Heartland (10 page)

They're beautiful, and your wife. And you? Jasmine said, pointing at the dark outline in the bottom half of the picture.

And me. I'm a shadow. I'm not good with the camera. Better in a car.

I think it's lovely, she said.

The traffic was flowing again; he put the picture back, began to change lanes.

The traffic's bad here, she said.

Here, yes, but have you been to Karachi?

He laughed softly at his own joke.

I've never been to Pakistan, she said quickly, embarrassed at the way conversations like this always went.

They turned off, zigzagged through the blocks of Polish delis in Greenpoint. She was staying in Williamsburg, a studio apartment of a friend of her friend Emilia. This friend of a friend had gone back to Kansas or Kentucky, Jasmine couldn't remember, maybe for a break, maybe for good, suddenly scared of city life. The attacks had come on her morning off from her job in a jewellery shop near the towers. Emilia told Jasmine the story of how her friend had raced up to Brooklyn Heights to watch the plume of ash.

You here to see family, friends? he asked. It's a good time to come. Cheap.

She couldn't tell if this was a joke.

No. No. I, erm, my boyfriend. He's missing. Was in New York in the attacks. Nobody knows where he is.

I'm sorry, he said.

She shouldn't really have said boyfriend. How should she refer to
him
? Lover, maybe, although that sounded inappropriately sophisticated. That suited him, maybe, but she didn't feel sophisticated. She felt duped, crushed, hollow.

She didn't even know which name she should use. When she thought of him she thought of him as Adnan, but he hadn't used the name for years.

I mean, he's probably dead, obviously. She heard both her parents' plain-speaking in the way she said this, outside of herself, almost. I mean, well I think he's dead but there's no record or anything.

I'm sorry.

They were sitting outside another Polish deli, pulled in against the kerb.

People are still being found, he said. In the hospitals, injured, turning up with no memories, bangs on the head, you see.

Jasmine wasn't so sure about this. She felt exhausted suddenly, wanted to lie down. There was the same kind of light as that morning, the shadows of trees and buildings were stark on the bleached asphalt street. A gull's shadow wobbled across the street in front of them as the bird flew towards the river.

We're here, he said. This is the address, ma'am.

He carried her bag to the shop door. She had to collect the keys from the deli. She paid him, tipped him clumsily.

Oh, what's your name, by the way? she asked.

Sammy.

Again that laugh on the cusp of a sob.

No, your real name.

Samir, he said, Samir.

Good luck, Samir. My name's Jasmine. I hope your wife and children can come soon.

Good luck to you, ma'am. I hope you find what you need.

David Beckham, side-on to the ball, poised over a free-kick wide on the left,
a hush in the clubhouse. It was all about his broken standing foot. He didn't hit it properly, it
went straight into the wall and ballooned in the air. There were groans, Lee swore loudly, the first words he'd said since kick-off. Beckham tore after it, after his mistake, looked like he might go flying in but – shouts and screams – Beckham won the header and Batistuta ran into him. Another foul, a better position this time. Batistuta looked wild-eyed, riled.

Ref, eh, ref!

Jim turned his head and looked at Rob and his dad.

He's gotta be careful, here.

Eh, he's rattled, Batistuta.

Yow've wound him up, Glenn, look.

Good position, this.

Come on England.

A better position this. The ghost of the free-kick against Greece crept into Rob's head, where, when it mattered, his standing foot held firm, his body whipped through the ball, his head down over it. That inevitability as the ball swung through the air, hit the top corner like a bomb going off.

Rob walked quickly.
Andre slumped on to the launderette step. Nancy, the launderette manager, came out and stood over Andre.

Woss happened, love? She touched Andre's shoulder.

All right, Andre. Rob crouched down in front of him. Woss the matter, mate? Andre didn't speak.

His left arm was hanging limp at his side. Blood dripped from his fingers poking out of the sleeve, a cartoon redness to it, like paint flicked across the pavement. Andre took shallow little breaths, his eyes fixed on the kerb, blinking. He was shivering and a stifled sob came from his chest.

Woss happened, mate?

Rob looked at Nancy, who shrugged to say she hadn't
seen anything. The rhythmic sound of the washers spinning came from inside the launderette. The blood dripped slowly. Andre rubbed his fingers together.

Was there a fight, Andre?

He nodded and closed his eyes for a moment.

Where you hurt, mate?

Again, the same nod. His voice came muffled through the hand at his face.

Stuck me.

OK, where, Andre? Where'd they stab yer, mate?

Rob heard Nancy gasp and saw her hand shoot to her mouth. Rob tried to breathe normally.

Phone an ambulance, Nance?

She held up her phone and took a couple of steps back into the launderette.

Where'd they stab yer, Andre? Wheer dyer hurt?

Andre shrugged and looked at Rob for the first time. His eyes were glassy. Rob thought of the picture of McGuigan losing the world title in the desert, that he'd cut out of the paper when he was a kid.

He felt that strange calm, the sort that descends when something's really bad, that shortness of breath. It was like when he found his dad lying on the front path, trying to work out just how bad it was. Nancy brought some towels from inside the launderette.

Wheer's it hurt yer, mate?

Rob was patting Andre's chest. He looked in his lap and up and down his legs for blood. There wasn't any.

Wheer's it hurt yer, mate?

Andre pulled his good hand from his face. There was a gash across his cheek. There was a line of blood and snot coming from his nose. The snot clung to his hand as he pulled it away. The cut on his face looked bad but wasn't deep.

Is it yer face, mate? Did they hurt yer anywhere else?

Andre looked down his left arm to his bloody fingers. Rob found a hole in the shoulder of his school sweatshirt and pulled at it. Andre flinched. Through the hole, the T-shirt underneath was torn; Rob got both hands at the material, tore it wider. There was a jagged wound underneath, oozing blood, again not deep, across his armpit and high on his shoulder.

Nowhere else mate, no? Yer face an yer arm. Jus yer face an yer arm. Yome OK.

Andre's breath came out in another judder.

Inhaler, he said with a stutter.

Rob patted at his pockets again, felt the lump of the asthma inhaler inside the sweatshirt, pulled it out.

Andre took the thing with his good hand, pumped it in his mouth.

Yome OK. Just try and breathe normal. Just shocked. Thass it. In an out, deep breaths.

Andre nodded, winced.

Iss all right, mate. Yome all right. Rob reached out and touched Andre's head, stroked his hair. There was cold sweat on the boy's head. He was shivering.

There were more people now, the women from the till in Barrys' and the bloke from the chip shop. Rob could hear a woman's voice saying hysterically, Iss just all the while, all the while, this is now. She had a little dog on a lead. It tried to lick one of the spots of blood. There was a siren coming from somewhere.

Another woman appeared. She was wearing slippers and a dressing gown. She came right up next to Rob.

I've just sin em aht the back winder. I was washin me hair. All over him, they was. All over him. On top on him while he was on the ground. They rid off on bikes, the ones that done it, some on em. They was cheering an
whooping. Had that camouflage on. I sin em. Had him off his bike. Like animals they was, on top on him. Yer might know who. All over him.

A police car arrived, the siren deafening. Two police, a man and a woman, started asking who'd seen what.

The woman who'd seen something from her window heard someone say he'd been stabbed and now kept repeating, He's bin stabbed? He's bin stabbed? in a high-pitched whine. Rob was looking at Andre saying, He's just hurt a bit. Iss OK, mate. Iss OK. Yow'll be OK.

Zubair used to joke to him that their dad was a good Muslim because Friday was his holy day:
pay day. Their old man loved work, believed in it in a way that seemed to fill any spiritual gap left by his less than enthusiastic mosque attendance. It wasn't just about money, though – even though he'd urge them that if they worked hard they'd get on – it was as though the physical act of work itself, any work, could cleanse you like prayer was meant to.

The summer he was eighteen Adnan picked up work through job agencies – odd days packing and lifting here and there – which paid for some driving lessons. He hadn't applied for university – his grades were good, everyone assumed he would – just drifted. He didn't like the places the agencies sent him to, units on new industrial estates or factories that had clung on through the bad years, depleted workforces rattling around in cavernous buildings. His jobs – the jobs they called the agency for – were always somehow removed from whatever the normal business was. So in a factory that pressed farm animal feeders he pulled up old carpet in the foreman's office. In a factory that made drinks coolers for pubs he sorted screws into plastic cartons. In a warehouse of flat-packed furniture he spent a day wrapping pallets laden with boxes of chocolate in
cling-film. This, combined with the fact that he'd only be there for a few days at most, gave him a sense of separation that suited him. It was an odd time, then. He'd spent the year catching two buses to the old grammar school sixth-form in Stourbridge where the brightest students went, a handful of clever Asian kids all getting the same bus at Dudley bus station. A Sikh lad from Himley Road he sometimes sat with had come up with a collective nickname for them – the Tokens.

Early that summer Rob had seen him at the bus-stop, pulled in to give him a lift in the little car he was obviously so proud of. He'd got through his first year at the Villa; over the loud dance music on the car stereo he told him a story about how skilful Dwight Yorke was, about going for a drink with some of the first team at the Belfry on a Monday night, full of himself. He was about to go off on holiday to Crete with Karen Woodhouse. There was a small picture of her stuck to the sunvisor on the driver's side, her head back laughing in the sunshine, holding a bottle of beer halfway to her lips, her spare hand waving as if to stop the photo being taken, its shadow merging with the photographer's as it fell across her brown legs.

When he got out of the car and Rob pulled away he'd stood on the pavement for a while, thinking about the photo, his clothes prickling on him in the sun's warmth. He remembered a few years earlier when he and Rob had sneaked up the cinema fire exit to watch
Back to the Future
three times in a row. In the film, characters would start to fade from photographs if someone interfered with the past. That was what he felt like now, like he was fading away. He looked at his watery shadow on the pavement. In one of Zubair's history books he'd read how shadows in Hiroshima were burned into the ground, the people who'd cast them blasted into nothing.

Adnan sat apart in work canteens, far enough away to
be separate, close enough to torture himself with the mocking or aggressive looks he got from boys his own age or men as old as his dad.

Wheer yow from, mate?

Dudley. Cinderheath.

No, wheer'm yer originally from?

Me family's from Pakistan. Well, Kashmir, I spose. He pictured his mum mouthing counting games and stories of the mountains in Pahari to Tayub.

Why doh yer fuck off back theer then?

That was a conversation with a bloke with an Elvis quiff driving a fork-lift at a place in Tipton. Usually things were a bit more subtle. If there were women at a place there was more conversation.

Ay it strange for yer, working here, like. Wouldn't it be better with yer own kind?

Dyer like curry, Adnan? I love it, I dun. We have a Chicken Tikka Masala every Friday.

He is good lookin, ay he, this un. Like that cricketer, whossisnaeme, Imran Khan. They send us some lovely-lookin lads from up Dudley, doh they?

He didn't know why he was doing it, what he was looking for. There was other work, office stuff, data entry, where things wouldn't have been such a battle, easier work too, but he always turned that down. He had other money coming in as well. He'd sold a couple of little programs he'd sent to a games magazine, adjustments and cheats for a simulation game where you played God and built a world from scratch. Most of the time he just felt he was waiting for something.

He got a day in a warehouse over the back from his dad's place. He spent the morning loading boxes of hinges into a van. The people who'd bought the site were saving stock before they pulled the factory building down. There were people working on a last order as the place got
pulled apart around them. At dinnertime he stood in the queue at the sandwich van and could see right across the yards into his dad's work canteen. He saw him sitting there, at the end of one of the long tables, alone, eating slowly.

Through another door he could see a group of men – white and black, all ages – looking down the table or across the tables, he couldn't see for the wall between the two doors, looking towards his dad, all laughing.

Adnan turned away, looked at the woman cutting sandwiches at the van hatch, blinked. It was all he could do to get his words out when she asked him what he wanted. What he wanted was to grab that knife from her hand and slit her freckled throat. That was what he wanted. Then to do the same to all of them. When he glanced back his old man was standing outside, lighting a cigarette. A group of young white men stood at the other end of the building, doing the same.