The Disappeared (17 page)

Stephen, who had half expected an
allahu akbar
and a knife in the heart, was taken aback by the broad Yorkshire accent. When he found words it was as though he were reading from an official summons.

‘It's you who need a lesson in leaving people alone.'

The man laughed contemptuously.

‘Is teacher going to give me a lesson?'

‘In this country assaults are matters for the police.'

The man stepped forward and put his face into Stephen's.

‘You go to the police and she's dead, see?'

‘What a simple worldview.'

Stephen, exhilarated by his own contempt, prepared for blows. But they did not come. Instead the man looked at him with something like astonishment.

‘You wanna be dead too? I'll put you on the list. No bother.'

A woman carrying shopping bags entered the foyer, and crossed to the lift. Stephen ducked past his opponent, saying ‘then we'll meet again'.

The man walked slowly up the stairs, singing a tuneless phrase to the words ‘Smack my bitch up'. If, at that moment, Stephen had had a weapon he would have used it. He lingered for a second and then went back with grieving heart to his desk and his laptop. He searched the Internet for the words the man had sung, and brought up the video clip of the Prodigy. It showed scenes of assault, rape, defecation, drug injection and nudity in which women are jostled, thrown about, scorned and humiliated, over an accompaniment of computerised rhythms, and with the four words tunelessly repeated from time to time as though by a disembodied observer. This was the world of Caliban, the world that existed all around him, into which his poor Miranda had been dragged. Stephen sat at his desk in a state of impotent rage and sorrow.

A few things had become clear to him nevertheless. Mrs Williams had a lover, Bogdan Krupnik, who was in the shipping business and often away. Krupnik had targeted Sharon, so that, while he was at home, the girl was cast off by her adopted mother. Meanwhile Sharon had been assaulted and raped by at least one of a gang of men: a gang that had already abused and destroyed her only friend. In the culture where this gang was at home, the Holy Koran and the Prodigy were of equal and opposite standing. The same person who recited the words ‘Mankind, fear your Lord, who created you from one soul and from that soul its spouse', words the beauty of which had pierced Stephen to the core when Farid Kassab had recited them in Arabic; the same person who respected women of his tribe as sacrosanct and untouchable – that same person sang in tuneless contempt of the women whom he met outside the home. When it came to the English girls in neighbouring flats his philosophy was summarised in those four shameful words: ‘smack my bitch up'.

He had assaulted Sharon in the lift, so that she avoided the lift, climbing fifteen flights on the stairwell, where there was some chance of protection. He had seen her fleeing with her teacher from the school where he had gone to demonstrate. He had waited for her, taken the lift ahead of her, and met her on the stairs coming down, there to strike this poor innocent across her frightened face, and to accuse that face of the only thing in it that he could not destroy, which was love. And he, Stephen, who had caused this love, must now respond to it.

At Oxford Stephen had studied the
Duino Elegies
, in which Rilke ponders the all-enveloping plenitudes of being through which our lives are perfected. These are the moments of visitation, the moments of the Angel. And yes, for a solitary poet like Rilke, that is surely how angels must be: an order of reality altogether superior to the human, which nevertheless enters and transfigures our world.

In the Koran too there are angels, beings that move among us invisibly, bearing divine commands. In the Surah of the Virgin Mary it is the Angel of the Lord who stands by Mary, as she clings in her pain to the trunk of a palm tree and wishes that she were already forgetting, forgotten –
nasian, mansian
. Stephen remembers the words, sounding in the voice of Farid. ‘The Angel comforts Mary and tells her to shake down the dates from the tree, so that she might go with the infant Jesus refreshed into the world of men.

‘Angels patrol the pages of our holy books, always sweeping in with aristocratic ease and unblemished immunity to suffering. We cannot call to them, cannot command their help. As Gabriel says in the Surah of Mary, “we descend not, save by command of your Lord”.' He recalled Farid's innocent poem, Angel Tower: the angel whose light opens the rose of the soul. For a moment, in his distress, Stephen had imagined the poem to be about Sharon, and he recalled the moment in a hot flush of shame. But of course, Farid was merely snatching fragrances from the Islamic perfume-chest. Sharon's essence could never be captured in that way. She belonged to another, more believable order of angels – the order of victims, beaten into corners, holding on, through their humiliation, to their inner purity of heart. Such an angel might be sent with the same redemptive task as those higher beings of Rilke or the complacent go-betweens of the Old Testament and the Koran. Such an angel might bring a message, ‘special from me to you', as Sharon did: the message of love, carried unsoiled against her heart through all the assaults and terrors of her journey.

But then there was the man who claimed her as his bitch: was there more to their relations than force? Suppose that, like Kundry in
Parsifal
, Sharon was the humble angel in one life, only because she was the trampled whore in the other. Stephen could not refute the idea, but he could not live with it either. It brought into his heart a wretchedness beyond any he had encountered. He slammed his fist on the desk; he paced around his living room; he flung himself on the bed and groaned aloud in torment. But the idea remained and he knew that he must act to extinguish it.

He rang Iona Ferguson, who agreed to meet him the next morning, when Stephen had a half-day's break from school. She came at once to fetch him from the secretary's office and sat him down with slightly flustered gestures. Without allowing her to speak he recounted in outline what had happened when he had accompanied Sharon home from school. He did not mention the hour-long interval in his flat. Iona nodded as she listened, and seemed altogether better disposed to believe him. He noticed that her office was in disarray, with files heaped on the desk. Her brown hair was tousled and her face without make-up, to Stephen's eyes a great improvement, for this woman was not a doll but a life-force, someone who shone a light of her own across the swamp of human failure, and seemed both to lament and to rejoice in what she saw. She leaned towards him as he spoke, her fingers stretched out on the desk.

‘Your story figures, Stephen. You appreciate we can do nothing direct until the girl is prepared to testify. But there is something nasty going on at Angel Towers and that girl is caught up in it. I will arrange a visit and see what Mrs Williams has to say. And as for the guy, we already know about him. He is one of two brothers; they came here as refugees from the war in Afghanistan. But they have Yemeni passports, are more Arab than Afghan, and are not refugees at all; they are certainly not entitled to Council accommodation, and we are going to eject them, when we can. Meanwhile I shall alert the police, who I guess will want a witness statement from you, should they decide to act.'

‘And why wouldn't they decide to act?'

She looked at him grimly and shook her head.

‘For the same reason I wouldn't decide to act, if I were in their shoes, which I am not quite.'

‘And what reason is that?'

‘Look, Stephen: we are dealing with closed communities, people who are driven to the edge by the white majority. Who wants to be accused of racism or xenophobia at a time like this? Certainly not a policeman or a social worker. It would be the end of the line for a superintendent, and not much different for me.'

‘So we have to sacrifice innocent girls to political prejudice?'

‘I wouldn't call it prejudice, Stephen. Just a commendable habit of seeing the general in the particular.'

Stephen absorbed her message as best he could. It had only one important implication, which was that he alone could rescue Sharon. He must act now or not at all. He went to school that afternoon in the hope of finding her, not knowing what he would say when they met, but hoping that it would all become clear, once they were face to face on neutral territory.

She was not in class, and the few remarks he had prepared about the Brontë sisters fell flat, precisely because she would have understood them and taken them to heart. He had come to depend on her, not only in his private life, but also in his work. When she was there he recovered his interest in English literature, his delight in words, and his belief in culture as a redeeming force. When she was not there the ghouls of modern life returned: not Facebook, Twitter and the chattering swarms in cyber-space only, but the things that he had been discovering in recent days – the things that passed for music, entertainment and literature in the world of his pupils, and which were accurately summarised in those four vile words: ‘smack my bitch up'. Only through the Kassab boys had he acquired any sense that poetry had a place in his pupils' lives. But it was the poetry of another time, another place, another language – and most of all of a religion that sat uneasily in the world that Stephen knew.

When the lesson was over he wandered in the school for a while, listened to a rant from Jim Roberts about the previous day's demonstration, and then made his way home. She was waiting outside the block of flats, standing to attention as though posted there. As he approached she did not look at him. Her left cheek was red and swollen, with a plaster stuck at the top. Her expression was taut and withdrawn. And when he stood before her she suddenly shot out a hand, in which a little sheaf of papers was held far out as a hot coal might be held with tongs. He took it, and she turned away, ignoring his calls as she ran across the street and disappeared into the alleyway.

There were several sheets, loosely folded together. Some were illegible scribbles; some were fragmentary quotations from poets in a scrawled version of her hand. The pages were crumpled and tear-stained. One of them contained a laconic poem:

On floor number eight
,

You meet your fate
.

On the fifteenth floor

You can take no more
.

On the final page the writing changed to her neat, firm classroom script, and took the shape of a letter:

Dear Stephen
,

Am I allowed to write your precious name? I think so, because this is the last letter I send you. Soon things will end. Therefore I must tell you what I feel. You think I am a child. No, Stephen. I am a woman, your woman. I have known this for half a year now: I have known it from the light that shines from your face, from your words, from your smiles. (I am sorry that I blush when you smile at me.) I have grown as a gift for you – a surprising gift in a horrible place, like a golden ring on a dust heap. When they have finished, there will be nothing left to give. But for this last moment I am entirely yours
.

I should have braved them yesterday, and left on my own. Truth is, I was jealous. I had seen all the others leave under your protection, and I wanted that protection too. I wanted it so badly. I loved running with you by the canal. I could have died then. This is not silliness, Stephen. It is truth
.

It was a love letter, a suicide note, and a final bid for help. If he did not act now, it would be too late to save her.

Fainting is not an option. All you can do is scream. He clamps his coarse hand across your mouth and pushes you on to the bunk. He is tearing at your shirt, your skirt, your knickers, and his loose eye seems to swivel uncontrollably, as though set in frenzied motion by his lust. In the corner of the cabin the monkey wrench is lying where Yunus kicked it. But your arms are pinned. Somehow he has managed to wriggle out of his trousers, and with one thigh he is forcing your legs apart.

You avert your eyes from his face, your thoughts from what is happening. You imagine this as the moment before death, the moment of those prayers relinquished long ago. Again there is the image of your mother. She had a way all her own of looking hurt by your behaviour, as though it had been aimed expressly at her. She would curl up in her corner, pull her books, magazines and needlework closer as though to affirm their status as her last reliable defences, and then complain softly with downturned eyes. Never did she raise her voice. Always she would speak as though calling the universe as witness to her patiently suffered trials.

Another thought follows. This monstrous insect gripping you and smearing you has not said a word. When he briefly takes his hand from your mouth you do not resume your screams. Instead you ask ‘Do you speak English?' like the demure Alice, confronting some inexplicable monster in the forest of her dreams. He pauses, and a glint of astonishment enters his functional eye.

‘Course I speak fucking English.'

‘Then tell me by what right you are doing this.'

‘Because you fucking asked for it, bitch.'

‘When did I ask for it?'

‘When you fucked my brother, bitch. Yunus inna having nowt I dunna have, man.'

‘Did Yunus say he had done this to me?'

‘Shut the fuck up,' he replies, clamping his hand across your mouth. ‘Yunus and me, we share everything, right?'

He begins to jab at you like a terrier digging a rat. Soon he will be inside you. This thing that you gave to Finn (a bad mistake), to Mick (a mistake too in its way) and yes, you mustn't deny him, that sweet boy Michael whom you met on holiday in Spain, who was studying to be an architect, who followed you back to England in vain and who was probably not a mistake at all – this thing that must be given since it is the whole of you, is about to be stolen and trashed. You manage to scream through the slipping fingers around your mouth. There are footsteps running. Someone is opening the door from outside. Yunus is shouting, angry words with that strange sound of a finger stuck down the throat.