The Blasphemer: A Novel (24 page)

As Daniel cycled home across Clapham Common, with Martha following on her bike a few yards behind, his relief turned to an odd sense of gratitude. Whether he knew it or not, Hamdi, or at least a simulacrum of Hamdi, had saved him. He had, after all, been trying to take his life jacket off when ‘Hamdi’ distracted him. He had stayed afloat. In terms of timing at least, there was a connection between the hallucination and his being saved. Daniel decided to send the teacher a present by way of thanks. A bottle of champagne. No. Hamdi was a Muslim. A CD box set. That would be better. Mahler. He could order it online, when he got home. He tried to think of a message – something along the lines of ‘thank you for saving me’ – but realized whatever he wrote would sound insane, so he would send the gift anonymously, next day delivery.

*

The phone rang. Nancy answered. ‘Is that Mrs Kennedy?’ The voice was graceful and measured.

Nancy hesitated. People often assumed she was married. ‘Speaking.’

‘It’s Mr Said-Ibrahim from the school. I was wondering if I could have a quick word with you and your husband one afternoon this week. Or first thing, if that would be easier.’

‘Anything wrong?’

‘No, no. Not at all. But I would like to see you both together if that’s possible.’

‘Of course. This afternoon? Martha is going back to a friend’s house for tea.’

‘Should we say three forty-five? I’ll be in the classroom.’

Nancy was surprised when Daniel readily agreed to the meeting. He normally tried to get out of school events.

Hamdi was sitting at his desk marking homework when Nancy tapped on the door.

‘Thank you for coming at short notice,’ Hamdi said, standing up and crossing the classroom to shake hands. ‘Can I get you a coffee?’

‘No, we’re fine,’ Nancy said.

‘Take a seat.’ Hamdi gestured apologetically at two children-sized chairs in front of his desk. ‘Sorry.’

When Nancy and Daniel sat down, their knees were almost level with their chests. They both sniffed and looked around. The classroom smelled of glue, gym socks and Cup-a-Soup. There were essays on the wall, a project about Ancient Egypt, a paperchain, an overhead projector and a blackboard which had the day’s date written in chalk and the word ‘equations’ underlined twice. There were also piles of Oxford Reading Tree books, colourful trays stacked with textbooks and pots of pencils sharpened to fragility and leaking smells of carbon.

Hamdi came straight to the point: ‘Is everything all right at home?’

The couple looked at one another in surprise.

‘Martha has been behaving oddly,’ Hamdi elaborated. ‘She seems unable to concentrate in class. Hasn’t been her usual, carefree self. And the thing is, I wouldn’t normally mention this as it is bound to happen from time to time, but she seems to have developed …’ He shifted uncomfortably. ‘How can I put this? She has become a little fixated with me.’

Daniel noticed Martha’s handwriting on one of the fact boxes on a volcano project. He saw, too, a chart of stars by pupils’ names and Martha’s had the most. His eye fell on the news cutting on the board behind the teacher’s desk:
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
. Hamdi followed his eye. ‘Martha brought it in to show me,’ he said. ‘She’s very proud of you.’ He paused again. ‘She’s been bringing in quite a lot of things for me. Gifts, I suppose you would call them. She leaves them in my desk.’

‘Gifts?’ Nancy asked, folding her arms defensively.

‘Cards that were unsigned but in her handwriting. Lines of poetry. Pictures she had drawn. Chocolates. When a half-used bottle of aftershave appeared, I did wonder then whether I should say something.’ From his desk he produced a black bottle of Calvin Klein Eau de Toilette Spray.

‘I wondered where that was,’ Daniel said.

‘But I didn’t want to embarrass her,’ Hamdi continued. ‘And I assumed the phase would pass. I decided I would slip the aftershave into her satchel at the end of term. Then a CD box set arrived. There was no message attached so I rang the internet store and was told it was paid for by a credit card belonging to a Dr Daniel Kennedy.’

Daniel found it hard to take all this in. He watched Hamdi’s lips move but could not concentrate on what he was saying, the words slipping through his mind like mercury through open fingers. It was partly to do with Hamdi’s appearance – androgynous, almost sexless – partly with his voice. It was unnaturally neutral and elusive, like soft rain. Daniel could not detect an accent, something he was
normally good at. And he found Hamdi’s expressions impossible to read, too, as if he was slightly out of focus, as though he had no edges. Yet for all his impersonality, Hamdi appeared familiar to Daniel, as if he had known him all his life. It was to do with the way his eyes bulged, a pressure of acuity.

Nancy had no difficulty concentrating on his words. ‘Thanks for being so tactful, Mr Said-Ibrahim.’

‘Please, call me Hamdi.’

‘We’ll have a word with her.’

‘And if there is anything you want to talk about regarding Martha, please feel free to call me at any time. My home number is on the school list. She is a gifted little girl.’

As had become her habit since the crash, Nancy did not wear her seat belt in the car on the way home. She was in the passenger seat and when she reached in the ashtray for a pound coin and slipped it under her bra Daniel asked, ‘What are you doing?’

‘It’s so I don’t forget to leave it under Martha’s pillow tonight. When I get undressed it will fall out and remind me.’

‘Why do you want to leave a pound under her pillow?’

‘She lost a tooth this morning.’

‘But she doesn’t believe in the tooth fairy.’

‘She believes in money.’ Nancy studied Daniel’s face. ‘What did you make of Hamdi?’

‘Seemed nice.’

‘He’s right, you know. She has been behaving oddly. I think we need to get some play dates and sleepovers sorted out for her. I don’t think she’s mixing. Not eating properly either. Small for her age. We should have family mealtimes.’

‘What about getting her to a child psychologist?’

‘Couldn’t hurt.’

‘Think I should be the one to have a word with her, father to daughter.’ Daniel tapped the steering wheel. ‘As it was my credit card she used.’

He looked at Nancy and fancied there was a cloud of suspicion in her eyes, but he dismissed this – she couldn’t have known that he had no intention of having a word with Martha. When he got
home he went to his study and phoned Hamdi.

‘Hello …’ Daniel couldn’t remember the name; it slipped through his mind, unable to find traction.

‘Hamdi.’

‘It’s Daniel, Martha’s father.’

‘Professor Kennedy. Hello. Thank you for coming to see me …’ That unplaceable voice again, part warm beer, part Arabian incense. ‘I hope you didn’t think I was being melodramatic.’

‘No.’ Daniel hunched his shoulders and spoke in a low voice. ‘I’m glad you asked me. Contrary to what Nancy and I said, we have been under strain since the plane crash. This may be why Martha has been behaving oddly.’

‘I see. Thank you for letting me know …’ Silence. ‘Was there anything else?’

There was hesitation in Daniel’s voice. ‘I know this is going to sound odd, but I have a feeling I’ve seen you before.’

‘I’ve been at the school since the middle of last term.’

‘No, somewhere else.’

It was Hamdi’s turn to hesitate. ‘I believe you saw me at that demonstration outside Parliament.’

‘Yes, I did see you there.’

‘I wasn’t taking part, you know.’ Hamdi sounded anxious. ‘I was passing. Went over to have a look. I was curious, that’s all.’

‘No, no. I wasn’t suggesting …I was passing, too. But it wasn’t there I was thinking of. Have you always lived around Clapham?’

‘Only for six months. I was at Birmingham University before I came here.’ He paused. ‘I read music. A doctorate. My plan was to teach music at university, but nothing has come up.’ Another pause. ‘I think when they see my name on the application … I’ve considered changing it.’

‘You should come along to Trinity. I’m there most days. Ask the porter to ring for me and I’ll sign you in. The music professor is a friend of mine. I could introduce you. It can’t hurt.’

‘Thanks. That’s generous. Remind me, what is it you teach there?’

Daniel hesitated. He had come to accept from years of awkward
moments at dinner parties that nematology was a discipline so obscure it could not pass without explanation. And when he did explain it, people always sounded embarrassed on his behalf. He thought he had perfected a technique for sparing people the awkwardness – and he deployed it. ‘I’m a nematologist. No, I hadn’t heard of it either. It’s an obscure branch of zoology.’

‘I have heard of zoology. You study elephants and tigers.’

‘Not exactly, I study worms.’

‘Oh.’

‘So where were you before university?’

There was silence.

‘I’m sorry, Mr …’

‘Hamdi.’

‘I don’t mean to sound nosy, I just …’

‘It’s OK, professor.’

‘Associate professor. But call me Daniel.’

‘My family live in Birmingham. My parents were born there. My grandparents came to this country in the fifties.’

‘From?’

‘Iraq. Karbala.’

‘Ever been there?’

‘Been asked …’ Hamdi hesitated. ‘But it is a dangerous place.’

‘Sectarian tensions?’

‘No, everyone in Karbala is Shia. It is a holy city, a place of angels. A thousand came down from heaven in the ancient days and never returned.’

Daniel fell silent. He was finding it hard to concentrate on Hamdi’s words again. They were evaporating like breath on a mirror.

‘Hello? Professor Kennedy? Are you still there?’

‘Yes, I’m still here. Look, I’d better go. I’m serious about Trinity. And call me Daniel.’

Daniel sat at his computer screen and self-consciously googled the words ‘guardian angel’, barely able to look at his screen as he typed. His ‘angel’, after all, had inverted commas for feathers. There were thousands of results, flapping in the electronic ether like
trapped birds. He found most of the sites too nauseating to open: New Age offers to ‘identify who your guardian angel is, based on your birthday’; or sites promising to show photographs of ‘angels’ supposedly seen in the smoke clouds of the falling Twin Towers. One, under the heading ‘how to recognize an angel by its smell’, intrigued him enough to click on it: according to medieval angelology, he read, angels were accompanied by an aroma associated with angelica, an ingredient in cakes and puddings. He smiled and shook his head. A site dedicated to Shackleton’s claim that he experienced a ‘guiding presence’ as he crossed the mountains of South Georgia looked promising, but turned out to be more nonsense.

It took a news site to make his eyes widen in appalled disbelief: a
Time
magazine poll revealed that 78 per cent of Americans believed in angels, while 63 per cent believed they had their own guardian angel. Unsure what it was he was looking for, he continued scrolling until he reached a pseudo-academic-looking site dedicated to something called the Royal Society of Angelology. There was indeed a royal crest, as well as a detail from Fra Angelico’s ‘The Annunciation’ and a brief history of the society, but that was all. The society had been founded by the Duke of Norfolk in 1615 and given a royal warrant by King James I the following year. A chair had been founded at New College, Oxford, but no one had held it for more than a century, it having been amalgamated with the theology and philosophy chairs. ‘Belief that God sends a spirit to watch every individual was common in Ancient Greek philosophy,’ he read in an introduction, ‘and Plato alludes to it in
Phaedo
, 108. But it is with the Judaeo-Christian tradition that angelology is more commonly associated. The Hebrew for angel is
mal’akh
, which originally meant the “shadow side of God” but came to be translated as “messenger” …’ Among the patrons listed was one Professor Laurence Wetherby. Daniel reached for his copy of
Who’s Who
. Wetherby’s entry listed ‘angelology’ under his interests, along with ‘humiliating modernists and liberals’. Daniel tapped his teeth with a pen, nodded to himself and sent Wetherby an email.

Martha returned from her friend’s house and ran up the stairs, as she always did, to see her father. ‘What you reading, Daniel?’ she asked.

Daniel was smiling. ‘Nothing important. And call me Daddy.’

Martha jumped on his lap. ‘Can I see?’

‘No.’ He tickled her ribs. ‘It’s private.’

‘Is it porn?’

His ringtone interrupted further discussion. Though there was a photograph of a grizzly bear flashing on the iPhone screen, Daniel hesitated before picking it up. The phone was also on vibrate and as it rang it turned slightly on its axis. ‘Bear,’ he said in a voice that sounded calmer than he felt.

‘Hi, Dan. Where are you?’

‘Home, just sitting with Martha. Say hello to Bruce, darling.’ Daniel pressed the iPhone to his daughter’s ear.

‘Hi, Uncle Bear. He won’t let me read his emails.’

‘Emails from who?’

‘Whom.’

‘Whom.’

‘Don’t know. Says they are private.’

‘Quite right too. You on the same insulin dosage as before?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Any more hypos?’

‘Nah. My doctor says I’m allowed to self-administer soon.’

‘Great. Can I have Daddy back please?’

‘He wants to speak to you.’

Daniel took the phone. ‘So what’s up?’

‘Just wanting to arrange a time for you to swing by my office.’

‘My test results?’

‘Yeah.’

Martha signalled for the phone back. Daniel put his finger in the air. ‘So what do they say? Pass? Fail?’

‘When can you come in?’

‘Can’t you tell me over the phone?’

‘Probably best to come in, then I can go through them with you, urm, you know, properly. How are you fixed for this week?’

‘Thursday morning would suit me best.’

‘Great. See you then.’

‘Should I be worried? Hello? Bear?’ He looked at Martha. ‘Gone.’

As he stared at the phone, Daniel’s fingers rose slowly to his scalp and began to massage.