name Imran Siddiqui mean anything to you?’
I sat back in my chair and measured the question. Yeah, that name meant something to me, but I wasn’t quite sure what. Imran, or Imy as I knew him, used to knock about with this stoner, Shaz, and on occasion when I was juggling, they’d pick up off me at the back of the Homebase car park, Isleworth. Some shit-talk and that was it, everyone on their merry way. Once I quit dealing, I didn’t see much of either of them.
Until one day Imy tried to fucking assassinate me.
From what little I found out, Imran Siddiqui was a sleeper agent for the terrorist cell, Ghurfat-al-Mudarris, and when said terrorist cell slapped a fatwa on my head, it was on him to carry it out. He couldn’t go through with it, though. Living in London, in Hounslow, had softened him, I guess. The fuck do I know!? All I know is that I was looking down the barrel of a gun and then I wasn’t.
‘What about him?’ I asked, drained all of a sudden. All that optimism dissipated out of me.
‘Do you know him?’ Idris said, one fucking word at a time, like I was a child.
‘I’ve seen him around,’ I shrugged. ‘Way back when, when I was hustling, he used to pick up a little weed off me… You going to tell me what’s on your mind, Idris?’
‘You haven’t seen him since?’
I wasn’t about to give it up that easily.
‘Yeah, knocking around town, probably. Fuck, man, what’s with the questions?’
‘He got married… Last week.’
I shrugged. ‘Yeah?’ The lights dimmed above me as the DJ took his place behind the booth, a ripple of excitement from the few early ravers. ‘Good for him,’ I said. ‘What’s that got to do with me?’
The DJ spun his first track, a Christmas classic remixed with a jaunty Euro-trash beat. Idris leaned in over the table so he could be heard over the music. I didn’t know what he was going to say but I had a feeling I didn’t want to hear it. I moved back even further in my seat and crossed my arms as I willed my knee to stop hammering under the table. He inclined with his head for me to join him at the middle of the table. I sighed, leaned in and met him there, our foreheads almost touching.
‘Ten days ago, there was an attack at his wedding reception,’ he said. ‘A bomb went off,’ he fucking said.
I used to have this itch. I’d scratch it and it would appear elsewhere. I’d scratch there. Then somewhere else. It would leave me with scrapes and grazes all over my head and body. At times I would break skin and bleed. It was a condition brought on by stress. Brought on by knowing with certainty that one day my past would catch up with me and destroy all those that I cared about.
I no longer have that itch. I no longer have that stress. My past caught up with me.
His name was Rafi Kabir, and at ten years old he was a child desperately trying to be a man. He reminded me of myself at that age, dripping in poison and ready to infect the whole world for a belief shared by millions but no longer by me. From the first time that I’d set eyes on him, I knew that he had the will to one day achieve what I never could.
I’d only spent a short time in his company, but Rafi often crossed my mind. The cocksure smile, the bravado, as though, at ten, he had it all worked out. Spitting out words with raw intention, the vicious promise to kill for his people, when at that age, his people should have been running around a playground, and not a battlefield.
But that’s not how he was brought up. He was a product of his environment. His father, his brother and his mother, all had a part to play in polluting an innocent mind with sick thoughts.
I had walked away from him, desperately relieved that he would never cross my path again, and I would never again have to look at the hatred in his eyes.
Life has a way about it, though.
An uninvited guest at my wedding. Standing beside my son, Jack, my wife, Stephanie, and my Khala. Waiting, just waiting for the right moment for me to notice him, acknowledge him. With guests in my ear, hands out for me to shake, and pats on my back, I noticed him.
I noticed the detonator, too big in his small hands.
My eyes moved hungrily over my family, one last time. I was too far away to save them but close enough to see the smiles on their faces. They were the happiest I had ever seen.
It’s how I would remember them.
My Khala was like a mother to me. I buried her the day after she’d been killed. As a Muslim, it had to be that way. Then I waited ten days locked away at home, lying on my side, staring through a small gap in the curtains as it shifted continuously from darkness to light to darkness. I ignored the knocks on the door, the phone calls and the well-wishers, and mourned them just as I had once mourned my parents. But I was older now, stronger, no longer a boy. And I had nothing or nobody left to lose.
On the tenth day, I put on the same black tie and suit and buried Stephanie, my wife only for a day, and Jack, my son. He would have turned six that day. We’d planned to celebrate on the beach in the Maldives, a joint celebration of our marriage, his birthday, and a future that I had been foolish to present to them. I had ripped the tickets into the smallest of shreds and then Sellotaped them back together and placed them in the inside pocket of my suit jacket.
I stood alone at the side of the graves, the rest of the mourners stood away on the other side. To them I was damaged, a disease, someone to steal glances at and blame. Stephanie’s mother and father would have stood by my side, but they too had been murdered on our wedding day.
Somebody, I don’t know who, had hired out an old tavern for the wake. And somebody, I don’t know who, said a few words. The mourners, who had been guests at our wedding, sat and listened in grim silence, surrounded with cheap Christmas decorations, knowing how close they themselves had come to death. They drank, they ate, they whispered, they stared. I felt the blame directed at me and accepted every judgement. They walked away, leaving me on my own with ringing messages of consolation and promises of support. It meant nothing to me. They meant nothing to me. I’d never see them again.
Last to leave, I walked out of the tavern and into the early evening darkness that the winter brings. My Prius sat alone in the small car park, a thin layer of snow melting away as the weather changed to a cold rain.
I unlocked the car and lifted the boot. From under the spare tyre I picked up a roll of plastic food bags, a handful of elastic bands, and a Glock .40-calibre handgun and suppressor. I pushed the boot shut and sat in my car, placing the items on the driver’s seat. I started the car and as I waited for it to warm up I felt a presence outside.
My hand reached across and instinctively I gripped the cold steel barrel of my gun and turned to look outside my window. A figure wrapped up in a black puffa and a woolly Raiders hat that I recognised, ambled slowly and uneasily towards me, each step more tentative than his last. I dropped the gun on the seat and placed my hands on my lap.
Shaz was the only other person left in this world that I cared about. But the cards had been dealt and turned over and he had walked away from my life without a goodbye. Because of who I was. Because of what I had brought into his life.
We watched each other for a moment through the driver’s side window, replaying the same events in our minds. I had once hurt him and I hadn’t seen him since. I blinked away the memory and slid down the window.
‘I’m… I’m so sorry.’ He said the words I should have said to him a long time