Heartland Read Free Page A

Market with ‘US Army’ written on a panel on the front. All the kids were wearing them. Rob had heard Michael ask his Aunty Pauline for one. She’d said he had a perfectly good Nike jacket she’d bought for him at the Merry Hill and what did he want one off the market for? Mohammed had customized his with a green star and crescent drawn in permanent marker on the sleeve.
    All right, Rob?
    All right, Mo. What yow doin aht here?
    Doh say nuthin, Rob.
    I woh if yow goo back to yer lesson.
    Let me goo to the shop?
    No.
    Giss a fag, Rob.
    No.
    Why?
    Yow ay old enough an cigarettes am bad for yer.
    I got me own.
    Mohammed took a lighter from his pocket and flicked it on and off.
    Yer doh need one o these, then.
    Footballers shunt smoke.
    I ay a footballer.
    Yer was a footballer.
    Was is different.
    Am yer play in against the mosque?
    I am.
    Mosque’s gonna beat yer, man.
    Probly.
    They got some sick players.
    Good.
    They’m gonna beat yer, man. You know Tayub?
    Arr.
    Yeah, you know him? He’s a sick player, man.
    He’s quick. Me an his brother, Adnan, we used to play in the same team, we went all through school together. And his brother, Zubair. He’s me mate. He’s a good player. Too old now, though.
    Rob grinned, thinking about Zubair. I’ve still got a season left in me, he’d said every summer for the last three or four years.
    Adnan the mujahedin, Mohammed said.
    What did yer say?
    Nuthin. Yow shunt play for them racists, man.
    I cor play for the mosque.
    Yow should become a Muslim, Rob, play for Man United.
    I’ll think abaht it. Goo back to yer lesson.
    Rob could’ve told him that he’d played against Man United once. He’d marked Ryan Giggs, not long after he changed his name from Wilson, not long before he got in the first team. Rob had played well, really well, one of those games, like he knew what was going to happen before it did, so he was always there, tackles, headers, interceptions. Just near the end he’d nicked it off Giggs’s toes, hit apass out to Froggatt’s feet. There’d been a round of applause from the few hundred on the sides. Everyone shook his hand and slapped him on the back at full-time. He thought he was making it then.
    Adnan the mujahedin. He should’ve asked him again what he meant. Of course, he knew full well what he meant, didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to think about it.
    A change was going to come. Glenn knew that much. He’d known it before the attacks on New York, before the arrests down the road and the talk of the supermosque when all the cards really were on the table. He hadn’t known how it was going to come, of course, no one had, but things were moving quickly now. Now the enemy had shown itself, he supposed.
    Not that he was interested in what was going on in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Kashmir or in bloody America, for that matter. No, the change he wanted was here in Cinderheath, in Dudley, in England. Mind you, that was where they all wanted change as well. The arrests and the house-searches had made that clear, even this government had woken up to it. They wouldn’t go all the way, though. They’d let the Americans have a few of them, stick them in Camp X-Ray. Over here they’d keep smoothing things over – build them a nice new mosque, sort their houses out for them and the families they’d bring over, push them to the front of the queue in the schools – keep fussing over them. What was it that Bailey had said at the meeting the other day? Keep fuelling the decadent and dangerous fires of multiculturalism. A change was going to come.
    What Glenn knew, though, what he’d found, was that there were people stronger than that, braver than that, people prepared to take a stand and defend their own, to defend England, even against itself. He was one of them. He was a soldier now.
    It would come here after New York, he was certain of that. What he