CHAPTER 7
Gordon’s Motors operated from what had once been an old blacksmith’s workshop and stable in a narrow side street behind Faisal World Travel on Park Road.
Access via a narrow alleyway hemmed in by crumbling brick walls on both sides had been fine for horses in Victorian times, but it was not easy to manoeuvre a modern-day SUV through. Gordon, therefore, specialised in smaller, older cars where any new scratch would go unnoticed—cars like Kevin’s old Volkswagen Golf that just needed to be kept going a while longer before they died or met with a fatal injury.
But Gordon’s business had survived. There were plenty of old cars around the side streets off Park Road, where owners sought cheap repairs, and Gordon himself was well known. He’d been living there since he was born. Indeed, he’d inherited the stables and the alleyway from his father.
If his head wasn’t inside a car engine or he was lying beneath it with only his feet showing, then Gordon was usually to be found in his office—a dark area in the far corner close enough to keep an eye on things and within sight of any new customer before they had time to fully check the place out.
On the day Kevin was three hundred miles away in Scotland and Cass was six thousand miles to the east, Gordon had been fretting over the bureaucracy of being an employer. “Wally? Where are you?” he shouted.
Walid was on his lunch break in the area behind the hydraulic car lift that Gordon called the staff room. He pushed his half-eaten cheese and pickle sandwich back into its pack, wiped crumbs from his mouth, scraped his chair back, and stood up. Across the table, Craig O’Donnell threw a piece of crust from his own sandwich at Walid. “Jump to it, Wally, or the stupid old bugger will have a heart attack.”
Around the grubby plastic table, Ali grinned, Mustapha drained his can of diet coke, Mo picked at his teeth, and Craig laughed. “Who’s a bad boy then? Been putting coolant in the brake fluid again?”
“Fuck off,” Walid said using the all-purpose phrase he’d quickly learned on arriving from Syria. Walid was just nineteen years old and the youngest of Gordon’s five staff.
Beneath his oily green overalls, Walid wore jeans and a bulky button-up sweater, and out of habit, he twisted the single ear stud in his right ear. He’d never told anyone, but he’d found the ear stud at a fuel station near Harwich, and it seemed to have brought him luck. Once he’d climbed down from the truck and said goodbye to Herman, the Polish driver who’d driven him across Europe, there it was lying on the ground.
“WALLY?” Gordon called again. “Are you deaf? Ah, Wally. There you are. Sit.”
Walid perched on the edge of the greasy black chair that might once have adorned Gordon’s dining room table at home. Gordon sat on its twin, staring at the dusty, greasy screen of his computer. His elbows were lying amongst pink receipt slips, and his boots were amongst a tangle of cabling beneath the table. He wiped the computer screen with his hand. “How long have you worked here, Wally?”
“Eight months, Gord.” Everyone else called Gordon Gord, so Walid did too.
“And you’ve now got a British passport, yes?”
Walid paused, worrying where this was heading. “My father was Turkish, Gord . . . I think.”
Gordon looked at him. “Wally, please try to stop confusing me with all these foreign places, will you? Just say yes or no. Somehow, you’ve now got a British passport, yes?”
Walid hesitated. “Yes,” he said cautiously.
The fact was that Walid had only had it a month, and now, after all the bureaucratic hassle of proving he was entitled to it, it had disappeared. To please Gordon at his interview, he’d told him he’d applied for one and expected it any day. It was true, but there had been complications because his birth certificate and other essential pieces of paper had been lost somewhere between London and Syria. And then there were the suspicions about how he’d arrived in the UK. Luck had played a big part in his trek from Syria that had ended in the ferry trip cross the North Sea.
“But you still speak a bit like an Arab, Wally. Remind me. Why is that?”
“I lived in Syria with my mother for seven years, Gord. She was Syrian.”
“Where were you born?”
“Peckham, South London.”
“So why the bloody hell come to this hellhole?”
“It’s a better hellhole than Peckham, Gord. And much better than Aleppo.”
Gordon was tapping his front teeth with a black and oily fingernail and squinting so hard at him that Walid felt he should add some detail. “My mum was a nurse, and she went back to Syria to help. I went with her. Remember? I told you before.”
“I remember, Wally. I’m not stupid. Where’s your father?”
Walid sniffed. “He went somewhere else.”
“Where?” Gordon now looked at him out of the corner of his eye, so Walid shrugged. He didn’t know. “Why doesn’t that surprise me, Wally? But your mother died in Syria, right?”
Walid nodded and looked away. His mother, who’d trained in London but returned to Syria during the fighting, had been killed when a bomb hit the hospital in Aleppo, where she’d been working. Walid had then gone to live with an uncle in Damascus.
Gordon watched Walid. He actually liked this young lad. He’d called him Wally since the day he started working because Wally rolled off his tongue easier than Walid. The boy was a quick learner with a flair for car electronics. He arrived on time, didn’t creep out early like that Irish dimwit Craig, and never had a day’s sickness either. He’d even asked to borrow Gordon’s pre-1996 Vauxhall Corsa and Toyota Carina service manuals to read. The lad was unusually conscientious.
Walid’s only weakness, as far as Gordon was concerned, was the ridiculous hooded sweater he wore, and that he seemed too lazy to shave off the thin threads of dark hair that sprouted from his chin. Gordon regarded himself as a very tolerant man, but what irritated him most was an unshaven teenager wearing a hooded anorak and low-strung trousers, with the crack of a bum and the top of underpants on show.
Walid waited, jigging his knees up and down. “Any problem, Gord?”
“Immigration checks. Every now and then, men in suits turn up,” he said. “Just because we’re in the middle of what I call Islamabad-on Sea, they suspect everyone here’s an illegal.” He waved his hand. “OK, go to work and bring your passport in tomorrow. I need to show a copy to the pen pushers. Off you go. Now send in Mo.”
Except for red-haired Craig from Belfast, each of Gordon’s staff—Ali from Iraq, Mo from Afghanistan, and Mustapha from Pakistan—were asked the same questions and told to bring in their passports the next day. “I need to cover my arse,” Gordon said three times.
Walid, though, spent the rest of the afternoon in sweat for he no longer had a passport.
That night in his tiny room on the first floor of number 9, Shipley Street, Walid couldn’t sleep.
Two days before, someone had been in his room during the daytime and moved his backpack. Then he’d noticed that the drawer where he kept the few things he’d managed to carry all the way from Syria had been left slightly open. In it were his mother’s rings, a leather necklace with its pendant, a badly engraved lion’s head, and a few other odds and ends. They’d clearly been moved but were still there, so he tipped everything from his backpack to find that the envelope with his new British passport he’d put right at the bottom wasn’t there. He’d only had it for two weeks, and Gordon wanted to see it in the morning.
Walid lay there all night, worrying what he’d say to Gordon in the morning. But what bothered him more than anything was the man he paid his rent to—Mr. Khan, who owned Faisal World Travel on Park Road.
Walid had been on the last stage of his trip across Europe, and unlike many others he’d met on the way, Walid had some money—US dollars that his mother had left him.
When he’d met Herman, the Polish truck driver, at the truck stop north of Dusseldorf and Herman suggested he could get him all the way from there to England on the ferry from the Hook of Holland to Harwich, the money had come in very useful.
“One thousand dollars,” Herman had said. “For that, you get a five-star ride in the cab with me. No questions asked. You’re my co-driver. Your name’s Hamid. Here’s your Turkish truck driver’s licence, and here’s your Turkish passport. They never check it. And, anyway, you look a bit like Hamid.”
Herman had dropped him in Harwich, and Walid then hitched a ride to North London to the car park of a furniture warehouse in Enfield. From there, he’d walked to Edmonton, bought a can of Coca-Cola at a kiosk, and then, because it was a sunny afternoon, wandered into Pymmes Park, where, quite suddenly, the traffic noise disappeared. He then found himself by a quiet lake with ducks, swans, and black and white geese. It was like an oasis—a place of peace and tranquillity.
He’d found a patch of dry grass and lay down, overwhelmed by a feeling of accomplishment because he’d made it back to London, where he’d started from all those years. He fell asleep, and when he woke up, the swans and geese had gone. The sun had sunk behind the trees, and it had turned cold, so he took his hooded sweater from his backpack and pulled it on.
He had the name and phone number of a Syrian man who said he would help him when he arrived in London, but whenever he’d ring the number, no one answered. Walid, though, was used to issues like that. Things always worked out in the end.
He looked around. He could still hear the traffic beyond the trees, and there were a couple of joggers and a woman with toddlers feeding the ducks. On a park bench close by was a black guy in jeans, tee shirt, and jacket. He was sitting with his arms outstretched across the back of the bench, with one of his feet resting on his knee, and his head back watching the sky. Walid, meanwhile, reorganised his backpack, redialled the number he’d been given, and with no reply, set off towards the park entrance just as the black guy did the same.
***
That black guy was me, Kurt, and that’s how and where I first met Walid. We’d arrived at the park gate together, and he looked at me and said, “Excuse me. Which way’s south?”
“That way, I think,” I told him.
He asked me if I knew the area, so I said, “Not so good, man. Where you from?”
Ten minutes later and feeling good about him, I remember saying to him, “You eat today, mate? Come chop?” I was fully into Lagos speak at the time because of Coolie.
Anyway, to cut the story short, Walid spent his first night on the floor back at Coolie’s place. Coolie, himself, turned up around midnight, and I introduced them.
“Everywhere one big go slow, like Lagos, man,” was how Coolie described the traffic outside. “You come from noise or peace and quiet?”
“I was born in Peckham,” Walid admitted, and we laughed.
“Fucking Peckham?” Coolie said. “Jesus Christ, man. Peckham’s part of Africa. I thought they’d chucked all the Arabs and whites out years ago.”
The following day had been a good one. I landed a job painting walls for the council, and Walid took my advice to take a long-distance bus and find somewhere cheaper than London.
“Around Park Road and Shipley Street, where I used to live, is cheap,” I told him. “Ask around. Lots of Arab boys. Even more Pakistanis. They’ll fix you with somewhere to stay. Get settled. Take your time. Sort your status.”
Walid and I stayed in touch after that, and later on, when Walid had settled in his room on Shipley Street and made some friends, we had a longer phone chat and caught up on names from the past because Walid had started mixing a bit in the area.
“Yeh, sure. I know Kev’s,” I said. “We were mates. He still working in Bashir’s? You meet Cass? Paki guy? No? Where’s Cass gone then? Good guy Cass. Ask Kevs where Cass is . . . So you got yourself a position? Gordon’s motors? Nice . . . Yeh, I know Gord too. Only white fella left. Fixes cars behind Park Road . . . Mr. Khan? Yeh. I know him as well. Jesus, man. You go careful. He owns half of Park Road and Shipley Street. Whenever he passed the window, my mother used to hide . . . Yeh, stay tuned, Walid. Next time you’re passing Edmonton, call in. Plenty of floor space. Coolie won’t mind. Just bring your ear plugs. Cheers, bro.”
Since then, Walid had heard other stories about Mr. Khan. It was Khan who seemed to know that Walid’s British passport application had stalled. He’d stopped Walid in the street one day, pulled him through the doorway of Faisal World Travel, and asked him about it. “You got money?”
“Some,” Walid had replied.
“Five hundred pounds,” Khan said. “You got a photo?”
A week later, Walid’s British passport arrived in a plain white envelope. Someone had pushed it under his door. Now it was gone again.
***
The next morning, in the garage, Walid again heard his name being called.
“WALLY?” Gordon hollered. “Come here.”
Walid went to Gordon’s office, sniffed, and said, “I’ve got something to tell you, Gord.”
“Then tell it.”
“My passport’s gone.”
“Gone? Gone where? Did it walk? Float away on the breeze? Fall in the john?”
Walid explained. “Always be honest,” his mother had told him.
Gordon listened while patiently tapping his teeth. After all, he still liked Walid. He liked his honesty, his way with words, his accent, and his general attitude. He just didn’t like the straggle of hairs on his chin. But once Walid had finished his explanation, he exploded.
“Mr. Bloody Khan?” he yelled. “He owns number 43 as well? And he’s your landlord? That bastard owns half the houses in Shipley Street and Park Road to say nothing of the Midland Road and Brick Street.”
Walid nodded. That was exactly what he’d heard from others.
“He sorted your passport?”
“I had problems, Gord. They needed evidence of where I’d lived.”
“How much did he charge you?”
“Five hundred pounds.”
“And in two weeks, it’s come and then gone again!”
Walid nodded. “Someone broke in my room while I was at work. Someone with a key.”
“Someone with a key?” Gordon repeated. “Did you keep a copy anywhere? Know the passport number?”
Walid shook his head, and Gordon scratched his head for a full minute. “Right. I’ll sort it with the immigration paper shuffler. Take a day off, Wally. Make yourself scarce. You’ve just gone on holiday to Lanzarote with your passport, OK?”
“Thanks, Gord.”
***
Walid took the day off, and during the day, he phoned me. He obviously needed someone to talk to about his passport, but it was not a good moment. I’d moved from wall painting for the council to domestic waste collection for more money. Because someone, somewhere had noticed I didn’t shirk and did OK at the interview. I was on a definite career ladder as a so-called facilities operator with an exciting career structure lying ahead as a refuse and cleansing operative leading to a recycling adviser if I learned the difference between polystyrene and PVC.
“I can’t talk now, Walid,” I said. “This is one big crazy street. Everything’s blocked by an accident. I’ll call you back, man.”
True to my word, I called him back. “Sorry, mate. I’ve finished for the day. In fact, I’m off on holiday soon. I’ll be glad to get away for some peace and quiet.”
“You got a passport, Kurt?”
“Sure. Nice new maroon one with all the fancy patterns.”
“I just lost mine,” Walid said. “Only had it two weeks. Someone nicked it.”
“Jesus, Walid,” I said. “What did I tell you? I’ll bet you thirty quid it’s fucking Khan. He’s a bastard. He’d stuff anyone.”
“Yeh,” Walid said. “By the way, I found out what happened to Cass.”
“Cass? Qasim Siddiqui also of Shipley Street? Tell me.”
“Kevs told me he got fed up living around here and bought an air ticket from Mr. Khan to go to Turkey for a change of scenery. Just before he left, Khan then gave him a parcel to take with him. Kevs hasn’t seen Cass since. No one’s seen him for two years. They think he might have joined ISIL, but Kevin doesn’t believe that. Do you?”
I admit I was shocked by that.
Cass was the least likely candidate for an extreme change of scenery like that. I could never imagine Cass wielding a machete and yelling “Allahu Akbar.” It was quite the opposite, in fact. I’d often heard him joking about eating crispy bacon and pork sausages, and Kevin would often fix things for Cass to avoid prayers.
“Wah. Is that right?” I said at last. “I can’t believe it. Cass was a mate. We were all mates. You need to watch where you step, Walid. A lot of dog shit in the streets around your patch. Know what I mean?”
“Yeh,” Walid paused, thinking. “But how about Gordon, Kurt? You know him? Trust him?”
“Gordon? Sure. Only white face left in Park Road. Probably there when Park Road was built.”
“Yeh, I think so. He told me to take the day off and pretend I’m on a holiday, but I only got as far as Shipley Street.” He tried laughing at his joke. “Where are you going on holiday, Kurt?”
“As far away as possible, Walid. Thailand. Dirt cheap flight. The land of smiles, the brochure said. Pictures look nice. Tranquil like. Blue skies, birds, and trees. Know what I mean?”
“You didn’t buy the ticket from Khan then, Kurt?”
That was a Walid joke, and we laughed and made a few more jokes. But then, I sat thinking about Kevin and Walid and Cass. The news about Cass was weird. Troubling. What had happened to him? Where was he?
I was to find out sooner than I thought.