Grow

by Luke Palmer

But why am I even thinking about going?

  It’s something connected to Alan, and what Alan was saying about Ahmed on Thursday. It’s got a lot to do with that website. Which means it’s got a lot to do with Carl.

  Despite this, I watch the clock slowly turn towards half past eight, and my legs start twitching. My fingers start to drum on my desk. Maybe if Carl’s there I’ll see Dana.

  I’m not going to go, I decide.

  But I have to say it out loud to myself. More than once.

  I’m still talking when I realise that I’ve opened my laptop and clicked on the email link again to the website of videos.

  Before, I’d just looked at the pictures. But now I look at what else is there. In the top right corner, there’s the outline of a lion’s head with White Lions written underneath it. Down the left-hand side, there’s the normal list of different parts of the website, also written in white. The one I’m on, ‘What We Do’, is underlined. I click on the top one, which says ‘About’. An error message pops up – You are about to leave a secure connection. Do you wish to continue? – I click ‘yes’.

  This page is mostly text. The White Lions are a group of people who love their country, it begins. At the top of the page, an animated St George’s flag flutters in a digital wind. We love our country passionately, and are prepared to do whatever we must do to protect it. We are deeply proud of who we are and what we stand for, and we know that the generations before us, who also fought to defend what was rightfully theirs, would be proud of us. We feel they walk among us every day, and we honour their memory in our ongoing struggle.

  At the bottom of the page is a small, red flower. A poppy. The cursor changes when I hover over it, and after I hold it there for a second or so, a little white box comes up that says ‘read more’. I click it.

  It’s a long page of text and I start to scan through it. I pause over one of the statistics highlighted in a bold font: Only 9% of Britons can truly say they belong here. That’s less than 10% of our beautiful nation who haven’t yet been poisoned by incomers and lesser species. I read about how the last official invasion of Great Britain was in 1066, but since then millions of people have come to these shores (our shores) uninvited. Under a pretext of weakness and the flag of surrender, the article continues, they set about changing our country, our culture, our colour, from the inside out. There are lots of bits about purity and impurity.

  Further down, there are sections about specific people – local councillors and business people, their bios say – that I’ve never heard of before. Their names always have three sets of brackets around them. Their children are named, too. Some of them have the names of local schools listed alongside. I skip through this all quite quickly.

  Then there’s the part about the terror attacks. All of them seem to be there; every single one documented. There’s the first one, the first act of war they call it, with the planes and the Twin Towers that happened before I was born, then a few more before 7/7, which is also a kind of hazy memory for me. I can’t have been much older than three or four maybe. Then they are listed, hyperlinked; the streak of smaller-scale machete and knife rampages, the cars driven into groups of pedestrians. And, finally, the one that killed Dad. The hyperlink is the same blue as all the others. I don’t know why but I feel somehow like it should be different. I click it. And there are the pictures – ones I’ve seen a hundred times on the news – pictures of police and ambulance crews, of scores and scores of injured and walking wounded. Some close-ups, some taken from a distance, some of piles of rubble, of angry orange explosions, or twisted and blackened metal.

  But there are other pictures too – ones I haven’t seen before – of the smoke still rising from burnt-out train carriages, of bloodied arms or legs sticking out from the rubble, twisted and unnatural like branches caught in a flood. Pictures of ambulance crews zipping up body bags around the remains of what used to be people. I spend a few minutes clicking through them numbly before I realise what I’m hunting for. None of the pictures are of Dad. But there’s one that I stare at for I don’t know how long – it’s a picture taken from one end of an exploded tube train, the roof ripped off and the strip lighting from the tunnel shining into what’s left of the carriage. Along the length of it, amongst all of the buckled seats and ripped fabric, there are bodies. In the blood that spatters the foreground, there are footprints. The caption reads epicentre of the blast.

  I look at it for a long time, not really seeing it. For some reason I can’t focus on any of the details, even though I want to strain my eyes over every distended limb or part of a face, looking for Dad.

  I try to return to the video page, but it’s blocked. A message on the website says site under construction. I go back to the email, click the link, and once again the dozen thumbnail images appear on my screen. I want to see again that look in Carl’s eyes – the look that says there’s something you can do about this to feel better.

  I click one of the thumbnails.

  Once again, the familiar bumpy camera work. The person holding the phone is running. They cross a normal, residential road towards a parked car. The camera drops slightly as the cameraman – Alan again? – crouches down. You can see a bit of the car bonnet at the bottom of the screen.

  From the left of the shot, two more people appear. They’re running in a kind of half-crouch, and looking left and right. Their hoods are up and I can’t see their faces. They run straight across the road and up the driveway of the house that’s in the middle of the image. One stops next to the car – a big white 4x4. Both of them put their hands down inside the zipped-up fronts of their coats and, almost perfectly synchronised, they pull out cans of spray paint, shaking them furiously. Huge, red shapes start to appear on the white garage door and along the side of the 4x4. Because it’s raining, the shapes start to disintegrate almost immediately, leaving a pinkish curtain of paint and water.

  One of the men wipes the garage door with his arm, then starts again. Seeing that it’s working, the other does the same on the car bonnet. The shapes this time are more distinct. Letters.

  Leave

  The front door opens, and a woman comes out. She has one foot on her front step, another still in the house, and she’s waving frantically with one arm. One of the hooded men takes a step towards the woman in the doorway, and she seems to shrink back, but her arm is still waving, and you can see her lips moving as she shouts at the hooded man. She steps quickly inside her house and slams the door just as one of the cans of spray paint bounces off it. The other man stamps on his can then throws it, erupting with paint, onto the roof of the car. The paint runs over the windscreen, the bonnet, the sides, like a veil of blood. The two hooded men then turn, sprinting away from the house, back the way they had come. They run out of the left of the shot. The camera goes shaky again as its holder stands up and begins to run in the opposite direction.

  The video ends. The screen with the thumbnails returns.

  I click on another.

  In this one, the camera is in the middle of a group of people. They are shouting, raising their fists towards something that I can’t see.

  I pick up my headphones, and shouts of ‘Murderers’ fill my ears.

  The camera turns a little, over the heads of a few more people. For a split second, like the camera has been dropped, it tilts down and I see Alan’s face staring straight at me. But it’s almost too quick to register, and I’m looking over the top of about fifteen people, past the signs that they’re waving, across a road. It’s a town – or a part of town – that I don’t recognise, but the people shouting seem to be behind some kind of fence, like the metal railings they put up for spectators to stand behind at marathons and things. Across the road there is a building behind a larger set of gates and fences – permanent ones, enclosing the building in a way that looks claustrophobic, as if it wasn’t originally designed to be fenced in. Behind the fences, the building is a faded white, with a steep roof. On the wall facing the road, the words ‘Jamia
Masjid’ are visible below a picture of a crescent moon and a star.

  As I watch, the doors of the building open, and the volume of the people near the camera gets almost unbearable. I have to pull the headphones away from my ears a little. Some people come out of the building, and start to walk towards the gates, moving as if to open them. They step back when a bottle smashes against the fence a metre or so to their left, and the camera swings around to see where it came from. Suddenly, more bottles are thrown, and the camera swings back as one of them flies over the top of the fence and hits the wall of the building. The people at the gates are by now moving quickly to get back inside. The doors close and a cheer goes up through the crowd.

  Then the camera starts shaking violently, and what seems to be a police officer’s hand, the arm glowing in that familiar neon yellow, reaches towards it.

  The video ends, this time with a title card – ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children – 14 Words.’

  I’m still staring at this screen, headphones on, when I realise Mum is standing in the doorway. I slam the laptop closed as she steps into the room.

  ‘Are you alright, love? I’ve been calling you for ages. Done your homework?’

  What did she see? ‘Bit of English to finish off. I’m doing it now.’

  ‘I fell asleep in the bath. I’m off to bed now. I can barely keep my eyes open. What were you watching?’

  Nothing. She saw nothing. ‘Nothing Mum, just some school research stuff. English homework, like I said.’

  ‘Well, don’t stay up too late.’ And she’s gone, closing the door gently behind her.

  TWENTY EIGHT

  ‘Thanks for not coming to watch this weekend, mate. We won five-nil!’

  Jamie finds me first thing on Monday morning. He’s glowing. Apparently, he scored a hat-trick, including one direct from a corner. I don’t mention the apparent competence of the opposition’s goalkeeper, and let him enjoy his glory.

  ‘You do Burgoyne’s homework?’

  We’d had to write a response to a Thomas Hardy poem about war. The poem was from the point of view of a soldier who was talking about his experience and how strange it is trying to shoot someone that, if you’d met them in a pub or something, you might get along with quite well.

  ‘Yeah, you?’

  ‘A bit. Didn’t really get it. Wrote something about the soldier not really liking war. It’ll do.’

  After Mum had gone to bed last night, I’d written about two hundred words explaining how the soldier was clearly just bad at his job, and that in wartime it was treasonous to consider the humanity of your enemy; if you were fighting for your country, it was your patriotic duty to kill those who threatened your home and way of life. I’d finished it with the words from that title card; that the only things that matter are protecting the existence of our people and a future for our children.

  But I don’t tell Jamie this.

  From across the playground, the new kid, Ahmed, is walking towards us. Jamie raises a hand in greeting.

  ‘And this is the man who made it all possible,’ says Jamie, clapping Ahmed on the back. Ahmed smiles, looking slightly embarrassed. ‘This guy endured wind and freezing temperatures to cheer me, to cheer us, to victory.’

  ‘You like football?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes, very much!’ Ahmed replies. Again that warm, soft voice. ‘I’ve been a Man City fan for years. Since I can remember. Though my father was always annoyed with this. He thought I should follow Al Ittihad, like him.’

  ‘Al who?’ My face is steel, strong, impassive.

  ‘Al Ittihad, best team in Syria, or were. They’re from my hometown, Halab.’

  Again I look blank, shrug my shoulders.

  ‘Aleppo. Here, it’s called Aleppo.’

  ‘So why not call it Aleppo?’ From the corner of my eyes – which are levelled hard at Ahmed – I see Jamie’s jaw tense, his forehead furrow. I know this is a ridiculous argument, but there’s no way I’m backing down.

  ‘It’s just pronunciation, I guess.’

  ‘Well, you’re in England now.’

  Jamie steps forward to speak, but Ahmed smiles – a wide and generous grin. ‘Yeah, I’d noticed. I’ve been here for years and still can’t seem to get it right. Maybe you could teach me?’

  Trying too hard, Jamie latches onto Ahmed’s joke and laughs. ‘Come on, that was the bell.’

  They walk just ahead of me. All the way to lessons I stare at the back of Ahmed’s head.

  *

  I barely notice the morning go by. I keep trying to work out what I’m supposed to do. Jamie sits next to Ahmed in all of the lessons, the teachers rearranging the seating plan to make it possible. It’s not that I have to move, but I find myself getting angry anyway. A small fire has sparked up at the bottom of my stomach and it’s hungry for fuel. Everything I feed it seems to make it hungrier and hungrier. I find myself following Jamie and his new best friend to the canteen at lunch and sitting with them. There’s something about the warmth and humour of Ahmed’s voice that I know I should like, but the fire in my stomach swallows it and grows hotter and hotter.

  And the embarrassment of how I acted earlier, the way I spoke to him, the anger that came out of nowhere, all because of the name of a place in his country! Surely he gets to call it what he wants. I don’t know what I was thinking, but all that shame keeps coming back to me and feeding the fire even more.

  By the end of the day, it’s a white-hot furnace.

  TWENTY NINE

  On the walk home, I’m suddenly aware of a strong grip on my arm. Vince, the attack dog, appears beside me as if out of nowhere. The fire inside me almost makes me take a swing at him to make him let go. I check myself just in time.

  ‘Alan wants a word,’ he grunts.

  Alan is waiting around the back of the Tesco garage, taking occasional lungfuls from an e-cigarette. Our conversation is punctuated by the sounds of younger kids coming out of the shop and laughing with each other as they tear into their sweets and energy drinks. It’s one of those shops that has a ‘two school children at a time’ sign, but no one takes any notice of it, and the staff never say anything either.

  ‘Didn’t see you last night then?’

  I shrug, unsure at first as to what he’s talking about.

  ‘Get that book I sent you? Nicked it from Walters’ desk. Thought you’d like it.’

  Of course the book came from Alan, not Mr Walters. My relief is stopped when I realise this means Alan knows where I live. So does Carl.

  ‘Tell me, is there anything in that textbook about different species of humanity and how they shouldn’t be allowed to breed with each other?’

  ‘Don’t know, haven’t looked yet.’

  ‘Ah! I’m sure there isn’t – but it’s a scientific fact that we need to start talking about. Natural differences. In intelligence and stuff. My brother says the government has silenced all the people that say it’s true because they don’t want to deal with the riots in the streets. But that’ll happen anyway when everyone realises they’ve been lied to. Maybe you’ll be the scientist who makes it all go off. Brings truth back to the world.’

  ‘OK.’ It’s the best I can offer.

  ‘So you won’t find it in textbooks. And not on the news either, unless you start looking at the right news.’

  I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say – there aren’t really any questions to answer – but I can still feel the imprint of Vince’s fingers on my arm like teeth, so I feel like I have to say something. I say, ‘I looked at more of that website.’

  ‘I know. That’s one of the places you’ll start to find the truth. What did you think of it?’

  ‘Yeah, it was OK.’

  ‘It’s the most honest thing you’ll find around here.’

  A cloud of vapour peels from Alan’s mouth into the sky. We watch it rise.

  Alan continues, ‘There are people watching us, Josh. You know what I mean? People. Watching. The
y don’t want you to know a lot of things. They think you won’t be able to handle it and you’ll just get angry. But you know what I say? I say anger is good.’

  I struggle to think how this constant, bone-deep heat could ever be good. I want to rip things up and run and run and run until my legs can’t anymore. Then I think of Carl’s eyes again, at the end of that video. The word that comes to mind to describe them now is satisfied.

  ‘But it’s a good job we’re watching too. I saw you talking to that new Muslim kid. The one your mate Jamie’s hanging around with.’

  There’s a pause. I hold Alan’s probing stare and try not to look away, to point my fire at him.

  ‘You did good,’ Alan smiles. ‘Kind of.’ Vince laughs – a cold, angry laugh.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You challenged him, Josh. You didn’t let him assume he could walk all over us without some kind of a challenge. You didn’t just lie on your back like your mate Jamie when he was told he had to be his “buddy”. You didn’t let some reprobate species of humanity tickle your belly. You showed strength. We need more people like you.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For the Lions. If you’re interested. No need to answer now. You know where we meet. I’ll send you some more truth in the meantime. I’ve got your email.’

  As Alan stops talking, a car – loud, black and with tinted windows – pulls around the back of the garage and comes to an abrupt halt. The driver’s window glides down.

  It’s Carl.

  My cheek starts to pulse again and I quickly turn away and look at the floor.