‘We are split people. For myself, half of me wishes to sit quietly with my legs crossed, letting the things that are beyond my control wash over me. But the other half wants to fight the holy war. Jihad! And certainly we could argue this out in the street, but I think, in the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution – it is not my solution. So I do not know what it is you would like me to say. Truth and firmness is one suggestion, though there are many other people you can ask if that answer does not satisfy. Personally, my hope lies in the last days. The prophet Muhammad – peace be upon Him! – tells us that on the Day of Resurrection everyone will be struck unconscious. Deaf and dumb. No chit-chat. Tongueless. And what a bloody relief that will be. Now, if you will excuse me.’
Samad took Poppy firmly by the hand and walked on, while Mad Mary stood dumbstruck only briefly before rushing to the church door and spraying saliva upon the congregation.
Poppy wiped away a frightened tear and sighed.
She said, ‘Calm in a crisis. Impressive.’
Samad, increasingly given to visions, saw that great-grandfather of his, Mangal Pande, flailing with a musket; fighting against the new, holding on to tradition.
‘It runs in the family,’ he said.
Later, Samad and Poppy walked up through Harlesden, around Dollis Hill, and then, when it seemed they were hovering too near to Willesden, Samad waited till the sun went down, bought a box of sticky Indian sweets and turned into Roundwood Park; admired the last of the flowers. He talked and talked, the kind of talking you do to stave off the inevitable physical desire, the kind of talking that only increases it. He told her about Delhi circa 1942, she told him about St Albans circa 1972. She complained about a long list of entirely unsuitable boyfriends, and Samad, not able to criticize Alsana or even mention her name, spoke of his children: fear of Millat’s passion for obscenities and a noisy TV show about an A-team; worries about whether Magid got enough direct sunlight. What was the country doing to his sons, he wanted to know, what was it doing?
‘I like you,’ she said finally. ‘A lot. You’re very funny. Do you know that you’re funny?’
Samad smiled and shook his head. ‘I have never thought of myself as a great comic wit.’
‘No – you are funny. That thing you said about camels…’ She began to laugh, and her laugh was infectious.
‘What thing?’
‘About camels – when we were walking.’
‘Oh, you mean, “Men are like camels: there is barely one in a hundred that you would trust with your life.” ’
‘Yes!’
‘That’s not comedy, that is the Bukhārī, part eight, page one hundred and thirty,’ said Samad. ‘And it is good advice. I have certainly found it to be true.’
‘Well, it’s still funny.’
She sat closer to him on the bench and kissed his ear. ‘Seriously, I like you.’
‘I’m old enough to be your father. I’m married. I am a Muslim.’
‘OK, so Dateline wouldn’t have matched our forms. So what?’
‘What kind of a phrase is this: “So what?” Is that English? That is not English. Only the immigrants can speak the Queen’s English these days.’
Poppy giggled. ‘I still say: So-’
But Samad covered her mouth with his hand, and looked for a moment almost as if he intended to hit her. ‘So everything. So everything. There is nothing funny about this situation. There is nothing good about it. I do not wish to discuss the rights or wrongs of this with you. Let us stick to what we are obviously here for,’ he spat out. ‘The physical, not the metaphysical.’
Poppy moved to the other end of the bench and leant forward, her elbows resting on her knees. ‘I know,’ she began slowly, ‘that this is no more than it is. But I won’t be spoken to like that.’
‘I am sorry. It was wrong of me-’
‘Just because you feel guilty, I’ve nothing to feel-’
‘Yes, I’m sorry. I have no-’
‘Because you can go if you-’
Half thoughts. Stick them all together and you have less than you began with.
‘I don’t want to go. I want you.’
Poppy brightened a bit and smiled her half-sad, half-goofy smile.
‘I want to spend the night… with you.’
‘Good,’ she replied. ‘Because I bought this for you while you were next door buying those sugary sweets.’
‘What is it?’
She dived into her handbag, and in the attenuated minute in which she scrabbled through lipsticks and car-keys and spare change, two things happened.
1.1 Samad closed his eyes and heard the words To the pure all things are pure and then, almost immediately afterwards, Can’t say fairer than that.
1.2 Samad opened his eyes and saw quite clearly by the bandstand his two sons, their white teeth biting into two waxy apples, waving, smiling.
And then Poppy resurfaced, triumphant, with a piece of red plastic in her hand.
‘A toothbrush,’ she said.
8 Mitosis
The stranger who wanders into O’Connell’s Pool House at random, hoping for the soft rise and fall of his grandfather’s brogue, perhaps, or seeking to rebound a red ball off the side cushion and into the corner pocket, is immediately disappointed to find the place is neither Irish nor a pool house. He will survey the carpeted walls, the reproductions of George Stubbs’s racehorse paintings, the framed fragments of some foreign, Eastern script, with not a little confusion. He will look for a snooker table and find instead a tall, brown man with terrible acne standing behind a counter, frying up eggs and mushrooms. His eye will land with suspicion upon an Irish flag and a map of the Arab Emirates knotted together and hung from wall to wall, partitioning him from the rest of the customers. Then he will become aware of several pairs of eyes upon him, some condescending, some incredulous; the hapless stranger will stumble out, warily, backwards, knocking over the life-size cut-out of Viv Richards as he goes. The customers will laugh. O’Connell’s is no place for strangers.
O’Connell’s is the kind of place family men come to for a different kind of family. Unlike blood relations, it is necessary here to earn one’s position in the community; it takes years of devoted fucking around, time-wasting, laying-about, shooting the breeze, watching paint dry – far more dedication than men invest in the careless moment of procreation. You need to know the place. For example, there are reasons why O’Connell’s is an Irish pool house run by Arabs with no pool tables. And there are reasons why the pustule-covered Mickey will cook you chips, egg and beans, or egg, chips and beans, or beans, chips, eggs and mushrooms but not, under any circumstances, chips, beans, eggs and bacon. But you need to hang around for that kind of information. We’ll get into that later. For now, suffice to say this is Archie’s and Samad’s home from home; for ten years they have come here between six (the time Archie finishes work) and eight (the time Samad starts) to discuss everything from the meaning of Revelation to the prices of plumbers. And women. Hypothetical women. If a woman walked past the yolk-stained window of O’Connell’s (a woman had never been known to venture inside) they would smile and speculate – depending on Samad’s religious sensibilities that evening – on matters as far reaching as whether one would kick her out of bed in a hurry, to the relative merits of stockings or tights, and then on, inevitably, to the great debate: small breasts (that stand up) vs big breasts (that flop to the sides). But there was never any question of real women, real flesh and blood and wet and sticky women. Not until now. And so the unprecedented events of the past few months called for an earlier O’Connell’s summit than usual. Samad had finally phoned Archie and confessed the whole terrible mess: he had cheated, he was cheating; he had been seen by the children and now he was seeing the children, like visions, day and night. Archie had been silent for a bit, and then said, ‘Bloody hell. Four o’clock it is, then. Bloody hell.’ He was like that, Archie. Calm in a crisis.