East of Wimbledon (24 page)

Robert put Hasan on a chair in the corner. The little boy showed no sign of Messianic behaviour. He sat quite still, his delicate hands folded in his lap. Robert looked from Maisie to the headmaster. How had he been so stupid? That was easy to understand. Malik had such a generalized air of gravity that his manner to individuals never conveyed anything of what he might really be thinking. He was standing, now, with Fatimah Bankhead and Mr and Mrs Akhtar, talking of the school’s future plans. ‘The whole of the west wing,’ he was saying, ‘will be turned into an art and design complex, while we are starting an appeal for the boat-house! The rowing team need somewhere to relax and “get their wind” after a damn good session on the river. And we also, obviously, need somewhere to keep the boats. I am fed up with having them in my kitchen!’

The boat-house was news to Robert. As was the fact that they had a west wing. Why did they need a boat-house? Was he planning to restage the battle of Lepanto? They did not even have a rowing team, as far as he was aware. The man was a swindler. Robert could not stop these thoughts. Ever since he had heard about Maisie and the headmaster they had risen in swarms, like rats leaving a sewer.

There were quite a lot of parents that Robert did not recognize. Over in the corner, by the window, was an elderly man with a white beard, wearing what looked like a cut-down fez. Next to him was a middle-aged character in a suit. As he watched, the two men wandered over to the door that led through to the garden. One thing about them surprised him. Although they were both wearing neatly polished leather footwear, the laces on both of their right shoes were undone, trailing behind them as they walked.

‘In ten minutes,’ called Mr Malik, ‘the pageant will begin!’

Robert crossed to Maisie. She was walking backwards and forwards over the makeshift stage shaking sand on to the boards from a small bucket, trying to evoke the desert sands of Saudi Arabia. In the opening section of the pageant, Mahmud, lying underneath the stage, was due to poke a flag decorated with a crescent moon up through a crack in the stage. The flag was tightly furled, but, at a signal from Mr Malik, three hairdryers, manned by boys from Dr Ali’s class, would be trained on it and, in the headmaster’s words, it would ‘symbolically flutter across the stage’.

‘You’re right,’ said Robert, ‘I am a mess. I need to stop lying. I need to face up to what I am.’

‘I shouldn’t be too quick to do that,’ said Maisie – ‘you might not like what you are. I might not like what you are.’

‘You can’t go on lying to yourself,’ said Robert. ‘How can you expect people to take you seriously, if you don’t have any convictions about anything?’

‘Why do you want people to take you seriously?’ said Maisie. ‘One of the things I like about you is that you’re so ridiculous.’

This was not quite how Robert had planned the conversation. Conversations with Maisie had a habit of going astray like this. You would go in there planning to discuss, say, her habit of ogling men in restaurants or her inability to repay money she had borrowed, or her ability to disseminate confidences throughout the whole of Wimbledon about five minutes after they had been imparted to her, and you would end up discussing the state of affairs in Europe, the merits of Beethoven, or, more usually, your own deficiencies.

‘What I mean is,’ said Robert, ‘if I could be . . . you know . . .
me
. . . do you think you could, you . . . sort of . . .’

Maisie kissed him lightly on the cheek. ‘I don’t think there is a real you, Bobkins,’ she said. ‘I think you’re just wonderfully insubstantial. That’s why I love you.’

As opposed to the Islamic loony now prancing around on the other side of the room
, thought Robert bitterly. Maybe he could report Malik to some high-up official in the Islamic world. During the summer term the man had consumed about twenty pints of Young’s Special a week. Did he ever give to the poor? Not really. He seemed far rnore concerned to take money off the rich – especially if they happened to be Muslim. Did he believe any more than Robert did? Wasn’t religion simply a pose with him, as it was for so many so-called Christians?

And yet – and yet . . . there was something glorious about him. Watching him now, as he shepherded parents in from the garden for the start of the pageant, listening to his deep, authoritative voice, he seemed, to Robert, more English than he himself could ever be. He seemed to summon up an England of green lawns, elegant teas and beautiful women in long dresses, trailing parasols. An England that, these days, existed only in Merchant Ivory films. There was nothing squalidly European about him. He was imperial in scope.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ called the headmaster, ‘we are ready to begin our pageant, to which we have given the lighthearted title
Islamic Wimbledon!’

There was laughter, and a smattering of applause.

From the stairs came Rafiq, with the two strangers Robert had noticed earlier. If Mr Malik noticed them, he showed no sign of it. They kept to the back of the crowd, hugging the wall in an almost furtive way. Opposite them were two or three other characters Robert could not remember seeing before at the school. One – a round, jolly, brown man of about fifty – was vaguely familiar. He kept shifting from foot to foot, as if in pain. Mr Malik was guiding parents to their chairs.

There had been much discussion about the music. Mr Malik had been keen for it to ‘bridge the gap between the musical traditions of East and West’, and the result was something that sounded suspiciously like the soundtrack from a commercial advertising Singapore Airlines.

As the lights started to fade, Mr Malik gave the signal to the school’s new music master, Mr Kureishi – a small, fat, serious man – who started to belabour an upright piano at the edge of the stage. Class 1 started to sing the opening chorus.

A few hundred years ago

In Saudi Arabia

A man was born—

A remarkable man,

With remarkable behaviour!

Mr Malik had tried a number of rhymes for the opening number. He had been unable to find one for ‘Mecca’, and had rejected a stanza that rhymed ‘keener’ with ‘Medina’. He himself was still not sure about ‘Arabia’ and ‘behaviour’, and he coughed loudly when the chorus reached this point in the song.

He was the seal of the prophets—

He really was an incredible guy.

He still has a great deal to teach us,

And if you listen I’ll tell you why.

Muhammad went up the mountain—

He was up there for more than an hour—

But when he came down he was different,

He had been through the Night of Power.

He received a Divine Revelation,

Which we still read to this day.

And if you read it regularly,

you’ll probably be OK.

At this point, Mahmud started to poke up the flag through the floorboards, and the offstage chorus went into the big number – the words of which were, mercifully, inaudible, but of a general philosophical nature.

As the flag waved around, to tentative applause, Mr Malik stepped into a spotlight and began. ‘People have come to Britain from many lands,’ he boomed, ‘and today the country is a melting pot! We are an integral ingredient of that pot!’

The audience were no surer of this than they had been of the song. The Islamic world, even in Wimbledon, thought Robert, was not quite ready for the fusion of styles unleashed on it by Mr Malik.

‘We must adapt,’ he went on, ‘and become one with the UK while remaining ourselves. This is the message conveyed to you by the Independent Islamic Wimbledon Day Boys’ School!’

As he spoke, various boys in various kinds of national costume trooped from the left and right of the stage; at the same moment, from beneath the stage, Mahmud started to poke a second flag up through the floorboards. It was, Robert noted with a mixture of horror and relief, the Union Jack. Some members of the audience applauded it.

Mr Malik raised his right arm. ‘The conflict between Islam and Christianity,’ he said, ‘is an old battle. And one that no longer needs fighting!’

At this point the Bosnian refugee leaped on to the stage on a small wooden horse, designed and built for him by his mother. From the other side of the acting space came the Husayn twins, tied together with a cardboard chain. ‘Confess your sins, Muslim dogs,’ said the Bosnian refugee, in slightly cautious tones, ‘and become Christians, or we slash you up!’ With these words he ran at the Husayn twins and started to belabour them with his plastic sword.

The boys stood this for as long as was decent, and then, after a particularly heavy blow to the head, the brothers grabbed the Bosnian refugee by both feet and up-ended him over the sand. ‘Die, Christian!’ said the fatter of the two twins.

This was not, as far as Robert remembered, in the script, but it seemed to be going down rather well with the audience. Mr Mafouz was clapping loudly.

But Robert’s eye was no longer seriously drawn to the stage. The fat man over to his right had leaned down to the floor. When he straightened up again, Robert saw that he was carrying something. It was impossible, from this distance, to see what he was wearing on his feet, but it seemed likely that he was one short of a full complement of shoes, because in his right hand he was holding a large, brown, elastic-sided boot. Robert recognized him now: it was the restaurant owner he had met on the day he had brought home Hasan – Mr Khan. Not only that: his was the round, jolly face he had seen in the window the day he had been hit on the head outside the room where he had been watching the Occultation of the Twenty-fourth Imam of the Wimbledon Dharjees.

Now, as he looked around the hall, Robert could see that the whole place was full of single men wearing one shoe. When had they come in? Presumably during the opening sequence of Mr Malik’s pageant. It would not have been difficult to have removed the chairs from under the parents watching the curtain-raiser of Mr Malik’s production – their attention was concentrated on the stage with what looked like some degree of permanence. Macbeth spotting a character he had recently bumped off could not have showed more interest.

Dr Ali, over by the kitchen door, in the darkness, was rocking backwards and forwards on his haunches, muttering something to himself. It was possible, thought Robert with some satisfaction, that he had finally got around to sentencing his employer to death. Serve the bastard right.

Robert looked around for Hasan. The little boy was no longer on his chair. Nor, as far as Robert could see, was he anywhere in the room. How had he managed to get out on his own?

Mr Malik, apparently unaware that his school was full of Twenty-fourthers, or that the Twenty-fourth Imam himself had started to display some of the talents referred to in Aziz’s manuscript (‘He shall come and go as he chooses, shall vanish and appear again’), was warming to his theme. ‘This,’ he said, indicating the Husayn twins, who were now beating the Crusader with his own sword, ‘is what happens when religious bigotry rules a nation. We see it in Northern Ireland. We see it in Tehran. We see it in Wimbledon!’

The audience did not like the direction this was taking. Mr Husayn started to mutter something to his neighbour. Two or three of the ladies present clicked their tongues loudly.

Mr Malik went for safe ground.
‘Those who believe and do good,’
he went on – ‘the
merciful will endow them with loving kindness!’

Fatimah Bankhead was nodding in the gloom, and Mr Mafouz, too, was looking appreciative. Something told Robert that the headmaster had managed to find another line in the Koran that wasn’t about chucking people into hell-fire and making them chew dust for the foreseeable future. Malik had got them on his side once again.

‘If this school is to survive,’ he went on, ‘and if the things it stands for are to survive, then it must adapt! We must learn to live in peace with our neighbours!’

The Husayns had now got the Bosnian refugee up against the far wall and were thwacking him in the kidneys with a piece of wood. Malik turned towards them, managing to give the impression that all this was part of a carefully arranged plan, and said, ‘Look! Look where hatred and bigotry leads!’

Robert could still not see where Hasan had gone, but he did see the janitor. Aziz was leering, wickedly. In his right hand he held a rather grubby trainer, and he was shaking it at the oblivious headmaster as Malik continued his speech. He looked pleased to have got it off, thought Robert. It must be torment for these guys to have to lace up a whole pair of feet every time they wished to pass themselves off as normal people.

‘We are making our own rules,’ went on Malik, ‘and, we must not allow others to dictate them to us. Our prosperity, and the prosperity of our children, depends on it!’

The Bosnian refugee was having trouble breathing. He had collapsed on the ground, and the Husayn twins, having appropriated his horse, were busy riding it round the stage, waving at the audience.

‘Let us see them!’ called Malik. ‘Let us see the children of many lands!’

At this point the plan was for the entire school to process across the stage, carrying flags of many nations and waving their exam certificates. They were then to turn to the audience, waving lengths of green silk and go into a non-representational routine, devised by Mr Malik, entitled
The Dawn of Islam in Wimbledon.
But, as the first wave of boys hit the side of the stage, the Twenty-fourther over to Robert’s right – the fat man, restaurant owning Mr Khan – raised his elastic-sided boot and yelled, ‘The Prophet said, “Do not go with only one shoe!” ’

Heads in the audience turned. They wore the polite expression of people who assumed that this was part of the show.

The Twenty-fourther was answered from across the hall and all along the stairs – quite a few more of the sect seemed to have crept in during the blackout that had preceded Mr Malik’s speech. ‘We go with one shoe to show the shame of breaking Islamic law!’ they yelled.

Mr Mafouz, who was obviously still convinced that this was part of the pageant, started to applaud vigorously. The boys, who were supposed to file off the stage in order, stopped to peer out past the lights at this interruption, with the result that the next wave of boys collided with those milling around on the sand.