ccording to Cass, his problem started on one of those Adull
wet and windy Saturday afternoons that
characterised everything about the area around Park Road.
Number 43, Shipley Street with its weed-strewn cobbles and council-owned trash bins had been Cass’s home for as long as he could remember. However, on that Saturday afternoon two years ago when he’d crept downstairs, opened the front door, and wandered away it had changed his life forever. In some ways it changed all of our lives.
When he turned the corner onto Brick Street, the only movement had been the dirty brown gutter water sweeping urban debris downstream. Plastic bags, cigarette ends, dead leaves, and other detritus from the maze of inner-city streets of Victorian brick terraces where we lived floated past to gather in soggy piles at the first blocked drain. On Park Road, strip lights shone inside the Cash for Clothes shop and behind the steamy front window of Osman’s Launderette. The dismal streets around Park Road were always like that.
Such was his mood that if he’d found Winston, Kevin, Mo, or Shafiq sheltering like wet pigeons in the doorway of Raja’s Store or Hussein’s Money Exchange like we often did when
we had nothing better to do it was unlikely things would have turned out differently.
If we’d called out, “Where’ re you going, Cass?” he’d probably have said that he was heading down to Mootalah’s because Moo would sometimes ask him to help unload his van for a free can of Coke or a couple of quid. But Cass hadn’t known where he was going. He’d just wanted to get away from everything and everybody. He was fed up, he said. He’d had enough of the stifling square mile of familiarity locally known as Park Road with its mosque, backstreets of broken pavements, builder’s rubble, abandoned cars, boarded up properties and shabby corner shops like Mootalah’s that smelled of wet cardboard, overripe fruit, and wilting vegetables.
Even if he’d passed Bushra and Javeria hiding beneath a tattered umbrella in their tight jeans and make-up who always smiled, giggled, and held onto each other when they saw him, he might have said something different.
“Hi, Cass. Going somewhere nice?”
“Pushing weights down at the centre.”
That would have been a Cass joke because, like us, he’d only ever looked through the plate glass window at the city’s sports centre and watched those who could afford the membership fee running, sweating, and going nowhere in their Lycra.
Perhaps it would have been better if he’d admitted he didn’t know what he was doing or where he was going but honesty demanded self-confidence which at the time was widespread.
At age sixteen or seventeen, we all suffered the same.
Bullshitting and a kind of false swagger got us through. It’s pathetic looking back now.
When Cass went for his stroll, I wasn’t amongst those sheltering outside Raja’s Store because I’d moved to London because I’d tagged along with my mother. If I hadn’t, I’d probably been left to fend for myself around Park Road just like Smithy and Hopper and a few others I could mention But, of course, I knew Cass, after all, we’d messed around together since we’d started school ten years before. There was a small gang of us who at age twelve ad-libbed bullshit and jokes that only ever amused us just to prove we were the real cool dudes on Park Road. No-one had better jokes than we did.
Cass’s best mate was Kevin. Kevin was the quiet one who missed school a lot for reasons we never asked about.
Looking back now I can see that Kevin’s confidence was rock bottom. In fact, his jokes were so bad we’d look at each other wondering if he was really from this planet.
But if, on that dismal Saturday, Cass had passed Bashir’s Asian Store and Kevin happened to be outside stacking boxes of oranges or cucumbers for pocket money, things might have turned out differently. If he’d seen Kevin, it’s likely he would never have stopped outside the shabby front window of Faisal World Travel on Park Road. But they hadn’t met, and so Cass had walked on and stopped, distracted by coloured stickers advertising cheap flights to Dublin, Paris, and Amsterdam.
Not only that but he’d gone inside and met the owner Mr.
Khan. It was Mr. Khan who’d then sold him a cheap air ticket to Turkey, which he bought in cash with savings from his part-time jobs.
At the last minute, Mr. Khan also gave him a parcel to give to his brother in Istanbul. The only other person who knew about the parcel was Kevin because Kevin was the one who’d waved Cass off on the bus to the airport.