A Week in December (22 page)

The shopkeeper was a man of about sixty in denim overalls with greasy grey hair and thick glasses. He fetched a cardboard box, about the size of a case of wine, from the back of the stores and placed it on the counter with an effortful grunt. For the sake of realism, Hassan handed over a second piece of paper requesting twenty litres of conditioner. He paid in cash.

With the boxes in the back of the people carrier, Hassan said to the driver, 'OK,
maintenant vin. Supermarche
.'

It was dark by the time they reached the wine warehouse, which was on the edge of a different industrial zone, apparently on the other side of Calais.

The driver looked reluctant to wait a second time, but Hassan showed him the large roll of euros in his pocket and the man nodded.

On the concrete slab inside the warehouse were thousands of different wines and vintages displayed in open wooden boxes. Rhone, Roussillon, Alsace ... The places and the chateaux meant nothing to Hassan, who wanted one thing only: screw tops. Had the French ever heard of such things? he wondered, as he went from one primly corked burgundy to another. Eventually, among the roses of Bordeaux, his search was rewarded. He put a case in his trolley and took it to the checkout.

A young man passed a hand-held bleeper over it and the price rang up on the electronic till.

'
Pouvez-vous
, er ... ?' Hassan mimed lifting the case with one hand and the young man nodded. He tied some hairy string round the carton in such a way that it made a primitive handle.

'
Merci
,' said Hassan, parting with more euros from his roll. '
Toilettes?
'

The man said something he didn't understand, but Hassan followed his gesture clearly enough. He carried the case in the direction indicated, through the door, and secreted it under the sink. He went quickly back to the taxi, held up three fingers to the driver, saying '
Trois minutes
', and carried the carton of hydrogen peroxide back across the floor of the warehouse to the lavatory. He took both boxes into the cubicle and locked the door.

There was something profoundly satisfying about pouring away alcohol, then refilling the wine bottles with a purer liquid - something closer to the heart of the almighty God. Hassan gargled with some of the wine and spat it down the seatless lavatory; then he splashed some down the front of his clothes to make himself smell like a
kafir
on a Christmas outing. He resealed the wine carton carefully with the brown tape so that it appeared unopened.

The taxi took him back to the passenger terminal of the ferry, and he tipped the driver, though not so generously that it would stay in his mind. The next departure was not on the line he had come over with, but left in only half an hour; he bought a single ticket, disclosing his name again, then took the carton of hair conditioner to the Gents and dumped it in a cubicle.

He was ready to go. He said a brief prayer, opened the lavatory door and made for the security area to which he had been directed by the ticket clerk.

Two bored young men stood by the scanner and the metal detector. Hassan hoisted the wine box on to the conveyor belt and placed his jacket in a plastic tray behind it. In a moment of inspiration, he left his mobile phone in his trouser pocket, so that when he walked through the metal detector, it let out a screech. In the ensuing body search, the finding of the cellphone and the re-passing of the detector, nobody took any notice of the case of Bordeaux Rose as it chugged slowly on the runners down to the end of the ramp.

Hassan made male drinking noises, laughed and breathed fumes on the younger guard as he hoisted his 'wine' up and made his way over to the brightly lit waiting area. There were only three other foot passengers, and he expected a quiet crossing. He recited a few
surah
of the Koran silently to himself as he waited for the gates to the shuttle bus to open.

Hassan al-Rashid knew the Koran very well. Scriptures you take in as a child, his father told him, are with you always; they provide the landscape of your life. So when he went to his first meeting with Salim at the Pudding Mill Lane Mosque he quickly saw that he was among people who either hadn't read the book or who'd moved on from it. This surprised him. He'd expected the group to be scripturally-based.

The atmosphere, though not really religious, was collegiate and warm. Salim introduced him to the others - about twenty-five, all men - and they went to pray. Afterwards, they had fruit juice and cigarettes while they listened to a speaker in the meeting room. The speaker referred to a famous book by Ghulam Sarwar, and Hassan remembered it from comparative religion classes at school in Renfrew. It was a basic text read by British schoolchildren of all faiths; its central claim was that in true Islam there was no distinction between religious belief and political action. Islam contained everything that was necessary for men to run and build their own societies. The only problem was that there was not yet a truly Islamic state anywhere in the world: kings, generals, dictators or Westernised democracy got in the way. It followed that, since religion and politics were coterminous, the task of the believer was a practical one: to build the true state - the pure Islamic model that had been absent since the last caliph.

'That's my simple proposal for you today,' concluded the speaker, a softly spoken man of about thirty. 'And it's a more inviting life task than that available to the Christian or the Jew. They believe their political structures are separate from spiritual beliefs. They also believe they have already achieved civil perfection. Their idea of this is ... the United States of America.'

There was some low satirical laughter.

Hassan was not impressed by the speaker. When at the age of sixteen he'd first told his father about this idea of an Islamic state, Knocker had ridiculed it. 'It's not in the Koran,' he said, 'it's a pure invention. Who's filled your head with this nonsense?'

'A book they teach us all at school.'

Knocker was appalled. 'And who wrote this rubbish?'

'His name is Ghulam Sarwar.'

'That joker!' said Knocker. 'He's not an imam, he's a business management lecturer! How come they pass that stuff around?'

'I don't know, but that's what's given out. To all the children. Of all faiths.'

Shame-faced, Hassan had not mentioned the Islamic state again: he had readdressed himself to the central message of the Koran, which was to devote oneself to Allah or risk hellfire in all eternity. Of course, there was also practical advice: be kind to orphans, pay the alms levy, go to Mecca if you can, sleep only with the servant girls of your own house and not with other men's. But the overwhelming, overpowering, message of the book, which Hassan knew from back to front and of which he could recite large sections in Arabic, was that Allah was the true and only God; that, while Abraham, Noah and Jesus were decent men, the Jews and Christians were wrong in their beliefs; and that if you did not believe in Allah and Islam then you would be tortured for all time after death.

There was nothing in the Koran about the politics of building an Islamic state; the Prophet had not concerned himself with such things. So, as the discussion grew heated around him, Hassan found himself become detached from it. These young men reminded him of the members of the Left Student Group at college; there was a competition going on among them to see who could be more radical in his alignment. At college it had been a contest between the International Marxist Group, the Socialist Workers Party or the mysterious Red International. Here the name-drop of Muslim Youth International was finessed by World Islam League; Mid-East Forum was trumped by Jamaat-e-Islami. He also had misgivings about the way they referred to all non-Muslims as
kafirs
. It was all right for Jews to refer to non-Jews as 'Gentiles', but less so to call them 'goys'. To Hassan's ear, '
kafir
' had a slur of assumed racial superiority about it.

He sighed. At least the Pudding Mill Lane Mosque had a prayer area for women. That seemed an advance on some of the places he'd visited, where row upon row of battered men's shoes were lined up outside with never a female slipper. After the political debate, matters moved into calmer waters as they read out news of football tournaments, youth camps and fund-raisers.

Afterwards, Salim put his arm round Hassan's shoulder as they walked towards the station.

'Did you enjoy it?' he said.

'Up to a point,' said Hassan. 'I don't agree with the political agenda. There's no basis for it in the Koran.'

'Religions move on,' said Salim. 'Even the word of God evolves through human interpretation. That's what theology is for. Other religions are the same. Christ had only male apostles. Now the Church of England even has female ministers.'

'I wouldn't take the Church of England as a model for anything,' said Hassan.

Salim laughed. 'Of course not. But you can look at it like this. True Muslims need to live in a society that respects their beliefs and gives them every chance of enjoying paradise when they die. Whether the Koran contains instruction to the last letter for making this new society is something the textual scholars can dispute. But meanwhile is it such a terrible aspiration to want to live in such a good place on earth or to want to help to build it?'

'If you put it like that, then--'

'I do put it like that,' said Salim. His deep voice was reasonable and reassuring; he seemed to have reserves of eloquence he'd kept hidden at their first meeting in the juice bar.

'Can I give you a lift? That's my old banger over there by the fence. Where do you live?'

'It's OK,' said Hassan. 'I'll take the train.'

'It's a DLR station. It's probably not open at this time of the evening. Come on. Hop in. It's no trouble.'

As the ferry was leaving for Dover, a strange thing happened: it began to fill up rapidly. Several coaches must have caught it just in time, Hassan thought, as he tried to find a seat away from the slopping of alcohol. He was pushed out of the way by a fat woman in her sixties making for the Food Court. 'Look at 'er go! Like a bloody greyhound!' her jovial companion shouted. Amongst the crowd of new passengers was a sense of hilarious relief at being homeward bound; a day on foreign soil had been enough. They carried pyramids of pale chips from the servery and ate them with their hands.

Next to the Food Court was a Club Lounge, though you had to pay to go in: PS15 to escape the rabble, read free copies of the tabloids and have 'complimentary' coffee. Hassan didn't want to stand out from the crowd; he found a seat among the beer-drinkers downstairs and noticed that the woman opposite was the one who had sat next to him on the shuttle bus to the ferry: young, Indian, quite well dressed, reading a middlebrow bestseller - typical, he thought, of the new MI5 recruits.

He looked down the deck to see if he could plausibly escape. There was a Cafe Bravo concession at the front of the ferry, but its queue had at least thirty people in it. At the other end of the deck was - of course - a giant bar. It was a nuisance to lug his heavy wine case down there, but he wanted to see if the suspicious woman followed.

'Any spirit. Double it for an extra PS1,' said a notice behind the bar, where Hassan positioned himself, with a good view of the whole room.

Some of the
kafirs
were so fat they could barely manage to get the trays full of lager and crisps back to their tables; many of them used sticks to help the knees that had given way beneath their weight. The younger ones sprawled on the red seats with their pierced bellies showing as they rolled down in lard layers over their low-cut jeans. Hassan noticed how many of the people in the bar were misshapen or deformed, though felt a slight unease at doing so, not sure at what point religious righteousness became a kind of racism. Above their heads came the fizzle and thump of a music video on a screen where a woman with dyed hair mimed fellatio on a microphone.

Hassan thought of the Prophet's life and of how in his religion God was immanent in all things, as he had been in the Sunna - the everyday actions of the Prophet; there was no disjunction between the sacred and divine because to a true believer all was holy, all was pure.

But suppose the afterlife was not as the Book described but a low-ceilinged, strip-lit hell like this? Not a garden of peace but a
kafir
ferry?

Hassan smiled as he placed his foot on top of his wine carton in a proprietary and confident way. He had no real concerns. His belief, at moments like this, was adamantine.

At Dover, he had to wait on the cold, deserted platform for an hour for a train to Charing Cross. There was a security announcement about unattended parcels.

With his own package tightly in his hand, Hassan walked up and down to keep warm. Through the glass door of the station manager's office he saw bored men waiting for their cold shift to be over. How few human beings lived life as if it mattered, he thought; to most of them it was just a case of passing time.

Eventually, the train came and he found an empty carriage. It was nearly nine o'clock and he had been on the go for fifteen hours. With his feet on the wine box, Hassan settled back against the headrest and fell asleep in the fug.

Above his head was a picture of a lone red suitcase with the words 'Increased threat to your security'.

II

Spike Borowski had arrived at the Worcester Park training ground at nine-fifteen that morning and parked his small German saloon. His customised large German saloon was on order from Bavaria and the dealer had lent him the embarrassing two-litre, two-door job in the meantime. In his kitbag he carried two pairs of boots, underwear, sweatshirts, gloves, a selection of crucifixes and two dictionaries. Max, the bootman, had told him on the phone there would be fluorescent bibs and a selection of team kit at the ground. Borowski looked up 'bib' in his Polish-English dictionary, where it offered '
sliniaczek
'. His English-English dictionary defined bib as 'child's food guard'; though 'bib
v
' was also defined as'drink alcohol to excess'. He'd heard a lot about English footballers' habits, but he didn't think the manager would kick off a training session by drinking to excess. Afterwards, maybe.