The Disappeared (10 page)

‘Is it OK to read the Koran in a Christian church, sir?'

‘Of course it is. But actually that's not the reason I brought you here.'

Farid blushed, mentally rehearsing all the ways in which he might have incurred his teacher's displeasure.

‘Yes, sir?' he asked.

‘It's about Angel Towers. We, that is to say the staff, are concerned about something.'

‘About what, sir?'

Farid felt a shiver of apprehension, as though his teacher would discover in him some crime of which he himself had not been aware.

‘About girls who live on the estate.'

‘Girls who live on the estate,' Farid repeated quietly.

‘Are they entirely safe there, I mean safe from people who might abuse them, capture them, force them to do things against their will? I apologize for asking this, but I am fond of you, Farid, and I know you will tell me the truth.'

It was obvious that his teacher was referring to Muhibbah Shahin, though for what reason Farid could not guess, since the girl had left St Catherine's three years ago, when Mr Haycraft was not yet on the scene. Farid's instinct was to protect her honour, to deny that the angel of light could be captured, abused or forced against her will into anything, and certainly not into marriage with some diseased old geezer in Waziristan. Here in his satchel, along with the Koran, was the sheaf of poems he had written in proof of her purity. In his confusion he looked down at his hands in silence. It was quite wrong of Mr Haycraft to intrude in this way on something so sacred, something that concerned only Farid, who would protect his angel from all polluting ideas.

Mr Haycraft shifted nervously for a while and then got to his feet and walked up and down the aisle of the chapel. Only once before had Farid visited this place, when Mr Haycraft had given some of the juniors a guided tour, recounted the stories of St Catherine of Siena, and said learned and touching things about the Gothic architecture. Farid particularly remembered his teacher's way of describing the mouldings around the pointed windows, as ‘crystallised light'. How he had loved Mr Haycraft then, and how he resented him now. All of a sudden one adoration had been put in question by the other, and the contest was unequal. If he must choose between Muhibbah Shahin and Mr Haycraft he would choose the angel above the man.

Farid looked up at last. A feeling of desolation rose through his body and gathered on the rim of his eyes. He had struggled hard with the Arab habit of weeping, and knew that there were many tears to be shed that evening – sweet, soothing tears, unlike those that were seeking an exit now. He swallowed, tried to speak, and the words would not come. At last the tears flowed, and the words with them.

‘A pure girl, sir, cannot be forced to anything. She would rather die.'

Mr Haycraft looked at him long and anxiously.

‘I wish it were true, Farid,' he said in a whisper. ‘I wish it were true.'

‘It
is
true, sir. I know it is.'

‘I am sorry. I did not mean to upset you.'

There was a long silence. The boy raised his fists to his face and pushed back the tears. On an impulse he reached into his satchel and took out the poems.

‘Sir, I meant to show you these.'

Mr Haycraft shook himself as though wrestling free from demons.

‘Not now, Farid. What are they?'

He shot a haunted look towards the boy, who was holding out the sheets with one hand while pressing the knuckles of the other into his face.

‘Poems I wrote. About that girl.'

‘About that girl,' Mr Haycraft repeated in a whisper.

He took the sheets with trembling hand and turned away while reading them.

‘I know they're no good, sir,' Farid offered.

Mr Haycraft was silent.

‘I wanted only to say what she means to me.'

With his back still turned Mr Haycraft whispered ‘In the tower of darkness shines an angel.' Then, swinging suddenly round he handed the sheets to Farid with a brusque flick of the hand.

‘Thank you for showing me these Farid. Let's discuss them tomorrow. There is some lovely, some lovely.…'

He tailed off, walked quickly to the door of the chapel, and beckoned to the boy to follow him. As he unlocked it he whispered ‘thank you', but so softly that Farid could only guess at the words. And Mr Haycraft hurried away from him into the heart of the school, leaving Farid with the thought that his teacher was after all just an ordinary person, and one whom it would be a mistake to love.

Jim Roberts could tell Stephen nothing about the social worker who had brought Ryan Williams to school except that she was short and plump, with cropped brown hair and dingy features, and was called Mona, Groaner or Fiona. He imparted this information during a lunchtime talk devoted to ‘racism awareness', in which an official from the City Council's office of community relations addressed the assembled staff on the need to deal sensitively with cultural differences. Jim sat at the back of the staffroom, rocking back and forth with ostentatious splutters of amusement, as the official – a young man in casual dress who spoke the same grammarless English as Stephen's pupils – explained that what might be truant in a white kid might equally be home education for a kid from Pakistan. ‘Notice,' said Jim in a loud whisper, ‘the use of “white” as a term of racial abuse.' The image of the abused Sharon caused Stephen to grip Jim's arm and stare wildly at the mute faces assembled for their hour of ideological instruction – faces of people who had learned to live with the official lies, who knew how unprofitable it was to quarrel with doctrine, and whose triumph was to rescue some child, of whatever race, creed or class, from the pitiless dominion of morons.

‘I'm not feeling so good, Jim. I've got to go home.'

Jim gave him an enquiring look.

‘You've gone a bit wan. And who wouldn't, listening to this bullshit?'

‘I've just the one class. Fourth year English at 2. Are you free then? Can you read them something? Harry Potter, say,
His Dark Materials
. Or show them the video.'

‘As long as I can tell them it's shit.'

‘Feel free, Jim. And thanks.'

Stephen slipped away, bent over with anxiety. He dialled the contact number for the child social services, and was given an address in George Street, where the visitors responsible for Angel Towers were based. The bus into the city centre was empty and he stared in desolation at the streets of Victorian houses through which it passed – many boarded up, or with front gardens piled with rubbish. Curtains were drawn in most of the windows, and behind those curtains a new form of life was briefly clinging, a nomadic life that had found this niche in a foreign country without discarding its ancient ways.

Stephen was a child of his time: he believed in the value of immigration and half accepted the official doctrine that such conflicts as arose from it were caused not by the suspicion and insularity of the incomers but by the racism and xenophobia of their hosts. Confronted with the intransigent bigotry of the Afghan fathers, however, he had begun to doubt this.

The bus stopped frequently at traffic lights, when he could snatch glimpses through roughly draped curtains of a life that refused to be openly known. In one house the curtains were drawn apart to reveal a television showing pictures of a shouting crowd. But the room was empty of people, and the other windows were dark. Two doors on, gaps in the downstairs drapery revealed bearded men huddled in a circle. A book was open on a low table, and one of the men, whose beard flowed down the buttoned front of his smock to his belly, was running a long finger from right to left along the page. In an upstairs room two women in burqas sat facing each other, motionless, lit from above by a strip-light that edged their black drapery with silver. Women behind veils and nose-guards; men behind beards; children who were gathered behind curtains and who sat in his class as though startled by daylight – everywhere the gaze that could not be met, the eyes that would not be followed.

And on the edge of this mystery Sharon, the foal abandoned by the herd and watched by eyes that refused to show themselves. As Stephen thought of this a groan started within him and sounded through the bus. The driver looked round before driving on as the traffic lights changed. Stephen left the bus at the next stop and walked with troubled thoughts to the address in George Street.

The Department of Community Services was housed in a featureless modern building composed of glass and concrete strips, set among decaying nineteenth-century facades. He found himself in a room plastered with cheerful mission statements and pictures of smiling multiracial children under smiling multicultural suns. He tried to communicate the urgency of his business to the distracted young secretary who greeted him, but he had no name for the person he wished to see other than Mona or Fiona. The rest of his story was one that he found hard to tell.

At the mention of Angel Towers, however, the secretary nodded, as though acknowledging that his tale might have a grain of truth in it, and asked him to wait while she made enquiries. He sat in a plastic chair staring at a notice about benefits. It was hung on the wall between two other notices, one in Arabic script and the other in what seemed to be Polish. Stephen assumed that their message was the same. The sight made him anxious. As a mere Englishman he was, in this environment, one of the dispossessed.

Iona Ferguson was as Jim Roberts had described her: short, plump, in her thirties, with a round unsmiling face framed by short brown hair. She was dressed in a long green tunic of some artificial stuff, which came down over her grey trousers as far as the knees. She looked at him coldly as though he were intruding into her private affairs, and made no move to shake his hand.

‘We'll go to my office,' she said, and turned abruptly round, as though her words were not an invitation but a rebuke.

Her office on the floor above overlooked the street, through long metal-framed windows that could not be opened. There was a desk with a computer, a few papers and a telephone. A filing cabinet stood beside the desk, surmounted by a plaster-cast figure of a cat. On the wall facing the window was a large poster, from which four men wearing dark glasses and leather jackets pointed their sightless faces defiantly at the observer. Above them was the word ‘Metallica', in which the M and the final A were stretched to form bolts of lightning. He remembered Metallica from his Oxford days, when he had been forced to overhear the sounds of Heavy Metal from the adjacent room on his staircase. It had been a relief when, in his final year, he had been able to move out of college into a house where he was the only undergraduate.

Iona Ferguson gestured to a chair beneath the poster and he sat facing her across the desk.

‘How can I help?'

‘I'm Stephen Haycraft, a teacher at St Catherine's. I gather you asked my colleague Jim Roberts to make discreet enquiries about Sharon Williams, who is one of my pupils.'

‘I did,' she said. She was eyeing him curiously, as though to penetrate his disguise. ‘It is a routine matter for every child in care. Whenever it comes to our attention that the domestic arrangements have changed, we try to forestall any trouble. If you have anything to tell us Stephen, it will certainly be useful.'

He assumed that surnames were never used in the world of social work. But it was harder for him to speak, when his status as the one authority in Sharon's mutilated life was so abruptly snatched from him.

‘What domestic arrangements do you mean?'

‘When we put Sharon with Mrs Williams, when was it, seven years ago now? Mr Williams was still around, and it was as near to a stable household as you are likely to find in Angel Towers. Apparently Mr Williams left quite some while back and there is a new man, a Polish guy, moved in – one reason why the boys are upset. When this happens young girls are at risk, as you will appreciate.'

‘I do appreciate. And I wish I didn't.'

‘So what has Sharon told you, Stephen? You can call me Iona, by the way.'

She leaned back in her chair and gave an abrupt mechanical smile. He noticed that her small brown eyes, which were closely packed against her nose, had been outlined with mascara. There was a hint of henna in her hair, and her coral pink nails bore the mark of a professional manicurist. There were other signs too, that Iona had tried to improve her appearance, struggling to make the best of nature's gifts, and in the course of doing so, spoiling them. And he thought with a pang of Sharon's quiet blemished beauty, which shone through every coating of neglect.

‘She has told me nothing,' he said.

‘Well, that's good to hear. I assume you are in a position to ask her the right kind of questions?'

‘If you mean can I ask her directly whether she has been raped, then the answer is no.'

She discerned his bitter tone and looked at him for a moment in silence.

‘Of course you are her teacher only,' she said. He did not like the word ‘only', which seemed to imply that he might be something more.

‘I happen to know she has been raped,' he said, and a hot flush suffused his face.

‘Oh? By whom?'

‘By a gang of foreigners, I suspect Afghan or Iraqi, who live in Angel Towers.'

Iona sighed and wiped a small hand across her brow.

‘You will appreciate Stephen that every time we put an Asian family into Council accommodation we have to cope with racist attacks and insinuations. It is our policy not to believe this kind of thing until there is proof.'

‘Suppose there were proof. What would you do?'

‘Well, we could go to the police of course. But we would first of all move the child to safe accommodation elsewhere.'

‘That is what you should do with Sharon. I beg you to do it. Now.'

Iona sighed again and shook her head.

‘You tell me she has said nothing. In which case I don't see how we can act.'