If You Were Me

by Sam Hepburn

  I slipped into the bathroom. The boy was kneeling on the floor, dropping tools into a bag. He looked dazed and troubled and he had a cut on the side of his head. I could see where the blood had soaked into his hair. Dan. That’s what his father had called him. I wanted to say his name and make him look at me. I didn’t dare. Instead I touched his sleeve. He pulled back, startled, as if his thoughts had been far away.

  ‘Please. Don’t tell anyone about the gun,’ I whispered.

  Still avoiding my eyes, he zipped up the tools.

  ‘Swear to me you won’t say anything.’

  He gave me the tiniest nod and walked away. The front door slammed behind him.

  The flat felt very empty when he’d gone.

  The rest of the day crawled slowly. I tried to fill time by reading the book I’d borrowed from the library. It was Oliver Twist, one of my father’s favourites. But the story was sad, about an orphan boy lost in London, and my thoughts kept slipping back to Behrouz and all the things I’d say to him when he got home. When it was time for our evening meal, I ate only a small piece of naan dipped in yoghurt and stood at the window watching for Behrouz while my mother and Mina picked at the dish of banjaan. Night was falling, studding the view from our flat with glimmering lights as if someone had spilt a basket of jewels across a dark carpet. I watched the lights gleam and twinkle until they merged into a shimmering blur. I was still there long after Behrouz’s food had gone cold and my mother and sister had gone to bed.

  At midnight, when Behrouz still hadn’t come home, I threw my mother’s shawl around my shoulders, took my purse from the drawer and crept out of the flat. The lights on our landing were broken and the yellow glow from the street lamps threw long jagged shapes down the stairwell that seemed to follow my footsteps. I wanted to turn and run back inside but I shut my ears to the voices in the shadows and hurried across the car park to the all-night garage on the corner. There was a phone booth on the forecourt that I used when I had to call the doctor about my mother or speak to Mrs Garcia from the refugee centre. I took out the piece of paper and dialled Behrouz’s new number. It went straight to his voicemail. I hung up and searched in my purse for the card for the minicab company where he worked. I held it to the light and dialled again. A woman answered.

  ‘Khan’s Cars. How may I help you?’ She had a deep, throaty voice and an accent I didn’t recognize.

  ‘My name is Aliya Sahar . . . please, may I speak to Behrouz?’

  ‘No private calls on this line . . .’

  My words tumbled out. ‘Please, I am his sister. He hasn’t come home and he doesn’t answer his mobile. I need to know if he stayed to work a night shift.’

  ‘I’ve just come on, but I’ll check for you.’ Her voice was kinder now and it got fainter as she swung away from the speaker.

  ‘Hey, Liam, is Baz on lates tonight?’

  I clamped my hand over my other ear, straining to hear the answer.

  A man’s voice said, ‘Nah, he came in early, dumped his car and buggered off.’

  ‘Was he sick?’

  ‘Don’t think so. I reckon he’s got himself a bird.’

  I heard other men laugh. The woman snapped something I couldn’t make out and came back to the speaker. ‘Sorry, he didn’t work today.’

  ‘Oh . . .’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  I hung up. But I wasn’t all right. Not at all. Why would Behrouz take the day off when we needed all the money he could earn? Where had he gone? Where was he now? The flickers of doubt were taking on life, turning into a monster in my mind that was feeding on the thought of the gun beneath my sheets. I knew what I had to do.

  I crossed the road at breakneck speed. A taxi blasted me with its horn. I hurried across the car park, keeping my head down. Doors slammed, an engine revved and a pair of headlights snapped on, blinding me as a van shot out between the cars, swerved towards the exit and screeched into the traffic. I ran upstairs and let myself into the flat. Moving quietly so as not to wake Mina, I took the grocery bag from under my mattress and ran back to the landing. There were people on the stairs. I pressed my back against the wall and waited until their voices and footsteps had gone before I dared to run downstairs. I crouched behind the skips and made my way around the edge of the car park, darting from one patch of shadow to the next until I reached the muddy alley that led down to the canal. I’d taken Mina there once to see the ducks and the painted boats but the burnt-out warehouses by the water had made her cry. I think they reminded her of the bomb-blasted buildings in Kabul that people said were haunted by djinns. The warehouses looked even eerier by moonlight. Tattered posters flapped and whispered from the blackened walls, and behind the broken windows there was nothing but hollow darkness. My feet slithered on the muddy path, I lost my balance and fell, smashing my knee on a sharp stone. I cried out, I couldn’t help it. Shadowy figures ran from beneath the bridge, where a small fire flickered on the path. I tried to limp away, frightened they would hurt me. When I turned around, they had slipped into one of the darkened doorways.

  Something rustled the rubbish along the path. I jumped back. A fox bounded out, shaking a rat in its jaws. Its eyes glinted at me for a second before it loped away. I was hobbling and sliding but I forced myself to keep searching until I found what I was looking for: an old wooden boat called the Margaretta. The first time I saw it, I’d felt sad that a boat with such a pretty name had been left to rot. Now I was glad it had been abandoned. I pulled on the rope, bumping the slimy hull against the bank. With a quick glance along the path to make sure no one was watching, I pushed the bag through a tear in the tarpaulin. The heavy thump of metal on wood echoed along the water. I heard a footstep. I spun round. An old man with long white hair and a dirty white beard staggered out of the darkness with a bottle in his hand. The smell of him made me choke. He swayed towards me, holding out his arms and making a gurgling sound with his mouth. I pushed him away and I didn’t stop running until I was back in our flat. Even then I didn’t feel safe.

  DAN

  What a nightmare, knowing what I knew and having to trail round after Dad all day when all I wanted to do was yell at him for being a liar. Thankfully we were so busy we didn’t stop for lunch, just grabbed a sandwich in the van, and the rest of the time I managed to avoid talking to him by putting on a sulk whenever he opened his mouth. By the time we got home I thought I was going explode with the strain so I decided to ring round a few mates and see if anyone wanted to meet up. I reached in my jeans pocket – no mobile. I couldn’t believe it, not after the day I’d had. I dug through all my other pockets, rang the number from the house phone, ran outside to check Dad’s van. Nothing. I must have left it at one of the jobs. I’d just have to think which one. When I got back inside, Mum was in the kitchen dishing up shepherd’s pie.

  ‘I knew you’d be hungry, so I’ve done your favourite.’

  Hungry? Was she kidding? After stumbling across Dad’s little sideline I never wanted to eat again.

  She hollered up the stairs, ‘Tea’s ready, Ron!’

  Dad came running down, rubbing his hands like a bad actor in a sitcom. ‘Looks great, love. I’m starving.’ He sat down and attacked the mound of food on his plate as if he didn’t have a care in the world. ‘I was just checking out some holiday deals in Turkey. What do you think, Dan? We thought it’d make a nice change from Spain.’

  I stared at the table, not trusting myself to speak. How could he sit there shovelling down mounds of mashed potato, helping himself to gravy and going on about holidays? How were you thinking of paying for it, Dad? With your share of the drug money, or by selling off a few more stolen washing machines?

  Mum frowned at me. ‘What’s the matter, love? Don’t you fancy Turkey?’

  I shrugged. Dad rolled his eyes. ‘Ignore him, he’s been in a strop all afternoon. I’ve hardly had a word out of him.’

  I played up the sulk, hunched my shoulders and picked at my food
, trying to remember where I’d left my phone, only my brain was so churned up I couldn’t think straight.

  Mum kept looking at me, wondering why I wasn’t eating, and her eagle eyes homed in on the cut on my head. ‘What’s this?’ She pushed back my hair and inspected my scalp.

  I’d done my best to clean off the blood but I should have known she’d see it. I scowled and shook her hand away. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘That looks nasty. How did you do it?’

  ‘Stop fussing, Mum.’ I didn’t want to think about hitting my head or what had been hidden behind the falling junk in the Meadowview basement. But even as I mumbled something about bashing myself on a bathroom cabinet it dawned on me in a horrible rush of panic exactly where I’d last used my phone. It was at Meadowview, when Dad called to tell me to hurry up with the spare pipe. I’d been in the loading bay and I put it down so I could shove the drugs and the washing powder back in the washing machine. I must have forgotten to pick it up. Picturing Dad or Jez walking in there and finding it made me feel sick. That couldn’t happen. I’d sworn to myself I’d never set foot in that place ever again and now, just when I thought my life couldn’t get any crappier, I’d have to go back there to get my phone.

  But I wasn’t going to risk doing it in daylight. After tea I took my skateboard down the park till it got dark, then I hung around in my room, playing half-hearted games on the PlayStation, waiting for Mum and Dad to go to bed before I nicked Jez’s keys out of Dad’s jacket, snuck out of the house and biked it over to Meadowview.

  The car park was even creepier at night. It looked deserted but you could feel there were people around, hiding in the shadows, watching from the darkened windows. I walked fast, trying to make out I was a kid from one of the flats, coming home late. I crept down to the basement and as I let myself in something rustled the litter in the stairwell. I swung round, peering into the darkness. What if I’d been followed? What if Dad turned up when I was in the loading bay? It was weird. There was this big black hole in my mind sucking in everything I thought I knew about him and twisting it into something dark and distorted.

  At least I’d brought a proper torch with me this time so I wouldn’t break my neck tripping over. I fumbled my way across the rubble, beginning to wonder if the mess was just a way to keep people out.

  Shifting all the scaffolding and oil drums again took ages, because I was trying to keep the noise down, and I was sweating hard by the time I stepped into the loading bay. Get in. Grab the phone. Get out. That was the plan.

  But where was it? I flashed the torch around, peering between the boxes, feeling inside the washing machines, going crazy. Come on, Dan. Start by the door. Do it methodically. I was on my knees, sweeping the torch around, inching backwards, when I heard a noise. A wheezy engine turning over, tyres crunching tarmac, and voices. Hushed. Urgent. It sounded like someone was moving the JCB I’d seen outside. My skin turned icy. I flipped off the torch and squeezed behind the pile of appliances, holding myself against the wall of boxes. A pinprick of light winked red in the darkness. My phone. Just out of reach. Footsteps were coming nearer. I willed them to go away. Fear exploded through my body as I heard the jangle of keys and the electric hum of the rolling door sliding up. Through a gap between the boxes I saw a red van back in and made out something that looked like ‘—tal Meats Ltd’ written down the side. Two men jumped out. Outlined in the glare of the headlights, the driver was tall, thin and stooping, wearing a woolly hat. He used a key to lower the door and as he turned round I caught a glimpse of a face I wouldn’t forget in a hurry. Thick eyebrows, sunken cheeks, hooded eyes and skin like badly mixed cement. The other man flung open the back doors of the van and the two of them sat on the tailgate, lighting cigarettes, checking their phones. Waiting. For what? My muscles burnt with the strain of keeping still. The slightest twitch would crackle the plastic. Give me away. I bit down on my lips to stop my teeth chattering and glanced at my phone, poking out from under one of the boxes. If it rang, I’d be dead.

  I heard something outside. Muffled cries, scuffling, an angry shout, then footsteps coming across the car park, getting louder. Cement Face switched off the headlights. Dropping his cigarette in a shower of sparks, he raised the rolling door. Three more people ducked under it, and as he turned the key to lower it again I fought a crazy urge to dash out, wriggle under the slowly narrowing gap and make a run for it. I knew I’d never make it.

  The headlights flicked back on. One of the new arrivals, a big fair-haired bloke, was dragging a hunched-up woman who had a black shawl over her head. The other man, a weaselly-looking creep, had a gun wedged into her back. When he snatched off the shawl, I nearly gasped out loud. It wasn’t a woman. It was a young dark-haired guy, blinking and shaking his head. Despite the blood and the bruises, I recognized him. He was the man I’d seen that morning on the stairs. He was trying to speak, hissing bubbles of blood through broken teeth. ‘Please . . . don’t hurt my family, they don’t know anything . . . please . . . please don’t hurt them.’

  ‘Shut up.’ Cement Face had a voice that made my hopes sink for the bloke they’d just dragged in. He held his hand out to the weasel with the gun. ‘You get his phone?’ Weasel tossed him a mobile.

  They pushed the young guy towards the back of the van. As he stumbled forward his head shot round in a last desperate hope there’d be someone there to save him. There wasn’t. There was just me, cowering in the dark, nearly wetting myself. Weasel flipped the gun, caught it by the barrel and thwacked him hard on the side of the head. With a dull crack of metal on bone the man slumped forward. They caught him as he fell and threw him inside.

  ‘What you going do with him, boss?’

  Cement Face gave a short, grating laugh. ‘I’m going to make him famous.’

  He slammed the doors. As he got in the driver’s seat he jerked his head at the pile of appliances. ‘Get that stuff out of here. Before it all kicks off.’

  Weasel slipped his gun in the back of his trousers and got out his phone. ‘No worries. I’ll get Jez and Ron on to it.’

  Jez and Ron. The names slammed round my head. Jez Deakin and Ron Abbott.

  The rolling doors hummed shut and after couple of minutes I heard the JCB rumble back into place outside. They’d gone. I crept from behind the appliances, grabbed my phone and stumbled back to the basement, the freeze-frame of that bloodied face seared into my brain. I wanted to call the cops but how could I when my own dad was involved? Somehow I managed to lock the padlocks and sling a few oil drums across the door before I slid to the ground and lay there, hunched over on the cold concrete, my thoughts flipping back to the night of my fifth birthday. We’re in the crummy flat we had back then. I can hear Mum on the phone. She’s crying. That makes me angry. I’m the one who’s upset. I’m the one whose birthday Dad has missed. I run into the kitchen. She turns round, her face is red and blotchy and she squats down, opening her arms to me, smothering me in kisses. When she speaks her voice is jumpy, as if she’s struggling to breathe, and she says, ‘I swear to you, Danny, your Dad’s never going miss your birthday again. Not ever. And when he comes home, we’ll have a special day out to make up for it. Just the three of us.’ Then she gets down the calendar and we count the days till he’ll be back. Every single one of them, and I’m feeling proud because it’s the first time I’ve ever counted to one hundred and twenty-two. That’s what he’s got left of the nine-month sentence he’s serving for receiving stolen goods. They’d gone easy on him because it was a first offence, but it seems like a lifetime to us, and when Mum hugs me again, her tears wet my cheek.

  Only they weren’t Mum’s tears I could feel – they were mine, and I wasn’t sitting at the table holding a chunk of birthday cake and looking at a calendar. I was lying in a freezing basement staring into blackness and wondering what the hell Dad had got himself mixed up in. He’d be setting off, any minute, him and Jez. I had to get the keys back before he discovered they were missing. I picked myself up and started to run. />
  ALIYA

  They came while we were sleeping. An angry swarm of policemen, smashing the door down with a bright-orange battering ram, pointing their guns at us and ordering us to ‘Freeze!’ Black boots, black gloves, black helmets and angry eyes staring through plastic visors. My mother didn’t make a sound. She just stood in the middle of her bedroom, wrapped in her long white shawl, looking more like a ghost than ever. A video camera swung past my face. Someone jerked my hands up my back and clamped my wrists with tight metal cuffs. They were doing the same to my mother, leading her to the door. Mina ran to me and clung to my legs. I couldn’t reach her, I couldn’t move my hands. I shouted at the men in black, ‘What do you want? What do you want? Where are you taking my mother?’

  They acted as if I was invisible, kicking open doors, pulling food from our cupboards, tipping out the rubbish pail from under the sink. There were dogs with them, straining on leashes, scrabbling down the hall, sniffing and whining at the floorboards in the bathroom. The relief of knowing the gun wasn’t there was swallowed by a terrible certainty. They would never send this many dogs and this many people to look for one small gun. They were searching for something else. I told myself over and over it was all a mistake and everything would be all right once they’d spoken to Behrouz. So why was the dark coldness squeezing my throat so tightly that I couldn’t even scream when they prised Mina’s arms from my legs and carried her away?

  One of the figures in black was a woman. She threw a blanket around my shoulders, dropped my sandals at my feet and hustled me downstairs, fingers tight on my arm. My feet slapped on the damp concrete. The blanket smelt bad and I felt ashamed to be outside in my nightclothes. She wouldn’t answer my questions. I felt her hand pressing on my head as she pushed me into a waiting police car. The car roared away. I looked back, trying to see what they’d done with Mina. I told myself this was England. That we’d come here to be safe, to get away from the terror, and that nothing bad could happen to us here.