‘I said I was sorry,’ said Usman, taking his place behind the counter. Usman spoke with some ill grace, since he was by no means sure that Shahid was actually going to mosque: they attended different mosques and he didn’t know for sure how regularly his brother went to prayers. But since he and Shahid basically got on, unlike he and Ahmed, he didn’t want to make too big a thing of it.
‘Laters,’ said Shahid in the high girly voice he used for saying that word to his younger brother. He held the door open for a mother with
an enormous three-wheel pram. Then Shahid was gone; as it happened, to mosque, for Friday prayers.
Brixton Mosque had acquired a bad reputation thanks to a few idiots. There had always been an anger to the rhetoric, more outside the mosque than inside, often, but inside too, and there was no point denying it: the imam was not everyone’s cup of tea. These things drew attention that you didn’t want and Shahid couldn’t help wondering, at times, just how many of his fellow worshippers were MI5 or Special Branch, operatives or informers or provocateurs or plants. And some of this had been self-inflicted by the community. Having a former worshipper plot to blow up a transatlantic jetliner via an exploding shoe – even if you believed only one word of every ten in the kafr media, this was bad PR. But Shahid had been going to Brixton Mosque for almost fifteen years, and was not about to stop now. He unlocked his bike – on dry days he chained it to the railings in front, where he could see it from behind the shop counter – and rode the first twenty yards along the pavement, then swerved into the road at the zebra crossing.
The traffic was strangely light, given that London in general was mad at the moment, everyone running around shopping as if their lives depended on it: the next three days were going to be insane, on every high street in the country, spending running up to however many billion it was. About half the people on the street were carrying shopping bags. The idea that the Christians thought this was a religious festival was hilarious; it was the most openly pagan thing Shahid had ever seen. Ahmed had been unable to prevent Fatima joining in the hoopla, so although the Kamals didn’t celebrate Christmas the children still got presents. Little Mohammed would grow up to enjoy the bounty created by his demanding sister. No doubt she wouldn’t be shy about telling him so. Shahid weaved through the traffic, skipping two red lights and having only one near-death experience, when a car came out of a side street on Acre Lane without seeing him or stopping. He cut up the one-way street on the pavement to Gresham Road and was in good time for ablutions before prayers.
Standing next to him at the basins was a Caribbean bus driver whose name Shahid didn’t know but who he’d seen on and off at the
mosque for more than a decade. The man had a meditative, half-a-beat-slow way of wringing his hands under the taps. Shahid had noticed it before, the bus driver slowing himself down with the cleaning ritual before prayers. That was what he liked about Friday prayers: the sense of continuity within his own life, the ritual stretching into the past and into the future, and the familiar faces and the friendliness. Some of the rhetoric and especially the anger no longer felt quite right to him, was no longer the good fit with his mood and temper that it had once been; but the other things mattered more. He’d never been an especially good listener. But he loved praying, the physical act of prostration. Not five times a day, obviously, not any more – who had time for that? But when he was praying, it was one of the only times in his life when he felt fully
there
. It was not a sense of transcendence: he didn’t go out of himself and he had no intuitions of other orders of reality. Some said that the self could be left behind; that Paradise could be glimpsed in the raptures of the most fervent, devout prayer. That wasn’t Shahid’s experience. But while he was praying, he was praying, fully given over to his own presence in the words and motions and the ritual. It was the best he could do, and for him it was enough.
The reading was from the Thunder sura, Al-Ra’ad, and Shahid could more or less follow it in his sort-of-OK Arabic.
‘Allah is the One who raised the heavens without pillars that you can see, then assumed all authority. He committed the sun and the moon, each running for a predetermined period. He controls all things, and explains the revelations, that you may attain certainty about meeting your Lord.
‘He is the One who constructed the earth and placed on it mountains and rivers. And from the different kinds of fruits, He made them into pairs – males and females. The night overtakes the day. These are solid proofs for people who think.’
‘Solid proofs for people who think.’ That was an idea Shahid liked. Who could possibly say that the Holy Qur’an was anti-scientific?
The imam said some things about Israel and the West and some other things about the evident political realities of the world, to which Shahid paid semi-attention. He had heard too much of it before and
it was no longer the reason he came to the mosque. Then prayers were over, and the congregation spilled out onto the street outside the mosque for Shahid’s second-favourite part of the ritual, the milling and chatting afterwards. During the service it had become night: this was after all the shortest day of the year, December the 21st. It was clear, and looking straight up Shahid could just see a star or planet, he didn’t know which, and a winking, moving light which must be a plane at cruising height.
‘How’s your fat brother?’ asked Ali, who’d been a loud but friendly contemporary of Ahmed at school, a pack leader. He now owned a chain of electronics shops through Croydon, Mitcham, Eltham and points beyond, and was said to be minted. He had recently given up smoking and it showed in his new soft podginess and also in the way he couldn’t stop fidgeting, jangling his car keys in his pockets and looking round the crowd as he talked.
‘No thinner,’ said Shahid. ‘Your lot all well?’
‘Another baby on the way,’ said Ali. ‘Gave up the fags just in time.’
Shahid slapped him on the arm and turned to some faces he knew. ‘Wasim! Kamran! Ali’s gone and done it again! A seventh on the way!’
The men came and began joshing Ali, who looked pleased. Ali used to joke that he wasn’t going to stop until he had enough for a five-aside football team. But that was a few years ago. Was he trying for eleven a side? What was the view of Mrs Ali, whom Shahid had never met? Was she having any say in this? If you have seven children, Shahid wondered, does that mean you’re keen on sex, keen on your wife, or keen on children? Or just shit at contraception? Or all four of those things?
‘Excuse me,’ said a voice with a European accent, ‘Shahid Kamal?’
Shahid turned and found himself talking to a North African man, about his age, with a narrow intent face and a well-trimmed beard. He wore a leather jacket and jeans and was looking expectant.
‘That’s me,’ said Shahid.
‘Iqbal,’ said the man, with a salesman’s air, ‘Iqbal Rashid. From Brussels to Chechnya? With the Udeen brothers? 1993?’
It came back to Shahid: this was one of the Belgian guys with whom
he had gone on his great adventure. Shahid would not have been able to put a name to him for a million pounds, but now that he was standing here in front of him it came back. That’s right. The two Algerians, Iqbal and Tariq. Iqbal had been both cooler and angrier than Tariq, hipper in his personal style, a big rap music fan, and also very very steamed up about the condition of Muslims everywhere. Well, they all were, they talked the talk and they were all walking the walk by virtue of going to fight for Chechnya, and Iqbal was the same only more so; there had been a personal edge to his anger. And now here he was, and Shahid had a flash of how he had aged himself by looking at him, because the guy he remembered as a skinny twenty-year-old kid was now unmistakably an only-just-young man, with a few streaks of grey in his beard and hair. Did he look that much older himself? That was a scary thought.
‘Of course, of course,’ said Shahid. ‘Wow. What are you doing here? That’s quite a memory for faces you have.’
‘I often think of those days,’ said Iqbal. ‘Some events in one’s life seem a long time ago, and yet as close as yesterday, don’t you find?’
That’s right: when Iqbal wasn’t ranting, he was always taking the direct route to some general philosophical point. It was the same Iqbal for sure.
‘How’s Tariq? You still see each other?’
‘People lose touch,’ said Iqbal, making it quickly clear that that particular old friend was not his favourite subject, and then brightening to add: ‘But then they sometimes find each other again! Listen, let’s swap numbers. I’m in town, it would be good to see you, talk about old times, talk about new times.’ He had taken a mobile out of his pocket and was standing with it open, ready to take down Shahid’s number. It was important to live without too many barriers, Shahid felt. Go with the flow. What will happen will happen. You’re only young once. Let things be as Allah wills. And so on. You had to go with what came to you. So Shahid, despite a feeling that something was slightly off about his old companion in jihad, his too-intent face perhaps, his not entirely casual attempt at casualness, gave him the number. The Belgian nodded and said his farewells and was gone.
Shahid thought: what was that all about?
He drifted back to where Ali and the other guys were discussing the Premiership, the usual Chelsea–Arsenal–Man United circular babble. They were like Sufis, if they kept it up for long enough they’d be able to levitate. Then someone said something so out of order, so libellous and grotesque, about Ashley Cole that Shahid had no choice but to enter the debate.
O
n Friday the 21st at five o’clock, Quentina Mkfesi BSc MSc picked up her pay cheque from the offices of Control Services Limited. The cheque was for £227 and it was payable to Kwama Lyons. Quentina put it in her inside jacket pocket and set off on foot towards Tooting. It took about half an hour to walk there. London was full of pre-Christmas bustle, which Quentina approved of: in a place where there was so little natural brightness and colour, it was good to create it through neon and optic fibre and shop windows and Christmas trees.
Quentina was still wearing her uniform; she was in a hurry and didn’t want to change. As it was dark, she didn’t trust the trip straight across the Common, and so stuck to the pavement on the side. The pub on the Common was already busy, people knocking off early to have a couple of pre-Christmas drinks. With Christmas on Tuesday, plenty of people would be starting the holiday today, and getting a full two weeks off. Quentina felt no resentment. She envied people’s work, not their leisure. It was cold but she had a T-shirt, a shirt and a sweater under her ridiculous Ruritanian army jacket, and Quentina had learned long ago that the secret to keeping warm in the English winter was to keep moving. Once she got past Balham, she cut left-right-left through domestic streets, Christmas wreaths on the doors and lights on, trees lit up too, this domestic version of London looking warmer and more welcoming than the city actually was. It looked cosy,
like TV Dickens, whereas the real place was cold and disconnected. Quentina found that she liked the softening illusion.
She came to the house she was looking for, a mid-terrace property with the multiple bins that signalled multiple occupancy. She rang the third buzzer up and was buzzed in without a word spoken. The hallway was narrow and smelt damp. A small table by the side of the door bore a stack of miscellaneous post and junk mail. Every time she came here the piece of paper on top of this pile was always a flyer advertising pizza. The English obviously ate an extraordinary amount of pizza.
Quentina jogged up the first flight of stairs, paused to get her breath back and then went up to the second floor. The door opposite was propped open so she went into the flat, which as she knew from previous visits was bigger than it looked, L-shaped, with a sitting room at the front and two bedrooms plus a kitchen round the corner. The front room was decorated with film posters, one for
Battleship Potemkin –
Quentina didn’t read Russian but she had asked – and another for
Mandingo
. That presumably was a joke. At a desk opposite the door, his back to Quentina, a large African man sat at a computer screen with a mobile phone held to his right ear, and his left hand in the air, in a gesture which very eloquently asked Quentina not to make a sound while he finished his conversation.
Remarkable: this man had one of the loudest voices Quentina knew. Yet standing across the room from him, she couldn’t hear what he was saying into the phone. She was glad of that, because everything Quentina thought and felt about this man could be very simply summed up: the less Quentina knew about this man who claimed to be Kwame Lyons, or ‘Kwama Lyons’, as his name appeared on her pay cheques, the better.
The man snapped his phone shut and swung around in his chair. He was fortyish and wore an Adidas tracksuit. He opened his arms expansively and smiled with his mouth but not his eyes.
‘Beautiful,’ he said.
‘I have your cheque,’ said Quentina, matching her actions to her words as she took the piece of paper out and stretched across. The man nodded, took the cheque, read it carefully, then reached behind him
for his wallet, opened it, and counted out £150 in ten-pound notes. Then he counted the money again. Then he handed it to Quentina.
‘I am happy to be able to take this risk for you,’ he said in his rich baritone.
‘I am happy also,’ said Quentina, which was a flat lie, but this exchange, or something similar to it, had become a sort of ritual. It was a dismissal too.
‘Happy Christmas,’ said the man, turning back to his screen.
‘The same to you,’ said Quentina, as she left the room, pulling the door behind her, and as always getting out of there with a mixed sense of shame and relief. She had succeeded in not learning anything new or in any way getting further involved, which was an unmixed positive. She ran down the stairs and was out of there. Quentina couldn’t have been in the building for more than ninety seconds. That was a good thing.