If You Were Me (17 page)

ALIYA

 

 

 

T
he blue hatchback was backing up, turning round. I squeezed behind a row of stinking waste bins, staying low until it had passed. It didn't make sense.

It was the boy who had led me to Hamidi. Why had he done that if he was working for him? I ran back to the bus stop, furious with the boy and furious with the small stubborn part of me that still wanted to trust him.

When I got back to the hotel, Sandra and Tracy were both there and my mother was sitting on the edge of the bed with a shawl around her head, holding her handbag on her knees, ready to go out.

‘Where have you been?' Tracy said, crossly.

‘For a walk. I needed air.'

She didn't believe me. I didn't care.

‘I've had a call from Inspector McGill.' Every muscle in my body tensed. ‘He says I can take you and your mother to visit your brother. Sandra will stay with Mina.'

‘Oh.' My eyes watered. I wiped them dry. ‘Did Behrouz wake up?'

‘Yes.'

I sank on to the bed, expecting a rush of joy. What I felt was the hollow trembling exhaustion of waking from a nightmare. I told myself Behrouz was conscious and now he could destroy all the doubts and demons in my head and tell the police who had done this to him. I looked up. Tracy was chewing her lip. I turned from her to Sandra. Something was wrong.

‘What is it?'

‘He's got no idea who he is or what's happened to him.' Tracy said. ‘They're hoping some familiar voices might help to jog his memory.'

I knew the big white hospital building well. I saw it every day on the television and every night in my dreams. But something inside me still ripped a little as WPC Rennell's dented red car swept us through the gates. We passed a row of ambulances striped with chequered bands of blue and yellow and drew level with two news vans topped with satellite dishes, parked to one side of the entrance. I pulled my cap low over my eyes. A group of reporters stood watching the passing cars, laughing, chatting and drinking from paper cups. Some of them had set up folding chairs
along the wall. Others were walking around with headphones clamped to their heads and one of them, a woman reporter with long glossy hair, was holding a microphone to her red-painted mouth and talking into a camera. They were here because of Behrouz. If they'd known who we were, they'd have chased our car like street dogs hungry for meat. I wanted to run over and yell into that camera that Behrouz was not a bomb-maker, whatever lies their experts told about him. Instead I shrank away from the window and kept my eyes on my hands.

To avoid the reporters, we had to go in the back way and creep through the basement and up the stairs like thieves. I put my arm around my mother. Her head had sunk into her shoulders as if she'd suddenly grown very old, and she kept her scarf pulled tightly across her face. Two policemen were guarding the door to Intensive Care, checking everyone who went in. Tracy went up to them and said something quietly. They hardly glanced at her. Their hard, curious eyes were fixed on me and my mother, taking in every detail, so they could go home and tell their wives what we looked like or sell what they'd seen to the newspapers. One of them took my backpack and rooted through my things with his big hairy hand. I felt the press of Behrouz's phone against my thigh and held my breath until the policeman thrust the backpack at my chest and waved me on.

WPC Rennell pushed open the door and led us into a reception area where a nurse made us clean our hands with
a sharp-smelling gel. She talked very softly and only looked at us when she thought we weren't looking at her. She pointed down the corridor to a door with two policemen sitting outside holding guns across their laps.

I knew my brother was badly injured, but nothing had prepared me for the twitching bundle of tubes and bandages that lay on the bed. I heard myself murmur, ‘No, no, no.' The policewoman sitting beside him looked up and let her magazine slip to the floor. My mother reached out to touch Behrouz's agitated fingers and let out a howl. His burnt, bandaged hand was cuffed to the bed. My tears grew hot with rage. I couldn't stop them pouring down my cheeks. The policewoman got up and moved to the window. Mor straightened a little, dropped her bag to the floor and, with more purpose in her face than I'd seen for months, she sat down and began to rock backwards and forwards, murmuring Behrouz's name and crooning a song she used to sing to us when we were little, ‘Sleep, sleep, sleep, my child, as still as a stone in the water.' His fluttering eyelids opened. The blankness in them was a blow to my heart. He didn't know her and he didn't know the song. His gaze wandered from her face to mine. He didn't know me either. A nurse came in to look at the monitors. ‘When will he remember?' I said.

‘We don't know, but his vital signs are much stronger.' Her voice was crisp and professional, as if she wanted to prove she would do her best for him, even if he was a killer. She removed the empty bag from his drip, snapped open a
fresh one and attached it to the tubes.

The next few hours passed in a hushed blur punctuated by the murmur of my mother's voice, the clicks and beeps of the equipment, the swish of the door as nurses came and went, and the muted voices of the policemen in the corridor. With every minute I felt more useless and frustrated. By late afternoon I couldn't stand it any longer. There was nothing I could do here. I couldn't sing to Behrouz or change his drip or check his monitors. I could hardly even bear to look at his burnt, restless body. But I could prove he was innocent. I backed towards the door, turned on my heel in my borrowed trainers and ran out of there.

If I were Behrouz, I would have had a plan all worked out in my head. I wasn't Behrouz and all I had was a burning urge to find out why everything that had happened led back to Tewfiq Hamidi.

It was very late by the time I found my way to Hamidi's house and when I got there it was in darkness. Dilapidated and menacing in the pale moonlight, dark stems of creeping vine stretching like tapering fingers across its frontage. I took out my phone to check it was switched to silent. There was no need. The battery had died. Fear trickled cold through my veins as I slipped it into my backpack. Breathing hard, I inched along the side wall and peered into the garden. Nothing moved. With a silent prayer I launched myself across the brambles, dropping to a crouch when I saw a sliver of light filtering through the curtains of
the back room. I stayed low, head down, pushing my cuff to my mouth until I found enough courage to creep towards the window. I put my eye to the tear in the curtains and peered through the web of threads. A bare bulb threw a dim light across a heap of cables and silver boxes lying on the floor. I was straining so hard to see what was in them that it took me a moment to realize there was a figure curled on the couch. It was the boy, fast asleep, with his knees pulled up to his chest. The first thing I felt was envy. I hadn't slept properly for so long it hurt to see him curled up like that, lost to my pain. Then the fury kicked in, rolling over me so I wanted to bang on the glass and scream at him. As I dug my nails into my palms the door of the room swung open. A fat man in a dirty white vest and track pants strolled in. Bleary-eyed and scratching himself as if he'd just woken up, he squatted down and began to pack away the cables. When he'd finished, he ambled over to the couch and bent over the boy. Gripping the window ledge, I stepped on to a broken brick and stretched up, angling my head to see what he was doing. He slapped the boy's face, shook him roughly by the shoulders and let him fall. The boy's head bounced against the arm of the couch and lolled sideways. Slits of white appeared between his twitching eyelids and a trickle of spit dropped from his gaping mouth.

Shock loosened my grip on the damp windowsill. I toppled off the brick, my foot skidding on the gritty surface of the terrace. Numb with terror, I dropped to my
haunches, crawled along the cracked concrete and flattened myself against the back of the garage. The curtains flew apart, throwing light into the darkness. Another light came on in the kitchen. Stiff bolts creaked. I scuttled around the side of the garage, freezing as tyres crunched the drive, headlights swept the trees and the bonnet of a pale-coloured car slid to a stop at the end of the wall. The headlights snapped off. Someone walked to the front door. The doorbell rang, loud, impatient bursts. I raised myself up, poised to run for the gate as soon as the driver had gone inside, dropping down again when the door opened and a voice yelled, ‘There's someone out there! Check the front.'

Seconds later the back door crashed open behind me. I heard someone run out, trip and swear loudly. I cringed into the brickwork as the car's headlights came back on ahead of me. I couldn't go forward to the drive. I couldn't go back to the garden. I took the only option left and crawled towards the car. My stomach caved in as I recognized the pale-blue hatchback. I lay in the strip of shadow between the tyres and the garage door, craning through the knotted stems of the vine to see the driver run to the gateway and stand on the pavement, flashing a torch up and down the darkened street. While his back was turned, I pulled open the passenger door and slipped inside. The back seat had been folded down to make a large flat surface, half of it heaped with boxes and cans of beer and the other half covered in plastic sheeting that crackled as I
scrambled under the seat and squeezed into the cramped footwell. I pushed my head into my knees, listening to the men stomp around outside shouting to each other.

More cars were arriving. More voices. I lifted my head, tipping the seat up just enough to see into the wing mirror. After a few minutes I saw the freckled man coming out of the house bathed in the light from the hall, carrying the boy on his shoulder like a carcass of meat. My heart seemed to stop. Was he dead? I ducked down. The boot creaked open and the folded seat thumped hard against my neck as he threw the boy inside. A phone rang. The man cursed and got in the driver's side to answer it.

‘Yeah. No . . . worse than that. He was in the bloody loading bay. Saw everything . . . and he found Sahar's phone in the flat.' I knew that voice. The throatiness of it, the way he stretched some sounds and blunted others. ‘Yeah, he and the sister went through the photos . . .' He was talking about me. I bit down on my lip to stop myself passing out. ‘. . . I don't know . . . fourteen, fifteen maybe . . . I know . . . not yet, but don't worry, we're on it. She won't get far . . .' I trembled in the darkness, tasting blood on my tongue. ‘Yeah, he's in the boot . . . Nah, leave it to me, I've got it sorted. We're going have a party . . . too many drinks, too many drugs and, apart from a line in the local paper and some do-gooder moaning about teenagers today, no one's going to bat an eyelid.' He laughed. ‘Yeah . . . just another stupid kid who made a mistake and ended up dead.'

A deadly coldness poured through my aching body. I hadn't understood everything he'd said, but enough to know they were going to kill the boy, then come after me. Terror spewed a memory from the back of my brain. The police station. That's where I'd heard the freckled man's voice. He was the policeman who'd brought me tea and sandwiches. He'd looked different in uniform but it was definitely him. Thoughts splintered into tiny pieces and reformed into ugly, unimaginable shapes. A policeman? Working with Hamidi? Drugging the boy?

I knew now why Behrouz had got himself a gun instead of trusting the police.

‘No, I'm keeping it local,' he was saying. ‘That way I'm on it as soon as they find the body. Yeah, I'll get a couple of the lads from the block to swear blind they saw him getting off his head. Nah . . . too risky. I'm going to use the three brothers . . . I know, the boss was all for it . . . All right, mate. Call you later.'

Who was his boss? Who were these brothers who killed people? What did it mean to bat an eyelid?

I willed him to go back to the house and give me a chance to run. When he started the engine, I struggled to hold on to my sanity. This man was going to find me and kill me before I could discover what any of this had to do with Behrouz. I heard the passenger door open. The car bounced as someone heavy got in. Another man said, ‘What shall I do with his phone?'

‘Text his mother. Tell her he's staying over at a mate's.'

‘What mate?'

‘I dunno, do I? Make up a name, then give it to me.'

I caught the smell of cigarettes, heard the men murmuring, then a click and a blast of music that shook the seat I was squashed against and pulsed through my cramped body. The car swung out of the drive, rattling the beer cans. The boy groaned. He wasn't dead. Not yet. And I couldn't let him die. Not before he'd told me everything he knew. The car stopped and started in the traffic, moving slowly for ten, fifteen minutes, then it got up speed, jolting my crushed bones for what seemed like a thousand dark, stifling, unbearable hours, made worse by the terror of what would happen when we stopped. I could barely breathe as the car turned off the smooth road and slowed down, bumping on to rough ground as it came to a halt. The music stopped. The men jumped out. The back door opened. I balled myself tighter and felt the seat lift a little from my back as they dragged the boy out.

The freckled man said, ‘It's all right. I've got him. You grab the beers. There's some vodka in the boxes. Couple of bottles should do it.'

The boxes moved. Glass clinked. I listened to their footsteps fade and waited ten more excruciating minutes before I pushed back the folded seat and wriggled up to peer through the window. Clouds covered the moon but the night wasn't pitch black like the night in Kabul and I didn't know whether to be relieved or disturbed to see I was on a stretch of waste ground by the canal and that
Meadowview was one of three light-sprinkled slabs in the distance. I scrambled into the front of the car, throwing aside cigarette cartons and sweet wrappers, searching for anything that might be useful. I got out on wobbly legs, struggling to stand, and gazed down the towpath. The boy was somewhere out there in the darkness with the freckled man, the passenger from the car and the three brothers. Five killers. All I had to save him with was a cigarette lighter I'd found shoved down the back of the driver's seat.