Heartland Read Free

game! We doh care who pays for we shirts. Now yer really do sahnd like one o them.
    Look, I cor talk abaht it now, Uncle Jim. I’ll pop rahnd later any road, see if yer want anything doing.
    All right, son, I know yome onny tryin to do the right thing but –
    Somebody nicked me flag off me car. Con yer believe it?
    The front door’s gooin. I’ll atta move. More bad news, I bet yer. An doh talk to me abaht flags, mate. Wait till yer see em dahn here.
    Rob shook his head, continued to worry about his job. The school had a new Head Teacher. She’d started after Christmas and it was becoming clear that she had different ideas to the last Head, Mr Cummings, who’d retired. Rob’s position wasn’t secure. No contract, just sessional rates, and a vague agreement about what he was meant to be doing. It had been something to tide him over, something he’d drifted into during a difficult time, when Karen had left and he’d stopped playing football. Well, football that paid. He’d written all of his clubs down for one of the kids he worked with the other day: Cinderheath Juniors; the Villa as a trainee; Wrexham (in digs for a season in the rain); Kidder Harriers; Hereford; Aberystwyth (in digs for three months in the rain); Moor Green; a pre-season at the Wolves, somehow; Stourbridge; Gornal; Tipton; Marconi; Cinderheath Firsts and now Cinderheath Sunday.He’d spent twelve seasons making a long, steady slide into nonentity.
    He was packing it all in now, though, he promised; the farce against the mosque team was going to be his last game of football.
    He lit a cigarette to confirm his retirement. Rob was timetabled to support a Year 9 boy called Kelvin, which he enjoyed, but Kelvin hadn’t been at school for the last two weeks since he was found sniffing paint thinner in the Technology stock cupboard and sent home for a couple of days until his mother came up to school. The problem was, there was no contacting his mother, phone numbers dead, no response to any letter. Rob had banged on their flat door a couple of times, but there was no sign of life. The neighbour had said she hadn’t seen them for weeks and wasn’t missing them either, with the dog barking and the music and the parade of different men. Rob had written an email about it to the Head of Year and Educational Welfare. Nobody seemed to be moving very swiftly. Kelvin had said his nan lived up Kates Hill. Rob thought he could check somehow.
    When he’d been a kid at the school, Rob used to scramble over the fence just here, outside the fire escape next to the Sports Hall, and pull himself up the embankment with great big handfuls of grass to get to the pork sandwich shop or the chippie, exactly the same as the kids did now. They all used to do it – they’d have races up there. Adnan was always the quickest, of course, before he started getting on with his work instead of messing about like that, Rob at his heels, a pack of other kids behind them.
    As if on cue, there was a scuffle from behind the fire-exit door and three lads came bursting out, blinking in the sunlight.
    Shit! they shouted in unison, almost running straightinto Rob. They turned and ran back in, falling over each other, one of them sprawling across the shiny, just-polished corridor floor. The boy who fell was Rob’s cousin, Michael.
    Shit, did he see we? Michael giggled.
    Course I did, Michael, arr, Rob shouted through the swinging door. He’d been weighing up what to say at home because Michael had been out of lessons too much lately but, after all, his uncle had enough on his plate with the election.
    One of the boys dawdled in the corridor and turned back to stand in the doorway. It was Mohammed, cockier than the other two, than Michael certainly, who until recently had been happy to stay in his room tip-tapping on computer games. Michael and Mohammed had become mates lately. Mohammed was wearing a camouflage jacket from Bilston