The Khan Saima Mir (best short novels TXT) 📖

she had done and all the things she was about to do for family, and the emotion in her drained away. ‘Yes. I am,’ she said. ‘And that makes you a son of a bitch.’

He stopped, shock spreading across his face. He had expected her to argue, not accept his accusations. He had wanted to hate her so much but she hadn’t let him. He had wanted her to say so much more but she wasn’t prepared to. And now he was exhausted and he didn’t have any fight left in him to make her see what she had done.

‘Get in the car, kid,’ she said, her tone cool. ‘Just get in the car and I’ll drive you home. You were caught trying to deal class A drugs, remember that? I’m the one who’s pulled strings and got the charges dropped, so unless you want to spend the next few years in a juvenile detention centre, I suggest you get in the car.’ She pointed towards an Aston Martin DB9.

He looked over at it, and found it hard not to be impressed. It was a beautiful car.

‘You want to try it out?’ she said.

‘What? Really?’

‘Yes, just wipe your nose before you get in. I don’t want your tears and snot all over the interior.’

He did as he was told, all his anger gone in an instant. How had she done that without giving him any answers? He walked to the driver’s side and tried the door.

‘Other side,’ she said. ‘One arrest in twenty-four hours is enough. There’s plenty of private road at Pukhtun House. You can try her out there.’

Ahad stared out of the window for most of the journey; his head hurt from the events and the sound of his own voice.

‘Elyas told me you were a good kid,’ Jia said.

‘I am a good kid.’

‘I think the police would disagree.’

‘What about you?’

She smiled at him, and for the first time in a long time it felt like genuine emotion. ‘No. I don’t think you’re bad. You’re my son after all.’ She had never spoken those words before and something inside him warmed. ‘Sometimes, the best people we know do the worst things just to keep the good people safe. Like my father. And maybe like your mother.’

They reached the gates to the house, swapping seats once safely inside. Ahad clicked the belt buckle into place and put his hands on the wheel, wrapping his fingers around it. He started the engine, pushed his foot on the clutch to move the gearstick but lifted it off too fast: the machine jolted forward and stalled. He tried again and again with the same result. Jia waited patiently, her face stoic, letting him try and fail and try again. She hadn’t been there when he’d learnt to walk, but she was here as he learnt to drive and she planned to stay.

‘It’s harder than it looks,’ he whispered. In the space of a few hours, Ahad had been arrested, and then rescued by the woman who had abandoned him, the woman he hated; he’d let her rile him and had spewed venom at her. He had wanted so desperately for her to be impressed and instead he felt like a fool. ‘I am clearly a loser of gargantuan proportions,’ he said. ‘You can’t even bear to look at me. Can you? Do you still dislike me that much?’

She didn’t answer. Her mind was back at the police station, running through the things he’d said. The police chief had called to give her a heads-up. ‘I hope now we can be friends, Ms Khan?’ he’d said on the phone. Ahad had been caught up in a routine raid, a small fish in a big net. ‘If my tiddler was mixed up in this kind of thing I’d want a friend looking out for him. Probably just needs his mother to set him straight. Most of these young men do. But then, you know him better than I.’

But she didn’t know Ahad. And sitting next to him, trying to make sense of things, she realised that in protecting herself she had inadvertently damaged her son. Something she had never intended. She reached into her handbag and pulled out her lipstick. There were certain things that simply shouldn’t be said without lipstick, and times where its application gave a woman the space to gather her thoughts.

‘You know…when they handed you to me you were so tiny, so helpless,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to let you go, and I kept you on me, on my chest, all night… Before, when I was pregnant, they told me there was something wrong with you, and I went to have a termination. But I couldn’t do it. By the time I found out I was pregnant, you were kicking…and I was afraid.’

‘You were scared? But nothing scares you.’

‘You don’t think I’m human?’ she said. He doubted her ability to feel, and she knew many thought the same, and while she didn’t care what others thought, she did care about him. He was her son, and though buried, her love for him ran deep. And so she cut open her chest and took out her heart for him to see. The words felt trite and saccharine on her tongue but they were the truth, and she knew that the bitter taste left by their sweetness said more about her than her choice of them. ‘Life is about losing,’ she said, ‘losing time, the people we love, our innocence, our ideals. That is all I know of life. So yes, I was afraid, I was afraid of the pain that comes with love. And so…when they told me you’d died, I was relieved. Relieved because I loved you so much that it hurt me. It’s not something I expected until I felt you within me, growing slowly, listening gently to the things I heard.

‘Ahad,’ she said, and for the first time he heard the weight of a mother’s feeling in