If You Were Me

by Sam Hepburn

  I waited for the anger, the hateful words, the door slamming in my face. Mrs Barnes didn’t shout or slam the door. She smiled. ‘That’s right. I went to my sister’s in Hertford. I’ve only just got back.’

  ‘Do you remember him?’

  Her eyes crinkled up. ‘As a matter of fact, I do. We had a lovely chat, all about his plans to go back to university and finish his engineering degree. I said to him, that’s what this world needs. People who can make things.’

  The boy gave me a tiny bewildered shrug. ‘Do you watch much telly, Mrs Barnes?’ he asked.

  ‘Actually mine’s broken. Your friend said if he had a spare minute, he’d come round and have a look at it for me. Wasn’t that kind?’

  ‘So you haven’t seen the news lately?’

  ‘No, dear. My sister always turns it off. I can’t say I blame her. They never report anything nice, do they?’

  ‘And you don’t read the newspapers?’

  ‘I prefer the wireless. They have some lovely music programmes on.’

  The boy held out the picture of Cement Face. ‘Mrs Barnes, have you ever seen this man?’

  The old lady slipped on her glasses and inspected the photo.

  ‘No, dear. Why do you ask?’

  It was one thing to think up a lie, another to pretend it was true. My mouth was so dry I couldn’t get the words to come out, even though I’d stood at the end of the street and practised the story over and over. But it came easily to the boy.

  ‘He got in our friend’s cab after he dropped you at the station,’ he said. ‘Then he ran off without paying. We were in the area, so we said we’d ask around and see if we could track him down.’ He even smiled his lopsided smile as he said it.

  ‘That’s terrible.’ Mrs Barnes looked shocked. ‘Was it a lot of money?’

  ‘Yeah, quite a lot, and his boss is making him pay it back out of his wages.’

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Well, thanks anyway. Sorry we troubled you.’

  ‘Don’t worry at all. To tell you the truth, it’s nice to have a bit of company. I hope you find this man. And say hello to your friend for me. What was his name again? My head’s like a sieve these days.’

  ‘Baz,’ I said quickly. ‘They call him Baz.’

  Mrs Barnes smiled and waved as I opened her creaking gate. I tugged my cap over my eyes and walked away very fast. The boy ran to catch me up. ‘Total waste of time,’ he grumbled.

  ‘No, it wasn’t. We know now that at eleven-thirty he was chatting to Mrs Barnes about university and offering to mend her television, and by two-thirty he was so scared that he ran off with Arif to get a gun.’

  I walked on, staring at the ground. I could feel the boy’s eyes on me. Finally he said, ‘What are you thinking about?’

  ‘An old pot I saw once in a book.’

  ‘What?’ he glanced up, not sure if I was serious. He saw that I was and said, ‘Go on, then. What was so special about this pot?’

  ‘There were just a few small pieces of it left, but someone had remade the whole thing by filling the spaces between them with white plaster. And when you saw where the pieces fitted, you knew it was not possible for that pot to have been any other shape.’

  The boy walked more slowly as if he was turning this over in his head. ‘So?’

  ‘It’s like the grid I have drawn. If we are clever, we can use the tiny pieces of information we have to work out the whole of what happened to Behrouz.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He seemed unnerved. ‘Or maybe just enough of it to get him off. Come on. Let’s go to the station. Maybe he passed Cement Face’s work on the way there.’

  ‘All right.’

  He tapped and stretched the map on his phone. ‘It’s about a half-hour walk.’

  The sky was darkening, purple-edged clouds closing in as the rain grew heavier. We plodded through puddles, getting sprayed by passing cars and searching every side road for the wall in the photos. By the time we got to the station I was so wet I was sure I would never feel dry again.

  ‘I’m starving,’ the boy said. ‘Wait here. I’ll get us something to eat.’ He slipped into the crowd, squeezing his way to a little kiosk, while I took one of the free newspapers from the crate by the ticket office. I held the paper in my hands, too scared to look at it in case I read bad news about Behrouz. A woman with short black hair and a brown leather jacket was leaning against the opposite wall, watching the crowd. Our eyes met for a second before she waved at a man coming through the barrier and hurried away. My eyes shifted to the boy. I felt a flutter beneath my ribs. He was talking to the other people in the queue, pointing to something on his phone. They were peering at the screen, shaking their heads. He ran back to me, holding out a bar of chocolate wrapped in shiny red paper. I did not take it. ‘What were you showing to those people?’ I said.

  ‘The photos of Cement Face. That wall he’s leaning against has got to be round here somewhere and I was hoping one of them might recognize it.’

  ‘Yes, but why do you have copies of Behrouz’s photos on your phone?’

  He flushed a little. ‘My screen’s bigger, it made it easier to see the details.’

  That made sense. He was helping me, being kind. The flutter grew quieter. I felt ungrateful that it didn’t disappear. Maybe I was just hungry. He pushed the chocolate bar into my hand and ran off to show the photo around some more, as if standing still would burn his feet.

  I nibbled a small piece of the chocolate. It tasted good. Hard on the outside and crispy biscuit in the middle. I took a bigger bite to give myself courage and looked down at the newspaper, hoping for a miracle. Nothing had changed. Behrouz was still unconscious and the police were still waiting to interview him. The little scrap of relief this gave me was snatched away when I turned the page and saw a photo of Behrouz beneath the words ‘The Evil That Men Do: Inside the Mind of a Bomber’. Someone in America had written this. A doctor who had never even met my brother. How dare she write these lies about him! I skimmed the other pages, glancing at pictures of food, cars, houses, clothes, anything to wipe the word ‘evil’ from my head. A name jumped out at me.

  A young British soldier was killed on Wednesday afternoon, just a day after arriving in Jordan with an advance party to prepare for the arrival of his regiment.

  Captain James Merrick, 29, who survived three missions in Afghanistan, died in what the army described as a tragic incident in the Jordanian desert in the east of the country. The army has begun an investigation into how he died, but army sources say he was killed by his own weapon while taking part in a training exercise.

  My mind wouldn’t work. The letters were shifting in and out of focus. The places where thoughts should have been were filling with fear and panic. All around me the station seemed to throb. I shrank back against the wall, seeing Merrick’s face beneath his helmet, his beefy hands reaching out to throw me into his jeep, his gruff delight when he told us we were coming to England. The boy came running over.

  ‘What’s up?’

  I held out the newspaper, struggling to speak. ‘It’s him. Captain Merrick. The one who helped us to escape from the Taliban.’

  ‘What’s he done?’

  Blood roared in my ears as the reality sank in. I felt myself sway again, so terrified I could barely whisper the words. ‘He’s dead.’

  The boy turned as pale as dough. His eyes dropped to the article.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I whispered. ‘Behrouz nearly killed, Arif dragged off where no one can find him, and Captain Merrick shot dead. Who is doing these things?’

  The boy glanced back at the crowd and steered me towards the exit. ‘I don’t know, but let’s get out of here.’

  The street was jammed with cars, vans, lorries and trucks. I pulled my hood over my cap, feeling as sick and scared as the moment the Taliban slid their death threat under our door. Only this time Behrouz wasn’t going to appear out of nowhere with a crazy plan to save us.

  I plodded
along behind the boy, shivering and weighed down by grief for Captain Merrick. I had met him only once, but I owed him my life. Nothing seemed real. Even the honking horns and the rattle of the traffic seemed faint and distant, as if they belonged to another world that had spat me out into nothingness and would never let me back. For a long time the boy was silent too. Maybe he’d had enough of my nightmare and he didn’t know how to tell me.

  ‘You don’t have to go on helping me,’ I said.

  He swung round. ‘We’re going to sort this, Aliya. You and me. All right? Whatever it takes.’ He said it fiercely but as he turned away I saw his lip tremble.

  ‘Thank you,’ I whispered. He walked on, head down, his hands stuffed in his pockets. We were supposed to be looking for the wall in the photo but I was too deep in my thoughts to see anything, too busy trying to find one single thread of sense in the tangled knot of horrors in my head.

  ‘Aliya!’ The boy was calling me. I jerked my head up. He was walking faster, breaking into a run, dodging and swerving through the beeping cars, shouting at me to hurry up. He leapt on to the opposite pavement and kept running as if he was chasing someone, not looking back or slowing down. I speeded up but my legs felt wobbly and I couldn’t catch him until he stopped at a crossroads and bent double with his hands on his knees.

  ‘Why did you run?’ I gasped.

  He was red-faced and panting, trying to catch his breath. He pointed down a street of red-brick terraced houses that looked identical to all the others we’d passed. ‘Let’s try down there.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Some girl at the station thought the wall in the photo might be –’ his eyes flicked to the big white building behind me – ‘down the road near that church, St . . . Olaf’s, but she couldn’t remember the name of the street.’

  The flutter was back beneath my ribs. It could have been unease, it could have been my heart beating too fast from so much running, or it could have been the continuing shock at the death of Captain Merrick. ‘All right.’

  I followed him to the end of the street and as we turned down another side road the houses gave way to empty ground littered with rubbish. Beyond that rose big metal buildings surrounded by high wire-mesh fences.

  ‘What is this place?’ I said.

  ‘Looks like some kind of industrial estate.’

  It was as big as a small town, full of criss-crossing roads and factories pumping tendrils of white smoke into the air, vast yards tangled with broken car parts, dusty machines, bags of cement and wooden pallets. The boy seemed unsure where to go. He glanced up and down, his eyes fixed on the passing trucks. Without warning, he started to move again. I followed him, trying not to breathe in the rancid smell that came and went with the breeze.

  I heard him gasp. I looked up. A man in green overalls was crossing the road up ahead. For a second I couldn’t work out why the boy had tensed. Then I saw the man’s white rubber boots, just like the ones Cement Face had been wearing in Behrouz’s photos. The man disappeared into the traffic. The boy started to run again. I tried to think as I pounded the pavement behind him, tried to work out what we should do if we actually saw Cement Face. We turned the corner into a section where the buildings were older, tucked behind high brick walls topped with black metal spikes. The boy had guessed right. He was good at guessing. This wall was just like the one in the photograph and so were the signs dotted along the top. There’d only been a corner of one in the photo, red and shiny, but now we could see they had ‘Hardel Intercontinental Meats Ltd’ printed across them in bright-yellow letters: a factory where they butchered and packed meat. That explained the stench, thick and fatty like something you could cut. There was a wide entrance gate about halfway down, choked with vans coming in and out. As we followed the wall around, the rancid smell grew stronger and the fear pressing down on my heart got heavier.

  DAN

  I’d nearly ripped my lungs out running after that red van. Maybe it was the shock of discovering Behrouz’s mate Merrick was dead. Maybe it was realizing the power and reach of these thugs that Dad had got himself mixed up with. Either way, I’d been in a sick, angry daze and hadn’t noticed the name Hardel Intercontinental Meats Ltd down the side of the van till the lights had gone green and it was pulling away. Then it had clicked: ‘—tal Meats Ltd’ – that’s what you’d see if half the letters were cut off by a pile of stolen washing machines. So I’d run like hell to find out where it was going and managed to follow a couple more Hardel’s vans right up to the gates. I felt like death, but it had been worth it. I’d found the place where Cement Face worked and now I had a chance to find out his name. I pulled Aliya back around the corner.

  ‘I’ll go on my own, check the place out. Give me an Afghan man’s name, quick, anything.’

  ‘Dost . . . I don’t know . . . Sajadi.’

  ‘Give me one of those pictures of Cement Face.’

  She got one out of her backpack. I scribbled the address of Hardel Meats along the bottom and walked back along the wall, repeating the name Dost Sajadi in my head. A couple of security guards stood at the gate, checking passes, sharing jokes with the van drivers, waving them through with their clipboards. I held back, trying to see inside, while I waited for a lull in the traffic. Workers in hats, blood-smeared overalls and rubber boots criss-crossed the yard, trundling trolleys past a couple of men who were directing the trucks down to a huge metal hangar right at the back. There were big signs everywhere – ‘Zone A’, ‘Zone B’, ‘No Turning’, ‘Smoking Strictly Forbidden’. I studied the guards’ faces. There wasn’t much in it, but I went for the friendlier-looking of the two, held out the photo and took a long breath.

  ‘Um . . . ’scuse me. I . . . I’m looking for this man. I think he works here.’

  He glared at me. ‘What makes you think that?’

  I pointed to the Hardel’s address at the bottom.

  ‘Why d’you want him?’

  My voice sounded thin and squeaky as I gave him the story I’d hurriedly cobbled together. ‘I found a wallet with this photo and a load of cash in it. If it’s his, I figured he’d want it back.’

  The guard looked sceptical. ‘Let’s see the wallet.’

  ‘My mum’s handing it in to the cops, but I was hoping if I tracked him down, he might give me a reward.’

  He seemed to buy that. Big black lies, little white ones, grubby grey ones – I was getting good at all of them. Just like my dad.

  ‘Leave us your name and number and I’ll get him to call you,’ he said.

  My stomach tightened. He’d as good as told me Cement Face worked there. He handed me his clipboard. I wrote down a made-up name and number.

  ‘Do you know what time he’ll be leaving?’

  ‘He does earlies, so he’ll finish at four.’ He broke off to wave a van through.

  ‘There was ID in the wallet,’ I said, doing my best to sound casual. ‘Name of Dost Sajadi. That him?’

  ‘Dost? Nah, he’s Tewfiq something or other.’

  He called to the other guard. ‘Hey, Terry, what’s Tewfiq’s surname?’

  The other guard thought about it for a couple of seconds and called out, ‘Hamidi.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘Maybe the wallet’s not his, then.’

  He wasn’t even listening. I headed back to Aliya, feeling pretty pleased with myself. ‘He definitely works there. His name’s Tewfiq Hamidi. That name mean anything to you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Let’s wait for him to come out, then we’ll follow him. He’ll be knocking off around four.’

  ‘Knocking off? That means to kill someone.’

  ‘That’s when you knock someone off. Knocking off means leaving for the day. Going home.’

  Shivering, she looked at her watch and wrapped her arms around her chest. ‘We must wait for forty minutes.’

  ‘Let’s get a sandwich and come back.’

  She chewed her cuff and stared at the ground. ‘I am not hungry.’

  She w
as lying. I could tell.

  ‘It’s on me,’ I said. ‘I got thirty quid for helping Dad at Meadowview.’ Thirty quid I wish I’d never earned.

  She said solemnly, ‘I promise that whatever happens, I will one day pay you back this money.’

  I forced a smile. ‘OK. I’ll hold you to that. Meanwhile, what do you want in your sandwich?’

  We got cheese rolls, crisps and cups of tea from the stand in the car park opposite. It wasn’t much more than a wooden shed with a drop-down hatch on the side but it was doing a good trade, catering to anyone who fancied a snack and wasn’t put off by the stink from the meatpacking plant. The man who served us said that after a while you got used to it. I couldn’t see how.

  My phone rang while we were eating. I nearly choked on my roll when I saw Dad’s name on the screen and I couldn’t believe it when he told me that that nosy cow Eileen Deakin across the road had called him at work to tell him she’d seen me bringing my girlfriend back to the house.

  ‘I don’t want you having girls round when there’s no one there. It’s not right, Dan. Do you hear me? Anything could be going on, and Eileen says she was foreign.’

  It was like a sick joke. Jez’s mum and my dad telling me what was right and what was wrong. I was so angry I cut the connection and pretended I’d lost the signal.

  I chucked the rest of my roll away and we wandered off among the cars, trying to work out exactly where Behrouz had been parked when he took his photos. Not in the car park, that was for sure. We followed the road round to a disused warehouse and spotted the side door of Hardel’s bang opposite. There were even a couple of men in wellies standing beside it, lighting up. It was obviously where all the smokers went for a fag. Aliya had gone quiet again, her face screwed up, concentrating, thinking something through. ‘To knock off is to stop work,’ she said, suddenly.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So what does “those DVDs are knock-off” mean?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I heard someone say it once in the market.’