Heartland (32 page)

If Rob hadn't called home he probably would have died right there. It was the summer holidays. He was helping run the playscheme and had called home to get a pump for some footballs, hadn't got the right key for the stores.

In the moments of lucidity, wearing the oxygen mask in the ambulance, Tom thought about the roses. He should buy Kathleen some flowers. He
would
buy her some flowers. She hadn't deserved what he'd given. It wasn't the pain that was the worst in the end, it was when the pain went, and he was left with the feeling of how he'd wanted things to be different. How he'd wanted it all to be different. At the hospital he'd tried to tell her that, when she got there from her mother's, her worried face scaring him more than all the pain in the world; he'd tried to say it to Rob too. That he'd wanted it to be different, that he loved them.

What this was now, he wasn't sure, watching Kathleen cut the flowers, the sun coming through the window. He wanted to go to her, wanted to tell her now. The way that it would be different, if he could just do it over again.

All Argentina.
They couldn't get the ball off them. Still no chances, though. Ferdinand put it out for a corner. It ended up with Zanetti, up and over the bar.

On election day morning, Jim stepped out of the shower and wrapped himself in a towel.
This is where it started, he said to himself. This is where it began. The bathroom was steamy. He'd been in the shower a long time, and he leaned to open the window to let in some air, all the time imagining a speech he'd make if he got the chance, or rather, he would make in some parallel world, where he had some sway and always did the right thing. He imagined standing outside the chained-up gates of the Cinderheath works, quieting the crowd, nodding, as if a crowd of any sort might turn up to hear him speak. This is where it began for us, here, he would say, and the crowd would lean forward to hear.

This is what brought you in from the fields. This is what gave you the vote, sent you to school, put shoes on
your feet, food in your belly, eh, this place here and others like them. This is what freed the slaves. What won the wars, made us rich. The idea of murmurs from the crowd. Yes, rich. Rich enough to forget, any road.

The steam was clearing in the bathroom. His face emerged in the mirror above the sink. It looked good with the little strip of lights they'd put in above it. He began to lather his face, picturing himself standing on an upturned crate or something, head above the crowd listening in front of him, the rusted gates and fence behind him, bleeding orange slowly into the ground around his feet.

Just because we've been forgotten doesn't mean we should forget ourselves.

I want you to think. I want you to think about a story you might've been told. A story you need to remember before it's too late. It could be anything, could be from anywhere. A story from parents or grandparents or passed down from before that. In the daydream he raised his arm in front of him as if waving something away.

The details weren't important but the gist of it was. They would know what he meant. A story of all being huddled up in bed together, brothers and sisters together, a blanket not quite big enough to cover you all and arms and legs out and exposed to the cold. A trip to the toilet in the middle of the night, out into the cold and dark, not knowing what's in the shadow, the mud and water all frozen as you crept your way across the yard. A younger baby brother or sister crying, wailing and then no sound at all. A knock on the door or a shout down the street. A collapse, an explosion, a burning.

Think. The razor felt good on his skin and he drew a clean line through his foamed cheek. It doesn't have to be here, even. Although here is where it might have ended up. A green field, a potato failure, nothing to eat. A dusty village in the heat, flies, babies crying.

I want you to think about this as a place of hope. He waves his arm again, this time more expansively, at the ruin behind him. This was a place of hope. Hard, hard work. Industry. Endeavour, eh? The ability to pull yourselves up. Together. To work together. He stumbled over the words in his head here, shaving the other half of his face and meeting his gaze in the mirror, humming softly. Not sure what he was saying. But the gist; the gist of it. To be proud of something. A wave now at the rusting gates behind him. Some lessons from this place of hope.

Jim turned the razor around, finished his neck and Adam's apple. He'd spent too long in the bathroom, he was late. It was too late. He was only too aware of that, deep down.

He took a fresh towel from the airing cupboard, dried himself quickly, reached for the aftershave.

It wasn't really a place of hope. It was a cenotaph. He imagined the silence around his words, maybe the wind in the trees, the creaking of a chain, the footsteps of a fox walking through the exposed ribs of factory buildings. You had to speak up to fill the silence. With words you could make anything happen. Put shoes on your feet, food in your belly. Win the wars. Raise the dead. You just had to have the right words.

He took his crisp white shirt from the hanger on the back of the door. Pauline had starched the collar and the arms. His shirt and tie were about the only things the same in the daydream and the reality. He thought of the words he really had to work with. A few badly photocopied sentences on how he'd worked on the Housing Committee and was a man who understood Cinderheath, a few others translated into Urdu and Punjabi that he didn't even understand.

The sun shone on him in the daydream. His blue suit and white shirt in front of the rusty works' gates, the castle,
another ruin, further behind. The glint of an aeroplane in the blue sky and all that brought to mind now, a rain of blood and fire.

He opened the bathroom door and walked across the landing. There was music thumping from Michael's room, the voice over the top of it like someone shouting a warning. Pauline called up the stairs, Jim! Bill's here, love, yome late, come on.

I know, my angel, sorry. Be right with yer, Bill.

In the bedroom he pulled on his suit. He knotted the tie.

The right stories, the right words. To undo the rust. To heal all wounds. To raise the dead. A strange and unlikely task for a Thursday afternoon in the Black Country this late in the day.

He hurried down the stairs and picked up his car keys. Bill was at the door.

Yome all right, mate, doh rush, it ay too late at all.

Jim stopped daydreaming, pictured Michael's laughing face. He'd done a bit too much daydreaming, he told himself.

The ticket had originally belonged to the Mexican FA.
It cost a fortune by the time it ended up with a tout in a Sapporo bar. His money was running low by now. He was thinking about selling the London flat. He'd got people renting it, had sorted agents out online and over the phone, but with their fees, and the amount the mortgage was, it wasn't giving him very much. Almost everything had been on credit. The bubble was bursting. He knew it should've been worrying him more than it was.

The ticket was too good a thing to pass up. The same as the whole trip itself. He'd got to California, looked at the Pacific, and instead of heading up to Palo Alto, like he'd thought he would, instead of starting to think about work and trying to stay somewhere longer than a night, he headed
on to Los Angeles and the airport and a flight to Tokyo. If you head west for long enough, you end up coming back east. That sort of stuff used to fascinate him as a kid.

It was a great position, halfway up the stand almost level with the halfway line, close to the dignitaries. When he got there he was relieved he'd put a suit on, that he could perhaps pass for Mexican; this wasn't your normal touted seat. He thought he saw Franz Beckenbauer a few rows away, in the seats with armchairs. Occasionally, when he was in London, when Wenger was putting his first great Arsenal team together, he would get tickets through work, good ones like this, and go and watch Bergkamp. He would worry mildly that
Match of the Day
or Sky would solve the mystery of his disappearance by beaming his face into his brother's front room. He knew Zubair would be watching, his dad and Tayub these days too. Whenever he went to a game he thought of the climb up the bank that time Wolves played at Dudley Town.

This was where he'd always wanted to be, he supposed, in the expensive seats, at the top of the world. He'd had a couple of bottles of Asahi before the game. He couldn't work out if the beer killed his thoughts or fuelled them.

While the teams were warming up, Beckham stopped for a moment and looked up intently into the stand close to Adnan, as if searching for someone. For a second he was looking right at him. Adnan raised his hand and waved. Beckham turned, struck a ball with his right foot, cleanly, purely, it arced across the vivid green turf.

Zubair wondered why he was suddenly so popular.
Rob had told him about Jasmine coming back, he was looking forward to seeing her. He had no idea what she wanted to see him for, certainly not why she'd made an appointment here at the office. It was probably to do with some kid at the school. He hoped she didn't ask him about Adnan.

With Jim it was probably something similar. Some kid in trouble. Some parents he'd told he'd get help for.

Wayne Bridge came on for Michael Owen.

Backs to the wall stuff now, eh?

Like the other week, Rob, Lee said.

Rob nodded and shrugged.

The news that the Gurdwara had put fourteen past Castle Villa and had won the league on goal difference filtered slowly through the Sunday afternoon. Jim had been tempted to wander down to the Lion himself where all of the Cinderheath Sunday players – minus Rob – and all the hangers-on were celebrating what they thought was their title. He thought he'd keep his distance, though.

No one believed it at first. Someone had a mate who played for Castle Villa, who told them how they'd only started with nine men and then had their keeper sent off after ten minutes, but they all thought it was a wind-up, kept on drinking and singing, Eng-er-land. The texting persisted though. It ended with Glenn phoning the league secretary who confirmed the result. He'd just come off the phone to the Castle Villa captain. Glenn smashed his phone, went in and told them the news. The drinking carried on.

Twiglet tried to fight Carl Jones. Bailey, who had been on his way out, sipping on an orange juice, told them they had to keep their discipline, that their time would come, was coming in a couple of weeks at the election after all.

Jasmine said this was the hardest thing she'd ever done.

I know what happened to your brother.

She told it him all from the start. How she could've come to tell him she'd found him. How she'd come to tell him she'd lost him again.

Zubair said nothing.

Will you be able to tell your parents?

My dad died the year after he went.

I'm sorry.

You'd better go, he said. She was crying and he almost went to her, but just sat there, shaking slightly.

When she left he opened his window like he always did at the end of the day, lit a cigarette and then another, thought about his dad and his brother. He had a bottle of whisky hidden in the filing cabinet drawer. He'd put it there to make him feel like Philip Marlowe, it matched the gold flaking lettering on the frosted glass, the seedy stories of stolen cars and hidden knives and even seedier defences he invented. A good imagination must've run in the family.

He sat with his feet up on the desk, sipping his whisky and smoking a cigarette, not sure when he'd throw the glass against the wall, turn the desk over, or if he'd just sit there all night, knowing that instead he should get back to his wife and daughter, probably call to see his mother. Tonight he'd intended to talk to Katie about the idea of a new house, about whether they could do something for his mother and Tayub. It would be a lot to ask. It could wait now.

He wondered whether he should tell his mother or not, staring vacantly at a report he was meant to be reading, not looking at the letters but at the white spaces around them, looking at ghosts, looking at silence.

There was a conversation they'd had years ago.
Rob and Adnan must have been eleven years old, hanging from the school's rusting climbing-frame. It was not long after Jasmine had left. Zubair was picking his brother up after school. There'd been a fight or something. They were all miserable. Rob could remember the climbing-frame flaking away in his hand. He'd been smashed in the face in the game the week before, had been put in with the older boys, had black eyes and his nose was filled with dried blood. Rust and blood smelled the same.

Adnan had found something out about Hitler and the Jews and a conspiracy to rule the world. Some kind of hybrid, fifteenth-hand politics and religion that neither of them knew anything about. Adnan was talking him through the process of the Holocaust with some glee, the industrialization of death, a shaping of the world to your own desire. Blood and rust.

Rob wouldn't have thought anything about that conversation at the time, not for years afterwards. Adnan had always been going on about stuff he didn't understand. It was funny how things could assume such importance with hindsight. The photographs of the twisted metal at Ground Zero reminded him. They looked like the rusting climbing-frame they'd hang from when they were miserable, when there was nothing else to do.

Rob wanted to ask Zubair about that conversation but it felt like a closed world to him. It was twenty years ago, now, after all. Where to begin?

When they put that parade of bombers' faces on the television after September 11th, he found himself involuntarily scanning the faces to see if Adnan was there, fearful and yet somehow wanting to see it, wanting, what? A story to fill the absence, maybe. And now Camp X-Ray and the raids in Tipton, how it felt like a weight, like a pressure, things closing in, a subsidence.