East of Wimbledon (8 page)

‘Right, Headmaster,’ said Robert.

‘And,’ said Malik, ‘even when you are in the house, watch him carefully.’

Robert looked apprehensively at Hasan. Was he, perhaps, liable to violent fits of temper? Could he have a serious incontinence problem?

‘Look,’ said the headmaster, ‘I am sure I am worrying about nothing. I’ve simply seen something I probably did not see. But, for the first few days anyway . . . keep him away from windows.’

‘On religious grounds?’ said Robert. Perhaps Dharjees were against windows.

‘Absolutely,’ said Malik. ‘Absolutely. On religious grounds. And if anyone comes asking for him at the door, or comes up to you in the street and expresses an interest, you haven’t seen him. Right?’

‘Right!’ said Robert.

‘Especially,’ went on the headmaster, ‘those gentlemen in the pub.’

‘With the peculiar shoes,’ said Robert.

Mr Malik wrinkled his brows and gave Robert one of those swift, shrewd glances that hinted at a complex, subtle person behind the actor’s manner. ‘You noticed that, did you?’ he said. ‘There is probably no significance in it. After all, my friend, we are the other side of August the eighth!’ And with this inexplicable remark Mr Malik leaped from the car, opened their door, and, like a chauffeur, bowed them out on to the street.

Robert trudged up the steps to the front door, after Maisie and Hasan. Mr Malik got back into the car. Robert turned back towards him but, before he had a chance to say anything, the headmaster had driven off towards Southfields.

There was quite a lot that Robert wanted to ask. Had they acquired this pupil by entirely legal means? Where were the other pupils going to come from? What was so dodgy about August the eighth? And what was the problem with windows as far as Muslims were concerned? Were they, perhaps, unclean?

Robert added one more biggie to that list as he turned back to Maisie and the little boy. How was he going to explain away the arrival of a ten-year-old blind Muslim boy in his parents’ house? Not to mention the fact that Hasan seemed to be looking for house-guest status for an unspecified period of time. Mr and Mrs Wilson were almost irritatingly tolerant people. They had been kind when Robert had failed all of his GCEs apart from woodwork. They had not minded when he failed to pass his driving test or, indeed, when he failed to show any aptitude for anything apart from walking round Wimbledon Common with Badger. But on this occasion he might well have gone too far.

‘Isn’t he
sweet
?’ said Maisie.

‘Will you give me some tea?’ said the little boy. ‘And a cake with jam on it?’

Robert looked down at his new charge and felt as if he was falling through space.

The boy took his hand and pressed it to his face. ‘You are a kind man,’ said Hasan. ‘I can hear it in your voice. I can tell a great deal from people’s voices.’

‘What can you tell from mine?’ said Maisie.

The little boy paused. ‘You are a very wise woman,’ he said. ‘You are very strong and clever and brave.’

Clearly Hasan’s voice test was not an infallible guide to a stranger’s personality. Or maybe he just said this to all the girls. But there was something impressive about him. He could have been very clever, or very well born, or very, very lucky. Or, possibly, simply
look
as if he might have been any of these things. But there was something about him . . .

As usual, Robert had forgotten his key, and, as usual in the Wilson house, no one was answering the door. Somewhere deep inside the family home, Robert heard his father shout, ‘I’m on the lavatory!’

‘I’m
on the lavatory!’ came his mother’s voice, making its normal, easy transition from gentility to an almost bestial directness of approach. ‘They’ll have to wait!’

‘It might be someone interesting!’ yelled his father.

Whatever he was doing in the lavatory didn’t sound very demanding.

‘Surely you’ve finished by now!’ yelled his mother. Over the years, the two men in the Wilson family had made so many inroads into her natural delicacy that now, at nearly fifty, she would sometimes seem to parody maleness, to flaunt it at its possessors, in an attempt at that last, desperate act of criticism – sarcasm.

‘Get your arse on down there,’ she yelled – ‘only make sure you wipe it first!’

Robert heard his father guffaw. They still had the capacity to amuse each other, even if they left him stone cold.

Before this conversation could become any more specific, Robert leaned on the bell, hard.

‘I’m coming!’ yelled his father. ‘Hold your horses!’

Hasan, his head and shoulders still eerily still, was smiling in a benign manner at the letterbox. He continued to hold Robert’s hand tightly. Robert tried to look natural, and failed.

‘He’s coming!’ said Hasan, ‘I hear him!’

There was a clumping sound from within the house. The door opened, and Robert found himself, once again, looking at his father. He took in the long, shaggy hair, the wire glasses, the beaky nose and the slightly anxious expression. Mr Wilson senior always looked as if he had just remembered that he had forgotten something. This was, indeed, quite often the case.

It was possible, he thought to himself, that his father would never work again. In which case he, Robert, would be the only earner in the household. He would have to try to do this new job in a thorough and conscientious manner. He would be a
good
teacher. He would be the inspiration of a whole new generation of British Muslims. He saw himself, sitting cross-legged in a stone courtyard, surrounded by eager little children from the Third World, dressed, like him, in long, white robes. Did Muslims sit cross-legged? Or was that the followers of the Maharishi Yogi or whatever his name was?

‘Hello there!’ said Mr Wilson to Hasan. ‘And how are
you
?’

He was talking as if to an old friend – a manner he quite often affected with complete strangers. Behind him, Mrs Wilson had appeared. She was bobbing up and down beside his left shoulder, jabbing her finger towards Hasan.

‘Who is
he
?’

This question was voiced silently, with a great deal of lip and teeth work. She could have been presenting a programme for deaf people. Robert did not answer her.

‘Is he one of
them
?’

Robert nodded.

Mrs Wilson looked determinedly saucy. She clearly hoped that social life in Wimbledon Park was going to look up now that her only son had become a Muslim.
Let them all come
, her expression seemed to say.
Baggy trousers, prayer-mats – wheel ’em in!
She pranced out of the front door. ‘Welcome to our house,’ she said to Hasan, in the low, solemn voice she used in the Wimbledon Players. ‘Welcome! And peace be on you and on your house!’ She bowed low as she said this, and walked backwards into the hall.

Behind the kitchen door, Badger was making small, high-pitched noises from the back of his throat.

Robert took one last, despairing look back at the street as he followed his mother inside. There was a man standing in the shadow of one of the plane trees opposite. He was wearing a shabby looking leather jacket, jeans and a check shirt. Although he was of Middle Eastern appearance, at first Robert took him for a punk, because his jacket was ripped at the back. It looked as if it had been torn in the interests of fashion. And, although it was hard to judge at this distance, there was definitely something suspicious about the man’s shoes.

Mrs Wilson did not seem unduly alarmed at the prospect of having acquired a paying guest. As they went into the front room, she announced her intention of giving Hasan her husband’s office upstairs. ‘You never do anything in it anyway,’ she said in a cheerful voice, ‘and at least he won’t notice the wallpaper. It’s amazing the way he gets about, isn’t it? For a blind person, he’s very quick on his feet!’

She made no attempt to modify her voice. Perhaps she had decided that Hasan was deaf as well as blind.

‘Where’s he from?’ said Robert’s father, clearly feeling, like his wife, that the little boy was not up to responding to direct questions.

‘Bangladesh,’ said Robert, aware that his parents liked definite answers.

Hasan walked into the sofa, fell on to it, and curled up like a cat. He smiled to himself. He seemed pleased to be in the Wilson house. ‘The time of my Occultation is not yet come!’ he said.

Robert thought this was probably good news. He thought of asking the little boy when he thought his Occultation might be. They might need to get in special clothing, or warn the neighbours.

Hasan, as if sensing Robert’s curiosity said, ‘I must not speak of these things. It is forbidden to speak of them!’

Maisie, standing over by the bookcase, next to Mr Wilson senior’s collection of country and western records, wore a solemn, almost religious, expression. ‘They’re very strict are Muslims,’ she said, in the kind of voice that suggested she wouldn’t mind them being a bit strict with her. She cast her eyes down to the floor. ‘Especially towards women!’ she added.

Robert looked at her and at Hasan. It was obvious that the Independent Boys’ Day Islamic School Wimbledon was going to change his life in more ways than he could anticipate.

He went over to the window and looked out at the street. The man in the ripped jacket was still there, although he was no longer watching the house. Now he was able to take a good long look at him, Robert could see that there was something strange about his shoes. One of them was a normal black leather boot. The other was a slipper-like creation of vaguely Eastern design. As he stood there, looking up the street, the man lifted it from the pavement and rubbed it against his leg, as if his foot was infected with some curious itch. Then he looked back at the Wilson house and stared, insolently, in at the blank suburban windows.

There had been difficulties with local planning officials. There had been opposition from local residents. Herbert Henry, the taxi driver, had told customers in the Frog and Ferret that its effect on house prices would be catastrophic. ‘Would you like to live next door to a Muslim school,’ he said, ‘considering what they get up to?’ When asked
what
they got up to, he had muttered darkly that he knew a thing or two about Muslims and ordered drinks all round. His son Alf, the skinhead, had said that he would personally strangle any Muslim he found messing with his wife, adding that if Tehran was such a great place why didn’t the bastards go back there?

Henry Farr, the solicitor from Maple Drive, who could be so funny when he chose, had said, in his comic colonel voice, that ‘Johnny Muslim can be quite a tricky customer!’

But, somehow or other, Mr Malik’s school was in business. He opened, five weeks behind schedule, in mid October. It had been, as the headmaster pointed out to Robert, a desperate scramble to get any of the punters in at all. A mole working inside Cranborne School had supplied them with a mailing list of all Muslim parents whose children had been rejected by ‘This is a Christian Country’ Gyles, the Junior School headmaster, and Robert and Maisie had been through the telephone directory, picking out anyone with a Muslim-sounding name. Apart from a few Sikhs and a very irritable Hindu from East Sheen, most of the targeted persons seemed quite pleased to be asked.

Teachers had been more difficult. ‘There are not many people in Wimbledon who have your qualifications,’ Mr Malik had said to Robert in the pub. This was not surprising. Since his appointment, Robert had awarded himself a degree from Yale, an honorary doctorate from Edinburgh University, two novels and a successful season with the Chicago Bears football team.

They had interviewed a man from Bombay who claimed to have a degree in physics but turned out to be a defrocked dentist, and they had nearly offered a job to a man from Sri Lanka who seemed to know everything about the school apart from the fact that it was supposed to be for Muslims. He turned out to have escaped from an open prison in Dorking. Finally they had hired an almost completely monosyllabic man from the University of West Cameroun called Dr Ahmed Ali. All he had said at the interview, apart from ‘I completely agree with you’ and ‘You are absolutely right, Headmaster!’ was ‘Let’s get this show on the road!’

‘He’s a dry stick, Wilson,’ said Mr Malik, ‘but he is 100 per cent loyal. And I am looking for 100 per cent loyalty. Everything else can go hang!’

Dr Ali was to teach maths, chemistry, philosophy, geography and world events. He was, presumably, at this very moment, teaching one or some or all of these things in the large, airy classroom he occupied next to Robert’s. As usual, no sound whatsoever came from his room.

Robert was not teaching. He was in the state – now, after two months of the autumn term, agonizingly familiar to him – of being about to teach.
At any moment
, he told himself,
I will find myself up on my legs, waving my arms around in the air and giving.
His mother was always telling him that it was important for teachers to give, although what they were supposed to give she did not say. What did the little bastards want?

He sat at his desk and looked at his class. They looked back at him. ‘Right,’ he said, threateningly, ‘I am going to call the register.’

Mahmud put up his hand. ‘Please, sir,’ he said, ‘I want to go to the toilet.’

Robert sighed. ‘Right,’ he said, even more threateningly. ‘Does anyone else want to go to the toilet?’

No one moved. Fifteen small faces, in various shades of brown, studied him impassively.

‘A Muslim should enter the lavatory with his left foot first, saying, “Bismillah Allahumma Inni a’udhu Bika min al-Khubthi wa al-Khaba’ith” (In the name of Allah, Allah in You I take refuge from all evils).’

‘I know what’ll happen,’ said Robert. ‘Mahmud will go to the toilet and then you’ll all want to go. You’ll all rush out after him, won’t you? I want you all to think very hard about whether you
really
want to go to the toilet.’

The pupils of the reception class at the Independent Wimbledon Day Islamic Boys’ School did not enter the lavatory with their left feet first. They ran at it, screaming, in large numbers. Like children everywhere, they seemed to find lavatories hilarious.