Free She Wore Red Trainers by Na'ima B. Robert Page A

flared again. ‘You aren’t even going to take my opinion into account?’
    â€˜Son, one day you will thank me for this. Remember, I am your father: no one wants more for you than I do.’
    â€˜Not even me?’
    â€˜That’s right, son, not even you.’
    ***
    I had to get out of that house. I pushed my feet into my running shoes and grabbed my iPod. I needed to run, to feel the wind in my face, to flood my ears with Mishari Rashid, to let the rhythm of running calm my jangled nerves.
    When I got to the gate at the bottom of our road, I turned left, towards Brockwell Park, where I played basketball with the brothers. As I ran, I tried to empty my head. I didn’t want to think about my conversation with Dad. I didn’t want to think about the prospect of going off to uni to bury myself in legal textbooks, of leaving Umar and Jamal. I didn’t want to think about how my whole attitude to everything had changed. What would Mum have thought? I guess that is amercy for the dead: they don’t have to watch the living falling apart as they grieve.
    By the time I reached the top of the hill, it was starting to get dark. I prayed three raka’at under an enormous oak tree then began to jog back home.
    Reaching our street, I keyed in the code to open the gate and began to walk up the hill. It wasn’t bad at all, this place. Seville Close was clean, the gardens well kept and all the houses were in good condition: respectable.
    As I looked back down the road before heading for our front door, I could just make out the figure of a girl walking up to the last house on the close. She was wearing a hijab and black abaya and, just before she turned into a driveway, I caught a glimpse of her face. My heart did a little flip. That was Zayd’s sister, I was sure of it.
    Then the realisation dawned on me: Zayd and his sister were my new neighbours.

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    It was him, I knew it. I would have recognised him anywhere. What was he doing on our street? Then, I remembered the moving van I had seen parked by number 7 and everything fell into place.
    Mr Light Eyes was my neighbour.
    Instinctively, I looked over at the sketch I had propped up on my desk, still piled high with A level textbooks, the sketch of his hands that I had drawn off by heart, literally.
    Too close , I thought. Too close for comfort .
    But, to my frustration, that thought didn’t stop me dreaming about him that night.
    ***
    I don’t know how many times I fell asleep as the double-decker bus crawled along the High Road, choked with Monday morning traffic.
    Four of us – Abdullah, Taymeeyah, Malik and I – were on our way to the Islamic centre in Streatham. The community had finally got itself together and put on a summer programme for the kids and I wasn’t wasting any time: those kids weregoing to be the first to sign up for summer school.
    Don’t get me wrong now. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the rugrats’ company; it’s just that I wanted them to get out more. It wasn’t healthy, staying indoors all day, only playing with each other, fighting over the computer. I’d always wanted them to get out more – especially Abdullah. Abdullah, my sweet, loving, tender-hearted brother who was born deaf, needed this more than any of them. He needed to be around other kids his own age. And they needed to be around him, to get to know him, to learn that the fact someone can’t hear you doesn’t mean that they can’t understand you, that they can’t be your friend. Abdullah needed to get out there and so did the other two. It was breaking my heart to see them preferring computer games and TV to reading books and playing outside. Even their Qur’an and Islamic Studies had taken a back seat to those games, something Mum was always ranting on about. I told her to just take away the computer, let them go cold turkey, but she just looked at me like I’d gone crazy.
    â€˜Then