Heartland (20 page)

I do, Glenn, said Twiglet.

Rhetorical question, Twiglet. I'm hoping we all do. Rob?

Glenn had started asking Rob to say a couple of things at half-time. He'd been flattered at first, now just wondered how he'd let himself get so caught up in this. He had to steady his voice, was still shaking as he started to speak.

Right, we've gotta tighten up at the back. Lee, that big fella's yower bloke, man-to-man, nuthin fancy this half,
just stick to him. Carl, same thing with the lad in the red boots, he's quick, so yow've gorra get right up his arse; if he turns yer out theer we'll atta fetch him down, we can defend free-kicks but not a foot-race with him. Their outlet ball, their onny ball, is through Zu – is through their left-back – Twiglet, Paul Hill, is yower job to close him down much quicker if he wants it from the keeper's hands. Everybody, the way for us to win this is for us to hit Glenn's feet a lot quicker, he's mekkin some great runs an he's got the beating of em when he has a goo at em. Rob took a deep breath. They were all looking at him, concentrating. For a moment everything else had disappeared.

Lads, one more thing, in a football sense wim givin em too much respect. They'm a better side than we've played this year, we know that, but we'm a good side too – he stopped himself adding, at this level – a better side, I think. Have a bit of confidence in yerselves. Winning the league should be enjoyable. So less enjoy it, eh, and, last thing, less keep this shut this half. Rob put his finger to his lips. Meself included.

Mark Stanley was blowing the whistle to get them back on. Everyone was clapping. Come on, Cinderheath. Come on the whites. They ran back on.

As Rob trotted towards the penalty area, forcing himself not to look over at the men standing around Bailey in the corner, Chris put his arm round him as he ran to the goal. They'll be bloody voting for yer next, mate, woh they, great stuff!

Rob shook his head and smiled. He was still shaking a bit, but did sneak a glance over at the corner now.

Doh worry, mate. It had to be said. Doh worry abaht that lot. Chris was clapping his hands, marking his goal out.

Come on, lads! Big effort!

The man with the glass eye, face strangely blank, drew his finger across his neck and stared at Rob.

He slept in the taxi for three, four months.
That's what he told her. She wasn't sure now. One morning in June, nineteen years old, he drove his taxi off the forecourt and all the way to London without stopping, without ever looking back. It was easy, in the end, he told her, that part at least.

He kept his money in a bag, kept it with him, eked it out. He'd been paid for a couple of programming jobs, had just picked up what he was owed from Joey Khan. He'd almost felt rich, more money than he'd ever seen then, a few hundred quid in an old football-boot bag on the passenger seat next to him. He knew he had to make it last, though, so he slept in the car for three, four months. There'd been some terrible rift. That was the impression he gave that night. Something had happened at home that made him run away. He'd used a different name and now that name had become his. Yusuf Khan. He hadn't spoken to his family since. He had tears in his eyes when he said this. She started to cry.

He moved every few days at first, found the emptier parts of the city: Park Royal, the wasteland behind King's Cross, Carpenter's Road, Clays Lane on the marshes, the back end of Canning Town by the scrapyards, Silvertown, North Woolwich by the airport and the flood barrier. He moved east for cheaper food. Romford Road was good, he'd said, smiling. She shuddered every time he mentioned somewhere she knew, held his hand a little bit tighter, thinking how she might've walked past him, how their paths might have crossed before now.

He said the strange thing was that he had neighbours in some places. Other men – always men – older than him, usually, wary obviously, sleeping in their cars. Some of them went off to work on the sites. He'd known people slept rough, shop doorways, the edges of parks, but he thought the car had been his own idea. He had some changes of
clothes on hangers in the back. At night he'd tie the bag of cash to his ankle.

He told her things to lighten the story. In the place he stayed the longest, for a few weeks, near the freight terminal in Stratford, flowers bloomed in the patch where he used the toilet. He kept himself clean. There were showers at the big railway stations. The mosques had crossed his mind, just as quickly faded from it. They weren't in this story. He didn't believe. He believed in what was in front of him, that we were just zeros and ones; he believed in the human imagination.

She told him where she'd lived, worked, mentioned Riverway. He knew it. He knew all the places.

You know everywhere, she said, amazed.

He'd walked for three, four months. Before that he'd memorized the
A–Z
, had thought he might fall back on driving a taxi if things didn't work out. When he wasn't walking, he'd use the libraries, he could use the computers there; that was a lifeline. He walked and thought about the things he was working on. There was this idea that the web would connect everyone. It was like the streets of a city. It was like the diagrams of the human circulatory system he'd had to learn at sixth form; his dad wanted him to be a doctor, of course. To get to places, you had to know your way around. He knew these things were linked, thought about them in all sorts of ways as he trudged the streets. There were hermits, monks who'd shut themselves in caves to find enlightenment. Maybe it was a bit like that. He smiled. She couldn't tell if he was serious.

After three, four months walking, thinking, plotting, planning, he got the break he'd been waiting for. Regular work for a small start-up, writing software that made predictions on industries in the developing world – Honduran timber, Congolese bauxite, Uzbeki gas – predicting where the money would go, where investors should follow, now
you could move cash with the click of a mouse. It could be the force of enormous good, he'd said. He asked her if she remembered that time in Miss Johnson's class, they'd had to walk it all the way through the tunnel, gone to visit Cobb's Engine House, had a picnic in the long grass by the ruins; she smiled and laughed, it was something she hadn't thought about for years. He talked about the way technology was changing the world in the way industry had then, or rather how this was another wave of technological change, another revolution.

He was restless, he said, unfulfilled. The work he was doing helped hedge-funds move their money around in milliseconds, but that just kept the money with the rich. Well, and with him. He laughed. He made a lot of money, he said, with a wave of his hand, like it was nothing. There were ways, he said, that the world might change. Say you were a cocoa farmer in Ghana, he said. She'd told him about her time teaching there. Say you had this small cocoa crop at the whim of big corporations in faraway countries. She'd taught her form class about some of this on charity days. Except this wasn't charity. If you had the training, the knowledge, you could turn things round. This hypothetical cocoa farmer they were suddenly so engrossed with could turn technology, the new pace of the world, to his own advantage, invest the money straight away in something else, Mexican honey for instance, keep it moving, money just made more money; next thing the cocoa farmer's building a school and a clinic for his village, a group of cocoa farmers are improving the roads. His eyes were shiny as he said this. It was a revolution. No guns, no bombs, just zeros and ones.

The digital revolutionary. She laughed.

The digital revolutionary. He nodded. I like that. That's what I'm doing. That's who I'm going to be.

Later she wondered if it was just another story he'd told her.

He said over and over again how amazing it was to see her. She told him her story since she'd last seen him those years ago at primary school. She thought now about little embellishments she might have made, little half-truths. She'd barely mentioned Matt, for instance, and she thought now about whether, if you change a small thing, there was such a big jump to changing the story altogether.

He'd been lucky during those first few months. He hadn't been robbed. One day he got back to find somebody had tried to set fire to the car, scorch marks up the side, but it had been too wet to take or someone had disturbed them. He said that near the end of his time, his meditation as she came to think of it, he woke after the first cold night of the year with the doors frozen shut. He'd got a room in a house in Forest Gate, moved soon after to a one-bed flat in Hackney, bought a place in Shoreditch, near the office, work going well, timed for the boom, had sold that, bought his flat now in Primrose Hill. He spent part of the time in New York, part in California.

He shrugged, like he was embarrassed. He'd told her all this in the back of a Turkish café on Kingsland Road, after they'd slipped away from the others, drinking coffee and Efes beer.

It was light when they left, just edging light with grey clouds billowing out east, the clouds she'd watch from her classroom window as they moved towards the sea, inevitable now that she'd get a cab back to his new flat. She drifted off to sleep on his shoulder as the taxi edged through a five a.m. traffic jam in Camden. It all seemed natural, inevitable.

He said of course he'd thought about going back, of course he had. And the long hours and travelling and
material success itself could be lonely. He was lonely. He'd dream about just walking back in as easily as he'd left, trying to make everything good. Going back was harder than leaving, though, but maybe one day, maybe. He'd like to.

This was the story he told her.

They brought Aimar on.
People were still settling, coming back in when they kicked off. The doors were open and they couldn't see the screen for the kick-off itself and when the image on the screen became clear, there was Aimar running at them, and suddenly Rob felt sobered; there was a whole second half to go yet, and here was Pablo Aimar skipping along with the ball, another of those Valencia players that he and his old man had spent Wednesday nights in the season in front of the telly cheering on.

I doh fancy himrunnin at us forforty-five minutes, Rob said to his dad.

Tek his legs, Jim shouted.

Just fuckin get into em, Glenn said.

Watch yer language, son. Jim leaned across to Glenn and touched him on the shoulder. Glenn apologized.

Thank the Lord for that, Tom said quietly. Rob couldn't work out if it was because Aimar had lost the ball or for Jim finally saying something.

It was seven weeks between her meeting Adnan – she couldn't call him Yusuf,
although that was the name he used – and telling Matt. There were two weeks of the holidays left. Matt had been at school every day running the summer programme. He'd taken the girls away twice as he'd promised. She and Matt had managed a weekend in Southwold: long walks in an empty landscape and an aching for Adnan, a physical sickness that made her think she was actually ill. The last night there she lay on the hotel bed and Matt stroked her hair, knowing that something was wrong, starting to explain that things would be different when the girls were older, how he loved her so much and understood how she'd put up with a lot in the last couple of years, and how brilliant it would be if they could just get a house together and get on with their lives. Normally, she'd ask, Why don't we then? And they'd spend hours
agonizing over his daughters and the fragile state his ex-wife was in and how it made sense to take things slowly, that enough damage had already been done. That night she didn't ask anything. She just looked forward to the next morning when Matt would get up and go out to school and she could pick up the phone and ring Adnan.

She told Matt everything that had been going on, start to finish.

Do you love him? he'd asked quietly, his voice a whisper.

She said yes. It was very sudden, she knew, but yes. He said good.

In the end it was easy, she thought, to walk out of one life into another one.

The way Matt spoke to her that night, quietly, plainly, made her think of the reasons they'd been together in the first place. It came back to her weeks later, lying, wailing on her old bed at her parents', about how she was sorry for what she'd done, and her dad trying to comfort her, stroking her back and quietening her as she sobbed, telling her it would be OK, she would be OK, quietly, clearly, then, an old joke, saying he knew she would be OK because, after all, he knew how the heart worked.

She hadn't told Adnan much about Matt. Not as much as she should have. He knew she was seeing someone, but hadn't asked many questions. Not about that, anyway. They'd taken to meeting at strange times; one of them would text the other. He'd have a meeting in Clerkenwell or the City or Kensington and they'd work out somewhere near where they could meet up. She'd change plans with friends, with Matt, all to see him. They'd eat, walk, talk, filling in their stories since they'd last seen each other, when they were ten years old. She didn't ask him why he'd left straight away; he skirted around it. She thought it would all come out in time. They had all the time in the world.

So you're free now? he asked, looking at her, after she'd
spent a long afternoon walking by the river telling him about Matt.

Well, it wasn't a prison sentence, but, yes, she was.

And we're free to be together?

She nodded. That's what I thought we might do.

His mum didn't even like the bingo.
She'd decided it was the only way she was going to see her old schoolfriends, Carol and Sandra, regularly, so she gave in. They talked between games and in the bar at the interval. Rob had gone with her a few times when he'd first moved back home. He'd enjoyed it more than her. He liked sipping his pint while the numbers were called out blandly. He liked the hush and murmurs of the crowd as they got close to sensing a ‘house', especially when the ‘National' was called.