Heartland (16 page)

The boy had been in that bad fight up at the shops. A knife, he'd heard. He thought about Andre. He'd actually seen him a few times. When Stacey was still at their mother's he'd call round to visit sometimes, timing it to avoid his sister, she was doing a cleaning job, working shifts. The baby boy would grip Glenn's fingers tightly as he lay there in his pram, Glenn tickling him with his other hand. Jordan was going up to the school in September. It would be nice if she had an older cousin around to look after her.

It would cost them all in the end. They'd learn. Their stubbornness and laziness would cost them all. What with
his sister and Rob and Jim on the one hand and families like the Woodhouses on the other, just running wild, no discipline any of them, people who should have known better. In the end, they'd have to realize whose side they were on. They'd have to choose. A change was coming.

The summers he was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, he would work late at his computer.
Zubair was out all the time now with university friends, or a girl, Adnan reckoned. His brother didn't say much when he got in. He'd often had a drink and would be trying to hide it.

Sitting alone, Adnan would sometimes be woken from his dream of zeros and ones by shouts from people on the main road, drunken calls from late-night kebab punters, young lads singing football songs, or by the tapping of moths attracted to the brightness of his desk lamp. He kept the window closed, the curtains open. The moths would batter the glass at first and then flutter their wings, increasingly gently, craftily, against the metal frame, paint flaking, as if trying to feel a way in. They would rest eventually, as if tired by their efforts, and Adnan would look at their alien heads pressed against the glass and transfixed by the light.

In the end it was a choice, he decided: between having it all and settling, between winning and losing. He could work hard, he could get on, like his dad said, like his brother was, like he himself was doing – getting on the bus every morning and heading off to sixth form, but in the end, he was on the outside, he was the clever Paki boy in the corner, never quite getting all the others' jokes, never quite wearing the right clothes.

It hadn't always been like this. As a kid it had been different. You could have it all. He liked football and fighting and computers and drawing and acting in plays and reading out stories at school to all the other kids sitting on the
story-mat. He liked everything. He liked the world and the people in it. But slowly your options shut down, the choices became one thing or the other, a whole string of zeros and ones, a narrowing of the world as the years passed. God knows what being a proper adult would be like, in a world as narrow as a coffin, as narrow as this space between two beds.

He sat on the same side of the bus every morning, head pressed against the glass as it pulled on to the Stourbridge ring road, and always looked for the same thing: two girls from his maths classes who would take turns in driving each other to college, Jessica and Rachel, perfect hair tied back, dressed in their cardigans and short skirts, seventeen with cars already, a Renault 5 and a Fiat Uno. Some mornings he'd see them across the traffic through the dirty glass as they pulled into the slip-road and the bus sailed past for the station, and they'd be laughing or singing along to the radio or just looking blankly at the college buildings and he would ache and look at them like they were something he had lost. They sat in the row in front of him in the lecture room on Thursday mornings. He'd always try to wear a good shirt and put on some of Zubair's aftershave. He'd hear snatches of their conversation, about university applications and some boys they knew who played rugby – always rugby not football – and a trip they were planning to Greece. He wanted to speak to them.

Stuck-up bitches, Ayesha, one of the girls who'd get on the bus in Dudley, used to mutter about them, and he'd laugh with the rest of them at her indignation, but really, just like Ayesha, he wanted to be part of that world and knew that from where he was starting it wasn't going to happen.

He was the moth, of course. Alien head pressed up against the glass. And he thought about how caterpillars
grew into moths, and in a wild daydream he saw them keep changing: moths becoming crows, eagles, pterodactyls, B-52 bombers, X-wing fighters out in deep space. Why not? If you accepted the outlandishness of the moth's head, resting now, trying to eat the tiny flakes of paint that drifted off the window frame, you could accept the outlandishness of the whole world – and why not transform?

He would leave. He would become someone else. His own dad, after all, had walked out of his village one morning, a village not even there now, drowned under the waters made by a massive dam, a village he barely spoke of, and walked out of one life and into another.

Once, when he'd been a little kid, they went to a massive wedding in Bradford, some cousin's or other. He'd overheard his dad telling the story of how he'd been headed for Dudley Hill, Bradford, and ended up in Dudley, still Worcestershire then, how all these places seemed the same at the time, and how he ended up staying there, just that little but further, just that little bit more distanced from the ties of home. By the time he'd realized his mistake fully, he'd sorted out a job, somewhere to live. He'd done it on purpose, Adnan knew that straight away. His dad told the story in his joky way, apologetically, to these smiling, bearded men who all looked like him. Just that little bit more distance. People did it all the time.

Adnan wasn't going to settle and he wasn't going to be the person people wanted him to be. He would transform himself. And he worked away at this problem, as he sat staring at his computer screen and the moths flitting outside the window, his options narrowing, the walls closing in.

England were on top again.
Rob drummed on the table. Sinclair had got it again, that run with his head over the ball, like Glenn's.

Goo on! He and Glenn shouted at the same time, a touch of incredulity in their voices, given their thoughts about Sinclair. It came out to Scholes.

A couple of years ago Rob had asked his Uncle Jim what modern player his dad had been most like.

Scholes, maybe. I'm serious, son. I doh know. Maybe a bit lighter weight than that. I doh think I ever sid him mek a tackle. Valeron, maybe. Bergkamp. Light on his feet, like a ghost. He was the best player I ever played with. Remember this is after the injury, he couldn't walk for six months after it. It ay like now where they'd a flown him off to some specialist somewhere. No, he had to practise hobbling up and down Cinderheath Lane on his own. Born at the wrong time, maybe, I doh know.

Scholes hit it. It came back off Heskey who'd been trying to run across the defender. It bounced around, came to Owen, inside the box. Owen with the ball in front of the defender, then he whipped the ball away. Owen went down. Penalty.

Penalty!

The game had stopped. They were all on their feet. He'd given it. Collina was pointing at the spot. Jim was punching the air. Everything slowed down. There was a gap for Rob, between the penalty decision and realizing Beckham would take it. It must have been the same for the rest of the room because the cheers were strangled, muted, as the camera swung to Beckham's face. Rob could hear Stacey asking if it was Beckham who had to take it, could hear the commentator saying something about what a moment, a chance of redemption.

Owen was asking Beckham if he wanted him to take it. He waved him away, stepped up for it.

Tom Catesby was the best player Jim ever played with.
That didn't make him the best man, though. There'd been
times in the years since when it had crossed Jim's mind that introducing his little sister to his older mate hadn't been the best decision he ever made. It struck him that back then, when he and Tom played together for Cinderheath in the late sixties, he was as much in love with Tom as Kathleen was. They used to have a few pints in the clubhouse after the game, listen to the results on the radio. If they'd played away, they'd get a lift back to the clubhouse or climb into Tom's Hillman Imp and have a couple with the reserve team before meeting Kath and one of her mates and heading up to Dudley or out for a meal. Tom was ten years older than Jim, turning thirty, the aura of his years at the Wolves wrapped around him like the dark overcoat, blue suit and shiny shoes that he'd wear at the weekends. Cinderheath were doing well, up near the top of the Southern League, had a great set of young lads together in their late teens and early twenties and then Tom, set there like a jewel in the middle of it all, strolling around, not tackling, not running back, walking into space and demanding the ball and then hitting a pass that no one else could see, not at that level, limping near the end of games, walking on tiptoe on the heavy pitches they played on; Jim doing the running for two, young and game, Tom just coaxing him through it.

Jim learned more from Tom in that couple of years they played together than he ever learned from anyone: when to run, when to stand still, how to hold yourself, not just on a football pitch, everywhere. Tom was slender and silent; there was always something a bit removed about him, always a sense he was holding something back, waiting. With Jim, what you saw was what you got: big, clumsy, talkative, eager to please. Jim tried to be like Tom, the way he'd wear his clothes, hold his drink, stand at the bar or at the edge of the room as if waiting for something, watchful. The years had made Jim think that what he'd
believed was Tom's authority, confidence, had always been something else, something darker, a silence, a fear, a kind of reckoning up of the world. There was a cynicism that came from this reckoning, some assessment that the world wasn't going to turn out how you wanted. If Jim had recognized it at all back then he'd have thought that maybe it all came from Tom's injury, but he wondered now if it had always been there, in some way, this ego, this selfishness.

When Tom and Kathleen became a regular fixture on a Saturday night, when Tom became a regular at the Sunday dinner table where they all ate together at the old house on Cinderheath Lane, when the date was set for their wedding up at the old church, it felt to Jim that this was some kind of affirmation. Of what he wasn't sure: of him, of his family, of their way of life. More ego, more selfishness, on his part this time.

In the years after Tom and Kath got married, though, it all seemed like a happy ending. Tom never played football as a married man, said he wanted to spend time with his wife, something Jim should've learned from when he got together with Jackie. When they had Robert they couldn't have been happier. From what Jim understood, it had been touch-and-go whether they could have children and when it happened there was a sense, you could tell, that they felt doubly blessed. Tom was already thirty-five then, after all, in those days ancient to be a first-time dad.

They'd settled into a way of life. Tom worked hard at Cinderheath, was respected, people whispering in the background out of earshot about his football, Tom just saying that was a long time ago now if anyone ever mentioned it to him. He'd been great with Robert in those early years, Jim thought. That was something he should've copied; he wished he could've been as close to Michael. It was when the works closed that it all went wrong again. As if everything
was as fragile as Tom's right knee. Tom had always liked a drink, but he lost himself in it then. Slowly, though, quietly, over time, a long withdrawal from the world.

Jim reached for the notebook between sips of tea and pulled a crumpled copy of the league table from it and put it on the table between them. Here yam, look at that.

Nobody's said anything abaht the Gurdwara, look yer.

No, I know. Complicates the picture a bit though, doh it. They've gorra win, what, by ten, ay they, an then we've gorra draw. Be like a kids' game, even in this league teams doh get double figures.

Rob looked at it a bit more, shook his head and smiled. Thirty-three goals we've let in. Two a game nearly, and wim top of the league. Think they need to get a new centre-half, to be honest.

It ud be double that without yow an they wudnt be worried whether they was gonna win the league or not, they bloody would be letting double figures in.

Who've they got, the Gurdwara?

Castle Villa.

No chance of em getting ten. That Luke Wilkinson runs em, doh he. He used to play for the district wi me when I was at school.

Iss interesting though, ay it. If yow was to draw, like.

Onny if somebody pays Castle Villa off. Rob laughed. I think we'll beat the Mosque easy, to be honest. Be nice to win summat, for a change. I doh even think there'll be any trouble. There's other stuff to worry abaht. Iss just a game o football.

Doh kid yerself, son. I think yower lads could turn nasty if yow lose, especially if the BNP lot am dahn theer stirring it up, which yer know they ull be.

We better win then.