East of Wimbledon (21 page)

‘Oh, my God!’ squawked Maisie. ‘Oh, my
God!’
It was Hasan.

Robert took in the neatly combed hair, the frail shoulders, the exquisite cheekbones with the red blemish on one side, and the huge, sightless eyes that roamed the blackness below him like inverted searchlights, as if to soak up the shadows. He took in the way the little boy’s hands stretched out over the crowd of distressed men as if to soothe them, and, for the first time in his life, he felt something that was not quite fear and not quite joy – an emptiness that longed to be filled. He heard Maisie’s voice once more:
What
do
you believe in?
And, in spite of himself, he heard he was groaning quietly, like the men in the darkened room.

Next to him he heard Maisie gasp. He became aware that she was breaking away from the window. He hoped she wasn’t proposing to make her presence known to the Twenty-fourthers. Robert had the strong impression that they viewed unwanted spectators in the same spirit in which the ancient Greeks received people barging in on the Eleusinian mysteries.

‘I am Hasan!’ said Hasan.

‘You are Hasan!’ shouted the crowd.

Behind him, Maisie had moved away from the window. Perhaps she had simply had enough. Hasan’s voice had a chilling quietness to it. Robert had to put his ear closer to the glass to hear it. The crowd, too, had lowered their voices, but this had the effect of making the exchanges even more momentous.

‘I am coming!’ said the little boy.

‘You are coming!’ said the crowd.

How was he staying up there? thought Robert. And why was his presence so disturbing? Even Maisie, who was now standing a few yards from the window, breathing heavily, seemed to have been paralysed by the sight of him.

‘I am coming to destroy!’ hissed Hasan.

‘You are coming to destroy!’ they whispered back.

‘And what am I going to destroy?’ murmured Hasan.

‘What are you going to destroy?’ muttered the crowd in answer.

Robert half expected the whole cycle to start again, so long had he waited for an answer to this question. But this time the answer was forthcoming. The little boy leaned his face to one side as if he was listening to some signal inaudible to mere mortals, and he whispered, ‘I am going to destroy Malik. I am going to destroy the seducer Malik and his friend Wilson,’ hissed Hasan. ‘They will both go to hell-fire!’

Robert felt something more than the natural peevishness of a betrayed parent or guardian. There was something so vivid and authentic about the little boy’s face and voice that he had to look away. He lifted his face from the peephole, and in the glass in front of him he saw a face he thought he recognized. A round, plump, jolly, brown face that he remembered from back last summer, when all this business started. But, before he was able to put a name to it, something hit him on the back of the head, and for a long time he knew no more.

‘Stick close to me,’ said Robert, ‘and do not talk to strange men!’

‘Can we talk to you, sir?’ said Mafouz.

‘Ha bloody ha!’ said Robert.

His charges followed him. From time to time he would look back with a certain pride at them. Mafouz, Sheikh, Mahmud, Akhtar, and, at the back, their ears jutting out like radio antennae, the Husayn twins with Khan – or Famine, Pestilence and War, as Mr Malik called them.

He hoped the Museum had not left any priceless bits of Islamic art lying around the place. If it had, they were liable to end up in the Husayn twins’ pockets.

He liked his class, though. In fact he liked the school. When it had beaten Cranborne Junior School by three hundred runs, two Saturdays ago, he had linked arms with the headmaster and sung three verses of ‘We Are the Champions’. He had also, after five pints in the Frog and Ferret, referred to Malik as ‘his Muslim brother’ and said, publicly, that any lousy Christian cricket team could not, in his view, fart their way out of a swimming-pool.

The school was getting even bigger and even more successful. They had taken on extra teaching staff. There was a rather pleasant man, called Chaudhry, who showed worrying signs of having actually gone to Oxford. He was always saying to Robert, ‘Do you remember old Jennings from Univ?’ or ‘Tell me, Wilson, did you use the Radcliffe Camera?’ To which Robert replied that he had never been interested in photography. They had also hired a French teacher, whose name Robert was unable to remember from one day to the next.

A man from the local education authority, after being taken over to the pub by Mr Malik, had announced his intention of sending his own son to the school. ‘Let them all come!’ said the headmaster to Robert. ‘We send our little bastards to Cranborne – why shouldn’t we take
their
money?’ The school was, he had told Robert, officially in profit. Mr Shah, he said, had a return on his investment.

The more he enjoyed teaching, and the more Mr Malik’s school seemed to prosper, the worse he felt about his original act of deception. As this summer, even hotter and drier than the last, worked its way up to August, Robert found he had developed a rich repertoire of twitches and guilty tics. He blinked. He snorted. He jerked his head backwards and forwards. He had even developed the beginnings of a stammer.

Maisie had told him he was ‘getting more and more like a space man’. Now he was not only unable to remember the names of politicians, sportsmen and television personalities, he also found his memory was unable to supply the personal details of people he had known since he was a child. It was probably that blow on the head he had received at the end of the spring term. He had, Maisie had told him, been unconscious for nearly two minutes. She herself had had a bag placed over her head and had been left, trussed like a chicken, under the windows of the mysterious house on the Common. When they had recovered, the Dharjees had gone.

Had the shock affected Maisie too? Was that why she had moved out of the Wilson family home?

She had said she couldn’t stand living in such close proximity to quite so many facial quirks, but there was something deeper in her decision to take a small flat near the school. He simply couldn’t respond to the person she had become. He would only be able to find his way back to her when he managed, for once in his life, to be honest about what he really felt and believed.

He would be dead soon, anyway, he reflected, as he made his way up the Museum stairs. If some friend of Ali’s didn’t get him, then the Twenty-fourth Imam would probably grind him into little pieces. Hasan was waiting for him at the top of the stairs, and, as soon as he heard his guardian’s tread, the little boy sat up, sniffed the air and stretched out his hands like a cat, waking after sleep.

Hasan had been unbearable ever since his Occultation. It can’t, thought Robert, be good for the personality to have a load of middle-aged men prostrating themselves in front of you and sobbing every time you open your mouth. He wasn’t yet quite in the Michael Jackson class, but for the last few months the little boy had been difficult in the extreme. He had refused to go to bed on time, insisted on watching
The Late Show
on television, and claimed that Badger was ‘not worthy’ to lick him. He had had a few more prophetic dreams. And one of them, Robert was almost sure, had foretold that something ghastly was going to happen in what sounded like the British Museum.

‘I am not really me,’ he had confided to Robert a few months ago, as the two were on a bus, on their way to the Megabowl in Kingston. ‘I am a reincarnation of the true Twenty-fourth Imam of the Nizari Ismailis! My father was sent to hell-fire on the sixth of Rabi!’

‘Is that right?’ Robert had said, with a nervous glance around at the other passengers. ‘Well, I hope it improves your bowling!’

Hasan giggled and put his hand in Robert’s. On their last visit to the Megabowl he had hurled his projectile directly at the fruit machines. ‘Sometimes you are so nice I do not want to kill you, Mr Wilson!’ he said. ‘And I know you do not really believe me. But you may look me up. I am in all the history books. I feature in
The Assassins
, by Bernard Lewis, a respectable work of scholarship.’

Robert had made the mistake of looking Hasan up in the work in question, at the end of which he had almost decided to call in an exorcist with some experience in the Islamic field.

‘I will come into my kingdom on the Day of False Resurrection,’ Hasan used to say, when Robert was trying to get him to brush his teeth, ‘which is the eighth of August. The day when Hasan the Second betrayed The Law!’

As Bernard Lewis had put it:

On the 17th day of the month of Ramadan, the anniversary of the murder of Ali, in the year 559 (8th August 1164) under the ascendancy of Virgo and when the sun was in Cancer, Hasan ordered the erection of a pulpit in the courtyard of Alamut, facing towards the west, with four great banners of four colours, white, red, yellow and green, at the four corners. As the pulpit faced west, the congregation had their backs towards Mecca.

He wished he didn’t know these things. He wished he’d stuck to Marwan Ibrahim Al-Kaysi. You knew where you were with Marwan. ‘
When putting on shoes they should be checked to make sure no harmful insect has hidden in them during the night.’
That was fair enough. But the true history of the Lord Hasan – Hasan the Second, on his name be peace – was mind-boggling stuff.

If he had had any decency he would have talked to Mr Malik about what was going to happen. He would have warned him. He was the only one to know that today was the day when Hasan was going to wreak his revenge. He was the only one to know the whole story. But neither he nor Maisie, as far as he knew, had spoken of what had happened at Hasan’s Occultation.

‘Come along, Wilson!’ boomed Mr Malik’s voice from the next gallery – ‘you’ll miss the fun! Bring young Hasan along!’

The headmaster stepped out of the gallery with a couple of the older boys. Beyond him, Robert could see Maisie and Rafiq. Rafiq! The man Malik trusted! The man he thought of as his oldest friend! Malik was simply too trusting. You simply could not afford to trust anyone – especially where religion was concerned.

Robert had tried to open up the subject of Hasan several times, but Mr Malik seemed far less concerned about him than he had been. ‘What people believe,’ he had told Robert, ‘is their own affair. But I have ways of dealing with unbrotherly conduct!’

He was whistling to keep up his spirits, that was all, Robert said to himself as the boys clattered after him. He had been nervous enough when the name of the Twenty-fourthers was first mentioned. Down below, in the gallery below him and Hasan, the Husayn twins and Khan were dancing round a case stuffed with priceless porcelain.
‘Shake de belly!’
called Khan in a mock African accent.
‘Break de glass and shake de belly!’
A man in a blue uniform was walking over towards them. Robert waved them on, and they scampered after the rest of the class.

‘Do you know why we destroyed Hasan the Second?’ said Hasan, in a conversational tone, as the two of them followed the headmaster and the rest of the school. Robert knew, but he wasn’t going to give Hasan the satisfaction of knowing that he knew. The trouble with this Islamic history was that, like the Western version, you got involved in it.

‘We destroyed him because he betrayed The Law!’ said Hasan, in the kind of voice that suggested Hasan the Second, the Twenty-third Imam of the Nizari Ismailis, had only just popped out of the room for a cup of coffee instead of being stabbed nearly a thousand years ago.

The Twenty-fourther beliefs were not simply rumours from the dawn of time: they came, like the Dharjees themselves, out of real history. That was the frightening thing about them.

Towards noon, the Lord Hasan 2nd, on whose name be peace, wearing a white garment and a white turban, came down from the castle, approached the pulpit from the right side and in the most perfect manner ascended it. Addressing himself to the inhabitants of the world, jinn, men and angels, he said, ‘The Imam of our time has sent you his blessing and his compassion and has called you to be his special, chosen servants. He has freed you from the burden of the rules of Holy Law.’

They had had a banquet in the middle of the fast. In the middle of Ramadan. And they had drunk wine on the very steps of the pulpit and its precincts. They had flouted the
shariah
, the fundamental law of Islam. That was what this argument was about, even now in the 1990s in Wimbledon. How closely should one follow The Law?

‘Come and look at this!’ shouted Malik. ‘There’s a bloke in here with nine arms! Can you beat that?’ He indicated a large Hindu carving, and the boys swarmed round it. The headmaster was clearly about to give one of his informal talks.

He had to get out, Robert thought. There was nothing else for it. He had to make a dignified and orderly retreat. Put himself out of the reach of Dr Ali, the Twenty-fourthers and everything else in the school. He was simply going to have to leave Islam, the way his father had left the Rotary club. You were allowed to leave, weren’t you? It wasn’t the British Army. He was going to ask nicely.

‘And so,’ Mr Malik was saying, ‘we observe the
accumulation of gods
, very much as one saw in pre-Islamic Medina. The process of monotheistic religions can be seen as the beginning of the rational approach to the world!’

It wasn’t going to be easy. He had already offered his resignation, twice, and Mr Malik had simply ignored it. When he had tried a third time, the headmaster had made some slightly menacing remarks about brotherhood and commitment.

‘And yet,’ went on Malik, ‘the holistic nature of the Hindu world-picture still has much to teach us. Religions, like arts and sciences, must learn from each other, and toleration, which is an essential part of Islam, must be
studied, worked at
, not simply mentioned as a piety.’

This was well over the heads of his audience. Khan and the Husayn twins were making offensive gargling noises while dancing round a statue that looked to Robert as if it might be the Lord Vishnu; behind them, Mahmud did his Native American impression.