Fine rain fell on Ramzi. He was sitting on a bench. Before him, while he buried his head in his hands, was the city that was his home, laid out below him, the lights of its streets blazing through the mist. Far to the east, above the lights and beyond them, was the first smear of a softer grey. Soon the day would come.
When the others had slept, he had made his preparations for flight. He had disguised his bed. He had opened the window with great care because the hinges creaked from the rust on them. He had dressed and pulled on his trainers. After each movement he had paused to allow the quiet of the night to settle around him again. Once, Syed had called out, but had not woken. He had stood on the bed and lifted his left leg out through the window. He had been astride the sill, half in, half out, his knee dose to a little china bowl that was a decoration there, when Jamal's cough had exploded, but none of the sleepers had been roused. He had worked his right leg through the gap, settled for a moment on the outer sill, then lowered himself into the flower-bed below and had felt the earth clog on his trainers. He had tried to close the window, fasten it, but that had not been possible so he had abandoned it. Ramzi had run and heard the flap of the curtains behind him, the swing of the window.
The strengthening wind had been on his face. He had run as if his life had depended on it, had charged across the lawn, because he had believed himself to be condemned.
He had gone through the hedge, missing the gap where the thorn was sparsest and the wire was down to knee height. He had struggled to free himself from the wire's barbs, the thorns, tearing his trousers and lacerating his hands. When he had slipped in the field, mud had smeared his face, hands and clothing. He had blundered to an open gate and there had gasped for breath, looked back and seen the dark outline of the building — but no lights were snapping on and no shouts carried on the wind, only the rain. He had skirted the far side of the wood that was near to the track leading to the building. The muscles he had built in the gym, with rings of weights, were in his shoulders and in his arms — they could be seen and gave him the stature he craved — not in his stomach and thighs. At a shambling trot, he had staggered towards the village.
He had come into it past the closed and blacked-out pub, past the shop, which had only a dim security light, and had crossed the street. For Ramzi, the countryside, its quiet and isolation, was an alien, unfamiliar place: he was used to concrete, paving, noise and the dense terraces of closely packed homes. He no longer had the will to run but he stumbled forward, going north, along the pavement. When he came under a high light, he had seen the mud from the ploughed field on his top and trousers round the tears. When he had cleared the village, gone past the last set-back houses, a car had swept past and he had waved — too late — at the driver. When the village was far behind him, and there was no pavement, and he meandered in exhaustion on the road, there was the scream of a horn as a van swerved by. His waved arms — frantic — were ignored. An hour later, when Ramzi could run no more, barely trot, only walk — and he was two or three miles from the village — he had heard the grinding approach of a heavy lorry. He had turned and stood with his arms spread, at the side of the road, and had heard the brakes wail. It had come to a stop fifty yards ahead. He had summoned his strength and run to the high cab door that had been opened.
He would have called the lorry driver a Crusader. He would have thought of him as an enemy. He had planned to kill, and the Crusader, the enemy — or his family — might have been close to the explosion, near enough not to have been able to duck away from the flying shrapnel of ball-bearings, nails and screws: it was what he had hoped to achieve. An arm had reached down, caught his fist and heaved him up into the warmth of the cab, where music played. 'Christ, you look a proper mess. What you done? Not my business, eh? Well, I like a bit of company — where you trying to get to?' He had named the city that was his home. 'Can't do that. Tamworth's the best I can manage, but you'll get a train out of Tamworth for Derby — yeah, I like a bit of company on a night run.' He had seen the driver when the cab light was on: he wore a sleeveless shirt and his arm was tattooed with a picture of a naked girl.
They had driven at speed through the night along deserted roads. 'Just so as we understand each other, if you're in trouble with the law — trouble with anything — I don't want to know. It's just good to have someone up here. Pity you're not a pretty bird…'
Ramzi had never before been so close, shoulder to shoulder, with a Crusader, an enemy. The family had no friends outside their own community. At his schools, the kids had all been Muslim and dominated by lessons on the Faith. At college, before he had dropped out of the computer-studies course — eight months into a two-year curriculum — the other students' families had originated from Pakistan and Bangladesh. The benefit office he used was staffed from the ghetto. The shops he, his mother and his sisters went to were inside the ghetto. Where he worshipped, where he had been recruited, the evils of the morally corrupt society of the Crusaders had been drilled into his mind. The television he watched came on the satellite, and the websites he visited trumpeted the successes of martyrs in the fight against the enemy.
It was a soft voice, a Birmingham accent. 'You want a sandwich? Sorry, sorry…I'm a daft bugger, they're ham. But there's rock cakes my missus made, and the flask's coffee.' He had wolfed three cakes, and drunk from the mug on top of the Thermos, and he had learned of the life of the driver, and his family's life, and their home in the Smethwick suburb of Birmingham, and the holiday he was looking forward to—'Can't come bloody fast enough, know what I mean?'—in a caravan park on the Yorkshire coast, and the job he did delivering shelf supplies to supermarkets. He had been driven into Tamworth, and a sign for the rail station had been pointed out.
'You'll be all right now, but better when you've had a wash and brush-up. Been good knowing you.'
He had stepped down from the cab. He had seen the smile above him, and the little wave. Should he have said it? Should he have told the kind Crusader, the generous enemy, not to go with his family next Saturday morning into the centre of Birmingham? It had been in his mind, deep in his throat…But the lorry had pulled away, and the warning was left unspoken.
The first train of the morning service out of Tamworth had brought Ramzi home. He had fled because he was condemned. Not in words…Where I fight, a cell must be secure or it will fail, and failure comes when respect inside the cell is lost. Trust was placed in you. Should I doubt that trust? The hand had been gentle on his shoulder, and a smile had been at the mouth. The words had been honeyed, not the eyes. The eyes had told him he was condemned — perhaps not that day, perhaps the day after, because Ramzi had lost respect, and trust in him was doubted, and the eyes had pierced him and had spelt out their contempt. He was dead if he stayed so he had run. If he walked slowly, he would reach his home within fifteen minutes, and he would hit the door with his fist and a sister or his mother would unlock it, and the story of his failure would be prised from him. They would learn of his disgrace, his shame, his humiliation. His old boasts replaced by a stuttered confession. Their old pride in him gone.
He sat on the bench and the cold sank into his body.
The handler was always the first in his home to rise, shower, shave and dress. A biscuit for the grand old lady, retired, in her basket. Then the kettle on, a pot of tea made, a mug taken, up to his wife, a bang on the doors of his kids' rooms and protest groans as a reward. It was still dark. He heard the six o'clock news on the radio every morning unless he was on early turn and already at work. He ate toast and listened to the news, then climbed into his waterproofs. On his pager, he read a bald text of an increased security alert down south in the capital, but the spin-off was that he was tasked to show the flag and let his spaniel sniff round the city's railway station and the bus terminus. It had been a regular routine since Seven-Seven, since the bombers had taken an early train into the heart of London with explosives in rucksacks on their backs. The radio told him that the Dow was down overnight, that big redundancies were forecast in the north-west, there had been a homophobic attack in the south-west, a junior minister was entangled in scandal, two suicide bombs in Iraq…The handler barely took in the litany of gloom. He savoured the tea, the toast and the quiet. By being dressed in time for the six o'clock news he was able to enjoy the peace of the house, and he would have said, if asked, that it was the time of day he enjoyed most, particularly in autumn, winter and spring when it was still dark outside, and he could think and reflect.