East of Wimbledon (3 page)

‘They serve the regulars first . . .’ said Robert.

‘They serve the white chaps first,’ said Mr Malik – ‘and who can blame them?’

The barman finished serving the leathery-faced man. He gave Mr Malik a measured stare. He looked at the headmaster as if he was an item he was trying to price for a jumble sale. After a while he walked back towards them.

‘A Special Brew, a Perrier water and a large Scotch for my friend,’ said Mr Malik.

Robert gulped.

‘Isn’t that what you were drinking, old boy?’ said Malik.

‘I was . . .’

How did he know this? Had he made a special study of infidels’ drinking habits?

The headmaster was looking up at the mirror above the bar. Robert followed the direction of his gaze. He found himself looking at the reflection of a man in a shabby blue suit, who was peering into the pub from the street. Apart from the fact that he had chosen not to wear a tea towel on his head, he bore a sensationally close resemblance to Yasser Arafat. Behind him, in a slightly less shabby blue suit, was a man who looked like a more or less exact replica of Saddam Hussein. Both men had two or three days’ growth of stubble on them, and both were wearing dark glasses. This could explain why they seemed to be having trouble making out what was going on in the interior of the Frog and Ferret.

Both men seemed to be hobbling slightly. Perhaps, thought Robert, as they pressed their noses to the glass, they had been involved in some industrial accident. They looked as if they had been working together, for years, on the same, grim production line.

Their effect on Mr Malik was profound. He looked like a man who has just opened a packet of cornflakes and been greeted by a Gaboon viper. Ignoring the barman, he reached out for Robert and squeezed his forearm. Without turning his head, he said, grimly, ‘Well, the Wimbledon Dharjees are upon us.’ He carefully knitted a crease into his forehead. ‘And not, I fear, the best type of Dharjee!’

Robert wondered whether the two men were brothers and this was their surname. Wasn’t a dharjee something you ate, like a bhajji or a samosa?

Mr Malik started to move away along the bar, keeping his face, as far as possible, away from the visitors.

‘Hey!’ called the barman.

‘Gentlemen’s lavatory,’ hissed Malik. And before anyone had time to question him further he was gone, moving with surprising speed for a man of his size.

Just as he left, the two men opened the door and started to hobble their way towards the centre of the room. It was only now that Robert was able to see what was making them limp: both were wearing odd shoes. Robert’s first thought was that this might reflect some kind of financial crisis in the immigrant community in Wimbledon. But then he noticed that each of them, on his right foot, was wearing what looked like a slipper. Not only that. As they moved into the pub they both stopped from time to time and wriggled their right feet anxiously. Did they suffer from some form of verruca, some ghastly mange that affected only the toes of the right feet?

When they reached the bar, the man without the tea towel on his head pushed up his glasses and peered round. He had small watery eyes. With his glasses on his forehead you got to see more of his nose. Yasser Arafat, Robert decided, was better looking.

‘Can I get you anything, gents?’

Yasser Arafat sneered. The barman sneered back. Then both men came over to where Robert was standing.

‘A beer? A glass of wine?’

Both men ignored the offer of service. This was more or less the reverse of the usual situation in the pub. The barman screwed up his face into a tight ball. With a shock, Robert realized he was trying to smile.

‘A soft drink of some kind?’

Saddam Hussein leaned his elbows on the bar and, looking sideways at Robert, said, ‘I see you know the man called Malik. The big man. We know his business. He teaches here in Wimbledon.’

His appearance and delivery gave the impression that he had got this information from some oasis a few hundred miles south of Agadir. It suggested, too, that he was not looking for the headmaster of the Wimbledon Islamic Boys’ Day Independent School in order to offer him a low interest mortgage or a new kind of double glazing.

Robert decided to reply cautiously. ‘Is he,’ he said, ‘a friend of yours?’

This seemed to amuse Yasser Arafat. ‘Malik,’ he said crisply, ‘is a slug and a blasphemer!’

His friend leaned his head over his shoulder and cleared his throat loudly. The barman’s mouth dropped a notch and he started to ask, in hostile tones, whether both men breezed into their own living-rooms without buying a drink.

‘He is,’ said his companion, ‘excrement.’

This seemed a little harsh to Robert. There was, he had to admit, something not entirely trustworthy about the headmaster, but to call him ‘excrement’ was, surely, to overstate the case.

‘He is,’ said the man without a tea towel on his head, ‘the vomit of a dog!’

For a moment Robert thought Saddam Hussein was going to spit on the floor. But his eye had been taken by the book, now lying on the counter of the bar. He looked at it suspiciously. ‘What is this?’ he said.

Robert coughed. ‘It’s the . . . er . . . Koran.’

They did not seem impressed. Perhaps he had not pronounced the word correctly.

‘I haven’t actually . . . er . . . read it yet,’ he went on, brightly, ‘but I intend to in the very near future.’

He had rather hoped that the book might provide a talkingpoint. But, if anything, its presence seemed to intensify the men’s suspicion of him. He did not feel it prudent to tell them that he had just embraced the Muslim faith, partly because he was not sure that they were Muslims and partly because he was afraid they might ask him what he was doing with a large whisky and a bottle of Special Brew. Robert’s voice died away.

‘This is the Koran?’ said the man who looked like Yasser Arafat.

‘It is indeed!’ These men, Robert decided, could not possibly be Muslims. Muslims would, surely, have felt the need to express some enthusiasm at finding an English punter leafing through it. ‘And from everything I hear it’s quite a book. It’s had enormous . . . er . . . influence . . .’

It was fairly obvious that he was telling them nothing new. In fact they were looking at Robert, as people tended to do, as if he had some satirical intent.

The man without a tea towel on his head reached forward and touched the book with his index finger. He withdrew it very quickly, as if the volume carried some electrical charge. ‘I have learned this book by heart,’ he said.

‘Good Lord,’ said Robert, ‘why did you do that?’

This was obviously the wrong thing to say.

‘He carries it in his heart,’ replied the second man, ‘and he speaks its truth to all who will listen. To those who will not listen he does not speak.’

‘Very sensible,’ said Robert.

‘He cuts them as he would slit the throat of a chicken.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Robert, ‘fair enough!’

Malik seemed to be spending a long time in the lavatory.

The barman seemed now almost pathetically anxious to please the new arrivals. He was rubbing his hands and smirking. It was clear to Robert that the best way of getting service out of him was to look as if you were about to gob on the floor. He seemed to be trying, not at all successfully, to attract their attention.

‘This is what one day will be done to Malik and those he serves!’ said Saddam Hussein. ‘He will be dragged in the dust and he will be pierced with knives. This will happen to those who serve him also.’

Perhaps, thought Robert, these men were from the Merton Education Authority. There was a clattering sound from out by the gentlemen’s lavatory.

‘You know him?’ said the man without a tea towel on his head.

‘I’m afraid I don’t. Not
know
exactly . . .’ said Robert.

‘I think you do,’ said Saddam Hussein. ‘I think you will be a teacher at the Islamic School. I think you are Wilson. I think you live in Wimbledon Park Road. I think you are a hypocrite Muslim!’

News certainly travelled fast, thought Robert. He had only sent the application in on Monday. How could they possibly know these things?

‘We have read your application,’ went on Saddam, ‘and we know about your sports abilities. But we do not think you write like a true believer!’

‘It will be a school for pigs and blasphemers,’ went on his friend, ‘and all who teach in it will die.’

‘We are all going to die,’ said Robert, as cheerfully as he could.

‘Tell your friend,’ said Saddam Hussein, ‘that we are watching him. And we will watch you also.’

‘OK,’ said Robert.

‘And tell him,’ the man went on, ‘that we have something that will make him and his friends ashamed to face the daylight. Something that, when our people read it, will make him and his friends crawl through the dung!’

Robert tried to keep very still. The man’s face was now pressed closely into his. He smelt sweet and musky.
I should probably investigate alternative ways of making a living as soon as possible
, thought Robert.

‘When the time comes,’ the man was saying, ‘we shall distribute this among our people. They will read and understand. And then, when the time of his Occultation is over, the Imam will come to us.’

The man who should have had the tea towel on his head was rummaging in his jacket pocket. It occurred to Robert that he might be looking for a gun.

Eventually the man pulled out a small parcel and set it on the bar, a few inches from Robert’s copy of the Koran. He looked into Robert’s eyes. ‘When you see Malik, give him this box. Let him read and understand that he will die. And that all who serve him will die. And that the staff and pupils of the Wimbledon Islamic Independent Boys’ Day School will burn in hell-fire when the day comes. And we know the day, my friend! It is coming!’

Robert was about to protest, once again, that he had only just met Mr Malik. But these men seemed worryingly well informed about aspects of his life about which even he was vague.

The first man made a complex, guttural sound and pushed the box towards him. Robert picked it up. It was wrapped in green paper. ‘If I see him,’ he said, ‘I’ll do that.’

The man grabbed him hard by the wrist. He was breathing hard. ‘You will see the Imam, but the Imam will not see you. Because, as it is written, hypocrite Wilson, the Imam sees not as we do! This, too, tells you you will be consumed in the fires of hell that do not cease!’

‘I’m sure,’ said Robert. ‘I’m sure!’

Everyone will burn in hell-fire when the day comes, he reflected, as he walked out into the glare of the street, but the day, for Jew, Christian and Muslim, has been a hell of a long time coming.

When he got home, he found his parents making a cassoulet. This was slightly better than finding them making love, or in the middle of an argument. They did all these things with a great deal of noise and enthusiasm.

‘What have you been up to today, Bobkins?’ said his father.

Robert stared out of the window at the featureless lawn. Badger, the family’s lurcher, was sitting in the middle of it, staring hungrily at passing flies.

‘I got a job,’ he said.

His father looked at his mother. They smirked at each other. Mr and Mrs Wilson were always convinced, each time their son took a new job, that this one would, in Mrs Wilson’s phrase, ‘lead to something.’ She was, in a sense, right. She had been positive that Renzo’s the Delicatessen was going to lead to something, although she could not have predicted that the ‘something’ was going to be the loss of Mr Renzo’s thumb in the slicing-machine. She had been positive that Bearman and Studde, the estate agents, were going to lead to something, and, although Mr Bearman’s suicide was not quite what she had had in mind, there was no doubt that Robert’s presence in the firm had, in Mr Bearman’s own words, ‘changed it, changed it utterly!’ Disaster had a way of following him. That was why for the last nine months he had stayed indoors as much as possible.

They beamed at him now from across the kitchen.

‘What . . . er . . . is the job, exactly?’ said his father.

Robert looked back at him cautiously. Both his mother and father encouraged him to use their Christian names, but calling them Norman and Sylvia had never helped him to feel more intimate with them. Nor had it helped to quell the guilt he felt every time he saw their eager little eyes brighten at the sight of their only son. He knew he was nothing to be proud of – why didn’t they?

‘I’m going to be a teacher,’ he said.

‘Great stuff!’ said Mr Wilson senior, as he chopped a red onion into a frying pan. ‘I’d give my right arm to be able to teach. They do
such
an important job! And they’re not really appreciated, are they?’

‘You would be a marvellous teacher, Robert,’ said his mother, ‘and it’s marvellous they’ve seen that without asking for all those stupid qualifications!’

‘Qualifications!’ said Mr Wilson senior, shaking the frying pan violently. ‘Who needs ’em?’

Norman Wilson, as he was fond of reminding people, had no qualifications. This could have been why the accountants for whom he had worked for twenty years had, early last year, asked him to leave. He did not seem worried about not having a job. ‘I’ve got the redundo, old son,’ he used to say, ‘and now I can get on with my writing.’ No one in the family knew what he was writing, apart from the occasional cheque.

Robert’s mother walked swiftly towards the fridge. For a moment he thought she was going to grab it by the handle and throw it over her left shoulder, judo style, but at the last moment she veered off to the left and, grabbing a tin of haricot beans, trotted towards the door that led to the garden. Out on the lawn, Badger reared up, his face wild with excitement.

‘No, no, no!’ screamed Mr and Mrs Wilson, in perfect synchronization. ‘Go away! Go away! Go away! Bad dog!’

Badger sat down again. He looked depressed.

‘What will you teach, exactly?’ said Robert’s mother.

‘English,’ said Robert, ‘Greek. That kind of thing.’

‘Do you know any Greek?’ said his father.

His mother was coming back, now, towards the sink. On the way she had acquired a corkscrew and a bag of potatoes. She threw the potatoes, viciously, on to the worktop. Out on the patio a small breeze stirred her geraniums.