Martin ran two kilometres on the treadmill. It took him fifteen minutes, and by the time he’d finished he was drenched in sweat – but then, that was the whole point of the exercise.
He grabbed a mat from a pile in the corner of the gym, put his towel over it and knelt down. He wiped the sweat from his eyes, then slipped on the goggles that were linked to the Physiotherapy Department’s computers. When he looked down, his clothes had vanished from sight, along with much of his body: skin, fat, blood vessels, genitals, viscera. All that remained of him was muscle, bones and tendons. The towel beneath him was gone as well; he appeared to be kneeling on a transparent cushion that was supporting him over a mirrored surface that had replaced part of the gym’s carpeted floor.
He moved his right foot in front of him, to the left, as he lowered his chest towards the ground, stretching out his left leg behind him to lie flat, while his right leg was bent and trapped beneath him. Looking down at his virtual reflection, he could see the piriformis muscle that crossed his right buttock at the back of his hip, helpfully highlighted in blue.
The operation to remove the tumour on his spine had impinged on a nerve in his spinal cord, giving rise to a month of excruciating pain. The pain felt as if it was in the muscle, though that had not actually been damaged at all: the pain there was a phantom, a false message. But his body didn’t know the difference, and the muscle had clenched up tightly to protect itself against the perceived injury. Now that the nerve had settled down, that tightness had turned the original phantom pain into a self-fulfilling prophecy: the piriformis muscle really was the problem now. Not only had it been damaged by its own defensive response, by refusing to move normally it was pulling everything else around it out of shape. It needed to be coaxed back into its old routine, but after a month spent cowed and quivering, that was easier said than done.
Martin leant forward as far as he could; the pressure on his right leg as he folded it against his body was transferred to the piriformis, stretching it a little. He kept the position for a count of twenty, then eased off.
Resting, he gazed down at the reflection of the back of his leg, at the inelegant network of fleshy ropes that had managed to tug itself so far out of balance that he was still taking painkillers just to sleep. There was something almost comical about the fact that the cancer itself had, so far, given him no pain, and the sophisticated drugs targeted against it had left him with none of the side-effects he’d been prepared to face, based on a lifetime of media images of people on chemotherapy. Instead, he just felt as if he’d been kicked in the arse by a donkey.
He leant forward again, holding the stretch to thirty this time, trying to persuade the stupid muscle that its cringing was only making things worse. When he relaxed he scrutinised the result; he could have sworn that the bundle of blue fibres was already a few millimetres longer than when he’d started. But the imagery he was seeing wasn’t likely to be that accurate; he didn’t have magic MRIVISION, showing him his true anatomy in real time. It was all just an educated guess, a simulation cobbled together from a month-old scan and some postural cues extracted from ceiling cameras in the gym and the goggles’ superficial teraHertz view of his body. It could help him perform the exercise correctly, by looking for the same information as a human physiotherapist would, but that was it. He couldn’t look down and search himself for new secondary tumours.
He did the piriformis stretch five times, then swapped legs and repeated the set; his left side was giving him no trouble, but the aim was to keep everything symmetrical. Then he went through half-a-dozen other lower-back exercises diligently enough, but with rather less zeal. They were all beneficial, and he didn’t doubt his physio’s advice for a moment, but it was hard to feel a sense of urgency over slightly stiff hamstrings; none of this routine was going to make a difference to the cancer, at least not directly, but if he could win back pain-free days and drug-free sleep, that would be both a victory in itself and a plausible boon to his overall health.
Martin showered and headed out of the hospital. He’d barely taken three steps along the road when a shabby white car pulled up beside him and a man in his twenties called out, ‘Taxi?’ The car bore no company insignia; everyone in Iran was a taxi driver when they felt like it.
Martin nodded and got in the front seat; they agreed on a price to his home. After Martin replied tersely to his attempts to start a conversation, the driver cranked up the volume on his stereo, unleashing a track with a female vocalist who sounded like an Iranian Céline Dion interspersed with an insipid male rapper.
Martin tried to be stoical, but the song was too loud to blank out and too excruciating to ignore. ‘Please, would you mind turning that down?’ he begged.
The driver didn’t seem offended, but he held out his hand. ‘Extra service.’
Martin said, ‘Forget it. Please stop the car.’
The young man pondered this new request. ‘You should pay me for my trouble.’
Martin was unmoved; they’d gone barely a hundred metres. ‘If you want flag-fall, get yourself a taxi licence. Just stop the car.’
‘You have to pay me!’ the man insisted, outraged. ‘You want me to call the police?’
‘Go ahead.’ Martin opened the door; the driver panicked and screeched to a halt, allowing him to disembark.
Martin slammed the door and walked away down Enqelab Avenue, trying to remember where the bus stop was. He paused and steadied himself against the side wall of a news kiosk, listening to the whine of motorbikes weaving through the pedestrians. He needed the treadmill to warm up before stretching, but it took away his energy for half the day.
He had to be patient. In six months, the perfect new liver being cultured from his own modified skin cells would be fully grown, ready to replace the tattered organ from which the primary tumour had been sliced. Ten years ago, stage four cholangiocarcinoma would have been a death sentence – and any form of treatment a gruelling ordeal – but Martin’s weekly injections had no side-effects at all. Twenty-four hours a day, the artificial antibodies with toxins attached were bumping into the cancer cells strewn throughout his body and polishing them off, with no collateral damage. Nothing was certain – the metastasising cells could always acquire resistance – but his oncologist said he had a thirty per cent chance of surviving five more years. Thirty per cent, up from zero with the old treatments.
Martin found the bus stop. At home, he set his alarm clock, then undressed and climbed into bed. The donkey-kick burned, but he wasn’t supposed to take any more codeine before evening. He closed his eyes and pictured Mahnoosh beside him.
‘I miss you,’ he whispered. He felt a twinge of guilt; sometimes it felt dishonest, or, perversely, like a kind of infidelity to summon up her presence.
‘What’s the problem?’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be forgotten.’
Maybe not. Or am I just putting words into your mouth?
‘As if I’d let you,’ she replied scornfully.
Martin suddenly recalled the night, not long after she’d moved in with him, when she’d been undressing for bed and he’d started chanting raucously, ‘Loose the Noosh! Loose the Noosh!’ She’d thrown a bedside lamp at him and broken his nose.
She said, ‘Give me your hand.’
She held it tightly as he drifted into shallow sleep, and when the alarm screeched three hours later, she still hadn’t deserted him.
Martin was at the school five minutes before the bell. The other parents nodded to him, but didn’t come too close; a few had tried to talk to him in the past, but there had always been a fundamental disjunction between the way they’d felt obliged to engage sympathetically with his family’s tragedy, and the way Martin had preferred that they mind their own fucking business.
Javeed emerged from his classroom staring at the ground. When he finally looked up and saw that Martin was there, his expression of relief was haunted, provisional: this time his father had come, but there was always tomorrow. Martin fought against the instinct to smother him in reassuring promises: I won’t leave you, pesaram; you’ll never be alone. Even if he’d believed the words himself, why would Javeed take them seriously? His radiant mother had died without warning, in perfect health. What could his grey-haired, limping, jaundiced father possibly say to regain an aura of invulnerability?
Martin took his hand and they walked across the playground. ‘What did you do today?’
‘Just stuff.’
‘Nothing exciting?’
Javeed didn’t reply.
‘Any pictures for me?’
Javeed stopped and unzipped his backpack. He took out a rolled-up sheet of what Martin always thought of as butcher’s paper and offered it to him. Martin unfurled it to reveal a drawing in coloured pencil.
A bird with a dog’s head hovered over a nest on a mountainside; on closer inspection, it looked as if the nest was made of whole tree trunks. Inside the nest, a blond-haired boy stood stretching up his hands. The bird, the Simorgh, was holding a dead lamb in its claws.
‘She brought him some food?’ Martin asked.
Javeed nodded.
‘So she’s a friendly bird, she’s not too scary?’
‘She’s friendly to Zal,’ Javeed agreed. ‘But he won’t stay with her forever. His father comes and takes him back home.’
‘It’s a good picture.’
Martin rolled it up and Javeed stored it in his backpack again. Martin said, ‘No taxi today, we’re going to catch the bus.’ Javeed was surprised, then he smiled approvingly. The bus to the city took a slow, complicated route, but they caught it so rarely that it still had some novelty value.
The journey took them past the bookshop; Martin cringed a little to see the crowds walking straight by the security shutters, not even able to window-shop. He was still paying rent on the premises, frittering away Mahnoosh’s life insurance; he should make up his mind to re-open the place with an assistant, or try to sell the business. People of the Book. On the day they’d signed the lease, he’d insisted to Mahnoosh – with a straight face, for almost half an hour – that her own mildly ironic suggestion was a faint-hearted choice, and they really ought to call themselves The Nicest of the Damned.
When they reached their destination Martin apologised to Omar; they were half an hour late, and Omar always set aside two ghal’eha for them. ‘I wish you’d let me pay you what you’re missing out on.’
‘It’s once a week, it’s nothing,’ Omar retorted. ‘Ah, here’s the big warrior.’ He squatted down and kissed Javeed on the cheeks, then handed him a square of gaz.
‘Where’s Farshid?’ Javeed asked anxiously.
‘Helping someone carry a TV to their car,’ Omar said. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be here when you’re finished.’
Martin and Javeed went upstairs on their own. They were becoming used to the mechanics of the process; after they’d put on their gloves and goggles, Martin held up his notepad to the two ghal’eha in turn. The machines read Nasim’s certificate and made the connection to Zendegi; all he and Javeed had to do was step inside. As the rim of Martin’s castle ascended, he saw one of their neighbours’ spheres spinning furiously. Even through the sound-proofing he could hear a muffled trace of its inhabitant’s rapid footfalls until his own bubble closed around him.
When Martin lowered the goggles’ screens the bland white space of the castle vanished immediately and he was standing beside Javeed at the edge of a desert oasis. No gentle, staged transitions and no menus to deal with. They had made their selection on the weekend through Zendegi’s website, sparing them all the preliminaries now.
Javeed gazed wide-eyed at the building that lay ahead of them in the distance. ‘King Zahhak’s palace!’ They’d seen pictures of the pale-brown mud-brick fortress when they’d chosen the story, but the sense of immersion, the knowledge that they’d stepped right into the picture, was already enough to render the sight far more vivid. In spite of the building material, the architecture was impressively crisp, with near-perfect scallops capping the walls above a series of narrow, slotted windows for archers. A cylindrical tower stood at each corner, with walls in exactly the same style; no fancy battlements here.
Javeed began striding across the sand, glancing towards Martin almost surreptitiously, as if he didn’t want to be caught checking that his father was keeping up. They both wore white dishdashas, traditional Arab robes; this story came from the Shahnameh but it wasn’t set in Persia. Martin had done more than enough treadmill work for one day, so he used a discreet hand gesture to tell Zendegi to amplify his steps. The result wasn’t quite seven-league boots, but it enabled his icon to walk vigorously with almost no effort on his part.
The dusty trail leading into the oasis gave way to a broad, palm-lined avenue strewn with small white stones. Horses and camels rested on the shaded grass beside the road; streams rose from beneath the ground, feeding a series of shallow pools. Javeed, usually shy with strangers, called out, ‘Salaam!’ to a group of older boys tending the animals, and they replied with friendly waves. Martin doubted that there were humans behind their welcoming smiles – who would choose to take on such a tiny role? – but he could still appreciate the warmth of their greeting for what it was, a part of the atmosphere. Nobody in a painting, a movie, a book, could ever be your friend back in the real world; that didn’t render the whole exercise deluded or dishonest.
As they drew closer to the palace the streets filled with people and they found themselves weaving through a crowded bazaar. For their benefit, everyone around them was speaking Farsi – albeit without the usual modern colloquialisms, and in accents that sounded plausibly Arabic to Martin’s ear, down to ‘w’ in place of ‘v’ and ‘b’ in place of ‘p’. Customers were haggling with traders for bolts of cloth, jewellery, fruit, grain, spices. Martin felt a pang of guilt at the sheer profligacy of the backdrop – surely software couldn’t conjure all of this effortlessly; surely some human designer had slaved for days to get the details right? – but then he decided that it was probably all recycled, with a little tweaking, from one setting to the next. There were a thousand games and stories that would need a bazaar like this; once all the elements were set up, changing the faces and permuting the merchandise would probably be easy enough.
Javeed stopped, confused. ‘Where’s the man who’ll give us the job?’
‘We have to go through the bazaar to the side of the palace. Remember?’
‘He doesn’t have an office here?’
Martin smiled. ‘I don’t think so.’ Maybe it made sense that the king’s elaborate domestic bureaucracy ought to have a recruitment centre out in the bazaar, but the notes on the website had pointed them towards the palace kitchens themselves.
At Martin’s urging, Javeed asked directions from a carpet merchant; they didn’t have time to get lost in this maze. The woman’s instructions led them past an unsavoury-looking garbage dump; it was mercifully incapable of sharing its aromas, but the buzz of flies alone was enough to turn Martin’s stomach.
There was a bead-curtained doorway at the kitchen’s entrance to keep out the insects without blocking the passage of air. Martin parted the curtain with his hands, wondering for a moment if Zendegi was tweaking the physics to ensure that not one bead brushed his face or shoulders and punctured his suspension of disbelief. The room was dim after the afternoon sunshine; when his eyes had adjusted he saw sacks of rice and legumes, and shelves stacked with earthenware bottles.
A harried-looking middle-aged man came through from an adjoining room. He introduced himself as Amir and greeted them politely, but it was clear that he expected them to explain their business without delay. Against all plausible cultural norms, it was Javeed he engaged with directly.
‘We’re looking for work,’ Javeed explained.
‘Really? What can you do?’
‘I can sweep the floors,’ Javeed said. ‘My father can carry things.’
Amir looked dubious. ‘You have a strong back?’ he asked Martin.
‘Yes, sir.’ That might have been a bare-faced lie in the real world, but the morning’s exercise had actually left him feeling flexible. If he was dealing with weightless provisions, he could probably lift enough to feed a small army.
Amir turned to Javeed. ‘And you’re a hard worker? The new cook won’t forgive a scrap of dirt on the floor.’
‘I’ll do a good job,’ Javeed promised.
Amir made an elaborate pantomime of thinking it over, running his hand through his beard and scowling as if weighing up all manner of pros and cons, but this part of the story was preordained.
‘You’ll need to start straight away,’ he said finally. ‘There’s a banquet tonight, for the king and three hundred guests. The cook will expect to find everything spotless.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Martin said. ‘You won’t be disappointed.’
He reached down and tapped the back of Javeed’s hand.
‘Thank you,’ Javeed added. Martin was glad that his son understood that Amir was no more real than the guides and assistants who smiled out from the screen of their home computer – but if they were going to take the story seriously, he expected Javeed to behave with courtesy – even if only to avoid acquiring bad habits.
Amir returned to his office, where he appeared to be agonising over the accounts. Martin wondered if the plot generator stretched to the kitchen manager embezzling money to bale out his no-good, hard-gambling brother-in-law, but he wasn’t about to hijack Javeed’s crucial mission just to test the machinery at its margins.
Martin found the broom and handed it to Javeed. Even though the haptic gloves could exert no net force, the sensations they produced were enough to make light objects feel eerily tangible. As Javeed set to work, Martin didn’t envy him; the floor was filthy, and sweeping up nonexistent dust and food scraps would be barely less tiring than doing the same thing for real.
When Javeed had finished in the storeroom, they moved to the preparation room, closer to the kitchen itself. Half-a-dozen kitchen hands – five teenaged boys and an older supervisor named Haidar – were plucking birds, gutting fish, and chopping and peeling vegetables. There were baskets for their waste, but most of it was ending up on the floor. The boys teased Javeed, calling him pipsqueak and dropping handfuls of feathers every time he thought he’d earned a brief rest. Martin watched his son’s face; when the pressure started to get too much for him, he took the broom himself. When one of the boys, Ahmed, made as if to brush all his peelings onto a spot Martin had just cleared, Martin rebuked him sharply: ‘Show some respect and do your job properly.’ Ahmed looked to Haidar for support, but the man said, ‘Exactly. You should be busy enough without making trouble.’ Ahmed sulked for a while, but scooped the peelings into his waste basket.
Haidar addressed Martin. ‘I need you to bring in ten sacks of rice.’
Martin handed the broom to Javeed. When he returned with the first four sacks on his shoulders – if he was going to play at being healthy there was no point taking half-measures – Javeed was gone.
‘Where’s my son?’ he asked Haidar.
‘Cleaning up the kitchen.’
Martin peered through the doorway nervously, as if the ovens and pots full of scalding water could do Javeed real harm. He hurriedly fetched the rest of the rice, then slipped into the kitchen himself.
Javeed had swapped his broom for a cloth and was down on his hands and knees diligently scrubbing at an oily puddle. This from a boy with no compunction about treating a mustard bottle as a makeshift water-pistol then leaving the aftermath for others to deal with. Three assistants were tending to the stoves; the red reflected glow on their sweaty faces was enough to make Martin feel the oppressive heat himself.
‘When’s the cook coming in?’ he asked one of the assistants, who was stirring the contents of a huge pot.
‘Soon,’ the man replied brusquely.
‘I hear he’s impressed the king already. And he’s only been here three days.’
‘He’s a master of his art,’ the assistant declared haughtily. ‘Please, just do your job and stay out of our way.’
With most of the pots now simmering gently, and the assistant cooks more fastidious than the kitchen hands, the mess in the preparation room soon became pressing again, and Haidar called them back to his domain. Javeed coped admirably, but Martin could see that he was growing tired. He made a hand gesture to summon up a private menu, invisible to Javeed, and shaved fifteen minutes off the story’s overall running time. Javeed always pleaded for a full hour when they were making choices on the weekend, but Martin doubted that he’d feel too cheated by being spared a further dose of mediaeval toil.
A raised voice spilled out of the kitchen; someone was addressing the assistants in peremptory tones. ‘More heat, more water, more salt; I explained all of that yesterday. How difficult can it be?’ The cook wasn’t shouting abuse, but even his gentlest admonitions were followed by a crushed silence. Haidar and the kitchen hands lowered their eyes, their expressions hovering between cowed and reverential.
Javeed whispered, ‘That’s him, Baba.’ He sounded a little fearful; Martin forced himself not to puncture the mood by grilling him on his resolve to continue.
‘Yeah, that’s him, all right,’ Martin agreed solemnly. Javeed knew that he could pull the plug any time he wanted; he didn’t need endless prompting.
A skinny black-and-white cat ran across the room and into the kitchen, mewing plaintively. Martin heard the cook laughing, then calling to the cat, clicking his tongue. ‘You want some food?’ he asked. ‘I doubt there’s any to spare, but we’ll see.’
Javeed was standing in a corner of the room; Martin went and stood beside him. He caught a glimpse of the cat through the doorway, circling around expectantly as if following at the feet of someone who was making promising gestures. The cat began purring loudly, and a hand reached down and stroked its head, long, slender fingers scratching at its ears. ‘Tsk, tsk, tsk,’ said the cook. ‘What have we got for you, I wonder? What have we got?’ The closer his patter came to baby-talk, the more Martin felt a chill down his spine.
The cat turned in ever tighter circles, rubbing its head against the long fingers. A second hand joined the first, stroking the cat’s flank, seeming almost to urge it on as the cat moved faster, its shape blurring with speed, black and white patches melting into grey.
The cook’s long hands caressed the whirling cat like a potter moulding clay. The sound of its hopeful purring grew louder, pulsing with the pressure of the fingers against its skin. Then the hands squeezed the spinning body tightly, bringing it to a halt before withdrawing from sight. The blur of cat-fur froze into clarity again, but now its shape had changed: its tail and rear end had been replaced by a mirrored copy of its head and chest. The poor animal had been transformed into conjoined twins, with two hungry, complaining mouths in place of one.
The two heads grimaced and snarled at each other; their single body postured and feinted, but the animal was too unbalanced to fight in the way it was accustomed to and within seconds it had been reduced to a writhing, ungainly ring of fur, thrashing around on its side, snapping and clawing at itself.
The cook said coldly, ‘Plenty of food within your reach now,’ and kicked the brawling animal out of sight.
Martin looked around the room, but nobody showed any sign of having witnessed the abomination; they had all kept their eyes conveniently averted. For a moment he was close to real frustration and anger: This ‘master of his art’ is not what he seems, you fools! But the whole point of the game was for Javeed – and himself, as the hero’s sidekick – to be the only ones to understand. The cook was not a man at all: he was the demon Eblis in human form. His culinary skills were meant to seduce this weak-willed king; if the banquet was successful, Zahhak’s display of gratitude to his impressive new servant would end in a transformation just as terrifying as the cat’s, and vastly more fateful.
Javeed looked daunted; Martin touched his hand. ‘What are we going to do?’ Martin whispered. ‘If Zahhak likes the food and he embraces the cook-’
‘Feathers,’ Javeed announced. ‘We have to mix in some feathers.’
Martin smiled. ‘Good idea.’ He’d been thinking of using a few handfuls of rotting waste from the garbage dump, but this sounded just as effective. It would also spare him any qualms about the wisdom of encouraging his son to spread dysentery.
Haidar and the kitchen hands finished their work: every pheasant had been plucked, every herb chopped, every vegetable diced. As Haidar surveyed the mess on the floor, he promised Javeed, ‘I’ll put in a good word for you with the boss. I’m sure he’ll want to keep you on.’
Javeed tried to be polite, but he seemed to realise that there’d be something dishonest about assenting to this notion unreservedly. ‘I might be busy with a different job tomorrow,’ he confessed.
Haidar was a little taken aback, but his software could supply no sensible response, so he just bid them goodnight and left.
‘Have fun, pipsqueak,’ said Ahmed, brushing a pile of aubergine skins onto the floor.
‘I will!’ Javeed retorted.
They were alone in the preparation room now. Martin helped Javeed finish sweeping the floor, but as they gathered up the last of the waste and carried most of it out to the dump, they kept one basket aside and filled it with the plucked feathers.
They stood by the kitchen doorway, listening, Javeed still holding his broom in case someone chanced upon them. Finally, the assistant cooks started carrying some of the dishes through to the banquet hall. The cook himself went with them, to watch over the serving of the meal and bask in the king’s delighted praise.
Martin peeked into the kitchen. ‘Okay, it’s empty! Quick!’
Javeed carried the basket of feathers past the long row of stoves; it might have been weightless, but he struggled with the sheer size of the basket, which forced him to hold his arms uncomfortably wide. There were only two pots still sitting on the flames, at the far end of the room.
Martin removed the lid from one of the pots and started scooping feathers into the stew. He felt them tickling his palm, and watched them sinking into the simmering liquid. ‘This is so disgusting,’ he enthused. It was almost impossible not to conjure up images of people pulling feathers from their mouths, grimacing with distaste. Maybe he and Javeed could sneak into the hall and actually witness that spectacle of discomfort. If no one was watching, Zendegi would gloss over all the details, which would be an awful shame.
Javeed tapped his free hand urgently. ‘Baba, they’re coming back!’
Martin hurriedly replaced the lid of the pot. The footsteps were close; the doorway through which they’d entered was too far away. He looked around and saw the entrance to a small room; the door was already half-open. He grabbed the basket with one hand and Javeed with the other and led him into the room.
They stood behind the door. Beside them, metal pots and earthenware vessels were stacked on wooden shelves.
Two of the assistants entered the kitchen, grumbling, and left again – presumably carrying the last of the pots. Martin stuck his head around the door, just in time to spot the shadow of someone else approaching. He withdrew quickly.
‘Zahhak, Zahhak, Zahhak!’ the cook sighed dreamily. ‘All I want in thanks is one royal embrace.’ Martin had read the story in Javeed’s book: when the king took the demon cook in his arms in gratitude for so fine a meal, his humble subject kissed him once on each shoulder – and from each shoulder, a snake grew out of the flesh. They were hacked off by the king’s surgeons, but rapidly re-grew. The only thing that would appease them was a regular meal of human brains.
The cook whistled happily; from the sound of his footsteps he was practically waltzing around the room. Martin smiled down at Javeed. Soon there’d be shouts of outrage from the banquet hall, and a royal summons quite unlike the one Eblis had been expecting. No beheadings, though; Martin had even emailed Nasim to check that he’d ticked the right boxes to rule out that kind of violence. In the story, Eblis had simply vanished after conjuring up the snakes; confronted with failure, he could do the same.
The whistling stopped abruptly.
‘What do I smell?’ the cook said. ‘Pheasant blood, raw? When everything’s well done?’ He made a brutish snuffling sound. Martin glanced at the basket; they hadn’t emptied it completely, and there was a residue of blood-caked feathers still sticking to the bottom. ‘The little pipsqueak left the floor clean, didn’t he? No mess in sight. And yet…’
Three soft footsteps in their direction.
‘And yet…’
Martin tensed, torn by conflicting urges. This was a fairground ride, a ghost train, nothing more. Did he want to smother Javeed, to cheat him of the brief, safe terror that every child craved?
‘When is a door,’ the cook asked, switching to English, ‘not a door?’ He’d lost his Arabic accent; now he sounded like James Mason in Salem’s Lot.
Martin took Javeed’s hand and met his eyes, hoping Zendegi could infer and reconstruct his look of reassurance, despite the goggles. He needed Javeed to know that if he was afraid, it was all right to flee – it was all right to give this make-believe world the thumbs-down and simply banish the monster.
‘No takers? Really? But it’s so simple!’ Martin heard breathing just inches away, and a long-fingered hand appeared, clasping the side of the door.
‘When it’s ajar!’
The cook stepped into view, tall, smiling, reaching down towards Javeed. Martin tried to punch him, but he ducked aside effortlessly; as he did, Javeed slipped around the door. ‘Run!’ Martin yelled after him, jubilant.
The cook rose up to his full height again, smiling at Martin unpleasantly. He was clean-shaven, which seemed like an odd choice for a disguise here, but maybe demons couldn’t grow beards.
‘Never mind,’ the cook said. ‘The pipsqueak’s lost, but the father’s twice the meal.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Martin replied. ‘I’m just the chaperone here, don’t knock yourself out for my entertainment.’
The cook’s skin turned jaundice-yellow, his face haggard, his eyes hollow. Martin felt the donkey-kick aching in recognition; for a second he was back in the hospital gym, staring into a virtual mirror tuned this time to guess-his-future.
The demon’s smile grew into a forest of pointed fangs as it bent down towards his shoulder. Martin feinted at its head; it drew back hissing like an angry viper and he quickly squeezed past it and around the door, then picked up the basket of bloodied feathers and swiped the edge across the demon’s face. The yellow skin ruptured; maggots swarmed from the wound.
Martin turned and fled. If the thing caught up with him, infected him, if Javeed saw snakes growing from his body-
Lucky he’d already switched on his power boots.
Javeed was waiting at the doorway, urging him on, holding out a trembling hand towards him. ‘Baba! Quick!’ Martin grabbed his hand and ran with him across the preparation room, the storeroom, never looking back, out into the light.
They fell onto the ground side-by-side, laughing hysterically. Martin didn’t know when Eblis had given up the chase, but the ghost train hadn’t beaten them over the head with its plastic monster. The game was just a game; it knew when to stop.
They rose to their feet and limped back towards the bazaar, cracking up again every few steps.
‘Did you see his teeth?’ Javeed asked.
‘Gross, huh?’
‘Worse than the man at the pizza shop. I wouldn’t let him cook my dinner.’
Martin clutched his stomach. He’d put no effort into running, but he was winded from laughing so much.
At the edge of the bazaar a crowd had gathered, watching a commotion in the distance. Dozens of finely dressed noblemen were streaming out of the palace and heading for their mounts. The banquet had been a disaster; the cook had been disgraced. Zahhak would not become the Serpent King who ruled over neighbouring Persia for a thousand years.
‘You changed the story,’ Martin said.
‘Yeah.’ Javeed sounded dazed now; they’d known all along what they’d hoped to achieve, but success had never been guaranteed.
‘Mubaarak, pesaram.’ Martin squatted down beside him, then remembered that he couldn’t hug or kiss him. ‘Well done! Let’s go tell Uncle Omar and Farshid.’
Javeed gave the thumbs-down and vanished, taking the scenery with him. Martin flipped up his goggles and waited for the castles to release them.
As they were coming down the stairs, Martin saw Omar and Farshid standing by the counter, staring intently down one of the aisles; when he’d taken a few more steps he could see the object of their interest for himself. A young woman dressed in brief shorts and a halter top was leaning against her boyfriend, one hand entwined in his, the other stroking his neck. Martin couldn’t blame anyone for staring; to see a woman dressed like that, behaving like that, was still a rarity in Tehran – even if it could no longer bring fines or imprisonment. He remembered Mahnoosh elbowing him sharply a few times in response to his gawking when they’d visited Australia together; those public displays of skin to which he had once been perfectly accustomed had become alien, almost hypnotic.
Omar addressed his son in a low voice, but not too softly for Martin to hear. ‘If you want to fuck something like that, go ahead, they’re begging for it. Just don’t bring the garbage home to shame your mother.’
Martin glanced behind him, but if Javeed had heard anything he didn’t appear to have taken it in. Martin turned around and lifted his son up onto his shoulders; Javeed screamed and laughed, hardly believing it. Martin hadn’t given him a shoulder ride for at least three years; the last time would be lost in the fog of infant memories.
The debt for the moment of joy was called in quickly; Martin sagged, the muscles of his lower back seizing up. Farshid rushed over to help Javeed down safely.
As Javeed briefed Farshid on his adventure, Omar approached Martin. ‘I’ll get you a taxi.’
Martin said, ‘We’re catching the bus.’
‘Are you crazy? Farshid will drive you home. Farshid-?’
Martin raised a hand to cut him off. Omar got the message. ‘Okay, okay.’ He put a hand on Martin’s shoulder. ‘Khaste nabashi, baradaram.’ Literally, may you not be tired, brother – but it packed as much goodwill, encouragement and solidarity into three words as could possibly fit.
As they parted, Martin couldn’t look Omar in the eye. He was ashamed of what he was thinking, but he couldn’t stop thinking it.
I don’t want you raising my son.