Worlds Apart Read Free Page A

skin enough time to heal. Kids sat away from me in case they were tarnished with the same brush by the imam, forming a big floor space around me.
    It began to affect my schooling. No longer did I find school fun. I would stand on my own at playtime waiting for the bell to go so I could go back in. Sometimes I would see my sister on the other side of the courtyard where the primary school pupils played, surrounded by a gang of girls. Quickly I would hide behind a wall, watching her discreetly. I didn’t want her to see my flaws or tell my parents that I couldn’t do what came so naturally to her.
    After school, I would wait for her so we could go home together, but she was always preoccupied with her friends. Quietly I followed behind until we reached the top of our street, where the girls left us and I would have my sister all to myself for the three-minute walk down to the house.
    One day as I walked across the croft to mosque Idecided to follow my heart. I’m not going, I told myself. Everybody hated me and I hated them, including the imam, so what’s the point, I thought.
    Instead, I went to hang out at the secondary school across the road, which was closed by this time. I looked up at the high gates not sure how to get to the other side, then stepped forward and began to clamber up, clutching my alphabet book tight in one hand and wedging my buckled shoes between the bars to help me over.
    On the first few attempts, my hands slid down the bars causing me to fall back and jolt my knees. I was not giving up. Besides, I was late for mosque and was not going to risk a caning for that. On my fourth attempt, I managed to pull my body over the top bar and drop down the other side.
    The slippery soles of my shoes missed the ground, causing me to land on my hands and knees. I could feel the skin burn beneath my polyester trousers, but it didn’t matter. From the ground, I scanned the surroundings: the empty buildings, netball courts and car park. It was strangely quiet and, for a moment, I became worried that I shouldn’t have been there. But it was the right decision. This is my new life, I thought excitedly. No more mosques, no horrible kids and no more caning. Happily I got up, wiped the grit off my hands and skipped through the courtyard, feeling a weight lift offmy chest. I couldn’t stop smiling and twirling; I was almost tripping over myself.
    I wondered if this feeling of freedom was what every English kid on our street had. The ones that were allowed to play rather than pray after school; the ones who looked different from me.
    My thoughts were interrupted by a group of boys who appeared from around the corner of a concrete building. They wore monkey boots and green bomber jackets and had shaved heads. I couldn’t make out their faces because they were stuck inside small polythene bags that they were breathing in and out of.
    One of them spotted me.
    ‘Paki!’ he shouted, making the others look round and head towards me.
    I’d heard that word being directed towards people with brown skin like me but didn’t know what it meant, just that it wasn’t nice. Before I knew what was going on, they started running towards me with angry faces and veins bulging out of their necks. I didn’t know what I had done to get them so angry but decided to leg it away from them as fast as I could.
    Tears sprang to my eyes. I clutched my trousers that kept coming down because of the loose elastic Mum had put in the waist. Perhaps this was the punishment the imam had kept going on about if we did somethingwrong. This was my punishment for not going to mosque.
    I ran across the netball court and, thankfully, the gate was open on the other side. I didn’t dare look behind. I had visions of a boy grabbing the hood of my coat and the zipper choking me to death. I looked around, losing sense of direction. All the buildings looked the same. Frantically, I searched between each one for the gate, for the boys, for a way out. Finally, I