TARIQ & SARAH

Tariq Iqbal is a 15- year old Rochdale schoolboy. His father has left his mother for a white English woman. He has formed a new family and abandoned his first one.

This leaves Tariq and his sister Naveed confused and disturbed. Tariq falls in love with his 34- year old schoolteacher Sarah Michaels. She is bemused but is aware that boyish infatuation is a phase. 

Tariq becomes aware that Naveed is selling sex for financial independence. Sarah tries to help her former pupil but Naveed is also emotionally damaged by her father’s behaviour.  Brother and sister search for an answer to their distress.  Tariq becomes obsessed with Sarah. Sarah appears to be in control of her work and emotional life but Tariq touches her vulnerable situation as a woman escaping a broken marriage. She and Tariq become lovers.  However, Tariq  has a rival for Sarah’s affections. This is his classmate Johnny Gisenga, son of Zairean refugees and evangelical Christians.   Johnny, and his parents risk deportation under the government’s crack-down on illegal immigrants.  In the Pentecostal Church, Johnny declares his love of Sarah to his congregation. He reveals the affair between Sarah and Tariq. Sarah is dismissed from her job and leaves Rochdale for Manchester.

Five years later, Tariq and Johnny have become taxi drivers in Manchester. Still obsessed with Sarah, Tariq approaches her and tells her he wants her. Sarah rejects him. He becomes confused and violent. Naveed has returned to Islam and Tariq decides that the only way he can become the man of the house is to marry his cousin. In this way he believes that he can prove to be a good example of manhood and family responsibility. He wants to be the man his father is not. 

TARIQ IQBAL a l5 year old boy of Pakistani heritage

‘JOHNNY’ GISENGA a l5 year old from Zaire

The setting is Rochdale, today.

SCENE TWO – OUTSIDE THE SCHOOL

TARIQ
Look at her.

JOHNNY
Zimbabwean twat. All that toffing high school stuff, government minister’s daughter. If it’s so good there why she come to our school.

TARIQ
You think Miss’ll come out soon?

JOHNNY
No.

TARIQ
Walk behind her. See her arse. (Beat.) That bet.

JOHNNY
Yeh.

TARIQ
Dating Miss. What’s it worth?

(Johnny takes out a wallet with credit cards in it.)

TARIQ
Bloody hell. Where you get them?

JOHNNY
Found them.

TARIQ
And I’m Prince William.

JOHNNY
I swear it.

TARIQ
Shit shit shit. What I couldn’t do with those.

JOHNNY
I should give them.

TARIQ
What?

JOHNNY
Police.

TARIQ
You nicked them.

JOHNNY
Found them on the floor in the Town Hall. 

TARIQ
What you doing there?

JOHNNY
Like the building don’t I. Stained glass windows. Kind of church. 

TARIQ
You shitting me.

JOHNNY
Not my church. That’s plain.

TARIQ
You! In the Town Hall!

JOHNNY
It’s England.

TARIQ
Course it’s fucking England.

JOHNNY
I mean not like out on the street. It’s real England. White men. In suits.

TARIQ
Them cards.

JOHNNY
What about them?

TARIQ
Give them to me.

JOHNNY
Oh yes?

TARIQ
You can’t take them to the police.

JOHNNY
Why not?

TARIQ
They’ll send you back.

JOHNNY
No they won’t.

TARIQ
Illegals innit?

JOHNNY
Not illegal.

TARIQ
What then.

JOHNNY
We’re waiting to hear innit.

TARIQ
Seventy thirty.

JOHNNY
That’s generous.

TARIQ
Seventy to me that is.

JOHNNY
Not a chance.

TARIQ
What then?

JOHNNY
This deal.

TARIQ
Get on.

JOHNNY
Whoever gets a date with Miss, well he gets the cards.

TARIQ
Why would you give them to me. You could just sell them and ignore this conversation.

JOHNNY
Who to? I don’t know anyone who does that.

TARIQ
I know lots of guys.

JOHNNY
But I don’t.

TARIQ
That’s why you need me. Seventy thirty. I give you the networks you give me the cards. (Beat.) You scared I’ll win. She likes me more than she likes you.

JOHNNY
Oh yeh?

TARIQ
Looking at me innit.

JOHNNY
Looking at all of us. That’s her job you Paki twat.

TARIQ
Zimbabwe, Zambezi coon.

JOHNNY
Zairian coon.

TARIQ
She wouldn’t go with a black man.

JOHNNY
You think that?

TARIQ
She’s white. You is black.

JOHNNY
She’s not prejudiced. 

TARIQ
How you know that?

JOHNNY
All that revolution stuff she goes on about.

TARIQ
That’s just talk. When it comes to doing it.

JOHNNY
I’m not talking about porking her. Just a date. That’s the deal.

TARIQ
Don’t you want to?

JOHNNY
I dream about it.

TARIQ
Well then.

JOHNNY
I dream. But I don’t think I can do it. Not before marriage. It’s not right.

TARIQ
Too much Jesus that’s your problem. And anyway wasn’t he porking around?

JOHNNY
I’d have to marry her.

TARIQ
What for a date?

JOHNNY
Cretin. For sex. That’s the way I am.

TARIQ
You in love with her?

JOHNNY
Love’s for girls innit.

TARIQ
A love marriage. You and her! Someone roast your brain?

JOHNNY
There’s something about the way she dresses.

(Pause.)

The deal.

TARIQ
Yeh.

JOHNNY
OK?

(Johnny holds up the cards in one hand. Tariq puts his palm against them to seal the deal.)