We Can Be Heroes

by Catherine Bruton

  He turns to me as he asks this. I shake my head.

  ‘No. Very few people do,’ says Shakeel. I watch his sharp knife moving swiftly over the sweet potato, revealing the bright orange flesh beneath the muddy brown exterior. ‘Why? Because the US is at war in Afghanistan. These civilian deaths are therefore simply considered unfortunate casualties in a time of war – but whether in reality that label makes the death of civilians any less terrorising is open to debate.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I say.

  ‘So the labels matter, you see.’

  Neither of us speaks for a few moments. I watch Shakeel chop the bright orange flesh into cubes, his knife moving rhythmically over the chopping board. Outside, I hear Priti shrieking, Jed shouting something I can’t make out.

  ‘So if it is a war,’ I say, ‘then who started it?’

  ‘That is another good question.’ Shakeel laughs, looking up from what he’s doing. ‘I suppose some might say the war started thousands of years ago, when Christians first embarked on the crusades. Others say it started on 9/11.’

  ‘But if the war didn’t start till after the planes hit the buildings then it can’t have been an act of war, can it?’ I say. ‘That means it was terrorism.’

  ‘Which is why definitions are so divisive,’ he says.

  Just then there is a crash from outside, followed by a lot of shouting. Shakeel looks up. ‘I think that an act of terror has just been committed on my sister. Now I suspect there will be out-and-out war.’

  He grins. And so do I.

  JULY 25TH

  Jed has to go to court today because his mum wants to see him and his dad won’t let her – or Jed won’t let her – I’m not sure which any more. Anyway, Uncle Ian arrives dressed in a suit to take Jed to the hearing. Jed is being really manic and he manages to break Grandad’s TV remote control by playing keepy-uppies with it in the kitchen and smashing it into the sink.

  Grandad can’t get mad with him while Uncle Ian is around, but after they’ve gone, he’s in a foul mood. He refuses to take his de-stress tablets or even eat the biscuits Granny offers him. (She normally won’t let him eat snacks between meals as he’s supposed to be on a low-cholesterol diet.)

  And then Gary turns up at just the wrong time. Apparently, he called and left a message with Grandad to say he was coming, but Grandad didn’t pass it on. This means that Granny is all flustered because she hasn’t cleaned the kitchen floor and she hasn’t got anything in to offer him. (She usually makes cakes and scones and stuff for guests, but today she’s only got garibaldi biscuits.)

  Gary thinks this is really funny. ‘After all I am follicly challenged!’ he says, patting the top of his head where the hair is thinning. ‘Gary-baldy! I like it!’ He laughs. Grandad and I laugh too, but Granny looks mortified.

  Gary is sitting on the sofa in the sitting room, with a framed wedding photo of mum and dad on the mantelpiece next to him.

  It’s good to see him.

  ‘How you doing, mate?’ he says when he sees me.

  ‘Good,’ I say. I want to give him a hug, but I don’t.

  ‘Your mum thought you might be missing some of your things,’ he says, indicating a big black hold-all on the floor. ‘She gave me a list of things to pick up for you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say.

  I open the bag and inside I can see some more of my manga books and my football boots. There are also lots more clothes, some drawing pencils and a new notebook.

  ‘How is Hannah?’ asks Granny.

  ‘She’s OK,’ says Gary, glancing at me.

  ‘Just OK?’ says Grandad.

  I pull out the new notebook and get a pencil from my pocket. I start to doodle leaves which quickly turn into slippery fish. I don’t look up.

  ‘She’s doing her best, but it’s hard for her,’ says Gary.

  ‘I thought this place she’s gone to was the best?’ says Grandad.

  ‘It takes time,’ says Granny. ‘Remember last time.’

  The slippery fish turn into birds with sharp, pecking beaks.

  ‘I remember it only too well,’ Grandad snaps. ‘I just can’t believe we’re here all over again.’

  ‘I think that it’s harder second time round,’ says Gary. ‘That’s what the doctors say. But I’m sure she’ll beat it.’

  ‘With all due respect, Gareth –’ I’m sure Grandad mispronounces his name on purpose – ‘you weren’t here the first time. We were the ones who’d just lost our son and then had to pick up the pieces when she couldn’t cope.’

  ‘I imagine that was very hard for you,’ says Gary. I look up again. He seems uncomfortable, but he’s obviously trying his best to be polite. I want to tell him that Grandad can be like this to everyone.

  ‘It wasn’t as if she was the only person who lost someone she loved,’ says Grandad.

  The birds turn into aeroplanes with feathers on their wings.

  ‘I don’t think it’s something she’s done deliberately,’ says Gary.

  ‘I mean, aren’t there just some drugs they can give her?’ asks Grandad.

  ‘I don’t think it’s quite like that, Barry,’ says Granny softly. ‘More tea, Gary?’ she asks. I realise that their names rhyme and I doodle ‘Gary’ and ‘Barry’ in different fonts in the corner of the page, next to the aeroplanes.

  Then I realise Gary is looking at me.

  ‘Glad to see you’re still drawing.’

  I look up and half smile.

  ‘Done any good comic strips?’

  ‘Not really,’ I say. ‘Just doodles.’

  ‘You should keep going with those strips. You’re really good,’ he says. I feel myself blushing. ‘Blythe misses the cartoons you do of her.’

  ‘How is she?’ I ask.

  ‘Having a great time with her mum,’ he says.

  ‘Do you miss her?’

  ‘Like mad.’ He smiles at me and I smile back. But then I become conscious of my grandparents watching. Do I have to choose – my dad or Gary?

  It’s only when it’s time to go and Gary goes to get his coat that I ask him what I really want to know. ‘Will she call, Gary?’

  ‘She wants to,’ he replies. ‘But she doesn’t seem to be able to.’

  ‘Aren’t there any phones there?’ I say, knowing this isn’t really what he means.

  ‘You know how she is, Ben,’ says Gary, putting a hand on my shoulder in a way that feels nice, but also makes me want to cry. ‘She doesn’t want to upset you, and she doesn’t think she can speak to you without losing it. And she’s never good with phones at the best of times. It’s all part of her being ill. But she misses you like mad. You’re the reason she wants to get better. Nothing else – not me, not anyone – just you.’

  ‘Then why doesn’t she?’ I say, trying not to sound like Grandad.

  ‘She’s doing her best. We have to hang on in there for her. Here, she asked me to give you this,’ he says, handing me another card.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, but I can’t even look at it. It makes me think of her in a straightjacket, struggling to hold a pen in her mouth.

  I want to ask more questions, but then Granny comes back and he lets go of my shoulder and I have to turn away so that no one can see that I’m starting to cry. I don’t wave him off either – I just go up to my room.

  I don’t look at the card for ages. When I do, I see it has a picture of the village where we live on it. It must have been taken, like, twenty years ago because the people standing on the bridge are wearing really old-fashioned clothes, but otherwise it looks just the same. On the back of the card, still in Gary’s handwriting, it says, Home is where the heart is, so I’m always with you in my heart.

  Perhaps Priti is right about the cards after all.

  After Gary leaves, I start to draw a few frames of a new comic strip. It has me and Priti and Jed as undercover agents, hunting down terrorists and suicide bombers. Jed is the maverick (one of Priti’s spelling bee words), Priti is the mouthy one and I’m the brains b
ehind the operation. Shakeel is the baddie – of course – and Zara is the girl who gets rescued. I’ve not decided yet if Ameenah is on our side or not.

  Drawing helps to take my mind off the depressing sight of what looked like the entire contents of my wardrobe in the hold-all. One frame shows me karate-kicking down a door. Caption: Kerpow!

  It doesn’t look much like me, but for some reason it makes me feel better.

  I haven’t decided what to call the strip yet, but I guess I’ll think of something.

  JULY 30TH

  This morning, Jed goes off with Granny to another one of their appointments, and Priti comes over with a shoebox she’s nicked from her mum’s cupboard and loads of other bits and pieces, like scissors and glue and paper and coloured pens and these plastic jewels that you can stick on things.

  ‘We’re going to make the memory box,’ she says and I know it’s no use trying to talk her out of it.

  First we have to wrap the box in hideous wrapping paper. It’s pink and gold and covered in bunnies, and I’m sure my dad would have hated it, but when I say this to Priti, she says that we don’t have time for me to doodle people with big eyes all over it, so we go with the bunny paper. Then Priti insists we stick the plastic jewels on it which makes it look even worse. I think how, if my dad was around, me and him would have had a laugh about it and that makes me smile.

  Then Priti hands me a piece of paper and a pen and gets one for herself. ‘Now we have to write down our memories.’

  ‘But you didn’t even know him!’ I say.

  ‘You keep saying that, but I’ve been looking at his picture to work out what sort of person he was. You always can – it’s in the eyebrows.’

  ‘So what do my dad’s eyebrows say?’ I ask. I imagine a bushy pair of talking eyebrows.

  ‘They say he was a nice bloke, but one of those people who tends to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

  ‘You can’t tell that from his eyebrows!’ I scoff.

  ‘Yes, you can.’

  ‘How do you know he was always in the wrong place at the wrong time?’

  ‘I didn’t say always, did I? You’ve got to admit that September 11th 2001 definitely wasn’t the day to be at the World Trade Center, was it?’

  I can’t really disagree with that, so I don’t try.

  ‘What’s your memory then?’ she asks.

  ‘I’m not sure yet,’ I say.

  ‘Well, you’d better get thinking!’

  She insists we both sit in silence and write something. So I do.

  Under this bit I draw a picture of a TV screen with a little boy and his dad on it.

  And under that, I draw a little picture of up and down escalators, with him going down one escalator while I go up the other, so we just miss each other.

  ‘Did you realise your initials spell BABE?!’ is the first thing Priti says when she’s read it.

  ‘My mum thought it’d be sweet.’ I feel myself redden.

  ‘Why do parents lumber us with these social handicaps?’ Priti muses, sounding more like her mum than ever. ‘And as for Barry!’

  ‘It’s my grandad’s name,’ I say.

  ‘That’s OK I suppose. Your grandad is cool!’

  I wonder what Grandad would think about this.

  Then Priti reads out what she wrote:

  After we read out our memories, we put them in the box. Then Priti puts in Jed’s memory that she wrote down the other day and I write down what Granny said about my dad helping her to put the shopping away and liking cricket and we put that in too.

  ‘What do we do now?’ I ask.

  ‘We could ask your grandad,’ says Priti.

  ‘I don’t think he likes stuff like this. Granny says he doesn’t like talking about Dad.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ says Priti. ‘I can get anyone talking.’

  So we go downstairs. Grandad is watching some programme about people selling antiques from their attic and doesn’t seem too pleased about being interrupted.

  ‘What do you two want?’ he asks, not glancing up from the TV. The remote control is still broken and he complains all the time about having to get up to change the channel.

  ‘Ben’s making a memory box about his dad,’ says Priti.

  ‘Your granny will be better at helping you with that sort of thing than me,’ says Grandad.

  ‘We just need to ask you a few questions,’ says Priti. I think she’s trying to sound like one of those polite people off the telly, or like a police officer. (That’s what they always say, isn’t it? ‘We just need you to come down to the station to answer a few questions.’) And she gets her reporter’s notebook out again, all official, and she even licks the end of her pencil.

  ‘What was the naughtiest thing Ben’s dad ever did?’ she asks even though Grandad hasn’t agreed to help yet.

  ‘What is this memory box anyway?’ asks Grandad, looking at Priti and me. ‘What’s it for?’

  ‘We’ll show you it when it’s done,’ says Priti. ‘Now what was the naughtiest thing?’

  Grandad looks at her standing there with her pencil poised. Then he leans forward and turns the TV to mute. He sighs then says, ‘There was this one time I bought a new stereo. Andrew was about three at the time and for some reason he got a big bag of flour and poured it all over the stereo.’

  Priti giggles and Grandad smiles.

  ‘Did it work after that?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes, but it was a bit crackly and I was finding white powder in the speakers for ages afterwards. I only threw it out a couple of years ago and I swear there was still flour in there.’ He laughs and grins at me and I wonder if he got as grumpy with my dad about the stereo as he did with Jed about the remote control.

  ‘That’s great!’ says Priti, who is noting things down in her best handwriting. I don’t have anything to hold, so I just stand there. ‘What was the stupidest thing he ever did?’

  ‘Don’t we want to find out nice stuff?’ I ask.

  Priti looks at me as if to say, You just don’t get it, do you? Which maybe I don’t because I still don’t really know why we’re doing this. So I shut up and look at Grandad for his answer.

  ‘He sawed a leg off his brother’s bed once,’ says Grandad. ‘And one time he did a poo in the bath because Ian bet him he wouldn’t.’

  Priti giggles again and I find myself smiling.

  ‘Jed’s in that bed now,’ says Grandad. ‘You can still see where I had to nail the leg back together again!’ Grandad laughs and he doesn’t seem mad about it at all – I guess he didn’t mind kids breaking things so much in the old days. ‘Oh, and he stuck a pea up his nose once,’ he goes on. ‘Your gran will tell you it was my fault because I’d been sticking candy cigarettes up my nostrils and pretending to be a warthog. Only they don’t call them candy cigarettes any more, do they?’ he says, breaking off – probably because me and Priti were looking confused. ‘Nowadays they call them candy sticks or something politically correct like that, just in case kids get muddled up and start eating Malborough Lights, or some other daft nanny state nonsense!’ He raises his eyebrows and hmmphs quietly. ‘Anyway, I’m sticking these white candy sticks up my nostrils and next minute your dad’s crying his eyes out with this massive bulge on the bridge of his nose and it turns out he’s stuck a pea up there.’ He glances at the picture of Dad in pride of place on the mantelpiece and smiles. ‘I had to take him to casualty. Crying all the way, he was. I felt awful.’

  ‘What did they do?’ asks Priti.

  ‘They made me blow it out.’

  ‘How did you do that then?’

  ‘A magic kiss, I think they called it. You put your finger over one nostril then blow in the mouth. Pea came flying out and hit me on the nose.’

  ‘Cool!’ says Priti.

  Grandad glances at me. ‘Your dad thought so too. Kept asking me to do magic kisses all the time after that! He looked the spitting image of you back then.’ He looks a bit sad and glances back at the fram
ed picture of my dad. Then he leans forward and flicks the sound back on the TV.

  ‘Have you got anything of his that we can put in the box?’ Priti asks.

  ‘Your granny has all of that stuff,’ he says, but it’s like he’s not really listening any more.

  ‘But you must have something you can give us.’

  The old couple on the TV are now at the auction watching people bid for their possessions, hoping to make a fortune from a snub-nosed pottery bunny and a few toby jugs. ‘I think there’s still a jar of olives in the cupboard,’ Grandad says, a bit distracted. ‘Your gran and I won’t eat them. Only Andrew liked them. You can have those.’

  ‘Thanks, Ben’s grandad,’ says Priti.

  It doesn’t seem very likely to me that Granny would have kept an ancient jar of olives in the cupboard. She’s always saying how she doesn’t like clutter. But it turns out that Grandad is right. There they are – in the back of the cupboard with a Best Before End Feb 2003 stamp on them.

  ‘Best not eat them, I suppose,’ says Priti. ‘They’ve probably grown legs.’

  We put the olives in the box and write down the things Grandad said and I put in the binoculars because I remember they used to be Dad’s. Then Granny and Jed come back, so we have to hide the box under my bed.

  Later on, after Priti has left and when Jed is asleep, I also write out my list of things I want to know about my dad and put it in, along with some of the other stuff I found out about 9/11. Then I put the box carefully back under my bed where no one can find it. I don’t want Jed catching sight of the bunny paper and those jewels.

  JULY 31ST

  ‘I know what it is with you,’ Priti says to Jed.

  ‘What is it with me then?’ asks Jed. We’ve been keeping lookout for Zara in the park all morning, hanging out inside one of the great big concrete pipes that gives us a view of the woods from one end and the alleyway by Priti’s house from the other. We’re all lying on our backs and me and Jed have our feet on the top of the pipe so the blood is rushing straight to our heads.