Heartland (23 page)

Some months before, Zubair had offered his own take on the state of the world.

They should just have a wank.

Yer what?

All this talk of these virgins waiting for em if they die on jihad. They should just get a couple o magazines, have a wank.

Zubair was drunk. Rob had been late to meet him and he'd had a couple sitting reading the paper about suicide attacks in Jerusalem and Haifa. There were pictures of
bodies and blood, twisted steel. He was wound up anyway, following an afternoon over at Brinsford, talking to a kid who'd run a woman over in a stolen car, who wouldn't make eye contact with him, just sucked his teeth and looked at the tiled walls.

Look, I'm trying to help you, he'd said.

The lad had looked at him then, come to think of it, and had smirked and shook his head slowly and let his eyes slide away, like he'd never heard anything so stupid.

There's a link between bombings and orgasms, I swear to God.

I'm sure there's more to it than that, mate. Rob felt uneasy and wanted Zubair to keep his voice down. You couldn't tell what he was going to say in this sort of mood.

Of course there is. But there's something in it. Educated people say that iss because they'm so desperate blah, blah, blah. He waved a copy of the
Guardian
around. They am desperate, course they am. The whole situation's evil. Doh mean to say they ay just being used, kids, explosions and the promise of sex and life in paradise, what fifteen-year-old boy wouldn't go for that?

Jesus, Zube.

Rob took a breath.

What about Adnan?

What dyer mean?

Well, dyer think that's what he might've gone for?

For a minute Rob thought Zubair might have taken a swing for him. He saw his hand tense around his pint, then that look, staring at him, looking right into him, the kind of thing Rob expected he must do in court, questioning some policeman, or more likely in the office or a bleak interview room somewhere, an incredulous, combative look that asked, did you really just say what I think you said?

Gone for what?

Yer know what I mean. Dyer think he got mixed up in something? Went off somewhere. Yer know.

He'd never asked him anything about it outright. Zubair was quiet for a bit.

I think he's too clever for that. What do you think?

I doh know. Maybe. I hadn't sin him for ages before he left. He was always interested in politics and stuff. I mean, yer cor just disappear. Thin air, yer know. He musta gone somewhere.

What, an yow think he's gone off to join al-Qaeda? Just cos he's supposedly a Muslim. Just cos he's supposedly a Pakistani. Thass what everybody tells us, anyway.

No. I doh know. Some kind of political stuff or summat.

He never went to mosque. We used to have to drag him if we ever went on a Friday.

I never said he did. I said political, any road. Not just religious.

Same things, these days, mate. Zubair shook his head and took a drink of his pint.

Look, I doh know. If you ask me, we have to think he's dead. I've said that to me mother. I've said, Me brother's dead. There's no other way to think of it. I doh know where he is. Probably we'll never know. I doh think he'll be back now. There'll be a body somewhere, yer know. Some back-street somewhere, stuck him in the canal, out in the forest, somewhere. Thass what'll turn up. The phone goes, yer know. An I think, this is it. No, I doh think he's anywhere, mate. I try not to think abaht it, honest. If I knew anything more, I'd tell yer.

Zubair finished his pint and they left. He was driving. Rob tried to tell him not to. Zubair ignored him. Said, Doh suppose yer want a lift, then?

Rob walked home in the rain, brooding, still something nagging away at him that Zubair knew more than he let
on. Fair enough, maybe it was a family thing. There was something. The way Zubair said, He's too clever.
He is
. Present tense. They hadn't met the following week or for a couple of weeks after that. Then, the week before Christmas, Zubair texted to see if Rob wanted to go for a game of pool, something they hadn't done for years. Rob decided not to mention Adnan again unless Zubair brought it up.

One-touch stuff from England.
Scholes was getting more space in midfield, put Beckham in. Beckham was running at them, went through, poked his chance wide, could've finished it.

That was a chance.

Golden.

Shoulda scored.

He ay fit, I doh care what anybody says.

It was strange the way momentum would change in a game at any level. The way that confidence or panic could spread with a kind of telepathy through groups of players. After winning that tackle, a big hole appeared in the middle of the park for a few minutes, their midfielder limping around, a big zero that Rob stepped up into.

Paul Hill misplaced a pass but Rob was onto it, decided to keep going with it, swerved around the limping midfielder, got his head down. It opened up suddenly and he thought about hitting it, took another couple of steps, veered away again from the defender who had come out to challenge, sidefooted it inside Zubair with Glenn saying, Yes, Rob, yes!

Glenn got to it a couple of yards inside the touchline, got his head up, floated a ball into the box for Rob. He'd continued his run. Rob watched it, the keeper flapping at it, waving it onto Rob's head and he rose and met it and put too much on it and the ball went a couple of inches
over the bar. There were screams from the touchline, from the girls that swore at Zubair. Rob crouched in front of the middle of the goal, closed his eyes then looked up, saw the helicopter right above the park, saw the castle away on the hill, suddenly aware of the world outside the pitch.

As Rob turned to run back, Glenn put his arm out, ruffled his hair.

Great stuff, lads, great stuff, much better! Big Chris clapped his hands loudly from the other end of the pitch.

She teased him about the work in New York,
said she thought he could do it all online. He'd gone that week, the first week of the new school year. Going back to Riverway had been awful; the gossip, avoiding Matt in the corridors and staff meetings, he didn't look great. She'd already moved a lot of clothes into Adnan's place and she'd half-hoped he'd ask her to come to New York. She'd have dropped everything, which shocked her, when she thought about how much she'd cared about school even a few weeks before.

His flight was due in on the Monday morning. She went to Heathrow to meet him. She phoned in sick, something she never did, from the airport, looking at the planes that he never got off.

She wandered around the airport shops, had a coffee, tried his phone repeatedly, told herself not to panic. Eventually she got through; work was taking longer than he thought, it would be a few days more, he was sorry. He loved her, reassured her. Still, it was a shock.

He phoned later. She was sorting out his kitchen cupboards, getting over the morning's disappointment; but what were a few days in the space of a lifetime? She would meet him from the plane on Thursday, Friday. She'd be more prepared. She'd been doing some thinking. She should put her notice in at Riverway. This was a new chapter.

He told her he was having second thoughts, that he couldn't do it, that he'd made a mistake. It had gone so quickly. It was a mistake. He was sorry.

There were bits she couldn't remember after that. She remembered dialling and redialling his numbers, screaming into his voicemail, pleading. She'd been so certain. This was something beyond her imagination. This was something beyond her. Out of the blue. That he could say this. It had been ten weeks, start to finish.

That afternoon, 11th September 2001, early morning American time, before the planes hit, she received a short email from an address she didn't know:

I can't do this. I am truly sorry. To avoid more pain I will not contact you again. I will not come to London. Forget about me.

From the flats' walkway Rob could see down the hill across the ruined factory
and Juniper Close and across the plague of St George's flags his uncle kept moaning about. Flags as curtains, fluttering limply from bamboo poles on the allotments, roped between two units on the industrial estate. A flat on Stacey and Andre's walkway had a newspaper flag taped against the inside of a broken window, music pounding from inside. He rang the doorbell and looked at the castle, a flag flying there as well. He could hear the television playing inside, then there was the sound of bolts turning and he saw her shape through the frosted glass.

I've come to see how he's doin.

Her face didn't change, suspicious, defensive, but Stacey rattled the chain off, opened the door and walked through to the living room. Rob shut the door behind him.

Andre sat in the armchair watching
Neighbours
with the sound too loud. He was wearing a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, rolled up to below his knee, hairs sprouting on
his legs, dark against his pale skin. He looked thinner than at school, as if weight had dropped off him in the couple of days since the attack; his face pinched, harder, older. That look Rob's old man sometimes had. And the scar, of course, a broken red line across his nose and cheek. You could see the padding of the dressing through his shirt.

Gemma played on the floor, things strewn around her, empty crisp bags, a cardboard box that the DVD player had come in, a plastic toy mobile phone, crayons and lipstick mixed together. She was drawing on the cardboard with some lipstick, big pink swirls. Rob stood still, not wanting to distract her after what his uncle had told him.

How am yer, mate?

Andre looked at Rob and shrugged, looked back at the television.

He ay sayin nuthin.

Iss all right, Andre, I ay come for a statement.

Rob picked his way through the debris to the settee.

No, I mean he really ay sayin nuthin. Yow ay said nuthin since we come back from the hospital, ay yer, mate?

What?

Andre shrugged again, looked at his mum, then Rob, then back to Harold Bishop.

Doh worry, Andre, I ay gonna try an mek yer talk.

Rob looked at Stacey standing in the doorway. Her face had softened a bit and she reached to take a pile of towels Rob had moved to sit down. The towels smelled chemically clean, like there'd been too much soap, like his mother made his sports stuff smell.

He ay said nuthin at all, she said and took the towels through to the kitchen.

Dyer like
Neighbours
, Andre? Rob asked.

Andre crinkled his nose slightly and shook his head.

What yer watch it fower then?

He grinned and shrugged again.

Yow ay sayin nuthin, am yer?

He shook his head more vigorously and looked pleased with himself; happy, even.

Thass all right. Just talk when yer like, son.

They watched the noisy television for a while. Gemma scrawled the lipstick across the cardboard box.

Yer doin yer writing, Gemma?

She looked at him and made a noise in the back of her throat, dribbled a little bit. There was a box of tissues on the low table between Rob and Andre's seat. Rob took one and went to wipe Gemma's face, but she squealed and turned away and went back to her scribbling. Andre motioned to Rob and took the tissue from him and leaned away from his chair to get to her. He ruffled her hair and kissed her head when he finished.

Apart from the big mirror over the gas fire the walls were bare, wallpaper that had been painted over with magnolia. The room seemed bright despite the three-quarter-drawn blinds. There were a few photos on and around the television: both of them as babies, Andre with Stacey on a ride at Alton Towers or somewhere like it. There were dried red flowers in a vase next to the fireplace and fresh ones – yellow freesias – on a table by the window. Rob wondered where they'd come from. There was clutter on the floor and washing draped on the chairbacks and a clothes-horse under the window. The room had been made to look bright, airy. For a moment it reminded Rob of the way he and Karen had tried to decorate the flat they'd bought – white walls, light wood furniture, plants and flowers. Everything weightless, blank, new. They'd got it from magazines. His eyes drifted to a row of Stacey's knickers, scrunched and small, splashes of colour like the flowers, drying on the clothes-horse.

The
Neighbours
theme blared out and the news started.
They watched British soldiers firing from an armoured vehicle filmed in night vision, streaks of phosphorus hanging in the greenish night, like the way old televisions used to show a ghost of the picture when you turned them off. Then there was a burning building. Andre changed channels to
Home and Away
when the pictures went back to the studio.

Rob got up and moved to the kitchen door to talk to Stacey. She'd laid out a couple of pasties next to the microwave in the small kitchen and was buttering some bread.

How is he really? he asked.

All right.

Has he really not spoke since they discharged him?

Not a word.

Well, I mean, that ay right, is it? Have yer tode the doctors?

It stops him havin to answer any more questions.

He ay in trouble, though, is he? Not for this.

That ay what it felt like.

He cor just say nuthin. Does he know them who did it? Is that what it is? He cor just say nuthin. How long can he keep that up? Is he scared, is that what it is? Iss understandable.

I doh know. Then, in a quieter voice, He's grateful yow was theer to help.

Ah, I was just at the shops.

I am an all.

Thass all right, yer know. He's a good lad.

The police come rahnd again earlier and banged on the door. I just left em, day answer it. They left after a bit.

They mighta found his bike.

Arr, course they have. The paper come rahnd an all, took a picture of him. I said no at first but, yer know.

What did they say?

Not much. Took a picture.