‘What’s a forced marriage?’ I say, pulling a face.
‘He’s gonna find some old, ugly bloke and make us marry him. Want some?’ she says, offering me the space dust.
‘Are you sure?’ I say. ‘Both of you?’
‘Not to the same bloke obviously.’
‘Obviously,’ I reply.
‘That’s why Zara’s into the Tyreese thing. It’s her last chance to mess up her own love life.’
‘So why doesn’t she get to choose who she marries?’
‘Cos that’s how it works, duh. Your dad chooses for you.’
‘Why not your mum?’
‘Patriarchal oppression!’ Priti says solemnly, emptying more space dust into her mouth then giggling as it explodes.
‘Do you even know what that means?’ I ask.
Priti licks her lips before saying, ‘I so do! It means the men get to decide everything and women are like glorified slaves. Not that it’s like that in our house. My parents have a marriage of equals – only my dad still blatantly reckons he gets to choose the husbands. Which is probably good because my mum’d be rubbish at choosing anyway. Psychiatrists are the worst judges of character.’
I’m about to ask why, but Priti doesn’t give me a chance.
‘And my mum went to university,’ she says. ‘Which no one is ever allowed to mention because my dad didn’t. She wants me and Zara to be educated and have careers before we get married, so she’s the one making us memorise the dictionary and learn speeches from the classics while my dad is off doing the whole matchmaker thing – although I bet she ends up getting the last word in that too, like she does about everything else. If you ask me, there’s a lot of gender role reversal going on in our house!’ Priti finishes, looking really pleased with herself, then runs her finger round the inside of the space-dust sachet to pick up any stray grains.
‘Does your mum really make you memorise the dictionary?’ I ask, imagining Priti with her head in a giant book, long words circling about and heaped up in piles all around her.
‘Yup. I have to learn ten new words a week. Then every Friday we have a spelling bee, with definitions and everything. And it can be any of the words I’ve learned over the last six months. Zara really hates it. She says it would be way cooler to fail all her GCSEs than know how to spell “phosphorescence”, but I reckon it just drives her nuts that I’m so much cleverer than her.’ Priti swallows quickly and says, ‘It’s not all bad though. My mum has some cool books that I get to read when she’s not looking.’
‘What sort of books?’ I ask.
‘About how all kids want to do it with their dad, and how all girls wish they had willies – which I totally don’t agree with because willies are the most pointless, ugly little things. And I bet even you don’t want to do it with your dad.’
‘Course not!’ I say.
‘No, I reckon that’d probably be too weird even for my mum’s books – maybe not though,’ she says, looking thoughtful. ‘Do you want to do it with your mum?’ she asks, looking at me curiously.
‘No!’ I say, angry at her for reminding me of my mum who I’ve been trying not to think about.
We’re back at Priti’s house now and she clambers up on the front wall and starts walking along it, arms akimbo, like she’s on a tightrope. To change the subject, I say, ‘Can’t your mum stop your dad from forcing Zara to get married then?’
‘Not if she finds out about Zara and Tyreese!’ Priti replies, wobbling on her wheelies. ‘She’d rather see us not graduate than get knocked up by some random trash boy before we’ve finished school.’ The way she says this reminds me of my grandad again. ‘Anyway, it’s tradition. Your dad’s supposed to decide who you go out with.’
‘Well, my mum’s got a boyfriend and I know for a fact her dad didn’t pick him out,’ I say.
An image flashes up from the other morning: Gary helping my mum into the car on the day she left. She was wearing a fur coat, even though it was the middle of summer, and she was carrying a suitcase. That was when I noticed that more of her beautiful hair had fallen out.
‘It’s a Muslim thing,’ says Priti, who is raising one leg then the other in the air as she walks. ‘I guess your mum didn’t have to check with anyone before she started carrying on with this Gary bloke then?’
‘She asked me if I was OK with it.’
Another image: of my mum’s face the morning she left. Red eyes, lipstick as dark as blackberries. Her lips mouthing the words, ‘Miss you, darling,’ although no sound came out.
‘Really?’ Priti looks surprised and abandons her performance for a moment. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said it was fine with me.’
‘And is it?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘That’s cool!’ Priti says. ‘You get to choose who your mum goes out with. I reckon I’d choose a wicked husband for my mum. One who dresses up as Elvis and knows how to make candyfloss and sticks his used bubblegum under the bed till it goes hard, and lets us have chips every day and go to sleep whenever we want and wear wheelies to school and never do any homework!’
‘I didn’t exactly get to choose,’ I say, imagining a Willy Wonka Elvis with a quiff and a giant stick of candyfloss walking down the aisle with my mum.
‘No, but you still get to say if you don’t like him, don’t you?’
I’m not really sure that I do, but I don’t bother trying to explain.
‘I guess my dad would have to die before I get a candyfloss Elvis,’ Priti says thoughtfully.
‘Yeah, there is that.’
‘That’d be a bummer. Still, it’d be pretty cool to have a dad who could blow bigger bubbles than you. So how did your mum meet him then, this Gary?’
‘They met at the village fete committee,’ I say.
‘That is so country!’ says Priti. ‘Still, I suppose you don’t have speed dating and Internet matchmakers in the sticks. Boy, am I glad I don’t live in the country!’
‘My mum’s on loads of committees,’ I say defensively. ‘She’s a pillar of the community.’
Actually, she’s a serial committee member who spends all her free time setting up trestle tables, decorating church halls, bulk-buying burgers and getting people to volunteer for things. Which is all great – I mean, I’m dead proud of her – but I don’t get to see much of her. Well, I do, but only while we’re both helping out with things. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve fallen asleep in the corner at a committee meeting or sat late in the headmistress’s office because mum was running late from organising something or other.
‘She sounds pretty needy, if you ask me,’ says Priti, tipped back on her wheelies now, but still balancing on the wall in a way that seems to defy gravity.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I ask. I can feel my bag of sweets getting hot and sticky in my pocket and my face doing the same.
‘Anyone who volunteers that much clearly has a desperate need to be needed,’ she says, authoritatively, like it’s something she’s read in another of her mum’s books.
‘You’ve never even met her,’ I say crossly, digging my hands deeper into my pockets.
‘OK, keep your hair on. I was only saying.’ She’s still tipped back at a precarious-looking forty-five degree angle, her arms folded across her chest.
‘Well, don’t!’
I stare down at my feet and wonder if she’s right. Before dad died, my mum was always ‘a willing volunteer’, but not like she is now. Now her friends are always telling her she does too much, but she just laughs and says, ‘I know, but someone’s got to do it.’
I wonder how all the committees are doing now she’s in hospital. The parent-teacher association and the village fete committee and the gardeners’ club and the Save the Post Office committee and all the rest? Will they fall apart without her? I wonder if she knows that I need her too.
‘OK, so why don’t you tell me what she’s really like then?’ says Priti, tilting back and forth on her w
heelies on the narrow strip of wall, staring down at her feet as she does so to make sure she doesn’t fall off.
I hesitate. What else is there to say about my mum? ‘Um, she’s called Hannah. She’s thirty-nine years old,’ I say, wrapping my fingers round the hot bag of sweets in my pocket, feeling their shapes sticky against the paper. ‘She’s pretty short and she has long hair down to her waist.’ Little girl hair she calls it. It makes her look younger from the back than from the front. But I don’t say that.
‘Yeah, but I mean, what’s she like?’ Priti glances up from her balancing act and nearly topples backwards, righting herself just in time. ‘Like, what does she do – when she’s not picking up men at village fete committees, that is?’
I stare at my feet some more. I want to tell her that my mum can do anything – she can make a light sabre from a toilet roll or save a nest of baby birds that have been abandoned by their mother. But I don’t. I say, ‘She’s an artist.’
‘What sort of artist?’
‘She makes pictures of the countryside where we live to sell to tourists.’ Then quickly, before Priti can interrupt again, I add, ‘But she has loads of other jobs too: she cooks these nut-free-gluten-free-meat-free-soya-free meals for a little girl down the road who’s ill; she does some landscape gardening; she works as a PA for a charity fundraiser and runs play-scheme projects for the council. And loads of other stuff too.’
‘Wow!’ says Priti, tilting herself forwards on her toes one last time before launching herself off the wall and landing next to me with a clatter. ‘Maybe my mum’s books are right,’ she says with a triumphant grin.
‘What about?’
Priti scrunches up her nose and parks her bum on to the wall next to mine. I notice that her tongue is bright pink from the strawberry lace. ‘Not about the whole “all boys are in love with their mums” stuff – that’s just obvious,’ she says. ‘More the one she’s reading at the moment. About how women who care too much screw their kids up.’
I want to think of something clever to say in response to this, but I can’t.
‘So are you going to share those sweets before they melt and make it look like you’ve wet yourself or what?’
When we get back from the parade, there’s a new arrival.
‘You look just like your dad did at your age,’ says my uncle Ian who’s sitting in Grandad’s chair. ‘He was skinny and scrappy like you. Used to do whatever I said, but I still beat him up pretty regularly!’
Uncle Ian laughs. Grandad laughs. Granny tells him to watch what he’s saying. And I remember why I don’t like Uncle Ian.
He and my cousin Jed turned up while I was out with Priti and Co. ‘A surprise visit,’ says Uncle Ian.
‘Cos we didn’t have anything better to do,’ says Jed.
Jed is only a year older than me, but it always seems like more. He’s bigger than me and cooler and better at pretty much everything. I haven’t seen him for ages and he seems to have grown about half a metre since last time and his hair is all long and scraggly.
Jed’s OK (so long as you always agree with him) but I’ve always been a bit scared of Uncle Ian. He has this habit of knowing exactly what to say to make me feel really small and stupid. I’ve seen him do it to Granny too, and to Jed – it’s just what he does. He used to be in the army and, even though he isn’t any more, he’s still got what Jed calls his ‘Corporal Bollocking voice’.
‘Why don’t you boys go and play in the garden?’ suggests Granny after about five minutes. Jed is climbing all over the sofa like a great big gangly toddler, his feet in dirty trainers, looking as if they’re about to smash into her favourite glass cabinet.
He pulls a face and says, ‘Play?’
‘Oh, you know, hang out,’ says Granny. ‘Or whatever you young people do.’
Jed glances at me like he’d prefer not to and says, ‘Do we have to?’
‘Do as your gran tells you,’ says Uncle Ian.
So the two of us head out into the back garden and I’m surprised to find myself wishing that Priti was here too.
‘My dad says your mum is turning into a nutcase just like mine,’ says Jed in a big loud voice as he bounds out through the patio doors, leaping so high he nearly takes his head off.
‘No, she’s not!’ I say, wishing I’d grown a bit more. And wishing my hair wasn’t so short.
‘That’s what my dad says. He reckons your dad and him were both stupid enough to fall for women who are soft in the head.’
‘My mum’s not soft in the head – she’s ill,’ I say.
‘Yeah, that’s what they would tell you, isn’t it?’
Jed’s brought a ball with him and he starts doing headers and keepy-uppies. He’s wearing a puffa jacket several sizes too big for him and it hangs off his shoulders. All his clothes hang off him, and not just because he’s wiry – although he is – more like he’s too cool for clothes. When I wear his hand-me-downs they don’t look the same on me at all, although my mum says this is because I actually bother to do up all the buttons.
I sit down on the patio and picture a cartoon Jed, swamped in a giant puffa so large it drags along the floor while he does keepy-uppies. ‘What’s wrong with your mum then?’ I ask.
‘She’s a bitch,’ says Jed and, as he says this, he lets the ball fall from the air, catching it in his hands and looking straight at me. It’s like he’s daring me to challenge him for swearing.
‘Why? What did she do?’ I sort of know already because my mum told me, but I ask anyway.
‘She tried to take me away from my dad.’
‘How?’
‘She took him to court, but he showed them she had a screw loose, which she does.’ Jed kicks the ball hard against the fence. ‘I don’t want to see her anyway,’ he says.
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t want her turning me soft in the head. It’s bad enough I’ve got her genes, I reckon, without her hanging around messing with my mind!’ He tosses the ball at me so quickly that I don’t see it coming and I miss it. ‘I bet you miss your mum, don’t you?’ he says.
‘No,’ I say quickly, picking up the ball, my face reddening.
‘I bet you do. I bet you cry for her at night, don’t you?’ He shrugs. ‘Don’t worry about it. I used to as well, but now I’ve got tough. Come on, let’s do penalties.’
So we play for penalties for a bit. I’m in goal and I’m not very good, but I soon realise it’s better if I don’t actually stop the goals anyway cos when I do, Jed gets really pissed off.
‘My dad says your dad was the falling man,’ Jed says after he’s shot three goals in a row.
‘What?’ I’m standing between the plant pots that Jed has set up as a makeshift goal and suddenly I see a picture of a stick man slowly falling in loop-the-loop motions, like a leaf from a tree.
‘The falling man,’ Jed repeats. ‘You must have seen him on the telly. He’s the guy who was the first one to jump out of the Twin Towers.’ He stares at me as if I’m an idiot. ‘You know, in 9/11?’
‘Yeah, I know,’ I say.
He pauses, stares at me, then starts grinning. ‘You haven’t seen it, have you?’
I can feel myself going red again. I’m not supposed to have seen any of the 9/11 footage – my mum doesn’t want me to – but I have anyway. My friend Lukas showed me the falling man on his laptop. We watched it over and over again. It was after that I made the thumb-flick cartoon.
‘God, mums are so lame!’ says Jed. ‘Wrapping you up in cotton wool – pulling the wool over your eyes more like. OK, so it’s like this,’ he continues. ‘After the planes crash into the buildings, they’re like a towering inferno. You must have seen pictures at least?’
‘Of course I have,’ I say quickly.
‘Right, well there’s this one guy who decides he’d rather jump out and die than get burned alive. So you see him jump out. Just this little man falling through the sky.’
I see it again, the little stick man, curling through
the air.
‘Then some others do it too, but that first one, he’s the coolest, I reckon, and that’s your dad.’
I feel more blood rushing to my cheeks so I stare really hard at the ball that Jed’s about to kick.
‘I reckon I’d do the same,’ Jed goes on. ‘I’d rather die jumping out of a building than get burned to death. At least it’d be a laugh on the way down. And it’d be pretty cool to be the first one to jump. What do you reckon?’ He looks at me.
‘I don’t know,’ I say. In my head, a giant boxing glove pings out on a spring and catches him square on the jaw.
‘Well, my dad’s watched that falling man over and over and he says it’s definitely Uncle Andrew. I think so too.’
‘Does he look like my dad then?’ I ask, glancing up quickly.
‘Yeah!’ says Jed.
I pause and then say, ‘So do you, like, remember him? What he looked like and all that?’
‘Yeah. Don’t you?’
Now I see a midget with a giant hammer clubbing him over the head.
‘Course I do,’ I say. But I’ve taken my eye off the ball and Jed kicks it hard so it goes straight past me into the flower bed behind.
‘Goal!’ cheers Jed.
A giant anvil falls out of the sky and flattens him to the ground.
THINGS I’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT THE MEN WHO FLEW THEIR PLANES INTO THE TWIN TOWERS AND KILLED MY DAD
1. What did they look like?
2. Did they actually come up with the idea themselves or did someone else think of it and they just agreed to do it?
3. Did they have brothers and sisters and families and kids and homes and stuff? And did they tell those people what they were going to do?
4. Were they scared of dying? Or was it that they didn’t like being alive and had rubbish lives so didn’t mind dying?
5. And if not, how did they end up being the ones picked to do it?
6. What did they do in the day before it happened?
We Can Be Heroes Page 4
