The Road from Damascus (26 page)

Tom, glaring through the windscreen, replied staccato.

‘Yeah, but not mine. I’ll help you out in all kinds of ways, but not like this. My name written down in a police station. On someone’s computer. That is what I do not want. Do you understand me?’

‘Yes, Tom.’

‘That is what I do not want. I do everything I can to cover my tracks, to keep anonymous, and you give the Tom Field name to the state machinery. You’ve set me back, Sami. You’ve got in the way.’

The tendons writhed in the back of Tom’s neck. The sound of car engine. Torsos through the windows. They moved through light and shade into the densest section of the city.

In the cheeriest of voices, Sami spoke again.

‘So, GR, that’s an unusual name.’

‘Yep,’ said the driver. ‘Signifying Global Resister.’

She wore a one-piece camouflage suit. Brown and green jungle camouflage. Not much use for the urban environment.

‘And what are you resisting?’

‘The whole thing. Capitalism. Imperialism. Globalization. The way we’re being driven to Armageddon.’

She had nine-tenths of her attention on the road. This reassured Sami.

‘I see,’ he said.

Light brown hair was pulled up and tied on top of her head. Her neck smooth and unblemished. The hairs glistened sunlight blonde where they left the skin. Sami judged her to be in her late twenties, at least a decade younger than Tom. He knew nothing of Tom’s private life.

‘So you think Armageddon’s coming. A war. The end of the world.’

It sounded silly when he said it, so he laughed once.

‘Things’ll get a lot worse

They lurched around a skip cooped off from the traffic by mesh, like the holy of holies screened from the mob in an orthodox church. The skip was radioactive green. A worker perched on its edge eating from a Pret A Manger bag, listening to a walkman.

GR had stopped talking to concentrate. Now she picked up again: ‘… then there’ll be a revolution.’

The shadows of office buildings blotted them out.

‘A revolution,’ said Sami politely, glancing again at Tom’s rigid neck, his tight-packed scalp. ‘I thought revolutions were old-fashioned.’

‘Marx is a lot more relevant now than he was in 1917. You know when Marx said the conditions would be right for revolution?’

‘No. When?’

‘Only when the entire world is connected up to the same economic system. That’s when. One global system. Sound familiar?’

‘I suppose it does.’

‘Know what Marx said capitalism would inevitably lead to?’

‘Revolution?’

‘Apart from that.’

‘No. What?’

‘He said it would inevitably lead to the commodification of two things. Of nature and the human soul.’ She pronounced each carefully. ‘Nature, and the human soul.’

‘Yes,’ said Sami.

‘See any signs of that around you?’

He saw her nodding in the mirror, smilingly serious. There was a madman on the pavement. Sami couldn’t see his face, but could tell the madness from the ardour of his arms. A pigeon lit choking on the bonnet of the black cab to Sami’s right, then swam into the air again. The city was coughing at him.

‘Could we stop somewhere to get water? When it’s convenient.’

GR reached under her seat without losing grip on the wheel. She handed back a leather bottle. A muscular arm where it emerged from the camouflage. Was she Tom’s lover?

‘It’s filtered,’ she said.

Not a bottle but a water sack. Sami liked that. He felt like a Phoenician swigging at it, or some other kind of ancient Semite. But then he understood the thought to be Mustafa-inspired, and allowed it to die.

‘Filtered at a home base. That one’s not a commodity.’

Sami drank and drank, wondering what a home base was.

‘So, yeah, the revolution will come,’ GR continued. ‘It’s inevitable. There are ups and downs, sure. Things’ll get worse before they get better. But they will get better. Radically better.’

In the mirror Sami watched her eyes, flecked with orange, shining with quiet rapture. Somewhat less than nine-tenths of her attention on the road.

‘Evolution is a proven scientific mechanism. Life develops to higher stages. In the present situation, revolution is the only way to break through upwards. Evolution is progress, and progress must happen.’

Sami took the water sack from his lips, held it on his lap, panting.

‘Do you believe in progress?’ he managed.

‘Progress is inevitable. Otherwise there’s no meaning to the human experience. But Tom Field and I disagree about this.’

She called him Tom Field. Both first name and last, like a code.

Sami watched Tom’s unyielding ears and the stubborn stalks of hair. Save the internal agitations hinted at on the surface, it could have been sculpture. A backward bust. A work entitled: Anger Enwrapped.

‘Tom,’ Sami pleaded, ‘I’m sorry, all right? I’ve learnt a lesson. It’s been a learning experience.’

The Tom Field face whipped round like a sheet of metal in a storm.

‘I hope it was worth it,’ he said, with energy.

‘Yes,’ reflected Sami. ‘Yes, it was.’ He paused for longer than was relevant. ‘I learnt that I am flesh and blood. We, I mean, are flesh and blood. We’re made of matter, no more nor less.’

GR raised her forehead in satisfaction. These were necessary evolutionary stages: from woolly spirit to materialism, thence to dialectics and revolutionary action. Tom, however, squirmed impatiently.

‘Actually, no,’ he said. ‘We aren’t matter. We channel matter. Matter irrigates us.’

Sami, blissful because Tom was talking to him now, asked, ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean we consume and excrete matter, we take it in and break it down. But matter isn’t us. Matter seems to become us for a while, but it’s always in flux. No cell in your body is the same cell as when you were a boy. On a smaller level, the particles that make you are always flashing in and out of existence. You aren’t matter, you organize it. You’re an organizing principle. The flesh and blood is produced by you, a temporary pattern you’ve made. It isn’t you.’

Sami understood Tom’s words a little differently, through his own filter. I am the by-product of a body, he thought. I am a changing breath, a transient unity of synapse flow. He heard a ringing in his head, caused by estrangement. Such knowledge resists comprehension. Does an ant also fail to understand that it is an ant?

He returned to simpler matters.

‘Anyway, Tom, I’m sorry. I was in a bad way. I’d been up all night. I was coked up, drunk, stoned. I was going through a crisis. I’m sorry. I didn’t think.’

‘I know that,’ said Tom. ‘I know it. I’m making allowances for your circumstances. Wouldn’t have come for you otherwise.’

‘What circumstances? Did Schimmer tell you?’

‘Yes, Dr Schimmer called. Your wife was looking for you.’

‘My wife? Why? I didn’t think Schimmer would call around to announce it. Didn’t think it was that important.’

Tom wrinkled his eyes.

‘He wasn’t announcing. He was trying to find you, on your wife’s behalf.’

‘So he called her? Because I’ve given up the doctorate? She wants me to anyway.’

‘You’ve given up your doctorate?’

‘What else are we talking about?’

Now Tom’s eyes opened wide.

‘We’re talking, Sami, about your father-in-law’s death.’

GR steered towards the inevitable. Two cycle couriers sped past meanwhile, metallic and aerodynamically sculpted, adapted to their medium by wave-shaped helmets and snarling teeth. A woman in a suit waved across the road, shouting something silent through the traffic. Pollutants rose into the cooking sky. A shaft of light pierced the window next to Sami. He bowed his head into it.

‘I’m sorry, Sami,’ said Tom. ‘I presumed you knew.’

‘No, I didn’t.’ But there had been that message from Ammar on his mobile, in the pub among the Freemasons, the message he’d ignored. He flattened his palms on his groin and found that his mobile too was gone. Another loss.

‘Yes, yes, I knew. I did really.’

Tom with forearm on the ledge of the seat, breath surging through his nostrils, watched Sami. In contemporary English there are no formulas for this kind of thing.

Sami raised his head.

‘You’d better take me home.’

‘That’s where we’re taking you. Remind me of the address.’

Sami gave it. After that there was no conversation, except for enquiries concerning the least clogged route. Sami, eyes down, touched his thumbs together, experiencing not so much butterflies in the stomach as a raging holy dread as to what he would find at home.

Marwan was dead, that was another father lost. But worse, Sami by his absence and betrayal had abdicated all pretence to husbandhood. So how did that feel? Not too unpleasant. As ever, the sense of drama lightened things for him. Bad news is always good news so long as it’s dramatically bad. So long as there’s otherness, newness, difference. Then everything can be borne.

That was the attraction of intoxicants for him, the pulse-stopping drama of difference they thrust him into. To be different from himself. For this second to be different to the last. For nothing to be settled or normal or real. He was aware of the possibility that his need for difference arose from misunderstanding what was real, or from a partial understanding, from a blindness. Perhaps reality seen properly would not be so dull.

Relying, for now in any case, on old habits, familiar drugs, he found solace in change. He didn’t bother preparing a defence with which to meet Muntaha, but sat quiet in the back seat as the car prowled West London, sat and felt a new leaf being turned over, enjoyed the cooling breeze as it flopped heavily, greenly down.

His street. Their home. Sami exited the car. His legs shook. How long since he’d eaten? He approached his own unwelcoming front door as wobbly as a space traveller unaccustomed to local gravity. Took big careful steps across the pavement.

Tom wished him luck. Sami thanked him, and apologized again.

‘Nice to meet you, Sami.’ GR seen in patches, winking through the window behind Tom. I’ll be in touch, when I’ve found some revolutionary action for you.’

He let himself in.

She was in the kitchen, wearing a nightdress. He heard her stand up and walk towards him. There was a kind of awful peace about her and, at first, a forgiving warmth. Her face was shrunken, making her eyes seem even bigger than usual, and blacker. An impressive vortex of rings surrounded them, which made Sami think of a near-death experience – darkness tunnelling in towards pricks of redeeming light – light enlivened, as she studied him, by developing horror.

‘You’re bitten,’ she said. ‘You’ve been having sex with someone.’

Sami mumbled, ‘No, no,’ fingering his throat. He hadn’t yet had the luxury of a mirror view of himself. ‘No,’ he mumbled, ‘no, no…’ Not denying the accusation, just winning time. He spread his fingers, felt cool air between them. We have webbing there, remnants of webbing between each digit, because we have evolved from fish. We’ve gained nails, thumbs and fur, in return for gills, fins and scales.

‘Either you’ve been fighting or having sex. And you only fight with me. Look at me. Have you betrayed me?’

He looked at her.

‘Have you been out fucking someone?’ The bowstring of her voice taut, the volume rising with each word.

Sami stood before her conscious of his size. Just irrigating liquid in flux, perhaps, but it felt solid to him, felt like bulk.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

‘On the day of my father’s death.’ Her olive-oil voice distorted by an act of terrible vandalism, and still rising. The string of a lute pulled so far back from the body of the instrument that it has to break.

‘Yes. I didn’t know about that. I mean, I only knew partially.’

Muntaha watched him as if waiting for an answer, her eyes roaming about his face, which he knew to be just the same unresponsive face as usual, a face which doesn’t give answers. He wanted to tell her so: ‘It’s only my face, the same one as before, there isn’t any reason to it.’ It took a long time for her to realize this. Then she cast her eyes down, and relaxed. The air whistled out of her. She returned to the kitchen.

He watched her move away. With her nightdress crumpled to her, her white arms sombre as moonlight, he glimpsed Muntaha as an old woman. There’s a future he was excluded from, a loss not yet lived but already determined. But he didn’t mourn. Newness was still exciting him. The stripping away of what he’d had whet his appetite for more denudation. A sense of anticipation, as if he was about to step into the steam of an old city hammam. About to get clean.

He climbed the stairs. Collected his toothbrush, laid out some clothes on the bed. Smelled the tranquillity of her there but resisted the urge to push his nose into the sheets. By his side of the bed were the wooden prayer beads he’d brought back from Syria for Marwan but had forgotten to give to him. He glanced from the window on to mud and wall, and glimpsed then the unvarnished truth: that he had betrayed everybody, in various ways. Mustafa. Marwan. His mother, of course. Now Muntaha. Not just now, but for a decade. He’d let down Mustafa by failing as an academic, even as an atheist. For Marwan, the betrayal was not being a Muslim, or a father. For his mother, he was not a son. For his wife, not a man. The pattern of his relations with the world was to betray its trust. Everybody’s trust. Here the vision of the betrayed expanded to include Tom, whose name he’d given to the authorities, and Schimmer, whose efforts had been wasted, and Ammar, who he hadn’t guided rightly, and Bikini Girl, for something obscure, and deeper into obscurity, his broken uncle Faris, in Damascus. Why was Sami responsible for that? The question posed itself in bright clarity, and Sami at once forgot it. Forgetful Sami. Leaving everything unpacked, he descended.

She was standing in the kitchen entrance, arms folded above her breasts. It looked to him that she needed somebody to give her a hug. He, of course, was not that somebody.

‘Would you say you’ve been a good husband to me?’ she asked, pouting slightly, brow knitted. Trying to work things out.

‘Well, no,’ Sami admitted. ‘No, I wouldn’t.’