Like a bird flapping lightly to ascend without moving in any other direction, my gaze carries out of the window and above the rooftops. I rise higher, wings catching air currents, suspended over a grid of terraces. Below me, the streets run in neat parallel lines broken only by large walled yards where the factories once stood. Like a bird of prey I zero in to street level and suddenly stop, surprised by the gentle sound of Grace snoring. She can no longer hear me but I describe to her a boy I can see in the street. Burnished by the sun, he is warm and happy. He wears blue shorts and his favourite Captain Astounding T-shirt. I was seven, I tell Grace.
3
I had wandered out of the house and down to the end of our street where stood a tall factory wall, taller than a man but not as high as a house. I was deep in thought staring at the wall and with one hand I was pinching at my hair. As I stood back to take in its full height, so impressive it blocked out the sun, my feet tottered dangerously on the edge of the kerb. Coming from behind the wall was a noise that could only be made by a hammer equal to the size of a car, and every ten seconds I could feel the crash of its great weight reverberate through my toes. I could smell it too. Halfway down the street the smell changed from cooked chapattis and damp clothes drying on lines to the cold scent of worked metal and oil and fire. It was well known by everybody that if you leant up against the wall when the hammer struck, your bones would splinter inside your body. I touched the brickwork with a fingertip and counted to ten. The hammer fell. Then I bent my finger. It still worked okay. I tested my palm flat against the wall. After three bongs I examined it, holding it up to my eyes and squeezing it with my other hand. Nothing bad had happened.
Suddenly a sensation like hot breath crept down the back of my neck, as though someone was watching me. Startled, I spun around.
‘Hey, little bro, what you playing?’
The speaker, a man, took a step back and, turning his head sideways, spat into the road. He was old enough to be a man, yet he didn’t match up to my ideas of what a man should be. Although he was tall, he was too thin, and he wore his hair long and had no moustache. He wore tight jeans that flared at the ends and a cropped leather jacket exposing a large belt buckle. He stood with his feet splayed and his thumbs dug into his leather belt. Behind him was the corner where the end of our street met the main road. I sweated, knowing I was already beyond the limits of where I was allowed to go.
‘Are you a good-for-nothing?’ I said, feeling my lips tremble at the conversation I was having with a strange, almost grown-up man. I was both confused and excited by his belt buckle, resplendent in the sunlight. It was square, and embossed on the silver were the numbers 786. ‘Mum says street’s full of good-for-nothings this time of day.’
He thought for a moment, his head cocked, examining me; his gaze lingered on my bald knees. I felt self-conscious, him looking at me like that, so I spoke up again. ‘I bet you can’t go tight up against that wall?’
Without a word, he stepped past me, pressed his back flat against it and spread out his arms like Jesus on the cross. A light breeze swept his hair across his face. He closed his eyes and with his mouth half open he took a long deep breath.
I counted to ten loudly, the hammer sounding.
‘Does it hurt?’ I asked.
He shook his head.
I counted to twenty.
He rolled his eyes and exhaled for a long time. ‘Can I get off now?’
‘You’re definitely not a good-for-nothing,’ I said, impressed.
‘What’s your name, little bro?’ His eyes darted left and right, scanning each end of the empty street, before returning to me.
I wasn’t sure whether to tell him. ‘Akram. Akram Khan.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Akram Khan, I’m Bobby.’
He took my hand and shook it and I thought, Bobby is a strange name for a Pakistani man. His hand felt warm and smooth, like my mother’s when she rubbed me clean in the bath. At the thought of Mum I stepped into the middle of the road, from where I could just about make out our red front door at the far end of the street.
‘What you looking at?’ Bobby asked.
I shrugged my shoulders.
‘I got a pound here, little bro.’ From a pocket he slowly pulled out a thin bar of Highland Toffee. He tossed it into the air. I leapt for it. ‘Good catch.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘but that’s not a pound.’ My teeth tore at the plastic wrapper.
‘No, but this is.’ He dangled a blue-green note between his fingers. I leant forward and pounced for it, and at the last moment he pulled his hand away and jerked back his head and laughed, exposing chipped brown teeth. ‘You can have it, but you’ll have to keep a big secret. Can you do that?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, biting into the hard toffee.
He retrieved a cigarette from behind his ear and tapped the filter end against a spoon-like thumbnail. ‘I don’t think so,’ he sneered, putting the cigarette between his lips and pocketing the pound. He turned away, about to cross the road.
‘I can,’ I insisted. Chewing the toffee was hard going at first and hurt as it pulled on a rotten milk tooth.
Slowly Bobby turned back to face me and lit the cigarette with a match. Shading his eyes with a hand, he looked at me for a long time. The smoke half covered his face in white clouds.
‘Honestly I can,’ I said. The previous evening I had sat on my knees on the floor by the fire, next to Mum, who was hunched over an exercise book at the table. Like a child, she was practising writing her name in discrete shaky English letters. Arriving home from the shop, my father had pulled a wad of notes out of his inside jacket pocket and placed them on the page of her exercise book. Mum had stopped what she was doing, folded the money into the leaves of the book, and stood on a chair to stow it away on top of a tall dresser.
‘I can keep a massive secret for a pound — no, a gigantic one,’ I pleaded. With every crash of the hammer his offer seemed to be slipping further away.
From the direction of our house a blue car hurtled past, and for no apparent reason it beeped its horn. My companion’s eyes followed the car until it disappeared from view. He sucked on his teeth and a bead of sweat dripped off his brow. ‘You don’t look brave enough to keep a secret as big as that.’
He turned and crossed the road. His oily hair was plastered to his skull and straggled down his neck. Bobby walked slowly for a man and I was able to keep up.
After a minute he stopped and spun around. ‘If you can follow me to the park and keep those cute little bro feet of yours exactly five steps behind all the way, then I’ll know I can trust you.’
‘No problem.’
I trailed him, struggling to keep the distance between us exactly five steps. As we walked, Bobby spat on his hand and put it inside the front of his trousers. He took it out, spat on it and put it back in. I followed him past the health centre where my mother took me for check-ups. Standing outside waiting for his mum was my friend Mustafa. He had been born different, it was said, with a special disease that made him the whitest Pakistani I knew. His eyes, pink-rimmed, were almost transparent in the centre, and he had been warned that if he looked into the sun for even a short time his eyes would hollow out.
‘Captain Astounding!’ Mustafa stared jealously at my T-shirt.
‘See you later?’ I suggested.
Bobby stopped and turned back to watch our conversation. He took out another cigarette, rapped it on his thumbnail and lit it, then blew the smoke out of his nose.