Good for Nothing by Mariam Ansar

Author:Mariam Ansar [Ansar, Mariam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241522080
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Published: 2023-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Eman

I don’t really like it when things are quiet. The backstreets, lit up by a single streetlamp, no animals howling or insects chirping because it’s too warm to move even a single muscle.

It’s funny, in its own way. Because the quiet seems to follow me around. It always has. But I’ve never wanted it to. I don’t want it to.

Yet it shoves itself into the walls of my life. Like mould. Like moss. It gets past the locks of other people’s loudness in my life: Nani’s laughter while telling me to stop skidding with my socks on the kitchen floor and the slow murmur of my mum’s car driving over the small gravel stones of our driveway.

The aunties speaking without apology in the launderette, bickering over care packages for the homeless and who’ll deal with Azrah aunty’s dramatic demands next. The light from the TV in our living room and my video games nestled under my pillow. The neighbourhood kids practising their Qur’an in the other room, rocking on their heels, letting the Arabic alphabet give them some momentum.

The quiet pushes itself around all of that. It makes itself at home in its absence. Like a thief in the night. Like an intruder.

So that even when my ears start hurting from too much loudness, my head suddenly heavy with it – in our old house, from the chaos of my mum’s shrieks and my dad’s punching swears – I still don’t miss the quiet I’m so used to. It hurts. Amir’s silence – his hands shoved inside his basketball shorts, his eyes cast down to the ground on the drive back to the station – bruised like a shove to the ribs.

And I was sorry. I really was. But I didn’t know what I was sorry for.

It was an early finish after we’d delivered leaflets to a few streets. The centre of town was still busy with afternoon shoppers, Danny Dangar’s familiar loping figure there among them as usual. The summer heat drying the leaves on neighbourhood trees and dropping leaves on to the roofs of parked cars. Shop windows made pretty with striped summer awnings, glinting mercilessly in the sun.

‘I expect tomorrow to be better,’ said PC Chris, battling against the sound of a mechanical fan in the stuffy warmth of the police station. He had a map filled with leaflet delivery locations safely downloaded on his phone.

‘I expect I’ll only have good things to report to PC Phillips tomorrow.’

He did the whole thing of looking at Amir when he said that.

He even made him stay behind so that they could talk about Amir’s friends distracting him. Something to do with ‘focus’ and ‘being a negative influence’. Kemi and I left him sitting on the stained sofa alone, the defeated curve of his neck suggesting a lack of appreciation for PC Chris’s words.

I remembered where I’d heard it before though – that stuff about his brother. It was in the launderette.

Nani had always hated how the police tried

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