Guantanamo Boy Read Free Page B

food, but that’s as far as the Muslim religion goes in Khalid’s family. Dad was brought up in Karachi, Pakistan. His father, who is now dead, owned a furniture shop there and Dad was the last child born to his mother, when she was thirty-nine years old. His three sisters are much older than him and only the oldest is married, so the others live with her and her husband.
    “Those whispering ninnies!” Dad calls them. He doesn’t like them much and hardly ever mentions them.
    “Your dad’s just like my grandpa,” Nico says. “Always telling you to straighten your shirt and comb your hair before you leave the house. As if anyone cares about that stuff any more!”
    Whenever Khalid sees Nico on the street, he’s wearing a black T-shirt and blue low-riders, eating a bag of chips. Always grinning like a lunatic, as if he’s just seen something mad. Nico’s a mate but he’s also the main supplier of alcohol to kids in the area. Being lucky enough to have an eighteen-year-old brother, Pete, who looks just like him, Nico only has to flag up his brother’s ID at the local store to buy crates of beer, which he then sells at inflated prices. Why he spends so much on chips, Khalid can’t understand. But then Nico always has an answer.
    “Eating chips, drinking beer and nailing those steroid heads in the park, how’s that for a brilliant life, eh, mate?” His deep laugh sounds more like a barking dog than a fifteen-year-old boy, which makes Khalid laugh too. Nico’s never mentioned nailing Muslims and Khalid doubts he ever will. He’s not that kind of kid. None of his mates are. They don’t see color, race or religion, any stuff like that. And the kids they call the steroid heads are a bunch of eleven- and twelve-year-olds with shaved heads who live on the estate behind the school and get their kicks from acting hard and bullying old ladies.
    “You finished your homework?” Mum’s back in the kitchen and watching Khalid out of the corner of her eye as she makes a cup of mint tea.
    “Yeah. Think I’ll go round Nico’s for a bit to talk about the match tomorrow.”
    Mum’s mouth twitches as she sits down at the table with a magazine. “Ask Dad first, Khalid. I don’t like that cocky boy!”
    “Mum! Nico’s top of the class in math and his brother’s at Manchester Uni doing electrical engineering. Dad says you don’t get much cleverer than that.”
    “All the same, there’s something strange about him. I don’t care what you say.”
    “Yeah, yeah, whatever!” Khalid kisses her on the cheek, pretending to be interested for a moment in her World of Cross-Stitching magazine. The sudden smell of her jasmine perfume catches him before, quick as a flash, he grabs his cool blue cap and dashes out.
    “Wait a minute, son!” Dad lifts his head from under the hood of Mac’s old Ford Fiesta as Khalid scoots past. “You can’t go out in your school clothes. You’ll wreck them.”
    Khalid puts on his innocent face. “I’m only going to Nico’s to check some math—a few equations and that.”
    For some reason this makes Mac laugh.
    “When I was your age we didn’t go round bothering our heads about math and footie when the streets were packed with girls.”
    Dad sighs. He hates Mac passing on advice like this to Khalid. But at fifty-four Mac is always that bit out of touch, so Dad doesn’t need to worry that Khalid is listening to him properly. Khalid tries to imagine what it would be like for Mac to hang round with his mates in the park, see what life is really like now.
    “Aye, you couldn’t move for hotties round our way!” Mac laughs to himself.
    “Yeah? Cool!” Khalid grins, wandering off. “See you later.”
    At the end of the road, Khalid rolls back his shirt cuffs, pulls his school trousers low until they sag, turns right, then second left and cuts through the cul-de-sac to the park. Once there, he runs past the swings. Straight to the spot by the oak trees where everyone hangs out on the