‘I’m gonna be sick,’ said Adrian, breaking the impasse and falling unsteadily towards the sacred carpet.
9
Grace stirs and I fall silent, wondering how much of the story she has actually heard. Still seated at the end of the bed, I turn to see her slowly prop herself up against a pillow and reach for the bottle on the bedside table. She drinks from the bottle, takes a pack of cigarettes from her bedside drawer and lights one up. She coughs, then peers over the foot of the bed, observes her towel spread on the floor, smiles and says nothing. Her face seems softer after the sleep and her lower jaw wobbles as though freed of its musculature. Her eyes are glazed and warm and she raises the bottle in salutation as though instructing me to continue.
*
The following morning I went to work for my father. My first task was to make a delivery. When I returned to the shop, my father was sitting behind the counter. He glanced up from his Urdu newspaper and eyed me suspiciously. He was singing along to a naath, repeating softly the word Allahu. It was playing from a pirate radio on a small transistor hung on a nail behind him.
‘I’m going to make up one-kilo bags of rice,’ I said, staring nervously at a series of open sacks propped up against the counter.
‘What for, coward?’
‘And packets of lentils: brown, yellow and black.’
He shook his head. ‘Here it is my system!’ He continued in a softer but condescending tone. ‘When the customer comes in they ask for a pound of this and a pound of that and I make it up in front of them and that way they know I am not cheating them.’ He laughed. ‘No one here asks for kilos.’
‘Then I’ll make up pounds,’ I offered.
‘Sometimes they ask for a pound’s worth in money, not weight. What will you do then? You will measure it out for them, won’t you? Why don’t you do what you cowards are good for and sweep up instead?’
I picked up the broom from behind the counter. The radio crackled, and changed to a long slow lament. I could make out the Arabic word jannat (heaven).
My father peered mistrustfully over his glasses. ‘You were gone a long time.’ I nodded. ‘You left the delivery by the door?’
I shook my head. ‘Can we tune to the football broadcast?’
‘That would be sin,’ he said, leaning his ear towards the radio as though guarding it. ‘Now that it is playing it is sawab to leave it on.’
I rubbed the hard bristles of the broom against a sticky mess of sugar under the counter. ‘Mice will get to that.’
My father laughed. ‘Scared of racists and scared of mice!’
On the back wall behind the counter and on two other walls were floor-to-ceiling shelves, painted white. Decades earlier, my father had put them up. They were not hung straight and the gaps between each shelf varied slightly, giving them a ragged appearance. Boxes and sacks occupied most of the floor space, some piled high, allowing only a narrow path to the counter. The shop was on a corner and had two windows to the street. Except on Saturdays, when the football crowd marched past to and from the ground, it was quiet outside.
‘Where were you?’ he asked.
‘You sent me to the new mosque, so I went in to take a peek. Why shouldn’t I?’
‘I sent you on a delivery.’
I reported the events to my father. I had cycled to a large, warehouse-like building. It was unmarked except for a narrow green door on which had been posted a white paper sign bearing handwritten Arabic script. The door was locked and from within came shouting and muffled noises. A guy let me in. Inside were hundreds of men, squeezed together on a makeshift prayer-room floor, and they all looked like wrestlers, only wrestlers with beards and from many countries of the world, including England. I wanted to provoke my father, and so I added, ‘I didn’t know there were so many gora Muslims in this crappy town!’
‘Islam is the fastest-growing religion.’
I laughed. ‘One day we will all be Muslims.’
My father slapped his palm hard on the counter top and demanded to know what had happened.
‘I think I missed it. There must have been some big event but by the time I was shown in they were just chanting, that’s all, and then I could swear this guy flew in the air.’
A sea of football supporters drifted past outside the shop window, clad in black and yellow: yellow for the martlet, a mythical bird born without legs to land upon and thus eternally in flight. The supporters wore expectant, hopeful faces.
I returned my gaze to my father. ‘Oh, and also I nearly got into a fight.’
My father looked both confused and angry. His face reddened and a bead of sweat dropped off his brow. He wiped it with a small hand towel he kept on a hook behind the counter. He took a long deep breath, shook his head dismissively and ironed out a corner of his newspaper with a fist. I continued with my report in a matter-of-fact tone that I knew would annoy him, my father feigning lack of interest and occasionally pointing to an area my broom had missed.
Stepping nervously in the few gaps between the densely packed worshippers, I had dispensed grapes, walnuts and dates from the box he had sent me to leave by the door. A lad with a long beard and rippling muscles took offence as I strayed in front of his space, and punched my leg. I nearly dropped the box, and smarting from the pain I stood my ground and glared. The brute force of the blow, and my shock at what he had done, in a mosque of all places, left me bewildered. I noticed a dark circular patch like a third eye in the middle of his forehead. The third eye was acquired by friction between skin and prayer mat. It was a sign of great sawab, and was known to take a lifetime of prostration to obtain, and even then, so it was said, only if Allah chose you. I wanted to say to him that it was a fake, his third eye — faking it was not an unknown phenomenon. Instead, and perhaps because I was indeed a coward, I rudely dropped a sprig of grapes into the guy’s lap and quickly passed on to the next man.
‘You would have liked it,’ I told Dad, ‘and you could have got sawab if you had gone yourself. Don’t you always say it is sawab to feed the faithful?’
My father said nothing.
‘What do you want to hear?’ I asked. ‘That they preached death to America and death to Britain and death.?’
‘Did they?’ He seemed genuinely excited.
‘Probably.’
‘You shouldn’t talk about what you don’t know, it’s dangerous.’
‘Truthfully, they were chanting Allahu and working themselves up into some sort of hysteria. ’ They were clapping as well, everybody, with necks strained and shoulders rolled forward and broad grins exposing various stages of dental decay. Together, as though in a Mexican wave, they swayed from side to side, and the gora spotted within their ranks appeared nervous and comically incongruous. I could tell they didn’t understand the words, and their blond or ginger beards clashed with the long white robes and elaborately bound, mullah-like scarves around their heads.
‘Hysteria is what your football yobs get up to.’ My father gazed thoughtfully out of the window at a passing football fan giving our shop the two fingers and mouthing the word Paki. ‘Don’t be so disrespectful,’ he added as an afterthought.
‘They must have been well fed.’ By the time I got to the front the box was still half full; seeing no easy way back and fearing another confrontation, I placed my box on the floor and, squeezing between two men, lowered myself to the carpet. Facing the assembly and only a few feet from me was the imam, sitting atop a set of triangle steps like a stepladder that had been filled in with wooden tables at the sides. Slim and wearing small round glasses, he was dressed like an English gentleman in a three-piece suit, and a silver pocket watch dangled off his waistcoat. He had thin menacing lips and a loose wiry beard. ‘Allahu,’ he led the chant; his voice was slow and controlled and it seemed to linger, almost stop, at the climax of each phrase. ‘Allahu.’ He smiled as he chanted. His eyes seemed to glisten and retreat into their sockets and his body swayed, reaching a perfect forty-five-degree angle on each side.