East of Wimbledon (12 page)

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’.

He finally caught up with her about thirty yards away from the pond. In order not to alarm her unduly, he moved into a space about ten yards ahead of her, and started to walk backwards and forwards on a ten-degree arc in her direct line of vision. Finally she stopped, and from deep within the black bag that enveloped her there was a kind of squeak. ‘Bobkins!’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I need to speak to you,’ said Robert.

She started to make small, whimpering noises. She sounded, thought Robert, rather like Badger shortly before one opened a can of dog food.

‘It’s about Hasan . . .’ he said, glancing back towards Hasan and the rest of the school. Aziz the janitor was now headed for the trees from which Robert had just come. He seemed to be focusing his attention on the group that Mr Malik was teaching. ‘And what you said this morning . . . about that manuscript I gave you. With the photo of Hasan in the locket. And you said something about assassins!’

‘
The
Assassins,’ said Maisie, in a slightly superior way, ‘were a group from the fortress of Alamut. They were the servants of Hasan I Sabah, the Old Man of the Mountains. From this sect called the Nizari Ismailis. He sent them all over the Islamic world to kill his enemies.’

‘As far as . . . er . . . Wimbledon?’ said Robert tentatively.

Maisie laughed scornfully. ‘All this happened about a thousand years ago,’ she said. ‘But there’s something even weirder in that manuscript you gave me. I showed it to Mr Malik, and he said it was very strange
indeed.’

‘Why show it to Mr Malik? What’s going on between you and Mr Malik?’

‘Nothing, Bobkins,’ said Maisie. ‘He’s just converting me, that’s all. I thought you’d be pleased!’

‘Well I’m not,’ said Robert, ‘and I want to know what you’ve found out about that manuscript I gave you!’

Feeling suddenly cold and miserable, Robert moved towards a bench at the edge of the pond. Ahead of him Cranborne School presented a Christian, redbrick face to the long sky above the Common.

‘Where are you?’ squawked Maisie.

‘I don’t know why you’re wearing that ridiculous outfit,’ said Robert, ‘and I don’t know why you’re telling all these things to Malik and telling him about things I gave you as a present.’

Maisie snorted and, following the sound of his voice, traced him to the wooden bench. She sat next to him. A glum-looking man in wellingtons followed his dog round the circle of irongrey water. Above them, seagulls mewed and wheeled in the December wind.

‘It’s nothing to do with you who I talk to,’ said Maisie. ‘Why shouldn’t I show it to him, anyway? He’s a Muslim. He knows about these things. You’re gay, anyway.’

‘I am not gay,’ said Robert. ‘I am a normal, healthy man with normal, healthy feelings!’

This was not strictly true, but it was certainly more true than saying that he was gay. The fact was that, now that Maisie was about as closely concealed from daylight as a roll of undeveloped film, his desire for her had passed the point where it was possible to conceal it. It was somehow easier to say these things to something that looked like a top-secret weapon in transit.

‘I think about you all the time,’ he went on. ‘I think about your body. I want your body. I want to penetrate you.’

There was a kind of squeak from deep within the black bag.

‘I lied about being gay,’ went on Robert. ‘I lie about everything. I’m incapable of the truth. But I want you. I dream about having you. I dream about your body and its—’

‘Bobkins,’ said Maisie, in tones that suggested that this was a not entirely unwelcome topic, ‘this isn’t getting us anywhere.’

Robert rather disagreed with this. He had never before been able to be quite so frank with anyone about his innermost feelings. Was it that, at last, he was learning to face up to himself? Or was it simply that she looked like a large, mobile bag of laundry?

‘You’ve got an erection!’ she said, accusingly.

This, thought Robert, was something of an optical achievement on her part. It had been touch and go whether she would get herself anywhere near, let alone actually
on
, the bench.

‘I love you,’ went on Robert, ‘and I want to have sex with you, and—’

‘Shut up, Bobkins!’ said Maisie. ‘I thought you wanted to know about Hasan. And about that manuscript you gave me.’