So said the banner on the top of the newspaper. So proclaimed the revellers who danced through early evening streets with their shrill silver whistles and Union Jacks, trying to whip up the feeling that goes with the date; trying to bring on the darkness (it was only five o’clock) so that England might have its once-a-year party; get fucked up, throw up, snog, grope and impale; stand in the doorways of trains holding them open for friends; argue with the sudden inflationary tactics of Somalian minicab drivers, jump in water or play with fire, and all by the dim, disguising light of the street lamps. It was the night when England stops saying pleasethankyoupleasesorrypleasedidI? And starts saying pleasefuckmefuckyoumotherfucker (and we never say that; the accent is wrong; we sound silly). The night England gets down to the fundamentals. It was New Year’s Eve. But Joshua was having a hard time believing it. Where had the time gone? It had seeped between the crack in Joely’s legs, run into the secret pockets of her ears, hidden itself in the warm, matted hair of her armpits. And the consequences of what he was about to do, on this the biggest day of his life, a critical situation that three months ago he would have dissected, compartmentalized, weighed up and analysed with Chalfenist vigour – that too had escaped him into her crevices. He had made no real decisions this New Year’s Eve, no resolutions. He felt as thoughtless as the young men tumbling out of pubs, looking for trouble; he felt as light as the child sitting astride his father’s shoulders heading for a family party. Yet he was not with them, out there in the streets, having fun – he was here, in here, careening into the centre of town, making a direct line for the Perret Institute like a heat-seeking missile. He was here, cramped in a bright red minibus with ten jumpy members of FATE, hurtling out of Willesden towards Trafalgar Square, half listening to Kenny read his father’s name out loud for the benefit of Crispin who was up front, driving.
‘ “When Dr Marcus Chalfen puts his FutureMouse on public display this evening he begins a new chapter in our genetic future.” ’
Crispin threw his head back for a loud, ‘Ha!’
‘Yeah, right, exactly,’ continued Kenny, trying unsuccessfully to scoff and read simultaneously, ‘like, thanks for the objective reporting. Umm, where was I… all right: “More significantly, he opens up this traditionally secretive, rarefied and complex branch of science to an unprecedented audience. As the Perret Institute prepares to open its doors around-the-clock for seven years, Dr Chalfen promises a national event which will be ‘crucially unlike the Festival of Britain in 1951 or the 1924 British Empire Exhibition because it has no political agenda’.” ’
‘Ha!’ snorted Crispin once more, this time turning right around in his seat so the FATE minibus (which wasn’t officially the FATE minibus; it still had KENSAL RISE FAMILY SERVICES UNIT in ten-inch yellow letters on either side; a loan from a social worker with furry animal sympathies) only narrowly missed a gaggle of pissed-up high-heeled girls who were tottering across the road. ‘No political agenda? Is he taking the fucking piss?’
‘Keep your eyes on the road, darling,’ said Joely, blowing him a kiss. ‘We want to at least try to get there in one piece. Umm, left here… down the Edgware Road.’
‘Fucker,’ said Crispin, glowering at Joshua and then turning back. ‘What a fucker he is.’
‘ “By 1999,” ’ read Kenny, following the arrow from the front to page five, ‘ “the year experts predict recombinant DNA procedure will come into its own – approximately fifteen million people will have seen the FutureMouse exhibition, and many more worldwide will have followed the progress of the FutureMouse in the international press. By then, Dr Chalfen will have succeeded in his aim of educating a nation, and throwing the ethical ball into the people’s court.” ’
‘Pass. Me. The. Fuck. Ing. Buck. Et,’ said Crispin, as if the very words were vomit. ‘What do the other papers say?’
Paddy held up Middle England’s bible so Crispin could see it in the rear-view. Headline: MOUSEMANIA.
‘It comes with a free FutureMouse sticker,’ said Paddy, shrugging his shoulders and slapping the sticker on his beret. ‘Pretty cute, actually.’
‘The tabloids are a surprise winner, though,’ said Minnie. Minnie was a brand-new convert: a seventeen-year-old Crusty, with matted blonde dreads and pierced nipples, whom Joshua had briefly considered becoming obsessed with. He tried for a while, but found he just couldn’t do it; he just couldn’t leave his miserable little psychotic world-of-Joely and go out seeking life on a new planet. Minnie, to her credit, had spotted this straight off and gravitated towards Crispin. She wore as little as the winter weather would allow and took every opportunity to thrust her perky pierced nipples into Crispin’s personal space, as she did now, reaching over to the driver’s cab to show him the front page of the daily rag in question. At one and the same time Crispin tried unsuccessfully to take the Marble Arch roundabout, avoid elbowing Minnie in the tits, and look at the paper.
‘I can’t see it properly. What is it?’
‘It’s Chalfen’s head with mouse ears, attached to a goat’s torso, which is attached to a pig’s arse. And he’s eating from a trough that says “Genetic Engineering” at one end and “Public Money” at the other. Headline: CHALFEN CHOWS DOWN.’
‘Nice. Every little helps.’
Crispin went round the roundabout again, and this time got the turning he required. Minnie reached over him and propped the paper on the dashboard.
‘God, he looks more fucking Chalfenist than ever!’
Joshua bitterly regretted telling Crispin about this little idiosyncracy of his family, their habit of referring to themselves as verbs, nouns and adjectives. It had seemed a good idea at the time; give everybody a laugh; confirm, if there was any doubt, whose side he was on. But he never felt that he’d betrayed his father – the weight of what he was doing never really hit him – until he heard Chalfenism ridiculed out of Crispin’s mouth.
‘Look at him Chalfening around in that trough. Exploit everything and everybody, that’s the Chalfen way, eh Josh?’
Joshua grunted and turned his back on Crispin, in favour of the window and a view of the frost over Hyde Park.
‘That’s a classic photo, there, see? The one they’ve used for the head. I remember it; that was the day he gave evidence in the California trial. That look of total fucking superiority. Very Chalfenesque!’
Joshua bit his tongue. DON’T RISE TO IT. IF YOU DON’T RISE TO IT, YOU GAIN HER SYMPATHY.
‘Don’t, Crisp,’ said Joely firmly, touching Joshua’s hair. ‘Just try to remember what we’re about to do. He doesn’t need that tonight.’
BINGO.
‘Yeah, well…’
Crispin put his foot down on the accelerator. ‘Minnie, have you and Paddy checked that everyone’s got everything they need? Balaclavas and that?’
‘Yeah, all done. It’s cool.’
‘Good.’ Crispin pulled out a small silver box filled with all the necessaries to roll a fat joint and threw it in Joely’s direction, catching Joshua painfully on the shin.
‘Make us one, love.’
CUNT.
Joely retrieved the box from the floor. She worked crouching with the Rizla resting on Joshua’s knee, her long neck exposed, her breasts falling forward until they were practically in his hands.
‘Are you nervous?’ she asked him, flicking her head back once the joint was rolled.
‘How d’you mean, nervous?’
‘About tonight. I mean, talk about conflict of loyalties.’
‘Conflict?’ murmured Josh hazily, wishing he were out there with the happy people, the conflict-free people, the New Year people.
‘God, I really admire you. I mean, FATE are dedicated to extreme action… And you know, even now, I find some of the stuff we do… difficult. And we’re talking about the most firmly held principle in my life, you know? I mean, Crispin and FATE… that’s my whole life.’
OH GREAT, thought Joshua, OH FANTASTIC.
‘And I’m still shit scared about tonight.’
Joely sparked the joint and inhaled. She passed it straight to Joshua, as the minibus took a right past Parliament. ‘It’s like that quote: “If I had to choose between betraying my friend or my country, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” The choice between a duty or a principle, you know? You see, I don’t feel torn like that. I don’t know if I could do what I do if I did. I mean, if it was my father. My first commitment is to animals and that’s Crispin’s first commitment too, so there’s no conflict. It’s kind of easy for us. But you, Joshi, you’ve made the most extreme decision out of us all… and you just seem so calm. I mean, it’s admirable… and I think you’ve really impressed Crispin, because you know, he was a little unsure about whether…’
Joely kept on talking, and Josh kept on nodding in the necessary places, but the hardcore Thai weed he was smoking had lassoed one word of hers – calm – and reined it in as a question. Why so calm, Joshi? You’re about to get into some pretty serious shit – why so calm?
Because he imagined he seemed calm from the outside, preternaturally calm, his adrenalin enjoying an inverse relationship with the rising New Year sap, with the jittery nerves of the FATE posse; and the effect of the skunk on top of it all… it was like walking under water, deep under water, while children played above. But it wasn’t calm so much as inertia. And he couldn’t work out, as the van progressed down Whitehall, whether this was the right reaction – to let the world wash over him, to let events take their course – or whether he should be more like those people, those people out there, whooping, dancing, fighting, fucking… whether he should be more – what was that horrible late twentieth-century tautology? Proactive. More proactive in the face of the future.
But he took another deep hit on the joint and it sent him back to twelve, being twelve; a precocious kid, waking up each morning fully expecting a twelve hours until nuclear apocalypse announcement, that old cheesy end-of-the-world scenario. Round that time he had thought a lot about extreme decisions, about the future and its deadlines. Even then it had struck him that he was unlikely to spend those last twelve hours fucking Alice the fifteen-year-old babysitter next door, telling people that he loved them, converting to orthodox Judaism, or doing all the things he wanted and all the things he never dared. It always seemed more likely to him, much more likely, that he would just return to his room and calmly finish constructing Lego Medieval Castle. What else could you do? What other choice could you be certain about? Because choices need time, the fullness of time, time being the horizontal axis of morality – you make a decision and then you wait and see, wait and see. And it’s a lovely fantasy, this fantasy of no time (TWELVE HOURS LEFT TWELVE HOURS LEFT), the point at which consequences disappear and any action is allowable (‘I’m mad – I’m fucking mad for it!’ came the cry from the street). But twelve-year-old Josh was too neurotic, too anal, too Chalfenist to enjoy it, even the thought of it. Instead he was there thinking: but what if the world doesn’t end and what if I fucked Alice Rodwell and she became pregnant and what if-
It was the same now. Always the fear of consequences. Always this terrible inertia. What he was about to do to his father was so huge, so colossal, that the consequences were inconceivable – he couldn’t imagine a moment occurring after that act. Only blankness. Nothingness. Something like the end of the world. And facing the end of the world, or even just the end of the year, had always given Josh a strangely detached feeling.
Every New Year’s Eve is impending apocalypse in miniature. You fuck where you want, you puke when you want, you glass who you want to glass – the huge gatherings in the street; the television round-ups of the goodies and baddies of time past; the frantic final kisses; the 10! 9! 8!
Joshua glared up and down Whitehall, at the happy people going about their dress rehearsal. They were all confident that it wouldn’t happen or certain they could deal with it if it did. But the world happens to you, thought Joshua, you don’t happen to the world. There’s nothing you can do. For the first time in his life, he truly believed that. And Marcus Chalfen believed the direct opposite. And there in a nutshell, he realized, is how I got here, turning out of Westminster, watching Big Ben approach the hour when I shall topple my father’s house. That is how we all got here. Between rocks and hard places. The frying pan and the fire.
Thursday, December 31 st 1992, New Year’s Eve
Signalling problems at Baker Street
No Southbound Jubilee Line Trains from Baker Street
Customers are advised to change on to the Metropolitan Line at Finchley Road
Or Change at Baker Street on to the Bakerloo
There is no alternative bus service
Last Train 02.00 hours
All London Underground staff wish you a safe and happy New Year!
Willesden Green Station Manager, Richard Daley
Brothers Millat, Hifan, Tyrone, Mo Hussein-Ishmael, Shiva, Abdul-Colin and Abdul-Jimmy stood stock-still like maypoles in the middle of the station while the dance of the New Year went on around them.
‘Great,’ said Millat. ‘What do we do now?’
‘Can’t you read?’ inquired Abdul-Jimmy.
‘We do what the board suggests, Brothers,’ said Abdul-Colin, short-circuiting any argument with his deep, calming baritone. ‘We change at Finchley Road. Allah provides.’
The reason Millat couldn’t read the writing on the wall was simple. He was stoned. It was the second day of Ramadan and he was cained. Every synapse in his body had clocked out for the evening and gone home. But there was still some conscientious worker going round the treadmill of his brain, ensuring one thought circulated in his skull: Why? Why get stoned, Millat? Why? Good question.
At midday he’d found an ageing eighth of hash in a drawer, a little bundle of cellophane he hadn’t had the heart to throw away six months ago. And he smoked it all. He smoked some of it out of his bedroom window. Then he walked to Gladstone Park and smoked some more. He smoked the great majority of it in the car park of Willesden Library. He finished it off in the student kitchen of one Warren Chapman, a South African skateboarder he used to hang with back in the day. And as a result, he was so cained now, standing on the platform with the rest, so cained that he could not only hear sounds within sounds but sounds within sounds within sounds. He could hear the mouse scurrying along the tracks, creating a higher level of harmonious rhythm with the crackle of the tannoy and the off-beat sniff of an elderly woman twenty feet away. Even when the train pulled in, he could still hear these things beneath the surface. Now, there is a level of cained that you can be, Millat knew, that is just so very very cained that you reach a level of Zen-like sobriety and come out the other side feeling absolutely tip-top as if you’d never sparked up in the first place. Oh, Millat longed for that. He only wished he’d got that far. But there just wasn’t quite enough.
‘Are you all right, Brother Millat?’ asked Abdul-Colin with concern as the tube doors slid open. ‘You have gone a nasty colour.’
‘Fine, fine,’ said Millat, and did a credible impression of being fine because hash just isn’t like drink; no matter how bad it is, you can always, at some level, pull your shit together. To prove this theory to himself, he walked in a slow but confident fashion down the carriage and took a seat at the very end of the line of Brothers, between Shiva and some excitable Australians heading for the Hippodrome.
Shiva, unlike Abdul-Jimmy, had had his share of wild times and could spot the tell-tale red-eye from a distance of fifty yards.
‘Millat, man,’ he said under his breath, confident he couldn’t be heard by the rest of the Brothers above the noise of the train. ‘What have you been doing to yourself?’
Millat looked straight ahead and spoke to his reflection in the train window. ‘I’m preparing myself.’
‘By getting messed up?’ hissed Shiva. He peered at the photocopy of Sura 52 he hadn’t quite memorized. ‘Are you crazy? It’s hard enough to remember this stuff without being on the planet Mars while you’re doing it.’
Millat swayed slightly, and turned to Shiva with a mistimed lunge. ‘I’m not preparing myself for that. I’m preparing myself for action. Because no one else will do it. We lose one man and you all betray the cause. You desert. But I stand firm.’
Shiva fell silent. Millat was referring to the recent ‘arrest’ of Brother Ibrāhām ad-Din Shukrallah on trumped up charges of tax evasion and civil disobedience. No one took the charges seriously, but everybody knew it was a not-so gentle warning from the Metropolitan Police that they had their eye trained on KEVIN activities. In the light of this, Shiva had been the first one to beat a retreat from the agreed Plan A, quickly followed by Abdul-Jimmy and Hussein-Ishmael, who, despite his desire to wreak violence upon somebody, anybody, had his shop to think about. For a week the argument raged (with Millat firmly defending Plan A), but on the 26th Abdul-Colin, Tyrone and finally Hifan conceded that Plan A might not be in KEVIN’s long-term interest. They could not, after all, put themselves in an imprisonment situation unless they were secure in the knowledge that KEVIN had leaders to replace them. So Plan A was off. Plan B was hastily improvised. Plan B involved the seven KEVIN representatives standing up halfway through Marcus Chalfen’s press conference and quoting Sura 52, ‘The Mountain’, first in Arabic (Abdul-Colin alone would do this) and then in English. Plan B made Millat sick.
‘And that’s it? You’re just going to read to him? That’s his punishment?’
What happened to revenge? What happened to just desserts, retribution, jihad?
‘Do you suggest,’ Abdul-Colin solemnly inquired, ‘that the word of Allah as given to the Prophet Muhammad – Salla Allahu ’Alaihi Wa Sallam – is not sufficient?’
Well, no. And so even though it sickened him, Millat had to step aside. In place of the questions of honour, sacrifice, duty, the life and death questions that came with the careful plotting of clan warfare, the very reasons Millat joined KEVIN – in place of these, came the question of translation. Everybody agreed that no translation of the Qur’ān could claim to be the word of God, but at the same time everybody conceded that Plan B would lose something in the delivery if no one could understand what was being said. So the question was which translation and why. Would it be one of the untrusty but clear Orientalists: Palmer (1880), Bell (1937- 9), Arberry (1955), Dawood (1956)? The eccentric but poetic J. M. Rodwell (1861)? The old favourite, passionate, dedicated Anglican convert par excellence Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall (1930)? Or one of the Arab brothers, the prosaic Shakir or the flamboyant Yusuf Ali? Five days they argued it. When Millat walked into the Kilburn Hall of an evening he had only to squint to mistake this talkative circle of chairs, these supposed fanatic fundamentalists, for an editorial meeting at the London Review of Books.
‘But Dawood is a plod!’ Brother Hifan would argue vehemently. ‘I refer you to 52:44: If they saw a part of heaven falling down, they would still say: “It is but a mass of clouds!” Mass of clouds? It is not a rock concert. At least with Rodwell there is some attempt to capture the poetry, the remarkable nature of the Arabic: And should they see a fragment of the heaven falling down, they would say, “It is only a dense cloud.” Fragment, dense – the effect is far stronger, accha?’
And then, haltingly, Mo Hussein-Ishmael: ‘I am just a butcher-stroke-cornershop-owner. I can’t claim to know much about it. But I like very much this last line; it is Rodwell… er, I think, yes, Rodwell. 52:49: And in the night-season: Praise him when the stars are setting. Night-season. I think that is a lovely phrase. It sounds like an Elvis ballad. Much better than the other one, the Pickthall one: And in the night-time also hymn His praise, and at the setting of the stars. Night-season is very much lovelier.’
‘And is this what we are here for?’ Millat had yelled at all of them. ‘Is this what we joined KEVIN for? To take no action? To sit around on our arses playing with words?’
But Plan B stuck, and here they were, whizzing past Finchley Road, heading to Trafalgar Square to carry it out. And this was why Millat was stoned. To give him enough guts to do something else.
‘I stand firm,’ said Millat, in Shiva’s ear, slurring his words, ‘that is what we’re here for. To stand firm. That is why I joined. Why did you join?’
Well, in fact Shiva had joined KEVIN for three reasons. First, because he was sick of the stick that comes with being the only Hindu in a Bengali Muslim restaurant. Secondly, because being Head of Internal Security for KEVIN beat the hell out of being second waiter at the Palace. And thirdly, for the women. (Not the KEVIN women, who were beautiful but chaste in the extreme, but all the women on the outside who had despaired of his wild ways and were now hugely impressed by his new asceticism. They loved the beard, they dug the hat, and told Shiva that at thirty-eight he had finally ceased to be a boy. They were massively attracted by the fact that he had renounced women and the more he renounced them, the more successful he became. Of course this equation could only work so long, and now Shiva was getting more pussy than he ever had as a kaffir.) However, Shiva sensed that the truth was not what was required here, so he said: ‘To do my duty.’
‘Then we are on the same wavelength, Brother Shiva,’ said Millat, going to pat Shiva’s knee but just missing it. ‘The only question is: will you do it?’
‘Pardon me, mate,’ said Shiva, removing Millat’s arm from where it had fallen between his legs. ‘But I think, taking into account your… umm… present condition… the question is, will you?’
Now there was a question. Millat was half sure that he was possibly maybe going to do something or not that would be correct and very silly and fine and un-good.
‘Mill, we’ve got a Plan B,’ persisted Shiva, watching the clouds of doubt cross Millat’s face. ‘Let’s just go with Plan B, yeah? No point in causing trouble. Man. You are just like your dad. Classic Iqbal. Can’t let things go. Can’t let sleeping cats die or whatever the fuck the phrase is.’
Millat turned from Shiva and looked at his feet. He had been more certain when he began, imagining the journey as one cold sure dart on the Jubilee Line: Willesden Green → Charing Cross, no changing of trains, not this higgledy-piggledy journey; just a straight line to Trafalgar, and then he would climb the stairs into the square, and come face to face with his great-great-grandfather’s enemy, Henry Havelock on his plinth of pigeon-shat stone. He would be emboldened by it; and he would enter the Perret Institute with revenge and revisionism in his mind and lost glory in his heart and he would and he would and he
‘I think,’ said Millat, after a pause, ‘I am going to vomit.’
‘Baker Street!’ cried Abdul-Jimmy. And with the discreet aid of Shiva, Millat crossed the platform to the connecting train.
Twenty minutes later the Bakerloo Line delivered them into the icy cold of Trafalgar Square. In the distance, Big Ben. In the square, Nelson. Havelock. Napier. George IV. And then the National Gallery, back there near St Martin’s. All the statues facing the clock.
‘They do love their false icons in this country,’ said Abdul-Colin, with his odd mix of gravity and satire, unmoved by the considerable New Year crowd who were presently spitting at, dancing round and crawling over the many lumps of grey stone. ‘Now, will somebody please tell me: what is it about the English that makes them build their statues with their backs to their culture and their eyes on the time?’ He paused to let the shivering KEVIN Brothers contemplate the rhetorical question.
‘Because they look to their future to forget their past. Sometimes you almost feel sorry for them, you know?’ he continued, turning full circle to look around at the inebriated crowd.
‘They have no faith, the English. They believe in what men make, but what men make crumbles. Look at their empire. This is all they have. Charles II Street and South Africa House and a lot of stupid-looking stone men on stone horses. The sun rises and sets on it in twelve hours, no trouble. This is what is left.’
‘I’m bloody cold,’ complained Abdul-Jimmy, clapping his mittened hands together (he found his uncle’s speeches a big pain in the arse). ‘Let’s get going,’ he said, as a huge beer-pregnant Englishman, wet from the fountains, collided into him, ‘out of this bloody madness. It’s on Chandos Street.’
‘Brother?’ said Abdul-Colin to Millat, who was standing some distance from the rest of the group. ‘Are you ready?’
‘I’ll be along in a minute.’ He shooed them away weakly. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be there.’
There were two things he wanted to see first. The first of which was a particular bench, that bench over there, by the far wall. He walked over to it, a long, stumbling journey, trying to avoid an unruly conga line (so much hashish in his head; lead weights on each foot); but he made it. He sat down. And there it was.
Five-inch letters, between one leg of the bench and the other. IQBAL. It wasn’t clear, and the colour of it was a murky rust, but it was there. The story of it was old.
A few months after his father arrived in England, he had sat on this bench nursing a bleeding thumb, the top sliced off by a careless, doddering stroke from one of the older waiters. When it first happened, in the restaurant, Samad couldn’t feel it because it was his dead hand. So he just wrapped it in a handkerchief to stem the flow and continued work. But the material had become soaked in blood, he was putting the customers off their food and eventually Ardashir sent him home. Samad took his open thumb out of the restaurant, past theatreland and down St Martin’s Lane. When he reached the square he stuck it in the fountain and watched his red insides spill out into the blue water. But he was making a mess and people were looking. He resolved instead to sit on the bench, gripping it at the root until it stopped. The blood kept on coming. After a while, he gave up holding his thumb upright and let it hang down to the floor like halal meat, hoping it would quicken the bleeding process. Then, with his head between his legs, and his thumb leaking on to the pavement, a primitive impulse had come over him. Slowly, with the dribbling blood, he wrote IQBAL from one chair leg to the next. Then, in an attempt to make it more permanent, he had gone over it again with a pen knife, scratching it into the stone.
‘A great shame washed over me the moment I finished,’ he explained to his sons years later. ‘I ran from it into the night; I tried to run from myself. I knew I had been depressed in this country… but this was different. I ended up clinging on to the railings in Piccadilly Circus, kneeling and praying, weeping and praying, interrupting the buskers. Because I knew what it meant, this deed. It meant I wanted to write my name on the world. It meant I presumed. Like the Englishmen who named streets in Kerala after their wives, like the Americans who shoved their flag in the moon. It was a warning from Allah. He was saying: Iqbal, you are becoming like them. That’s what it meant.’
No, thought Millat, the first time he heard this, no, that’s not what it meant. It just meant you’re nothing. And looking at it now, Millat felt nothing but contempt. All his life he wanted a Godfather, and all he got was Samad. A faulty, broken, stupid, one-handed waiter of a man who had spent eighteen years in a strange land and made no more mark than this. It just means you’re nothing, repeated Millat, working his way through the premature vomit (girls drinking doubles since three o’clock) over to Havelock, to look Havelock in his stony eye. It means you’re nothing and he’s something. And that’s it. That’s why Pande hung from a tree while Havelock the executioner sat on a chaise longue in Delhi. Pande was no one and Havelock was someone. No need for library books and debates and reconstructions. Don’t you see, Abba? whispered Millat. That’s it. That’s the long, long history of us and them. That’s how it was. But no more.
Because Millat was here to finish it. To revenge it. To turn that history around. He liked to think he had a different attitude, a second generation attitude. If Marcus Chalfen was going to write his name all over the world, Millat was going to write it BIGGER. There would be no misspelling his name in the history books. There’d be no forgetting the dates and times. Where Pande misfooted he would step sure. Where Pande chose A, Millat would choose B.
Yes, Millat was stoned. And it may be absurd to us that one Iqbal can believe the breadcrumbs laid down by another Iqbal, generations before him, have not yet blown away in the breeze. But it really doesn’t matter what we believe. It seems it won’t stop the man who thinks this life is guided by the life he thinks he had before, or the gypsy who swears by the queens in her tarot pack. And it’s hard to change the mind of the high-strung woman who lays responsibility for all her actions at the feet of her mother, or the lonely guy who sits in a fold-up chair on a hill in the dead of night waiting for the little green men. Amidst the strange landscapes that have replaced our belief in the efficacy of the stars, Millat’s is not such odd terrain. He believes the decisions that are made, come back. He believes we live in circles. His is a simple, neat fatalism. What goes around comes around.
‘Ding, ding,’ said Millat out loud, tapping Havelock’s foot, before turning on his heel to make his hazy way to Chandos Street. ‘Round two.’
December 31st 1992
He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow
Eccles. ch. 1, v. 18
When Ryan Topps was asked to assemble the Lambeth Kingdom Hall’s Thought for the Day desk calendar for 1992, he took especial care to avoid the mistakes of his predecessors. Too often in the past, Ryan noted, when the assembler came to choose quotations for entirely fatuous, secular days, he let sentiment get the better of him, so that on Valentine’s Day 1991 we find there is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear, I John 4:18, as if John were thinking of the paltry feeling that prompts people to send each other Milk Tray and cheap teddy bears rather than the love of Jesus Christ, which nothing surpasseth. Ryan took very much the opposite approach. On a day like New Year’s Eve, for example, when everybody was running around making their New Year resolutions, assessing their past year and plotting their success for the next, he felt it necessary to bring them to earth with a bump. He wanted to offer a little reminder that the world is cruel and pointless, all human endeavour ultimately meaningless, and no advancement in this world worth making besides gaining God’s favour and an entry ticket into the better half of the after-life. And having completed the calendar the previous year and forgotten much of what he’d done, he was pleasantly surprised – when he ripped off the 30th and looked at the crisp white page of the 31st – at just how effective the reminder was. No thought could have been more apt for the day ahead. No warning more propitious. He ripped it from the calendar, squeezed it into the tight leather of his trousers and told Mrs B. to get in the side car.
‘He who would valiant be, ’gainst all disaster!’ sang Mrs B. as they zipped along Lambeth Bridge, heading for Trafalgar Square. ‘Let ’im in constancy, follow de master! ’
Ryan made sure to signal a good minute before turning left so that the Kingdom ladies in the minibus behind wouldn’t get confused. He made a quick mental inventory of the things he’d put in the van: songbooks, instruments, banners, Watchtower leaflets. All present and correct. They had no actual tickets, but they would make their protest outside, in the cold, suffering like true Christians. Praise be to God! What a glorious day! All portents were good. He even had a dream last night that Marcus Chalfen was the devil himself and they were standing nose to nose. Ryan had said: Myself and yourself are at war. There can be only one winner. Then he had quoted the same piece of scripture at him (he couldn’t recall precisely what it was now, but it was something from Revelation) over and over and over again, until the devil/Marcus had become smaller and smaller, grown ears and a long forked tail, and finally scurried away, a tiny satanic mouse. As in this vision, so it would be in life. Ryan would remain unbending, unmoving, absolutely constant, and, in the end, the sinner would repent.
That was how Ryan approached all theological, practical and personal conflicts. He didn’t move, not an inch. But then, that had always been his talent; he had a mono-intelligence, an ability to hold on to a single idea with phenomenal tenacity, and he never found anything that suited it as well as the church of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Ryan thought in black and white. The problem with his antecedent passions – scootering and pop music – was there were always shades of grey (though possibly the two closest things in secular life to a Witness preacher are boys who send letters to the New Musical Express and those enthusiasts who pen articles for Scooters Today). There were always the difficult questions of whether one should dilute one’s appreciation of the Kinks with a little Small Faces, or whether Italy or Germany were the best manufacturers of spare engine parts. That life seemed so alien to him now he hardly remembered living it. He pitied those who suffered under the weight of such doubts and dilemmas. He pitied Parliament as he and Mrs B. scooted past it; he pitied it because the laws made in there were provisional where his were eternal…
‘There’s no discouragement, shall make ’im once relent, his first avowed intent, to be a Pilgrim! ’ trilled Mrs B. ‘Who so besets him round, with dismal stories… do but themselves confound, his strength the more is.. .’
He relished it. He relished standing nose to nose with evil and saying, ‘You yourself: prove it to me. Go on, prove it.’ He felt he needed no arguments like the Muslims or the Jews. No convoluted proofs or defences. Just his faith. And nothing rational can fight faith. If Star Wars (secretly Ryan’s favourite film. The Good! The Evil! The Force! So simple. So true) is truly the sum of all archaic myths and the purest allegory of life (as Ryan believed it was), then faith, unadulterated, ignorant faith, is the biggest fuck-off light sabre in the universe. Go on, prove it. He did that every Sunday on the doorsteps and he would do precisely the same to Marcus Chalfen. Prove to me that you are right. Prove to me that you are more right than God. Nothing on earth would do it. Because Ryan didn’t believe in or care about anything on earth.
‘We almost there?’
Ryan squeezed Mrs B.’s frail hand and sped across the Strand, then wound his way round the back of the National Gallery.
‘No foe shall stay his might, though he with giants fight, he will make good his right, to be a Pilgrim! ’
Well said Mrs B.! The right to be a pilgrim! Who does not presume and yet inherits the earth! The right to be right, to teach others, to be just at all times because God has ordained that you will be, the right to go into strange lands and alien places and talk to the ignorant, confident that you speak nothing but the truth. The right to be always right. So much better than the rights he once held dear: the right to liberty, freedom of expression, sexual freedom, the right to smoke pot, the right to party, the right to ride a scooter sixty-five miles an hour on a main road without a helmet. So much more than all those, Ryan could claim. He exercised a right so rare, at this the fag-end of the century, as to be practically obsolete. The most fundamental right of all. The right to be the good guy.
On: 31/12/1992
London Transport Buses
Route 98
From: Willesden Lane
To: Trafalgar Square
At: 17:35
Fare: Adult Single £0.70
Retain Ticket for Inspection
Cor (thought Archie) they don’t make ’em like they used to. That’s not to say they make them any worse. They just make them very, very different. So much information. The minute you tore one from the perforation you felt stuffed and pinned down by some all-seeing taxidermist, you felt freeze-framed in time, you felt caught. Didn’t use to be, Archie remembered. Many years ago he had a cousin, Bill, who worked the old 32 route through Oxford Street. Good sort, Bill. Smile and a nice word for everyone. Used to tear off a ticket from one of those chug-chug big-handled mechanical things (and where have they gone? Where’s the smudgy ink?) on the sly, like; no money passed over; there you go, Arch. That was Bill, always helping you out. Anyway, those tickets, the old ones, they didn’t tell you where you were going, much less where you came from. He couldn’t remember seeing any dates on them either, and there was certainly no mention of time. It was all different now, of course. All this information. Archie wondered why that was. He tapped Samad on the shoulder. He was sitting directly ahead of him, in the front-most seat of the top deck. Samad turned round, looked at the ticket he was being shown, listened to the question and gave Archie a funny look.
‘What is it, precisely, that you want to know?’
He looked a bit testy. Everyone was a little testy right now. There’d been a bit of a ding-dong earlier in the afternoon. Neena had demanded that they all go to the mouse thing, seeing as how Irie was involved and Magid was involved and the least they could do was go and support family because whatever they thought of it a lot of work had gone into it and young people need affirmation from their parents and she was going to go even if they weren’t and it was a pretty poor show if family couldn’t turn up for their big day and… well, it went on and on. And then the emotional fall-out. Irie burst into tears (What was wrong with Irie? She was always a bit weepy these days), Clara accused Neena of emotional blackmail, Alsana said she’d go if Samad went, and Samad said he’d spent New Year’s Eve at O’Connell’s for eighteen years and he wasn’t going to stop now. Archie, for his part, said he was buggered if he was going to listen to this racket all evening – he’d rather sit on a quiet hill by himself. They’d all looked at him queerly when he said that. Little did they know he was taking prophetic advice he’d received from Ibelgaufts the day before:
28 December 1992
My dearest Archibald,
’Tis the season to be jolly… so it has been claimed, but from my window I see only turmoil. At present six felines, hungry for territory, are warring in my garden. Not content with their autumnal hobby of drenching their plots in urine, the winter has brought out a more fanatical urge in them… it is down to claws and flying fur… the screeching keeps me up all through the night! I cannot help but think that my own cat, Gabriel, has the right idea, sat atop my shed, having given up his land claims in exchange for a quiet life.
But in the end, Alsana laid down the law. Archie and the rest were going whether they liked it or not. And they didn’t. So now they were taking up half the bus in their attempts to sit alone: Clara behind Alsana who was behind Archie who was behind Samad who was sitting across from Neena. Irie was sitting next to Archie, but only because there wasn’t any more space.
‘I was just saying… you know,’ said Archie, attempting the first conversation to broach the frosty silence since they left Willesden. ‘It’s quite interesting, the amount of information they put on bus tickets these days. Compared with, you know, the old days. I was just wondering why. It’s quite interesting.’
‘I have to be honest, Archibald,’ said Samad with a grimace, ‘I find it singularly uninteresting. I find it terminally dull.’
‘Oh, right,’ said Archie. ‘Right you are.’
The bus did one of those arching corners where it feels the merest breath will topple it over.
‘Umm… so you wouldn’t know why-’
‘No, Jones, I have no intimate friends at the bus garage nor any inside knowledge of the progressive decisions that are no doubt made daily within London Transport. But if you are asking me for my uneducated guess, then I imagine it is part of some huge government monitoring process to track the every movement of one Archibald Jones, to ascertain where and what he is doing on all days and at every moment-’
‘Jesus,’ Neena cut in irritably, ‘why do you have to be such a bully?’
‘Excuse me? I was not aware you and I, Neena, were having a conversation.’
‘He was just asking a question and you have to come over all arsey. I mean, you’ve been bullying him for half a century. Haven’t you had enough? Why don’t you just leave him alone?’
‘Neena Begum, I swear if you give me one more instruction today I will personally tear your tongue out at the root and wear it as a necktie.’
‘Steady on, Sam,’ said Archie, perturbed at the fuss he had inadvertently caused, ‘I was just-’
‘Don’t you threaten my niece,’ Alsana chimed in from further down the bus. ‘Don’t you take it out on her just because you’d rather be eating your beans and chips’ – Ah! (thought Archie, wistfully) Beans and chips! – ‘than going to see your own son actually achieving something and-’
‘I can’t remember you being all that keen,’ said Clara, adding her twopence worth. ‘You know, you have a very convenient way, Alsi, of forgetting what happened two minutes ago.’
‘This from the woman who lives with Archibald Jones!’ scoffed Samad. ‘I might remind you that people in glass houses-’
‘No, Samad,’ Clara protested. ‘Don’t even begin to start on me. You’re the one who had all the real objections about coming… but you never stick to a decision, do you? Always Pandy-ing around. At least Archie’s, well, you know…’ stumbled Clara, unused to defending her husband and unsure of the necessary adjective, ‘at least he makes a decision and sticks by it. At least Archie’s consistent.’
‘Oh surely, yes,’ said Alsana acidly. ‘The same way that a stone is consistent, the same way my dear babba is consistent for very simple reason that she’s been buried underground for-’
‘Oh, shut up,’ said Irie.
Alsana was silenced for a moment, and then the shock subsided and she found her tongue. ‘Irie Jones, don’t you tell me-’
‘No, I will tell you,’ said Irie, going very red in the face, ‘actually. Yeah, I will. Shut up. Shut up, Alsana. And shut up the lot of you. All right? Just shut up. In case you didn’t notice, there are, like, other people on this bus and, believe it or not, not everyone in the universe wants to listen to you lot. So shut it. Go on. Try it. Silence. Ah.’ She reached into the air as if trying to touch the quiet she had created. ‘Isn’t that something? Did you know this is how other families are? They’re quiet. Ask one of these people sitting here. They’ll tell you. They’ve got families. This is how some families are all the time. And some people like to call these families repressed, or emotionally stunted or whatever, but do you know what I say?’
The Iqbals and the Joneses, astonished into silence along with the rest of the bus (even the loud-mouthed Ragga girls on their way to a Brixton dance hall New Year ting), had no answer.
‘I say, lucky fuckers. Lucky, lucky fuckers.’
‘Irie Jones!’ cried Clara. ‘Watch your mouth!’ But Irie couldn’t be stopped.
‘What a peaceful existence. What a joy their lives must be. They open a door and all they’ve got behind it is a bathroom or a lounge. Just neutral spaces. And not this endless maze of present rooms and past rooms and the things said in them years ago and everybody’s old historical shit all over the place. They’re not constantly making the same old mistakes. They’re not always hearing the same old shit. They don’t do public performances of angst on public transport. Really, these people exist. I’m telling you. The biggest traumas of their lives are things like recarpeting. Bill-paying. Gate-fixing. They don’t mind what their kids do in life as long as they’re reasonably, you know, healthy. Happy. And every single fucking day is not this huge battle between who they are and who they should be, what they were and what they will be. Go on, ask them. And they’ll tell you. No mosque. Maybe a little church. Hardly any sin. Plenty of forgiveness. No attics. No shit in attics. No skeletons in cupboards. No great-grandfathers. I will put twenty quid down now that Samad is the only person in here who knows the inside bloody leg measurement of his great-grandfather. And you know why they don’t know? Because it doesn’t fucking matter. As far as they’re concerned, it’s the past. This is what it’s like in other families. They’re not self-indulgent. They don’t run around, relishing, relishing the fact that they are utterly dysfunctional. They don’t spend their time trying to find ways to make their lives more complex. They just get on with it. Lucky bastards. Lucky motherfuckers.’
The enormous adrenalin rush that sprang from this peculiar outburst surged through Irie’s body, increased her heart-beat to a gallop and tickled the nerve ends of her unborn child, for Irie was eight weeks pregnant and she knew it. What she didn’t know, and what she realized she may never know (the very moment she saw the ghostly pastel blue lines materialize on the home test, like the face of the madonna in the zucchini of an Italian housewife), was the identity of the father. No test on earth would tell her. Same thick black hair. Same twinkling eyes. Same habit of chewing the tops of pens. Same shoe size. Same deoxyribonucleic acid. She could not know her body’s decision, what choice it had made, in the race to the gamete, between the saved and the unsaved. She could not know if the choice would make any difference. Because whichever brother it was, it was the other one too. She would never know.
At first this fact seemed ineffably sad to Irie; instinctively she sentimentalized the biological facts, adding her own invalid syllogism: if it was not somebody’s child, could it be that it was nobody’s child? She thought of those elaborate fictional cartograms that folded out of Joshua’s old sci-fi books, his Fantasy Adventures. That is how her child seemed. A perfectly plotted thing with no real coordinates. A map to an imaginary fatherland. But then, after weeping and pacing and rolling it over and over in her mind, she thought: whatever, you know? Whatever. It was always going to turn out like this, not precisely like this, but involved like this. This was the Iqbals we were talking about, here. This was the Joneses. How could she ever have expected anything less?
And so she calmed herself, putting her hand over her palpitating chest and breathing deeply as the bus approached the square and the pigeons circled. She would tell one of them and not the other; she would decide which; she would do it tonight.
‘You all right, love?’ Archie asked her, after a long period of silence had set in, putting his big pink hand on her knee, dotted with liver-spots like tea stains. ‘A lot on your chest, then.’
‘Fine, Dad. I’m fine.’
Archie smiled at her, and tucked a stray hair behind her ear.
‘Dad.’
‘Yes?’
‘The thing about the bus tickets.’
‘Yes?’
‘One theory goes it’s because so many people pay less than they should for their journey. Over the past few years the bus companies have been suffering from larger and larger deficits. You see where it says Retain for Inspection? That’s so they can check later. It’s got all the details there, so you can’t get away with it.’
And in the past, Archie wondered, was it just that fewer people cheated? Were they more honest, and did they leave their front doors open, did they leave their kids with the neighbours, pay social calls, run up tabs with the butcher? The funny thing about getting old in a country is people always want to hear that from you. They want to hear it really was once a green and pleasant land. They need it. Archie wondered if his daughter needed it. She was looking at him funny. Her mouth down-turned, her eyes almost pleading. But what could he tell her? New Years come and go, but no amount of resolutions seem to change the fact that there are bad blokes. There were always plenty of bad blokes.
‘When I was a kid,’ said Irie softly, ringing the bell for their stop, ‘I used to think they were little alibis. Bus tickets. I mean, look: they’ve got the time. The date. The place. And if I was up in court, and I had to defend myself, and prove I wasn’t where they said I was, doing what they said I did, when they said I did it, I’d pull out one of those.’
Archie was silent and Irie, assuming the conversation was over, was surprised when several minutes later, after they had struggled through the happy New Year crowd and tourists standing round aimlessly, as they were walking up the steps of the Perret Institute, her father said, ‘Now, I never thought of that. I’ll remember that. Because you never know, do you? I mean, do you? Well. There’s a thought. You should pick them up off the street, I suppose. Put ’em all in a jar. An alibi for every occasion.’
And all these people are heading for the same room. The final space. A big room, one of many in the Perret Institute; a room separate from the exhibition yet called an Exhibition Room; a corporate place, a clean slate; white/chrome/pure/plain (this was the design brief) used for the meetings of people who want to meet somewhere neutral at the end of the twentieth century; a virtual place where their business (be that rebranding, lingerie or rebranding lingerie) can be done in an emptiness, an uncontaminated cavity; the logical endpoint of a thousand years of spaces too crowded and bloody. This one is pared down, sterilized, made new every day by a Nigerian cleaning lady with an industrial Hoover and guarded through the night by Mr De Winter, a Polish nightwatchman (that’s what he calls himself – his job title is Asset Security Coordinator); he can be seen protecting the space, walking the borders of the space with a Walkman playing Polish folk-tunes; you can see him, you can see it through a huge glass front if you walk by – the acres of protected vacuity and a sign with the prices per square foot of these square feet of space of space of space longer than it is wide and tall enough to fit head-to-toe three Archies and at least half an Alsana and tonight there are (there will not be tomorrow) two huge, matching posters, slick across two sides of the room like wallpaper and the text says MILLENNIAL SCIENCE COMMISSION in a wide variety of fonts ranging from the deliberate archaism of VIKING to the modernity of IMPACT in order to get a feel of a thousand years in lettering (this was the brief), and all of it in the alternate colours grey, light blue and dark green because these are the colours research reveals people associate with ‘science and technology’ (purples and reds denote the arts, royal blue signifies ‘quality and/or approved merchandise’), because fortunately after years of corporate synaesthesia (salt amp; vinegarblue, cheese amp; oniongreen) people can finally give the answers required when a space is being designed, or when something is being rebranded, a room/furniture/Britain (that was the brief: a new British room, a space for Britain, Britishness, space of Britain, British industrial space cultural space space); they know what is meant when asked how matt chrome makes them feel; and they know what is meant by national identity? symbols? paintings? maps? music? air-conditioning? smiling black children or smiling Chinese children or [tick the box]? world music? shag or pile? tile or floorboards? plants? running water? they know what they want, especially those who’ve lived this century, forced from one space to another like Mr De Winter (né Wojciech), renamed, rebranded, the answer to every questionnaire nothing nothing space please just space nothing please nothing space