Seventy-Two Virgins (13 page)

Over the next few days he started looking more closely at Vanessa who was — though he and Paulie argued about this to begin with — at least as pretty as some of the girls in the
Daily Star.
On any pretext he would wander past her checkout and make some remark, in the hope of eliciting a smile. He was usually successful. Every time he looked at her sweet oval face, and her tight white checkout coat, he felt the choky feeling in his lungs. Bashfully he would buy chocolates at her till, with his own money, and
ching-ching
he would present them to her.

One day he asked her to the pub with Paulie, and as they said good night, she actually stuck out her cheek for a kiss. He took her out again, and when he got home, he looked at himself in the mirror. He hadn’t told her his origins, and he wasn’t sure what to say. The interesting thing about his half-caste looks, he decided, was that he didn’t look Negroid.

He looked kind of Arab: dark skin, curly hair, a forceful but straight nose. Yes, for the purposes of conversation with Vanessa, he would be a sheikh.

One night in the pub he poured forth his life’s story: the misery of his existence with Dennis and Vie, the burning of Price’s cheesorium, the tragic ram-raid. He couldn’t believe how much she wanted to know, and how saddened she seemed by the details of his shocking finances. For the first time in his life, it occurred to him that he might be an interesting person.

“Ere Vanessa,’ said Dean, who was fairly sure he was on the right lines, ‘has anyone ever told you how lovely you are?’

‘Oh Dean,’ said Vanessa, ‘that’s reely reely sweet.’

‘Vanessa,’ said Dean, knitting his fingers, ‘I love you.’

‘Oh Dean,’ she said, and to his delirious stupefaction, she hugged him. But the following night, when he had summoned the bottle to ask her whether she would like, perhaps, to see a film, it turned out that she was busy. Something to do with her Nan, and a hip bath, and cuts in social services.

It was the same story the following night; or rather, it was a different story, but with the same result. This time there was something very slightly distant in her manner. That evening, when Paulie came back to their digs, Dean had a sudden suspicion. Next Monday evening came the moment of tragic revelation. It was not strictly true that it was a night he would never forget, since the memory became distorted over the years, depending on how much he wanted to torment himself.

Sometimes it was an X-rated scene, sometimes it was almost innocent. It involved Vanessa and Paulie, and a store room for cleaning things which they wrongly believed they had locked from the inside. Dean was so offended, so horrified, and of course so jealous that he could only think of one thing to do. He spent the rest of his brief career at RitePrice hiding in the store room to make sure it could never happen again. He was fired.

A few days later he was sitting at home, eating a pot noodle and watching
Countdown
when Paulie walked in. He was looking triumphant.

“Ere, look who I shagged.’

He was waving the
Guardian,
not a newspaper that normally came into this household. It was a long article by someone called Lucy Goodbody, in the G2 section, called ‘Breadline Britain’.

It was all about being a checkout girl in a shop in Wolverhampton, and how tough it was. He looked at the picture by-line. That wasn’t Lucy Goodbody.

That was Vanessa.

‘What’s this bollocks?’ he asked, and read, with mounting despair, Lucy Goodbody’s account of life in RitePrice Wolverhampton.

It seemed they were among the lowest paid workers in Britain, and according to Lucy Goodbody they all hated their jobs.

That’s not true, thought Dean. He’d rather enjoyed bits of it. Then he came to the passage about him. She described someone called ‘Dave, a young, painfully lost-looking Anglo-Caribbean with a beautiful smile’.

‘To my shame and embarrassment,’ recorded Lucy Goodbody in her diary-type report, ‘young Dave is developing a crush on me. He uses any excuse to come to my checkout till, and buys me presents he really cannot afford.’

Dean could read no longer. His eyes were too full.

‘I shagged her,’ said Paulie. ‘I shagged some reporter from the
Guardian.’

That afternoon, Dean did something really stupid. It occurred to him that he knew where the
Guardian
was based. It was just down the road; at least it must be the local branch of the
Guardian,
because it had a big black and white sign over the shop front, saying
The Guardian/The Observer.
The luckless newsagent’s went the way of Price’s cheese lab.

He had been in Her Majesty’s Young Offenders’ Institution at Feltham for two weeks when he became aware of Islam. ‘What’s all those shoes doing there?’ he asked as he was walked down a dim corridor.

‘It’s the mosque, innit.’

Every Friday lunchtime he listened to the Khutab. He heard incredible things, and things that seemed to him to be obvious, that explained so much about the evils of his world. He couldn’t believe, really, that a preacher was allowed by the authorities to speak so frankly to prisoners.

Apparently there was a satanic Zionist freemason plot to ban the hijab, or headscarf. That didn’t seem too bad to Dean. He’d vaguely heard that they were doing something of the kind in France.

‘Britain is a society of divorce and adultery, where women are not taught to respect their own bodies,’ said the imam. Yeah. Dean felt sick as he thought of Vanessa writhing on the floor of the stock room.

‘Thirty-five per cent of women in Britain have been abused,’ said the imam, ‘usually by someone known to them. In the Muslim religion, women are to be loved and respected, and not treated like a piece of meat.’

Yeah. Dean thought of Vanessa/Lucy Goodbody (the very name was now a provocation) and how she treated her own sexuality. He thought how she had obviously liked the piece-of-meat approach, and he shuddered with horror and desire and incomprehension.

He discovered that Islam meant surrender. It meant obedience. It meant a union with God and with the word of God, unmediated by human agency. It also meant specifically a rejection of a world which had rejected him. When he left Feltham six months later, there were all kinds of outreach workers ready to reach out for him, but Dean was now on a different conveyor belt.

It was at the Finsbury Park Islamic Welfare Centre, where he went to pray, that he fell in with the man called Jones. Jones was the disciple and lieutenant of a one-eyed, one-armed cleric who had survived and prospered despite, or perhaps because of, all the hatred heaped upon him by the tabloid papers. Faith was flowering here, in the most unpromising surroundings. Hard by a thundering railway bridge was a kind of concrete cattle yard, and here the faithful came in their hundreds, from all over the world, five times a day, to hear the militant Islamic teaching of the one-eyed mullah.

‘The American Christian fundamentalists want to bring about Armageddon, which is preparatory to the second coming of Christ,’ said the priest. His audience sat on the tarpaulins, listening with glassy appreciation.

‘It is planned to have the first homosexual prime minister.

‘They wish to clone human beings.

‘They wish to legalize child prostitution.

‘Marriage with animals will become legalized.

‘The women will be allowed to beat the men with rods, like in the American jails.

‘There will be microchipping of the entire population.

‘GM crops will be introduced.’ Yeah, thought Dean: you should see some of the things we used to sell at RitePrice.

‘They want to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque.’

Slowly Dean became not just spiritually awakened and doctrinally literate. He became politically engaged. They had videos at the Islamic Welfare Centre, documenting the struggle against the Israeli occupation; and they had videos narrating and celebrating the sacrifice of the suicide bombers.

He learned of Richard Reid, the heroic young man from South London, who tried to blow up his own shoe. He heard of other would-be heroes, who had so far gone undetected by the authorities: the sock bomber, the pants bomber, the vest bomber, the biro bomber and — most rare and admirable —the bra bomber.

Sometimes, after he had been brought to an ebullition of anger, he started to wonder whether he might be made of the same stuff. And so did Jones — Jones the Bomb.

‘Remember,’ said this prince of philosophers after their first tutorial, ‘he who does not fight is not a true believer.’ Every word Jones uttered seemed to slide into place like a sweetly smacked nail. Now, as they sat in the Norman Shaw North car park, Jones the Bomb repeated those words. Dean found he needed no further prompting.

With dextrous shelf-stacker’s hands he assembled the team’s gear, like a man in charge of a parachute jump or a dive. They had a big DSR37OP Sony Camcorder, with no battery, to be carried by Habib. They had two big fluffy grey sound booms, though anyone who knew anything about TV would spot that this was unnecessary, and one of the sound booms was no longer grey.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Dean, for such, since his conversion, was the limit of his profanity, ‘the bloody warden has bleeding bled on everything.’

‘Never mind, Dean,’ said Jones.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

0924 HRS

‘All right,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell to Colonel Bluett, ‘let’s be practical. The President is due to start speaking at ten a.m. In all candour, I think if we haven’t found this blasted ambulance by then, we should activate Option Minicab.’

Bluett winced. Minicab was the emergency exit. It meant bundling the two Permanent Protectees into the Black Hawk, flying straight to Northolt, and putting them aboard Air Force One, the blue-painted 747.

‘Shee-,’ he said. It would go down as one of the most lamentable lapses in Presidential security since they shot Ronald Reagan. ‘Let’s run that tape again,’ he said. Through the eye of a CCTV camera mounted on the Barry Tower of the House of Lords, they watched the ambulance make its jerky progress up Millbank. The shot was grey and fuzzy, but the licence plate L64896P was clear enough. Though they didn’t know it, they also watched Barlow and Ziggy Roberts, moving in ten-yard leaps and making Chaplinesque gestures.

‘That’s our guys,’ said Bluett, as they watched the ambulance being stopped by Joe and Matt the USSS men. ‘What are they frigging playing at?’

‘It’s no one’s fault,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell.

‘That,’ said Bluett, ‘may or may not turn out to be the verdict of history.’

‘So now it goes up Whitehall, and then I am afraid we lose it.’

‘We lose it?’ said Bluett.

‘Well, it seems one of the cameras has been vandalized.’

‘Sheee-it,’ said Bluett.

‘There’s a lot of ill-feeling against the congestion charge, you know.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

0926 HRS

The last Jason Pickel had seen of the ambulance was when it turned right, out of his field of vision, into Norman Shaw North. He had keen enough eyes to see that it had three Mediterranean or Middle Eastern types in the front seat, and though he knew he shouldn’t be prejudiced, he was getting those Dad flashbacks again.

‘Go on,’ said Indira the friendly sniper, as he croaked to a halt, and once again checked his hand for tremor. ‘What happened then?’

Jason got a grip and continued. ‘You British have a great poet, Wystan Hugh Auden.’

‘Mmm.’ Indira couldn’t remember much about Ordon.

In his poem “Icarus” he makes a good point about any human disaster. Something terrible may be happening in one place, but just down the road people are getting on with their lives. In one corner of the canvas a tragedy is happening, a boy failing into the sea. But the ploughman gets on with his ploughing. The boat sails on.’

‘Yeah,’ said Indira, thinking he was a nice chap, the big depressed Yank, but hoping very much he wasn’t about to recite poetry — or maybe he already was?

When he ran out into the street, and after the sunlight went off like a firework through his shades, what he mainly noticed, said Jason, was this incredibly peaceful scene. There were kids fishing in the Tigris, right by the American cantonment. In an instant, even while he could hear the screams of warning from the road, he took in their feet splayed in the mud, the way they cast their lines beyond the biblical rushes and the wavelets glittering. Then he saw the car coming down the road. The sweat was already coursing over his eyebrows and stinging his corneas, but he couldn’t brush it away because he was carrying an Ml 6 and a mobile, and anyway, there was no time.

‘Stop or I fire!’ yelled Sergeant Kennedy.

‘Stop!’ shouted GI Kovac.

‘Stop!’ shouted Jason. ‘What part of stop don’t you understand?’

The car rolling slowly towards them was a Chevrolet GMC, a big white shiny machine of a kind that could be seen all over Baghdad. Like every other example, the car had the letters TV extravagantly striped all over it in masking tape. It meant nothing. There were more ‘TV’ cars currently cruising Baghdad than there were TV stations on the planet. The Chevrolet GMC was the favoured vehicle of every Baathist kingpin turned looting gangster. Plenty of well-attested sightings had put Saddam himself behind the wheel of a GMC. The orders of Jason and the rest of the detail were clear. If the vehicle failed to stop within a reasonable delay, they were at liberty — no, they had a duty — to protect human life, Iraqi or American, from possible terrorist attack.

‘Jesus Christ,’ screamed Barry White the Limey journalist. ‘What are you fucking well doing? He’s not fucking stopping, is he?’

‘Please keep calm, sir,’ said Jason Pickel, and dropping the satphone still connected to his stunned and possibly faithless wife, he raised the carbine to his shoulder and shouted clearly, ‘Driver, unless you halt I will open fire on the count of three. One.’

By some instinct the little fishermen of the Tigris flung themselves face-first into the reeds.