Free Heartland by Anthony Cartwright

hurried through the gates, giggling and holding cooking dishes covered with tea towels.
    Working hard, Rob? The new Head strolled past towards the office and didn’t wait for a reply.
    When he’d seen the computer had gone from the corner of their room, Zubair knew that Adnan meant to go for good. He’d been drifting. They hadn’t been speaking to each other, but by that point Adnan wasn’t really speaking to anyone. He’d do his taxi shift, always offering to work Friday andSaturday lates, which brought in more money but more hassle too. Sometimes he’d stay to be dealt a hand in the perpetual game of cards that went on in the back of the cab office, but usually he’d just be home to the computer, eating at different times to everyone else, in front of the screen.
    Zubair thought he had his own worries then. He’d been about to move out and get a flat with Katie. He hadn’t told Adnan this, hadn’t told anyone. He announced it one Saturday morning that autumn, with his bags already packed, his parents sitting there not saying anything, like they’d been turned to stone, wondering how they’d managed to lose two sons in the space of a couple of months. It bothered him now, that even amid the agony of his brother’s disappearance his big concern had been moving in with Katie, not wanting to lose her. They could’ve waited, he thought now. It would’ve helped his mum and dad.
    Weeks went by. His parents would look at him like he had the answers; his mother sitting rocking on the edge of the settee, his dad deflating, ageing in his chair. They tried the police and hospitals. There was a procedure for registering a missing person. If a man, boy, nearly twenty, with no obvious problems wanted to just walk away from his life, though, there was nothing much stopping him. Zubair knew his dad had tried stuff through the mosque. He wasn’t sure anyone was that bothered, though. Some of them probably thought, bring your kids up as English, bad Muslims, then this is what you get.
    In the summer before he left, Zubair remembered seeing Adnan flipping through an old London
A–Z
a couple of times. He’d almost asked him if he was thinking of going on a trip but they were barely speaking then. Adnan would’ve probably just grunted, shook his head, turned away. It was something to go on, though. The only thing they’d got to go on. Zubair bought an
A–Z
, closed hiseyes, tried to picture the position of the book when he’d seen his brother looking at it.
    On that first trip he’d stayed on Seven Sisters Road in one of the dubious hotels opposite the park. When a big lorry lumbered past, as they seemed to all through the night, the electricity flickered in the building and Zubair thought of the rats eating their way through wiring and then the walls. He ended up sitting in a chair and dozing intermittently in the reddish light that passed for dark, the shadows of vehicles on the main road circling through the room.
    When he woke for the final time and pulled back the dirty net curtain, there was Finsbury Park in the bleak morning light, the flow of traffic absent for a moment; he could hear a bird singing, and there in the corner of the park someone had lit a fire, smoke curling upwards slowly, three or four shapes shuffled around it. A man with a huge bushy beard, wearing what looked like a monk’s habit tied with rope, pushed a shopping trolley filled with bits of wood down the path towards the fire. He took a swig from a can he’d rested in the trolley’s child seat. Zubair shook his head, rubbed his eyes and then his back, sore from his night in the chair. He thought about the way life could swallow people up; he saw it all the time at work. He shivered, showered and dressed quickly and walked to find a café; he needed to drink coffee and make a plan about what to do next, a plan about what to say to his parents.
    He got breakfast