A Week in December Read online

  ‘... judged by our very own music specialist,’ Barry was saying, dragging out his introduction as he watched Lisa being let into the house, ‘lead singer on no less than six top-ten hits and three platinum albums with the fabulous Girls From Behind, yes, it’s L-i-i-i-i-s-s-a-a-a!’

  Lisa clattered down the two steps inside the Barking Bungalow, expertly balanced in high heels and tiny skirt. She greeted the assembled contestants with loud bonhomie and tested out the karaoke microphone with a few bars from Girls From Behind’s best-known hit, ‘Between You and I’.

  All seemed to be working well as the elderly Preston crossed the floor to have the rudiments of the machine explained to him by Lisa.

  ‘So you take this in your hand, love,’ she said, giving him the microphone, ‘then you look down at this little screen and sing the words you can see. No don’t hold it down there, not in front of your trousers like a ... No, no, Preston, you naughty boy ... Hold it up to your mouth ... Now what have I said? Stop it, Barry. Now, what are you going to sing, love?’

  Preston, a Londoner in a grey cardigan with heavy-rimmed glasses, was an experiment for It’s Madness. Normally they liked the contestants to be no more than thirty-five years old, so that there was more likelihood of ‘chemistry’ in the bungalow. The introduction to ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling’, the Righteous Brothers song, played loudly while Preston gazed at the screen by his feet.

  ‘Where’s Mandy?’ said Preston. ‘I said I’d take her to the pictures. Why haven’t you brought the car round?’

  A cut to the celebrity studio showed Barry Levine saying, ‘Maybe we should give him the lyrics of “Mandy” if that’s what he wants to sing.’

  In a moment, a scuffle had broken out in the bungalow, with big Darren trying to force Preston to sing into the microphone, and Preston lashing out with his arms while Lisa, in exaggerated alarm, hid behind the sofa, peeping over the edge from time to time to wave to the camera.

  ‘She’s a natural, that girl,’ said Barry in the studio. ‘What a talent.’

  Four

  Wednesday, December 19

  I

  Hassan al-Rashid was sitting on the Dover to Calais ferry, where he was surprised to find himself almost the only passenger. He’d imagined throngs of thirsty kafirs going to stock up at discount alcohol warehouses in time for their ‘religious’ festival. As he came onboard down the covered companionway and stepped through the first available door, he found himself at once in an outsize alcohol-vending lounge; it was apparently called ‘Le Pub’. He’d walked round both decks available to passengers, but there was no escape: every seat was in a licensed area. He placed himself as far as he could from the bar and stared through the window. The low, gunmetal sky met the high pewter sea at a smudged horizon; the world was wrapped in grey.

  He’d risen with the alarm at six in Havering-atte-Bower to be in time to catch a train from Victoria. He found a seat in a quiet compartment and opened his book. At home he was reading the seminal Milestones by Sayyid Qutb for the third time, but didn’t want to be seen with it, so had brought along one of the many new books that had recently been arriving in his father’s study since the ‘literary gentleman’ had been visiting. It was a ‘thriller’ about horse racing, though not that thrilling. His concentration was disturbed by a raised voice. It was a youth who’d been evicted from first class by the ticket collector. The boy, though white, tried to sound black. He was accompanied by a man who actually was black: a tubby old-timer with a leather cap perched on top of greying dreadlocks. They settled next to Hassan, and the youth occasionally stood up and shouted. He swore in his too-loud, fake-black voice, still angry with the ticket man. Next, he tried to catch the eye of others in the carriage, but all were suddenly engrossed, even by giveaway newspapers. Hassan knew the type: attention-deficit and destined for a life in and out of prison; the old black man was presumably his probation officer or social worker.

  At Faversham, the train divided and Hassan used the excuse to switch carriage with a dumbshow of having only just noticed that he was in the wrong section. At Dover station he waited for a bus to the port, but there was no bus. Then he saw a taxi and climbed in. They went past Dover College and down to the front with its dilapidated hotels; it was gone to seed in the mysterious way of all seaside towns. One hotel had an old red phone box in the forecourt, filled with flowering plants; the cliffs to their left looked less white than grey: grubby and tired in the winter light.

  In the travel centre, Hassan could choose between two ferry lines and picked the one with the first sailing.

  ‘Name?’ said the clerk behind her computer. ‘And first name?’

  Why on earth did you have to give your name to buy a foot-passenger ticket? But Hassan was too surprised to lie. Worse was to come. A loudspeaker announcement directed him and his five fellow passengers to a coach. They drove smartly through the dock area, down white-edged lanes, and were nodded through by the man at the frontier post. As Hassan was starting to relax, the coach was suddenly waved into a shed. Everyone got out and had to put bags and coats through a scanner, then walk through a metal-detecting machine, exactly as at an airport. He hadn’t foreseen this, and it was a setback, perhaps fatal, to his plan.

  So as he sat encased in his grey world on the ferry, Hassan tried to work out how, assuming the scanning arrangements were the same in Calais, he might be able to get his cargo of hydrogen peroxide back through security without arousing suspicion. He hoped to buy the chemicals piecemeal in different pharmacies, to make himself less remembered, but had also found, after only twenty minutes on the Internet, the address of a hairdressers’ supplier in the outskirts where he could buy it all at once.

  He had used Shahla’s knowledge of French to prepare himself. She was always pleased, if a little surprised, to hear from him and, when he told her that he needed help, she’d asked him to her flat in Clapham. She made Persian kebabs with rice and salad; she had bought orange juice for him.

  ‘All right, Mister, what’s it all about?’

  He told her he was going on holiday to France in the summer and wanted to practise his conversation. Shahla clearly disbelieved him, but was too pleased to have his company to ask difficult questions. She’d visited friends of her father’s in Lebanon and learned to speak French from a young age.

  ‘I may have a slight Lebanese accent, Hass,’ she said, throwing back her long black hair as she leaned over to struggle with the cork in the wine bottle. ‘But they won’t mind that in Provence.’

  Hassan was able to turn the conversation to the general topic of how similar many words were in the two languages.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Shahla. ‘It’s easy to have conversations about science or philosophy because the words are all the same. What’s hard is when they talk about ...’ She glanced round the room. ‘You know, concrete things – windowsill, fender, poker, mantel-piece, castor, latch.’

  It was easy then for Hassan to have her confirm the pronunciation of oxygen, for instance, or hydrogen.

  ‘Hydrogène. You’d say it “eed-row-gen”. Try and gargle the “r” a bit.’

  Later he slipped in peroxide.

  “‘Pay-rock-seed”,’ said Shahla. ‘No, let me check. It may not have an acute.’ It didn’t. ‘So it’s “pe-rock-seed”. Sorry about that.’

  He watched her as she reached up to put the dictionary back on its shelf. Her grey skirt rode up to show for a moment the navy blue tights above the brown leather boots. How long were those legs from ankle to hip? he wondered. The funny thing was that Shahla wasn’t coltish on them, but moved quickly and with such balance.

  Then they did some general conversation about shopping and getting into a bus or taxi.

  ‘You’re brilliant, Hass. I thought you said you couldn’t speak a word.’

  ‘Aye, well we did study French at school. The Scottish system, you know. Hadn’t quite packed up yet.’

  ‘So you did a GCSE or something?’

  ‘Yes, but yo
u didn’t have to speak it to pass.’

  He didn’t like to use Shahla in this way, but it was easy enough to explain it to himself. It was a question of priorities. The minor deception of a friend would be forgiven in the long perspective of establishing justice on earth and gaining paradise afterwards. God would look well on Shahla for having helped him; he might even overlook her irreligion.

  Hassan’s conviction that he was right was troubled only by an aching sense of how lucky he was to have a friend who questioned him so little, who seemed to like him just for what he was. If everyone could have taken this view of him, he wondered, would he be planning to go to Calais at all?

  He couldn’t tell anyone of what Husam Nar was planning, but if there was one person in whom he might have confided, it was Shahla. There had been moments over the past two years when he had been tempted to tell her what path he was travelling, but he had always pulled back.

  It was not that Shahla would have been unsympathetic; on the contrary her brown eyes glowed with concern for him. No, the reason he couldn’t tell her was that he felt she would laugh.

  She wouldn’t call Special Branch or MI5 or even the local plods; she wouldn’t tell his parents or his tutors, but he could just imagine her holding her face in her hands and shaking with laughter while her long black hair tumbled down over her breasts. ‘All this, Hass, for a disembodied voice in a desert?’

  Every month he saw a magazine called The Toad on the news-stand and it seemed devoted only to showing how fake and dishonest the public world really was. On radio and television, he felt bombarded by cynicism about current affairs, about politics and, within certain limits of correctness, religion.

  This low-minded national scepticism was part of what he wanted to leave behind in his devotion to what was pure and eternal. No kafir or Jew would ever understand just how spiritual and how demanding Islam really was; in the marrow of its being it meant that every breath and every thought you had was touched by the divine. Hassan’s difficulty was that as a native Scotsman, resident there or in godless London all his life, he was saturated with British culture; his difficulty, if he could have been truthful to himself about it, was that he found The Toad quite funny.

  Shahla was a Muslim and a friend; she shared the outlines of his identity; but she was also a danger because she had balanced things in such a different way. The more he was drawn to her, the more he had to keep away.

  On the ferry, Hassan noticed that most of the conversations he overheard were about money – or rather, about price and value. The chips, the beer, the duty-free drink ... They were obsessed by it, and it made him long for cooler, more spiritual air. His father had often told him as a child that their religion had sprung up because the Prophet was shocked that the people of his tribe were so mercenary. The backbone of Islam, in Knocker’s version, was the need for generosity, alms-giving – for sharing with the weaker members of the group.

  Hassan remembered coming in his parents’ car to France when he was eight or nine, when the ugly materialism of his fellow countrymen, and their drunkenness, had not particularly bothered him. Now everything he saw affirmed the Prophet’s words. Every crude action and word of those around him made him more convinced that he alone on the gently heaving ferry had access to the truth. It was exhilarating – the way that everything, every detail, every observation, played into his heady conviction. It was almost, he imagined, like being in love.

  At Calais docks, he boarded the shuttle bus, then saw a taxi draw up ahead and drop its passenger. He went to the front of the bus and asked the driver to release him. She opened the double doors with a pneumatic hiss and he was in time to catch the taxi and instruct him, ‘Centre ville.’ (‘Not “sontruh vee”. You sound the “l”: “sontruh veal”,’ Shahla had stressed.)

  Just outside the dock area were bars called Le Pub and Le Liverpool, where Hassan pictured busloads of vomiting English fans on their way back from a match.

  The driver began talking to him conversationally, so Hassan said ‘Pardon’, pulled his phone from his pocket and feigned a call. He had wondered whether he should perhaps pretend to be deaf, to wear an obvious hearing aid, but then wondered how many deaf Pakis took a taxi into Calais. Be normal, always normal, Salim had said.

  He was deposited near the huge town hall. The driver gave him a card with his number and told him, so far as Hassan could understand, to ask in a shop and anyone would call the cab for him. To gather his thoughts, Hassan went to look at the statue of The Burghers of Calais by Rodin. The dejected men in their robes and chains had outsize flat feet; some of them looked more like bronze apes than town councillors.

  It was three o’clock and growing dark already. Hassan had forgotten to bring his gloves, and his hands were cold. They always were in winter; it was presumably a genetic weakness that harked back to his ancestors in the warm Mirpur Valley. Or was that an impermissible thought?

  Hassan walked down the Boulevard Jacquard with its half-hearted Christmas lights. He looked into a pharmacy on the left, advertised by its large and flashing green cross. It was forbiddingly empty, with a serious bespectacled woman behind the counter. ‘Edith Dumont. Pharmacien’ it said on the glass door. He could imagine her saying, ‘And why exactly do you require so much hair dye?’

  He had the answer. ‘Je suis coiffeur.’ ‘Zher swee quaff-urr.’ He had got Shahla to spell it out for him in a conversational game of what might be said to him by people he met on holiday. He’d also taken a few business cards with the blessing of the local hairdresser in Havering.

  The eye of Edith Dumont, however, was too forbidding. He tried the shop across the road, then the one in the Boulevard Gambetta, without ever feeling he could manage it. How odd it was they all sold so much homeopathic stuff and ‘produits vétérinaires’ – dog food – as well as skin tonics advertised by naked women with golden skin. Finally, he tried the supermarket at the far end of the Centre Commercial, the indoor shopping centre. At least he wouldn’t have to speak to anyone there, but could just load a trolley. His eyes scanned the ceiling for CCTV cameras; none were visible, but perhaps they were just better hidden than at home.

  The ‘Cheveux’ section of the supermarket was huge, but the amount of hydrogen peroxide in a bottle of proprietary colouring was so small that he would need to buy up the whole place and all its reserve stock. The hardware section had variations of something called Javel in large enough bottles, but its active ingredient was chlorine; it was bleach, but of the wrong kind.

  Hassan walked swiftly back down the overheated mall, with its tinny music and sweet smell, past a shop selling women’s underclothes where a kafir poster girl in scarlet suspenders pushed her breasts against the glass, and out into the freezing air.

  He found an alley where he was unobserved, then bent to say a brief prayer.

  In a twenty-four-hour brasserie on the Boulevard La Fayette, he ordered something easy to translate – ‘Une omelette’ – and gave the waiter the taxi driver’s card.

  ‘Pouvez-vous—’

  ‘Oui, oui.’ It was clearly not the first time the waiter had been asked.

  Ten minutes later he was in the back of a sickly scented people carrier on his way to the out-of-town hairdressing supplier whose address he’d printed off the Internet and now handed without speaking to the driver. The shop was a fifteen-minute drive away on the edge of an industrial zone, and had a counter in front with stockroom shelves behind, like a builders’ merchant in London.

  On the counter Hassan placed a piece of paper, on which he’d written his order, and one of the cards from his local hairdresser, in case he needed proof to qualify for the cash-and-carry discount.

  The shopkeeper was a man of about sixty in denim overalls with greasy grey hair and thick glasses. He fetched a cardboard box, about the size of a case of wine, from the back of the stores and placed it on the counter with an effortful grunt. For the sake of realism, Hassan handed over a second piece of paper requesting twenty litres of conditioner.
He paid in cash.

  With the boxes in the back of the people carrier, Hassan said to the driver, ‘OK, maintenant vin. Supermarché.’

  It was dark by the time they reached the wine warehouse, which was on the edge of a different industrial zone, apparently on the other side of Calais.

  The driver looked reluctant to wait a second time, but Hassan showed him the large roll of euros in his pocket and the man nodded.

  On the concrete slab inside the warehouse were thousands of different wines and vintages displayed in open wooden boxes. Rhône, Roussillon, Alsace ... The places and the chateaux meant nothing to Hassan, who wanted one thing only: screw tops. Had the French ever heard of such things? he wondered, as he went from one primly corked burgundy to another. Eventually, among the rosés of Bordeaux, his search was rewarded. He put a case in his trolley and took it to the checkout.

  A young man passed a hand-held bleeper over it and the price rang up on the electronic till.

  ‘Pouvez-vous, er ... ?’ Hassan mimed lifting the case with one hand and the young man nodded. He tied some hairy string round the carton in such a way that it made a primitive handle.

  ‘Merci,’ said Hassan, parting with more euros from his roll. ‘Toilettes?’

  The man said something he didn’t understand, but Hassan followed his gesture clearly enough. He carried the case in the direction indicated, through the door, and secreted it under the sink. He went quickly back to the taxi, held up three fingers to the driver, saying ‘Trois minutes’, and carried the carton of hydrogen peroxide back across the floor of the warehouse to the lavatory. He took both boxes into the cubicle and locked the door.