The Road from Damascus (40 page)

And another: ‘Hands off our women’s vaginas!’

The audience swerved from side to side hunting for drama.

‘Your
women?’ Iqbal rejoined. ‘They own themselves, my primitive friend. And the vagina, being hidden, is not your target. It is the vulvas you want! It is the visible vulvas that offend!’ Forgetting in the heat of combat to touch lower lip to teeth, Iqbal pronounced it ‘wulwas’. Wisible wulwas.

‘Oi! Leave our vulvas alone!’ One of the flappers there.

And another, clearly also British-born, mocked, ‘You take our wul-was, Iqbal, but leave our vulvas alone!’

Someone barked, ‘Female circumcision got nothing to do with Islam anyway!’

Booing and hissing to that.

‘That’s not his business! That’s our business! That’s our discussion!’

‘But he’s pretending it’s part of Islam!’

To which, a clamour of agreement.

Two voices in concert urged, ‘Propaganda!’ It was unclear whether they opposed propaganda or wanted some, and who they thought the propagandist in question was.

‘He called us suicide bombers!’

‘Terrorists!’

‘Don’t insult our martyrs!’

‘Fucking murderer!’

‘Shut your faces!’

‘Fundamentalists!’

The audience tossed like wind-pulled waves. Even the front rows lost their unity. Faces couldn’t agree which direction to turn. Unruly eyes and fingers splashed all ways like foam. People were standing up, which made others strain and stretch to better view the action. Shouts spattered like bursts of rain on foliage.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Iqbal made a preacher’s sweeping gesture over the mob, ‘I present my characters.’

Iqbal had always liked rough and tumble. It was a long while since he’d written notes for his speeches; the confidence conferred by fame had made them unnecessary. He preferred to speak on his toes, feeding on nervous energy and on the responses of the crowd. Hecklers aided his improvisation, summoning sparks from him and electrifying the audience. Hecklers were welcome. Violence was welcome, so long as it was at a reasonable distance. He got a buzz out of it. Whenever he wanted a bolt of inspirational lightning he remembered the communal fighting of his youth. Mainly Sunni Shia in Lucknow, but Hindu Muslim in other cities. Or the street battles between language communities. The primitivism of it, the wild men roaring, the keening women beating their breasts. His headmaster called it ‘the human comedy’, those mornings when the dayboys from the inner neighbourhoods couldn’t come to school. ‘Smaller classes today, boys. The human comedy is in performance once again.’ Seen on television as arms and legs and teeth and police sticks, or with the rolling naked eye as purple smoke rising above the old town, it was enjoyable, it was colourful. Rough and tumble. Slap and tickle. Colour and trees and birds on the largest scale. Mother India. Monsoon leaves slapping against the windows. Illuminated dreams.

‘Mosques are taking over abandoned churches,’ he shouted. ‘Are we happy with this? Is this what we call progress?’

The tempest met his voice. Sonic Iqbal and the hecklers struggled like clashing pressure fronts.

He shouted, ‘Some of our young, excitable friends are taking offence. Well let them! Let obscurantism and demagoguery take offence! Let us fight if fighting is necessary! Proactively. Pre-emptively. Let us fight in defence of the right to offend!’

With a transposition of atmospheric volumes, Iqbal was drowned out.

From mid-hall: ‘Fuck your progress!’

From the stage, behind Iqbal: ‘Please! Please!’

General pleading from all around. Whimpers of distress. Chorused cursing not at anyone specific, but just because the world was bad. Combative chuckles and howling. Disruption, as a longbeard pushed through from the centre, jostling chairs: ‘Come down and fight, then!’ Photographers prowled between seats and stage, shooting at random.

Daoud Jenkinson, wearing a magisterial frown, reached his feet and opened his mouth. At this rate, he would miss his chance to answer Iqbal.

‘Uncle fucking Tom!’ someone called, presumably at Iqbal.

‘House Nigga!’

‘Fuck your mother! Am I offending?’

The gridmarked doors from the corridor wheezed open and shut and trickles of protesters forced their way through into the already brimming hall.

‘The headscarf,’ Iqbal persisted. ‘Why should a secular and modern society have to put up with it? It oppresses women and it oppresses those men who might wish to see women’s hair without being accused of perversity. Why should we allow this?’

‘If I may respond,’ mouthed Daoud. ‘If I may calm tempers by responding to this assault.’

Too late to calm a cloudburst. Eschewing the guerrilla tactic of striking and ducking, people now stood on chairs and sloganized, attracting punters from the no-longer seated, milling crowd.

‘They weaken our culture so they can steal our land!’

‘There’s your multiculturalism! Chaos! It’s a Paki invasion!’

‘Imperialist!’

‘Imagine,’ screamed Iqbal. ‘Imagine the future. Freed from mind tyranny, free to design the heavens for ourselves. Freed of religious war, liberated by control of the material world, the only world we have. And then there will be no grieving. Freed to explore the imaginary realms. No grief will touch us.’

A crumpled ball of paper bounced off his forehead. More followed, like Himalayan hailstones.

‘Traitor!’ was screamed at him.

Sami, meanwhile, vague and amused, had risen from his seat into a quarter crouch. Debate had crossed a line and was becoming riot. As the first chairs were thrown he sensed the supernatural presence of ruptured normality, of danger. Unable to believe it, an ambiguous grin spread from one side of his heavy beard to the other.

A knot of brothers occupying a section at the front were haranguing Daoud: ‘What colour are you? Sitting with the kuffar! He’s one of the kuffar!’

Daoud responded with splutters, enraged: ‘What colour am I? Islam is above race!’

A chant started: ‘Al-Jihad! Al-Jihad!’

And another, more weakly: ‘Black and white / Unite and fight!’

‘Time’s coming to get you!’ threatened a voice with time on its side.

A pained, tormented voice: ‘Consultation, brothers! Seeking to come to terms!’

Someone ordered, ‘Restore order!’

And this was the last widely registered word. A dam burst followed. When Sami saw brawny white males in cheap suits and T-shirts and football colours pouring through the open doors he clutched his throat protectively. BNP, it looked like, restoring order with urgency and dedication. They hadn’t been represented at the stalls outside, but here they were. Here they were. Fists into ears, boots and neatly toed office shoes into balls and vulvas. Chairs not thrown but beaten against the floor until they could be recycled as batons and clubs. A screaming, and a thickening rain of blood drops.

Mujahid unexpectedly wheeled into sight. ‘Brother Sami!’ he yelped, pulling at him in his panic.

In the same moment the drunken man Sami had called his uncle ran unevenly past Sami’s right eye. ‘Devils!’ he proclaimed. ‘Possessed by demons!’ He’d either had a good wash since his police-cell sojourn, or fear had removed Sami’s sense of smell.

Sami found himself gripping a metal bar, formerly chair leg, protecting Dr Schimmer’s eggshell skull. His hands stung. The ballhead facing him grappled back his weapon and swung at a frozen Mujahid. Sami’s hands connected again, stinging more. Sami and ballhead both expressionless. It was all too quick to be personal. Mujahid ball-eyed, quivering, understanding once more what he’d let himself in for with the floppy clothes and the beard.

Now police flooded in to establish another brand of order, and added to the crowd. It was as packed as Carnival, as Haj. A lot of earnest, busy, unselfconscious noise. Sami looked round for Tom Field but didn’t find him. (Tom had slipped out when Iqbal made the headscarf comment.) Sami had decided to get out of the way himself when he realized the police were heavy truncheoning only the Muslims. Theblackbeards and hijabs and dark skin andskullcaps taking the brunt. Ballheads dropping their chair legs and strolling to the sides, and out. Sami gathered his beard in his fist.

He heard a thundercrack. Not heard; felt. It was heart-shaking. He’d done a strobe dance of defensive contortions and turns before he told himself what the sound was. Gunshot.

The hall was stilled. Everybody stationary. The dreadlocked headphone couple stood up slowly and pressed their backs to the back wall.

The Westway above Shepherd’s Bush was thunderous not with traffic but rebellion. Or with the techno sound which signalled one self-conscious sort of rebellion. A high-stacked sound system set up against the base of the central reservation was blasting a trance version of Public Enemy’s ‘Party For Your Right to Fight’, which is what several thousand young and older were doing, shaking, swigging, smoking, smooching. Drumming and juggling. And agitating: a long Reclaim the Streets banner was hung from the flyover railings. Because this wasn’t Carnival. Carnival had been a fortnight before. Here on the Westway, which Carnival never touched, anarchist flags flew. A Jamaican flag. A Palestinian flag. A ganga-leaf flag. Children of the radicals kicked castles over in a sandpit hastily constructed on the east-bound carriageway. There was free food of the bean and brown rice variety being ladled out. Stalls selling natural highs, on both carriageways, and thin men moving through the crowd advertising ‘Bush, Bush’. A lot of shabby-as-normal people, some surprised in formal working clothes, alongside others dressed especially for the bacchanal and masquerade, like the clowns and the silly top hats. Like the women on stilts under whose absurdly hooped skirts hidden eco-guerrillas drilled holes in the tarmac, holes to be filled with peaty soil and small trees smuggled from black bin liners, and before that liberated out of commercial forests in the Home Counties. The structure heaved and vibrated under all this weight. It heaves under the weight of cars and lorries too, but on ordinary days there are no feet to feel the heaving. The smoke of spliffs and sparklers rose, but no petrol carbonate, not from this half-mile of concrete, not at the moment. The Trellick Tower glistened from the east. Wormwood Scrubs prison visible to the north, and towers and inter-arterial no-man’s-land to the south.

Sami was there, reading a leaflet.
The whole of our enculturation
, it said,
consists of being told to stay inside. Remember Don’t Talk To Strangers, Keep Off The Grass and No Ball Games? We’re told that outside doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to private vehicles, to business! Reclaim The Streets says Bollocks to that! Dis-enculturate yourself! Clean your brain out! Go Outside! Go into the streets
!

He’d come because GR had invited him. She’d promised revolutionary action the day she’d driven him from police cell to Muntaha. The day Muntaha told him to leave. GR made good her promise: stopping cars was her revolution, at least her first step. It looked like a little bit of fun, but not so much fun that Sami would feel guilty or overcome by it. Still avoiding hedonism, he’d only skirted the edge of Carnival (all his life was there in the noise and the throng: old Moroccan ladies swaying on the pavement, liberal Arabs on the al-Muhajir float, spliff and lager, reggae and hip hop, the steel pans you hear practising when you walk canalside in the summer, booming systems,
The Final Call
sold by Nation blacks, and Muntaha in it somewhere munching a corn on the cob, watching the procession). But this Reclaim the Streets thing was new for him, and new was good. It had nothing to do with Muslim or Arab controversies. Enough of that with Rashid Iqbal and bullets in the ceiling. Enough of that with Marwan and Mustafa.

Global Resister in karate kit handed him a clay mugful of carrot juice.

‘Shutting the city to cars, Sami, is opening it to us. Opening our lungs too. The combustion engine is the single worst invention of capitalism, I tell you. Just filth. Smoke for the lungs, heat for the planet, cash for the bosses.’

He remembered his driving lessons, a dirty secret.

‘Where’s the public space,’ GR cheerily continued, ‘except when we steal it back? You know, we used to have town centres, common land, public squares where we could meet and talk and sing and protest. Now a square is something for cars. Something for privatized transport. We’re only allowed to walk across it at designated points, when the lights tell us we can. Town centres are corporate owned. Instead of markets we have malls. All policed and mood-controlled and surveyed by closed-circuit TV.’

The space was increasingly rammed. ‘Street Now Open’, signalled a sign. And: ‘Car Culture: No Future’. And: ‘Road Rave’, the ‘v’ busting a ‘g’ out of its way.

‘Where’s Tom?’

‘He thinks it’s too late for this kind of resistance. He’s a pessimist. And he doesn’t want to be seen by the cameras.’

Police vans at the protest perimeter banked against the human flow, and policemen wielding shock-absorbent cameras standing on the bonnets. Lenses also extended from helicopters which Sami hadn’t remarked. You stop noticing helicopters in London just as you stop noticing flies in Syria. Some of the Reclaim the Streets hardcore, the people working the drills, wore balaclavas and kuffiyehs.

‘But he should have come,’ said GR. ‘Don’t you feel optimistic, being here?’

Sami searched and found an abdominal effect not unlike belief. ‘I do,’ he said.

‘That’s the power of direct action. It gives you a sense of your own strength. It shows you what you can achieve. You’re interested in the Arabs. It’s a good time for the Arabs too, isn’t it? At last.’

So here we go. Arab controversies. But from a new, non-Arab perspective.

‘Why do you say so?’

‘The Intifada, for a start. I know it’s sad they’re being shot. But it’s good to see them in open rebellion. It’s an inspiration. It’s terrifying the ruling class.’

She wore only karate trousers and a karate jacket. And sandals. Hair tied up and flowering from the crown of her head. Bird’s feet of enthusiasm radiating from the sides of her eyes and mouth.