A Week in December Read online

  Meanwhile, Nasim, Farooq’s wife, was tired of the rainy streets of Glasgow. She was still young enough to yearn for the shops and theatres of London, where she pictured herself lunching with elegant friends in Piccadilly, then meeting Knocker in the foyer of the National Theatre. There were not enough spending opportunities in Glasgow for her to dispose of the generous allowance her husband made her, but London ... Her idea of it was based on television programmes and newspaper supplements with pictures of boorish chefs and thin models with brand names coming off the pages in a flickering, subliminal staccato. This year’s go-to, must-see, gotta have ... She didn’t know why there was such urgency about a ‘raunchy’ musical or a shiny handbag but she wanted to find out, before she was too old.

  Havering-atte-Bower wasn’t what Nasim had had in mind. It was almost in Essex. Knocker pointed out to her that in Knightsbridge or Notting Hill they couldn’t have had such a lovely house, with an acre of garden, in sight of Edward the Confessor’s old hunting lodge. They were at the highest point of Greater London, 110 metres above sea level, surrounded by three parks, with open country to the north and extended views in all directions. It was convenient for the Dagenham factory; and for Nasim, Knocker pointed out, it was a short drive to Upminster station, from where the District Line could take her straight to Sloane Square.

  ‘Do I want a view of Purfleet?’ said Nasim. ‘Or the M25?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Knocker. ‘You may grow to like them both.’

  ‘And who was Edward the Confessor?’

  ‘I think he was an English king, or perhaps a monk. A good man anyway.’

  Hassan was pleased to make the move with his parents. He’d been arrested in Renfrew during a scuffle outside a club. After a night in a police cell, he’d come before the magistrates and been given a lecture and a conditional discharge. He told his parents he had stayed the night at a friend’s, and the local paper’s court reporter didn’t connect his name to that of his father, so no account of it appeared.

  So that was the law, thought Hassan, as he left the court. He wondered how many people had criminal records that they had concealed from their families. He certainly felt no obligation to tell his.

  Running with the non-Muslim gang hadn’t helped his work, and neither did the move down south. He caught the second year of sixth form in a new school and did well enough in his exams only to squeeze into the University of South Middlesex, a clumped aggregation of prestressed concrete and multiple fire doors in one of the wider streets of Walworth. He put his name down to study Social Policy.

  One night after lectures in his first term, Hassan found himself by chance at a meeting of the Left Student Group. One of the third years was giving a talk called ‘Multiculturalism: the Broken Dream’ and something in the title appealed to Hassan.

  The speaker was a scrawny white Londoner with a fluent manner.

  ‘The advertisement read as follows,’ he said, leaning forward to the lectern and adjusting his glasses as he looked down at a piece of paper. ‘“We are trying to recruit from all sections of the community. Because of the specific nature of the work, the number of self-confessed Jews we can appoint will be subject to certain limitations.”’

  He lifted the piece of paper and shook it at his audience. ‘And this,’ he said, ‘is not the product of some neo-Nazi dictatorship, this is from a local council in our very own capital. Yes. Think about that.’

  The audience thought about it, and didn’t like it.

  ‘And yes,’ said the speaker, ‘the wording has been modified by me, with “self-confessed Jews” instead of “gay men”, but, it should be stressed, that is the only amendment. Not good, is it?’

  There was a murmur of assent.

  ‘What was the advertisement for?’ said Hassan.

  ‘Not sure,’ said the student next to him. ‘Some sort of youth team leaders, I think.’

  ‘Have these people already forgotten who went into the gas chambers at Belsen and Auschwitz?’ said the speaker. ‘Not only the Jews, but tens of thousands of gypsies and what the local council in question would doubtless call “self-confessed homosexuals”. We must fight homophobia wherever it appears. It is a virus as vicious as racism. In fact, homophobia is racism.’

  Hassan had given little thought to homosexuality. No one he knew in Glasgow had admitted to being gay, and the teaching of the Koran on this matter hardly encouraged debate. Meanwhile, the speaker’s voice was rising: ‘... and such views are symptomatic of a much wider and deeper hostility and intolerance of otherness. Only last week, a London evening paper felt able to sponsor a debate entitled “Is Islam good for London?” Do another substitution here and imagine the reaction if Judaism had been the subject. Are Jews good for London? You just can’t picture that question being posed in a civilised society. Yet there are still those who claim that Islamophobia can’t be racist, because Islam is a religion not a race! They’re fooling themselves. A religion is not only about faith but also about identity, background and culture. As we know, the Muslim community is overwhelmingly non-white. Therefore Islamophobia is racist – and so is anti-Semitism.’

  Hassan was aware that a kind of slip of logic had taken place in the last two sentences – perhaps that a part and a whole had swapped places, or that an implied ‘moreover’ had become a ‘therefore’ – but he couldn’t put his finger on it. What he could see was that the flapping dove had been pulled from the conjuror’s top hat and so, like the others, he applauded. He was against racism, and homophobia and Islamophobia. He didn’t see how he could not be.

  Soon, Hassan became a regular at the LSG meetings. They talked about things that had previously troubled him in a peripheral, unformed way; but what was most attractive to him was that the LSG seemed to have an answer to all these uncertainties – a unified explanation of everything. In this way, he thought, it was itself a bit like a religion. When you went to the imam, he could answer all your questions; that, for believers, was the point of him. Presumably it was the same with the Christians and the Jews: no religion would offer partial solutions or offer help on only some of the big issues, while admitting that on the others it hadn’t a clue. So it was with the LSG. Once you’d got into their way of thinking, there was nothing it couldn’t explain: everything could be seen as the wish of the powerful to exploit the weak. As a template for understanding the world, it drew its strength from the fact that it was grounded on the basest part of human nature – the only thing that defined the species: power. Power expressed through money. But really just power. The other attractive thing about the LSG view of the world was that, once you’d cracked it, it was instantly practicable. It was as though after a one-week correspondence course you could sight-read all music, from ‘Frère Jacques’ to Scarlatti.

  Hassan felt ready to try his new skill on an audience, and began with his parents. They disagreed with him, as he’d expected, but what impressed him was how easily he was able to counter all their objections. The LSG model told him that any international situation could be seen as imperialism and its descendants manipulating the less developed, while domestic issues were always about economic exploitation. Abroad, there was a hierarchy of ownership and race that could not be bucked (it was like a card game: spades always trump diamonds; white always exploits black), while at home the ownership of property and/or employment conferred powers in exact proportion to the value of the item owned. Rich, Western-backed Israel was the source of all stress in the Middle East; America, being the biggest and wealthiest country, was by natural logic the worst offender: the embodiment of the power principle.

  There were in this system no variables or abstracts, nothing fickle, unpredictable or unquantifiable. Here were the simple laws of physics, before any uncertainty principle. To suggest that people acted for any reason other than economic or cultural self-advancement was wilfully to ignore the evidence; you might as well believe in Creationism. And with these rules of caste and behaviour in mind, you could impute motive with certainty. Y
ou knew what drove decisions, because only one motive existed.

  ‘You’ve become very cynical,’ said Nasim. ‘You sound so disillusioned with life.’

  ‘Not disillusioned,’ said Hassan, quoting an LSG speaker. ‘Unillusioned. There’s a crucial difference.’

  For at least a year, the certainty of his understanding gave Hassan a new confidence. It made him feel better able to talk to his fellow students and more at ease with his parents, whom he could see in a clearer, if smaller, perspective.

  It was a kind of joy. He no longer felt brown-skinned or alien or different; he felt enfranchised into a brotherhood of the wise. The many new friends he made through the LSG came from a variety of families, but they had a common intelligence and a bond of knowledge: they had the keys to the kingdom, and Hassan was pleased to be in their number.

  What he had found, he told himself, was identity, and an international one at that; what he had stumbled across was nothing less than himself – and such a discovery was sure to be exhilarating.

  * * *

  Two years after he had first chanced across the LSG, there was an emergency meeting about the American and British occupation of Iraq.

  Hassan was standing at the back, next to Jason Salano, a confident third-year whose grandparents had come to London from Jamaica. The second speaker of the evening was a guest from outside the college, an angry woman from a race relations advisory board.

  ‘Let there be no doubt,’ she said from the lectern, ‘the West wishes to have a base in the Middle East so that if and when its ally Saudi Arabia undergoes a revolution and a new fundamentalist Saudi government is hostile to the West – as Tehran, remember, once kicked out BP – then America and its friends can still have guaranteed access to cheap oil. Did it ever occur to you when the American military was slaughtering Iraqi civilians that Iraq, far from possessing dangerous weapons with intent to use them on the West, was in fact very easy to subdue? Did you ever pause to think that this was precisely why Bush and Blair selected Iraq – not because it was strong and threatening, but for precisely the opposite reason: because it was weak and cheap to invade?’

  She paused rhetorically. ‘It makes sense to the United States to invade countries where it can first use overpowering force to win the war at minimum cost to itself, and then award long-term business contracts to its own multinational companies for decades afterwards to rebuild the devastated country in the American image. Cue Dick Cheney and Haliburton. I’m not saying Saddam Hussein was a blameless leader. But I am saying that Iraq under his leadership had one of the more enlightened regimes in the Middle East, particularly in regard to women’s rights and religious freedoms.’

  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 film
ed 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 café 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 Café 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?