Heartland by Anthony Cartwright Read Free Book Online Page A

of the other volunteers when she’d worked in Ghana, but this was different.
    Matt had grown up near Riverway and his family had followed the general eastward drift – parents retired now in Canvey; his ex-wife and girls in Hornchurch – but there was something about the area he couldn’t give up. Even at the cost of his marriage. Back then she thought that was committed, romantic even. Now she wasn’t so sure.
    But you can’t measure what difference it makes, she’d say to him. Because you can’t measure all the times someone doesn’t drown in the docks, or pick up a knife, or get themselves pregnant after you’ve said something to them. There are other people responsible for them as well as you, you know. They’ve got some responsibility for themselves. He’d shrug and nod but then carry on as before. And she loved that in him. At first, of course.
    Jasmine didn’t go down to the docks again, preferred to look from the classroom’s big windows, watching the arc of the bodies, little flashes of life against the steel and glass, the water and concrete. Some of them were boys whom she taught – it was all boys and young men – clumsy, inarticulate, angry in school; she wondered whatwent through their minds. She’d even asked one of them, Freddie Barber, who she knew went down there with his string of brothers, who looked like he’d walked out of the
Oliver Twist
poster, but he was tongue-tied, just shrugged, looked blank, said it felt good. She hadn’t pursued it. Maybe that’s what it was, a few moments of grace, something that felt good, and then a blankness.
    She knew what was coming next with these thoughts. Maybe if all the things Matt said near the end hadn’t been so corrosive, if he hadn’t been quite so arrogant, so convinced that the fate of Riverway’s kids, some of them damaged and dangerous long before he came across them, was so utterly in his hands, maybe if he’d agreed that they move in together, instead of the ridiculous set-up they’d had, then perhaps, perhaps, when she’d run into Adnan, she wouldn’t have been quite so reckless herself.
    Matt betrayed himself – putting school first was a way of hiding from other responsibilities. She betrayed Matt; Adnan betrayed her. The way these thoughts ran: the jumpers from the towers, a rain of people on to the streets below and then a rain of concrete, steel and glass. Dust and ashes, silence and absence. Where was he? Why hadn’t Adnan kept his word?
    She thought, of course, that he was somewhere there, underneath the rubble, buried, interred, but she also knew that if she kept working away at these thoughts, in the way she was smoothing the edges of these posters, the way she picked the flesh from around her thumbnails, some other certainty would creep into her thoughts – like a change of light, like a drifting cloud of ash – the certainty that he was somewhere else altogether. The cold, hard fact that a person who could walk out of a life once, without leaving a trace, could do the same again. Maybe one day would have to do the same again.
    Before it got too bad, she imagined her mother’s voice,kind and stern, Come on, love, and she laid out the posters and crumbling masks, pulled herself from the chair and opened the library door, off to get some Blu-tack and drawing pins and get back to work.
    They had a throw. Zubair took it, the first time he’d touched the ball. His belly was sticking out over the top of shorts that were pulled up way too far, like the way the old men who stood at the bar at the Lion wore their trousers. Rob wanted to laugh, suddenly. A couple of girls – women – from down Juniper Close gave Zubair a shout. One of them was Kyle Woodhouse’s girlfriend, he thought. Zubair, with the ball resting on the flat of his hand, gave them that look that he’d always had, just staring, a raised eyebrow,