If You Were Me

by Sam Hepburn

  I was sat there staring at it for a couple of minutes, too stunned and scared to move, when I got that prickle across my scalp that tells you you’re being watched. I glanced up. There was a girl at the door in a grey dress and baggy trousers, with a dark blue scarf round her head. She was skinny, fourteen, maybe fifteen, dark hair, narrow nose, high cheekbones and eyes that were this weird greeny-grey colour. For a second we just looked at each other.

  Her eyes darted back to the gun and she stepped forward, reaching out her hand as if she was trying to take a bone from a dangerous dog. ‘Please. Do not tell anyone. If the police find out, they will make trouble for us.’

  Dad’s boots thudded down the hall. I dropped the gun and the tin back in the carrier and shoved it into her outstretched hand. Dad poked his head round the door. ‘What you got there, Danny?’

  The girl swung round, fear freezing her face, but he was looking at the hole under the bath. I said quickly, ‘Yeah . . . you’re right, Dad. Pipe’s split.’

  He squatted down and poked around under the pipe. ‘Looks like it’s been knocked. It’s so corroded it couldn’t take it.’ He stood up and smiled at the girl. ‘What you been hiding under there, then? The crown jewels?’ She opened her mouth. No words came out and he went on chatting and smiling as if there was nothing unusual about the way she was backed into a corner, clutching a wet plastic bag to her chest and struggling to breathe. ‘We’re going to have to replace the whole lot, I’m afraid.’ She didn’t answer and as she tried to dodge past him to get to the door the bag slipped through her trembling fingers and fell with a thud. Dad picked it up. I saw her eyes flicker with panic, so I blurted out the first thing I could think of to get her and the gun out of there.

  ‘Hey, tell you what,’ I said, ‘I could murder a cup of tea.’

  Her eyes flew to my face, trying to work out what I meant.

  ‘Tea’d be great,’ Dad said. ‘I’m gasping.’

  She reached out to take the bag from Dad’s fingers and once she had it in her grasp she scuttled down the hall.

  ‘Milk and two sugars if you’ve got it,’ he called after her. He threw me a sideways smile. ‘We’ll make a plumber of you yet, Danny.’

  I looked away. In your dreams, Dad.

  ALIYA

  Iran into the cramped little kitchen and fell back against the wall, with my cuff to my mouth. My mother called out in her weak, fretful voice, ‘Aliya, What are you doing?’

  It was a struggle to move, to breathe, to think, but I called out, ‘Making tea, Mor. I will bring you some.’ I took the kettle from the stove and turned on the tap but my hand was shaking so much the water bounced and splattered everywhere except into the spout. I couldn’t help it. The shock of seeing that gun and that blue plastic bag had made my muscles seize up. I thought back to last night: Behrouz had come home very late and I remembered seeing him take that bag into the bathroom and come out without it, but I never dreamt there was a gun in it. Behrouz hated guns. Only fear and desperation would make him bring one into our home. I put the kettle on to heat, leant over the sink and stared down at the black water of the canal sliding past the buildings below, wondering if the boy would tell anyone what he’d found. I wasn’t sure. He’d been scared, I’d seen it in his eyes, but at least his strange talk of murdering tea had helped me to get the gun away from his father.

  What was happening to us? When we arrived three weeks ago, Behrouz had fallen in love with everything about our new English life: the endless rain that washed all the colour from the sky, even when it was supposed to be summer, the cinemas and restaurants we couldn’t afford, the man at the corner shop who sold us rotten fruit, the hooded boys who reared up on their bikes and scowled at us whenever we walked by, and the angry, dull-eyed men in the other flats who had no families and no work.

  He wouldn’t speak a word against that miser Amir Khan, who’d given him a job driving a minicab. My brother had always loved driving and always loved cars, and he said Mr Khan had taken him on as a favour because he had been friends with our father in Kabul. But making him work such long hours for so little money didn’t seem like much of a favour to me. Behrouz didn’t even mind living in this damp, dirty flat. He said we were lucky to have it at all and that we only got it because Colonel Clarke and his wife ran a charity that had an arrangement with the council. They call their charity Hope Unlimited. It is a bad name. Hope is not unlimited. It is like a fire or a child. If you do not feed it, it will die.

  The day we moved in, Behrouz helped me to rip out the cracked lino and the dusty curtains and we scrubbed every room until our backs ached. When we’d finished, I wanted to cry, because the whole place still made me feel empty and sad. The next day, to cheer me up, he took us in his cab to see some of the famous sights of London: the palace where the queen lives, a place called Trafalgar Square, which was full of pigeons, and the tower of Big Ben. I wanted to go for a ride on the big wheel they call the London Eye, which is so huge I can see it from our flat, but the tickets were too expensive. Instead Behrouz bought us fish and chips. He said they were typical English food but the chips were so grey and floppy they made us laugh when we held them up and in the end we fed them to the pigeons.

  That evening Colonel Clarke came to visit us. He brought us a television, some books and chocolates for me and Mor, a doll for Mina and a signed photo of him giving Behrouz his medal, to replace the one we’d had to leave behind. The colonel was very tall and I was a little scared when he walked in, but he was kind and easy to talk to and he made us laugh, even my mother, although Mina wouldn’t come out from behind the sofa. He told Behrouz that in a few weeks’ time there might be a chance of some work for him at Hope Unlimited. When he’d gone, Behrouz put his hands on my shoulders and said that with two jobs it wouldn’t be long before he’d be able to get us a house with a garden for Mina to play in, the best doctors to make Mor well again, all the books I could ever want and a computer of my own. I smiled up at him, and just for a second I believed that in a country like England such things could be possible.

  Then, a week ago something happened to Behrouz that changed him, something bad that dried up all his hope and laughter and stopped him eating and sleeping. It was the day some women hung flags across the doorways and put up stalls, selling things to raise money to mend the broken swings. I remember it because he went down early to help them set up, and when I took Mina down later to see the clown, we found Behrouz standing on his own behind the skips. He looked very pale and he left quickly. When I saw him later, I begged him to tell me what was wrong but he said it was nothing.

  Over the days that followed he started to act like a stranger, and I’ve felt his fear getting worse and worse, infecting everything, gnawing at our nerves like the rats in the walls. My mother has stopped taking the tablets the doctor gave her and Mina is getting thinner and has started to cry in her sleep, although she still won’t speak, not a word since we left Kabul. And then this morning, just as I was getting her to drink some milk and eat a little piece of toasted naan, that mean old man from downstairs frightened her by shouting at us and beating on the ceiling with his stick. I didn’t go down to see what he wanted, because he’s been shouting at us from the day we arrived. He complains about everything: the smell of our food, the money the government gives us, even the sound of our footsteps. I don’t understand about the footsteps. Whenever my mother gets up, which isn’t very often, she drifts around like a ghost, Mina sits on the couch all day watching cartoons and Behrouz works so many shifts he is hardly ever at home. I’m sure it isn’t my footsteps he can hear. In fact I’m beginning to feel as if I don’t exist at all, even though there is food on the stove that I have cooked, forms on the table that I have filled in, and suspicion in that boy’s eyes when I begged him not to tell anyone about the gun.

  I left the kettle to boil, crept into the narrow bedroom I share with Mina, opened the grocery bag and looked at the gun. There were bad people on this estate, thieves and crooks, people Behrou
z had warned me to stay away from. Had he got involved with them? Had he done something terrible to get us the things he’d promised? I hated myself for even thinking these thoughts. I dropped the gun back in the bag and opened the tin, bewildered when I found what looked like Behrouz’s phone tucked inside it, wrapped in cling film. I picked it up. Why would he hide it? He hated to be without his phone. Cold darkness crawled up my skin as if it was trying to creep into my head. I wouldn’t let it in. I pressed the keys. The battery was too low to get a signal and there was no credit. I shut it back in the tin, dropped it in the bag, pushed it under the mattress and rumpled the sheets to hide the bump. As soon as Behrouz came home I’d make him tell me what was wrong and, however terrible it was, I’d smile and tell him that I had a plan and we’d work out what to do. The way we always did.

  We didn’t have any English tea or any milk, so I made green Afghan tea and carried it to the bathroom. My hands were still shaking and I spilt some on the floor. The boy poked the curly leaves floating in his cup and pulled a face. His father made a tutting sound. ‘Come on, Dan, it’s good to try new things.’ He took a big sip and smiled at me. ‘Not bad.’

  The boy tried his and pushed his cup away. His father looked embarrassed. ‘If you’re not going to drink it, you can go and see if Jez has got any replacement pipe in the basement.’ He threw him a heavy bunch of keys. ‘I’ll need about four metres of twenty-two and a box of connectors. He keeps his spares in a cage by the door, but watch yourself, there’s building work going on down there.’

  The boy hurried out, jangling the keys. He didn’t even look at me.

  DAN

  I couldn’t get out of there quick enough, though the dark landing and the stink of pee in the stairwell were nearly as bad as that manky flat and the fear on that girl’s face.

  The Meadowview basement was a lot tougher to get into than the ones in the other blocks. There was a tangle of shopping trolleys and broken wheelie bins chucked across the entrance, which had bright-yellow ‘Danger! Building Work in Progress’ signs stuck all over it, and instead of flimsy metal panels and a wobbly lock that gave way if you kicked it hard enough, the doors were reinforced steel, fitted with heavy-duty bolts and thick new padlocks. I rifled through Jez’s keys, trying out three or four before I found the right ones and got the doors open.

  I fumbled around for the light switch. A couple of fluorescent strips flickered on, leaving the outer edges of the vast space in gloom. The place was a bomb site. The floor had been hacked into rubble and piled up all over the place, and I had to duck to avoid flapping strips of foil and loops of cable dangling from the ceiling. I looked around for the metal cage where Jez stored his supplies. Wouldn’t you know it? He’d dumped it right down the other end with a load of builders’ junk. I picked my way across the debris, tripping on lumps of concrete and stumbling into craters full of scummy water. I turned on my phone and flashed it across the cage. It was big, maybe two metres high by one across, and full of lengths of pipe and boxes of taps and fittings, all covered in gritty dust like they hadn’t been touched in months. No surprises there. Jez wouldn’t bother replacing anything if he could get away with botching up a quick repair. The lazy jerk hadn’t even left the door facing outwards.

  Annoyed, I shoved my fingers into the mesh and shunted the cage to one side. A stash of planks and scaffold poles came crashing down, slammed into a wobbly stack of oil drums and set off an avalanche of junk. I wrenched my fingers out of the cage and dodged back but I still got bashed by a falling pole. I dabbed my bleeding scalp and kicked the pole across the floor. It could have killed me. I flashed my phone across the mess. Why hadn’t Jez and his stupid builder mates dumped all this crap in that skip I’d seen outside? It’s not like it would have taken much effort. There was a big double door right there where they’d stashed the oil drums. In fact it’d be much easier to take the spare pipe out that way than kill myself hauling it back across the building site. I shone my phone at it. The pale light bounced off three heavy bolts fastened with shiny padlocks, identical to the ones on the outer door. I clambered over the fallen planks, battered oil drums and coils of wire and fetched out Jez’s keys. Three of them fitted. Wiping the dust off my face, I kicked one of the doors open and squeezed through on to the raised platform of the loading bay. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom I could see a fork-lift truck parked next to a pile of large polystyrene boxes stacked on pallets. I ran the phone light across the labels – dishwashers, washing machines, tumble driers. All top of the range. I knew that, because they were exactly the same as the ones Dad had just got for Mum. The ones he’d installed as a birthday surprise, telling her, ‘Only the best for my Debs,’ the ones she never stopped bragging about to her mates.

  All knock-off.

  Had to be. Why else would they be hidden away in an unused loading bay?

  I staggered back, feeling sick. So this was how Jez had helped him to ‘save the business’. I knew Dad was no angel, he’d done a bit of time when I was a little kid, but he’d sworn to Mum that he’d gone straight ever since. I’d seen him do it, look her right in the eye and tell her she’d never have anything to worry about on that score ever again. What a liar! She’d go mental if she found out. My eyes flitted round the loading bay like a camera, taking it all in bit by bit. It looked like they’d got a system going for stripping the original wrapping off the boxes and rewrapping them using the heat-sealing equipment and jumbo-sized rolls of polythene set up at one end.

  I squatted down in front of one of the unsealed washing machines, opened the glass door and pulled out a bundle of leaflets and a freebie pack of washing powder. I’d have shoved it straight back if I hadn’t noticed a glob of glue on the bottom of the box. I stared at it for moment, then I slid my finger under the flap, plunged my hand into the soapy granules and pulled something out. A handful of little plastic bags filled with white powder.

  For a second I was baffled – then, like a slow-motion wrecking ball, it hit me. I’d watched enough cop shows to be pretty sure what it was. Drugs.

  I stared around me in shock, not wanting to believe that Dad would ever get involved in something like this. But the evidence was right there, staring me in the face, and it looked like a big operation. Nice little loading bay with nothing overlooking it except the canal, where they could unload and load up out of sight, and plenty of room for storing the appliances, packing them full of drugs and sealing them up again. And who was going to think twice when they saw a couple of plumbers delivering a washing machine or dropping off a few free samples of washing powder? But if they got caught, they’d be looking at years and years inside.

  Thoughts crashed round my brain. I tried to separate them out, make sense of them, think what to do. My phone rang. It was Dad.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘What’s taking so long?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Have you found the stuff?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Spare pipe. Did you find some?’

  ‘Oh . . . yeah . . . plenty.’

  ‘Well bring it up, then. I haven’t got all day.’

  ‘All right. I’m coming.’

  I shoved everything back and slipped through the doors, giving the pile of appliances a last swift glance before locking the bolts and stacking the oil drums back into place. The cut on my head throbbed, my heart pumped and I felt sick. Worst of all, I had no idea how I was ever going to look my dad in the eye again.

  ALIYA

  I tried to stay busy. I swept floors, scrubbed pans until my knuckles hurt and sliced aubergine and onions to make banjaan. Outside in the hall the boy’s father banged and sawed and clanked in and out with pieces of pipe. After a while I heard him phoning the boy. He was annoyed. He told him to hurry up.

  My mother called out, asking for her tea. I poured her some, sprinkled it with sugar, the way she likes it, and took the cup to where she lay on the sofa. One of her fists was clenched against her chest as if she was holding something precious.<
br />
  ‘What’s in your hand, Mor?’

  She opened her fingers. In her palm lay a crumpled card printed with the words ‘Abbott & Co Plumbing. Prompt, Fast, Local’ and a scrap of paper with a number written on it.

  I took the paper. ‘What’s this, Mor?’

  She frowned, searching for an answer, then almost smiled as the memory drifted back.

  ‘Behrouz came home. When you were at the shop. He said to be sure to give it to you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He has a new phone. This is the number.’

  The cold darkness made my voice tremble. ‘Why did he change it?’

  My mother blinked at the floor and I knew she hadn’t even thought to ask him. I stuffed the card and the number in my purse and went back to the onions, as if cooking Behrouz’s favourite dish would solve the mystery of the gun and the phones and make everything all right. The boy came back to the flat. I saw him go up and down the hall at least twice. He didn’t look at me and whenever his father spoke to him he grunted or didn’t answer at all. His disrespect surprised me very much. I was frying the onions with garlic when his father poked his head around the door and handed me back the cups.

  ‘Smells good,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the tea. All fixed now. Any problems, just give us a ring. Your mum’s got one of our cards.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  He walked down the hall and called over his shoulder, ‘Bring the rest of the tools, will you, Dan. I want to have a look at those drains before we go.’