by Joe Layburn
“I told him if he kept going on about my dad, I’d hit him. So I did.”
“So you did. . .”
I stared hard at Mr Atkinson, at his wild hair and bulbous nose.
“Are you going to expel me, sir?”
He laughed.
“Expel you? Absolutely not. You’ll be getting a Saturday detention, but my plan, Smith, is to integrate you – to force you to fit in, whatever that takes. The first thing you’re going to do is apologise to Rosen. And you’re going to shake his hand.”
I was supposed to go straight to the classroom where Adam Rosen was doing Latin or Greek or something and ask if he could be excused to speak to me for a few minutes. I tapped on the door of Room A12, coughed and entered. Three rows of pupils were bent over their desks working on some kind of test. Their teacher, Mr Stokes, was clicking idly on a computer mouse and checking the value of his stocks and shares. I could see this, as could anyone else who cared to look, because his computer was linked to the interactive whiteboard, which glowed like a cinema screen behind him.
“Ah, it’s our resident Blackshirt. How are you today, young Mosley? I mean, Smith.”
Mr Stokes had a running joke about me and Sir Oswald Mosley, whose British Union of Fascists had worn uniforms in the 1930s, just like the notorious Italian Blackshirts and Adolf Hitler’s SS.
“Sir, Mr Atkinson has asked you several times to stop making comments about Oswald Mosley when you see me.”
Mr Stokes took his hand away from the mouse and placed it theatrically at the side of his head.
“Has he really? Mr Atkinson, you say? I must have missed that particular memo. Fair enough, Smith, no more mention of storm-troopers smashing up Jewish shops. No more references to those ever-so-stylish black shirts. Consider me reprimanded, dear boy. It stops right here.”
I looked down at my shoes. I would have loved to use them to kick him until he really did shut up.
“Sir, I’m here to ask if I could have a word with Rosen outside in the corridor.”
“You want Rosen, you say. By God, Rosen, he has come for the Jews after all. Are you sure you want to step outside with him?”
The class had all put their pens down now and were laughing, Rosen included.
“I think I’ll be OK, sir,” he said.
“Well if you’re sure, Rosen. If you really are sure, off you go. But watch him. We don’t want him blacking your other eye, do we?”
Mr Stokes stared hard at me and now there was not a flicker of amusement on his face.
“Smith, Mr Rosen is one of my most dedicated pupils. He’s not used to your rough stuff. You can step outside for your little chat if you wish, but leave the door open so I’ll hear if he starts screaming.”
Adam Rosen pulled the door almost shut behind him and stood before me squinting. His left eye was half closed, the skin around it purple and orange. Mr Atkinson must have talked things through with him, because he seemed to be ready for my apology. But now that we were facing each other, I found the words sticking in my throat. Rosen had provoked me. He’d kept jibing at me long after I’d warned him what was going to happen. I was pretty sure my dad wouldn’t have wanted me to be shaking his hand. Most probably, Dad would have been proud of what I’d done.
I started to turn away from him, but suddenly I felt this pain flash around inside my head like an electric eel burrowing deep into my brain and shorting all the circuits. I staggered forward and Rosen, who looked suddenly terrified, stepped aside, bullfighter-like. I slid down the smooth green wall of the corridor and crashed to the floor. I could feel myself writhing and twitching like a fish that’s found itself on the deck of a trawler, but it all seemed as if it was happening to someone else. I’d seen one of the sixth-formers having an epileptic fit in the swimming pool. Maybe I was experiencing something similar. But then I heard that voice again – the girl’s voice I’d heard at the rally. That’s when I decided I was simply going round the twist.
Please, you must make things right with this boy.
I stared up at Rosen, whose head seemed to be floating up near the ceiling like a balloon. He’d been joined by a perplexed-looking Mr Stokes, who bobbed along beside him.
“Crikey, Rosen,” I heard him say. “Did you do this?”
That’s when I shut down completely. Apparently, they had to carry me – unconscious – to the medical room.
MELISSA
From the start, Fatima told me I had to be more “diplomatic” with people – by which she meant that I shouldn’t just blurt out the first thing that came into my head. That was hard. My brain seems to be wired differently from everyone else’s. My teacher, Miss de Souza, said I was “blunt, borderline-rude” and that it was something I had to work on with my learning support assistant, Stacey.
Stacey thought my moods might improve if I stopped eating so much junk food, especially between meals. But that was hard too, and easy enough for her to say. She stayed skinny and pretty whatever she ate. By the age of nine, I was taller than all the other kids in my year and fatter than everyone else in the school, apart from Jamal who ended up in Newham General Hospital because of his weight issues.
Fatima said I was one of her projects. She said she liked talking to people whose minds she could change. It was a challenge for her. She wanted to make the world a better place and she was starting from the bottom up – which meant, I suppose, people like me.
Having Fatima’s voice inside my head was like having a friend, only better in some ways because I didn’t have to explain things to her. It’s like my brain was a computer and she had access to all the important files. What I’m saying is, she knew what I was thinking and I couldn’t hide stuff from her.
I remember one time getting upset because I wanted her to speak only to me, like we were best friends, and not talk to anyone else. But she said it couldn’t be that way. Fatima spoke to lots of other children. She said one day we might all be able to meet up – when the time was right.
After she’d gone, I used to feel really empty and wish that I could contact her. Fatima said that if I kept concentrating, I might be able to send my thoughts in her direction rather than just waiting for her to contact me. But that never happened. When I asked her if some of the other children could start conversations with her in their heads, she said lots of them could, but most couldn’t. When I asked if we could meet up some time soon, she said that wouldn’t be possible for now.
I knew she wasn’t far away and it made me angry that I couldn’t just go round her house and meet her face to face. She told me to be patient.
I tried to keep Fatima a secret, but I remember one time when I really slipped up. I was outside the classroom with Stacey cleaning the paint trays. I’d been difficult all morning and I’d made Stacey cry, which wasn’t that hard because she was too soft to work with me really. I’d told her I hated her and only pretended to like her. That’s when Fatima’s voice popped into my head, all soothing and sweet, telling me to be nice.
“Be nice? Be nice to that cow?” I wasn’t really thinking straight and I actually shouted the words out loud, which made Stacey go all wide-eyed and scared. She started backing away from me as I carried on this noisy conversation with someone who wasn’t even there. “You must be joking, Fatima,” I cried. “She thinks I’m nothing and she’s so special.”
With that, I pulled the paintbrushes out of the jam jar and threw the dirty water all over poor, frightened Stacey. She was wearing this white top with ‘D&G’ on it in sparkly silver letters. It was probably a knock-off, but she was all pleased with it because she’d got it from her boyfriend, Reece. Now it was soaked in watery brown muck and Stacey started howling. Miss de Souza rushed out into the hall and Mr Hammond came from next door, both of them shouting as if there was some kind of emergency. An hour later they’d got the educational psychologist out to talk to me, but by then I’d stopped feeling even the slightest bit angry. The problem was, I couldn’t stop giggling, which made everyone else even m
ore upset.
I think of those days as “the bad days” because now I’m a whole lot better. But the wonderful thing about Fatima is that she always liked me, whatever I did. And I did do some terrible things.
OMAR
If Fatima, our sister, had been able to read my brother’s mind, or talk to him like she talked to me, life would have been much simpler. I knew she was concerned that Sadiq had stopped going to our mosque and was mixing with these dodgy extremists. She’d asked me to keep a close eye on him, which was difficult in some ways because he was never around, and easy in others because we shared a bedroom and I could root around in his personal stuff without much risk of getting caught.
My side of the room was a mess, like a clothes bomb had gone off in the corner. There were empty Lucozade Sports bottles and sweet wrappers under my bed, and socks and pants and things all over the floor. Until recently, Sadiq had been just as bad, but now he was much tidier. He’d taken down his football posters and thrown out most of his clothes. He actually made his bed in the morning before he caught the bus to uni.
It was after he’d left one morning that I saw something sticking out from under his mattress. It looked like the corner of a magazine but when I pulled it out, I realised it was a scrapbook. Sadiq hadn’t written anything on the cover to show what was inside and for a second I thought about just shoving it back and going down for my breakfast. I wasn’t sure I wanted any concrete evidence of what my big brother was getting up to.
Finally, I did open it and discovered it was full of newspaper cuttings. There was a picture of a man I recognised as the Fascist politician George Smith under a headline which read, “Big gains for the far right”. As I turned the pages I realised that all the clippings were about him. There were profiles about his background and his wife and children too. Smith was always trying to make out that he was a reasonable sort of man, but Sadiq had scribbled all over the cuttings things like “lies” and “disgrace” in angry red pen.
I was so absorbed in what I was reading that I didn’t take in the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs or the door handle turning. When I looked up from the scrapbook, Sadiq was in front of me. It was raining outside and his clothes were soaked.
“What are you doing, fool?” he said, snatching the book from my hands.
I could feel tears welling up in my eyes. When I shook my head, they began to leak down my cheeks.
“We’re worried about you, Sadiq, man. We’re scared, Fatima and me, about what you’re getting into.”
“It’s nothing that concerns you. And you can tell our sister to stop interfering as well.”
He was holding the still-open scrapbook by his side and I could see George Smith’s face staring up at me.
“Why have you got all that stuff in there? All those newspaper articles and things?”
“Because, Omar, you have to know your enemy, and George Smith is our enemy. He wants war with the Muslims. He wants to drive us out of this precious country of his.”
I shook my head. We’d been talking about the elections at school.
“He won’t be allowed to do that, Sadiq. There are lots of other more sensible politicians who will stop him if he tries anything.”
Sadiq snorted.
“I don’t have any faith in politicians. Sometimes you have to act for yourself.”
I could feel myself getting angry now. The skin at the sides of my head seemed to be all stretched and prickly.
“So what do you and your friends plan to do, Sadiq? Blow him up or something?”
I suppose I expected my big brother to laugh at what I’d said, but instead he just looked away from me and stared out the window. Droplets of rain were dribbling down it in erratic little streams.
“Come on, Sadiq. Answer me.”
Sadiq rolled his shoulders and then his neck.
“Please answer me.”
Finally he let out a long sigh.
“Omar, let’s just pretend we never had this conversation. And don’t you mention it to Fatima, either.”
GEORGIE
When I got back from the hospital – where it took them six hours to decide there was nothing obvious wrong with me – the house was quiet. Albion, my sister, was over at her friend’s place and I guessed that Dad must be slumped in his den watching The History Channel with a cigar and a couple of bottles of real ale. Mum fussed about in the kitchen, desperate to fix me something to eat. She must have been starving because she’d eaten nothing all afternoon while we waited for the doctors to do the scans and blood tests and half-hearted quizzing about whether I was worried or depressed or something. I sensed she was getting angry that Dad hadn’t come out to check on me, though she had sent him a text from the hospital to say I was basically OK. Finally he appeared in the doorway of his den with a documentary about the Battle of Stalingrad rumbling and flickering on the television screen behind him.
“So what do they reckon?” he asked, hitching up his jogging bottoms.
“They don’t know, George. We’ve been there all afternoon and they haven’t got a clue what’s going on with him.”
“Did any of the doctors give you grief, like when Albion broke her arm?”
“No, they were fine. They didn’t make the connection with you.”
He rolled his bottom lip.
“Did you have to wait long?”
Mum got some lettuce from the fridge and began to wash it under the tap.
“I said, did you have to wait long?”
Mum turned the tap off and glared at him. The muscle that twitches in her jaw when she’s tense was fluttering like a trapped moth.
“You mean was the hospital full of doctors from India and Africa who couldn’t speak English? And were the waiting rooms clogged up with asylum-seekers? No. Not that I noticed, George.”
“It was a straightforward question.”
My mum blew a strand of blond hair away from her face.
“I thought you was trying to make a political point as usual.”
Dad rubbed the dark whiskers on his chin. He really needed to shave twice a day.
“I think you’ll find it’s ‘you were trying to make a political point’, not ‘you was’,” he growled.
Mum threw the dripping lettuce into the sink and stormed out of the kitchen.
“Whatever,” she called over her shoulder.
Dad looked at me and shrugged, as if to say, “What was that all about?” But their arguments had been growing much more frequent lately. Mum didn’t really care about politics, but you couldn’t be in George Smith’s family and stay on the sidelines. You got dragged right into the boggy parts of the pitch every day of your life.
Dad pulled up a stool next to mine at the breakfast bar. Neither of us said anything. The noise of a loan company’s TV advert filtered through from the den.
“So what happened? I spoke to Mr Atkinson who says you had a run-in with some Jewish kid and then you fainted when he sent you to apologise. Is that right?”
I nodded.
“Pretty much.”
“So that’s the second time now you’ve had a bit of a wobble, like at the rally in Barking. I don’t understand.”
“Perhaps I’m not as tough as you and Brian and Tony and Mart.”
“Forget them. By the sounds of it, you’re about as tough as Billy Elliot.”
He grinned, and there was that sparkle in his eye which often charmed even the news journalists who expected to despise him for his political views.
“Come here.”
He reached around the back of my neck and pulled me close to him. Dad was smaller than average but he was a solid block of muscle. He kissed the top of my head and I smelt the fumes from the beer he’d been drinking.
“Who loves ya?” he said.
“You do,” I whispered.
“Louder.”
“You do.”
“That’s right. Now I’m going to have a sarnie, whatever anyone else plans to eat this evening. D’you wan
t one?”
“I’m OK.”
Dad enjoyed doing stuff in the kitchen. He always made sure he had everything he needed all laid out precisely, even if he was just making something simple like a cheese and onion sandwich. With a look of great concentration on his face, he pressed the onion down on the chopping board as if he was daring it to try and slip free from his grasp. When he’d chopped it into little bits, he reached for a different knife to set about the cheddar.
“Sir Oswald Mosley,” I said. “Tell me some more about him.”
“You’re asking the right man. I reckon I know everything there is to know about Mosley.”
He smiled, then his brow became creased.
“Has that Mr Stokes been having a go again?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, despite what Mr Stokes would have you believe, Mosley was a great Englishman. He was the leader of the British Union of Fascists, the Blackshirts. And a lot of people saw the sense in what he was saying about the problems in our country in the 1930s. You know that paper your mother reads, the Daily Mail? They ran a headline which said ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’, so even people in the mainstream supported Mosley and his ideas. Mosley wanted to march with his supporters down Cable Street in the East End of London to protest about the way the country was being taken over by the Jews, just like it’s being overrun by the Muslims now. And, as I think I’ve told you before, there was a big ruck and a lot of property got smashed up because a crowd of Jews and their Communist friends blocked the road and stopped them going through.”
“Mr Stokes reckons there were a lot of ordinary local people who decided to stand with the Jews. Thousands were there, he said, forming a human barricade.”
“Maybe so. A lot of misguided locals who should have known better.”
“And Mosley was stopped and turned back?”
Dad shrugged.
“Yeah, he was stopped. But if the police had done their job properly, the Blackshirts would’ve been allowed to march right through and make their lawful protest.”