Guantanamo Boy (7 page)

“You lost?” he says in a broad Liverpool accent. Khalid is shocked. The man winks. “I know how you feel, mate. This place is a madhouse. Me name’s Jim.”

“Khalid. Hi.” He blinks, surprised. “How come you speak Urdu?”

“I’m studying Eastern languages in London. Plus I’m a genius, like all Liverpudlians. Can’t you tell?” Jim laughs and Khalid immediately warms to his friendly smile.

“Yeah, mate, whatever you say,” Khalid jokes in reply.

Relieved to find someone who can help him, Khalid wanders with him through the bazaar as it fills with people and Jim tells him about his trip to Pakistan with two mates who are also students in London.

“My friend Mohammed invited me here for the holidays and I thought,
Why not?
At any rate, it gives us a chance to speak the language. Know what I mean? You’re a bit bleary-eyed, mate. You OK?”

“I got some dirt in my eye.” Khalid explains about the demonstration, his dad not coming home, plus the fact he’s never been into the city until now. “That’s why I’ve got this address, although I have no idea where the place is.”

“You’re looking for your dad? What are you going to do if you don’t find him?”

“Dunno.” The same question had occurred to Khalid when he left the house.

“Look, I can take you to this flat. But I suggest if he’s not there you scarper home and wait for news. If you want some good advice, don’t go near the police without a group of male friends and then always cooperate with them fully. Answer any questions. Do ya hear?”

Khalid nods. “Can’t I trust the police, then?”

“Let’s just say there’s loads of backhanders going round this city.” Jim frowns. “Drug-trafficking and the like and plenty of CIA blokes paying out for supposed al-Qaeda suspects.”

“Just like my nearest city, Manchester, then?” Khalid laughs.

Jim grins but his smile quickly fades. “They’re obsessed with finding dirty bombs,” he explains. “Men are disappearing all over the place.”

Khalid thinks back to his conversations with Nasir and Tariq. “Not my dad, though. He’s a Westernized Pakistani. He doesn’t even like it here—only wants to help his sisters move house.”

Jim shakes his head. “Everybody from a Muslim country is seen as a threat to the USA right now.”

Something about the way he says this makes Khalid feel suddenly more anxious than ever. If only he can find his dad and get back to Rochdale and their normal lives.

After ten minutes, they come to a small block of flats. Jim leads the way up narrow concrete stairs to the top floor. With a firm hand he bangs on the door of Flat 26, looking round for signs of life. Then he peers into a small window hardly bigger than an envelope while Khalid waits anxiously for his dad to answer the door.

There’s nothing but silence and a moldy apple core on the dusty concrete floor at Khalid’s feet.

“Doesn’t look good,” Jim says before shouting in Urdu at the top of his voice. The door to Flat 25 next door opens in slow motion. Locks and bolts click and slide before an elderly man peers out an inch. He eyes them suspiciously.

“
Salaam!
” Jim rushes to greet him while he has the chance. Quickly explaining about Khalid’s dad. Pointing to Flat 26.

The watchful old man takes his time to reply, as if not certain that Jim’s telling the truth. A feeling of dread spreads over Khalid as the man looks them up and down, then spits. He stares hard with suspicious eyes, even as Jim speaks to him in the local dialect. Finally he answers quickly, then shuts the door. Bolting and locking it as fast as he can. His footsteps hurry down the creaking floor as if he can’t wait to get away from them.

Jim turns to Khalid and holds up his hands. “Sorry, mate. I tried. He said there’s no one at the flat. Some rich bloke owns it, wants to rent it out. He thinks someone might have banged on the door last night but he’s not sure.”

Khalid closes his eyes and breathes out. Like he’s been holding his breath the whole time. Without saying anything, he peers in the small window of the flat to see nothing but a small hall with red tiles and a pile of unopened mail on the coir mat. “I guess he’s not here, then,” he says eventually.

They walk back together, Khalid in silence with a heavy heart and Jim talking non-stop about a girl he likes called Carla, an archaeology student he’s madly in love with. Trying in his own way to make Khalid feel better by distracting him from the disappointment.

“You know how it is when you like a girl, you can’t get her out of your mind,” Jim says, smiling. He leads Khalid down a side street to avoid the market and the demonstration, which has grown even larger. But the rhythm of men chanting and yelling, and a car screeching to a halt nearby, fire rockets of unimaginable fear and panic through Khalid with every step.

Dad? Dad?
Terrified he’ll never see him again, a sudden smell of woodsmoke overwhelms Khalid. His thoughts, his feelings and senses are out of his control. Unless Dad’s at
home when he gets there, his life will be turned upside down.

A strange numbness sets in as Khalid walks the dusty road, drifting between noise and silence. Jim’s voice takes him to the edge of a cliff and then back again, the pointless chatter sounding as if it’s coming from the bottom of a deep cave somewhere.

“She’s amazing. Know what I mean?” Jim says.

“Yeah.” Khalid hasn’t got the energy to smile. The words
She’s amazing
—
amazing
—
Yeah
zip past in a circle above his head, while the terrible thought his dad might be dead squeezes a clamp around his heart. They walk in silence for a few moments and for some reason Khalid’s mind shoots back to a day last September, when he and Niamh were sitting together under an oak tree in the park. And even though Holgy was pulling faces at him all the while and Nico was throwing sticks at the bench, Niamh told him about her plans to become a lawyer and live in New York. About how she was going to get out of Rochdale the moment she could, because her mum was driving her crazy after the divorce.

“Will you have to marry a Muslim girl?” Niamh asked.

“I can marry who I like,” he’d said. Not wanting to get into this. Thinking,
Should I tell her if she isn’t a Muslim she can convert? Loads do.

“Mum says it’s better if I marry a Catholic. Hah, she had to marry one—and look where that got her. Anyway, we’re past all that now, aren’t we, Kal, us? Thanks for listening.” Jumping up when the ice-cream van sounded its silly tune at the park gates.

“Are you in the mood for an ice cream?”

“Er—no. Yeah, OK!” Khalid remembers how he grinned. Sitting there like a lost puppy until she came back with two double whips. Silently praying she’d sit next to him again, which she never did.

Five days after the party, when he last saw her, he already felt bad. They went to Karachi, and now Dad’s gone missing he feels even worse. Perhaps he should have warned him about the kidnappings and stuff that Nasir, the shopkeeper, had told him about.

Jim stops suddenly. “That’s your aunties’ road, yeah? Didn’t you say it was this street?”

“Yeah. Yeah. They live at 74A.” Khalid nods.

Jim stares at him. “Are you OK? Do you want me to come and speak to your family with you?”

Khalid shakes his head, knowing that a stranger in the house will just make things worse when he gets home without Dad.

“OK, well, see you, then. Bet your dad’s already home,” Jim says with little confidence. “Here’s my mobile number if you need anything. Look after yourself, OK?”

“Thanks a lot,” Khalid says finally. He wants to say more, like how he couldn’t have found the flat without him, or spoken to the old man in the next-door flat, but he’s worried if he talks too much he’ll start crying or something. Jim understands and just grins a show of affection as Khalid turns and heads down his street. Raising a hand to wave goodbye in a half-hearted way.

As soon as Jim’s out of sight something snaps inside Khalid and he runs as fast as his legs will carry him, arriving at the house in a gasping, dusty, hot heap. Adrenaline makes his head swim with a thousand awful pictures of Dad hurt, bleeding, kidnapped, shot, and he becomes convinced the instant he opens the door that Dad isn’t back.

When the sound of a passing, rumbling truck dies down, Khalid prepares himself by taking a deep breath of fried garlic and cumin.

There’s an oasis of silence and peace inside the house as the door closes. The dark wall-hangings create a sense of cave-like gloom. Though his temporary home is familiar, it provides no comfort to Khalid as he pauses to gaze through the open door of the dark back room to see Uncle Amir curled up, asleep as usual, in the far corner.

Everyone else, he can tell, is in the other room, listening hard. Knowing it’s Khalid by the way he kicks off his sandals before he heads towards them with hesitant steps.

Looking round at the sea of questioning faces, Khalid thinks that the whole neighborhood seems to have crammed itself into the living room. There’s barely space on the small tables for another bowl of sugar cubes or cup of half-drunk coffee. He suddenly has no idea where to start. All at once, hundreds of inquiring voices fire questions at him in Urdu and Punjabi, neighbors and distant relatives crowding round him. The aunties wring their hands, sobbing. Mum stands in the corner, wailing. Gul and Aadab, pale and shaken, are close to screaming.

“I dunno where Dad is,” Khalid says when everyone eventually falls silent. He goes over the chain of events as quickly as possible, not bothering to mention the demonstration and the hordes of angry men he’d come across.

The moment Khalid finishes, leaving people none the wiser, everyone begins sounding off with their own ideas and gesturing to heaven for help. A stream of desperate prayers begins to flow from their downturned mouths. No one notices Khalid slip away to grab a glass of water, wash his dusty face and hands and flop on the kitchen floor. At last, he gets to sit on his own in a state of total disbelief at his useless, wasted search.

He is tired out of his mind, head spinning from too many hours without rest. The wooden ceiling fan seems to loom over him as he builds a nest of red cushions on the floor, their gold tassels swinging as he lies down. Soon falling under the gentle hypnosis of the fan’s whirring and faint clicks, he enjoys a moment’s peace until people begin coming and going, stepping over him. Clattering cups, brewing coffee, whispering, trying not to be noisy, even though they can see he’s not asleep.

In the end their constant interruptions force Khalid to get up again. He pads back to the living room, where Gul and Aadab stare from one sad face to another, wondering if anyone will notice if they eat the rest of the sugar cubes in the green glass bowl. Gul reaches to grab a handful and pass some to Aadab. Both try hard to enjoy the cloying sweetness while pretending not to be eating anything and, along with Khalid, gaze sadly at Mum. Fatima and Roshan stand with their backs to them at the window, looking out. Aunt Rehana listens blank-faced to a neighbor who’s brought a pot of honey and some walnuts to cheer them up.

Everyone is in the same state of lonely grief, only half here in this room, their minds overloaded with stories they’ve read in the papers about people who’ve gone missing and are later found dead from bomb blasts, accidents, murders. It’s easy to think the worst here.

Later, after a few hours tossing and turning in bed, Khalid gets up. He moves quickly, pulling on his jeans, hurrying to hear what’s happened. Peeping into the living room, he sees the same faces, feels the same hopelessness, and steps back. Rushing instead to the computer cupboard, where he half expects an e-mail from someone, anyone, who might be able to tell him what’s happened to Dad.

He opens the door and is amazed to find Abdullah on the computer. “What are you doing here?”

“What do you mean?” Abdullah clicks on the corner of the page he’s looking at so it disappears. Quickly turns to face Khalid with a calm, unsurprised smile.

“That’s our computer,” Khalid stutters.

“I have permission from the family to use this, but I have finished with it now so you may continue your game,” Abdullah says in his annoying formal English and scrapes the chair back.

The thought flashes through Khalid’s mind that he’s never told him about Tariq’s game, but then anyone could see what he’s been doing online because he didn’t log off the last time he used the computer. From now on, he’ll log off each time and shut it down properly.

“Don’t worry. I am not interested in what you are doing on the World Wide Web. I am not a spy,” Abdullah says, reading his mind. “Myself, I am only reading the newspapers, as I have always done. My brother and my sister’s husband, they come here to do the same. We have not been doing this for some days because your family are here. I was looking to see if there was any news of your father.” He stands up and walks off, leaving Khalid standing there, unable to say anything back.

He feels guilty for a moment, but quickly forgets as he checks his e-mails. There are three: one from Tariq, suggesting the time to play
Bomber One
tonight; one from Nico, rambling on about how he’s downloaded a bunch of songs for free on his MP3 player; plus one from a kid at school called Jamie, who’s doing his history coursework on Galileo too.