We Can Be Heroes
Page 6
I draw a picture of Jed and Granny, both wearing pig disguises, tiptoeing along like undercover spies. Jed’s pig looks really angry, but Granny’s one ends up just looking old and sad.
* * *
‘You know it’s not for making radios, all that,’ Jed says when we’re both in bed. He still seems to be in a bad mood from before.
‘What?’
‘All that stuff Shakeel has. It’s not for radios.’
‘How do you know?’ I say. I’m busy doodling cartoons of him and Priti dressed as Princess Leia and Han Solo and duelling with light sabres.
‘I just do.’
‘What is it then?’ I ask.
‘It’s for making bombs,’ he says.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ I say, looking up from my sketch pad and glancing across to the other bed where he’s playing with his games console.
‘He’s a Muslim, yeah? That’s what they do. My dad told me.’
‘That’s stupid. Why would he want to build a bomb?’
‘To blow up loads of British people.’
‘And how’s he going to do that then?’
‘He’ll strap it all on to himself, then put on a big coat so no one can see and then he’ll go somewhere really busy, press the button and – boom!’
‘He’ll get killed himself then,’ I say.
‘Duh! That’s the point!’ says Jed. ‘Haven’t you ever heard of suicide bombers?’
‘Of course I have,’ I say.
‘My dad’s always going on about them. He reckons there are loads of them out there, plotting stuff even worse than what happened to your dad. He reckons we need to hunt them all down and string ’em up.’ Jed sniffs and stares up at the ceiling then says, ‘I reckon he might be in some counterterrorism intelligence unit actually. Undercover.’
‘Really?’ I say. I’m sort of used to him making stuff up; he’s been doing it ever since I’ve known him. When we were little, before his mum and dad split up, we used to see him loads and my mum told me not to believe everything he told me. (That was after the time he said he could hold his breath under water for ten minutes and dared me to try it too.)
Jed just shrugs. ‘Maybe. Cos there’s no way the army sacked him, so I reckon he’s undercover.’
I don’t say anything.
‘I don’t really get it myself.’
‘What?’
‘Terrorists. Like, why don’t they just plant the bomb somewhere then press the button when they’re safely away? Or maybe they’re too stupid and haven’t thought of that.’
‘Shakeel seems really clever,’ I say.
‘Or maybe the sniffer dogs can’t find bombs if they’re on people, only if they’re in shopping bags or suitcases or whatever.’
‘Maybe.’ I do some more drawing. Of Shakeel as Yoda, then as Darth Maul with zigzags on his face.
‘Oh, man!’ says Jed, tossing aside his controller as his games console plays the music for ‘Game Over’. He flops over on to his back and stares at me crossly. ‘What’s that all about anyway?’ he asks, waving in the direction of my notepad.
‘What?’ I say.
‘The drawing stuff.’
‘I just like doing cartoons,’ I say.
‘Show us then,’ says Jed.
He reaches out a hand across the gap between the two beds. I hesitate before passing him my sketchbook.
He flicks through it with a bored look on his face. ‘These are all right.’
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘You’re meant to read it backwards.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s manga. You know, Japanese comic strips.’
‘I know what manga is.’
‘Well, you read them backwards, don’t you?’
‘I don’t do reading either way,’ says Jed, staring up at the ceiling again.
‘My English teacher says it’s not real reading,’ I say. ‘Because there aren’t enough full sentences.’
But Jed isn’t listening. He’s come across the pictures of him and Priti in Star Wars outfits. ‘Cool!’ he says. ‘Reckon I’d be a better Anakin though. Can you draw me as him?’
‘I can try.’
Jed tosses the book back at me. ‘Glad to find there’s something you’re good at. I was beginning to think you were a total no-hoper. When did you start this mango thing anyway?’
‘Manga,’ I say. ‘I dunno.’
I could have told him that when I started getting pocket money, I bought The Beano (which Mum said was my dad’s favourite when he was a boy) and that’s when I started drawing my own stuff. Just doodles at first, then my friend Lukas got me into manga and I started doing little comic strips, mainly about me and Lukas as superhero kids, defeating loads of baddies. I could have told Jed that it was about the same time my mum met Gary and then got into doing her stuff again that I started thinking in comic strips. But I don’t bother explaining any of that because I don’t think he’s listening anyway.
‘So you just, like, make it up?’ he asks.
‘I suppose so,’ I shrug.
I don’t tell him about the doodling in my head either: how, when I’m watching stuff going on – everyday things – I find myself adding captions or doodles; how I imagine drawing pencil moustaches and specs on teachers’ faces and see things people say in speech bubbles above their heads. Because if he did listen, I know he’d only laugh.
‘So do you reckon Shakeel is a terrorist or what?’ says Jed, losing interest in my notepad.
I shrug again.
‘If someone held a gun to your head and said they were going to shoot you unless you decided, what would you say?’
‘That’s stupid,’ I reply.
‘Yeah, but what would you say?’
‘I’d say: if Shakeel is building a bomb, why would he show it to us?’
‘He reckons we’re just kids and we won’t realise what he’s up to,’ says Jed.
We both lie in bed and I stare at my dad’s star-sticker constellations on the ceiling. I can make out Orion, the Bear and the Seven Sisters. I don’t know any of the others, but I decide to ask Granny tomorrow if she has a book I can look them up in.
I glance over at Jed. He’s holding a tatty bit of old baby blanket close to his face and is still for the first time all day. He looks different somehow.
‘I don’t think Shakeel is a suicide bomber,’ I say. ‘He’s nice.’
‘Yeah, well, I bet that’s what people said about the men who killed your dad,’ says Jed.
JULY 16TH
This morning, Granny’s taking Jed to his appointment. She doesn’t say what it’s for and Jed avoids talking to me over breakfast, so I guess he doesn’t want me to ask.
Granny makes Jed put a belt on before they go, so his trousers don’t hang down and show his pants. She even makes him do his coat up, which I know he hates.
She seems a bit nervous about going: she gets in a muddle about the bus times and numbers when she talks to Grandad. (He doesn’t offer to drive – he says that being summoned to pick me up at five in the morning was enough driving to last him all year.) Jed looks a bit weird too. He rolls his eyes at me as they leave and when Granny tries to put a hand on his arm, he shrugs it off impatiently.
Later on, Priti comes over and we hang out in my bedroom.
‘He thinks he’s it, doesn’t he? Your cousin,’ says Priti, checking out some of Jed’s things, which are scattered all over the place. In fact, apart from the extra bed and a stack of manga comics, it hardly looks as if I sleep here at all.
‘No, he doesn’t,’ I say. For some reason, I don’t want Priti saying bad stuff about him.
‘Don’t pretend you don’t agree.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Yeah, right. Anyway, Zara doesn’t reckon he’s cool. She reckons she saw him out the window yesterday, doing keepy-uppies on your driveway like he thought he was some kind of Premiership footballer. She says he looks like a tramp. And I agree with her.’ Priti is wearing a red and white cheerleader’s
outfit with a huge picture of some teen movie star emblazoned on her bum and red and white pompom bobbles holding up her pigtails.
‘She says you can tell he doesn’t have a mum,’ she goes on.
‘How do you know?’ I ask.
‘I’m right, aren’t I!’ She grins. ‘You can always tell.’
‘Anyway, he does have a mum,’ I say. ‘He just doesn’t see her.’
‘Same difference.’
Priti flicks through one of Jed’s football magazines. I pick up my notepad, but I can’t think what to draw.
‘So can you tell I don’t have a dad?’ I ask.
‘That’s not the same,’ says Priti, without looking up from the magazine.
‘Why?’
‘It just isn’t,’ she says.
‘So you can’t tell then?’
‘Yeah, you can. But it’s not the same. He talks funny too, your cousin.’
‘He talks the same as you.’
‘He so does not. He sounds like a total chav,’ she says.
‘You both talk through your noses,’ I say. ‘My mum says that people in the city do that because of the pollution.’
‘Yeah, well, at least I can talk about my mum without looking like I’m going to have a heart attack.’ She flicks the pages of the magazine, her red and white bobbles bouncing up and down with each turn.
I imagine the bobbles morphing into giant red and white basketballs, crashing down around her head.
‘How can you tell then?’ I ask after a moment.
‘What?’
‘That I don’t have a dad.’
She stops flicking and looks thoughtful. ‘Well, you’re crap at climbing trees and you’re way more polite than most boys I know. Oh, and you’re always drawing those pictures.’
‘Is that it?’
‘And you walk differently.’
‘I do not.’
‘Not like a girl. But not all swaggering and sticking out your crotch like most boys do. I guess they must get that off their dads.’
‘That’s pants,’ I say.
‘Don’t blame me if you’ve got unresolved issues about this! Hey!’ she says, suddenly leaping to her feet, looking very excited. ‘Do your grands have a computer in the house?’
‘Yes. Why?’ I still have a picture in my head of myself swaggering like a cowboy with chaps on.
‘We should do some research.’
‘What are we researching?’ I ask.
‘You,’ she says. ‘The whole 9/11 kid thing. You never talk about it. So I reckon we should find out more about it. Then I can help you.’
‘I don’t want to be helped.’
‘Try telling that to my mum.’
Priti makes out that her mum is this terrifying professor type, but I met her yesterday after Shakeel finished showing us all the radio stuff, and she’s actually a tiny little woman with a soft voice and long hair down to her waist, like my mum. She wears hippy tie-dye stuff and dangly earrings, and she seems all right to me. Priti says that I’m not the one who has to carry around ‘the weight of maternal expectations’, so what do I know.
If Granny had been here, she’d have made a fuss about supervising Internet access, but Grandad is too busy reading an article about benefit fraudsters to care about cyber-stalkers. He just says, ‘Don’t blow up the computer!’ and lets us get on with it.
So Priti makes herself comfortable in the big swivel chair in Grandad’s office (really the spare room) while I get to perch on a kitchen stool, which is dead uncomfortable and too high.
‘Right, what shall we type in?’ She doesn’t even pause for my answer before saying, ‘9/11.Then what?’
I shrug. Staring at the screen, thinking of paper aeroplanes and cartoon towers.
‘Bereaved children,’ she says.
‘Bereaved?’
‘That’s what my mum called you. “He’s bereaved,” she said. She reckons that’s why you don’t talk much. B-E-R-E-A-V-E-D. Bereaved,’ she says, with a slight American accent as she types in the word.
Priti turns to me and grins as she jabs at the enter button and almost immediately a whole scroll of links comes up.
‘Bingo!’ she says. I imagine a fruit machine coming up with three little aeroplanes. Ching! Ching! Ching! ‘Right, let’s just click on the first one.’
I don’t look at the screen. I look down at my hands, but Priti opens the link and reads out the contents in a loud voice, so I don’t get much choice but to listen.
‘Nearly 3,000 children under the age of 18 lost a parent during the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001,’ she reads. ‘Wow! So there are loads of you out there.’
‘Most of them are in America,’ I say.
‘Still, there must be some over here. I bet you didn’t know there were so many of you.’
‘I hadn’t thought about it,’ I say, which is almost true. I’ve never considered how many other kids there are like me out there, although I’ve sometimes wondered what I’d do if I ever bumped into one.
‘The average age of the “9/11 kids” when the Twin Towers fell was 9,’ Priti reads. ‘But some were mere babes in arms (or in their mothers’ wombs) when they lost a parent that day.’ She turns to look at me and says, ‘So if some of them were born after it happened, they must never have met their dads at all.’
‘I guess so,’ I say. At least they’ve got a decent excuse for why they can’t remember their dads.
‘That must be weird,’ says Priti. ‘I wonder if they met them on the way down.’
‘What?’
‘The babies on their way down to earth and the dads on their way up to heaven. Maybe they crossed on the way.’
‘I don’t think it works like that,’ I say.
‘How do you know?’
‘I don’t – obviously!’
‘Well, there you are then.’
I don’t bother to argue as Priti carries on reading from the screen. I’ve got to admit – but not to her of course – I’m impressed at what she can read for a kid her age. ‘A recent study showed the rate of psychi–’ she hesitates – ‘psychi-atric disorders is more than double the norm among children who lost loved ones in the 2001 terrorist attacks,’ she goes on. ‘Psychic-hat-trick means mental cases. Nutjobs. The sort of people my mum deals with. Right?’ she says, glancing at me like she’s looking for signs I’m going mental.
There must be a better word for it, but I can’t think of one, so I just nod.
‘Wow, you’re screwed then.’
‘What else does it say?’ I ask, ignoring the loony tunes face she’s pulling at me.
‘Researchers found that more than 50 per cent were displaying signs of an anxiety disorder, while a third had symptoms of post-trau–’ She pauses and, for a moment, I think she may finally have come across a word she can’t read, but then she continues, ‘Post trau-mat-ic stress disorder.’
‘I don’t even know what that means,’ I say.
‘Nor do I,’ says Priti. ‘D’you reckon you’ve got it?’
‘How should I know?’
‘Well, if you’ve got it without realising it, it can’t be that bad, can it?’
‘I suppose not,’ I say.
Priti turns back to the screen. ‘More than 27 per cent of the bereaved children showed symptoms of separation anxiety, while 14 per cent had a major depress-ive disorder,’ she reads, spelling out the longer words carefully. ‘The rate of simple pho-bia in bereaved children was also double that of non-bereaved children.’
‘Well, there you are then,’ says Priti. ‘That explains why you look so miserable a lot of the time.’
‘I do not!’
‘And you get well scared about stuff.’
‘That’s not true!’
‘When Tyreese and his gang were yelling, you were bricking it.’
‘So would any normal person!’ I say. ‘Just because you get a weird kick out of that kind of thing doesn’t mean I have an anxiety disorder or whatever they called it.’
‘I don’t like spiders much,’ I say.
‘Nor do I,’ says Priti, shivering. ‘So I suppose that doesn’t count. What about “separation anxiety” or whatever it is? Do you miss your mum?’
‘Course I do.’
‘Jed doesn’t.’
‘That’s different.’
‘You’re right. He’s weird,’ says Priti. ‘So where does this leave us with you?’
‘None of that stuff applies to me because I don’t remember my dad,’ I say, not looking at her as I say it. ‘Which means I can’t be “bereaved” or whatever your mum called it.’
I sometimes wonder if I should be feeling all those things the other bereaved kids are feeling. Should I be terrified of snakes or heights or shaking like a bag of nerves or being carted off to the loony bin? And if I’m not, what does that say about me?
‘My mum reckons you’re never too young to feel the pain of loss.’
‘I might be bereaved, but I’m not bonkers,’ I say.
‘You’re obviously getting upset,’ says Priti. ‘Perhaps we should leave it for now.’
‘I am not getting upset!’ I say, annoyed at her for acting like she knows it all, when she doesn’t.
‘Whatever you say,’ she replies, sounding just like my mum.
In my head, I draw her being attacked by a giant, hairy, goggly-eyed black spider, which sucks all her blood. And a speech bubble saying, ‘Yum! Yum! ’
My school once suggested to my mum that I see a counsellor. The pastoral head rang her up one day when I was in Year 7 and said perhaps I’d like to talk to someone about 9/11. They didn’t tell me they were going to call her. And if they had, I’d have asked them not to because I knew it would only upset her, and she’d been so happy since she started seeing Gary.
So the first I knew about it was when I came home to find Mum crying in the kitchen. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were finding things hard?’ she said.
‘I’m not,’ I replied.
‘You could have talked to me.’
‘But I’m OK, Mum.’
‘You know I’m always here if you need to talk, don’t you?’