‘You, Brother Akram, have an advantage over me.’
‘I would have preferred a pint of Banks’s — tastes like dishwater but I got used to it.’
‘Society,’ Mustafa repeated, tasting the word. ‘It is time you knew your own. You, Brother Akram, your fate was sealed before you were even born. Up to this day, it has been child’s play, but from now on you must step up and become your own man.’
I took a swig from the bottle and drew on the cigarette. Like a tender lover, Mustafa rubbed my back. ‘Take your time, brother. Take six months, even a year. Learn about who you are. Let Allah take over your body, let Him put whiskers on your chin and ease your pain.’
I laughed. ‘Can you fashion me a third eye?’
‘With a gentle rub of gunpowder I can, or maybe a match,’ he laughed knowingly, ‘but I warn you it will burn.’
‘Through the pain I might learn something,’ I carelessly challenged him.
He shook his head. ‘No, brother. You must also span the other society. When you are needed you must also blend.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Become a brother to the brothers. Grow the sign of a believer’s beard and know one thing above all else, that only through Allah’s grace do we understand the term justice.’
‘Allah is a strange thing. One that has followed me all my life.’
‘When you wake up and see the impotence of our people in the face of the white man’s crusade then you will come to me and say, “Brother Mustafa, tell me what I can do. Equip me with the power of what I must do.”’
‘Are you certain I will do that?’
‘When you say “Allah”, think justice. Just substitute those words.’
‘All my life, as a kid and at school, it wasn’t so much about being brown and not white; even then, really it was a religious war.’
‘It’s not just religion. It’s a supremacy of morals, ideas; it is the future of mankind. That duty as it has been written, that of killing for vengeance, that noble act is not for the cowardly sweetmeat carriers or the men who trudge blindly around shopping centres behind their wives. It is for men who follow their faith to its natural end.’
A loud drumbeat accompanied the chant. Feeling giddy, I sang along with it, ‘La ilaha il Allahu la ilaha il Allah,’ my voice and the bass echoing loudly into the distance, bouncing off the mossy brickwork like a clap of thunder.
18
Grace helps me upstairs and I dress clumsily, using the edge of the bed and the bedroom wall for balance. Her arms folded at her waist, Grace watches quietly but does not help. She wants to slow it down, my inevitable departure, as do I.
She follows me to the door, my cap in her hand. I flip the daysack over a shoulder. Her eyes dart to it.
‘We soldiers do love to hump.’ I try to laugh.
She opens the door and I step out into the street. She stands on the step, half a foot taller than she actually is. ‘It’s not soldiers I fear. It’s those that come not in uniform.’
I nod gently in understanding. ‘Don’t put your lights out, Grace. Promise?’
‘I’ll see Britney once more, in a few hours.’ She holds back her tears. ‘After that—’
‘You will see her again after that.’
‘You can’t help me?’ Her voice breaking.
‘Remember what Adrian would have said. No pain.’
Briefly, she laughs and cries at the same time.
‘Hold on.’
She nods, wiping her eyes with a fist.
‘One day you’ll be walking along the street minding your own business and this beautiful young woman will walk right past; then a few feet on she’ll stop and glance back, and she’ll be like, “Fuck, Mum?”’
Grace smiles, considering the scene I have painted, but says nothing.
‘And when she does turn, be yourself, she will love you for it, and tell her all about her dad.’
‘I’ve decided to stop,’ she says earnestly. ‘You know, the job.’ She shrugs her shoulders. ‘Wasn’t much good at it anyway.’ She reaches up on her tiptoes and places the cap on my head. There is a long pause as we try not to look at each other.
‘Got to crack on.’ I offer a quick smile and half turn to go.
She half closes the door. ‘Was it a coincidence? Us?’
‘Allah has a plan for each of us.’
‘Don’t be such a cryptic bastard. You came to get it off your chest?’
I nod. ‘I came because Adrian would have wanted you to know.’
‘Will I see you again?’
‘Inshallah.’
A thought lingers on her lips and floats out of view as I turn, my boot scrapes against the pavement, she closes the door and the latch clicks shut.
Grace’s voice, ‘Inshallah,’ rings in my ears. It was the second time she had said it; it sounded curiously different on her lips, as though it was more important when spoken by the gora. Inshallah — God willing. A cruel God meting out a brand of justice none of us, least of all Grace, can comprehend.
I walk, pounding the pavements of my hometown, lost in a daze, my face battered by the wind, my thoughts returning to the One from whom I came, Allah. I am conscious of the daysack weighing me down but it feels good, exhilarating, it reminds me of recruit training, of endless route marches. And then of daysacks humped on patrol, weighted with teabags, sugar, powdered milk, stove kit and ammo. Although I attempt to tread quietly, each boot step clips against the pavement, sharp and loud. A weapon slung across my bent arms would counterbalance the daysack, would make me feel whole. The wind blows intermittently and the sun has not completely broken through the cover of purple-grey clouds: the best conditions for a route march. I recall cooling wind on a perspiring brow and false peaks in the distance and training sergeants and corporals lining the route at mile intervals drinking tea from large green canteens, bellowing encouragement mixed with insults with a wit peculiar to the army.
I reach a roundabout at the base of a hill and proceed upwards. Time is closing in, counting down. The occasional minicab races past, well above the speed limit, and I, a crippled former soldier heading towards the monument, occupy an infinitesimal and fleeting space in the thoughts of its driver.
An unmarked white coach trundles past, belching black smoke. In low gear its engine creates a vicious racket, as though its hulk is squeezed onwards through a thin slip of air. In its rear window, now receding slowly from view, hangs a drum sergeant’s dress tunic and the top end of a black case with comforting curves that evoke the brass instrument within. Perhaps one of the coach’s occupants sees me, one of their own, and considers a wave, and the vehicle moves on faster than he can raise his hand. The cap rubs against my damp brow and I take it off, allowing the wind to my hair. Grace, fingering the double-headed eagle pinned to the cap, had called it two-faced. I had never thought of it that way, but now it seems apt. She described the two personalities of her disorder, a dark phase that could last for months and then, as though the sun had broken through the clouds, give way to lightness. She had lost her child in her helplessness — a state I cannot imagine. Grace, almost without thought, revealed the dark gap in her mouth and smiled, a trusting smile. She did that so that I could see her for what she was. I could stay or go: to her I could easily have been just another man passing through, and in some ways I have been just that.
To the east a small shaft of light penetrates the clouds, opening a gap, and instinctively I say a Bismillah. Out of the bend the road slopes steeply up towards the town centre, where a stone cross stands on a flat piece of ground, and behind that is a dip where once was a moat. Beyond that, in jagged spurs like those of a looming mountain, are the remains of a castle casting a broken shadow as old as old England. England was then for the English, and as the great castle sprang up, how grand it must have seemed to the peasants in their dwellings at the base of the hill — imperious like a structure of the Lord. And within the castle must have resided a lord who, having read his barometer (looted during his most recent foray into France), might have stood looking down from the highest wall, clapped his hands, and proclaimed that by virtue of his God-given powers, he knew that a storm was coming. And when the storm did come how the peasants, who knew nothing of barometers, must have bowed to the words of the lord, who, they whispered, was a reincarnation of the Almighty.