East of Wimbledon (20 page)

Perhaps, thought Robert, as he trudged after her towards the iron gates, this was a signal for their lovemaking to become more decorous. Guilt was, after all, one of the things that made sex really interesting. One of the most positive things the Catholic Church had done for screwing was trying to stamp it out. She was living the part, he said to himself, and then: no,
it’s me that’s living the part. She actually believes this stuff.

Maisie put her shoulder to the gates. They creaked open – one swinging wildly over to the left, while the other ground to a halt on the gravel after a few yards. He stopped, waiting for armed Twenty-fourthers to swarm out of every window, demanding to know why Robert was proposing to barge in on their most secret and important ceremony.

‘Suppose he is an imam!’ said Robert. ‘Oughtn’t we to at least consider whether these people have a right to
think
he is. I don’t see what harm they’re doing!’

‘They’re evil!’ said Maisie. ‘They are the scum of the earth! They’re—’ her face reddened with fury – ‘intolerant! Do you know why they wear one shoe? It’s to shame the rest of the Dharjees, because they say that Dharjees flout Islamic law!’

She looked like Ronnie Gallagher, the pacifist organizer of the Wimbledon Peace Council, shortly before he put Derek ‘Small Publisher With Big Problems’ Elletson in hospital for suggesting that, under certain circumstances, war might be necessary.

‘They have to be crushed, Bobkins!’

So saying, she marched off down the gravel path, making the kind of crunching noise Robert had thought could only be produced by the BBC sound-effects department.

As they rounded the edge of the building, he could see that behind the house was a vast garden. There was a brick patio over on the left, studded with dwarf cypresses in terracotta tubs. Stretching up to and away from the patio was a vast lawn, smothered with spring flowers – yellow daffodils and a parade of brilliant hyacinths. In the middle of the lawn was a cedar tree, and, attached to one of its branches by a knotted rope, was a child’s swing, idling above the flowers as the rain guttered out and another squall of sunlight came in from the west. There was a terrible quiet about the place.

‘I think,’ said Robert, ‘we should go and get reinforcements. We should go and ask Mr Malik.’

Maisie gave him a contemptuous look and marched up towards the patio. With a heavy heart, Robert followed her towards the smooth, mysterious features of the house, whose windows, on this side, he could now see, were blacked out from the inside.

When they got to the windows, Maisie put her ear to the glass. Robert, who was still looking nervously up and down the garden, stood a little away from the rear wall. But after a while it was clear that she could hear something, and he was unable to resist following her example.

The cloth inside muffled the noise, but when he got close to the window he could make out a human voice. At first he thought it was unfamiliar to him, but then, with a shock, he realized it was Rafiq’s. But there was a quality to it he would not have expected. It was deep and assured.

‘Say,’ said the voice: ‘Who is the Lord of the Heaven and the Earth? Say: Allah. Say: Why have you chosen other gods beside him, who, even to themselves, can do neither harm nor good? Say: Are the blind and seeing alike? Does darkness resemble the light?’

Other voices joined in, in a low growl, but Robert could not hear whether they were repeating what Rafiq had said, or, indeed, whether they were speaking English at all.

He pulled his ear away from the glass. ‘I think we should ring on the doorbell,’ he said, ‘and just ask them, politely, what they’re doing with Hasan. If they’re worshipping him, could they guarantee to us that he . . . you know . . . enjoys being worshipped. Otherwise it may well be a form of child abuse. Worshipping someone without their permission . . .’

Maisie still had her ear pressed to the glass. From inside, the noise of the voices was getting louder. Someone was beating what sounded like a tambourine, and, high above all this, Robert thought he heard a flute. Then, slowly at first, but building to an almost military rhythm, the stamp of feet on wooden boards. Rafiq’s voice was calling something, like a chant, and was answered by the other voices. Robert could not understand it at first, but, after he put his ear back to the window, it resolved itself into two syllables:

‘Ha-san . . . Ha-san . . . Ha-san . . .’

Over and over again:

‘Ha-san . . . Ha-san . . . Ha-san . . .’

And then, when the shouting had reached a climax, there was a ghastly scream from inside the room. At first Robert thought someone must have been hurt, but, a second later, the scream came again and he realized, with horror, that this was a cry of joy.

Maisie was waving at him wildly. She had found a gap in the blackout material and had fixed her eye to it. He wasn’t at all sure that he wanted a good view of whatever was going on inside the house. It sounded a good deal more basic than, say, Holy Communion at Cranborne School. And that was bad enough. Were they committing human sacrifice? And if they were, shouldn’t they get the police? Or might this be regarded as an intrusion on people’s right to worship as they saw fit?

‘You must look,’ whispered Maisie, ‘it’s weird. You must look.’

Eventually, Robert looked.

The room was in almost total darkness. The only light came from a group of candles high in one corner. It smeared the faces of the men in the room, fighting a losing, fitful battle with the shadows. There might have been twenty or thirty figures in there, but it was too dark to distinguish anything more than their vague shapes. There didn’t seem to be any furniture. All the figures, some of them cloaked like witches, were facing in the same direction – away from Maisie and Robert. But they were not looking at one point, as the worshippers did at the Wimbledon Islamic Boys’ School (Day Independent): they were moving up and down, backwards and forwards, bumping into each other and generally carrying on like people at Victoria Station during the rush hour.

The only figure that stood out was Rafiq. He was standing on a kind of pedestal a little above the others, thrusting both arms up into the air. He seemed to be focused on the black space beyond the candlelight. The room, Robert felt, might go on for yards and yards. But, as he watched, even the sense that it was a room vanished. It was as if he was looking into a pinhole camera, as if the scene before him was a mirage.

‘For nine hundred years!’ called Rafiq.

‘For nine hundred years!’ answered the crowd.

‘He was hidden!’ called Rafiq.

‘He was hidden!’ answered the crowd.

‘He is coming!’ called Rafiq suddenly.

‘He is coming!’ called the crowd around him.

‘What will he do,’ yelled Rafiq, as if he had a good answer to this question, ‘when he comes?’

‘What will he do?’ yelled the crowd in return. They seemed keen to find out.

‘What will he do?’ riposted Rafiq. He was not letting them get away with this easily.

‘What will he do?’ yelled the crowd.

Robert’s eyes were starting to ache. But Rafiq was still not keen to put over the punch line. He changed the topic, rather neatly, by howling, ‘He is the Twenty-fourth Imam!’

The crowd liked this. They came back with, ‘He is the Twenty-fourth Imam!’

‘He has been hidden!’ yelled Rafiq.

‘He has been hidden!’ yelled the crowd.

Robert wondered how this particular breakaway section of a breakaway section of the Nizari Ismailis had managed to carry on like this in Wimbledon for the last seventy years. Presumably, behind many of the net curtains in Wimbledon Park Road things as strange, or even stranger, were always going on. It was handy, anyway, that they celebrated their religion in English.

Back inside, Rafiq had gone back to the thousand-dollar question. ‘What will he do when he returns?’ he shouted.

Perhaps, thought Robert, he had simply been playing for time and had now come up with a credible answer.

‘What will he do when he returns?’ yelled the crowd.

It had better be good
, thought Robert.
After a build up like this, you can’t afford to let them down.

‘He will destroy!’ yelled Rafiq.

‘He will destroy!’ yelled the crowd.

‘What will he destroy?’ shouted Rafiq.

‘What will he destroy?’ answered the crowd.

The answer to this one was usually simple.
Everything apart from us, guys!
seemed to be the stock religious response. Imams or Christs, Mahdis or Messiahs were there to cancel all debts, atone for all insults. But, if this was the answer, Rafiq was not giving it all away at once. He clearly had something tasty up his sleeve.

Robert heard a cough behind him. He pulled his eye away from the pinhole and, turning, saw a near neighbour who had last year changed her name, by deed poll, to Cruella Baines. She was the lead singer in an all-girl rock group. She weighed fifteen stone.

‘What’s going on in there?’ she said. ‘Is it a party?’

Robert put his eye back to the pinhole. They had started dancing now. It was a fairly individualistic affair. Some of them were whirling round like dervishes. Others crouched on their haunches and kicked out their back legs behind them, like men carrying out a complex fitness programme. One man was lying on his back and cycling with his legs, rather like Badger, while a figure that Robert recognized as Aziz’s friend from the Frog and Ferret was doing a lot of semaphore work with both arms.

Robert turned back to Cruella. ‘There are naked people in there,’ said Robert, ‘having sex! Find a hole and have a look!’

Cruella Baines grunted and waddled off along the line of windows, her steel bangles rattling against her gigantic thighs. Eventually she seemed to find a gap in the blackout and, her enormous behind reared aloft, she glued her eye to the glass.

Inside, the lads were all enjoying themselves immensely. When the dancing had reached its climax, the whole crowd flung themselves on to the floor and further worked themselves up into what looked like a communal epileptic fit.
If this is Islam
, thought Robert,
give me more!
He hadn’t seen anyone carry on like this since going to watch the World Wrestling Federation with Gilbert Lewis, the man next door’s nephew, who had had a major seizure at the sight of a man called Hulk Hogan and had written to Robert afterwards to say that he ‘had never expected to see anything like that in real life’. Perhaps Islam had developed differently in Wimbledon than in other parts of the world. Perhaps long exposure to tennis, bad public transport, English weather and the sight of miserable middle-aged people walking their dogs had driven this particular breakaway section of a breakaway section of the Nizari Ismailis right round the bend.

After a while they seemed to get bored with kicking their legs in the air. They wanted more. One by one they struggled to their feet. A man Robert recognized as the second man from the Frog and Ferret started to hop in circles, beating himself on the head and shouting something. Rafiq was doing a lot of waving into the darkness, as if he expected something to appear – a deputation from the Noise Abatement Society, thought Robert, if they all carried on like this for much longer.

‘Oh!’ he heard Maisie gasp, over to his left. ‘Oh!’

Being a Twenty-fourther obviously called for high physical stamina, for the group showed no signs of slacking. They were now all waving in the direction indicated by Rafiq. But, although Robert strained his eyes against the glass, he could see nothing but impenetrable blackness beyond the hectic yellows and reds cast by the candles.

Rafiq started again. ‘He is coming!’ he shouted.

‘He is coming!’ shouted the lads in reply.

Suddenly the candles went out. Someone must have blown them or snuffed them, because the darkness was sudden and almost complete. Robert did not shift his eyes, waiting for another image to swarm out of the chamber in front of him, but all he could hear, now, was groaning.

‘He was killed!’ moaned Rafiq.

‘He was killed!’ wailed the support group.

‘He was sent to hell-fire!’ moaned Rafiq.

‘He was sent to hell-fire!’ his congregation replied. Some of them seemed to be actually sobbing.

Robert thought he could hear grinding teeth. With a start he realized they were his teeth and he was grinding them. Even looking at this stuff from behind a black screen was punishing. It wasn’t surprising that some of them were cracking under the strain.

‘He was the son of Hasan b. Namawar!’ said Rafiq.

There was a slight pause. This was obviously not a name that tripped off the tongue, but the lads rose to it manfully, while managing to weep, groan and, from the sound of it, pull out lumps of each other’s hair at the same time. ‘He was the son of Hasan b. Namawar!’ they yelled in the darkness.

‘Of the Daylamis!’ yelled Rafiq.

This was easier. ‘Of the Daylamis!’ they yelled back.

However long they had been in Wimbledon, the suburb had not yet managed to curb their enthusiasm. The sound from the room made your average Pentecostal church sound like a tea party given for a group of Radio 3 announcers. They were starting to thump the floor now, and the chorus that had played low, while they gave out the stuff of how he was the son of Hasan b. Namawar and had been sent to hell-fire, came back in loud and strong.

‘He is coming to destroy!’ yelled Rafiq, once more.

‘He is coming to destroy!’ they yelled back.

‘What is he going to destroy?’ yelled Rafiq.

‘What is he going to destroy?’ they answered.

If he doesn’t give the answer to this one soon, thought Robert, he is in danger of losing his audience. But their patience seemed endless.

Instead of answering his own question, Rafiq let out a high-pitched wail, which was taken up by the rest of the men. The wail started high and went higher, until they were shrieking off the register. It was almost painful to listen to, and Robert was about to pull his face away from the window when, suddenly, high up in the far darkness, a tiny figure in white robes jumped into vision. He did not seem to be standing on anything. He seemed to hang suspended above the worshippers, his two tiny arms held out in front of him, and he was as still and quiet and calm as he had been when sitting at the Wilsons’ table or resting, alone, at the back of Class 1.