And the sins of the Eastern father shall be visited upon the Western sons. Often taking their time, stored up in the genes like baldness or testicular carcinoma, but sometimes on the very same day. Sometimes at the very same moment. At least, that would explain how two weeks later, during the old Druid festival of harvest, Samad can be found quietly packing the one shirt he’s never worn to mosque (To the pure all things are pure) into a plastic bag, so that he might change later and meet Miss Burt-Jones (4.30, Harlesden Clock) without arousing suspicion… while Magid and a change-of-heart Millat slip only four cans of past-their-sell-by-date chickpeas, a bag of variety crisps and some apples into two rucksacks (Can’t say fairer than that), in preparation for a meeting with Irie (4.30, ice-cream van) and a visit to their assigned old man, the one to whom they will offer pagan charity, one Mr J. P. Hamilton of Kensal Rise.
Unbeknownst to all involved, ancient ley-lines run underneath these two journeys – or, to put it in the modern parlance, this is a rerun. We have been here before. This is like watching TV in Bombay or Kingston or Dhaka, watching the same old British sitcoms spewed out to the old colonies in one tedious, eternal loop. Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition – it’s something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you’re still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There’s no proper term for it – original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better. A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals – that they can’t help but re-enact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign. It will take a few replays before they move on to the next tune. And this is what is happening as Alsana sews loudly on her monstrous Singer machine, double-stitching around the vacancy of a crotchless knicker, oblivious to the father and the sons who are creeping around the house, packing clothes, packing provisions. It is a visitation of repetition. It is a dash across continents. It is a rerun. But one at a time, now, one at a time…
Now, how do the young prepare to meet the old? The same way the old prepare to meet the young: with a little condescension; with low expectation of the other’s rationality; with the knowledge that the other will find what they say hard to understand, that it will go beyond them (not so much over the head as between the legs); and with the feeling that they must arrive with something the other will like, something suitable. Like Garibaldi biscuits.
‘They like them,’ explained Irie when the twins queried her choice, as the three of them rumbled to their destination on the top of the 52 bus, ‘they like the raisins in them. Old people like raisins.’
Millat, from under the cocoon of his Tomytronic, sniffed, ‘Nobody likes raisins. Dead grapes – bleurgh. Who wants to eat them?’
‘Old people do,’ Irie insisted, stuffing the biscuits back into her bag. ‘And they’re not dead, akchully, they’re dried.’
‘Yeah, after they’ve died.’
‘Shut up, Millat. Magid, tell him to shut up!’
Magid pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose and diplomatically changed the subject. ‘What else have you got?’
Irie reached into her bag. ‘A coconut.’
‘A coconut!’
‘For your information,’ snapped Irie, moving the nut out of Millat’s reach, ‘old people like coconuts. They can use the milk for their tea.’
Irie pressed on in the face of Millat retching. ‘And I got some crusty French bread and some cheese-singlets and some apples-’
‘We got apples, you chief,’ cut in Millat, ‘chief’, for some inexplicable reason hidden in the etymology of North London slang, meaning fool, arse, wanker, a loser of the most colossal proportions.
‘Well, I got some more and better apples, akchully, and some Kendal mint cake and some ackee and saltfish.’
‘I hate ackee and saltfish.’
‘Who said you were eating it?’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Well, you’re not going to.’
‘Well, good, ’cos I don’t want to.’
‘Well, good, ’cos I wouldn’t let you even if you wanted to.’
‘Well, that’s lucky ’cos I don’t. So shame,’ said Millat; and, without removing his Tomytronic, he delivered shame, as was traditionally the way, by dragging his palm along Irie’s forehead. ‘Shame in the brain.’
‘Well, akchully, don’t worry ’cos you’re not going to get it-’
‘Oooh, feel the heat, feel the heat!’ squealed Magid, rubbing his little palm in. ‘You been shamed, man!’
‘Akchully, I’m not shamed, you’re shamed ’cos it’s for Mr J. P. Hamilton-’
‘Our stop!’ cried Magid, shooting to his feet and pulling the bell cord too many times.
‘If you ask me,’ said one disgruntled OAP to another, ‘they should all go back to their own…’
But this, the oldest sentence in the world, found itself stifled by the ringing of bells and the stamping of feet, until it retreated under the seats with the chewing gum.
‘Shame, shame, know your name,’ trilled Magid. The three of them hurtled down the stairs and off the bus.
And the 52 bus goes two ways. From the Willesden kaleidoscope, one can catch it west like the children; through Kensal Rise, to Portobello, to Knightsbridge, and watch the many colours shade off into the bright white lights of town; or you can get it east, as Samad did; Willesden, Dollis Hill, Harlesden, and watch with dread (if you are fearful like Samad, if all you have learnt from the city is to cross the road at the sight of dark-skinned men) as white fades to yellow fades to brown, and then Harlesden Clock comes into view, standing like Queen Victoria’s statue in Kingston – a tall stone surrounded by black.
Samad had been surprised, yes surprised, that it was Harlesden she had whispered to him when he pressed her hand after the kiss – that kiss he could still taste – and demanded where it was he might find her, away from here, far from here (‘My children, my wife,’ he had mumbled, incoherent); expecting ‘Islington’ or maybe ‘West Hampstead’ or at least ‘Swiss Cottage’ and getting instead, ‘Harlesden. I live in Harlesden.’
‘Stonebridge Estate?’ Samad had asked, alarmed; wide-eyed at the creative ways Allah found to punish him, envisioning himself atop his new lover with a gangster’s four-inch knife in his back.
‘No – but not far from there. Do you want to meet up?’
Samad’s mouth had been the lone gunman on the grassy knoll that day, killing off his brain and swearing itself into power all at the same time.
‘Yes. Oh, dammit! Yes.’
And then he had kissed her again, turning something relatively chaste into something else, cupping her breast in his left hand and enjoying her sharp intake of breath as he did so.
Then they had the short, obligatory exchange that those who cheat have to make them feel less like those who cheat.
‘I really shouldn’t-’
‘I’m not at all sure how this-’
‘Well, we need to meet at least to discuss what has-’
‘Indeed, what has happened, it must be discu-’
‘Because something has happened here, but-’
‘My wife… my children…’
‘Let’s give it some time… two weeks Wednesday? 4.30? Harlesden Clock?’
He could at least, in this sordid mess, congratulate himself on his timing: 4.15 by the time he got off the bus, which left five minutes to nip into the McDonald’s toilets (that had black guards on the door, black guards to keep out the blacks) and squeeze out of the restaurant flares into a dark blue suit, with a wool V-neck and a grey shirt, the pocket of which contained a comb to work his thick hair into some obedient form. By which time it was 4.20, five minutes in which to visit cousin Hakim and his wife Zinat who ran the local £1 + 50p shop (a type of shop that trades under the false premise that it sells no items above this price but on closer inspection proves to be the minimum price of the stock) and whom he meant inadvertently to provide him with an alibi.
‘Samad Miah, oh! So smart-looking today – it cannot be without a reason.’
Zinat Mahal: a mouth as large as the Blackwall Tunnel and Samad was relying upon it.
‘Thank you, Zinat,’ said Samad, looking deliberately disingenuous. ‘As for a reason… I am not sure that I should say.’
‘Samad! My mouth is like the grave! Whatever is told to me dies with me.’
Whatever was told to Zinat invariably lit up the telephone network, rebounded off aerials, radiowaves and satellites along the way, picked up finally by advanced alien civilizations as it bounced through the atmosphere of planets far removed from this one.
‘Well, the truth is…’
‘By Allah, get on with it!’ cried Zinat, who was now almost on the other side of the counter, such was her delight in gossip. ‘Where are you off to?’
‘Well… I am off to see a man in Park Royal about life insurance. I want my Alsana well provided for after my death – but!’ he said, waggling a finger at his sparkling, jewel-covered interrogator who wore too much eyeshadow, ‘I don’t want her to know! Thoughts of death are abhorrent to her, Zinat.’
‘Do you hear that, Hakim? Some men worry about the future of their wives! Go on – get out of here, don’t let me keep you, cousin. And don’t worry,’ she called after him, simultaneously reaching for the phone with her long curling fingernails, ‘I won’t say one word to Alsi.’
Alibi done, three minutes were left for Samad to consider what an old man brings a young girl; something an old brown man brings a young white girl at the crossroads of four black streets; something suitable…
‘A coconut?’
Poppy Burt-Jones took the hairy object into her hands and looked up at Samad with a perplexed smile.
‘It is a mixed-up thing,’ began Samad nervously. ‘With juice like a fruit but hard like a nut. Brown and old on the outside, white and fresh on the inside. But the mix is not, I think, bad. We use it sometimes,’ he added, not knowing what else to say, ‘in curry.’
Poppy smiled; a terrific smile which accentuated every natural beauty of that face and had in it, Samad thought, something better than this, something with no shame in it, something better and purer than what they were doing.
‘It’s lovely,’ she said.
Out in the street and five minutes from the address on their school sheets, Irie still felt the irritable hot sting of shame and wanted a rematch.
‘Tax that,’ she said, pointing to a rather beat-up motorbike leaning by Kensal Rise tube. ‘Tax that, and that,’ indicating two BMXs beside it.
Millat and Magid jumped into action. The practice of ‘taxing’ something, whereby one lays claims, like a newly arrived colonizer, to items in a street that do not belong to you, was well known and beloved to both of them.
‘Cha, man! Believe, I don’t want to tax dat crap,’ said Millat with the Jamaican accent that all kids, whatever their nationality, used to express scorn. ‘I tax dat,’ he said, pointing out an admittedly impressive small, shiny, red MG about to turn the corner. ‘And dat!’ he cried, getting there just before Magid as a BMW whizzed past. ‘Man, you know I tax that,’ he said to Magid, who offered no dispute. ‘Blatantly.’
Irie, a little dejected by this turn of events, turned her eyes from the road to the floor, where she was suddenly struck by a flash of inspiration.
‘I tax those!’
Magid and Millat stopped and looked in awe at the perfectly white Nikes that were now in Irie’s possession (with one red tick, one blue; so beautiful, as Millat later remarked, it made you want to kill yourself), though to the naked eye they appeared to be walking towards Queens Park attached to a tall natty-dread black kid.
Millat nodded grudgingly. ‘Respect to that. I wish I’d seed dem.’
‘Tax!’ said Magid suddenly, pushing his grubby finger up against some shop glass in the direction of a four-foot-long chemistry set with an ageing TV personality’s face on the front.
He thumped the window. ‘Wow! I tax that!’
A brief silence ensued.
‘You tax that?’ asked Millat, incredulous. ‘That? You tax a chemistry set?’
Before poor Magid knew where he was, two palms had made a ferocious slap on his forehead, and were doing much rubbing for good measure. Magid gave Irie an et tu Brute type of pleading look, in the full knowledge that it was useless. There is no honesty amongst almost-ten-year-olds.
‘Shame! Shame! Know your name!’
‘But Mr J. P. Hamilton,’ moaned Magid from under the heat of shame. ‘We’re here now. His house is just there. It’s a quiet street, you can’t make all this noise. He’s old.’
‘But if he’s old, he’ll be deaf,’ reasoned Millat. ‘And if you’re deaf you can’t hear.’
‘It doesn’t work like that. It’s hard for old people. You don’t understand.’
‘He’s probably too old to take the stuff out of the bags,’ said Irie. ‘We should take them out and carry them in our hands.’
This was agreed upon, and some time was taken arranging all the foodstuffs in the hands and crevices of the body, so that they might ‘surprise’ Mr J. P. Hamilton with the extent of their charity when he answered the door. Mr J. P. Hamilton, confronted on his doorstep by three dark-skinned children clutching a myriad of projectiles, was duly surprised. As old as they had imagined but far taller and cleaner, he opened the door only slightly, keeping his hand, with its mountain range of blue veins, upon the knob, while his head curled around the frame. To Irie he was reminiscent of some genteel elderly eagle: tufts of feather-like hair protruded from ear drums, shirt cuffs and the neck, with one white spray falling over his forehead, his fingers lay in a permanent tight spasm like talons, and he was well dressed, as one might expect of an elderly English bird in Wonderland – a suede waistcoat and a tweed jacket, and a watch on a gold chain.
And twinkling like a magpie, from the blue scattering in his eyes undimmed by the white and red surround, to the gleam of a signet ring, four argent medals perched just above his heart, and the silver rim of a Senior Service packet peeping over the breast pocket.
‘Please,’ came the voice from the bird-man, a voice that even the children sensed was from a different class, a different era. ‘I must ask that you remove yourselves from my doorstep. I have no money whatsoever; so be your intention robbing or selling I’m afraid you will be disappointed.’
Magid stepped forward, trying to place himself in the old man’s eyeline, for the left eye, blue as Rayleigh scattering, had looked beyond them, while the right was so compacted beneath wrinkles it hardly opened. ‘Mr Hamilton, don’t you remember, the school sent us, these are-’
He said, ‘Goodbye, now,’ as if he were bidding farewell to an elderly aunt embarking on a train journey, then once more ‘Goodbye’, and through two panels of cheap stained-glass on the closed door the children watched the lengthy figure of Mr Hamilton, blurred as if by heat, walking slowly away from them down a corridor until the brown flecks of him merged with the brown flecks of the household furnishings and the former all but disappeared.
Millat pulled his Tomytronic down around his neck, frowned, and purposefully slammed his little fist into the doorbell, holding it down.
‘Maybe,’ suggested Irie, ‘he doesn’t want the stuff.’
Millat released the doorbell briefly. ‘He’s got to want it. He asked for it,’ he growled, pushing the bell back down with his full force. ‘ ’SGod’s harvest, innit? Mr Hamilton! Mr J. P. Hamilton!’
And then that slow process of disappearance began to rewind as he reconstituted himself via the atoms of a staircase and a dresser until he was large as life once more, curled around the door.
Millat, lacking patience, thrust his school information sheet into his hand. ‘ ’SGod’s harvest.’
But the old man shook his head like a bird in a bird-bath. ‘No, no, I really won’t be intimidated into purchases on my own doorstep. I don’t know what you are selling – please God let it not be encyclopedias – at my age it is not more information one requires but less.’
‘But it’s free!’
‘Oh… yes, I see… why?’
‘ ’SGod’s harvest,’ repeated Magid.
‘Helping the local community. Mr Hamilton, you must have spoken to our teacher, because she sent us here. Maybe it slipped your mind,’ added Irie in her grown-up voice.
Mr Hamilton touched his temple sadly as if to retrieve the memory and then ever so slowly opened his front door to full tilt and made a pigeon-step forward into the autumn sunlight. ‘Well… you’d better come in.’
They followed Mr Hamilton into the town house gloom of his hall. Filled to the brim with battered and chipped Victoriana punctuated by signs of more recent life – children’s broken bikes, a discarded Speak-and-Spell, four pairs of muddy wellies in a family’s variant sizes.
‘Now,’ he said cheerily, as they reached the living room with its beautiful bay windows through which a sweeping garden could be seen, ‘what have we got here?’
The children released their load on to a moth-eaten chaise longue, Magid reeling off the contents like items from a shopping list, while Mr Hamilton lit a cigarette and inspected the urban picnic with doddering fingers.
‘Apples… oh, dear me, no… chickpeas… no, no, no, potato-chips…’
It went on like this, each article being picked up in its turn and chastised, until the old man looked up at them with faint tears in his eyes. ‘I can’t eat any of this, you see… too hard, too bloody hard. The most I could manage is probably the milk in that coconut. Still… we will have tea, won’t we? You’ll stay for tea?’
The children looked at him blankly.
‘Go on, my dears, do sit down.’
Irie, Magid and Millat shuffled up nervously on the chaise longue. Then there was a click-clack sound and when they looked up Mr Hamilton’s teeth were on his tongue, as if a second mouth had come out of the first. And then in a flash they were back in.
‘I simply cannot eat anything unless it has been pulverized beforehand, you see. My own fault. Years and years of neglect. Clean teeth – never a priority in the army.’ He signalled himself clumsily, an awkward jab at his own chest with a shaking hand. ‘I was an army man, you see. Now: how many times do you young people brush your teeth?’
‘Three times a day,’ said Irie, lying.
‘LIAR!’ chorused Millat and Magid. ‘PANTS ON FIRE!’
‘Two and a half times.’
‘Well, dear me, which is it?’ said Mr Hamilton, smoothing down his trousers with one hand and lifting his tea with the other.
‘Once a day,’ said Irie sheepishly, the concern in his voice compelling her to tell the truth. ‘Most days.’
‘I fear you will come to regret that. And you two?’
Magid was midway through formulating some elaborate fantasy of a toothbrush machine that did it while you slept, but Millat came clean. ‘Same. Once a day. More or less.’
Mr Hamilton leant back contemplatively in his chair. ‘One sometimes forgets the significance of one’s teeth. We’re not like the lower animals – teeth replaced regularly and all that – we’re of the mammals, you see. And mammals only get two chances, with teeth. More sugar?’
The children, mindful of their two chances, declined.
‘But like all things, the business has two sides. Clean white teeth are not always wise, now are they? Par exemplum: when I was in the Congo, the only way I could identify the nigger was by the whiteness of his teeth, if you see what I mean. Horrid business. Dark as buggery, it was. And they died because of it, you see? Poor bastards. Or rather I survived, to look at it in another way, do you see?’
The children sat silently. And then Irie began to cry, ever so quietly.
Mr Hamilton continued, ‘Those are the split decisions you make in war. See a flash of white and bang! as it were… Dark as buggery. Terrible times. All these beautiful boys lying dead there, right in front of me, right at my feet. Stomachs open, you know, with their guts on my shoes. Like the end of the bloody world. Beautiful men, enlisted by the Krauts, black as the ace of spades; poor fools didn’t even know why they were there, what people they were fighting for, who they were shooting at. The decision of the gun. So quick, children. So brutal. Biscuit?’
‘I want to go home,’ whispered Irie.
‘My dad was in the war. He played for England,’ piped up Millat, red-faced and furious.
‘Well, boy, do you mean the football team or the army?’
‘The British army. He drove a tank. A Mr Churchill. With her dad,’ explained Magid.
‘I’m afraid you must be mistaken,’ said Mr Hamilton, genteel as ever. ‘There were certainly no wogs as I remember – though you’re probably not allowed to say that these days are you? But no… no Pakistanis… what would we have fed them? No, no,’ he grumbled, assessing the question as if he were being given the opportunity to rewrite history here and now. ‘Quite out of the question. I could not possibly have stomached that rich food. No Pakistanis. The Pakistanis would have been in the Pakistani army, you see, whatever that was. As for the poor Brits, they had enough on their hands with us old Queens…’
Mr Hamilton laughed softly to himself, turned his head and silently admired the roaming branches of a cherry tree that dominated one whole corner of his garden. After a long pause he turned back and tears were visible in his eyes again – fast, sharp tears as if he had been slapped in the face. ‘Now, you young men shouldn’t tell fibs should you? Fibs will rot your teeth.’
‘It’s not a lie, Mr J. P. Hamilton, he really was,’ said Magid, always the peace-maker, always the negotiator. ‘He was shot in the hand. He has medals. He was a hero.’
‘And when your teeth rot-’
‘It’s the truth!’ shouted Millat, kicking over the tea-tray that sat on the floor between them. ‘You stupid fucking old man.’
‘And when your teeth rot,’ continued Mr Hamilton, smiling at the ceiling, ‘aaah, there’s no return. They won’t look at you like they used to. The pretty ones won’t give you a second glance, not for love or money. But while you’re still young, the important matter is the third molars. They are more commonly referred to as the wisdom teeth, I believe. You simply must deal with the third molars before anything else. That was my downfall. You won’t have them yet, but my great-grandchildren are just feeling them now. The problem with third molars is one is never sure whether one’s mouth will be quite large enough to accommodate them. They are the only part of the body that a man must grow into. He must be a big enough man for these teeth, do you see? Because if not – oh dear me, they grow crooked or any which way, or refuse to grow at all. They stay locked up there with the bone – an impaction, I believe, is the term – and terrible, terrible infection ensues. Have them out early, that’s what I tell my granddaughter Jocelyn in regard to her sons. You simply must. You can’t fight against it. I wish I had. I wish I’d given up early and hedged my bets, as it were. Because they’re your father’s teeth, you see, wisdom teeth are passed down by the father, I’m certain of it. So you must be big enough for them. God knows, I wasn’t big enough for mine… Have them out and brush three times a day, if my advice means anything.’
By the time Mr J. P. Hamilton looked down to see whether his advice meant anything, his three dun-coloured visitors had already disappeared, taking with them the bag of apples (apples he had been contemplating asking Jocelyn to put through the food processor); tripping over themselves, running to get to a green space, to get to one of the lungs of the city, some place where free breathing was possible.
Now, the children knew the city. And they knew the city breeds the Mad. They knew Mr White-Face, an Indian who walks the streets of Willesden with his face painted white, his lips painted blue, wearing a pair of tights and some hiking boots; they knew Mr Newspaper, a tall skinny man in an ankle-length raincoat who sits in Brent libraries removing the day’s newspapers from his briefcase and methodically tearing them into strips; they knew Mad Mary, a black voodoo woman with a red face whose territory stretches from Kilburn to Oxford Street but who performs her spells from a bin in West Hampstead; they knew Mr Toupee, who has no eyebrows and wears a toupee not on his head but on a string around his neck. But these people announced their madness – they were better, less scary than Mr J. P. Hamilton – they flaunted their insanity, they weren’t half mad and half not, curled around a door frame. They were properly mad in the Shakespearean sense, talking sense when you least expected it. In North London, where councillors once voted to change the name of the area to Nirvana, it is not unusual to walk the streets and be suddenly confronted by sage words from the chalk-faced, blue-lipped or eyebrowless. From across the street or from the other end of a tube carriage they will use their schizophrenic talent for seeing connections in the random (for discerning the whole world in a grain of sand, for deriving narrative from nothing) to riddle you, to rhyme you, to strip you down, to tell you who you are and where you’re going (usually Baker Street – the great majority of modern-day seers travel the Metropolitan Line) and why. But as a city we are not appreciative of these people. Our gut instinct is that they intend to embarrass us, that they’re out to shame us somehow as they lurch down the train aisle, bulbous-eyed and with carbuncled nose, preparing to ask us, inevitably, what we are looking at. What the fuck are we looking at. As a kind of pre-emptive defence mechanism, Londoners have learnt not to look, never to look, to avoid eyes at all times so that the dreaded question ‘What you looking at?’ and its pitiful, gutless, useless answer – ‘Nothing’ – might be avoided. But as the prey evolves (and we are prey to the Mad who are pursuing us, desperate to impart their own brand of truth to the hapless commuter) so does the hunter, and the true professionals begin to tire of that old catchphrase ‘What you looking at?’ and move into more exotic territory. Take Mad Mary. Oh, the principle’s still the same, it’s still all about eye contact and the danger of making it, but now she’s making eye contact from a hundred, two hundred, even three hundred yards away, and if she catches you doing the same she roars down the street, dreads and feathers and cape afloat, Hoodoo stick in hand, until she gets to where you are, spits on you, and begins. Samad knew all of this – they’d had dealings before, he and red-faced Mad Mary; he’d even suffered the misfortune of having her sit next to him on a bus. Any other day and Samad would have given her as good as he got. But today he was feeling guilty and vulnerable, today he was holding Poppy’s hand as the sun crept away; he could not face Mad Mary and her vicious truth-telling, her ugly madness – which of course was precisely why she was stalking him, quite deliberately stalking him down Church Road.
‘For your own safety, don’t look,’ said Samad. ‘Just keep on walking in a straight line. I had no idea she travelled this far into Harlesden.’
Poppy snatched the quickest glance at the multicoloured streaming flash galloping down the high street on an imaginary horse.
She laughed. ‘Who is that?’
Samad quickened the pace. ‘She is Mad Mary. And she is not remotely funny. She is dangerous.’
‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous. Just because she’s homeless and has mental health… difficulties, doesn’t mean she wants to hurt anyone. Poor woman, can you imagine what must have happened in her life to make her like that?’
Samad sighed. ‘First of all, she is not homeless. She has stolen every wheelie bin in West Hampstead and has built quite a significant structure out of them in Fortune Green. And secondly she is not a “poor woman”. Everyone is terrified of her, from the council downwards, she receives free food from every cornershop in North London ever since she cursed the Ramchandra place and business collapsed within the month.’ Samad’s portly figure was working up quite a sweat now, as he shifted another gear in response to Mad Mary doing the same on the other side of the street.
Breathless, he whispered, ‘And she doesn’t like white people.’
Poppy’s eyes widened. ‘Really?’ she said, as if such an idea had never occurred to her, and turned round to make the fatal mistake of looking. In a second, Mad Mary was upon them.
A thick globule of spit hit Samad directly between his eyes, on the bridge of his nose. He wiped it away, pulled Poppy to him and tried to sidestep Mad Mary by ducking into the courtyard of St Andrew’s Church, but the Hoodoo stick slammed down in front of them both, marking a line in the pebbles and dust that could not be crossed over.
She spoke slowly, and with such a menacing scowl that the left side of her face seemed paralysed. ‘You… lookin’… at… some… ting?’
Poppy managed a squeak, ‘No!’
Mad Mary whacked Poppy’s calf with the Hoodoo stick and turned to Samad. ‘You, sir! You… lookin’… at… some… ting?’
Samad shook his head.
Suddenly she was screaming. ‘BLACK MAN! DEM BLOCK YOU EVERYWHERE YOU TURN!’
‘Please,’ stuttered Poppy, clearly terrified. ‘We don’t want any trouble.’
‘BLACK MAN!’ (She liked to speak in rhyming couplets.) ‘DE BITCH SHE WISH TO SEE YOU BURN!’
‘We are minding our own business – ’ began Samad, but he was stopped by a second projectile of phlegm, this time hitting him on the cheek.
‘Tru hill and gully, dem follow you dem follow you, Tru hill and gully, de devil swallow you ’im swallow you.’ This was delivered in a kind of singing stage-whisper, accompanied by a dance from side to side, arms outstretched and Hoodoo stick resting firmly underneath Poppy Burt-Jones’s chin.
‘What ’as dem ever done for us body bot kill us and enslave us? What ’as dem done for our minds bot hurt us an’ enrage us? What’s de pollution?’
Mad Mary lifted Poppy’s chin with her stick and asked again, ‘WHAT’S DE POLLUTION?’
Poppy was weeping. ‘Please… I don’t know what you want me to-’
Mad Mary sucked her teeth and turned her attention once more to Samad. ‘WHAT’S DE SOLUTION?’
‘I don’t know.’
Mad Mary slapped him around the ankles with her stick. ‘WHAT’S DE SOLUTION, BLACK MAN?’
Mad Mary was a beautiful, a striking woman: a noble forehead, a prominent nose, ageless midnight skin and a long neck that Queens can only dream about. But it was her alarming eyes, which shot out an anger on the brink of total collapse, that Samad was concentrated on, because he saw that they were speaking to him and him alone. Poppy had nothing to do with this. Mad Mary was looking at him with recognition. Mad Mary had spotted a fellow traveller. She had spotted the madman in him (which is to say, the prophet); he felt sure she had spotted the angry man, the masturbating man, the man stranded in the desert far from his sons, the foreign man in a foreign land caught between borders… the man who, if you push him far enough, will suddenly see sense. Why else had she picked him from a street full of people? Simply because she recognized him. Simply because they were from the same place, he and Mad Mary, which is to say: far away.
‘Satyagraha,’ said Samad, surprising himself with his own calmness.
Mad Mary, unused to having her interrogations answered, looked at him in astonishment. ‘WHAT’S DE SOLUTION?’
‘Satyagraha. It is Sanskrit for “truth and firmness”. Gandhi-gee’s word. You see, he did not like “passive resistance” or “civil disobedience”.’
Mad Mary was beginning to twitch and swear compulsively under her breath, but Samad sensed that in some way this was Mad Mary listening, this was Mad Mary’s mind trying to process words other than her own.
‘Those words weren’t big enough for him. He wanted to show what we call weakness to be a strength. He understood that sometimes not to act is a man’s greatest triumph. He was a Hindu. I am a Muslim. My friend here is-’
‘A Roman Catholic,’ said Poppy shakily. ‘Lapsed.’
‘And you are?’ began Samad.
Mad Mary said cunt, bitch, rhasclaat several times and spat on the floor, which Samad took as a sign of cooling hostilities.
‘What I am trying to say…’
Samad looked at the small group of Methodists who, hearing the noise, had begun to gather nervously at the door of St Andrew’s. He grew confident. There had always been a manqué preacher in Samad. A know-it-all, a walker-and-a-talker. With a small audience and a lot of fresh air he had always been able to convince himself that all the knowledge in the universe, all the knowledge on walls, was his.
‘I am trying to say that life is a broad church, is it not?’ He pointed to the ugly red-brick building full of its quivering believers. ‘With wide aisles.’ He pointed to the smelly bustle of black, white, brown and yellow shuffling up and down the high street. To the albino woman who stood outside the Cash and Carry, selling daisies picked from the churchyard. ‘Which my friend and I would like to continue walking along if it is all right with you. Believe me, I understand your concerns,’ said Samad, taking his inspiration now from that other great North London street-preacher, Ken Livingstone, ‘I am having difficulties myself – we are all having difficulties in this country, this country which is new to us and old to us all at the same time. We are divided people, aren’t we.’
And here Samad did what no one had done to Mad Mary for well over fifteen years: he touched her. Very lightly, on the shoulder.
‘We are split people. For myself, half of me wishes to sit quietly with my legs crossed, letting the things that are beyond my control wash over me. But the other half wants to fight the holy war. Jihad! And certainly we could argue this out in the street, but I think, in the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution – it is not my solution. So I do not know what it is you would like me to say. Truth and firmness is one suggestion, though there are many other people you can ask if that answer does not satisfy. Personally, my hope lies in the last days. The prophet Muhammad – peace be upon Him! – tells us that on the Day of Resurrection everyone will be struck unconscious. Deaf and dumb. No chit-chat. Tongueless. And what a bloody relief that will be. Now, if you will excuse me.’
Samad took Poppy firmly by the hand and walked on, while Mad Mary stood dumbstruck only briefly before rushing to the church door and spraying saliva upon the congregation.
Poppy wiped away a frightened tear and sighed.
She said, ‘Calm in a crisis. Impressive.’
Samad, increasingly given to visions, saw that great-grandfather of his, Mangal Pande, flailing with a musket; fighting against the new, holding on to tradition.
‘It runs in the family,’ he said.
Later, Samad and Poppy walked up through Harlesden, around Dollis Hill, and then, when it seemed they were hovering too near to Willesden, Samad waited till the sun went down, bought a box of sticky Indian sweets and turned into Roundwood Park; admired the last of the flowers. He talked and talked, the kind of talking you do to stave off the inevitable physical desire, the kind of talking that only increases it. He told her about Delhi circa 1942, she told him about St Albans circa 1972. She complained about a long list of entirely unsuitable boyfriends, and Samad, not able to criticize Alsana or even mention her name, spoke of his children: fear of Millat’s passion for obscenities and a noisy TV show about an A-team; worries about whether Magid got enough direct sunlight. What was the country doing to his sons, he wanted to know, what was it doing?
‘I like you,’ she said finally. ‘A lot. You’re very funny. Do you know that you’re funny?’
Samad smiled and shook his head. ‘I have never thought of myself as a great comic wit.’
‘No – you are funny. That thing you said about camels…’ She began to laugh, and her laugh was infectious.
‘What thing?’
‘About camels – when we were walking.’
‘Oh, you mean, “Men are like camels: there is barely one in a hundred that you would trust with your life.” ’
‘Yes!’
‘That’s not comedy, that is the Bukhārī, part eight, page one hundred and thirty,’ said Samad. ‘And it is good advice. I have certainly found it to be true.’
‘Well, it’s still funny.’
She sat closer to him on the bench and kissed his ear. ‘Seriously, I like you.’
‘I’m old enough to be your father. I’m married. I am a Muslim.’
‘OK, so Dateline wouldn’t have matched our forms. So what?’
‘What kind of a phrase is this: “So what?” Is that English? That is not English. Only the immigrants can speak the Queen’s English these days.’
Poppy giggled. ‘I still say: So-’
But Samad covered her mouth with his hand, and looked for a moment almost as if he intended to hit her. ‘So everything. So everything. There is nothing funny about this situation. There is nothing good about it. I do not wish to discuss the rights or wrongs of this with you. Let us stick to what we are obviously here for,’ he spat out. ‘The physical, not the metaphysical.’
Poppy moved to the other end of the bench and leant forward, her elbows resting on her knees. ‘I know,’ she began slowly, ‘that this is no more than it is. But I won’t be spoken to like that.’
‘I am sorry. It was wrong of me-’
‘Just because you feel guilty, I’ve nothing to feel-’
‘Yes, I’m sorry. I have no-’
‘Because you can go if you-’
Half thoughts. Stick them all together and you have less than you began with.
‘I don’t want to go. I want you.’
Poppy brightened a bit and smiled her half-sad, half-goofy smile.
‘I want to spend the night… with you.’
‘Good,’ she replied. ‘Because I bought this for you while you were next door buying those sugary sweets.’
‘What is it?’
She dived into her handbag, and in the attenuated minute in which she scrabbled through lipsticks and car-keys and spare change, two things happened.
1.1 Samad closed his eyes and heard the words To the pure all things are pure and then, almost immediately afterwards, Can’t say fairer than that.
1.2 Samad opened his eyes and saw quite clearly by the bandstand his two sons, their white teeth biting into two waxy apples, waving, smiling.
And then Poppy resurfaced, triumphant, with a piece of red plastic in her hand.
‘A toothbrush,’ she said.