o’clock tomorrow morning,’ she said, looking past him and returning my angry, gum-chewing scowl with the calm stare of someone enjoying their little moment of power.
I could see that she was wondering what such a young-looking boy was doing travelling on his own and having his ticket bought for him by a middle-aged Asian man. It obviously struck her as strange. My heart was thumping and I was poised to run if she went to press an alarm button or pick up a phone to call the police. I felt so close to escaping, and the thought of having to hang around the cold station all night made me shiver. The disdain that she was showing towards Mohamed was stoking my anger back up again.
‘Can I buy a ticket for tomorrow then?’ Mohamed persevered.
‘Are you travelling alone?’ she asked me, ignoring him completely. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Course I’m all right,’ I snarled back angrily. ‘Look, woman, are you going to give us this ticket or not?’
All the boys in the homes I had been in talked like that to virtually everyone. We all wanted to sound like the black guys we met on the streets. We wanted to mimic their easy confidence and cheek in the face of authority. I expect we all sounded as foolish as Ali G suggested when he turned our patter into a comic character. I guess the ticket lady lost interest in my welfare at that moment, deciding I was a nasty piece of work and could look after myself for all she cared, because she passed the ticket over and took Mohamed’s money.
‘Enjoy your trip,’ she said to me.
I glanced back as we walked away and saw that she was watching us go, obviously still curious about what our story might be, perhaps not certain that she had done the right thing by issuing the ticket. Maybe she had grandsons my age.
My next worry was how to get through a night on the station without being picked up by the police. I was still worried that Mum’s neighbours might have reported the damage I’d done to the house, and once the police started checking me out they would pretty soon put two and two together. Thanks to Mohamed I now had my ticket to the promised land of Charing Cross; I just needed to stay out of sight for the next ten or so hours. I had a feeling that Mohamed had been as offended by the woman’s suspicions as I had, but he didn’t say anything as we walked back out to his taxi, both of us wondering what to do next. It was as if I had become his responsibility now.
‘What are you going to do tonight, Joe?’ he asked eventually.
‘Find somewhere to wait, I suppose,’ I said with a shrug, trying to look as if I wasn’t bothered.
I guess he was worried about what would happen to me if he left me on the street, but equally he was nervous about giving the wrong impression by asking me if I wanted to go back to his place. We were both stuck in a strange, polite sort of limbo.
‘Don’t misunderstand me, please, Joe,’ he said eventually, ‘but why don’t you come back to my flat for something to eat while you think about what to do next?’
All my instincts flared up and warned me to be wary. I knew from bitter and painful experience how foolish it could be to go to a strange place with a man I knew nothing about. But at the same time the option of being picked up by the police seemed worse. He appeared to be a genuinely kind man and he wasn’t being pushy or creepy in any way. I decided it was a chance worth taking.
‘OK,’ I said, shrugging, as if it was I who was agreeing to do him a favour, rather than the other way round.
We climbed back into the car and as we drove I picked up a book that was lying next to the seat.
‘What’s this?’ I asked, wanting to make conversation and break the awkwardness of the moment.
‘It is the Qu’ran,’ he said. ‘The Holy Book. I am a Muslim.’
‘That’s where you’re from?’ I asked, having no idea what he was talking about.
‘No,’ he said, smiling. ‘It is my religion. I am a Muslim Brother.’
My ignorance was so total that I stayed silent, unable to think what to say next without sounding stupid. He must have realized that I knew nothing and spent the rest of the trip trying to explain it to me. By the time we got to his flat I was lost in new thoughts as I tried to make sense of what he was telling me about his God and his beliefs. I liked the fact that he talked to me as if we were just friends, not like an adult with a difficult kid, which was the tone I was used to hearing in other people’s voices.
‘My wife and I are getting a divorce,’ he explained as he opened the door to his flat. ‘So I have only just moved into this place. Our marriage was arranged for us by our families and we were not suited. My family are all very angry with me for leaving.’
It was a cold, empty-feeling place with a musty, damp smell oozing from the shabby walls and worn carpet. There was hardly any furniture apart from a strangely old-fashioned record player housed in a wooden cabinet. There was no television or radio to break the silence of the little rooms. He explained that everything he owned he had left in the family house with his wife. The only decorations in sight were the pictures of the small children he had left behind in exchange for this bleak place. He saw me looking at the photographs and began to tell me about them, his face glowing with pride.
‘You want to listen to some music?’ he asked, gesturing towards the record player.
‘OK.’
He pulled out an Elvis record and started dancing wildly round the flat, encouraged by my laughter to ever greater heights as he mimed to the words, eager to entertain me. I recognized the songs because my dad had been a big Elvis fan and used to play the songs in the car on the days when he drove me around to keep me out of Mum’s way. The music was embedded in my head as firmly as the images of Dad burning to death in front of my eyes. It unlocked happy memories of our short time together but also reminded me of the cold horror of his love being snatched so cruelly away from me so young, the only love I had ever known.
When the song ‘My Boy’ came on, the surge of emotion took me by surprise. Images of my father and me together in the car, of sitting with him in the garage while he worked and of watching him running around in flames in front of me became overwhelming, and my laughter at Mohamed’s wild antics turned to a choking sensation in my throat as I struggled not to cry. Dad used to play that song to me all the time, over and over again, telling me I was his boy. It was ‘our song’.
The harder I fought to hold back the tears the more overwhelmed I felt by the emotions that the song unleashed in me. Mohamed stopped in the middle of his dancing, shocked to see that my tears of laughter had turned so suddenly to misery.
‘What is the matter, Joe?’ he wanted to know. ‘Have you hurt yourself?’
‘It’s the song,’ I said, not trusting myself to be able to explain any more than that.
‘I’ll turn it off. I’ll turn it off.’
‘No,’ I said, not wanting to reject the memories of Dad and be left back in the awkward silence. ‘I want to listen to it.’
‘Not good song?’ Mohamed asked, obviously worried that he had upset me.
‘It’s memories. My dad’s song.’
As I listened to the rest of the track and cried, Mohamed stood beside me and put his hand on my shoulder until it was over.
‘You want to listen to it again?’
‘Yeah,’ I nodded, no longer trying to hide the tears, wiping my running nose on my sleeve.
‘I will go and make us some food while you listen,’ he said, putting the track back on and disappearing out to the kitchen to leave me alone with my memories.
‘No more Elvis,’ Mohamed announced when he came back into the room a few minutes later. ‘I am making us a nice curry.’
As the smell of cooking drifted into the room and my saliva glands started to work, I realized that I was really hungry. I had