Free Heartland by Anthony Cartwright Page B

there’s acarload of Asian lads that sits aht the front on a Sunday night smoking. It ay very pleasant, I spose, but young lads atta hang rahnd somewhere. Not that colour’s anything to do with it. BNP’s too left-wing for em. They just want everybody shot, I think. Oh, an they want the Merry Hill buses to stop tekkin schoolchildren, an they wanna know why the flats dahn Willow Road have had theer winders done again when iss meant to be theer turn. Dyer want this corned beef, the date’s up today?
    Arr, lovely. They might have a point about the winders, everything’s gone in the wrong order after that row with the contractors.
    Honestly, they moan abaht everything, though. Nothing’s any good. I’m just surrounded by people moaning. How am yer, Gladys?
Not too good.
Lovely day, Olive.
Bit too hot for me.
    All right, calm down.
    Calm down? Yow ay the one who’s had to listen to it all morning or every day more like. Then they got on to the mosque. What am I supposed to say to em?
    There were plans for a new mosque and community centre to be built on the Cinderheath works site that had been derelict for twenty years because of endless planning rows. The papers had been calling it a Supermosque. It didn’t help that the old church next to the site was lying empty too, because the Church of England was too tight to fix the roof and wanted to pull it down and sell the land for houses or, more likely, to the mosque developers. People were blaming the council for the church as well as the mosque. Jim thought there was enough to blame the council for without picking on things that they had no control over.
    The current mosque was in the old Dudley Road school building, but that was way too small and Friday prayers had started spilling out on to the street. At least that wasin an Asian area, though. The roads that led up to the works site, furthest from the shops, furthest from anywhere, were the worst in the estate. Jim thought darkly that now they’d finally got a wrecking ball over the works site they could do worse than take the bloody church out and a few of the streets as well.
    There was a roar of approval, laughter and jeering and banging tables. Batistuta looked up at the yellow card being held aloft by Collina. Collina’s eyes bulged.
    He’s a good ref, him, ay he, Mark?
    The best.
    Right decision, that.
    There was a close-up of Batistuta’s face on the screen, his long hair matted and his face hollow like that of a saint. Glenn jumped up quickly, leaped in front of the screen, made his fingers into a circle, moving his wrist back and forth.
    Batistuta, you wanker!
    He’d jumped in front of the projector and Glenn’s shadow appeared across the screen, monstrous, to loud cheers and a couple of voices shouting, Sit down! Rob looked at his dad and rolled his eyes.
    It was all about his standing foot. People talked about the angle that Beckham ran up at, the speed with which he whipped his foot through the ball, the angle at which his foot made contact with the ball. Rob thought it was about his standing foot, his broken foot, the angle he planted it at, anchored himself. It was his foot that allowed the whip. It was all the other things as well, but it was his standing foot. Rob had been studying it. He reckoned you could prove it, work it out with maths and angles. He thought of Adnan, as always with things like this; you could work it out with a computer no doubt. Or youcould stand, hour after hour, day after day, rain and shine, whacking free-kicks on some bleak wasteland on the edge of east London and Essex with no one watching or caring, or at Carrington with Cantona and Ferguson looking on, until it was burned into your muscles, a rhythm you could find in your sleep.
    Rob was testing his theory with Patrick Richards and Leroy Moses, the best players at the school. Leroy was on terms at West Brom, Patrick was still playing in the junior teams at Cinderheath,