If You Were Me by Sam Hepburn Read Free Book Online Page B

appliances, grabbed my phone and stumbled back to the basement, the freeze-frame of that bloodied face seared into my brain. I wanted to call the cops but how could I when my own dad was involved? Somehow I managed to lock the padlocks and sling a few oil drums across the door before I slid to the ground and lay there, hunched over on the cold concrete, my thoughts flipping back to the night of my fifth birthday. We’re in the crummy flat we had back then. I can hear Mum on the phone. She’s crying. That makes me angry. I’m the one who’s upset. I’m the one whose birthday Dad has missed. I run into the kitchen. She turns round, her face is red and blotchy and she squats down, opening her arms to me, smothering me in kisses. When she speaks her voice is jumpy, as if she’s struggling to breathe, and she says, ‘I swear to you, Danny, your Dad’s never going miss your birthday again. Not ever. And when he comes home, we’ll have a specialday out to make up for it. Just the three of us.’ Then she gets down the calendar and we count the days till he’ll be back. Every single one of them, and I’m feeling proud because it’s the first time I’ve ever counted to one hundred and twenty-two. That’s what he’s got left of the nine-month sentence he’s serving for receiving stolen goods. They’d gone easy on him because it was a first offence, but it seems like a lifetime to us, and when Mum hugs me again, her tears wet my cheek.
    Only they weren’t Mum’s tears I could feel – they were mine, and I wasn’t sitting at the table holding a chunk of birthday cake and looking at a calendar. I was lying in a freezing basement staring into blackness and wondering what the hell Dad had got himself mixed up in. He’d be setting off, any minute, him and Jez. I had to get the keys back before he discovered they were missing. I picked myself up and started to run.



ALIYA
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    T hey came while we were sleeping. An angry swarm of policemen, smashing the door down with a bright-orange battering ram, pointing their guns at us and ordering us to ‘Freeze!’ Black boots, black gloves, black helmets and angry eyes staring through plastic visors. My mother didn’t make a sound. She just stood in the middle of her bedroom, wrapped in her long white shawl, looking more like a ghost than ever. A video camera swung past my face. Someone jerked my hands up my back and clamped my wrists with tight metal cuffs. They were doing the same to my mother, leading her to the door. Mina ran to me and clung to my legs. I couldn’t reach her, I couldn’t move my hands. I shouted at the men in black, ‘What do you want? What do you want? Where are youtaking my mother?’
    They acted as if I was invisible, kicking open doors, pulling food from our cupboards, tipping out the rubbish pail from under the sink. There were dogs with them, straining on leashes, scrabbling down the hall, sniffing and whining at the floorboards in the bathroom. The relief of knowing the gun wasn’t there was swallowed by a terrible certainty. They would never send this many dogs and this many people to look for one small gun. They were searching for something else. I told myself over and over it was all a mistake and everything would be all right once they’d spoken to Behrouz. So why was the dark coldness squeezing my throat so tightly that I couldn’t even scream when they prised Mina’s arms from my legs and carried her away?
    One of the figures in black was a woman. She threw a blanket around my shoulders, dropped my sandals at my feet and hustled me downstairs, fingers tight on my arm. My feet slapped on the damp concrete. The blanket smelt bad and I felt ashamed to be outside in my nightclothes. She wouldn’t answer my questions. I felt her hand pressing on my head as she pushed me into a waiting police car. The car roared away. I