Heartland (30 page)

It's saved on the school system, she said incredulously.

Rob blew his cheeks out.

Has anybody else seen it, yet?

Apart from all the kids, you mean? No.

We better go and see Ms Dragovic, I suppose. He sighed.

Oh, I'm sorry, Rob. She put her hand on his, the other up to her mouth. He wanted to stay sitting there, her hand on his.

He was in the desert
. This thought hit him drunkenly as he leaned on the balcony at the front of the motel room looking across the scrubland and at the cold, hard stars. He took a drink from the bottle of Jim Beam that he'd rested on the balcony rail, the stars shooting as he jerked his head back to drink. He thought of the world turning
through space. Roswell, New Mexico: dinosaurs and spaceships and a young Hispanic prostitute without much English lying on the bed in his room. He'd picked her up because she looked like Jasmine.

He could've just asked her to come with him. Could've told her he couldn't go home but that she could come with him. He could've tried something. Something other than running away, of course. That was what he did. Run away.

He threw his head back and the sky reeled. He used to be able to name all the stars. Not here, though, with so many. Time passed and you forgot and had to grope around in your memory to try to bring things back. A satellite blinked evenly above him, a satellite or an alien spaceship, and he giggled and shifted his view back to the highway in front of him and the desert beyond it. He stepped back and slung the bottle wildly across the road. It sailed in an arc, last drops of whiskey splattering the highway tarmac, and landed silently in the dust. Everything was quiet. He'd been seeing cowboys for the last few weeks. He thought of his dad, claiming to have learned English from Westerns. All the things he couldn't ask him. The stars blurred again with tears. He could go back, he thought, in a sudden wild surge of hope, could just go back. Then he turned and opened the door and disappeared into the room.

Argentina again.
Campbell, looking bigger now, blocked a cross like a brick wall.

They heaved it one last time towards the box. Rob again, a few steps, pushing Lee out of the way as he got up, got his head firmly on it and away it went again. It dropped towards the halfway line. Out, out, out again, he said.

Mark Stanley let the ball bounce past him, put the whistle to his mouth and blew for time. They'd done it.

There were shouts of Yessss! from the huddle on the sidelines. The mosque players had their hands on their knees. Rob put his arms up. Felt suddenly self-conscious with everyone patting him on his back and went over to Lee.

Fuckin great game, Rob, Lee said. Over his shoulder Rob watched Glenn run across to Bailey and the others on the side, shaking hands and clapping each other on the back.

What abaht yow, mate. Eh? Rob had grabbed Lee round the neck. You ay scored since yow was in the Cubs, have yer? He ruffled Lee's hair, harder than he should have, still looking at the touchline. Lee looked delighted with himself, though. Fuckin brilliant, he kept saying, and shaking his head.

Three policemen strolled across the pitch with Mark Stanley. The plan was obviously to get everyone away with the minimum of hassle. Rob glanced across at the cars at the side of the pitch to see if anything was going to happen. Some of the players were shaking hands. Chrissie was going over to their players who hadn't walked off. Rob tried to shake Tayub's hand. He didn't really look at him. Rob walked across to Zubair, his hand out. They shook.

Hope yome pleased wi yerself, Zubair said and nodded towards the group that had pulled out a St George's flag to celebrate with.

Well played, mate, Rob said. I'm just glad it's over.

Zubair nodded. I'll give yer a ring, he said. Then, Less get out of here, over Rob's shoulder to Tayub.

Rob pulled his shirt off. He used to do it at the end of games when he moved down to semi-pro and still had a professional's body. Now he had a pot-belly beginning to emerge over the top of his shorts, pale and flabby skin, a promise of the middle age to come.

He jogged towards Glenn and Bailey and the bloke with the glass eye, who were doing a little dance with the flag. Kyle Woodhouse and Twiglet ran across to join them. Carl Jones had popped open a bottle of pomagne that he must've hidden in the kitbag. When he got to the flag-dancing Rob dropped the shirt on the floor in front of them and carried on towards the dressing rooms. The police were trying to usher them off the pitch. Rob just pulled a T-shirt on and grabbed his kitbag, turned and jogged back past the celebrating figures. More bottles of pomagne had emerged, Lee was spraying one around, flicked some towards Rob.

Yer comin in for the photo, Rob?

Lee nodded towards the group that was forming around the flag. There was someone from the paper. One of Bailey's mates had a camera with him as well.

Rob shook his head, didn't break stride, put his thumb up to Lee and winked, kept running, back past the goal and up the hill until he fell in step with his dad.

All right?

All right, Dad.

Yer played well, mate. Decent game. In the circumstances, like.

I'm glad iss over. Thass it for me, now, he said.

They'll want yer next season.

Rob shook his head.

Yow all right walkin, Dad? he asked.

Course I am. I ay finished just yet.

Rob started leafleting down at the canal.
It meant calling by his old flat. Someone buzzed him in and the entrance hall still held a new smell of fresh wood, carpets and glue, like it had when he and Karen had lived there, fainter now but still there. He'd nearly given the block a miss. When he'd delivered general election leaflets this time last year,
he'd felt like someone had put his chest in a vice and his eyes had filled with tears. He'd dumped the leaflets on the floor of the entrance hall and walked out, had a cigarette looking at the ducks on the canal to calm down. It wasn't even like he missed Karen any more. At first, he'd missed her so much it had felt like he was being suffocated. People said time healed; people said a lot of things.

Yow'll allus miss her, mate. I miss Jackie an I love yer Aunty Pauline, wouldn't have anything any different.

Jim knew a lot of things. Maybe he was right about these leaflets after all. He'd written different things for each language. The English ones said he had reservations about the mosque, the others said he thought it was a great idea. Jim guessed no one would read both. Rob wondered if anyone read them at all.

No tears on this visit. In fact, he went round to each of the flats, dropping a leaflet on each doormat. When he got to their number seven he stopped for a minute. There was a mat outside the front door that wasn't there before and a plant in a pot to the side, which he thought looked good. He breathed in and remembered the sound the door would make as it opened – like opening an air lock in a spaceship – and the flat's bare white walls and wooden floors. On the left on the way in he'd got a Villa shirt he'd played in, another one signed by Dwight Yorke and McGrath that he'd asked them for when he was released. They were sitting at the back of his wardrobe now, behind his piles of football shirts; perhaps he'd put one on for Ms Dragovic.

They'd queued for tickets to the Saturday morning picture show.
Now they were queueing for ice-cream. Zubair was holding Camilla's hand while Katie messed in the bag she'd got hanging from the pushchair. Zubair couldn't believe the numbers of people. Dudley had gone ten years without a cinema at all, now it had a huge multi-screen that
was always packed. It was good, he supposed, it must mean there was more money around. Right now, though, with children's voices echoing back off the plastic surfaces and niggling at the hangover in his temples, artificial light that reminded him of police station interview rooms and the prospect of an hour or so of blaring cartoons, he would've preferred to have been somewhere else.

They might not last long, he thought. It was the first time they'd tried Camilla at the cinema. His daughter moved her hand in his and it seemed to pump him more full of life. He felt suddenly guilty for wanting to have been doing something else. She was a beautiful little girl. He knew that he was bound to think so, but Katie told him that people came up to her in Tesco and said as much.

Camilla stood patiently in the queue holding his hand, watching serenely as other kids rampaged up and down around them. He wasn't sure how she had turned out so calm, given his and Katie's temperaments. Another of the miracles of parenthood, he supposed. She took after her gran maybe, Zubair's mother, who would move through her house steadily, slowly these days, but with an air that suggested whatever calamity might befall them – and calamity was never far away – she would wait it out. Things took their toll, though. She was looking tired lately, turned fifty now after all. She never mentioned Adnan but she'd touch the photo of his dad on the cupboard at the bottom of the stairs as she went up to bed. He'd seen her do it when he left late at night, as he watched through the little window at the side of the front door to check she was OK. Her life. As he got older he marvelled more and more at the adventure of her life, sent from a village up in the mountains that wasn't even there any more to come and join her husband here, of all the places in the world. He wondered when she realized she was never going back,
and how hard that was. Women were more rooted than men, he thought. They'd wait things out. He didn't believe his dad took one backward glance, couldn't wait to leave.

The house would be too much for her on her own. If Tayub left. When Tayub left. She'd lost energy with her youngest son. When Zubair had gone round there the other day, there'd been a bass sound throbbing through the house, coming from his brother's room, the bigger room, the one he and Adnan had shared. If either of them had ever tried that, and they did, their dad would've been up the stairs, ripping wires from the walls, their mother at his heels. It had always been unclear to him whether she was chasing her husband because she agreed with him or whether she was protecting her boys. Both, he guessed now.

He'd thought it was hip-hop at first, the growl of the music that came from the earphones of boys who he spoke to about matters such as who exactly pulled the screwdriver first. It wasn't, though. As he climbed the stairs and his ears adjusted to the fuzzy sound of a stereo that Adnan had customized years ago he realized it was preaching. He'd heard him playing a Hamza Yusuf tape a few months before; this was different though, growling, angrier, talking about the infidel.

Zubair frowned. Tayub turned it off. He was going through some kind of crisis, travelling across Dudley to a more ramshackle, younger mosque, much less moderate than the one in Cinderheath or up in Dudley itself. He'd also spend an hour waxing his hair before he went out, was neglecting his college work, lifting weights in front of the mirror in the corner of the room where Adnan's computer had been. That day he'd wanted to show Zubair his new, bright red football boots.

They're boss, man, he'd said.

They'll see yer comin.

He'd enjoyed coming to pick Tayub up on Sunday mornings that season. The reason Zubair had carried on playing football had been to do this, to play in the same team with his brother. He'd try to give him advice light-heartedly in the car. He found himself suggesting that the solution to any problems Tayub might have was a few games of football and getting a girlfriend. Zubair thought they were the solutions to most young men's problems. Or rather, he knew they weren't, but they were as good a way as any to paper over the cracks. We never say the things we mean, he thought.

Tayub was a good player, quick, moved like Adnan, not like Zubair, who was built more like his dad, took after him more, or had become more like him: forward, always forward, work hard and you'll get on, try to stay on the surface of things. His dad had no time for the past. Not his own, anyway. He liked to watch old cowboy films and joke that this was how he used to practise his English. He liked other people's pasts, other people's stories.

Tayub was at the age now when he and Adnan had stopped really speaking. A bit older maybe. Zubair had been at university, getting on. Adnan had reduced himself until the only space he filled was the narrow one between the beds where he'd set up the computer. He knew he'd gone when he saw the computer was missing. He thought now, every day if he was honest with himself, which was rarely, that he could've done something more for Adnan, could've done something before it came to that, someone of all his talents reducing himself to a corner of the bedroom, the anonymity of the taxi driver's seat.

It was Zubair who was fidgeting, not Camilla, standing there in her jelly shoes and floral dress with a matching red flower hairclip. Katie folded the pushchair, they'd had to park miles away, he reached out to help.

Why don't you nip out and have a cigarette while you can, darling? she said, and kissed his cheek, folding the pushchair with one hand.

He'd been trying to give up, of course. She leaned into him as she kissed him and he put his arm around her. Katie went to the gym. He would have to do something. If he stopped playing football completely – Sunday mornings and Wednesday night five-a-side –he was going to be the size of a house. Smoking as well. Lately, when he had a cigarette, he heard his dad's rattling morning cough and then later, late on, the cough like he was drowning. His old man had been fifty-three when he died. If he went at that age Camilla would be twenty-four. He wanted to grow old, see his grandchildren. They planned on having more kids themselves. He was trying, cutting back, had taken to drinking wine lately instead of beer. The problem was he drank wine at the same pace as beer. That was why he had a hangover.

Zubair became aware of someone looking over as they shuffled along the queue. Glenn Brown was over there, wiping one of his kids' noses while they sat on a purple monster at the edge of the play area. They nodded hello to each other. Civil. Katie stiffened, glared, put her hand on his shoulder. This BNP stuff would all blow over. In some ways it was more honest. All this stuff would fade, dissipate like drifting smoke. Maybe he was like his mother, after all. You had to endure. That was all there was in the end.