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or at Merry Hill, before dumping the car and ending up back in the Lion.
    Zubair would shrug, not look at Rob properly. Maybe he knew something more, maybe he didn’t. There was family stuff that Rob couldn’t really get at, felt he couldn’t ask or wouldn’t understand, didn’t know where to start. Muslim stuff, maybe; things seemed more complicated than they used to.
    You couldn’t just disappear into thin air, though. You couldn’t become nothing.
    Rob knew the truth was probably mundane, and tragic, but stories crept in to fill the gaps. Adnan the mujahedin. That was one of the stories. Rob reckoned Zubair knew more than he let on.
    A couple of years after he’d gone, Rob read something about the routes into Bosnia, stories of young British Muslim men travelling there to sign up. Get a holiday flight to Italy or Corfu. There were middlemen to sort out a boat across to Albania. Hang around the harbour in Tirana and wait for a bus to a training camp and then the front. So maybe that was it; he was trudging through the mud with an AK-47 or rocket launcher. Or living like a bandit in the dusty mountains of Afghanistan. Or sneaking through the winding alleyways of Gaza. And you had to admit, Rob thought to himself, and only to himself, that there was something in that, something a bit more exciting than sitting here watching it all unfold on the telly, watching everything, your own life included, slide away, turn to rust. Then he wondered exactly who it was he was thinking about.
    Nowadays he pictured Adnan bearded and hollow-faced in a cave or dead, under the rubble somewhere, sinking in the mud. Wild fantasies filled the silence. He found himself scanning the faces of al-Qaeda terrorists when they flashed up on the news; the bland, sinister head-shots reminded him of the ones on the football stickers he and Adnan had swapped as kids.
    Rob thought about Zubair sitting in his office, watching the television he’d rigged up for the World Cup, chain-smoking through matches, leaning back on his chair against the frame of the open window. Thinking about Adnan, his missing brother. Zubair was lonely, Rob thought. But he didn’t know how lucky he was: he’d married Katie, a legal secretary he’d worked with; they’d bought a nice house by the park, had a little girl. Rob had bumped into Katie once at a bar at The Waterfront – he’d shagged her mate, but nothing came of it – Zubair had been at home with the baby.
    Mills made a run up the right. Scholes tried to find him with a pass. England looked in, but the move came to nothing. Rob heard his dad mutter, Unlucky son, to Mills, or more likely to Scholes for spotting the pass.
    Suddenly Simeone hit it diagonally, the same kind of ball but in reverse, into the space behind Ashley Cole for Ortega to run on to. Not quite. Another scare. The ball ran out of play.
    Thass the ball. Thass the ball they’ll atta watch. His dad tapped his arm and leaned towards him as he spoke. They’ll atta watch that space in behind Cole, he pushes up way too far, forces it. I doh care how quick he is, I’ve tode yer.
    His old man leaned back then, as if he’d solved a tricky crossword clue.
    Rob was suddenly scared that his dad would clap if Argentina scored using that ball inside the full-back, would look around nodding his head, saying, I tode yer, they deserve it.
    He wondered what Glenn or some of the others would do then. Maybe they’d just indulge him, maybe not. He wondered what he’d do in return. He’d served that lot with plastic beakers, given himself a glass.
    Jasmine always thought she’d come back to Cinderheath. Even getting together with him – and everything that this had caused – had been a kind of return. Looking back on the past year, she knew she wouldn’t have lost all sense, the way she did, if it hadn’t all somehow led back here. She would never have hurt Matt in the