Akram's War Read online

  Like a bird flapping lightly to ascend without moving in any other direction, my gaze carries out of the window and above the rooftops. I rise higher, wings catching air currents, suspended over a grid of terraces. Below me, the streets run in neat parallel lines broken only by large walled yards where the factories once stood. Like a bird of prey I zero in to street level and suddenly stop, surprised by the gentle sound of Grace snoring. She can no longer hear me but I describe to her a boy I can see in the street. Burnished by the sun, he is warm and happy. He wears blue shorts and his favourite Captain Astounding T-shirt. I was seven, I tell Grace.

  3

  I had wandered out of the house and down to the end of our street where stood a tall factory wall, taller than a man but not as high as a house. I was deep in thought staring at the wall and with one hand I was pinching at my hair. As I stood back to take in its full height, so impressive it blocked out the sun, my feet tottered dangerously on the edge of the kerb. Coming from behind the wall was a noise that could only be made by a hammer equal to the size of a car, and every ten seconds I could feel the crash of its great weight reverberate through my toes. I could smell it too. Halfway down the street the smell changed from cooked chapattis and damp clothes drying on lines to the cold scent of worked metal and oil and fire. It was well known by everybody that if you leant up against the wall when the hammer struck, your bones would splinter inside your body. I touched the brickwork with a fingertip and counted to ten. The hammer fell. Then I bent my finger. It still worked okay. I tested my palm flat against the wall. After three bongs I examined it, holding it up to my eyes and squeezing it with my other hand. Nothing bad had happened.

  Suddenly a sensation like hot breath crept down the back of my neck, as though someone was watching me. Startled, I spun around.

  ‘Hey, little bro, what you playing?’

  The speaker, a man, took a step back and, turning his head sideways, spat into the road. He was old enough to be a man, yet he didn’t match up to my ideas of what a man should be. Although he was tall, he was too thin, and he wore his hair long and had no moustache. He wore tight jeans that flared at the ends and a cropped leather jacket exposing a large belt buckle. He stood with his feet splayed and his thumbs dug into his leather belt. Behind him was the corner where the end of our street met the main road. I sweated, knowing I was already beyond the limits of where I was allowed to go.

  ‘Are you a good-for-nothing?’ I said, feeling my lips tremble at the conversation I was having with a strange, almost grown-up man. I was both confused and excited by his belt buckle, resplendent in the sunlight. It was square, and embossed on the silver were the numbers 786. ‘Mum says street’s full of good-for-nothings this time of day.’

  He thought for a moment, his head cocked, examining me; his gaze lingered on my bald knees. I felt self-conscious, him looking at me like that, so I spoke up again. ‘I bet you can’t go tight up against that wall?’

  Without a word, he stepped past me, pressed his back flat against it and spread out his arms like Jesus on the cross. A light breeze swept his hair across his face. He closed his eyes and with his mouth half open he took a long deep breath.

  I counted to ten loudly, the hammer sounding.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ I asked.

  He shook his head.

  I counted to twenty.

  He rolled his eyes and exhaled for a long time. ‘Can I get off now?’

  ‘You’re definitely not a good-for-nothing,’ I said, impressed.

  ‘What’s your name, little bro?’ His eyes darted left and right, scanning each end of the empty street, before returning to me.

  I wasn’t sure whether to tell him. ‘Akram. Akram Khan.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Akram Khan, I’m Bobby.’

  He took my hand and shook it and I thought, Bobby is a strange name for a Pakistani man. His hand felt warm and smooth, like my mother’s when she rubbed me clean in the bath. At the thought of Mum I stepped into the middle of the road, from where I could just about make out our red front door at the far end of the street.

  ‘What you looking at?’ Bobby asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  ‘I got a pound here, little bro.’ From a pocket he slowly pulled out a thin bar of Highland Toffee. He tossed it into the air. I leapt for it. ‘Good catch.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘but that’s not a pound.’ My teeth tore at the plastic wrapper.

  ‘No, but this is.’ He dangled a blue-green note between his fingers. I leant forward and pounced for it, and at the last moment he pulled his hand away and jerked back his head and laughed, exposing chipped brown teeth. ‘You can have it, but you’ll have to keep a big secret. Can you do that?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, biting into the hard toffee.

  He retrieved a cigarette from behind his ear and tapped the filter end against a spoon-like thumbnail. ‘I don’t think so,’ he sneered, putting the cigarette between his lips and pocketing the pound. He turned away, about to cross the road.

  ‘I can,’ I insisted. Chewing the toffee was hard going at first and hurt as it pulled on a rotten milk tooth.

  Slowly Bobby turned back to face me and lit the cigarette with a match. Shading his eyes with a hand, he looked at me for a long time. The smoke half covered his face in white clouds.

  ‘Honestly I can,’ I said. The previous evening I had sat on my knees on the floor by the fire, next to Mum, who was hunched over an exercise book at the table. Like a child, she was practising writing her name in discrete shaky English letters. Arriving home from the shop, my father had pulled a wad of notes out of his inside jacket pocket and placed them on the page of her exercise book. Mum had stopped what she was doing, folded the money into the leaves of the book, and stood on a chair to stow it away on top of a tall dresser.

  ‘I can keep a massive secret for a pound – no, a gigantic one,’ I pleaded. With every crash of the hammer his offer seemed to be slipping further away.

  From the direction of our house a blue car hurtled past, and for no apparent reason it beeped its horn. My companion’s eyes followed the car until it disappeared from view. He sucked on his teeth and a bead of sweat dripped off his brow. ‘You don’t look brave enough to keep a secret as big as that.’

  He turned and crossed the road. His oily hair was plastered to his skull and straggled down his neck. Bobby walked slowly for a man and I was able to keep up.

  After a minute he stopped and spun around. ‘If you can follow me to the park and keep those cute little bro feet of yours exactly five steps behind all the way, then I’ll know I can trust you.’

  ‘No problem.’

  I trailed him, struggling to keep the distance between us exactly five steps. As we walked, Bobby spat on his hand and put it inside the front of his trousers. He took it out, spat on it and put it back in. I followed him past the health centre where my mother took me for check-ups. Standing outside waiting for his mum was my friend Mustafa. He had been born different, it was said, with a special disease that made him the whitest Pakistani I knew. His eyes, pink-rimmed, were almost transparent in the centre, and he had been warned that if he looked into the sun for even a short time his eyes would hollow out.

  ‘Captain Astounding!’ Mustafa stared jealously at my T-shirt.

  ‘See you later?’ I suggested.

  Bobby stopped and turned back to watch our conversation. He took out another cigarette, rapped it on his thumbnail and lit it, then blew the smoke out of his nose.

  ‘Where you going?’ Mustafa looked at my companion suspiciously.

  ‘Far,’ I said in an important voice. He put on a worried face. With the toffee binding my teeth I could not add to my report.

  Resuming our walk, I followed Bobby past my old nursery and the infant school I’d joined the previous year. Each time we had to cross a road, Bobby would go first and wait impatiently on the other side, signalling with a jerk of his head when it was safe for me to cross. I could hear other hammers at
work behind high walls, and sometimes I peeped through gaps in enormous iron gates. I still didn’t spot a hammer but I did see dark-looking men lowering, on a chain, a gigantic ship’s anchor. One man worked the chain and several others guided the anchor onto the tray of a truck. If it fell it would have crushed them. I felt a knot in my stomach, knowing I was far from home. I wouldn’t know how to find my own way back. My aching jaw from the hard-going toffee was making me feel sick.

  As we approached the Mash Tun public house, Bobby and I crossed to the other side of the road. The pub was a square building with wooden picnic benches commanding a thin strip of yard next to the pavement. Skinheads in boots, tight jeans and bomber jackets stood outside drinking out of tall glasses. Each wore a long chain folded over at the hip. Spotting us, they stopped and stared. One scratched under an armpit in imitation of a monkey. They mouthed words at us – Wog, Paki – exaggerating the lip movements so their meaning was impossible to miss. Bobby shrank back against a wall as though it would afford him protection. One of the skinheads, swinging his chain frighteningly fast at his hips, mouthed the word Later, and they all laughed. Among them, sitting on a low stool, was a boy, Adrian Hartley, a bully I recognized from school. He nodded to me and ran across the road towards us. I stopped warily as he approached.

  ‘You wagged school then?’ Adrian’s hands were deep in his pockets. With his feet planted firmly on the ground his body swayed from side to side while his head nodded as though he could hear a song playing in his ears. I was worried that he might punch me, but his hands remained in his pockets.

  ‘I’m not wagging. Mum says I’ve got a tummy ache.’

  Adrian looked at Bobby and smiled, his white teeth dazzling in his pale round face blotched with blue and black stains, maybe dirt. ‘I’m not wagging either.’ He jerked his head towards the Mash Tun. ‘My dad said I could skip today on account of my black eye.’ His stubby finger traced the blue circle around his bloodshot left eye.

  The skinheads shook their heads, and digging their thumbs into tight denim pockets they slunk off into the pub, through a swinging door like in a cowboy film. Bobby stood perfectly still exactly five steps in front of Adrian and me. He dug one thumb into his belt and twisted his long hair around a finger of his other hand. His feet were spread wide. He turned his head to the side and a bolus of spit shot out of his mouth to land fizzing on the hot tarmac.

  Adrian gazed hungrily at the stub of Highland Toffee in my hand. ‘Have it,’ I said, offering him the gooey mess. ‘You can buy twenty Highland Toffees with a pound, and I know how you can earn a whole pound.’

  ‘Really?’ said Adrian, his eyes wide. ‘In the Mash Tun with a pound I could drink Tizer all day.’

  Bobby squinted as though examining some detail on Adrian’s skin. ‘The white boy your friend?’ he called.

  A white friend, I thought, and nodded proudly.

  He whistled, sucking the air through his teeth. ‘You have good friends.’

  It grew warmer as we walked on, and each successive street was quieter with fewer houses. Adrian kept turning to me, squeezing out a nervous smile, and I reciprocated with a reassuring nod. At what was to be our final turn, the view before us was like that of a country village. The road sloped lazily downwards, lined on each side by trees. A sign on one side read Lye Park, and a set of low gates led onto grassland. In the distance the grass sloped gently upwards, and on the crest of the hill was a playground, incongruous in its orange tubular metal construction. Emanating from it were the excited shrieks of preschool children and the guarded, muffled voices of their mothers.

  Lye Park was huge, and after walking some way in the opposite direction to the playground, Bobby stopped and scanned the view. We stopped too, waiting. He dropped to the ground, and we followed, the three of us crawling on our knees and elbows over the warm earth like soldiers, towards a small dense orchard of crab apple trees. The fruit was tiny and wouldn’t ripen until the autumn. Pointing to the base of one tree, Bobby instructed me in a harsh whisper to stay there as a lookout. I sank to my haunches, my legs quivering.

  Bobby led Adrian by the hand to a nearby tree, one with a low canopy of dense green leaves. ‘It looks like a camp in here,’ I heard Adrian say excitedly as he disappeared underneath the thick mass of overhanging green. Bobby wriggled in after him. His big feet stuck out, their red rubber soles lolling out like tongues.

  There was some sort of argument. Adrian’s boots were ankle high and green with red laces and took him ages to get off. They were thrown, as though discarded, to the edge of the foliage, a Union Jack stitched on each side.

  The sunlight was strong and it shimmered through the few spaces between the leaves. Bobby spat a lot and cursed and the wind shook the leaves on the tree. Then Bobby squashed Adrian underneath him and then he seemed to be propped up on his knees. He spat some more, rubbed himself and made gentle murmuring sounds as though he was coaxing a baby to sleep. Finally he let out a subdued grunt, and Adrian, pulling up his trousers, wriggled out feet first from underneath the bush. He leapt for his boots, looked inside them and then at Bobby, on his face an expression of confusion and betrayal.

  *

  Smarting again at the memory, I reach across and untangle a stray hair on Grace’s brow. At the parting her hair is darker, almost black, like a water stain that re-emerges however many times it is scrubbed clean. Even in sleep her face looks thoughtful and disappointed as though she is about to cry. I wonder what she dreams about.

  ‘That’s not the whole story,’ I tell her. ‘Adrian looking so hard done by: that was because of me. I took the pound that Bobby had paid him. I slipped it out of his boot when he was inside the bush, and as soon as I stole it I felt a dullness, a despair I hadn’t felt before. I knew that if I replaced the money the hopelessness would go away, but I didn’t. For a reason unknown to me, at the time and even now, half a lifetime later, I feel I am in need of that despair.’

  I expect Grace at least to stir, but there is only the shallow rise and fall of her chest and a gentle vibration as the breath passes across the Cupid’s bow of her upper lip. All of me wants to touch her body, softly at first until she wakes up, and then I want her to say again that I can fuck her.

  4

  Bobby walked briskly away, and Adrian and I were stranded, wandering aimlessly until Adrian recognized a pub from which he was able to navigate, pub to pub, back to the Mash Tun. I tried not to look at him, out of fear of what he might report, and he carried a limp. A few times, suddenly remembering, he cursed the pound he had been cheated out of. I was glad when he went into the pub.

  I got back to find Mustafa in the middle of the road, exactly halfway between his house and mine, which stood facing each other. Mustafa trembled and covered his eyes with his hands, muttering, ‘Allah, oh Allah!’ As though oblivious to the boy’s panicked presence, a dog chased a cat in circles around him. The cat, I thought, would lose the dog. It would leap through a small opening in a fence or do an about-turn far too quickly for the lumber­ing dog, and scarper. The animals changed direction and disappeared, and Mustafa, slowly uncovering his eyes, looked cautiously around. His chest swayed rapidly and seeing me, a thin spray of tears ran down his cheeks.

  I took him by the arm and led him off the tarmac, onto the pavement. We sat on the kerb, kicking our feet into the road.

  ‘Did you go really far?’ he said between shuddering breaths. His eyes were still narrowed suspiciously.

  ‘You don’t trust no one.’ I pulled the pound note a little way out of my pocket for him to see.

  ‘Did Bobby give you that?’ His eyes widened.

  ‘Didn’t have to do anything,’ I bragged, though I was secretly surprised that he knew the man’s name. ‘Anyway, how come you’re wagging school?’ I asked, changing the subject.

  ‘Opticians.’

  Just then, in a blur, the cat and dog went past us. ‘Come on,’ I cried, tugging at Mustafa’s arm, ‘we’ve got to save the cat!’

  We follow
ed the animals back and forth through slim alleys that ran between houses. When we reached an allotment where a neighbour grew radishes, I stopped abruptly, Mustafa colliding with my heels. I gazed intently at the cultivated earth that ran in neat lines across the small plot. Inside the troughs, small leafy shoots marked the position of each radish. It took a lot of rubbing to clean off the dried soil, but the taste of the radish would fizz on my tongue as though stolen food ought to taste bitter. Seeing them reminded me that I was hungry and that my mother would be wondering where I was.

  We trailed the animals across a mountain of brick and timber where number eleven had collapsed one night earlier that year. No one had been in it, and the following morning our entire street had come out and watched in awe as a digger with a huge iron ball on a chain rolled in and flattened what remained; somehow, numbers nine and thirteen were still completely intact. Long nails studded the timber planks and Mustafa and I picked our way carefully across the debris. Where the garden had once been, the cat screamed like a baby but the dog made no sound, just the whoosh of air around it and the thud of its paws as they met the ground.

  Nobody I knew had a dog, and if one came along the footpath towards us my mother would take my hand and we’d cross the road. Dogs were unclean and if you got too close to one Allah would be angry. But now, as though we were each proving something to the other, Mustafa and I were chasing the animals.

  Mustafa was an albino. At first, his mum and dad were convinced it was an English conspiracy, or at the very least a mix-up at the hospital. But then an albino was born into his family in Pakistan, and after that they put it down to something they called Allah’s will. Mustafa lagged behind me and clutched his chest as though he was in pain. He couldn’t run properly, partly on account of his eyes and partly because of his fat little legs. He was prone to stumbling, and when he did he bled and it wouldn’t stop until he got stitches. His eyelids trembled in the breeze, fragile like a butterfly’s wings. His skin was paper white, and all summer long he’d squint, or like a soldier’s salute he would shield his eyes with his hand, and when he looked at you he’d stand real close as though examining a fly on your nose.