East of Wimbledon Read online

  Malik looked puzzled by this remark. ‘Why, Wilson,’ he said – ‘a Twenty-fourther, of course. What did you think I meant?’

  This, thought Robert, had a definitely sexual ring to it. Was it some ghastly anal version of soixante-neuf?

  ‘A Twenty-fourther,’ went on Mr Malik, ‘like that damned Aziz and his friend! A group that threatens to split the Wimbledon Dharjees right down the middle! That endangers the security of this school, Wilson!’

  ‘Do you mean,’ said Robert, ‘those people who wear peculiar shoes on their right feet?’

  The head seemed amused by Robert’s obvious ignorance of the subject. ‘They do indeed wear “peculiar shoes”, my dear Wilson! They do indeed! And you know why?’

  ‘I’m afraid I haven’t a clue,’ said Robert.

  Mr Malik leaned forward. The muscles in his neck were quivering. Robert could not remember seeing him as disturbed as this. ‘So as they can whip them off at a moment’s notice!’ he hissed. ‘So as they can get their damned toes out and waggle them at people!’

  Robert’s expression had obviously convinced him of his innocence.

  ‘The Prophet said, “Don’t walk with only one shoe. Either go barefoot or wear shoes on both feet.” ’

  ‘Did he?’ said Robert brightly. Muhammad had certainly covered the ground as far as etiquette was concerned. It was, in a way, rather restful to have a series of instructions covering almost every area of one’s life.

  ‘Long ago,’ continued the headmaster, ‘before the Dharjees came to Wimbledon, they shared a common history with the Ismailis. The Nizari Ismailis. Are these people familiar to you? They are an old, old sect in Islam.’

  He grabbed Robert’s arm and squeezed it. ‘They are after Hasan!’ he said. ‘They won’t move yet, but when they do . . . watch out! You must watch him every minute of every day! And when we come near to the time of his Occultation you must never let him out of your sight.’

  ‘When is that?’ said Robert. ‘Is it in the school holidays?’

  Mr Malik laughed wildly. ‘My dear Wilson,’ he said, ‘all you need to know is that it is not yet come. But it will. There are secrets of the Nizari Ismailis that are never spoken of – never spoken of! Like the Golden Calf of the Druze, my friend, they are a real and living mystery!’

  But, before Robert had the chance to ask him about the Golden Calf of the Druze, or what a Nizari Ismaili might be, or how many of either group might be lurking around Wimbledon, the bell sounded for the end of break, and, below them, in the Great Hall, he heard the sounds of the whole school assembling for nature, recreation and Islamic dancing.

  Malik strode towards his study door, flung it open, and turned to Robert with a firm, manly smile. ‘We will discuss this later,’ he said, ‘and we will think of a way to build trust between us. I like you, Wilson. I worked with you on the brochure. I want there to be trust between us. I want to feel that I have entrusted Hasan to a gentleman. You understand my meaning?’

  Without waiting for an answer to this, he turned on his heel and went down to his waiting pupils.

  It was not difficult to see how he had converted Maisie. After a few minutes with Mr Malik, Robert himself quite often felt like making the frighteningly short journey from doubt to belief. Islam, as the headmaster was always reminding him, meant surrender. Maybe he should surrender. Waggling his arms and legs in preparation for Islamic dancing, Robert started down the stairs after Rafiq and Dr Ali. If things get too complicated, he told himself, not for the first time in the last few months, I can always make a run for it.

  9

  Mr Malik was very fond of nature. He used it, freely, in argument. ‘Look at the birds!’ he would say. ‘Look at the frogs! Are not they an example to us? We hang around shuffling our feet and making phone calls and they just get on with it!’

  Whenever he had the chance he got the whole school out on to the Common. When they weren’t running across it, cheered on by the headmaster, they were snipping bits off it and bringing them back to school to put in jars. Once Malik had cut down a small tree, dragged it across the grass, and cut it up in the back garden, with the help of two large boys in the third year. Flora Strachan, the ecology-conscious pensioner, had chased after him, waving a copy of her pamphlet An Uncommon Common and threatening to report him to the police.

  ‘If you kill a wall gecko at a single blow, a hundred merits will be credited to your account. To kill it with two blows is less meritorious!’ Malik would say, grabbing Robert’s sleeve as he did so. ‘Do you know who said that?’ And Robert, who was by now learning the basic rule that if anybody said anything interesting it was probably Muhammad, would ask if by any chance it just happened to be a saying of the Prophet, to which the headmaster would reply, his eyes shining, ‘That’s it! That’s it! What a man! He covers everything! Cats! Dogs! Wall geckos!’ And, rocking with laughter, he would clasp Robert to him – something, thought Class I’s form master, as he joined the throng in the hall, the headmaster would probably not be doing a lot of in future.

  ‘In a line, boys!’ Mr Malik was calling. ‘In a line! Let us show them that the Wimbledon Independent Boys’ Day Islamic School is the best behaved, the best organized and the best equipped in Wimbledon!’

  Mahmud and Sheikh were on the floor. Mahmud was trying to strangle Sheikh. Sheikh was trying to jab a pencil in Mahmud’s eyes. Mr Malik beamed at them in a fatherly manner. ‘Nature,’ he beamed. ‘This too is an aspect of nature. It is natural for young men to try and kill each other. Absolutely natural!’ So saying, he aimed a kick at Sheikh’s ribs and lifted Mahmud clear of the ground by his collar, flinging him into the stew of boys gathered around the window that overlooked the front garden.

  Through the doors at the back, from the kitchen area, came Maisie. She started, very cautiously, towards the assembled school. For a moment Robert thought she might have had her feet bound, and then he realized that her problem was simply that her face mask was now so in line with Islamic law that her field of vision was only about six inches to the left and right of her. She stopped, raised her head, and tracked it left and right, like a robot searching out its target. When she had located the headmaster she moved towards him.

  Mr Malik, ignoring these manoeuvres, swept out towards the front door. Dr Ali, suddenly submissive, moved quickly in front of him and opened it. Rain and wind swirled in, scattering papers and banging the door to Class 2’s room.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ said Robert to Maisie, as the school filed out towards the Village.

  ‘You can’t,’ hissed Maisie. ‘I’m a woman!’

  ‘That doesn’t mean I can’t talk to you, does it?’

  As far as he could remember from Marwan Ibrahim Al-Kaysi, you were allowed to talk to women. There was a tricky thing called the seminally defiled state, and you had to make sure that when your old lady left the house she was doing so for a specific purpose, but on the whole even Marwan was pretty laissez-faire about a girl and a boy talking about subjects of mutual interest.

  Maisie’s conversion wasn’t quite as much of a surprise as it should have been. And even her clothes, once you had got over the original shock, were part of a long tradition of home-made outfits dating back to her days at the Mother Theresa Convent, South Wimbledon. The see-through trouser suit she had designed herself had caused a sensation at Rachel Ansorge’s party.

  Islam was the first project they had shared since the Cranborne/ Mother Theresa joint school production of The Tempest all those years ago. Perhaps that was why he was beginning to find her almost unbearably attractive. He had never, before, seriously thought that she would get beyond the occasional sisterly peck on the cheek, or allowing him the privilege of listening to her troubles. But since the school term had started they had spent hour after hour in intense, ill-informed conversations about who was who in seventh-century Medina. Robert merely had to drop a few bon mots from Marwan Ibrahim Al-Kaysi’s handbook into the conversation and Maisie’s eyes widened the way they did
when you offered to take her out for a meal or when she was telling you how someone had told someone that she had a beautiful mouth.

  Her costume made her more, rather than less, attractive to him. ‘A Muslim woman’s dress consists of three items – a shift, a veil and a cloak.’ So, according to Marwan anyway, underneath that long, black cloak was a shift. And underneath the shift . . . As the school filed across the High Street and up towards the Common, Robert found he was sweating. Was there anything underneath the shift? Assuming he did, one day, manage to get her into bed, what would happen after she had shimmied off the veil, let the cloak fall around her naked ankles, and then eased her white, sweet-smelling flesh out of the shift to reveal . . . What? What was ideologically correct Islamic underwear? Presumably an item so secret that they were even keeping it from Dr Al-Kaysi of the University of Yarmouk.

  She was about ten yards behind him as the party splashed its way into the swampy grass. But every time he turned round to look at the black shape labouring after him he was confirmed in the suspicion that Islamic outfits were far sexier than boring old black leather bras, split-crotch panties or steel suspenders. What must it be like for the lads in Riyadh or Tehran, watching the women of their choice swoop around the supermarkets in twenty-five yards of black drapery? How did they cope? With each movement under the flowing garments, Robert imagined breasts, flecked with pink nipples, a pleasantly loose belly, white thighs grinding against each other. Oh, my God, he thought, would that there were an Islamic garment for men, designed to conceal massive erections! Ahead of them, a woman of about sixty in a blue tracksuit pawed the ground in the jogger’s equivalent of neutral. Listing at about ten degrees off vertical, she seemed to be hoping that the grass of the Common would itself carry her forward, like a travelator. If something like that did not happen soon, Robert thought, she might well not have long to live.

  ‘Are you all right, Yusuf?’ said Dr Ali.

  Robert looked down. Dr Ali was scurrying along beside him and from time to time glaring down the line of boys. Whenever he caught the eye of one of them, the boy would look away and allow his conversation to die. The maths master looked as if he was about to have another revelation.

  ‘I’m . . . er . . . fine,’ said Robert, desperately trying to work out how he might get close to Maisie, ‘but I am . . . er . . . worried about the boys.’

  In the distance he could see a group of dog walkers. Dick Shakespeare, who did the gardening programme on television, was striding after his black labrador, Chesty. He was wearing green wellingtons and a flat cap, and round his neck was a huge silver whistle. ‘Chesty!’ he barked. ‘Come away down there!’

  Dick Shakespeare had a large repertoire of traditional sheepdog commands, picked up from videos of One Man and His Dog. He was always asking Chesty to lie down, and come away, and sometimes trying out weird commands all of his own. Chesty had been publicly ordered to ‘lurk’, to ‘fold’, to ‘carry the juice’ and, on one occasion, to ‘walk away down there nicely’. The dog never paid any attention to any of these commands, but, like most dogs, carried on eating golf balls, smelling strangers’ private parts, and looking immensely pleased with himself. When things got really bad, Mr Shakespeare used the whistle. This, too, Chesty completely ignored.

  Robert wondered whether the dog walkers might provide cover.

  ‘Hi there!’ called Dick Shakespeare. He indicated the pupils of the Wimbledon Islamic Boys’ Day Independent School, put the tips of all ten fingers together, and bowed, briefly. ‘Three poppadams,’ he said, ‘and a little piece of mango chutney!’

  Behind him was Marjorie Grey, in her green anorak, surrounded by Franks the poodle, Macintyre the elderly Border collie and Stroud the unstable Staffordshire terrier. Robert waved briefly, ducked, and looked for an alternative means of escape.

  He would just have to walk, openly, away from the main body of the school, get downwind of Maisie, stalk her carefully, and, when they had reached the birch trees on the other side of Cannizaro Road, creep up on her and leap out at her when she wasn’t looking. It shouldn’t be difficult. With a field of vision as limited as hers it was amazing that she could see anything at all.

  Just at that moment, Mahmud started to shriek. The small boy had just caught sight of his cousin, who went to Cranborne School. Mahmud’s cousin, clad in a pair of white shorts, was running, with a fat boy in glasses, towards the Wimbledon Islamic School. Robert thought he recognized the fat boy. Mr Malik and he had visited Cranborne in order to organize a chess match between the two schools. The fat boy had mated him in four moves.

  ‘Chalky!’ Mahmud screamed, ‘I got Monkey Island off Sheikh, but this is better than Monkey Island! It’s better than Coconut Forgery! You’re a mercenary and you kill people with laser guns! It’s really good!’

  Ali’s nose twitched. He looked like a man who smelt un-Islamic behaviour. Either that or he was about to sneeze. But, although the headmaster turned to frown at Mahmud, Robert didn’t yet feel he had any justification for leaving the neat line of boys and tracking down Maisie.

  ‘It will be interesting to see,’ said Dr Ali, ‘whether, during the month of Dhu’l-Hijja, our “friend” Malik offers a sacrifice.’

  ‘It will,’ said Robert.

  ‘Our “friend” Malik,’ said Dr Ali, ‘is a passport Muslim, and that is all. He is Sahib nisab, I presume?’

  ‘I would have thought so,’ said Robert quickly – ‘a man of his age.’

  He looked about him desperately. Behind him, Rafiq, as always, was walking with Hasan. The little boy had his hand in the engineer’s. From time to time Rafiq would gently prise his hand free and stroke the boy’s hair, murmuring some soft endearment. Hasan was almost the only person to whom he spoke. Behind him a huge, dangerous looking jogger in bright purple shorts thundered up and then, after a brief, explosive display of sweat and breath, was off into the quaking grass.

  Robert became aware that the mathematics master was talking, once again, about sacrifice. ‘A camel or she-camel,’ he was saying, ‘if chosen, should be more than five years old.’

  Robert nodded vigorously. ‘We only have a rabbit,’ he found himself saying, ‘but we kill that usually. That or the dog.’

  Mahmud had broken away from the main crocodile and was engaged in earnest conversation with the small fat boy. The fat boy was holding out a pile of thin plastic diskettes. Mahmud, as far as Robert could make out, was offering the fat boy a tenpound note for them. It was, thought Robert, probably the same ten-pound note that had been awarded to him by Mr Malik for his prizewinning essay ‘My Snake’.

  ‘I wonder,’ said Robert idly, ‘what the Prophet would have thought about computer games.’

  ‘They are,’ said Dr Ali, ‘the work of the Devil.’

  It was amazing, really, thought Robert, that Dr Ali allowed himself to be anywhere near a place as fundamentally un-Islamic as Wimbledon. Had he fallen out of an aircraft on its way from New York to Tripoli? Had he walked out of the Lebanese embassy one night and come down with an attack of amnesia? According to the headmaster, he had a degree from the University of Surrey. Before the maths master started on what to sacrifice when you couldn’t lay your hands on a goat, or how to cope with Ramadan in a modern technological society, Robert, muttering something about the need for discipline, marched off towards Mahmud.

  Out of the corner of his eye he could see Maisie, who was now about a hundred yards south of the rest of the school. Whether this was Islamic modesty was hard to tell – she could have got her shift stuck in a tree trunk. Mahmud and his cousin were haggling over the price of a game called Willy Beamish. ‘It is write-protected,’ he heard Mahmud say. ‘I only got it from Lewens for fifteen!’

  Robert leaned over the little boy. ‘If you do not return to the line now, Mahmud,’ he said, ‘I am going to cut off your knackers!’

  Mahmud glanced briefly up at him, considered this proposition, and went back to negotiating the price of the computer game.

 
; Robert looked back at the school. Mr Malik seemed now to have taken on board several other members of Cranborne School who were growing tired of cross-country running. He had arranged them, with his own boys, in a circle round a plane tree and was giving an impromptu lecture on the classificatory work of Darwin to both notionally Muslim and notionally Christian pupils. If only, thought Robert, I had had teachers like that. There was something so constantly curious about the headmaster of the Boys’ Wimbledon Day Islamic Independent School that, after a while, you stopped wondering where, or indeed whether, he had acquired a degree in anything, and surrendered to that mellifluous, actorish voice.

  He moved stealthily into the trees. As far as he could see, Maisie, who was now thoroughly disorientated, was headed for the pond in the centre of the Common. Occasionally she made brief, distressed movements of the head, rotated right, left and right again, but was unable to get the rest of the school in her sights. Back on the main road, Robert caught a glimpse of Aziz the janitor. He was still carrying his mop and broom and wearing his brown overalls. He looked as if he was about to start sweeping the Common.

  As Robert watched, Aziz raised his mop and started a kind of semaphore in the direction of the Windmill. He raised the bucket too, and shook it rhythmically, as if it was some kind of primitive musical instrument. Looking behind him, Robert saw that he was signalling to his friend from the Frog and Ferret, who was crouched in the long grass.

  Perhaps they were going to go after Hasan now. Perhaps Mr Malik had got it wrong. Perhaps the time of his Occultation – whatever that might be – was almost upon them. It was something of a shock to him to realize how fond of the little boy he had become. He didn’t want him to be Occultated. Whatever it might involve, Robert felt sure that Hasan was not ready for it.

  He thought about Hasan at the swimming-baths. Hasan loved to stand in the shallow end, splashing his face and chest with the warm water, his face lifted to the lights in the roof. He thought about Hasan and the television, about the way the little boy placed his olive cheek next to the loudspeaker, caressing the wooden cabinet, while the Wilson family watched the evening news. And then, without caring what the headmaster might think, he ran after Maisie as fast as he could. She was now about a hundred yards away from him, apparently on a collision course with an Irish wolfhound belonging to Jake, ‘The Man You Avoid on Dog Walks’.