and potent and made out of the blackest metal, and a cordon of blue and white plastic tape drew a rough semicircle around number fifty-eight.

The house where Jamal lived.

Front doors the length of the street were opening, people stepping out and staring slack-jawed into the flashing blue lights, and now there were officers coming from number fifty-eight, and they were holding someone by the arms; a shoeless young man, dressed in a crisp white shirt and designer jeans. Jamal.

Ibrahim waited for the awful moment when his friend would look at him, when that one glance, witnessed by his parents, by his whole family, would be enough to prove his guilt. He waited for it with his hands clenched into fists and his toes curled and his mouth dry and his heart beating faster than it ever had before, but that look never came. One of the officers put his hand on Jamal's head and pushed him down and forward and into one of the vans, and on the doorstep of number fifty-eight Jamal's mother was wailing, and his younger brothers were crying, and Jamal's father and uncles and cousins were on the doorstep, shouting at the police, but there was nothing they could do. The van doors slammed shut, and the sound of that slam echoed down the street, for a fraction of a second drowning out even the helicopter's drone and the chattering of their neighbours.‘Tonight, of all nights,' said one of his cousins. ‘They've got no respect.'

‘That was Jamal,' said Ibrahim's mother. ‘Why have they taken Jamal?'

And now all eyes were on Ibrahim, because if any of them should know it was him. He and Jamal had been friends for over a year, since he'd joined the sixth-form college. They studied together, attended Friday prayers together.

‘I don't know,' he said, his voice little louder than a whisper.

‘Let's go back inside,' said his father. ‘No point in standing around gawping at them all night.'

Nazir turned and with a sweeping gesture of his arms ushered everyone back into the house, closing the door behind him. The helicopter was flying away now, and they heard the police cars and vans heading toward Stopford Road. As the convoy passed their house, Ibrahim shuddered, half expecting them to stop outside, for armed officers to come crashing in through their windows, but they didn't.

Within minutes he received the first of that night's many text messages, and before reading it thought it might tell him what he already knew – that Jamal had been arrested. Instead, this message – written in the urgent, garbled argot of textspeak – told him there'd been two more arrests, the first in Beckton, the second Upton Park, and he knew the names of those arrested: Ismail and Yusuf. Whatever moment of relief he felt when the police vans and cars drove past his house and didn't stop, came to an abrupt end.

The police were coming back. They would take Jamal and Ismail and Yusuf to the police station, to Paddington Green, lock them in cells, and come back for him. The blue and white tape would be torn away from the lampposts and trees holding it in place around number fifty-eight, and another cordon made around his parents' house. The police would beat their fists on the door and order them to ‘Open up!' and his mother would start crying and yelling at him in a language he barely understood, and his father would look at him in horror and – worst of all – shame.

When he opened his eyes Ibrahim realised he wouldn't have to wait for the police to come back, for them to beat on their door and drag him away, as they had Jamal, for him to see that expression, because he was looking at it already.

‘Ibrahim,' said his father. ‘I think we need to talk.'

Ibrahim. He'd called him Ibrahim. Not Prakash. Not Sunshine.

Ibrahim nodded nervously and followed his father to the kitchen. After protests from his mother and the aunties, who saw the kitchen as their domain, they were alone.

‘Do you know anything about this?' His father asked, his voice hushed. Ibrahim pictured his cousins pressed up against the door, listening in on their conversation.

Ibrahim shook his head. He hadn't had enough time to think of anything to say; some convincing excuse or lie, some way to sidestep any questions.

‘Don't lie to me, Ibrahim. You and Jamal are best friends. You're at that
bloody
mosque every single day. We hardly ever see you.'

‘Honest, Dad,' he said, unable to look his father in the eye. ‘I don't know why he's been arrested.'

‘You're lying.'

‘No, Dad. Seriously. I'm not.'

‘I can tell when you're lying, and you're lying now. Don't think I don't know what goes on in that place, the kind of bloody rubbish they fill your heads with. I've heard all about it. And when I go to Friday prayers now, there are no young people there. There are…'