East of Wimbledon

by Nigel Williams

  ‘Ha-san . . . Ha-san . . . Ha-san . . .’

  Over and over again:

  ‘Ha-san . . . Ha-san . . . Ha-san . . .’

  And then, when the shouting had reached a climax, there was a ghastly scream from inside the room. At first Robert thought someone must have been hurt, but, a second later, the scream came again and he realized, with horror, that this was a cry of joy.

  Maisie was waving at him wildly. She had found a gap in the blackout material and had fixed her eye to it. He wasn’t at all sure that he wanted a good view of whatever was going on inside the house. It sounded a good deal more basic than, say, Holy Communion at Cranborne School. And that was bad enough. Were they committing human sacrifice? And if they were, shouldn’t they get the police? Or might this be regarded as an intrusion on people’s right to worship as they saw fit?

  ‘You must look,’ whispered Maisie, ‘it’s weird. You must look.’

  Eventually, Robert looked.

  The room was in almost total darkness. The only light came from a group of candles high in one corner. It smeared the faces of the men in the room, fighting a losing, fitful battle with the shadows. There might have been twenty or thirty figures in there, but it was too dark to distinguish anything more than their vague shapes. There didn’t seem to be any furniture. All the figures, some of them cloaked like witches, were facing in the same direction – away from Maisie and Robert. But they were not looking at one point, as the worshippers did at the Wimbledon Islamic Boys’ School (Day Independent): they were moving up and down, backwards and forwards, bumping into each other and generally carrying on like people at Victoria Station during the rush hour.

  The only figure that stood out was Rafiq. He was standing on a kind of pedestal a little above the others, thrusting both arms up into the air. He seemed to be focused on the black space beyond the candlelight. The room, Robert felt, might go on for yards and yards. But, as he watched, even the sense that it was a room vanished. It was as if he was looking into a pinhole camera, as if the scene before him was a mirage.

  ‘For nine hundred years!’ called Rafiq.

  ‘For nine hundred years!’ answered the crowd.

  ‘He was hidden!’ called Rafiq.

  ‘He was hidden!’ answered the crowd.

  ‘He is coming!’ called Rafiq suddenly.

  ‘He is coming!’ called the crowd around him.

  ‘What will he do,’ yelled Rafiq, as if he had a good answer to this question, ‘when he comes?’

  ‘What will he do?’ yelled the crowd in return. They seemed keen to find out.

  ‘What will he do?’ riposted Rafiq. He was not letting them get away with this easily.

  ‘What will he do?’ yelled the crowd.

  Robert’s eyes were starting to ache. But Rafiq was still not keen to put over the punch line. He changed the topic, rather neatly, by howling, ‘He is the Twenty-fourth Imam!’

  The crowd liked this. They came back with, ‘He is the Twenty-fourth Imam!’

  ‘He has been hidden!’ yelled Rafiq.

  ‘He has been hidden!’ yelled the crowd.

  Robert wondered how this particular breakaway section of a breakaway section of the Nizari Ismailis had managed to carry on like this in Wimbledon for the last seventy years. Presumably, behind many of the net curtains in Wimbledon Park Road things as strange, or even stranger, were always going on. It was handy, anyway, that they celebrated their religion in English.

  Back inside, Rafiq had gone back to the thousand-dollar question. ‘What will he do when he returns?’ he shouted.

  Perhaps, thought Robert, he had simply been playing for time and had now come up with a credible answer.

  ‘What will he do when he returns?’ yelled the crowd.

  It had better be good, thought Robert. After a build up like this, you can’t afford to let them down.

  ‘He will destroy!’ yelled Rafiq.

  ‘He will destroy!’ yelled the crowd.

  ‘What will he destroy?’ shouted Rafiq.

  ‘What will he destroy?’ answered the crowd.

  The answer to this one was usually simple. Everything apart from us, guys! seemed to be the stock religious response. Imams or Christs, Mahdis or Messiahs were there to cancel all debts, atone for all insults. But, if this was the answer, Rafiq was not giving it all away at once. He clearly had something tasty up his sleeve.

  Robert heard a cough behind him. He pulled his eye away from the pinhole and, turning, saw a near neighbour who had last year changed her name, by deed poll, to Cruella Baines. She was the lead singer in an all-girl rock group. She weighed fifteen stone.

  ‘What’s going on in there?’ she said. ‘Is it a party?’

  Robert put his eye back to the pinhole. They had started dancing now. It was a fairly individualistic affair. Some of them were whirling round like dervishes. Others crouched on their haunches and kicked out their back legs behind them, like men carrying out a complex fitness programme. One man was lying on his back and cycling with his legs, rather like Badger, while a figure that Robert recognized as Aziz’s friend from the Frog and Ferret was doing a lot of semaphore work with both arms.

  Robert turned back to Cruella. ‘There are naked people in there,’ said Robert, ‘having sex! Find a hole and have a look!’

  Cruella Baines grunted and waddled off along the line of windows, her steel bangles rattling against her gigantic thighs. Eventually she seemed to find a gap in the blackout and, her enormous behind reared aloft, she glued her eye to the glass.

  Inside, the lads were all enjoying themselves immensely. When the dancing had reached its climax, the whole crowd flung themselves on to the floor and further worked themselves up into what looked like a communal epileptic fit. If this is Islam, thought Robert, give me more! He hadn’t seen anyone carry on like this since going to watch the World Wrestling Federation with Gilbert Lewis, the man next door’s nephew, who had had a major seizure at the sight of a man called Hulk Hogan and had written to Robert afterwards to say that he ‘had never expected to see anything like that in real life’. Perhaps Islam had developed differently in Wimbledon than in other parts of the world. Perhaps long exposure to tennis, bad public transport, English weather and the sight of miserable middle-aged people walking their dogs had driven this particular breakaway section of a breakaway section of the Nizari Ismailis right round the bend.

  After a while they seemed to get bored with kicking their legs in the air. They wanted more. One by one they struggled to their feet. A man Robert recognized as the second man from the Frog and Ferret started to hop in circles, beating himself on the head and shouting something. Rafiq was doing a lot of waving into the darkness, as if he expected something to appear – a deputation from the Noise Abatement Society, thought Robert, if they all carried on like this for much longer.

  ‘Oh!’ he heard Maisie gasp, over to his left. ‘Oh!’

  Being a Twenty-fourther obviously called for high physical stamina, for the group showed no signs of slacking. They were now all waving in the direction indicated by Rafiq. But, although Robert strained his eyes against the glass, he could see nothing but impenetrable blackness beyond the hectic yellows and reds cast by the candles.

  Rafiq started again. ‘He is coming!’ he shouted.

  ‘He is coming!’ shouted the lads in reply.

  Suddenly the candles went out. Someone must have blown them or snuffed them, because the darkness was sudden and almost complete. Robert did not shift his eyes, waiting for another image to swarm out of the chamber in front of him, but all he could hear, now, was groaning.

  ‘He was killed!’ moaned Rafiq.

  ‘He was killed!’ wailed the support group.

  ‘He was sent to hell-fire!’ moaned Rafiq.

  ‘He was sent to hell-fire!’ his congregation replied. Some of them seemed to be actually sobbing.

  Robert thought he could hear grinding teeth. With a start he realized they were his teeth and he was grinding them.
Even looking at this stuff from behind a black screen was punishing. It wasn’t surprising that some of them were cracking under the strain.

  ‘He was the son of Hasan b. Namawar!’ said Rafiq.

  There was a slight pause. This was obviously not a name that tripped off the tongue, but the lads rose to it manfully, while managing to weep, groan and, from the sound of it, pull out lumps of each other’s hair at the same time. ‘He was the son of Hasan b. Namawar!’ they yelled in the darkness.

  ‘Of the Daylamis!’ yelled Rafiq.

  This was easier. ‘Of the Daylamis!’ they yelled back.

  However long they had been in Wimbledon, the suburb had not yet managed to curb their enthusiasm. The sound from the room made your average Pentecostal church sound like a tea party given for a group of Radio 3 announcers. They were starting to thump the floor now, and the chorus that had played low, while they gave out the stuff of how he was the son of Hasan b. Namawar and had been sent to hell-fire, came back in loud and strong.

  ‘He is coming to destroy!’ yelled Rafiq, once more.

  ‘He is coming to destroy!’ they yelled back.

  ‘What is he going to destroy?’ yelled Rafiq.

  ‘What is he going to destroy?’ they answered.

  If he doesn’t give the answer to this one soon, thought Robert, he is in danger of losing his audience. But their patience seemed endless.

  Instead of answering his own question, Rafiq let out a high-pitched wail, which was taken up by the rest of the men. The wail started high and went higher, until they were shrieking off the register. It was almost painful to listen to, and Robert was about to pull his face away from the window when, suddenly, high up in the far darkness, a tiny figure in white robes jumped into vision. He did not seem to be standing on anything. He seemed to hang suspended above the worshippers, his two tiny arms held out in front of him, and he was as still and quiet and calm as he had been when sitting at the Wilsons’ table or resting, alone, at the back of Class 1.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ squawked Maisie. ‘Oh, my God!’ It was Hasan.

  Robert took in the neatly combed hair, the frail shoulders, the exquisite cheekbones with the red blemish on one side, and the huge, sightless eyes that roamed the blackness below him like inverted searchlights, as if to soak up the shadows. He took in the way the little boy’s hands stretched out over the crowd of distressed men as if to soothe them, and, for the first time in his life, he felt something that was not quite fear and not quite joy – an emptiness that longed to be filled. He heard Maisie’s voice once more: What do you believe in? And, in spite of himself, he heard he was groaning quietly, like the men in the darkened room.

  Next to him he heard Maisie gasp. He became aware that she was breaking away from the window. He hoped she wasn’t proposing to make her presence known to the Twenty-fourthers. Robert had the strong impression that they viewed unwanted spectators in the same spirit in which the ancient Greeks received people barging in on the Eleusinian mysteries.

  ‘I am Hasan!’ said Hasan.

  ‘You are Hasan!’ shouted the crowd.

  Behind him, Maisie had moved away from the window. Perhaps she had simply had enough. Hasan’s voice had a chilling quietness to it. Robert had to put his ear closer to the glass to hear it. The crowd, too, had lowered their voices, but this had the effect of making the exchanges even more momentous.

  ‘I am coming!’ said the little boy.

  ‘You are coming!’ said the crowd.

  How was he staying up there? thought Robert. And why was his presence so disturbing? Even Maisie, who was now standing a few yards from the window, breathing heavily, seemed to have been paralysed by the sight of him.

  ‘I am coming to destroy!’ hissed Hasan.

  ‘You are coming to destroy!’ they whispered back.

  ‘And what am I going to destroy?’ murmured Hasan.

  ‘What are you going to destroy?’ muttered the crowd in answer.

  Robert half expected the whole cycle to start again, so long had he waited for an answer to this question. But this time the answer was forthcoming. The little boy leaned his face to one side as if he was listening to some signal inaudible to mere mortals, and he whispered, ‘I am going to destroy Malik. I am going to destroy the seducer Malik and his friend Wilson,’ hissed Hasan. ‘They will both go to hell-fire!’

  Robert felt something more than the natural peevishness of a betrayed parent or guardian. There was something so vivid and authentic about the little boy’s face and voice that he had to look away. He lifted his face from the peephole, and in the glass in front of him he saw a face he thought he recognized. A round, plump, jolly, brown face that he remembered from back last summer, when all this business started. But, before he was able to put a name to it, something hit him on the back of the head, and for a long time he knew no more.

  PART FOUR

  18

  ‘Stick close to me,’ said Robert, ‘and do not talk to strange men!’

  ‘Can we talk to you, sir?’ said Mafouz.

  ‘Ha bloody ha!’ said Robert.

  His charges followed him. From time to time he would look back with a certain pride at them. Mafouz, Sheikh, Mahmud, Akhtar, and, at the back, their ears jutting out like radio antennae, the Husayn twins with Khan – or Famine, Pestilence and War, as Mr Malik called them.

  He hoped the Museum had not left any priceless bits of Islamic art lying around the place. If it had, they were liable to end up in the Husayn twins’ pockets.

  He liked his class, though. In fact he liked the school. When it had beaten Cranborne Junior School by three hundred runs, two Saturdays ago, he had linked arms with the headmaster and sung three verses of ‘We Are the Champions’. He had also, after five pints in the Frog and Ferret, referred to Malik as ‘his Muslim brother’ and said, publicly, that any lousy Christian cricket team could not, in his view, fart their way out of a swimming-pool.

  The school was getting even bigger and even more successful. They had taken on extra teaching staff. There was a rather pleasant man, called Chaudhry, who showed worrying signs of having actually gone to Oxford. He was always saying to Robert, ‘Do you remember old Jennings from Univ?’ or ‘Tell me, Wilson, did you use the Radcliffe Camera?’ To which Robert replied that he had never been interested in photography. They had also hired a French teacher, whose name Robert was unable to remember from one day to the next.

  A man from the local education authority, after being taken over to the pub by Mr Malik, had announced his intention of sending his own son to the school. ‘Let them all come!’ said the headmaster to Robert. ‘We send our little bastards to Cranborne – why shouldn’t we take their money?’ The school was, he had told Robert, officially in profit. Mr Shah, he said, had a return on his investment.

  The more he enjoyed teaching, and the more Mr Malik’s school seemed to prosper, the worse he felt about his original act of deception. As this summer, even hotter and drier than the last, worked its way up to August, Robert found he had developed a rich repertoire of twitches and guilty tics. He blinked. He snorted. He jerked his head backwards and forwards. He had even developed the beginnings of a stammer.

  Maisie had told him he was ‘getting more and more like a space man’. Now he was not only unable to remember the names of politicians, sportsmen and television personalities, he also found his memory was unable to supply the personal details of people he had known since he was a child. It was probably that blow on the head he had received at the end of the spring term. He had, Maisie had told him, been unconscious for nearly two minutes. She herself had had a bag placed over her head and had been left, trussed like a chicken, under the windows of the mysterious house on the Common. When they had recovered, the Dharjees had gone.

  Had the shock affected Maisie too? Was that why she had moved out of the Wilson family home?

  She had said she couldn’t stand living in such close proximity to quite so many facial quirks, but there was something deeper in her dec
ision to take a small flat near the school. He simply couldn’t respond to the person she had become. He would only be able to find his way back to her when he managed, for once in his life, to be honest about what he really felt and believed.

  He would be dead soon, anyway, he reflected, as he made his way up the Museum stairs. If some friend of Ali’s didn’t get him, then the Twenty-fourth Imam would probably grind him into little pieces. Hasan was waiting for him at the top of the stairs, and, as soon as he heard his guardian’s tread, the little boy sat up, sniffed the air and stretched out his hands like a cat, waking after sleep.

  Hasan had been unbearable ever since his Occultation. It can’t, thought Robert, be good for the personality to have a load of middle-aged men prostrating themselves in front of you and sobbing every time you open your mouth. He wasn’t yet quite in the Michael Jackson class, but for the last few months the little boy had been difficult in the extreme. He had refused to go to bed on time, insisted on watching The Late Show on television, and claimed that Badger was ‘not worthy’ to lick him. He had had a few more prophetic dreams. And one of them, Robert was almost sure, had foretold that something ghastly was going to happen in what sounded like the British Museum.

  ‘I am not really me,’ he had confided to Robert a few months ago, as the two were on a bus, on their way to the Megabowl in Kingston. ‘I am a reincarnation of the true Twenty-fourth Imam of the Nizari Ismailis! My father was sent to hell-fire on the sixth of Rabi!’

  ‘Is that right?’ Robert had said, with a nervous glance around at the other passengers. ‘Well, I hope it improves your bowling!’

  Hasan giggled and put his hand in Robert’s. On their last visit to the Megabowl he had hurled his projectile directly at the fruit machines. ‘Sometimes you are so nice I do not want to kill you, Mr Wilson!’ he said. ‘And I know you do not really believe me. But you may look me up. I am in all the history books. I feature in The Assassins, by Bernard Lewis, a respectable work of scholarship.’

  Robert had made the mistake of looking Hasan up in the work in question, at the end of which he had almost decided to call in an exorcist with some experience in the Islamic field.