The Road from Damascus (35 page)

‘Someone tracking you?’

‘You never know, brother.’ Then, noting Sami’s swallowed-lips grin: ‘Nah, not now. But this is training.’

In slow dawn on Wormwood Scrubs, with Ammar barking whispered orders, they stretched, did sit-ups, press-ups. Military crawls through morning-moist weeds.

‘We could do this nearer you.’ Ammar giving the impression of measuring words by the millimetre. ‘Regent’s Park. Hampstead Heath. But we’re safer on the Scrubs.’ And more cryptically: ‘We’ve got it… erm… pegged.’

Pegged? Reference to tents? The pavilions of the first holy warriors? Sami let it go. There was dogshit everywhere, at this hour like icebergs hidden in a dark sea. They jogged a long circuit. Planes in the cloud above, traffic rumble occult on the horizons. Training finished with a race, which Ammar, spider legs clicking, always won. Mujahid second, with the tighter movements of a crustacean. Sami last, being early middle-aged. Blood tubes in his brain constricted above the ears, chest sputtering like the combustion engine, stealing oxygen, puking carbonate. Now his more urgent race began, to have them deliver him to the student room, and the shower. He had only minutes before the sweat sheen staled on him.

He jogged to the car when they wanted to stroll. ‘Training’s never over,’ he said, successfully, to enthuse them. He wanted to get back fast, but they wanted to educate him.

They quoted Qur’anic prophecies concerning cars:
And (it is He who creates) horses and mules and asses for you to nde, as well as for (their) beauty: and He will yet create things of which (today) you have no knowledge
(Qur’an 16.8).

Between Westbourne Park and Marylebone they explained how light travels in a day the distance the moon travels in a thousand years, how the Qur’an contains this information. Statistics, equations he didn’t understand. By Marylebone, and the shops opening for business, he had a millennium’s worth of self-stink in his nostrils. New wax in his ears. The Qur’an says the earth is egg-shaped, that the mountains move like clouds, that stars and planets swim in their orbits. Sami swam in encrusting sweat, in brewing shit. The shower, please God, fast. The Qur’an gave hints to brain science, describing the cerebrum –
the lying, rebellious forehead
! – as the site of lies and aggression. Sami’s forehead yellowed, full of heat.

But strangely enough, Sami felt at ease with these boys talking science. There was little otherworldly in it. It was his own dirt that made him panic. So to forget it, to keep it at bay, he steered the talk to more local issues.

‘How’s everything at home?’

‘Fine. Aunt Hasna’s upset. You heard about Salim.’

Salim. Her good, obedient, Iraqi son. Doctor Salim.

‘No.’

‘He’s engaged to a Nigerian nurse.’

‘Fuck.’

‘That’s right. Without his mother’s permission, of course. Which is not good, if you ask me. The ties of the womb and so on. Otherwise, good for him. She’s a sister. Hausa girl. Muhajjiba.’

‘What else?’

‘My sister’s missing you.’

‘Did she say so?’

‘Not so much say so. But I see it, man. I know.’

Mujahid sank in silence on the back seat. Silence all round. The lack of words seemed to stretch the minutes out. So Sami brought them back to their favourite topics.

‘What exactly are you training for?’

‘The last battle, brother.’

‘So it’s coming up, is it?’

‘Coming fast.’ Ammar bowing his forehead in satisfied assent at his own comment, as if he’d found a bonus in his pay packet.

‘Well, you know better than me on the Islamic thing. But at the time of the Mongols there were Muslims who thought the endtimes were around the corner.’

‘Irrelevant. Read the traditions of the Prophet and his companions. The signs are falling into place.’

Their interest, like Mustafa’s, was ancient and modern, cutting out the centre of Islamic history.

‘Palestine, brother. Iraq. Crusader bases all over the Gulf, on holy soil. Vodka-addicted atheists raping our sisters in Chechnya. Brothers in Bosnia blockaded so they can’t defend themselves from kuffar. Hindus desecrating mosques in Kashmir. Oppression all over the umma. But we waking up now. Palestine’s the start of it. Soon there’ll be a world Intifada, and then this training will have a purpose. You too, Sami. There’ll be purpose for you.’

‘Is God not purpose enough? Not my place to ask, I suppose, but…’

‘God’s not here, is He? I mean His nation’s here, and His rulebook. His constitution. It’s our job to implement His law. To change this state of oppression.’

Ammar, in the absence of God, must find the absolute elsewhere.

‘But if Allah had wanted…’ put in Sami, sly.

‘Shit, Sami.’ Ammar slipping. ‘Don’t play games. It’s a different issue. Action is what we need. Allah doesn’t change the state of a people until they change what’s in themselves. You not learning that yet? We need to be ready.’

‘Action is what we need.’ Ammar’s sentence reverberated in Sami’s idleness. His pride had already been swallowed, pushed fibrously through his cleaned-up system, and shat out into the bowl of past time. There was therefore no reason why he shouldn’t take the first job he could find. He was even learning to drive, which meant accepting his status as damned and helpless contributor to the Earth’s death – as carbonate merchant. Who was he to resist? The system was greater than him, and he was ready for any indignity, economically speaking. Anything to earn his daily bread. In one evening’s
Standard
, he read:

Pyramid Power

Marketing Professionals Urgently Required

The Future Starts Here

No Experience Necessary.

He pitched his voice to self-sale and called the number. A machine answered, telling him success was waiting riverside at eight every morning. He rubbed his shoes with a cloth and scissored the edges of his beard. Ammar provided him with suit and pressed shirt. He set his alarm for five, making time to shower and to progress across the city gently enough not to bring forth sweat.

The address in his pocket named a two-storey building crammed beneath a railway arch. He arrived early and paced the pavement, practising smiles. Some booming vibration swam from upstairs to meet the traffic in fishy embrace. Young, brightly dressed people skipped E-happy through the door. It looked like a morning-after party. Sami even wondered if he’d misunderstood the advert. Had it been cryptic warehouse-rave code? ‘Future Starts Here’ sounded junglistic enough, and of course ‘Pyramid Power’. Rave, or New Age, or Masonic. But Marketing Professionals? How out of touch was he?

At five minutes to the appointment he pushed the steel door open. A wooden door to his immediate right was handleless and marked with a no-entry X. Otherwise, a stairwell. He had to step through a triangular polystyrene frame to start climbing. An A4 printout reading ‘The Ascension’ was stapled to the apex. He ascended, approaching trance tones, a clickety beat, big booms. At the top, two more doors of unadorned, gouged wood, labelled ‘Initiated’ (to his right) and ‘Uninitiated’. Sami supposed he was uninitiated, and knocked. The door was opened.

A blonde in business skirt and blouse said ‘welcome’ into his eyes. The South London accent didn’t match the greeting. She ushered him inward and pointed to an imitation-leather couch. A black girl perched there nervous as a deer, hands clasped around slim stockinged knees. The corners of her wide mouth twitched upwards. Sami smiled hello.

‘Welcome,’ repeated the blonde. ‘Be seated if you will. A few minutes only.’

She swished into a back office.

Sami sat, subsiding further than he’d expected into the couch’s numb reception. The rave sound was quietened, as if the room were soundproofed. His couch companion rolled involuntarily towards him, touched her hand on his thigh to steady herself, and grinned ‘oops!’ to make it friendly.

‘I’m Aisha,’ she said, lifting her hand from his thigh to shake.

He took it. ‘I’m Sami.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Sami.’

She sustained her smiling, unbroken as a river’s flow. Liquid black eyes unblemished. The whiteness of her teeth. The pinkness of her tongue. It was revelatory to Sami to remember that a human could be pure. He couldn’t name her smell but it was inside him like spring-cleaning. Molecules of her floating inside his brain, sparking receptors.

She asked him, ‘Any experience of this kind of work?’

‘No. Well, I don’t know what it’s going to be really, but no anyway. I was trying to be an academic until recently.’

‘Academic? That’s interesting. I think it’s sales. I’ve done a little. It’s all right if you keep thinking positive. I need this one, though. No money in the bank. I need this one.’ She flicked crossed fingers between their noses. ‘I need it, God,’ she prayed.

The blonde returned, bearing papers. ‘Welcome,’ she said, to Sami’s eyes, then Aisha’s. She dropped her gaze to give instructions, and kept it dropped as she turned and sashayed away. An efficiency of skirt-bound buttocks.

They each had a form to fill. Name, Age, Birth Sign. Then an open question: How Much Do You Want To Win?

Sami Traifi, Sami wrote. Virgo. He put twenty-seven for age. How Much Do You Want To Win? He answered in genre: One Hell Of A Lot.

He waited for Aisha to finish. She wrote a paragraph about winning in tiny letters, the pen pushed hard into the resistance of her folded leg.

‘Aisha. That’s a Muslim name.’

‘Don’t know. It’s Aisha Smith. My Mum says it’s African, Aisha. You Muslim?’

‘Well, in a way. By birth, yeah.’

‘Fair enough.’ A sporting smile.

‘Aisha was the name of the Prophet Muhammad’s favourite wife.’

The blonde returned, face to carpet. ‘I’ll gather these,’ she said, ‘if I may.’ And next into Aisha’s eyes, Sami recognizing this contact to be scripted: ‘Welcome, Ee-sha. It’ll be your turn first.’

Aisha rose, smoothing herself down. As he watched her legs recede, heels striking the tiled floor, Sami felt a twinge of fear on her behalf. Deer hooves clacking on concrete.

Someone came forward to meet her, tall and padded, suited like a mukhabarat man. Neck erupting from a tight, white collar, and a fleshy chin, a roast-tomato tan on tumescent nose and cheeks. Sunken green eyes, pools bordered by red anemones. His moist forehead bulging. Creamed brown hair. He slapped at Aisha’s palm like she was a male. Like a rugby player in the bar. ‘Antony,’ he said.

Left alone, Sami sat forward, thinking American artifice to put him in the mood for the new economy. Cartoons in technicolour, novelty, fast food, gadgets, gloss. Muffled rave through the wall. Aisha’s neat shape engraved next to him.

No more than two minutes passed and she was back, overshadowed by Antony’s bulk.

‘Thanks a lot now.’ He dismissed her. ‘That’ll be all for today.’ His smile slapped on like sunscreen.

Sami stood. Again she presented her hand. A fact, unarguable.

‘I know you’ll be selected,’ she told him. ‘You have personality.’

Her face was curved and full like the stages of the moon stitched together, but seamless. Her skin didn’t mask any of her emotion, which made her vulnerable in this environment. She was upset, and she also wished Sami well. Genuine on both counts. No script. Old-fashioned, really.

Sami took his turn, swinging into the mid-Atlantic shake-slap presented him.

‘I’m Antony. In charge of this operation. On the peak of the pyramid.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Antony.’ First names are important. The mask of intimacy.

‘Firm shake. I like it.’ Antony smiled into Sami’s eyes to indicate the liking. ‘Please step this way.’

He sat in an imitation-leather armchair on one side of an empty desk, Sami on the other side, on a plastic chair. On the wall behind there was a portrait of Antony framed in imitation gold leaf. Lines like rays or roots were drawn downwards from the photograph into a descending base of more photos, fifty or sixty, passport sized. In the portrait Antony beamed as he was beaming now.

‘Sami, my brother.’ Raising his head from Sami’s form. ‘I call you brother because we’re a family here at Pyramid Power. You can think of Pyramid Power as your home. Now. You say you want to win one hell of a lot. Can you expand?’

‘Not so much want,’ Sami said, ‘as need.’

Antony cocked his head with worry. Sami noted it, and inspiration flowed.

‘Not so much need,’ he said, ‘as desire. Desire strong enough to be need. I’m already a winner. Let me out there, I’ll bring home the trophies.’

‘I like it!’ Antony congratulated him. ‘Sami, Sam. You know what the S stands for?’

‘Success?’ Sami offered.

‘That’s another possibility. Not what I was looking for, though.’

‘Er… sales?’

‘Sex, Sam, sex. That desire you mentioned, very aptly. You’re a… think of yourself as a penis, yeah?’

‘OK.’ Sami grinned.

‘Seriously. A throbbing member, Sam.’ Thin lips curled. ‘I’m going to set you free. You’re going to penetrate the world out there, find the sale, and–boom!’ A handclap. ‘Orgasm, Sam. Sex, Sam.’

‘I’m ready for that.’

‘I know you are. I know more than you think.’

‘All right.’

‘This is S for safe sex. You don’t lose, Sam. I’m going to give you twenty quid just for returning home this evening, sale or no sale.’

‘OK, then. Thanks.’

‘You’re on board.’ Antony springing erect, hand groping in his pocket. ‘I’m gifting you something special now. Something – I jest not, Sam – something sacred.’ Extending a silver key across the desk. ‘The key to the manor. The key to the future.’

Sami took it. Smeared his fingerprints on it.

‘Thanks a lot.’

‘One more thing, Sam.’ A low, confidential tone. ‘The beard will have to go. You know what they say about beards?’

‘No, not really.’

‘Beards bedevil business.’ Antony sympathizing. ‘Off with it by tomorrow, OK?’

‘Sure. It’s only recent.’

‘Good. Jules will guide you.’

With a flapping of palms markedly less feel–good than the interview, the blonde directed Sami from the office and through the Uninitiated room. Through the door and to the next. Initiated.