The Disappeared (16 page)

‘Yes, sir. But there canna be nowt harm in it.'

Sharon was true to her word. She sat down at the dining table that he never used and took out the folders from her satchel. For half an hour she bent over her work. Then she took a couple of books from the bookcase across to her place at the table. She read in complete silence, sometimes pausing to write on a piece of paper, while he sat at his desk pretending to work, striving to think of something other than the quiet presence behind him. When he turned at last he saw that she was nodding to herself. She seemed to have recovered from her fear. He asked what she was reading.

‘Yeats, sir. ‘Byzantium', what you told us to read.'

‘How do you find it?'

‘It's huge, sir. But it gives me words. Unpurged images of day: that's just how it is, sir. But with me they dunna recede: those images that yet fresh images beget.'

‘I know that, Sharon. It is why you should talk.'

‘Canna, sir. Better go now.'

She rose quickly and had packed her satchel and reached the door before he could get up from his desk. The fear had returned and she stood looking at him with rigid features.

‘I'll see you home, Sharon.'

‘No, sir. This is home.'

‘As you wish, Sharon.'

‘I do wish it, sir.'

‘I didn't mean…'

But what did he mean? To take her back to the place of destruction, when she was his, a thousand times his? He stood with one hand on the desk, fighting himself. And he remembered the man with a squint, who leaned in his overcoat against a lamppost, eyeing him like an enemy. Suddenly it came home to Stephen that he was engaged with this man in a mortal struggle, that if he lived this man must be destroyed. And with that thought came a great surge of relief. It was as though he had made a decision, and at last was free.

When Sharon turned quickly and slipped with a whispered ‘goodbye' on to the stairs, Stephen waited for a moment and then took his coat and followed her. He had to walk quickly to keep her in sight, and by the time she reached Angel Towers, where she melted through the abandoned trolleys into the foyer of Block A, he was out of breath.

He stood by the lift, which was occupied. The illuminated panel showed the carriage stopping at the fifteenth floor. He pressed the button, and studied the ranks of bell pushes on the graffiti-covered wall to his left. Most of the name-tabs were blank or illegible, and he could see no ‘Williams' on the fifteenth floor. He entered the lift nevertheless, propelled by a reckless desire to move in her shadow, to find her as she truly was, to trap her and to cut off her flight.

The lift smelled of sweat and urine, and its walls were covered in obscenities scrawled in black with a felt-tipped pen. On the fifteenth floor two large flats faced three smaller ones across a corridor. The walls seemed to have been freshly painted in bright yellow, but had already been sprayed here and there with illegible squiggles of graffiti. There was music and someone was shouting at a child. Two of the smaller flats had nameplates beside their doors, and one of them said ‘Williams' in Sharon's neat handwriting. Underneath, pasted to the wall, was a lozenge of white cardboard with the name ‘Krupnik' scrawled in biro.

Stephen lingered outside the door, not knowing what his next step should be. There was a sound of television, and two of the Williams boys were arguing about the programme. Pots and plates were being moved about. Then a woman, Mrs Williams he assumed, raised her voice above the noise, saying ‘turn that thing off, I'm on the phone.' Stephen walked quietly away. Someone had called the lift, so he decided to take the stairs, which were lit by fluorescent lights set in walls of greenish concrete. All the surfaces were covered with the same black graffiti, a repeated pattern that, in its meaninglessness, seemed to exude a bestial anger. It was as though worms had been spat on this wall, spoiling its unclaimed spaces, and preventing any human thought from breeding there. The sight infected Stephen with a chill. To be a teacher of literature now: what a picture of futility. And yet there was Sharon.

He came across her on the eleventh floor. She was crumpled in a corner of the stairs, crying silently. The books from her satchel were spilled on the concrete landing. There were two folders, a battered edition of
The Tempest
, and his own copy of Yeats, which she must have smuggled from his bookcase.

‘Sharon!'

He was on his knees beside her. She held her hands close to her face, shaking her head and refusing to allow him to prise her hands away. There was blood between her fingers and the sleeve of her jacket was torn at the wrist.

‘Listen, Sharon. I'll not allow this to happen to you. You must tell me who did this and why.'

She dropped her hands suddenly. The blood was flowing from her cheek, which was red from a sidelong blow and cut against the cheekbone. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed the blood away.

‘Why are you here, sir? Dunna let them see you.'

She was moaning again and struggling to her feet. In order to hide his pity he began to gather up her books. She was leaning on the wall, holding the handkerchief to her cheek, and reaching out with her free hand for the satchel. He took the hand in his and led her towards the lift.

‘No, sir. I'll walk up.'

She was shaking, and he held her beneath the arm to steady her. She spoke in a whisper.

‘Take me to the fifteenth floor, sir.'

He took the weight of her body on his arm and helped her step by step on the staircase. At the fifteenth floor she turned to him.

‘You dinna ought to have followed me, sir,' she whispered. ‘It was because of you he hit me. And dunna you never go in that lift.'

‘Why is the lift so dangerous, Sharon?'

‘You go now. Please.'

He stared at her, confused and wretched. She walked alone to her door, where she turned and pointed to the stairs. He hesitated, and then descended with a bleak sense of having intruded without right into Sharon's life. Why did his attempts to respect her end like this, as though the presumption were his? Maybe it was always like that with a precocious child. But it was too late to back off, too late by far. Sharon was his and would be his forever.

Abdul Kassab had written a letter to the local paper supporting Mrs Gawthrop and St Catherine's Academy. Following threats from local Islamists, he had warned his sons to stay away from school on the day of the demonstration. But Farid's curiosity had proved too great. From the gardener's shed where he was hiding he had a good view of the front of the school, and a sidelong perspective on the crowd.

He accepted Abdul's view, that religious education is not a matter of learning the Koran by rote, but a matter of opening the heart and the mind to illumination. And he acknowledged that the divine light enters through many pathways, the Christian Gospels being one of them, the poems of Rumi another. But how, he wondered, can you convey this tolerant vision to people who believe that faith lies in recitation, ritual and the five times daily utterance of words that Allah must surely be fed up with hearing by now? He did not despise the crowd of protestors, though he found it hard to believe that Islam meant anything very much to the belligerent young people who had joined them. And as for that woman in a burqa, his blood boiled to see her, as she shouted disgraceful words that no woman should use, while hiding her mouth behind a screen.

Abdul viewed the burqa and the niqab as forms of unforgiveable rudeness and he approved the French law that banned them from the public realm. In the society that has offered us protection, he told his sons, people are face to face, confessing to their faults, meeting each other's eyes, and in general showing that they are free, fair and accountable. We commit a terrible offence by hiding our faces when others so openly expose themselves to judgment. The headscarf, yes, but not the veil. Farid thought of Muhibbah Shahin, who had worn neither garment, but nevertheless held her face away from the world, as though she would return your look only in some private sphere to which you were not – yet – invited. That, in Farid's eyes, was purity – a quality instilled in the flesh, and not worn in a strip of cotton.

There was a commotion, and the noise increased to a roar. The door of the school had opened and Mr Haycraft was standing on the steps, four frightened children in the St Catherine's uniform clinging to his jacket. His face was pale, and he put his hands out in front of him as though to soothe a pack of dogs. Then, holding his head high, he walked towards the gates of the school. Farid had not entirely recovered his feelings for his teacher. Given the opportunity to enter the sacred sphere where Muhibbah Shahin was sovereign Mr Haycraft had decided instead to desecrate it, and Farid had found it hard to forgive him. Nevertheless it had been tacitly decided – by whom Farid was not sure – that their readings of the Koran would continue, and Mr Haycraft had even, on one occasion, volunteered some comments on Farid's poems, suggesting that florid imagery of the Persian kind is not enough to lift a mortal human subject into the realm of spiritual perfection. Being a fair-minded person Farid took this criticism to heart, and set about improving his style.

As Mr Haycraft led the children past the crowd, therefore, receiving the insults as though leaning against a storm, Farid was able to look on his teacher objectively, as an imperfect but in many ways admirable human being, a gentleman who lived by the rule of kindness, and who was now exhibiting a rare dignity and courage. For a moment he was tempted to come out of hiding and walk beside Mr Haycraft, just to show these hooligans the contempt in which he held them. But, unlike his teacher, he would be the legitimate target of revenge, and revenge, he knew from his Basra years, was both a way of life and a pact with the Devil – the Devil from whom Colonel Matthews had rescued them.

The teacher left the children at the bus stop. Seeing him return the crowd abandoned the small amount of restraint that the children had inspired in them. The woman in the burqa had somehow got the word ‘rapist' into her head, and was shouting it through the cloth in a rhythmical chant. Others were hurling more cogent insults. One smooth-shaven man in a two piece suit and tie repeated
la illah ila allah
in a tone almost too soft to be heard, but with a constant admonitory wagging of his finger in Mr Haycraft's face. The teacher entered the school, returning instantly with another six children. He was visibly flustered now, and ushered the children before him as though they might protect him from the worst. After five trips to the bus stop Mr Haycraft returned through the crowd with bowed head and shaking hands, and Farid's heart went out to him. He cursed the tormentors of this innocent man and for a moment meditated revenge against them. But his father's strictures against revenge again took up their habitual place in his thoughts, and he sat on the gardener's pile of hessian sacks in a fit of melancholy, dreading what this conflict might mean for the school and for his own hopes of a solid English education.

He sat thus for an hour. The crowd gradually dispersed, most of the men climbing into the bus that had been parked beyond the gates. When he judged it safe to emerge, Farid pushed the glass door of the hut ajar. But to his surprise Mr Haycraft was once again standing on the steps. A girl in the school uniform pressed against him, clutching his jacket and hiding her face in its folds. When she looked up at last, her face emerging like the small head of a tortoise from its shell, Farid saw that it was Sharon Williams, the frail sixth-former who lived somewhere in Block A at the Angel Towers. He watched as they advanced with wandering steps towards the gates.

A group of men were loitering in the street beside a lamppost and Mr Haycraft was being pulled away from them by the girl. The two kept colliding awkwardly as they stumbled along. There was a peculiar intimacy in her way of pulling at her teacher, and also in his way of falling against her, with his arm constantly around her shoulder, and his head bowed over hers. On reaching the road they did not turn right towards the Angel estate. They went in the opposite direction, towards the canal, a place of ill repute where no pure girl would ever go.

Farid waited a while before taking the direct route home. A strange thought had occurred to him, and he entertained it as you might entertain a visitor with whom you hoped for no future connection. Suppose Mr Haycraft were in love with that girl. And suppose he wanted to believe her to be an angel: the faint English shadow of Muhibbah Shahin. Would that not explain his mad assault in the chapel, his desperate search for reassurance, his need to prove that a girl can be pure without fighting for her purity with every inch of her being as Muhibbah Shahin would have fought? And would he not know, in his heart, what a mistake he was making?

Abdul Kassab had often reminded his sons of St Paul's advice: ‘whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.' And only on these things, Abdul always added. So Farid dismissed the thought that had briefly visited him. Nevertheless, he cast a glance at the two receding forms and shook his head.

The man had taken up position like a sentry at the bottom of the stairs, his black overcoat buttoned over his chest, his arms folded across it. His dark hair fell across his brow in greasy strings. The cheeks were clean-shaven, the mouth curled and cruel. He fixed Stephen with one eye, while the other roamed as though dissociating itself from the business. Stephen was suddenly struck by the absurdity of his situation: his new life as a public-spirited teacher ending like this, in a fight to the death with a criminal.

‘You leave my fucking bitch alone, man, OK?'