A Week in December (16 page)

It was an odd thing, Hassan sometimes thought, that although all the LSG people were atheists, they were often concerned for the religious freedoms of others. The Mormons of North America were Creationist bigots, but the Shias of Mosul, it seemed, had their rights. The Protestants of Bogside used their brute numbers to suppress the Roman Catholics - whose kitsch little shrines, on the other hand, being all they had, were entitled to protection. Sometimes Hassan worried that this was a perverted kind of colonialism - little better than the French Empire which, long after it had ditched religion at home, was concerned to send nuns and missionaries to the people it colonised in Africa and Indochina.

It wasn't that hard to explain, though, this apparent inconsistency. Religious belief, he thought, was always subservient to the power motive and therefore ...

At this moment, Jason Salano jabbed him in the ribs with his elbow. 'Stick your hand up, Jock.'

'What?'

'Stick your hand up, Jock. We're voting for immediate withdrawal.'

Dazed and a little bruised, Hassan raised his arm and made himself one with the crowd.

'What did you call me?' he said, as the applause for the speaker and the carried motion died down.

'What do you mean?' said Jason Salano.

'Did you call me "Jock"?'

'Don't get like that, man. It's just a friendly term. You know. It's like the way you talk, man. Like the Welsh guy, we call him "Dai" Thomas.'

'I see,' said Hassan. He felt the sudden, icy recoil of cultural loathing that he'd felt towards the foul-mouthed Glasgow boys - a desire for higher ground, with cleaner air. 'And does that mean I call you Rasta?'

'Aye. Ye can gi' me a wee nickname any time ye fancy, Jock.' Jason laughed. 'Come on, man. Let's go. I'm hungry. It's time for my tea.'

As he walked away from the college and towards the Tube, Hassan felt his belly grow acid with anger. He had tried as a boy to find a place of safety and light where he could be a good, true thing. God knows, it hadn't been easy, what with his different-coloured skin, the complication of his parents' relative wealth - to say nothing of their religion and of being always in a minority. And then in the LSG he had found people of like mind to whom these superficial things were of no interest because they were all just citizens of a multicultural world. And now ...
Jock
.

He spat the word out as he walked up Walworth Road in the icy rain towards the Tube station at the Elephant and Castle. Well fuck
them
, he thought. He was close to tears. The truth was that for a long time now he had been dissatisfied with what the LSG was offering, and Jason's crude intervention had served only to make him confront the fact that he had been avoiding: that politics alone were not enough.

A bicycle with no lights on shot past him along the pavement, making him leap to one side.

A few days later, he began a blog on YourPlace.

Blog blog blog blog feel a bit funny doing this. blog blog blog. OK what am I trying to say?

The thing is I feel confused. I guess most guys of my age are trying to find what they believe in. I see it at college, I saw it at school. I liked that about college at first, the passion. Of course I didn't go for the same things as everyone else like folk dancing or astronomy. But I had principles, I had passions and I knew what was right. Trouble was I just couldn't put it all together, I couldn't find a scheme that explained everything. Then I thought I'd found an answer in politics. We had some very good meetings and I caught a glimpse of how there could be a unified explanation.

My father was a religious man, he still
is
a religious man. When I was a kid I used to recite the Koran in public. I learned enough Arabic to recite well at the mosque. When I was eleven,
tajwid
was my thing. That's a special way of recitation. Blog blog blog. Who on earth will read this? I'm talking to myself, aren't I?

God I'm like a fifteen-year-old locked up in his room wondering if he EXISTS! You can see from my 'doormat' how old I really am and what I look like.

I lost interest in religion when I was at school because I felt it was divisive. It was pushing me away from my friends and making a foreigner of me. My experience of politics at college underlined this. It made religion look kind of tribal and a drag on progress which was to get people to understand how exploitation works, how economic systems are geared, how the US runs the Middle East, etc. How the wretched of the earth toil for the rich.

Then I had a sort of road to Damascus - road to Mecca, more like - moment. I saw that identity was more important than economic power and that till we've got that sorted out we're going nowhere fast. Is this back to square one?

Hassan stopped typing. He'd in theory been a 'member' of YourPlace for two years but hardly ever logged in. His 'doormat', or welcome screen, gave little away and he wasn't much interested in what had happened to the children he'd been at school with, even though one or two of them had graffiti-ed his bulletin board.

Blogging was the last resort of the loser, he thought, as his eye ran down the accounts of going to the pictures, trying out new restaurants, arriving at airports to visit far-flung aunties. They were like an end-of-year round robin sent by a cousin so boring he'd been exiled as a penance to Patagonia. The videos were worse: shaky travelogues filmed from the back of taxis on mobile phones, or music promos of women thrusting out their groins.

Most of these people just seemed to be asking for confirmation that they existed, thought Hassan. The answer was, they did. Unfortunately. Now millions of them could show each other just how empty their existence was.

But he still resumed his typing, two-fingered and accurate.

Within the week his homepage had a 'jab', as YourPlace called it, from someone called Grey_Rider, who said he was very interested in what Hassan had written and thought perhaps he could help. It would be better to meet in person and he suggested an Internet cafe at the top of Tottenham Court Road.

Hassan thought about it for a few moments. It was the sort of thing your parents warned you against, but he was no longer twelve years old. What could go wrong? At the worst, the man would be a pervert, in which case he'd just walk out. From a life in Glasgow and London he'd at least picked up some street nous.

Seated in a booth, with a takeaway cup of tea from the next-door Cafe Bravo, Hassan passed the time by connecting to his e-mail server. Grey_Rider, it was agreed, would recognise him from his YourPlace photograph so there was no need for any red carnation in the buttonhole of his bomber jacket.

'You must be Hassan.'

He hadn't noticed the man in the next booth. How long had he been there while Hassan was going through his webmail?

'Aye.'

Hassan stood up and found his right hand warmly clasped.

'My name is Salim. No need for this pseudonym nonsense any more.'

Hassan found himself shaking hands with a man of about thirty, taller than he was, of African parentage, Ethiopian maybe, with a candid, friendly expression and a London accent. He put his arm briefly round Hassan's shoulder. He had an earring in his left lobe.

'There's a juice bar not far from here. We could go and have a chat there if you like.'

'All right.' Hassan was aware of how guarded he must seem and regretted not being able to respond more openly to Salim's friendly manner, but the way they'd met had after all been pretty strange: from the hypothetical reality of pseudonymous e-mail to the warmth of human touch.

In Grafton Way, Salim led him into a juice bar/cafe with lightweight metal chairs and circular tables. It was the kind of place Hassan liked - modern, teetotal and one of a dwindling number not owned by Cafe Bravo, Folger's or some other US monster with sour, expensive coffee, glutinous muffins and a long queue.

He ordered mango juice and noticed Salim did the same.

'I saw your thing on YourPlace,' said Salim. 'I use this, like, powerful search engine that picks up a lot of keywords. Then, when I read what you'd written I couldn't stop laughing.'

'I know it was a wee bit teenage, it's just--'

'No, no, I didn't mean that. I laughed because it was so right. Me and you were meant to meet.'

'We were?' Hassan felt himself smile a little, despite his caution. Burly Salim reminded him of Baloo the Bear in the
Jungle Book
cartoon.

'We were.' Salim smiled. 'I run a discussion group at a mosque not far from where you live. Near Pudding Mill Lane. We meet after prayers once a week and we discuss our faith and our lives, how we can bring the two together. A lot of traditional Muslims, I think they pay lip-service if you know what I mean, and when they've said their prayers they think that's it. But we share our thoughts on how the Koran's a programme for all you do. Islam's for life.'

'Not just for Christmas,' said Hassan.

'What?'

'Silly joke. Like a dog. It was an RSPCA advert. "A dog is for life, not just for--"'

'Do you make a lot of jokes about religion?'

'No, no. Not at all,' said Hassan quickly. Shit.

'Are you from Scotland?'

'Yes,' said Hassan. 'Is that relevant?'

'No. Not to our purposes.' Salim smiled again.

'Good.'

'Well, do you think you'd like to come along and try it? You obviously know the scriptures and you're looking for something more meaningful in your life.'

Hassan thought. It was a little disappointing, just to be called back to the old faith. But in another way, he felt it was time. There was something attractive about going home, returning to the fundamental things, when politics alone had let him down. 'Jock'. God.

'All right,' he said. 'On condition I don't have to give any speeches or public declarations.'

'Sure,' said Salim. 'We're perhaps a bit more fervent than people of your father's generation. You know. But we're traditional too. It's all based on scripture, not on interpretation.'

'But no public speaking? You promise?'

'I think you'll find you want to. But it's entirely up to you.'

Salim paid the bill and gave Hassan a booklet to read. 'Our next meeting's on Wednesday. Will I see you there?'

'Maybe. Probably.'

III

Gabriel Northwood was staring through the window of his barrister's chambers at the warm drizzle that was starting to fall on Essex Court. He had finished the Tuesday 'Brutal' Sudoku and had fallen back on the 'Testing'. He tossed the puzzles into the wastepaper basket and picked up a copy of the novel he was reading, one of Balzac's slower ones, which he'd borrowed from the library since he no longer had enough money to buy books. The pace didn't bother him. He didn't care for too much narrative in novels, and he liked the solidity of the Master's specification: the stone flags, lead and verdigris; the inky writs and rent books. He held it in his left hand, and, with his feet up on the desk, he used his right to click the mouse over the e-mail icon and watched the inbox unfurl from the dock.

There were two new messages. His accountant. Subject: Your VAT return. Then, [email protected]. Subject: Dec 22: pour-memoire.

He had forgotten he was meant to go to dinner with them. Perhaps he had meant to forget. In the human mind, the French psychologist Pierre Janet had claimed, nothing ever gets lost; it was merely a question of whether the route to finding it was blocked by other traffic or by a hidden desire to forget - as Janet's one-time colleague Sigmund Freud maintained; for in our thought processes, the old Moravian dream-reader had believed, nothing is ever accidental.

By this reasoning, Gabriel was a contributor to his own failure. His lack of work couldn't be ascribed only to chance or to the judgements of solicitors who didn't brief him - or even to his own performances in court; there must on his part have been at least an element of volition.

Perhaps, thought Gabriel. He didn't remember how he'd met the Toppings in the first place - probably through Andy Warshaw, his friend in Lincoln's Inn; then all it had needed was one attendance at their house, reasonable manners, and he was for ever listed as a solitary man who could be summoned to sit between female strangers.

Yet the thought of dinner was attractive to Gabriel. The food at lunchtime in the dining hall was no longer the bargain it had once seemed; he disliked sitting on long benches with other barristers and he disapproved of the way they called the dining hall 'Domus', to rhyme with 'comb-us', as though they could rewrite Ovid's scansion in their own dog-Latin. The Toppings would doubtless have caterers who'd be obliged to provide a minimum of three courses. Most of the other guests would probably spend the evening trying not to eat, pushing the food round the plate while offering insincere compliments. Someone had to put the stuff in his mouth, and Gabriel was thin enough to eat three dinners single-handed; a week before, he had bought some braces (from the Oxfam shop, he couldn't help noting) to keep up the trousers of his suit.

Samson put his head round the door. 'Tea in Mr Hutton's room, Mr Northwood.'

'Thank you,' said Gabriel.

The Thames was just visible from the window of Eustace Hutton, QC's room, where members of the chambers stood among the boxes of documents and the towers of lever-arch files from which curled yellow gummed-paper markers. When Hutton walked over to the Royal Courts of Justice, the clerks preceded him with railway porters' trolleys on which they wheeled the weight of papers his Appeal Court appearances necessitated. 'If I might request your lordships to start the day with a little housekeeping,' Hutton invariably began, speaking from within his piled redoubt of cardboard boxes, while identifying for the judges the system by which he would refer to documents he wanted them to see. Equally invariably, their lordships, however scintillating on matters of jurisprudence, grumbled about the paperchase. 'Box four, file two, appendix three, page forty-four, paragraph seven ... Is this not something of a record - even for you, Mr Hutton?'