East of Wimbledon Page 7

  Teachers had been more difficult. ‘There are not many people in Wimbledon who have your qualifications,’ Mr Malik had said to Robert in the pub. This was not surprising. Since his appointment, Robert had awarded himself a degree from Yale, an honorary doctorate from Edinburgh University, two novels and a successful season with the Chicago Bears football team.

  They had interviewed a man from Bombay who claimed to have a degree in physics but turned out to be a defrocked dentist, and they had nearly offered a job to a man from Sri Lanka who seemed to know everything about the school apart from the fact that it was supposed to be for Muslims. He turned out to have escaped from an open prison in Dorking. Finally they had hired an almost completely monosyllabic man from the University of West Cameroun called Dr Ahmed Ali. All he had said at the interview, apart from ‘I completely agree with you’ and ‘You are absolutely right, Headmaster!’ was ‘Let’s get this show on the road!’

  ‘He’s a dry stick, Wilson,’ said Mr Malik, ‘but he is 100 per cent loyal. And I am looking for 100 per cent loyalty. Everything else can go hang!’

  Dr Ali was to teach maths, chemistry, philosophy, geography and world events. He was, presumably, at this very moment, teaching one or some or all of these things in the large, airy classroom he occupied next to Robert’s. As usual, no sound whatsoever came from his room.

  Robert was not teaching. He was in the state – now, after two months of the autumn term, agonizingly familiar to him – of being about to teach. At any moment, he told himself, I will find myself up on my legs, waving my arms around in the air and giving. His mother was always telling him that it was important for teachers to give, although what they were supposed to give she did not say. What did the little bastards want?

  He sat at his desk and looked at his class. They looked back at him. ‘Right,’ he said, threateningly, ‘I am going to call the register.’

  Mahmud put up his hand. ‘Please, sir,’ he said, ‘I want to go to the toilet.’

  Robert sighed. ‘Right,’ he said, even more threateningly. ‘Does anyone else want to go to the toilet?’

  No one moved. Fifteen small faces, in various shades of brown, studied him impassively.

  ‘A Muslim should enter the lavatory with his left foot first, saying, “Bismillah Allahumma Inni a’udhu Bika min al-Khubthi wa al-Khaba’ith” (In the name of Allah, Allah in You I take refuge from all evils).’

  ‘I know what’ll happen,’ said Robert. ‘Mahmud will go to the toilet and then you’ll all want to go. You’ll all rush out after him, won’t you? I want you all to think very hard about whether you really want to go to the toilet.’

  The pupils of the reception class at the Independent Wimbledon Day Islamic Boys’ School did not enter the lavatory with their left feet first. They ran at it, screaming, in large numbers. Like children everywhere, they seemed to find lavatories hilarious.

  Robert had read the chapter on lavatories in Morals and Manners in Islam by Dr Marwan Ibrahim Al-Kaysi of the University of Yarmouk. It was tough stuff, and here, as in so many departments, the Independent Boys’ Islamic Day Wimbledon School was falling short of Dr Al-Kaysi’s, admittedly high, standards.

  Morals and Manners in Islam was the only book on the subject he had been able to find in Wimbledon Public Library. Apart from Mr Malik, it was Robert’s only real guide to his assumed religion. But was it right? Was Al-Kaysi on the money? He certainly seemed to strike few chords with Class 1.

  ‘If you really, really want to go,’ Robert went on, ‘then now is the time. There will be no other chance for the rest of the lesson. From now on in it’s do-it-in-your-pants time.’

  His class laughed. They liked him. And Robert, in some moods, found the company of boys under ten both soothing and stimulating.

  Sheikh, a small, pale boy of about seven, leaned forward in his desk. ‘Is this number ones and number twos, sir?’ he said – ‘or is there any flexibility on that?’

  Sheikh was going to do well. His father described himself as a lawyer, although, like most of the parents and many of the staff of the Wimbledon Islamic Independent School (Boys’ Day), Robert suspected he was not being entirely open about his status.

  ‘We must all pull together in the various departments!’ Mr Malik had told Robert, Rafiq and Dr Ali at their first staff meeting. ‘We are going for maximum expansion. You are in on the ground floor of something very, very exciting!’

  It was true they had kitchens now. And once, through the open door of his classroom, Robert had seen Dr Ali using a Bunsen burner. But there was still an alarmingly improvisatory air about Mr Malik’s school. Rafiq, for example, who had not changed out of the grubby overalls that he had been wearing on the day of Robert’s interview, seemed to spend most of his time painting the walls of his classroom. And the headmaster had a disconcerting habit of offering jobs to people he met at dinner parties. A man called Harris had been offered a shadowy role as Exterior Liaison Officer, and Mr Malik was always talking of ‘finding something’ for Maisie.

  Maisie, in her turn, was always hanging around the school. She had bought her own copy of the Koran and was to be seen reading it on her way to work in the morning. She was on page 124 and pronounced it ‘riveting’.

  It was two weeks away from Christmas. Outside, in the street, there were Christmas trees and coloured lights in the windows of the shops. People pushed along the pavements of Wimbledon Village, grey faces stung into crimson by the wind, and, on the Common, the last scraps of last year’s leaves bowled crazily through the defeated grass. A winter’s day in the 1990s.

  Or, alternatively, a winter’s day in the 1380s. That was the period according to the Islamic calendar. In here it was the 1380s.

  Or was it? Robert had not quite mastered the Islamic calendar. But, since no one he had met in Wimbledon Islamic circles seemed to use it, it did not prevent him from holding his head up in the staffroom. It was something to do with the year of the Prophet’s birth, or the year in which he had gone to or come from Mecca or Medina, but Robert could never remember which.

  He really must get hold of another book. The Bluffer’s Guide to Islam – that was the kind of thing he needed.

  The class were looking at him. They were silent, rapt. They viewed Robert as an exotic form of entertainment. Mafouz, a tiny, pale, Egyptian boy, had said to him a week or so ago, ‘Sir – I am not allowed television. But you are better than television!’

  He must use this moment to demonstrate his familiarity with Islamic law. ‘Now,’ he said, pacing in front of the blackboard, ‘if you do go to the toilet, and if you do a number two—’

  The class laughed. Robert continued: ‘—which hand do you use to wipe your behind?’

  This, he thought, was pretty basic stuff. It was there, clearly set out in Dr Marwan Ibrahim Al-Kaysi’s indispensable guide to how to get ahead in the Islamic world. And here they were, nearly twenty-odd children, gaping back at him as if he had just asked them to run through the periodic table.

  ‘Sir,’ said Sheikh, ‘you don’t use your hand. You use paper.’

  This went down very well with Class 1. They rocked on their heels. Robert, mindful of Dr Al-Kaysi’s injunction to Muslims on page 139 – ‘A Muslim should avoid: 1. Being nervous, highly strung or liable to sudden anger and 2. Bad relations with others’ – smiled benignly back at them.

  ‘You use your left hand!’ he said, slowly and clearly, in the tones of one who knew a thing or two about Islamic adab.

  ‘Ergh!’ said Sheikh. ‘I won’t shake hands with you then!’

  What did their parents teach them? Did they even attend the mosque on a regular basis? And, if so, which one? It wasn’t a question Robert felt he could ask. Anyway, the mosque was one of the many subjects he felt it safest to avoid until he had plucked up the courage to go into one.

  When the school had started, Robert had expected tobacconist’s sons, monolingual Turks, or youths with swarthy faces and hooked noses, clad in sheets. But, as Mr Malik kept remi
nding him, this was not the target audience of the school. They were after upwardly mobile Muslims. Perhaps because they were the only people able to afford the fees.

  The children Robert was attempting to teach were, although they didn’t know it, the latest recruits to the mysterious section of English society known as the lower upper middle class. They were the sons of dentists, ambitious businessmen and fairly successful academics. The vast majority of them had tried, and failed for one reason or another, to get into one or other of the local preparatory schools. Their parents were sending them to the Wimbledon Islamic Day Independent Boys’ School because they wanted them to grow up English.

  The only truly exotic one among them was Hasan. He sat, as usual, at the back of the class, his little shoulders eerily still, his face tilted to one side, as if drawing warmth from some invisible light source. He never spoke to the other boys, and they never spoke to him. At the end of each day, as he had done since the beginning of the autumn, Robert took him home, where Mr and Mrs Wilson petted him, fed him, and put him to sleep in the spare bedroom as if he were their own son.

  ‘Let me remind you,’ said Robert, ‘of one of the hadiths of the Prophet. Who knows what a hadith is?’

  No one knew. Not even Mafouz or Sheikh. No wonder the Islamic world is in such a mess, thought Robert angrily, they don’t even know what a hadith is. Where have they been all this time? Or (he did not like this thought) were they winding him up? Were they all pretending to be ignorant in order to trap him into making some punishable blunder?

  It was possible they didn’t know. They spent so much time in Zap Zone at Streatham, scampering about in clouds of dry ice, zapping each other with laser guns, so many hours watching Neighbours or running up and down shopping malls, playing Super Nintendo, they had probably not had time to go anywhere near a mosque or get their heads round the basics of Islamic education. Ayatollah Khomeini, he thought grimly, had a point. He wouldn’t let the Iranian people watch Neighbours. He knew where such behaviour leads.

  ‘A hadith,’ said Sheikh eventually, ‘is a saying of the Prophet.’

  ‘Good, Sheikh,’ said Robert. ‘Good!’

  Sheikh was an important man to have on your side.

  They knew, all right. They were just not telling him. With the uncanny prescience of children, they had divined that he was a fake. They had gone home and told their parents. Mr Mafouz, a big, jolly man who worked for a travel agent, was compiling a dossier on him. He would send it to Baghdad or Cairo, and, within minutes, men even more serious than the two in the Frog and Ferret would be on their way to Wimbledon with automatic rifles.

  One of the men from the pub (the Yasser Arafat look-alike) was also working for the school. Mr Malik had given him a job as a janitor. ‘Aziz is a shifty fellow,’ Mr Malik had said, ‘and he is on no account to be allowed near Hasan. But he is first class with the mop and broom. He cleans as he sweeps as he shines!’

  Aziz spent most of his time skulking about the corridors, snarling at people or banging his pail loudly immediately before and immediately after daily prayers. ‘He is that kind of Dharjee,’ the head had said, when Robert asked him about this. ‘What more can one say?’ And he added, as he laid his finger to the side of his nose, ‘It is not advisable to discuss religious questions with him!’

  Robert was not about to do so. His principal endeavour was to stay off the subject of Islam except when alone with the children. But Mr Malik was always bringing up the subject. He seemed fascinated by the details of Robert’s conversion. Robert had been vague about them on an embarrassing number of occasions.

  It might be simpler, in the end, to actually become a Muslim. Was it, wondered Robert, something one could do by post?

  ‘A hadith is a saying of the Prophet. A man called Bukhari went around after Muhammad died and spent sixteen years compiling his collection. He talked to over a thousand sheikhs in Mesopotamia and—’

  Where else? All this information, derived as it was from chance remarks of Mr Malik’s, threatened to slip away from his memory even as he was talking. Robert put a lot into the delivery of the speech. He tried to make it sound fresh and exciting. He spoke slowly and clearly and smiled a lot. But Class 1 looked back at him listlessly.

  ‘Well,’ Robert went on, aware that he had lost his audience, ‘someone called Abu Quata . . . Abu . . . Anyway, someone called Abu told Bukha . . .’

  Was it Bukhari or Bukharin? Robert groped for a familar name.

  ‘Anyway Muhammad said to this chap that when you go to the toilet you shouldn’t wipe your bum with your right hand.’

  They were bored. He thought he was on safe ground with lavatories, but they were bored. The only thing they wanted to hear was that the Prophet had said that everyone could go to Zap Zone and stay there for the rest of their natural lives. Robert thought of the day he had taken Class 1 to Zap Zone, and shuddered.

  He went to the far side of the classroom. He climbed on one side of the desks, stood on tiptoe, and, forcing up the skylight, eased his head through into the icy December wind. The class, used to his eccentricities, waited patiently.

  Robert looked across at the High Street. There was the man standing near the gates of the school. It was Aziz the janitor’s friend from the pub. The one who looked like Saddam Hussein. He was always hanging around near the entrance of the school. Sometimes the two of them could be seen muttering together in the playground.

  Robert peered back at Hasan. All this was something to do with the manuscript. Why else had Hasan’s picture been put with it? But what else were they after? And why had Hasan been entrusted to him?

  He was getting paranoid. This had to stop. No one was after him. He was pretending to be a Muslim. He was indulging in a little harmless deceit. That was all.

  As he stood there, a woman, heavily swathed in black drapes, turned into the driveway of the school and started towards the front door. It wasn’t until she got within a few yards of him that he realized it was Maisie. Robert looked back at his class. They were watching his legs with polite interest.

  ‘What are you doing in that?’ said Robert. ‘You look as if you’ve climbed into a bin liner, Maisie.’

  ‘The name,’ said Maisie, ‘is Ai’sha.’

  She held up her right hand, and brandished what looked like a Batman mask on a stick. ‘You shouldn’t really be looking at my eyes,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t see how we can avoid that,’ said Robert, ‘unless you use some kind of periscope.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Bobkins,’ said Maisie. ‘You must stop being stupid. We must be friends now. We are Muslims.’

  ‘We’ are Muslims! Uh?

  ‘The Muslim,’ said Maisie, in a complacent tone of voice, ‘is the brother of any other Muslim. He should not oppress or surrender him.’

  Robert recognized this quotation – it was one of which Malik was particularly fond. The headmaster had a large store of quotations designed to show what a nice, easygoing bloke Muhammad was. He did not dwell on the hyena spotted in blood that Abraham was going to throw into hell on the Day of Resurrection, or on the necessity of chopping male infidels into small pieces.

  ‘When,’ said Robert querulously, snatching a glance back at Class 1 as he spoke, ‘did you become a Muslim?’

  ‘This afternoon,’ said Maisie. ‘It’s as easy as falling off a log.’

  ‘Something you’ll be doing rather a lot of,’ said Robert, ‘if you insist on wearing those ridiculous clothes.’

  How did one become a Muslim? It wasn’t really a question he could ask at this stage. But, however you did it, Maisie was clearly keen on doing the job properly.

  ‘Mr Malik’s converted me!’ said Maisie.

  Robert had still not been able to discover the headmaster’s first name, although on occasions Malik had asked to be addressed as Abdul, while making it clear that this was not his name. Apparently – he told Robert – anyone at his school who was not 100 per cent white had been referred to as ‘Abdul’. Mr Malik
had been brought up in Cheltenham and had attended a public school, although he was never precise about which one.

  ‘How has he done that?’

  ‘He sort of lays his hands on you,’ said Maisie – ‘it’s extraordinary!’

  Robert did not like the sound of this. He looked back, briefly, at his class, resolving to have a word with the headmaster as soon as possible. Saddam Hussein, on the other side of the street, lifted his right leg and scratched his toes against his left calf. He was, like Aziz the janitor, definitely wearing one shoe and one slipper. Robert started to withdraw his head.

  ‘I’m going to come and work at the school,’ said Maisie. ‘I’ve given up Sotheby’s.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  Maisie smirked. ‘I’m not going to teach, obviously. I’m a woman. I’m not capable of teaching. I shall probably do something humble, like work in the kitchens making Islamic school meals.’

  This was not wholly bad news. The food at the Boys’ Day Islamic Independent Wimbledon School was unspeakable. It was cooked by a woman, or something that looked like a woman but could have been a giant panda. She was reputed to be a relative of Mr Malik.

  ‘Anyway,’ she went on, more urgently, ‘I need to talk to you. I’ve found out something rather alarming.’

  Robert looked across the street. Saddam Hussein was still scratching his right foot. What was with these guys’ feet?

  ‘It’s about that bit of paper you gave me. With the locket with the photo of Hasan in it.’

  ‘What about it?’

  Maisie looked sulky. Robert looked back into the class. He could just see Hasan, sitting, as usual, quite still, his hands resting lightly on the desk in front of him. He realized, suddenly, he didn’t want to know who or what the little boy was. He simply wanted him to go on sitting there.

  ‘You told a fib, Bobkins. It isn’t about Hoj or Hoj’s woman’s breasts. It’s about something rather disturbing!’

  The man was now working his right foot out of its slipper. Why was he doing this? The temperature outside was down to nearly zero.