The Road from Damascus (21 page)

Schimmer’s head jerked in mock hilarity. ‘Not much to say! This is a rich field, as your father witnessed. It is, what we say, a sea of knowledge, aa, bahr ul-uloom.’

Arabic in a German accent. To Sami, glaring at the frozen floor, it sounded like Hebrew. And why did Schimmer keep bringing Mustafa into it? By what right did this German talk about his father?

Schimmer noted his student’s displeasure like a naturalist spotting a rare insect, and warmth flickered over his thin northern features, sparkling at the sharp nose.

‘Ach, Mr Traifi. You torture yourself too much, I fear. It has been a long time for you, this thesis, so many years and without, aa, progress. Now perhaps you should reconsider.’

Sami could tell what was coming next.

‘Perhaps you go out into the world. Perhaps do something new. It may be that suits you best. You can always, aa, come back. We can arrange it, for the son of your father.’

Sami leapt to his feet.

‘My advice, Mr Traifi, is only to look in front of your nose. Don’t, aa, fret yourself with big ideas. The details, Mr Traifi. Truth and beauty are in the details.’

Sami walked to the plastic door.

‘Have a break from these big ideas, Mr Traifi. See the little things clearly. Enjoy your life.’

‘You’re right, Dr Schimmer,’ said Sami. ‘You are right.’

So events were moving at last. At least that. The logjam was breached.

From there down to here, he’d had several warming drinks. Desire sloshed inside him like meltwater over rapids and he reached for a next step. He had no idea what it could be, but it had to be something sizeable, something as big as a Schwarzenegger bicep, as unwieldy as a capsized ocean liner. A great leap. Something towering and infernal.

Suited men were filling the pub. Suits expensive and sombre, in dark, unshowy tones. Every wearer meeting a common standard: upper middle class, middle-aged, of medium Anglo size or slightly larger, with steamed unreadable faces, conversing at medium volume. And all men. As if a detail of conformity doormen had arrived to police the entrance. Sami linked this obscurely with the Nazi Schimmer, who he sensed following him, sending in Aryan goons. (But how unfair he was to Schimmer in his bitter, wounded mood. Schimmer who was, in fact, an eccentric and sensitive scholar, a convert to Islam, a defender of diversity.)

Suits trooping in. Sami the only dark tone in an assembly line of pastels. The only extreme. The only willing drunkard. The only atheist Muslim. The only one with no future or past. He found himself – searching drunkenly for an analogy – surrounded by an alien army in the realm of Middle Earth.

In this case the old racist refrain held good: it really was difficult to tell them apart. Still more came, darkening the door, increasing the heat. Half had hair and half did not. Those with hair shared the same hair colour, midway between blond and brown. And the same haircut, sideparted, lank. They sat in rows on either side of rectangular tables. They clustered around circular tables. Gin and tonics on the surfaces, hands flat on knees. They queued against the bar, and their sound rose in a gnawing and humming.

Then Sami understood where he was. Each man held the same model of briefcase. So not in Middle Earth but somewhere just as cultish, among beings as incestuous and secret as elves or dwarves. These were Freemasons. Rolled-up-trouserleg people. Bared breast people. In-house handshake people. Not people: a fraternity, a band of brothers. Its own species.

Lost, bereft, impotent, Sami had stumbled into the halls of power. Freemasonry was the organization of ruling dynasties, chief policemen, top civil servants. An international network hustling behind the scenes since Solomon’s temple. The eye in the pyramid on the American dollar. This was significant. That he, a mess of feeling, pissed up, was in the middle of it. And placed here randomly? By coincidence only? Today of all days? He was at the centre of power, like antimatter. Like a black hole.

Black holes sucked in light, so were unseen. And sure enough nobody saw him, not even the barman. The barman’s suit jacket was hung up on the wine rack. He made subtle signs of recognition to his customers. Sami rapped at the bar and called, ‘Oi! Oi, barman!’ to bring him over. He had mid-brown eyes, a say-nothing smirk. With Muntaha-like imperturbability he failed to notice Sami’s rudeness, listened mildly to his order: triple whiskey.

All around the Freemasons were preparing, planning, taking control. Arranging for the last days. What to do? It couldn’t be long now, thought Sami with sudden chirpiness, until there would be essentials to be busy with. He caught a glimpse of his future. Black holes sucked in surrounding light, and pulling faster than light confounded all the laws of physics. Theories suggested new universes blossoming on the other side of black holes. Through wormholes, something like that. Negative universes.

He sank the whiskey, banged the bar, held up a finger for more. If the master class here had organized itself, why, he could do his own organizing. Form his own group. He wasn’t quite deranged enough yet, he admitted that, not yet confident enough in his lunacy to give it shape and force.

Sami felt hot. To slow down he decided to check the messages on his mobile.

From Muntaha: ‘Where R U?’ Something from Ammar too. He saw it. But he didn’t want to read it. Now was not the time.

Where was he? That’s right, he had an aim. Which brought with it a surge of energy. He would make an immediate start, to derange himself. To purify himself. A few minutes back he’d been considering a meal, even returning home. Mentally, he slapped his forehead. Stupid! That way lay sameness, and desperation. How easy it would be to fall back into that. No, something entirely different was called for. Something diverting. Here in the shape of the whiskey glass, for a start. Down in one, down deep, to close the gates on normality.

His throat anaesthetized, it slipped into him. Ice inside melted with it. To the furnace of his stomach.

The stool flounced away from his buttocks and he was staggering to the toilet, Freemasons bouncing gently off his shoulders. He seized on the cistern for stability, and made a tight little bundle there of the remaining grass. So much more important than just a spliff, this spliff. It was the plan. The answer.

Invisible even to himself, he reappeared at the bar. A fresh drink awaited. Down it went, whiskey and meltwater. He clawed money from his pocket and dropped it, and then he was out on the street, crowded night colliding with his cheeks, feeding himself spliff and flame, injecting smoke into the organism, sensing it pull him forward.

Time was rushing on. This is what he needed. Not thought, but action. He’d had a decade of thinking. What had it done for him? What did it threaten now to do? He clanked his eyelids shut and, hearing them open, was half a kilometre further on. Leaping across ten minutes in one bound. A superhero.

Consciousness located him at intervals. The city red and brown. The oil economy rumbling on. Scorched red buses, black cabs, police vehicles. Laughter and music and food steam in envelopes (smouldering cheese, kebabs, Chinese). Scalding darkness and reflected light. Through the riotocracy at fantastic speed, crowds parting like the sea before him.

He stopped with a click. Oh it was blissful how decisions were made, how the body functioned. That thumb undergoing evolutionary adaptation to the techno-environment. It switched on a mobile phone, summoned a name (Greek Chris), and dialled.

‘Emergency situation, Chris. I need one gram of coke and two bags of weed. Three bags of weed. Yes, I’ll pay. I’ll pay the transport fee.’

He named a delivery point. Turned the mobile definitively off. Took his bearings. His mind, his body, was a bullet launching itself. It swivelled, locked on its northern target. It ran.

He made the connection in a sultry King’s Cross pub. He’d extended his overdraft by way of a cashpoint on the way, and here between a fruit machine and a pensioner couple with nothing left to discuss he unpeeled blue notes and counted them thrice before yielding them triumphantly. As if they were proof of a wager won. Greek Chris stuffed the cash inside his shirt and winked. By magic there appeared on the polished plastic table a brimming, layered grey package. Sami snaffled it, cellophane damp on his palm, into a tight pocket.

‘I’ll have another one of these, squire.’ Greek Chris shook his curls at an empty glass beneath him. ‘Gin and tonic and lemon. Gentleman’s drink.’

Sami at the bar. Two gins and two lagers. And another gin because he drank his while the barman oh so slowly, turning the glass like a key on a grinder, drew the lager.

‘I don’t drink that piss,’ said Greek Chris.

‘What’s that?’

‘That piss. I don’t drink it.’

‘What do you ask for it, then?’ asked Sami.

‘I don’t ask anything for it. I just don’t drink it.’

‘What?’

Greek Chris scratched at incipient moustache.

‘Having a mad one are we?’

‘A mad one. Yeah. I am. Purifying myself.’ Sami’s nose twitched. A nerve jerked at his temple.

‘Right you are,’ said Greek Chris, and then he laid a stubby finger on the rim of the nearest pint glass. ‘This piss,’ he said. ‘What is called lager by the commonality. I don’t drink it.’

‘Oh I see!’ said Sami loud enough to rouse the sad-eyed old woman at the next table. She blinked in his direction. Her husband gazed dejectedly into his drink. The woman’s hair the colour of cigarette stains. Her face puffy but sunken, like bread out of the oven.

‘What a lovely fucking colour to dye your hair,’ said Sami in a kind of wonder. Then, quick as sparrows, he took Greek Chris’s lager and drank a third. ‘I’ll have it, then,’ he said. He stood up, patted his pocket, sat down again.

‘I think,’ said Greek Chris, leaning in, ‘you want to inspect the merchandise.’

Sami said, ‘The merchandise. I do. I do.’

‘Off you go, then.’ Greek Chris, tonguing oily lips.

Sami in the toilet. Again by magic, a newly rolled spliff tucked behind his ear, and a line of cocaine arranged on a cistern clean enough to lick. It was that kind of pub. King’s Cross certainly, but no sawdust on the floor. No TV football. No crowds. No whores permitted. In a Bengali neighbourhood. Staid and clean.

He snorted and bolted back up. It was sultry, though. A well-nigh tropical night, sleaze leaking in from outside, through the aspirator: flesh, coconuts, wet perfume, brine. A ramshackle bar on the docks. He banged the saloon door behind him.

No it wasn’t. It was north of King’s Cross.

Across from his dealer, on a low upholstered stool, bouncing a leg on the ball of his foot.

Greek Chris rubbed a curling eyebrow. ‘The ear,’ he said.

‘Yeah, man,’ said Sami. He had no idea what Chris meant.

Greek Chris. Old sea salt. On shore leave after a long, long time. Searching for fights and rum and easy girls.

‘Good not to be cooped up, yeah?’ Sami said. ‘Get your feet on solid land at last.’

Greek Chris frowned. ‘The ear,’ he said, tapping at his own. ‘The fucking doobie. This is not the place.’

Sami’s hand hovered and fumbled about his head. It found the spliff. He examined it, a bit cross-eyed.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I see what you mean.’

Greek Chris hissed, ‘Keep it under the table.’

Sami did as he was told. ‘It’s hot in here,’ he said.

Greek Chris made a concessionary shrug. His shirt was V-necked, skin-coloured. His curls were fierce and spiky.

‘Warm summer for these climes,’ he said. ‘That’s the global warming.’

Sami nodded, and slurped at lager.

‘Kicking off again, your lot,’ said Chris.

‘Football?’

‘Arabs. On the news tonight. Settlers shooting up children and that. Tanks and planes against blocks of flats. It doesn’t seem fair to me.’

‘No, that’s the Israelis,’ said Sami. ‘Anyway, I have a plan.’

And he jabbered on. It was about internationalizing the conflict, cosmopolitanizing it, by means of a secret organization, and hijacking the ships in the docks right now, and burning universities and de-religiousizing everything and getting rid of names so no one could tell who was who.

‘I must tell you,’ he said. ‘It’s been getting rather too slow in here. I’ve been talking you see. Which doesn’t help. Slows things down. Last time I looked I was talking and now I’m still talking. You know what I mean?’

‘What’s keeping you?’ said Greek Chris, with a curl flick to the door.

‘I’ll finish my drink first,’ said Sami, but found he already had. All of them.

Next, a warehouse, thoroughly overheated. Jumping amid short girls in bras. In the toilets a lot, and queuing for Lucozade. Reverse-coughing coke from the back of a strobe-lit hand. Racing himself, mainly victorious, around the Bacchanal’s perimeter.

Then the leaping began again, Sami the Time Lord vanishing into empty space, into spectral cloud landscapes. In just one flash of the strobe. Maybe time stood still and he was everywhere at once. Alternative realities – that was what he wanted. Maybe he was going backwards, back so he could start again. Maybe the universe was shrinking to something more manageable.

He chunked and blipped. The blanks were soft and silent, and each re-arrival came with a boom as the sound-system invaded his ears anew, and he arrived each time in a clearing, flailing his arms and floppy fingers to force outward the storm-tossed trees which were dancers, fortunately too chemical-happy and endorphin-rushed to mind.

When he came out there was a crowd in the street and neon lights shining in the club’s entrance. False-tolerant bouncers consulting their watches. Sami was everybody’s friendly loon, pushing his way into freshets of people as they spilled out. The stars were ferocious above. He kept his eyes on the Earth.

Then eastwards in somebody’s car, a tangle of limbs in there, Sami poorly balanced across knees, his head lower than his feet. The people he was with thought he was telling jokes. Everybody screeched.

They entered a terraced house of small rooms, open plan because the doors had been removed, brimful of stuttering junglistic sound. A house which represented, in the absence of crisis politics, what the city took to be its underground. Conspirators without a conspiracy, nodding to the drum plot, shaking to the bass.