If You Were Me

by Sam Hepburn

  ‘Oh. Right. It means they’re stolen.’

  ‘But “he knocked his cup off the table” means he hit it and it fell?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It would be better to use different words.’

  ‘S’pose.’

  It was getting on for four o’clock by then so we walked back towards the main gate and slipped behind a row of cars in the car park, watching the early shift come straggling out, looking none too happy about life. I scanned their faces, worried we’d miss Cement Face in the crowd.

  ‘Over there.’ Aliya nudged me and looked away. I held up my phone, zoomed in on the tall stooping figure and caught his face full frame: the lumpy pockmarked skin, the hooded eyes, the mean mouth that had twisted into a smile when he’d said he was going to make Behrouz famous. It felt like the pavement was giving way. For a second I prayed it would swallow me up. It was definitely him. On his own, walking fast, towering over the rest of the workers. His head jerked around. Trying to keep my hand steady, I panned the phone to see what he was looking at. The security guard was calling him over. Cement Face didn’t like it, but he went anyway, looking surly. The guard was rifling through the sheets on his clipboard. He tore something off. Jesus. It had to be the fake name and number I’d left. The guard leant forward, telling him something. When he held his flattened hand up level with his chin, I knew he was giving him a description of me.

  As I ducked behind a green Mondeo, Cement Face glanced round, scouring the street for a thin boy, medium height, brown hair, wearing jeans and a grey hoodie, before he walked off, stuffing the strip of paper into his pocket. I tore off the hoodie and kicked it under the Mondeo.

  Aliya stepped back. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘That guard just told him what I look like. Give us your cap.’

  She bent her head and took off the baseball cap. We’d found Cement Face, adrenaline had kicked in, and I should have been concentrating on our next move. Instead I was looking at the curve of her neck and the way her silky hair tumbled free as she lifted her head. I rammed the cap on my head and slipped my arm around her shoulder. She spun round in horror and shook it off. ‘What are you doing?’ she hissed.

  ‘He thinks I’m on my own, so act like we’re together. Cap, no hoodie, girlfriend – it’s part of the disguise.’

  ‘Oh.’ She set off, walking beside me, stiff and awkward as a zombie.

  ‘Relax,’ I whispered. ‘Act normal.’

  ‘I can’t. For me this is not normal.’

  It wasn’t normal for me either, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. ‘You’ve got to pretend. If he turns round, put your face close to mine so he can’t see what either of us looks like.’

  We merged into the stream of workers crowding the pavement, hoping Cement Face wasn’t about to jump in a car and drive off. He headed for the bus stop and made a call while he waited. I stood with my back to him, keeping well out of his eye line. Aliya, who’d been peering over my shoulder, suddenly jerked her head back and looked up at me. ‘He just turned round,’ she whispered.

  Close up, there was a weird mix of dark and light in her eyes, as if someone had splashed green ink in a glass of water and swirled it around. And they were nervous, like a lost dog’s, watching everything, taking it in, trying to survive. I wanted to tell her I was sure we’d find the truth, that Behrouz would be all right and her family wouldn’t get sent back to Afghanistan. Only it would have been another lie. I wasn’t sure of anything.

  We stood like that till the bus came, cold, uncomfortable and embarrassed. When Hamidi went upstairs, we stayed on the lower deck, ready to get off when he did without it looking too obvious. We’d been travelling for nearly forty minutes through parts of London I’d never seen before when he finally thudded down the stairs and pushed past us. The bus stopped. The doors swung open and he jumped off. Aliya made a move towards the exit. I held her back, waiting till the very last moment before I pulled her on to the pavement. By then Tewfiq Hamidi was about fifty metres ahead of us and we stayed right back as he turned down a dingy lane, trailed past a terrace of scruffy little houses that backed on to a railway line, crossed the road and disappeared down the driveway of a corner plot that was almost hidden behind a thick jungle of shrubs and trees.

  We broke into a run, squeezed through a gap in the rotting fence and crept through the undergrowth just in time to catch him going into a scabby pebble-dash house, standing on its own in the middle of an overgrown garden. It had a peeling, dung-coloured door and filthy windows half covered with some kind of creeper that crawled across the front to a crumbling garage stuck on one side. The whole place looked totally abandoned until you noticed a tiny sliver of light seeping through a rip in the upstairs curtains.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Aliya whispered.

  ‘We wait,’ I said.

  ALIYA

  The overgrown garden looked ghostly in the misty rain but the damp earth smelt good after the rancid stink of the meat factory. Without taking my eyes off the house, I sank down with my back against a tree trunk, hugging myself for warmth and imagining what the old Aliya would be doing now, the one who always wore a salwar-kameez and a scarf on her head. The one who would never dream of running across London, searching for a man with brutal eyes, or standing close to a boy she’d known for a day and looking up into his face. But that Aliya didn’t have a brother lying in hospital accused of being a terrorist.

  Was Behrouz drifting in a haze of pain, listening for my voice? Wondering why I wasn’t there? Or was he dreaming of life in Kabul when we were younger: my mother singing while she cooked, filling the house with warm delicious smells, my father reading aloud from the newspapers, sharing gossip from the hospital, tuning the radio to catch the news from the BBC, helping us with our homework.

  A light snapped on in the hall. I started forward. The boy tensed too. Seconds later the front door opened, Cement Face came out, pulling on an old brown jacket. The burning in my chest made it painful to breathe. He waved his keys at the garage. The dented door jerked slowly upwards. I glanced at the boy. He had his phone out, taking photos. The car inside was low, black and shiny. It purred softly when Cement Face started it up. He nosed it forward, left it running and went back into the house. Minutes later he came out with another man, who was wearing a long black coat that flapped around his knees and carrying a hold-all which he threw in the back as he got into the passenger seat. As the car roared past I caught a glimpse of his face – leathery cheeks, fleshy nose and a hairless, knobbly head.

  ‘I got the number plate,’ the boy whispered. ‘Any more cars turn up, get theirs too. I didn’t get much of a look at the other guy. Did you recognize him?’

  ‘No . . . I don’t think so.’

  ‘Come on, let’s see if we can get inside.’

  I was shocked. ‘We can’t. We’re not thieves.’

  ‘How else are we going to find out what’s going on?’

  ‘What if they catch us and call the police?’

  ‘Believe me, the last thing Hamidi’s going to do is call the cops.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘You don’t get to drive a forty-grand BMW on a meatpacker’s salary, not unless you’ve got some really dodgy sidelines going on.’

  I glanced up at the chink of light in the curtains. ‘What if someone is still in there?’

  ‘Only one way to find out.’

  He scrambled forward, pushing the branches aside. I stayed back, watching him walk up to the front door and ring the bell. I closed my eyes and counted. I’d got to twenty when he rang it again, holding his finger down. The shrill sound screeched through the silence. Nobody came.

  ‘Come on,’ he called, and disappeared down the side of the house. I crouched low as I shot past the front window and slashed my way through the waist-high brambles growing around the sides and back of the house. It made me think of a story Mor used to tell about a sleeping princess locked inside a castle surrounded by thorns. I didn’t want to th
ink about the way Mor used to be, and I didn’t want to ask myself what it was that drove this boy, who had already fought his way to the little terrace at the back of the house and was peering through one of the windows with his hand cupped against the glass.

  ‘Do you see anything?’

  ‘An empty kitchen.’

  He rattled the window frame, then stepped backwards, gazing up at the other windows and circling round to the side of the house.

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘A way in.’ He pointed up at a small window in the wall above the garage. ‘That looks like our best bet.’

  He dragged a rotting garden chair over to the back wall of the garage and used it to scramble on to the flat roof. I stood in the fading light, keeping an anxious lookout as he worked his penknife between the window and the frame. He levered it open a little and slipped his hand inside. A mixture of fear and excitement made me gasp as a catch clicked and the window swung open. I climbed up after him on to the roof, dropping on to my belly as I slithered across the wet buckled asphalt to scan the driveway.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I whispered. ‘No one is coming.’

  The boy lowered himself through the window and disappeared for a couple of seconds before his face appeared again, gaunt and pale in the half-light.

  ‘It’s OK. You can step on to the toilet under the window.’

  The terror, panic and disbelief I felt as I swung my legs through that narrow space was swept aside by the thought of Behrouz. If this is what it took to save him, then I would do it. I wriggled through the window feet first and dropped into a narrow bathroom. It smelt bad. There were finger-marks all over the sink, the tiles and the pink painted walls, and a pool of greasy water in the basin. We tiptoed on to the landing, adrenaline flooding my veins and sharpening my senses as we pushed open doors and looked into the bedrooms. There were three of them. All with bright-flowered paper on the walls, mattresses laid out on stained carpets and messy heaps of clothes scattered everywhere. The boy searched under the mattresses while I went through the clothes. We didn’t find much, just a few coins, Hamidi’s driving licence and the passport of someone called Wafik Faryadi.

  ‘Come on,’ the boy whispered. ‘We can’t hang around.’

  We slunk down the stairs like prowling animals ready to flee at the first sign of cars or voices. The sink in the kitchen was full of dirty plates caked with slimy shreds of chicken, congealed curry sauce and chunks of pizza. I opened the cupboards one by one, not sure what I was looking for. I even checked inside the oven, smearing my hands with thick brown grease. The tall white fridge was empty too, except for some bottles of beer which rattled when I tried to close the door. I had to slam it twice before it clicked shut. The boy swept his hand across the top, scattering dusty menus and vouchers for takeaway food on to the floor. I quickly gathered them up and shoved them back. By now my heart was beating faster than a wedding drum. I took a breath and peeked into the room at the back. It was empty except for a dirty old couch and a wooden chair tipped sideways on the carpet. The boy nudged open the door of the front room, let out a low whistle and flung it wide. ‘Look at this.’

  The first thing I saw was a television so big it covered the whole space above the fireplace. In front of it was a couch covered in shiny leather and two matching armchairs with built-in footrests. The boy squatted down and flipped open the laptop on the coffee table. ‘This is nearly two thousand quid’s worth,’ he said, ‘and that TV must have cost a fortune.’

  ‘If they have money to buy this television and this laptop, why do they live like dirty animals in a house that’s falling to pieces?’

  ‘This way no one knows they’re loaded.’

  ‘Loaded? That means “rich”?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  There were papers on the table, held down by a chipped glass ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. With trembling fingers I set it aside and went through the papers: receipts for the TV and laptop, a letter from the landlord, payslips from Hardel Meats, and two coffee-stained envelopes. The letters inside them were typed on thick white paper and full of words I didn’t understand. I handed them to the boy. ‘What are these?’

  He skimmed the writing. ‘This one’s a summons telling Hamidi he’s got to go to court for assaulting some bloke called Greg Parkin.’

  ‘What is “assaulting”?’

  ‘Beating up. Attacking.’

  Something creaked behind me. Fear spun me round. It was only the door swinging loose on its hinges. The boy read the second letter and frowned. ‘He got lucky. Parkin dropped the charges.’

  He handed them back to me. ‘OK. Try the edges of the carpet. If you find any sections that aren’t nailed down, we’ll take a look under the floorboards. I’ll check the ones upstairs.’ He got to the door and looked back. ‘If you hear anyone coming, run up to the bathroom.’

  I refolded the summons and as I put it back I noticed a scrawl of pencil on one of the envelopes. It was Greg Parkin’s name and address, written by someone uneducated who could barely form their letters. For a second I hesitated, then I tore it off, slipped it into my pocket and tucked everything back under the ashtray. The swirly red and orange carpet was so dirty it felt sticky to touch, and when I’d gone right the way round it without finding any loose nails, I went into the back room to search in there. As I knelt down my fingers brushed a dark mark on the carpet beside the fallen chair. It was wet.

  ‘Hey, Aliya. Up here!’ The boy sounded excited.

  I ran to the staircase, freezing when I heard car tyres sweep the gravel outside. In a panic I saw the fridge door had swung open. I dashed down the hall and slammed it hard. A couple of leaflets fluttered off the top. I stuffed them into my pocket and hurtled up the stairs to the bathroom.

  ‘Quick,’ I hissed. ‘They’re back!’

  The boy had removed one of the plastic tiles from the ceiling and he was standing on the toilet, shoving thick packets of money into the hole.

  ‘Go on,’ he said. He balanced the tile on his shaking fingers and hurriedly slid it into place. I squeezed past him, scrambled through the window and flattened myself on the wet roof. Beneath me the garage doors rumbled open. The boy pulled himself up after me and eased the window shut.

  ‘They brought back a takeaway,’ he whispered.

  He didn’t need to tell me – the rich scent of curry was making me woozy with hunger. He rolled over next to me and we lay side by side listening to the men shouting at each other as they got out of the car, arguing in English and Pashto about who owed who money for the food. I picked out at least four different voices before the front door banged shut. In my mind I did a frantic check of every room, every object and every door, trying to reassure myself that we’d left them all as we’d found them. A light snapped on in the bathroom. I stopped breathing. Someone started to do his business. He made a lot of noise. The boy grinned. My cheeks burned hot. The man stomped out, leaving the light on, and went back downstairs to join the argument in the hall.

  ‘What did you do to your hand?’ the boy murmured.

  I held it up to the glow from the window and felt a shiver of horror. It was blood, but it wasn’t mine. ‘It must have been on the carpet in the room at the back.’

  I thought of the fallen chair beside the patch of damp and shuddered to think whose blood had been spilt on that carpet. Thunder rumbled across the sky and heavy spots of rain began to fall. We shuffled over to the wall, to get what shelter we could.

  ‘Did you see that money? There must have been at least fifty grand in there.’

  He was proud of his discovery, waiting for praise. The words stuck in my throat. How did he find these things – the bundles of money, the place where Hamidi worked? Why did little pockets of silence spring up whenever we talked about Behrouz?

  ‘How did you know where to look?’ I said.

  ‘Didn’t you see the dirty finger-marks round the edges of the tile? Dead give-away.’

  I should have thou
ght of that. I owed this boy so much and I felt ashamed that I had let my doubts creep back.

  ‘Listen.’ He jerked his thumb at the house. ‘That music. It’s the football. With any luck they’ll be eating curry glued to the telly till half-time.’ He crawled across to the side of the garage and looked over the edge. ‘There’s a pipe here, coming off the gutter. You OK to climb down it and sneak through the trees to the road?’

  I nodded. He swung himself on to the drainpipe and jumped on to the gravel below. I followed behind, grabbing the gutter. As I scrabbled for a foothold between the crumbling bricks, headlights split the darkness and a car turned out of the lane into the driveway. The boy flattened himself against the side of the garage. I clung on to the gutter and leant out a little so I could peer through the leaves of the vine. The front door opened, splashing light on to a battered pale-blue hatchback. I strained to see the licence plate, flinching back as the driver’s door opened and a man got out. The guttering creaked and shifted. I could feel it giving way, about to snap and bring me crashing down. As if from nowhere, the boy caught my dangling feet and guided them on to his shoulders, taking my weight. I closed my eyes and leant into the wall. We stayed frozen like that until the man had gone inside.

  The moment the door banged shut, the boy crouched down so I could jump on to the ground. He caught my arm, dragged me through the trees and helped me to wriggle through the hole in the fence into the lane. ‘That was close,’ he panted. ‘Did you get a look at them?’

  ‘Not really.’ I took out my phone as I ran.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Putting in the number of that car.’

  We moved quickly, keeping our heads down, listening out for cars and footsteps. Even when we reached the bus stop, I was still trembling, partly with fear, partly with excitement. I whispered to the boy, ‘We know Cement Face’s name is Tewfiq Hamidi, we know where he lives and where he works, and that he is violent and probably a thief. This is good. I think he is the man who Behrouz was afraid of and now I need to find out why.’