White Teeth (64 page)

It was the same now. Always the fear of consequences. Always this terrible inertia. What he was about to do to his father was so huge, so
colossal
, that the consequences were inconceivable — he couldn’t imagine a moment occurring after that act. Only blankness. Nothingness. Something like the end of the world. And facing the end of the world, or even just the end of the year, had always given Josh a strangely detached feeling.

Every New Year’s Eve is impending apocalypse in miniature. You fuck where you want, you puke when you want, you glass who you want to glass — the huge gatherings in the street; the television round-ups of the goodies and baddies of time past; the frantic final kisses; the 10! 9! 8!

Joshua glared up and down Whitehall, at the happy people going about their dress rehearsal. They were all confident that it wouldn’t happen or certain they could deal with it if it did. But the world happens to you, thought Joshua, you don’t happen to the world. There’s nothing you can do. For the first time in his life, he truly believed that. And Marcus Chalfen believed the direct opposite. And there in a nutshell, he realized, is how I got here, turning out of Westminster, watching Big Ben approach the hour when I shall topple my father’s house. That is how we all got here. Between rocks and hard places. The frying pan and the fire.

Thursday, December 31
^st
1992, New Year’s Eve
Signalling problems at Baker Street
No Southbound Jubilee Line Trains from Baker Street
Customers are advised to change on to the Metropolitan Line at Finchley Road
Or Change at Baker Street on to the Bakerloo
There is no alternative bus service
Last Train 02.00 hours
All London Underground staff wish you a safe and happy New Year!
Willesden Green Station Manager, Richard Daley

Brothers Millat, Hifan, Tyrone, Mo Hussein-Ishmael, Shiva, Abdul-Colin and Abdul-Jimmy stood stock-still like maypoles in the middle of the station while the dance of the New Year went on around them.

‘
Great
,’ said Millat. ‘What do we do now?’

‘Can’t you
read
?’ inquired Abdul-Jimmy.

‘We do what the board suggests, Brothers,’ said Abdul-Colin, short-circuiting any argument with his deep, calming baritone. ‘We change at Finchley Road. Allah provides.’

The reason Millat couldn’t read the writing on the wall was simple. He was stoned. It was the second day of Ramadan and he was cained. Every synapse in his body had clocked out for the evening and gone home. But there was still some conscientious worker going round the treadmill of his brain, ensuring one thought circulated in his skull:
Why? Why get stoned, Millat? Why
? Good question.

At midday he’d found an ageing eighth of hash in a drawer, a little bundle of cellophane he hadn’t had the heart to throw away six months ago. And he smoked it all. He smoked some of it out of his bedroom window. Then he walked to Gladstone Park and smoked some more. He smoked the great majority of it in the car park of Willesden Library. He finished it off in the student kitchen of one Warren Chapman, a South African skateboarder he used to hang with back in the day. And as a result, he was so cained now, standing on the platform with the rest, so
cained
that he could not only hear sounds within sounds but sounds within sounds
within
sounds. He could hear the mouse scurrying along the tracks, creating a higher level of harmonious rhythm with the crackle of the tannoy and the off-beat sniff of an elderly woman twenty feet away. Even when the train pulled in, he could still hear these things beneath the surface. Now, there
is
a level of cained that you can be, Millat knew, that is just so
very very
cained that you reach a level of Zen-like sobriety and come out the other side feeling absolutely tip-top as if you’d never sparked up in the first place. Oh, Millat
longed
for that. He only wished he’d got that far. But there just wasn’t quite enough.

‘Are you all right, Brother Millat?’ asked Abdul-Colin with concern as the tube doors slid open. ‘You have gone a nasty colour.’

‘Fine, fine,’ said Millat, and did a credible impression of being fine because hash just isn’t like drink; no matter how bad it is, you can always, at some level, pull your shit together. To prove this theory to himself, he walked in a slow but confident fashion down the carriage and took a seat at the very end of the line of Brothers, between Shiva and some excitable Australians heading for the Hippodrome.

Shiva, unlike Abdul-Jimmy, had had his share of wild times and could spot the tell-tale red-eye from a distance of fifty yards.

‘Millat,
man
,’ he said under his breath, confident he couldn’t be heard by the rest of the Brothers above the noise of the train. ‘What have you been
doing
to yourself?’

Millat looked straight ahead and spoke to his reflection in the train window. ‘I’m preparing myself.’

‘By getting messed up?’ hissed Shiva. He peered at the photocopy of Sura 52 he hadn’t quite memorized. ‘Are you crazy? It’s hard enough to remember this stuff without being on the planet Mars while you’re doing it.’

Millat swayed slightly, and turned to Shiva with a mistimed lunge. ‘I’m not preparing myself for
that
. I’m preparing myself for
action
. Because no one else will do it. We lose one man and you all betray the cause. You desert. But I stand firm.’

Shiva fell silent. Millat was referring to the recent ‘arrest’ of Brother Ibrāhām ad-Din Shukrallah on trumped up charges of tax evasion and civil disobedience. No one took the charges seriously, but everybody knew it was a not-so gentle warning from the Metropolitan Police that they had their eye trained on KEVIN activities. In the light of this, Shiva had been the first one to beat a retreat from the agreed Plan A, quickly followed by Abdul-Jimmy and Hussein-Ishmael, who, despite his desire to wreak violence upon somebody,
anybody
, had his shop to think about. For a week the argument raged (with Millat firmly defending Plan A), but on the 26th Abdul-Colin, Tyrone and finally Hifan conceded that Plan A might not be in KEVIN’s long-term interest. They could not, after all, put themselves in an imprisonment situation unless they were secure in the knowledge that KEVIN had leaders to replace them. So Plan A was off. Plan B was hastily improvised. Plan B involved the seven KEVIN representatives standing up halfway through Marcus Chalfen’s press conference and quoting Sura 52, ‘The Mountain’, first in Arabic (Abdul-Colin alone would do this) and then in English. Plan B made Millat sick.

‘And that’s it? You’re just going to
read
to him? That’s his punishment?’

What happened to revenge? What happened to just desserts, retribution, jihad?

‘Do you suggest,’ Abdul-Colin solemnly inquired, ‘that the word of Allah as given to the Prophet Muhammad —
Salla Allahu ’Alaihi Wa Sallam
— is not sufficient?’

Well,
no
. And so even though it sickened him, Millat had to step aside. In place of the questions of honour, sacrifice, duty, the life and death questions that came with the careful plotting of clan warfare, the very reasons Millat joined KEVIN — in place of these, came the question of
translation
. Everybody agreed that no translation of the Qur’ān could claim to be the word of God, but at the same time everybody conceded that Plan B would lose something in the delivery if no one could understand what was being said. So the question was
which
translation and
why
. Would it be one of the untrusty but clear Orientalists: Palmer (1880), Bell (1937— 9), Arberry (1955), Dawood (1956)? The eccentric but poetic J. M. Rodwell (1861)? The old favourite, passionate, dedicated Anglican convert par excellence Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall (1930)? Or one of the Arab brothers, the prosaic Shakir or the flamboyant Yusuf Ali? Five days they argued it. When Millat walked into the Kilburn Hall of an evening he had only to squint to mistake this talkative circle of chairs, these supposed fanatic fundamentalists, for an editorial meeting at the
London Review of Books
.

‘But Dawood is a plod!’ Brother Hifan would argue vehemently. ‘I refer you to 52:44:
If they saw a part of heaven falling down, they would still say: “It is but a mass of clouds
!” Mass of clouds? It is not a rock concert. At least with Rodwell there is some attempt to capture the poetry, the remarkable nature of the Arabic:
And should they see a fragment of the heaven falling down, they would say, “It is only a dense cloud
.” Fragment, dense — the effect is far stronger, accha?’

And then, haltingly, Mo Hussein-Ishmael: ‘I am just a butcher-stroke-cornershop-owner. I can’t claim to know much about it. But I like very much this last line; it is Rodwell . . . er, I think, yes, Rodwell. 52:49:
And in the night-season: Praise him when the stars are setting
. Night-season. I think that is a lovely phrase. It sounds like an Elvis ballad. Much better than the other one, the Pickthall one:
And in the night-time also hymn His praise, and at the setting of the stars
. Night-season is very much lovelier.’

‘And is this what we are here for?’ Millat had yelled at all of them. ‘Is this what we joined KEVIN for? To take no action? To sit around on our arses playing with words?’

But Plan B stuck, and here they were, whizzing past Finchley Road, heading to Trafalgar Square to carry it out. And this was why Millat was stoned. To give him enough guts to do something else.

‘I stand firm,’ said Millat, in Shiva’s ear, slurring his words, ‘that is what we’re here for. To stand firm. That is why I joined. Why did you join?’

Well, in fact Shiva had joined KEVIN for three reasons. First, because he was sick of the stick that comes with being the only Hindu in a Bengali Muslim restaurant. Secondly, because being Head of Internal Security for KEVIN beat the hell out of being second waiter at the Palace. And thirdly, for the women. (Not the KEVIN women, who were beautiful but chaste in the extreme, but all the women on the outside who had despaired of his wild ways and were now hugely impressed by his new asceticism. They loved the beard, they dug the hat, and told Shiva that at thirty-eight he had finally ceased to be a boy. They were massively attracted by the fact that he had renounced women and the more he renounced them, the more successful he became. Of course this equation could only work so long, and now Shiva was getting more pussy than he ever had as a kaffir.) However, Shiva sensed that the truth was not what was required here, so he said: ‘To do my duty.’

‘Then we are on the same wavelength, Brother Shiva,’ said Millat, going to pat Shiva’s knee but just missing it. ‘The only question is: will you do it?’

‘Pardon me, mate,’ said Shiva, removing Millat’s arm from where it had fallen between his legs. ‘But I think, taking into account your . . . umm . . . present condition . . . the question is, will
you
?’

Now
there
was a question. Millat was half sure that he was possibly maybe going to do something or not that would be correct and very silly and fine and un-good.

‘Mill, we’ve got a Plan B,’ persisted Shiva, watching the clouds of doubt cross Millat’s face. ‘Let’s just go with Plan B, yeah? No point in causing trouble.
Man
. You are
just
like your dad. Classic Iqbal. Can’t let things go. Can’t let sleeping cats die or whatever the fuck the phrase is.’

Millat turned from Shiva and looked at his feet. He had been more certain when he began, imagining the journey as one cold sure dart on the Jubilee Line: Willesden Green → Charing Cross, no changing of trains, not this higgledy-piggledy journey; just a straight line to Trafalgar, and then he would climb the stairs into the square, and come face to face with his great-great-grandfather’s enemy, Henry Havelock on his plinth of pigeon-shat stone. He would be emboldened by it; and he would enter the Perret Institute with revenge and revisionism in his mind and lost glory in his heart and he would and he would and he

‘I think,’ said Millat, after a pause, ‘I am going to vomit.’

‘Baker Street!’ cried Abdul-Jimmy. And with the discreet aid of Shiva, Millat crossed the platform to the connecting train.

Twenty minutes later the Bakerloo Line delivered them into the icy cold of Trafalgar Square. In the distance, Big Ben. In the square, Nelson. Havelock. Napier. George IV. And then the National Gallery, back there near St Martin’s. All the statues facing the clock.

‘They do love their false icons in this country,’ said Abdul-Colin, with his odd mix of gravity and satire, unmoved by the considerable New Year crowd who were presently spitting at, dancing round and crawling over the many lumps of grey stone. ‘Now, will somebody please tell me: what is it about the English that makes them build their statues with their backs to their culture and their eyes on the time?’ He paused to let the shivering KEVIN Brothers contemplate the rhetorical question.

‘Because they look to their future to forget their past. Sometimes you almost feel sorry for them, you know?’ he continued, turning full circle to look around at the inebriated crowd.

‘They have no faith, the English. They believe in what men make, but what men make crumbles. Look at their empire. This is all they have. Charles II Street and South Africa House and a lot of stupid-looking stone men on stone horses. The sun rises and sets on it in twelve hours, no trouble. This is what is left.’

‘I’m bloody cold,’ complained Abdul-Jimmy, clapping his mittened hands together (he found his uncle’s speeches a big pain in the arse). ‘Let’s get going,’ he said, as a huge beer-pregnant Englishman, wet from the fountains, collided into him, ‘out of this bloody madness. It’s on Chandos Street.’

‘Brother?’ said Abdul-Colin to Millat, who was standing some distance from the rest of the group. ‘Are you ready?’

‘I’ll be along in a minute.’ He shooed them away weakly. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be there.’

There were two things he wanted to see first. The first of which was a particular bench, that bench over there, by the far wall. He walked over to it, a long, stumbling journey, trying to avoid an unruly conga line (so much hashish in his head; lead weights on each foot); but he made it. He sat down. And there it was.