Read Online Heartland by Anthony Cartwright - Free Book Online

was with him, encouraged him, even. They went on a residential trip to Ilfracombe in their last year of primary school. This was the year after Jasmine had left. The year Rob and Adnan’s friendship started drifting apart. The trip was a week of activities – archery, canoeing, rock climbing – some sort of reward for good behaviour. They lived in an old barracks, with other schools from all over the place. It hadn’t gone well. The kids from the other schools, with better clothes, generally, and more aptitude for outdoor pursuits, had made them feel clumsy and ragged. It had rained all week and they’d got into fights, with the other schools and each other. Halfway through, on the Wednesday, after the communal breakfast there’d been a big to-do with a school from Portsmouth or somewhere. Adnan got pushed forward to fight another boy. The boy was big, with wild ginger hair and thick glasses fastened in one corner with tape. Adnan tried to knock the glasses off, aimed to stamp on them, thought it might gain him some time before the teachers came, but the boy was stronger than him and the teachers didn’t come. He ended up rolling in the wet grass and mud, being pummelled by theboy’s heavy fists, ruining the tracksuit bottoms he’d got his mother to sew a Tacchini badge on to. They pulled the boy off him in the end – other kids from Portsmouth, as was the rule with these things – still no sign of any adults.
    Fuckin Paki, he’d spat at Adnan as he was led away. He’d heard it before, of course, but somehow in this strange place in this strange accent, the words seemed to give him forewarning of what to expect in life, if he wasn’t careful, if he wasn’t clever.
    No Woodhouse boys in their year group meant he and Rob were the cocks of Cinderheath – as they’d have said then, the eleven-year-olds, at least. Rob, feeling guilty, he imagined, as it had been a toss-up which one of them fought the ginger boy, helped him clean up, got him some cream for his black eye and the scratches on his neck, lent him some spare clothes.
    Sick of it all, they’d skived the evening meal, half-hoping to get caught and sent home. They jumped the barracks wall and walked to a chip shop on the front, near the putting green. There were two girls in there, other camp escapees, from a school in Glasgow, equally out of place, sharing a cone of chips and a can of Coke.
    Rob had talked to them while they waited for their chips to cook, looking out of the steamy window at the sea. He’d made them laugh, trying their accent.
    And what’s your pal called? the more talkative of the two girls asked.
    Glenn, he’d said. Glenn, before Rob could give an answer.
    The girls’ names were Elizabeth and Susan. He didn’t know which way round.
    They sat on a covered wooden bench and ate their chips together. The more talkative girl took a permanent marker from her tracksuit pocket and wrote RFC and NO SURRENDER on the back of the bench. It impressed them. Next thing, she’d sat on Adnan’s lap and kissed him. Too quickfor him to get nervous or anything, his bruised lips and hers fixed tight together and then open, mouths hot from the chips. Rob and the quieter girl adopted the same position. After a while, the girls got worried about getting caught, having been away for so long, and said they’d best sneak back in. They were leaving in the morning, staying in a youth hostel in the Lake District on the way back up, with food even more disgusting than this place and with even less to do. They arranged to meet up after breakfast to swap addresses, but they never did.
    Rob and Adnan watched the girls climb back up the hill, both thinking they should’ve offered to walk them, both not wanting to go back. Rob pulled a couple of crumpled cigarettes and a lighter from his pocket.
    These fell out of his pocket when he was palin yer.
    They sat and tried to smoke and