East of Wimbledon (16 page)

At the mere thought of the word
shift
his penis leaped doggily to attention.
Islamic underwear!
he crooned to himself, as he groped for his grey jersey.
It takes so long to get off!
Her clothes, lying across the back of the bedroom chair, spread out in a black line towards the door. There was enough material there, thought Robert, reaching for his green tie, to shroud a fair-sized glasshouse in darkness. You could climb in there with her and still have room to conduct Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Her garments were so large and flowing that a man could have pleasured her while she was waiting at a bus stop and no one would have been any the wiser.

‘We’ll be late, darling!’ he called, lightly. ‘Darling!’ She let him talk dirty whenever he felt like it!

She had been living with the Wilsons for nearly three months. Maisie’s father had died just after Christmas. He had been briefly but sincerely mourned. Her mother had surprised everyone by dying just as they were recovering from her husband’s death. She was helped into the gardens of paradise by a number 33 bus, which had reversed over her while trying to execute a three-point turn outside the Polka Theatre, but some people still claimed that her death was, in part anyway, due to a broken heart. ‘If she’d been herself,’ Maisie wailed to Robert, ‘she’d have looked.’

Maisie had been more affected by her mother’s death than most people thought possible. She had always referred to her as ‘the old bat’, or occasionally as ‘that hard bitch’. Mr and Mrs Wilson had been very sympathetic.

Maisie had moved out of her parents’ house and come to stay at the Wilsons’ shortly after her mother’s funeral, a multidenominational affair dominated by the headmaster of the Wimbledon Independent Islamic Boys’ School (Day). Mr Malik’s speech – described by one of Maisie’s mother’s oldest friends as ‘a masterpiece of bad taste’ – had dwelt, at great length, on the sexual prospects awaiting the Faithful in heaven. Maisie was no longer on speaking terms with any of her family ever since her stepbrother’s son had asked her where she had parked the camel and when she was going to be circumcised.

Robert struggled into his green socks. Mr Malik had insisted the staff also appear in uniform since early February, although Robert suspected this was only because he had a deal with the shop that supplied the ties and the socks. He had come to quite like the outfit.
I will die with my boots on! It can’t be worse than Ramadan!

He shuddered slightly as he thought about Ramadan. Dr Ali had been particularly active during Ramadan. He kept leaping into the darkroom, created for the Photographic Society on the first floor, and claiming that he had heard the sound of munching.

It was surprising, really, that the only person in the school whom Dr Ali had sentenced to death should be Robert. Close examination of the man’s conversation suggested that no one in the Western world was safe. There was quite a lot of his conversation. Like the woman in the fairy story, once Ali started talking he did not stop.

There were, as far as Robert could tell, no other members of the British Mission for Islamic Purity, the organization the doctor claimed to represent. Ali had an aunt in Southfields, but, he told the headmaster, she was doomed to everlasting hellfire. The man was, as Dr Malik had pointed out to Robert, a fundamentalist’s fundamentalist. ‘As far as he is concerned,’ said the headmaster one evening in the Frog and Ferret, ‘there is Allah, there is Muhammad, and then there is him. What can you do with such people?’

Ali, it turned out, had been sentencing people to death for years. He had sentenced the owner of a garden centre in Morden to death when the man refused to take his Access card. He had sentenced the entire General Synod of the Church of England to death. He had sentenced over fifteen hundred journalists to death, including all of the staff of
The London Programme.
He had terrifyingly conservative views on the ordination of women.

The encouraging thing was that all the people he had sentenced were, so far at any rate, in good health. Some of them, as far as Robert could tell, were completely unaware that Dr Ahmed Ali had officially decreed they were no longer worthy to share the planet with him. Some of them seemed to have positively enjoyed the experience. One of them – the owner of a mobile whelk stall in South Wimbledon – had told the doctor that he could sentence him to death until he was blue in the face and that he, personally, could not give a flying fuck. This was more or less the view of the headmaster.

‘By all means sentence Wilson to death,’ Mr Malik had said. ‘By all means. I think we should all start sentencing each other to death. It clears the air. Let’s “go for it”. Sentence me to death if it makes you feel better.’

Mr Malik’s tolerance was limitless. ‘I may have tried to keep the loonies out,’ he said, ‘but once they are in, they are in!’ The more eccentrically his maths master behaved, the more Malik was prepared to defend him. At half-term, Ali had offered ten pounds to any of ‘the proud Muslim people of South-West London’ who would be prepared to finish off Robert Wilson, but, even though he had raised this sum to twelve pounds fifty, there were, so far at any rate, no takers.

Robert’s real worry was that he could not understand what it was that had caused offence. If he had been able to understand that, he might at least have been able to formulate a coherent apology. It couldn’t have simply been his reading
The Sheep-Pig
to Class 1. Maybe the doctor had some inside information on him. Anyway, if he opened his mouth again, he thought glumly as he started down-stairs to breakfast, he would probably get into worse trouble. He had stayed clear of the subject of religion since Christmas.

If only he could manage to finish the Koran. He had made several attempts on it. He had tried saying it out loud. He had tried reading it on trains, in bed at night, and even, on one occasion, in the bath. He had tried starting in the middle and working backwards. He had tried starting at the end and flicking to the beginning. He had tried reading isolated pages – reading three pages, skipping three, and then reading four. He had tried it drunk and he had tried it sober. He had even tried starting at page
I
and working his way through to the end. None of these methods had worked. After a page, his eyes would wander away. After two pages, he would find himself, without quite knowing why or how he got there, making a cup of tea or watching the television. After three or four pages, he found himself wandering the streets or pacing anxiously through some park he didn’t even recognize, twitching and murmuring strangely to himself while mothers, at the sight of him, drew their children to them and stole softly away across the grass.

When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he turned and called up to Maisie. ‘Coming!’ she replied.

Hasan was sitting up at the table, eating a large slice of toast. The butter was dribbling across that huge mark on his cheek. Mrs Wilson was sitting on the sofa, smiling foolishly at him.

Immediately he heard Robert’s footsteps, Hasan stopped. ‘Hello, Mr Wilson,’ he said, in his high, precise voice. ‘I dreamed last night that Badger turned into a hedgehog. Would you see if there is a hedgehog on the lawn?’

Hasan was always having prophetic dreams. They were modest, small-scale affairs, usually about very mundane subjects. But the events described in them – the loss of some ornament, or the visit of some old family friend – quite often turned out to happen just as the little boy had predicted. There was something uncanny about him, his high forehead and his big, sightless eyes.

Robert went to the French windows and looked out to see if he could see anything. There, in the middle of the lawn, was a hedgehog. Robert whirled round on his mother, suspecting her of some collusion with the child, but, with the wistful fondness of a woman who has finished with childbearing, Mrs Wilson was still gazing at the Twenty-fourth Imam of the Wimbledon Dharjees.

‘Is Badger around?’ said Robert, trying to keep the panic out of his voice, ‘because there’s a hedgehog on—’

At this moment Badger skulked into the kitchen, loped over to the pedal bin, and stood gazing mournfully at a piece of orange peel, just visible over the edge of the plastic rim.

‘Maisie!’ called Mrs Wilson.
‘Le petit déjeuner est servi, ma chérie!’

There was a grunt from upstairs. Robert’s father was awake.

Robert sat at a vacant space and put his head in his hands. His mother looked at him, briskly. ‘What’s the matter this morning?’ she said, in the voice she had used when he asked her for an offgames note.

‘Just the usual,’ said Robert, with heavy sarcasm. ‘I’ve been sentenced to death. Apart from that, everything is fine. Everything is a winner!’

Mrs Wilson snorted. ‘I do not think, Robert,’ she said, ‘that anyone takes this man very seriously. All you said was that the Koran wasn’t an easy read. Nobody kills anyone for saying something like that. It’s fair comment. I personally think—’

Before his mother could get started on the Koran, Robert held up his hand. You never knew who might be listening. She looked, however, as if she was fairly determined to give her views on the matter, but before she could start on the
Why do they come over here if they don’t like it?
speech or her
I believe in respecting people’s religious feelings but would die to defend their right to disagree with me
speech, Maisie came round the door.

She ate breakfast in a kind of compromise Islamic outfit. Just after her conversion – a moment of mystical submission she insisted on replaying several times a day – she had kept the veil on even at meals, and forked meat and potatoes in under her mask like a game-keeper baiting a trap. She also stored food in there like a hamster, and sometimes, when least expected, her head would snake back inside her covering and the crunch of crisps or the slurp of a boiled sweet could be heard. But now her outfit, although loose and flowing, was slightly closer to the kind of garment you might expect in SW19. It was more like a giant caftan than anything else.

It was Mr Malik who had persuaded her to soften her approach. ‘Even in Libya they don’t carry on like that,’ he had said. ‘You look like something out of a pantomime. What are you supposed to be?’

Her friendship with the headmaster remained a close one. While Mr Malik hardly ever discussed religion with Robert, he spent many evenings in the La Paesana restaurant, Mitcham, going over the finer points of Islamic doctrine with Maisie. ‘We always spend a lot of time with female converts, Wilson,’ he said, giving him a broad wink. ‘They are a lot more work, if you take my meaning!’

Robert was not exactly jealous of the headmaster – he could not remember meeting anyone less sexually threatening. But there were moments when he almost wished that what was happening between Maisie and Mr Malik did have a sexual connotation. At least he would then have been able to understand it.

‘Sports Day today!’ said Maisie brightly.

No one, as usual, wanted to discuss the fact that he had been sentenced to death. They were bored with it. At first, Robert’s father had got quite excited. He had even gone to the Wimbledon police, but they had not seemed very interested. They had said a Detective Constable McCabe, a community policeman, would ‘look in’, which, after a couple of weeks, he did. He seemed mainly interested in whether there were any locks on the windows.

Robert’s father appeared. His hair was matted and uncombed, and his face, as usual in the mornings, was a rather shocking blend of inflamed pink and seasick white. He was wearing a dressing-gown.

‘What do you do for Sports Day?’ he said. ‘Stone one of the junior ticks to death?’

A lot of Mr Wilson senior’s liberal attitudes had not stood the test of having two converted Muslims living in the house. He was often to be found slumped in front of the television, muttering about nignogs. At Christmas he had insisted on hanging up Robert’s stocking on the end of his bed, and had suggested the two of them visit the Cranborne School carol service. He peered across at Maisie now, as he groped his way to the table, his face showing the strain of his forty-eight years in Wimbledon. ‘You used to have nice legs, Maisie,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong with our getting a look at them?’

Mrs Wilson had told him he should get out of the house more. This he achieved by getting along to the Frog and Ferret at about eleven each morning, where he spent hours in conversation with George ‘This is My Coronary’ Parker.

Maisie giggled. Underneath the Islamic garments she was still an English convent girl. With her veil pushed back and her black hood shading her face, she looked rather like a nun.

Mrs Wilson rose and, folding her hands together, bowed in an Oriental manner. ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘for our meal.’ It was not clear whether this remark was addressed to Allah, Jehovah or the London Muffin Company. She had taken, this spring, to a sort of generalized reverence that looked as if it was planned to accommodate any new religion to which her son or his girlfriend might have become attached.

She had also given up all her domestic routines. She cleared the table as they were eating, following, as always now, her own weird domestic schedule. Sometimes she would start laying the table for breakfast at four in the afternoon; sometimes she would pursue Maisie and Robert out into the street with plates of hot food, begging them to eat more. And sometimes she would announce that she was doing no more in the house. ‘There it is!’ she would yell, pointing at the fridge. ‘It’s all in there! It’s every man for himself from now on in!’

Perhaps, thought Robert, she was worried about him. It would be nice to think that someone was. He pushed back his chair, and, after one more careful look round the garden, went to look for Class 1’s homework. At the top of the pile was a beautifully typed essay from Sheikh on the causes of the English Civil War. The little bastard, or his parents, or some hired professional historian, had written three thousand closely argued words. Robert had given him beta minus (query).

‘There you are, Mr Wilson,’ Maisie was saying, as she twirled her skirt above her legs like a cancan dancer – ‘knees!’