If You Were Me

by Sam Hepburn

  It was just gone quarter to midnight when I finally leant out to pull them on to the balcony. Mina’s thin body was rigid with terror. I prised her hands from his neck, murmuring over and over that she was safe, but she wouldn’t open her eyes and she wouldn’t speak. Without a word, Behrouz turned back to fetch my mother.

  Although her body was wasted by sadness, she was far too tall for him to carry, so she went ahead of him, moving like a pale, fluttery ghost in her white salwar-kameez. Suddenly her left hand was groping for the rope, snatching air. Behrouz lurched forward. I could hear him murmuring to her, gentle but urgent. Almost immediately she righted herself, searching for the beam with her flailing foot. Was the numbness helping her? Blotting out the fear of falling, as well as the pain of living? My throat was tight with tears when I finally reached for her spindly wrists and dragged her over the parapet. No time for relief. Behrouz was telling me to lift Mina on to his back and help my mother down the sloping roof on the other side. Our feet clanged against the ridges of the corrugated iron. The noise rang out, loud as a cymbal. Somebody shouted. I turned. A shadowy figure was leaning from our window. A torch beam slashed the darkness, lighting up the rope. I ran to the edge of the roof and toppled to a stop, horrified by the dark gap running between the buildings. Behrouz’s pounding feet were vibrating the metal behind me, gaining speed. I heard him shout, ‘Jump!’

  I grabbed Mor by the hand, her frightened fingers crushing mine as I pulled her backwards to take a run. Behrouz was up and over, crashing on to the other side, staggering forward. Mina slipped sideways across his shoulders, her skinny legs dangling loose as he stumbled on to his knees. He hitched her up and yelled again, ‘Jump!’

  Still hand in hand, Mor and I skittered down the roof and pushed off with our toes. Our feet rose in the air, skimming emptiness. A second of uncertainty. Then we landed on the other side in a rolling tumble, swaying, tottering, picking ourselves up. Pain shot through my ankle. Mor was limping. Scared we’d lose sight of Behrouz, I dragged her under lines of dangling washing, clambering over bins and buckets and stumbling down a crumbling concrete staircase. A glare of headlights. A jeep roared towards us, the door flew open before it had even juddered to a halt. I wrenched Mor around and hobbled blindly the other way. Behrouz was pushing me back. ‘It’s OK, it’s OK, it’s Captain Merrick.’

  A soldier leapt out, big and bulky in his helmet and body armour. A voice burst from his radio. He tore Mina from Behrouz’s arms, threw her into the back and flung me and my mother in after her. ‘They’re coming!’ he hissed. ‘Get your heads down and keep them down.’

  He jumped into the driver’s seat. Behrouz slid in beside him and rammed the door shut. We jolted forward, thrown off balance by the heavy tyres smashing through the rubbish in the alley. The smell of sweat and diesel burnt my throat. I pressed Mina on to the seat, feeling the throb of her sobs and the shudder of the chassis as we hit a pothole. Something struck the rear windscreen, cracking the glass. My mother closed her eyes, making soundless movements with her lips. Choking on panic, I jerked my head up. Merrick was yelling into his radio, his head swivelling backwards and forwards between the inside and outside mirrors. We skidded around a bend. As we swung back the other way Mina vomited, spurts of yellow shooting from her mouth, sticking to her hair and slopping across the seat. I shushed her sobs, cringing lower each time a horn beeped or a lorry lumbered past. The jeep accelerated, swerving through the narrow backstreets, cutting across lanes of speeding cars and screeching through junctions, until the lights of the city faded and the mountains loomed ahead, blacker than the night. We hit a winding track that bumped and rattled us to a halt in a boulder-strewn crevice hidden between two overhanging rocks.

  Captain Merrick switched off the engine. We cowered in the darkness, suspended in silence, waiting for the roar of a Talib truck to shatter our lives. Mina lay stiff in my arms barely breathing. I held her tight, counting each second. Certain it would be our last.

  A crackle from Captain Merrick’s radio shot a tremble of panic through Mina’s body. A voice whooped through the static. He snapped a reply, slapped Behrouz on the back and restarted the engine. My mother cried softly as he spun the wheel, bouncing the jeep’s headlights over the rocks and heading down the mountain in a rattle of stones.

  That’s when it hit me. We could never go home. I would never sit another exam at my school and from now on Salma would always be top of our class. I leant forward and dropped my forehead on my brother’s shoulder. ‘Where can we go, Behrouz, where can we hide?’

  I dreaded that he’d say Peshawar, the crowded refugee camp across the border in Pakistan. I didn’t want to live in Peshawar. I didn’t want to die in Kabul. He twisted around and grinned at me. ‘England,’ he said.

  ‘We can’t. We don’t have visas.’

  Captain Merrick shouted over his shoulder. ‘Colonel Clarke’s sorting all that. The lads have been pushing for Baz to get asylum and after tonight . . . well, the colonel says he can swing it. There’s a plane leaving the base in a couple of hours.’

  I threw my arms around Behrouz’s neck, almost afraid that if I let him go, this chance of safety would be snatched away. He pulled my head close and whispered, ‘It’s OK, sis, it’s going to be OK.’

  I began to sob into his sweat-soaked shirt, loud, jerky tears that I couldn’t stop. I knew Colonel Clarke was something important in the British government now and if he wanted something to happen, then it would. We were leaving this harsh, stony land full of fear and fighting and going to England. My mother and sister would laugh again, Behrouz would finish his engineering degree, I would go to school with girls who had short skirts and swishy hair and boys who put rings through their eyebrows, and we’d get to see the sights of London and the palace of the queen. Best of all, we’d be leaving the terror behind and starting a whole new life, in a place where we’d be safe. But as we skidded down the narrow track the thought of living among strangers, so far from everything I had ever known or loved, stabbed my heart with sadness. I lifted my head and glanced back to snatch a last glimpse of my mountains. There was nothing there but a wall of black.

  DAN

  LONDON, England. Three Weeks Later

  ‘Get a move on, Danny. I’m going out to load up.’ I chucked my toast in the bin and followed Dad outside. I’d had plans for the first day of the holidays and helping him mend washing machines and unblock sinks wasn’t one of them. I slumped into the van and slammed the door. He jumped in beside me and pulled out into the traffic.

  ‘I’m not having you sulking all day. You know I can’t manage all Jez’s jobs as well as my own, not without another pair of hands.’

  I glowered out the window. ‘Why’re you letting him skive off, then?’

  ‘He’s not skiving. He was in the pub last night and picked an argument with the wrong bloke. Ended up in A and E.’

  ‘What bloke?’

  ‘Never you mind.’ He flicked me a look and caught me grinning. ‘It’s not funny, Dan. One of these days that temper of his is going land us all in trouble.’ He ran his hand over his bristly head. ‘Don’t tell your mother, all right? She thinks he fell off a ladder.’

  ‘You lied to Mum?’

  ‘You know what she’s like.’

  Too right. Mum had a real downer on Jez and always laughed when Dad claimed it was taking him on that had saved the business. Jez wasn’t much of a plumber, that’s for sure, but he was great at bringing in the work, doing the accounts and keeping the customers happy, specially the ones who went for blond hair, tight T-shirts and bulging muscles.

  Dad checked his list. ‘First job’s at Meadowview. We’ll have to pick up Jez’s keys on the way.’

  That was all I needed. Meadowview was one of the old tower blocks by the canal. One minute the council was going to do them up, stick a gym in the basement and sell them off to rich boys who worked in the city, the next they were going to pull them down. Meanwhile they were using the flats as emergency housing an
d somehow Jez had wangled the contract to keep the rotting pipework patched up. It was a lot of work but they’d divided the blocks up between them; Dad looked after Sunnyhill and Woodside and left Meadowview pretty much to Jez, which was fair enough, seeing as Meadowview was even more of a dump than the others. It stank for a start, and there were rumours of all sorts going on behind those boarded-up doors. I hated going in there, specially when I could have been earning good money unlocking phones for Bernie Watts. Plus, I didn’t want anyone I knew catching me in these stupid overalls. The in-your-face ‘Abbott & Co’ logo was one of Jez’s bright ideas. He called it ‘branding’. I called it looking like a prat.

  Dad pulled up outside Jez’s house and stomped through the rain to get the keys off Jez’s girlfriend, Donna. She came to the door looking pretty upset, though not upset enough to let Dad inside in his work boots. Once she’d fetched the keys, she kept him on the doorstep talking. Or rather she talked and Dad stood there with his arms folded, looking shifty.

  ‘How’s he doing?’ I said, when he got back in the van.

  ‘He’ll live.’

  I could tell from the way he was glaring at the road and gripping the wheel that there was something going on, but he wasn’t about to tell me what it was. He turned the radio on full blast and didn’t say another word till he swung into the Meadowview car park. He braked hard to avoid a gang of kids who were setting fire to a tatty string of bunting draped round the play area. One of them kicked a can at the van. By the time Dad got the window down to yell at them, they’d legged it down the alley. ‘Little buggers,’ he muttered.

  He parked round the back, on the stretch of car park overlooking the canal. Two blokes in parkas peeled themselves off the wall and came slouching towards us. Dad gave them a look, like he was warning them off. They stared him out for a bit but as soon as I got out they swerved away, muttering to each other.

  ‘Who are they?’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘Dunno. Come on, eighth floor. What’s the betting the lift isn’t working?’

  I looked up at the twenty storeys of mouldering concrete, peeling paintwork and broken windows. Some mate of Jez’s was supposed to take care of the general maintenance but the rusty skip and rickety old JCB he’d dumped outside the loading bay had been there for months and the smell was disgusting. The guys in parkas were still eyeballing us but they’d gone over to lean against the rolling door and murmur into their phones. Dad wasn’t bothered. As far as he was concerned, dodgy locals and stinking drains were all part of the job.

  He was right about the lifts, though. I was nearly dead by the time we’d chased up eight flights of stairs, but he didn’t even drop the tool bag before he rapped sharply on the door of flat 805. The door cracked open and a watery eye glared out at us through a haze of cigarette smoke. ‘What do you want?’

  Dad flashed one of his cards. ‘I’ve come about the leak, Mr Brody. Council sent me.’

  Brody’s eyes flicked to the logo on Dad’s overalls. ‘Where’s the other one?’

  ‘Jez? He’s off sick.’

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’

  ‘Accident. Nothing serious.’

  Brody sneered. ‘Pushed his luck once too often, did he?’

  ‘Where’s the leak, Mr Brody?’

  Brody pulled open the door. ‘It’s that lot upstairs.’ He took a suck of his soggy roll-up and pointed at the big patch of damp on the ceiling. ‘Look at that! Twice the size it was last week. And you should see what they’ve done in there.’ He jerked his head towards the bathroom. ‘Started last night. Don’t they have running water where they come from?’

  I hovered in the hall, holding my breath against the reek of fags and garbage, while Dad took a closer look at the circle of drips round the bare bulb in the bathroom. Brody edged towards me and leant close. His breath stank.

  ‘They want to stick me in a home and give my flat to a load of scroungers.’ He took a drag on his fag and started to cough. ‘I told ’em, I’m not going anywhere. Thirty-two years I’ve been living here.’

  ‘Right.’ I pulled away and stared at the mildew creeping along his filthy skirting boards. ‘Must have been a bit different when you moved in.’

  ‘It was.’ Brody picked a fleck of tobacco off his lip. ‘No dirty foreigners messing the place up.’

  I was trying to think of something to say to that when Dad came out of the bathroom.

  ‘OK, Mr Brody. Looks like it’s your mains pipe leaking. We’ll have to get to it from the flat upstairs.’ He made a quick call to the council, who said there was a family called Sahar in the flat above. Dad picked up his tools. ‘We’ll nip up and see if anybody’s in. Meantime, make sure you don’t turn on any lights.’

  Brody grunted and shuffled off down the hall, still muttering about dirty foreigners.

  I slammed the door. ‘Should have let the old git electrocute himself,’ I said.

  Dad grinned. ‘You meet all sorts in our line of work. The trick is not to let them get to you.’ He hoisted the tool bag on to his shoulder and headed down the corridor. ‘Honestly, last week I was doing a rush job for this posh woman up in Camden who said if I worked through my lunch break she’d bring me something to eat. Anyway, lunchtime comes, I’m starving and she walks in with this big fancy plate but all there is on it is a couple of tiny biscuits. So I bite into one of them and it’s a ruddy dog biscuit.’

  ‘You’re kidding? Did you spit it out?’

  ‘No. I chewed it up and swallowed it. You can’t go upsetting the customers.’

  We were halfway up the stairs, still laughing, when a young skinny guy with a kink in his nose and black curly hair flopping across his forehead came racing round the corner, crashed into Dad and leapt back, flattening himself against the wall with a look of total terror on his face. For a second he just stood there, eyeing Dad’s tool bag as if he thought we were going to pull out a couple of spanners and attack him. ‘Hey, no problem,’ I said, raising my hands and standing back to let him pass. He stared at my overalls, then at my face, his dark eyes probing mine, before he mumbled, ‘Sorry,’ and clattered off down the stairs.

  Dad rolled his eyes. ‘Like I said, you meet all sorts in this job.’

  Most of the doors on the ninth floor were boarded over. Even the ones that weren’t were splashed with graffiti. Dad tried the buzzer of flat 905. It didn’t work. Course it didn’t. This was Meadowview. He knocked hard. After a long silence we heard a croaky, ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is that Mrs Sahar?’ he said.

  ‘Who is there?’

  ‘Ron Abbott,’ Dad said. ‘Council sent me. I’m a plumber. There’s water leaking into the flat below.’

  The door opened slowly and bumped back on its chain. The woman on the other side had probably been quite pretty when she was younger. Not any more. Her face was lined, her eyelids drooped and her dark hair was stringy and streaked with grey. Dad was ready with another of his cards. She took it slowly and stood there, staring at the writing as if she’d forgotten we were there. Dad held out his mobile and said gently, ‘Here, do you want to talk to the council? They’ll vouch for me.’

  She hesitated for a minute, then unslid the chain and let the door swing open. We followed her into the living room. I frowned at Dad but he wouldn’t catch my eye. He kept this fixed smile on his face as we took in the rotten window frames, the scrappy bits of furniture and the damp plaster showing through the peeling wallpaper. The kitchen, if you could call it that, was through a doorway down one end, just a sink, a rusty cooker and a couple of units with the doors hanging off. It looked like someone had had a go at scrubbing off the worst of the dirt but they hadn’t managed to shift the mildew or get rid of the smell of must. A little girl, she must have been about three or four, was curled up on a torn vinyl couch, watching cartoons with the sound turned down, sucking her thumb. She was so quiet I didn’t notice her at first and when Dad crouched down in front of her and said hello, she looked right through him. I didn’t blame her. If I
had to live in Meadowview, I’d switch off too.

  Dad heaved himself up. ‘We’ll have to take up some of your floorboards, Mrs Sahar. Will that be all right?’ She flapped her hand as if she didn’t much care what we did and sat down beside the little girl, murmuring to her in a low breathy voice. Dad handed me a jemmy and a torch. ‘Have a look under the bath, Danny. I’ll make a start in the hall.’

  The bathroom was about as scuzzy as it gets: cracked basin, rust stains under the taps, chipped tiles lifting off the walls and one of those old-fashioned Ascot water heaters. Mum would have freaked if she’d had to give up her power shower and sparkling tiles to live in a place like this. Half the floorboards were rotten and the ones under the bath weren’t even nailed down. I lifted them out and shone the torch into the hole. The disc of light wavered along a length of green copper piping, picked out a few places where the drips had darkened the dust, and glistened on a water-spattered carrier bag, wedged under the pipe. Dad was always going on about the weird things he’d found under floorboards – money, dirty magazines, a mummified cat. I tugged the bag free, shook off some of the water, put my hand gingerly inside and fetched out a tobacco tin. I popped open the lid. Inside was a phone wrapped in cling film. The screen was chipped and it was too old to be worth anything. I slipped my hand back in the carrier and pulled out a bundle of sacking. My brain flipped slowly between shock and disbelief. Poking out of one end of the sacking was the curved black handle of a gun. Poking out of the other was the grey metal tip of the barrel. I’d never held a gun before and I felt a horrible sort of thrill as I unwrapped it and weighed it in my hand. It lay there, compact, deadly and not much bigger than my palm.