Read Online Heartland by Anthony Cartwright - Free Book Online Page B

wanted to ask why her things were still in London. His mind started working on the possibilities. He’d wanted to ask but didn’t feel that confident. He was careful not to ask any stupid questions, just grinning a big friendly smile and listening stupidly, a bit daunted, if he was honest, of Jasmine Quereishi, with her posh accent and the unfinished PhD she talked about, and her heart surgeon dad from Karachi, and her mother from Cinderheath, with her dark, shining eyes and perfect hair.
    She said they should get together and talk more aboutthe whole reading thing and that he was right: loads of kids slipped through the net. Then she’d said something about how she had such happy memories of William Perry school. He’d nodded, feeling stupid and dumbstruck, unable to take his eyes from hers, and it was only later that he realized she hadn’t looked away either.
    See you Monday, she’d said, and turned and smiled as she went back to the girls filling out library membership forms. One of the girls was called Nasima; he’d seen her in basketball lessons and he waved over to them. When Jasmine got back to the table she said something and they all giggled. He found himself hoping she’d said something about him, about when they were kids, knowing the girls would try to tease her for talking to him.
    He’d found a reading scheme on the internet for older kids and sent for a sample. It was great – boys always going off down the river to have adventures like Huckleberry Finn, each lesson on different phonic sounds. Structured, ordered. That’s what you needed. Rob had learned things himself. The only problem was that it was an American system and cost a fortune. He’d been trying to suggest the school buy it but no one had seemed that interested. He could talk to Jasmine about it, find a way in.
    Rob sat there at the window, watching the kids walk up the road. Some days he was timetabled to be on duty on the gates at the end of the day with the senior teachers and police, to keep an eye out for trouble, but not today. The idea was to keep a mix of people out there. This afternoon looked a good one to be doing it though, everyone going home calmly in their little gangs. There’d been a few bits of trouble lately, usually when adults or older brothers came down with some issue or the other. The arrests and now the election were hardly helping things.
    He wanted to make a dash for it, as soon as the rush had gone, get up to the sports shop and buy a cheap pairof new boots. His Kings – the last evidence of him once being a decent player – had disintegrated. Then he could get to Tesco before the after-work rush. He cooked for his mum and dad on Thursday nights. He’d always done that, even when he lived with Karen. He’d always liked cooking, would maybe have tried to do something with it if he hadn’t tried to make it with his football.
    He flipped vaguely through the snakes book Andre had found for him, then leaned back and put his feet up on the radiator and watched the last of the crowds go through the school gates. He was trying to think of how to start a new conversation with Jasmine. He could always, of course, just ask her out for a drink, but he feared that she might wonder what the teaching assistant who strutted around in his football kit all day was doing thinking he had a chance with her. He might be nice to look at and they might have sat in the same classroom twenty years ago but, come off it. It hadn’t felt quite like that, though. Maybe she’d like to chat about what had happened to the other kids who’d been in their class, to get nostalgic about when she lived around here. He wondered if she knew about Adnan, if he should mention it. He could dress it up as a big tragedy then offer a shoulder to cry on, or something. Actually, that was probably the way to do it.
    A mixed group of girls – headscarves and hair bobbles –