by Amis, Martin
When in Islamic history did the Sunni–Shia schism take place?
a) After the Sykes–Picot Agreement in 1916
b) After the Alhambra Decree in Spain in 1492
c) After the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 AD
None of us had any idea. What schism? What was Shia and what was Sunni? And remind us – who exactly was the Prophet Muhammad? As the clock ticked we hurriedly conferred: 1916 looked too recent, 632 too ancient, so we opted for 1492. Wrong…Quite a while later, when we were on our third round of drinks (and about £25 down), the question reappeared (questions quite often reappeared); and this time we went for 1916 and Sykes–Picot. Wrong again.
‘…So quite a while back,’ concluded Steve.
‘Yeah, they must’ve done it first thing,’ said Mike. ‘They didn’t hang about.’
The TV on its perch above the mirrored bar was not silently devoted to snooker or golf or darts, as it normally was. On the screen we saw the sulphurous hole in the flank of the Pentagon. This image was then supplanted by the priestly and prissy beauty of Osama bin Laden.
‘Well. One thing we do know,’ said Mike. ‘It’s all off now.’*5
‘Now it’s all off,’ said Steve.
And I agreed that now it was definitely all off.
Hanif and the great sea
On my way back to the mews (to freshen up before going home) I stopped at Hanif’s Service Store on Portobello Road for a fresh wallet of Golden Virginia. Hanif, the owner–manager, had come to Britain four decades ago from the city of Gujarat (there were, and are, more Muslims in India than in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, and Hanif’s father was one of them). He and I had regular exchanges, in the warm, courteous, rather literary, no, in fact strikingly high-style English characteristic of the Subcontinent, so I was planning to say something like Well, Hanif? It seems, does it not, that yet again the violent have borne it away? But there were other customers to be served, and while I waited I reached down for an Evening Standard (whose front page confronted you with 09.03, September 11, 2001, and the moment of climactic kinesis, as the second plane hits the South Tower in ballooning parachutes of flame), not the copy on the top of the stack, which was wet and frayed, and not the copies immediately under it, which were curled and damp; no, I boldly seized the spine of a copy about halfway down, and tried to ease it free…
Now it was already a family joke, the promptness – the instantaneity – of my reaction to any resistance whatever on the part of inanimate objects. Just the other Sunday I came down to breakfast and my wife and daughters (trying not to laugh) presented me with a fresh item of evidence. Exhibit A, this time, wasn’t a bent door key or a scragged toilet roll. It was an allegedly resealable ice-cream carton that I had briefly struggled to open the night before. The rectangular plastic lid bore the crosswise gashes of a carving knife. Even Inez, at twenty-five months, had come to see this sort of thing as extremely funny. In other words, at the slightest show of dumb insolence from the non-organic world, I turned at once to uninhibited force.
So now I am reaching down for that stacked Standard, and pulling on it. And encountering recalcitrance – followed by intransigence. My internal mutter was as usual Christ – what’s in it for YOU? and with fingers that were always impatient, always tremulous (Eliza called them ‘too wobbly’), I tensed myself in a half-crouch and tugged with maximal strength.
My grasp slipped and my hand flew wildly up and drove its knuckle into the rusty iron bracket of the shelf above – scab first.
Hanif hurried over, tearing at a little packet of paper tissues. The Standard’s front page was being steadily and audibly dotted with blood.
‘Here, my friend.’
‘Thank you. Thanks.’ I sighed. ‘So I add my drops…’
‘…to the great sea.’
‘Yes, Hanif. To the great sea.’
For twenty minutes in the kitchen of his workplace he wearily sluiced his wound under the cold tap. Outside, high, high up in the sky, a dark shape cleaved its way through the colourlessness.
Was it a Bird? No. Was it a Plane? No, not really. Was it Superman? Or perhaps one of Superman’s enemies – the Joker, Black Zero, Mr Mxyzptlk…?
Osama had unveiled a new target: human society (in all its non-Koranic forms).
…Martin knew that for the rest of his life he would never see a low-flying aircraft with his original eyes. And what lay beneath? A place where every building was a vulnerability and every citizen was a combatant. A place where everyone was dreaming they were naked.
Which they were.
*1 This was 2001, and of course everything seen from a distance in time looks innocent, and is innocent, comparatively (because the opposite of innocence, when it’s not guilt, is experience, and experience just accumulates, like age). That was an unsuspecting sky in the hours after dawn on September 11.
*2 Suicide missions are no doubt as old as human conflict, and you and I may have actually glimpsed the grey and grainy footage of the kamikaze (the word translates as divine wind) going about his work over the Pacific, in 1944–5. But Japan, at that stage, was fighting for national survival, and the tactic was partly an effect of what Churchill called ‘the moral rot of war’: as a war grows older, it also grows crueller. September 11 was not the last act of a drama but its prologue; the suicide mission is what it started with…Some points of general comparison. The kamikazes’ ‘success rate’ (hitting a ship) was 19 per cent; they killed 4,900 sailors at the cost of 3,860 pilots. Al-Qaeda’s success rate (hitting a building) was 75 per cent; they killed just under 3,000 for the loss of nineteen. The kamikaze operation lasted for ten months, al-Qaeda’s for just ninety-one minutes. And while the suicidaires of 1944–5 killed uniformed enemy combatants, those of 2001 killed men, women, and children who were dressed for the office or for the airport.
*3 The angle was in fact twelve degrees – confirming the marked distortion of one’s senses on that day (with the pathetic fallacy also showing its presence). But the mind was not deceived about the aircraft’s speed. In the thicker air of the troposphere, planes observe set limits, and must not exceed 230 mph below 2,500 feet (stacked above an airport, you are wallowing around at 150 mph). Muhammad Atta hit the North Tower at 494 mph (floors ninety-three to ninety-nine); Marwan al-Shehhi hit the South Tower at 586 mph (floors seventy-five to eighty-five) and his 767 was close to breaking up in the air. Partly for this reason, the North Tower stood for just over a hundred minutes, the South Tower for just under an hour.
*4 Much later I would learn that British Islamists, lifelong residents of (say) Bradford or Luton, habitually disobeyed traffic lights, on principle, as a way of showing their disdain for the norms of an alien and impious land. The deeper urge, perhaps, is to free yourself from reason. This is really a sine qua non for the jihadi ideologue: free yourself from reason, and anything seems possible (at least for a while), including world domination and a global caliphate…I cannot refrain from quoting Lolita – three pages from the end. Humbert is in his car, having just murdered his rival Clare Quilty: ‘…since I had disregarded all the laws of morality, I might as well disregard the laws of traffic…It was a pleasant diaphragmal melting, with elements of diffused tactility, all this enhanced by the thought that nothing could be nearer to the elimination of basic physical laws than deliberately driving on the wrong side of the road. In a way, it was a very spiritual itch.’
*5 The phrase ‘all off’ derives, I assume, from the sphere of spontaneous brawls and broils and ruckuses. It means something like ‘now anything goes’ or ‘now all hell can break loose’ or ‘now all bets are off’. In Bill Buford’s book about football hooliganism, Among the Thugs, a tracksuited capo rallies his troops by weaving among them and potently repeating the words It’s going to go off. In this context violence ‘goes off’ in the way a bomb goes off. Mike and Steve were applying ‘it’s all off’ to interna
tional relations – and informally prefiguring the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Chapter 4
September 11
3: The days after the day after
Don Juan in Hull
Elena yawned lavishly and said to him, ‘It’s midnight.’
‘That’s true, El. It is now September 13.’
‘And I’m tired…Why does she call Larkin the poet from Hell?’
‘…It’s not in the sense of, I don’t know – the neighbour from hell. He was the poet from Hell, capital aitch. Hell was where he lived. Hull. A port city in Yorkshire, Pulc, where the constant mist reeks of fish.’ With his sound hand Martin got hold of the Scotch bottle and poured himself a big one. ‘He wasn’t from Hull yet, mind, not in 1948. He was still pulling his wire down in Leicester.’
‘How old was he then? Was he just a librarian?’
‘Mm, and he wasn’t a poet yet either, not mainly. He was Kingsley’s age, so twenty-six. But he was a red squirrel all right. He’d already published two novels.’
She said, ‘Like you.’
‘…Uh, yeah, now you mention it.’ He drank. ‘You know, at that stage it looked as though Larkin would be the novelist and Kingsley’d be the poet. If anything.’
‘Your wound’s seeping. Use the roll.’ She took up the pages. ‘PL as she now calls him got to Ainsham in time for Christmas Day. And he was still there when Kingsley crept back with his dirty laundry on New Year’s Eve. So there was an awkward but in the end “very jolly” Hogmanay. In quotes. I see. They all got pissed.’
‘Yeah, assuming they had the cash. They were very poor. I was a penniless baby.’
‘Kingsley said he knew at once that something had happened. He was frankly relieved because it sort of equalised the guilt. PL took his leave on Jan 2 and K and Hilly, after a cagey interlude, got back to normal. At which point they discovered Hilly was pregnant. With you, Martin. And Kingsley hadn’t laid a finger on her since November.
‘They agreed that they’d never say anything to PL. Who would’ve been horrified, don’t you think? Being a child-hater?…And life went on.
‘Anyway, such was Kingsley’s account. And of course he swore me to absolute secrecy. Well, that vow I considered void the moment I saw his obituary. For six years I’ve been wondering when it would be best to tell you and so free myself of this awful burden. Oh, sure…I feel better already. Yeah, I bet you do.
‘New paragraph. I heard him out and I told him quite firmly, “I’ve always thought of you as Martin’s father, so the taboo is still there and I can’t pretend it isn’t. Sorry to disappoint, but there we are.” He was a perfect gent about it, as I said. Then we watched the news and he played some jazz, you rang, and I went to bed (I was already ailing from the Parfait Amour).
‘We’re coming to the last bit. God, this – this calligraphy’s positively gruesome. So bad luck, mate. Rather confusing, no? Still – not the milkman! exclamation mark. Not the milkman. Just the wanker from Hell. Yours, Phoebe Phelps. PS. It broke my heart to hear about poor dear Myfanwy. You must feel so horribly guilty…
‘Dot dot dot. The end.’
They sat for a time in silence.
‘Elena, which one is lying? Was he lying? Or is she lying?’
‘…Most likely they’re both lying. He lied to get her into bed. Which he no doubt did anyway, without lying, without exerting himself in any way. She lied about that. And now she’s lying about this.’
He waved his bandaged hand in the air. ‘Wait. Give me a moment to…’ Just then the dishwasher churned into life. ‘You know, some of this is plausible – the stuff about 1948. Okay, circumstantially plausible. But psychologically plausible too.’
Elena was sceptically considering him. He went on,
‘See, Mum always admired and respected Philip. I’ve been looking at the Letters. Kingsley’s. She’d dress up – she needed some persuasion but she’d dress up in sort of babydoll outfits, and Kingsley took photos and sent them to Hell. Hull. No. Leicester. Oh yeah. And Mum woke up once saying she dreamt Philip was kissing her. I don’t know. The jolly Hogmanay rings true. Kingsley wouldn’t have minded that much. If at all.’
‘Because he was drunk.’
‘No – because he was queer. Kingsley was a bit gay for Larkin. And you know how that works. Like Hitch approving of me sleeping with any girl he’d slept with.’
‘…Why does Phoebe have it in for you?’
‘Hull hath no fury…There’re others like that,’ he vacantly continued. ‘Hull is other people. Don Juan in Hull. The road to Hull is paved with good intentions.’
‘Did you ever scorn her?’
‘Phoebe? Turn her down, you mean? No.’ Certainly not. Are you kidding? But then of course he remembered – the stairwell, the bathroom, the swollen breasts. ‘Yes I did. Once. Very late on. After it was over.’
‘Well there’s that. And there was Lily. You’re not seeing the obvious with Lily. You confine Phoebe for a night alone with your father, while you go off to Durham to rescue an ex. Jesus. And don’t tell me she didn’t reward you. No need to ask. In general, though, your conscience is clear.’
‘More or less. Over the five years. But I did end it – to get married to someone else.’
‘Was there any overlap?’
‘No. There would’ve been if I hadn’t turned her down. That one time.’
‘All right.’ Elena gave a shiver of dismissal. ‘What this shows, at most, is the lengths your father would go to for the chance of a fuck. Now you get this straight.’ And her glass came down on the tabletop, like a gavel. ‘I’m serious, Mart. This girl knows you and thinks she can toy with your head. Like you’re a lab rat. Don’t let her.’
He raised his palms and said, ‘I’ll try.’
‘You’ll try? Listen. Ask your mother! Ring her tomorrow and ask her.’
‘I can’t ask her over the phone.’ Or in person, he thought. ‘Nah. Mum didn’t have a go at adultery for another ten years. And it never sat well with her. She was a country girl. She was twenty. No. The idea of her being uh, consoled by Larkin with Nicolas sniffling in his cot. No, I don’t believe that part for a moment.’
‘Promise? Do you realise that not once’ve you…You always call him Dad. But you haven’t done that once tonight. You’ve called him Kingsley.’
‘Is that so?’ He shifted in his chair. ‘And what about his father, Larkin’s, that filthy old fascist Sydney? I’m giving myself cold sweats just imagining the horror of being a Larkin male. You’d have to look quite like him too. Imagine that.’
‘There you are then. You’re the spit of your father. Identico.’ Those were her words. But now she was frowning and gazing at him – with her aesthetic eye, her genealogical eye, feature by feature (and Elena, in speaking of cousins and old family friends, had been heard to say such things as She’s got her grandmother’s lower lip or He has his great-uncle’s earlobes). ‘No. It’s her you look like. Your mother.’
The hidden work of uneventful days
I felt its concussive magnitude: September 11 looked set to be the most consequential event of my lifetime. But what did it mean? What was it for?
‘The main items of evidence’, said Christopher on the phone from DC, ‘are the fatwas issued by Bin Laden in ’96 and ’98. And both are blue streaks of religious parrotshit, with a few more or less intelligible grievances listed here and there.’
I said, ‘From now on Osama should let the intellectuals state his case. What the fuck is going on with the American left?’
‘Yes I know. What does it like about a doctrine that’s – let’s think – racist, misogynist, homophobic, totalitarian, inquisitional, imperialist, and genocidal?’
‘Maybe the Marxists like its hard line on usury. Christ, let’s have some light relief. Tell me about Vidal and Chomsky. I know Gore, but you know them both.’
‘A bad idea? We can argue about the practice, but it’s a good idea.’
‘Agreed. If Gore’s addicted to conspiracies, Noam’s addicted to moral equivalence. Or not even. He thinks if anything Osama’s slightly more moral than we are. As proof, he reminds us that we bombed that aspirin factory in Khartoum. Killing one nightwatchman. I had to point out to him that we didn’t bomb crowded office blocks with jets full of passengers.’
‘…Well keep it up, Hitch. You’re the only lefty who’s shown any mettle. It’s your armed-forces blood – the blood of the Royal Navy. And you love America.’
‘Thank you, Little Keith. I do, and I’m proud that I do.’
‘You know, what I can’t get over is the dissonance. Between means and ends. The intricate practicality of the attack – in the service of something so…’
‘Benthamite realism in the service of the utterly unreal. A global caliphate? The extermination of all infidels?’
‘The whole thing’s like a head injury. Last question – I’m being called to dinner. Will there be more?’
‘Maybe that’s it for now. But it’s probably just the beginning. We’ll see.’
What we saw the next day was the delivery of the first of the anthrax letters. And at that point the occult glamour of Osama reached its apogee. It was as if his whisperers and nightrunners were everywhere, and you could almost hear the timed signals of his hyenas and screech-owls, and rumours were skittering about like a cavernful of bats.*1