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Midland heartlands’ emerging in reaction to terrorism, political correctness and multiculturalism –and the Labour government, probably, tame and increasingly disappointing as it was. If they said it often enough it would probably happen. He wished everybody would just shut up.
    A phone call earlier that week meant his estrangement from the local Labour Party was almost complete. Trevor Williams urged Jim to give him times when he could send some of the Labour students from the university to come and bang on doors.
    We’ll do our own door-banging here, Jim had said.
    Why won’t you just accept some help?
    Because it won’t be help, just hindrance. Folks doh wanna listen to it, at least, with respect, Trev, from the likes of all that lot.
    I’m tryin to help you out.
    Yome gonna send em rahnd any road so it doh matter what I suggest.
    It might have escaped your attention, but there are other seats, other wards, you know. Why are you so intransigent?
    I doh see how folks comin in from outside an tellin people how brilliant it ull be if they vote Labour is gonna work. Crowd of students, outsiders, walkin up and down the streets rahnd here, poking theer noses in is all folks ull think cos they’ll soon disappear. All that’ll happen is they’ll have theer phones nicked an I’ll have another mess to deal with.
    Even though he’d been working on not blowing his top, he could feel his voice rising and his face reddening. Pauline had come out into the conservatory and mouthed, Calm, calm, calm.
    Is that all you think of the people you’re meant to represent? Trevor asked.
    Doh start with that nonsense.
    Why should your cynicism mean we lose a council seat to extremists?
    If yer listen to me, I’ve actually thought it through. I doh wanna stir folks up. Thass what the BNP am dooin. Softly, softly, thass the approach. A bloody twenty per cent turnout ull suit we. Get the Asian vote out and keep it quiet on the estate. Any road, I thought cynicism was what we did these days.
    Jim, there’s obviously no reasoning with you.
    Eh, talking of these students, what happened that time I asked if yow’d get some on em to come dahn an do somereading in the primary school? Lasted abaht a wik, most on em.
    With that he’d put the phone down. He was on his own. These days it was how he preferred it.
    Adnan the mujahedin. Adnan the ghost. He’d been missing now for nearly ten years. One June morning he’d driven off in his taxi and never come back. For a while, as kids, Rob and Adnan had been best mates. They’d been in the same classes at primary school, drifted apart as teenagers. There were a couple of years when they were eight, nine, ten that they’d lived in a kind of state of grace. They’d had the same class teacher, Miss Johnson, for two years running. They’d do projects on space, the sea, knights in shining armour. They’d put on Diwali and Nativity plays. At the end of each day they’d sit on the mat at the front of the classroom – out the window you could see the works’ gantry and the castle in the distance behind it – and Miss Johnson would read them stories.
Narnia
, tales from Shakespeare, Roald Dahl. Or they’d read each other’s work out. Adnan had written a whole book on his own at the library about journeys to other planets, monsters, ghosts. When school finished they’d play football or cricket on the field, collect frog spawn. A couple of times Rob and Adnan went all the way through the canal tunnel out the other side and over the hill to look for golf balls, showed them off the next day. Rob knew he remembered it how he wanted to remember it, not how it really was, but he didn’t care.
    This was about the time things had begun to change around there. The works had closed. Their dads lost their jobs. During this time Rob’s family had all lived at his grandparents’ house on Dudley Road. Then his