The baby isn't sleeping so I take him for a walk past Cherry Tree Playing Fields to the bmx track. Some boys are grouped at the start of the course - thirteen, fourteen and fifteen year olds - straddling their bikes, helmets on, but straps hanging limp. Apparently the brother of someone they know goes to mosque. "Did you call him a baby?" one of them asks another. "No, man, Albanian." And having confirmed that, he swoops down and leans low over his handle bars to take the high incline. He is determined; lean and mean. When he comes back his mates are watching another group of boys, slow pedestrians and, it has to be noted, of darker skin. The bmx boys call out in mock Arabic and then, pumped for a fight, take on the course with kick-butt wheelies and sharp swerves. Back at the base, "What does qasm illahi mean anyway?"
"I told you, I don't know Albanian."
I swear to God I want to tell them. And some other things too.
I hope the man washing his car in the drive doesn't think I'm smiling at him simply because his house bears the sticker, 'Smile, You're on CCTV'. No, I'm smiling because I love his family. I have not met them, it has to be said, but Janice next door told me all about them. Once, after drinking a cuppa soup, she described the festival food they used to bring round: meat biriyani, phulke and gulab jamuns, the words filling her mouth, popping like pakore. In the white of her room, she loved the colours they wore and whenever she talked about them, she took thin air between her fingers and thumb to stroke georgettes, chiffons and silks. One scarf she mentioned on several occasions: dark blue velvet embroidered with silver sequins. Perhaps she saw the heavens in it.
I wonder if his family takes trays round to whoever lives next door now.
The cricketers who had been marking out the field when we passed them earlier are now all kneeling in a row, in a line that springs from the neat parallels of their pitch at a quirky tangent. It is as if they have abandoned their wickets and stumps for a different game altogether. But they are serious as they gaze beyond Cherry Tree Playing Fields, beyond Crawley to far away Mecca before lowering their heads, humble, to the ground.
The baby stirs and wakes. With bmx bikes, birds and boughs of blossom swooping around like this; with millions of men rising and falling; with whole universes spangled on scarves, there is such a lot of world to see.
"I told you, I don't know Albanian."
I swear to God I want to tell them. And some other things too.
I hope the man washing his car in the drive doesn't think I'm smiling at him simply because his house bears the sticker, 'Smile, You're on CCTV'. No, I'm smiling because I love his family. I have not met them, it has to be said, but Janice next door told me all about them. Once, after drinking a cuppa soup, she described the festival food they used to bring round: meat biriyani, phulke and gulab jamuns, the words filling her mouth, popping like pakore. In the white of her room, she loved the colours they wore and whenever she talked about them, she took thin air between her fingers and thumb to stroke georgettes, chiffons and silks. One scarf she mentioned on several occasions: dark blue velvet embroidered with silver sequins. Perhaps she saw the heavens in it.
I wonder if his family takes trays round to whoever lives next door now.
The cricketers who had been marking out the field when we passed them earlier are now all kneeling in a row, in a line that springs from the neat parallels of their pitch at a quirky tangent. It is as if they have abandoned their wickets and stumps for a different game altogether. But they are serious as they gaze beyond Cherry Tree Playing Fields, beyond Crawley to far away Mecca before lowering their heads, humble, to the ground.
The baby stirs and wakes. With bmx bikes, birds and boughs of blossom swooping around like this; with millions of men rising and falling; with whole universes spangled on scarves, there is such a lot of world to see.
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