We Can Be Heroes (5 page)

‘You trying to shame me, bro?' Mik pushes him away.

‘You bring shame on yourself by fighting in the street,' says Shakeel.

‘So you'll let them insult your sisters, your family, your people. That's supposed to be honourable, is it?'

‘There are better ways of keeping our honour than this!' says Shakeel. As he says it, he touches his brother on the arm again and the two of them stare at each other for a moment.

Next to Shakeel, Mik looks really young and really angry. He shakes Shakeel's hand away.

‘Not worth getting my hands dirty for anyway!' he says, furious, turning away.

‘You can leave your sister here for us if you want,' says Tyreese. ‘I wouldn't mind a bit of that myself.' He laughs.

Mik swings round and is about to go for him, but Shakeel pulls him back, more forcefully this time. ‘Let them keep,' he says, speaking right into Mik's face now. ‘There are better ways to deal with this kind of scum than with your fists.'

But there's a look on Mik's face as his brother
drags him away – his clenched jaw, furrowed brow, the cartoon daggers flying out of his eyes – that makes me think this is not over for him. Not by a long way.

Somehow Priti manages to persuade Shakeel to let us get our sweets, despite the fact that a race riot is about to kick off at the parade, but he makes us go straight home after. Zara's mad at him, but Mik is even madder. As I watch him marching on ahead with Zara, I get the feeling Mik doesn't like having to do what his older brother tells him.

Priti and I hang at the back, munching on our sweets.

‘That was well cool back there, wasn't it?' she says, sucking a fizzy pink strawberry lace through her teeth.

‘Nothing like that happens where I come from,' I say.

‘No?' She turns and looks at me curiously. ‘Aren't there any Muslims where you live?'

‘What's that got to do with it?' I say.

‘Not sure,' she says, slurping in the last of her lace. ‘Aren't there?'

I think for a moment. ‘Not sure.'

‘People don't like Muslims much,' she says, trying to lick a stray bit of pink sugar from her nose with the tip of her tongue. ‘I don't think your 9/11 thing helped our image, to be honest.'

‘It's not my 9/11 thing,' I say.

‘You know what I mean. And they don't like the headscarves either.' She stretches up her tongue again, tantalisingly close to the sugar grains this time.

‘Why don't you wear one?' I ask.

‘Cos I'd look minging,' she says, scrunching her nose to try and shift the pink sugar closer to her mouth. ‘Zara reckons she's “emancipated”, but that basically means she thinks she's too cool for one.'

Priti stretches out her tongue one last time, without success. ‘Bum!' she says, wiping the sugar away with her sleeve. ‘I'm sure my tongue has shrunk!'

‘Why did Tyreese have a go at her?' I ask after a moment. This has been bothering me. If he's supposed to be her boyfriend, why did he let his mates talk about her like that?

‘It's like foreplay, I reckon,' says Priti. ‘Gets them both hot and steamy!'

‘Foreplay?'

Priti looks at me like I'm some kind of idiot. ‘You really don't know much, do you?' She shakes her head. ‘Zara's into the whole forbidden love thing. She reads too many of those soppy vampire romance novels, I reckon, so now she figures Tyreese is like one of those repressed bloodsuckers who gets off on seeing girls in danger. Which is a load of misogynist nonsense if you ask me, but you know what teenage girls are like.'

I imagine doodling fangs and a hooded cape on to Tyreese, drops of blood dripping inkily down his chin. I don't bother asking her what misogynist means.

We're nearly back at the close now and Priti is opening a packet of pink space dust. ‘Anyway, my dad says we're going to Pakistan for a holiday next year,' she says. ‘And you know what that means, don't you?'

I shake my head.

‘He's going to get Zara into a forced marriage. And maybe me too. Go on, ask me what a forced marriage is. I know you want to!' She pours space dust
on her tongue and keeps it out, watching the bright pink grains exploding.

‘What's a forced marriage?' I say, pulling a face.

‘He's gonna find some old, ugly bloke and make us marry him. Want some?' she says, offering me the space dust.

‘Are you sure?' I say. ‘Both of you?'

‘Not to the same bloke obviously.'

‘Obviously,' I reply.

‘That's why Zara's into the Tyreese thing. It's her last chance to mess up her own love life.'

‘So why doesn't she get to choose who she marries?'

‘Cos that's how it works, duh. Your dad chooses for you.'

‘Why not your mum?'

‘Patriarchal oppression!' Priti says solemnly, emptying more space dust into her mouth then giggling as it explodes.

‘Do you even know what that means?' I ask.

Priti licks her lips before saying, ‘I so do! It means the men get to decide everything and women are like
glorified slaves. Not that it's like that in our house. My parents have a marriage of equals – only my dad still blatantly reckons he gets to choose the husbands. Which is probably good because my mum'd be rubbish at choosing anyway. Psychiatrists are the
worst
judges of character.'

I'm about to ask why, but Priti doesn't give me a chance.

‘
And
my mum went to university,' she says. ‘Which no one is ever allowed to mention because my dad didn't. She wants me and Zara to be educated and have careers before we get married, so she's the one making us memorise the dictionary and learn speeches from the classics while my dad is off doing the whole matchmaker thing – although I bet she ends up getting the last word in that too, like she does about everything else. If you ask me, there's a lot of gender role reversal going on in our house!' Priti finishes, looking really pleased with herself, then runs her finger round the inside of the space-dust sachet to pick up any stray grains.

‘Does your mum really make you memorise the
dictionary?' I ask, imagining Priti with her head in a giant book, long words circling about and heaped up in piles all around her.

‘Yup. I have to learn ten new words a week. Then every Friday we have a spelling bee, with definitions and everything. And it can be any of the words I've learned over the last six months. Zara really hates it. She says it would be way cooler to fail all her GCSEs than know how to spell “phosphorescence”, but I reckon it just drives her nuts that I'm so much cleverer than her.' Priti swallows quickly and says, ‘It's not all bad though. My mum has some cool books that I get to read when she's not looking.'

‘What sort of books?' I ask.

‘About how all kids want to do it with their dad, and how all girls wish they had willies – which I totally don't agree with because willies are the most pointless, ugly little things. And I bet even
you
don't want to do it with your dad.'

‘Course not!' I say.

‘No, I reckon that'd probably be too weird even for my mum's books – maybe not though,' she says,
looking thoughtful. ‘Do you want to do it with your mum?' she asks, looking at me curiously.

‘No!' I say, angry at her for reminding me of my mum who I've been trying not to think about.

We're back at Priti's house now and she clambers up on the front wall and starts walking along it, arms akimbo, like she's on a tightrope. To change the subject, I say, ‘Can't your mum stop your dad from forcing Zara to get married then?'

‘Not if she finds out about Zara and Tyreese!' Priti replies, wobbling on her wheelies. ‘She'd rather see us not graduate than get knocked up by some random trash boy before we've finished school.' The way she says this reminds me of my grandad again. ‘Anyway, it's tradition. Your dad's supposed to decide who you go out with.'

‘Well, my mum's got a boyfriend and I know for a fact her dad didn't pick him out,' I say.

An image flashes up from the other morning: Gary helping my mum into the car on the day she left. She was wearing a fur coat, even though it was the middle of summer, and she was carrying a suitcase. That was
when I noticed that more of her beautiful hair had fallen out.

‘It's a Muslim thing,' says Priti, who is raising one leg then the other in the air as she walks. ‘I guess your mum didn't have to check with anyone before she started carrying on with this Gary bloke then?'

‘She asked me if I was OK with it.'

Another image: of my mum's face the morning she left. Red eyes, lipstick as dark as blackberries. Her lips mouthing the words, ‘Miss you, darling,' although no sound came out.

‘Really?' Priti looks surprised and abandons her performance for a moment. ‘What did you say?'

‘I said it was fine with me.'

‘And is it?'

‘I suppose so.'

‘That's cool!' Priti says. ‘You get to choose who your mum goes out with. I reckon I'd choose a wicked husband for my mum. One who dresses up as Elvis and knows how to make candyfloss and sticks his used bubblegum under the bed till it goes hard, and lets us have chips every day and go to sleep whenever we
want and wear wheelies to school and never do any homework!'

‘I didn't exactly get to choose,' I say, imagining a Willy Wonka Elvis with a quiff and a giant stick of candyfloss walking down the aisle with my mum.

‘No, but you still get to say if you don't like him, don't you?'

I'm not really sure that I do, but I don't bother trying to explain.

‘I guess my dad would have to die before I get a candyfloss Elvis,' Priti says thoughtfully.

‘Yeah, there is that.'

‘That'd be a bummer. Still, it'd be pretty cool to have a dad who could blow bigger bubbles than you. So how did your mum meet him then, this Gary?'

‘They met at the village fete committee,' I say.

‘That is so country!' says Priti. ‘Still, I suppose you don't have speed dating and Internet matchmakers in the sticks. Boy, am I glad I don't live in the country!'

‘My mum's on loads of committees,' I say defensively. ‘She's a pillar of the community.'

Actually, she's a serial committee member who
spends all her free time setting up trestle tables, decorating church halls, bulk-buying burgers and getting people to volunteer for things. Which is all great – I mean, I'm dead proud of her – but I don't get to see much of her. Well, I do, but only while we're both helping out with things. I've lost count of the number of times I've fallen asleep in the corner at a committee meeting or sat late in the headmistress's office because mum was running late from organising something or other.

‘She sounds pretty needy, if you ask me,' says Priti, tipped back on her wheelies now, but still balancing on the wall in a way that seems to defy gravity.

‘What's that supposed to mean?' I ask. I can feel my bag of sweets getting hot and sticky in my pocket and my face doing the same.

‘Anyone who volunteers that much clearly has a desperate need to be needed,' she says, authoritatively, like it's something she's read in another of her mum's books.

‘You've never even met her,' I say crossly, digging my hands deeper into my pockets.

‘OK, keep your hair on. I was only saying.' She's still tipped back at a precarious-looking forty-five degree angle, her arms folded across her chest.

‘Well, don't!'

I stare down at my feet and wonder if she's right. Before dad died, my mum was always ‘a willing volunteer', but not like she is now. Now her friends are always telling her she does too much, but she just laughs and says, ‘I know, but someone's got to do it.'

I wonder how all the committees are doing now she's in hospital. The parent-teacher association and the village fete committee and the gardeners' club and the Save the Post Office committee and all the rest? Will they fall apart without her? I wonder if she knows that I need her too.

‘OK, so why don't you tell me what she's really like then?' says Priti, tilting back and forth on her wheelies on the narrow strip of wall, staring down at her feet as she does so to make sure she doesn't fall off.

I hesitate. What else is there to say about my mum? ‘Um, she's called Hannah. She's thirty-nine years old,' I say, wrapping my fingers round the hot bag of
sweets in my pocket, feeling their shapes sticky against the paper. ‘She's pretty short and she has long hair down to her waist.' Little girl hair she calls it. It makes her look younger from the back than from the front. But I don't say that.

‘Yeah, but I mean, what's she
like
?' Priti glances up from her balancing act and nearly topples backwards, righting herself just in time. ‘Like, what does she do – when she's not picking up men at village fete committees, that is?'

I stare at my feet some more. I want to tell her that my mum can do anything – she can make a light sabre from a toilet roll or save a nest of baby birds that have been abandoned by their mother. But I don't. I say, ‘She's an artist.'

‘What sort of artist?'

‘She makes pictures of the countryside where we live to sell to tourists.' Then quickly, before Priti can interrupt again, I add, ‘But she has loads of other jobs too: she cooks these nut-free-gluten-free-meat-free-soya-free meals for a little girl down the road who's ill; she does some landscape gardening; she works as a PA
for a charity fundraiser and runs play-scheme projects for the council. And loads of other stuff too.'

‘Wow!' says Priti, tilting herself forwards on her toes one last time before launching herself off the wall and landing next to me with a clatter. ‘Maybe my mum's books are right,' she says with a triumphant grin.