It was the same now. Always the fear of consequences. Always this terrible inertia. What he was about to do to his father was so huge, so colossal, that the consequences were inconceivable – he couldn’t imagine a moment occurring after that act. Only blankness. Nothingness. Something like the end of the world. And facing the end of the world, or even just the end of the year, had always given Josh a strangely detached feeling.
Every New Year’s Eve is impending apocalypse in miniature. You fuck where you want, you puke when you want, you glass who you want to glass – the huge gatherings in the street; the television round-ups of the goodies and baddies of time past; the frantic final kisses; the 10! 9! 8!
Joshua glared up and down Whitehall, at the happy people going about their dress rehearsal. They were all confident that it wouldn’t happen or certain they could deal with it if it did. But the world happens to you, thought Joshua, you don’t happen to the world. There’s nothing you can do. For the first time in his life, he truly believed that. And Marcus Chalfen believed the direct opposite. And there in a nutshell, he realized, is how I got here, turning out of Westminster, watching Big Ben approach the hour when I shall topple my father’s house. That is how we all got here. Between rocks and hard places. The frying pan and the fire.
Thursday, December 31 st1992, New Year’s Eve
Signalling problems at Baker Street
No Southbound Jubilee Line Trains from Baker Street
Customers are advised to change on to the Metropolitan Line at Finchley Road
Or Change at Baker Street on to the Bakerloo
There is no alternative bus service
Last Train 02.00 hours
All London Underground staff wish you a safe and happy New Year!
Willesden Green Station Manager, Richard Daley
Brothers Millat, Hifan, Tyrone, Mo Hussein-Ishmael, Shiva, Abdul-Colin and Abdul-Jimmy stood stock-still like maypoles in the middle of the station while the dance of the New Year went on around them.
‘Great,’ said Millat. ‘What do we do now?’
‘Can’t you read?’ inquired Abdul-Jimmy.
‘We do what the board suggests, Brothers,’ said Abdul-Colin, short-circuiting any argument with his deep, calming baritone. ‘We change at Finchley Road. Allah provides.’
The reason Millat couldn’t read the writing on the wall was simple. He was stoned. It was the second day of Ramadan and he was cained. Every synapse in his body had clocked out for the evening and gone home. But there was still some conscientious worker going round the treadmill of his brain, ensuring one thought circulated in his skulclass="underline" Why? Why get stoned, Millat? Why? Good question.
At midday he’d found an ageing eighth of hash in a drawer, a little bundle of cellophane he hadn’t had the heart to throw away six months ago. And he smoked it all. He smoked some of it out of his bedroom window. Then he walked to Gladstone Park and smoked some more. He smoked the great majority of it in the car park of Willesden Library. He finished it off in the student kitchen of one Warren Chapman, a South African skateboarder he used to hang with back in the day. And as a result, he was so cained now, standing on the platform with the rest, so cained that he could not only hear sounds within sounds but sounds within sounds within sounds. He could hear the mouse scurrying along the tracks, creating a higher level of harmonious rhythm with the crackle of the tannoy and the off-beat sniff of an elderly woman twenty feet away. Even when the train pulled in, he could still hear these things beneath the surface. Now, there is a level of cained that you can be, Millat knew, that is just so very very cained that you reach a level of Zen-like sobriety and come out the other side feeling absolutely tip-top as if you’d never sparked up in the first place. Oh, Millat longed for that. He only wished he’d got that far. But there just wasn’t quite enough.
‘Are you all right, Brother Millat?’ asked Abdul-Colin with concern as the tube doors slid open. ‘You have gone a nasty colour.’
‘Fine, fine,’ said Millat, and did a credible impression of being fine because hash just isn’t like drink; no matter how bad it is, you can always, at some level, pull your shit together. To prove this theory to himself, he walked in a slow but confident fashion down the carriage and took a seat at the very end of the line of Brothers, between Shiva and some excitable Australians heading for the Hippodrome.
Shiva, unlike Abdul-Jimmy, had had his share of wild times and could spot the tell-tale red-eye from a distance of fifty yards.
‘Millat, man,’ he said under his breath, confident he couldn’t be heard by the rest of the Brothers above the noise of the train. ‘What have you been doing to yourself?’
Millat looked straight ahead and spoke to his reflection in the train window. ‘I’m preparing myself.’
‘By getting messed up?’ hissed Shiva. He peered at the photocopy of Sura 52 he hadn’t quite memorized. ‘Are you crazy? It’s hard enough to remember this stuff without being on the planet Mars while you’re doing it.’
Millat swayed slightly, and turned to Shiva with a mistimed lunge. ‘I’m not preparing myself for that. I’m preparing myself for action. Because no one else will do it. We lose one man and you all betray the cause. You desert. But I stand firm.’
Shiva fell silent. Millat was referring to the recent ‘arrest’ of Brother Ibrāhām ad-Din Shukrallah on trumped up charges of tax evasion and civil disobedience. No one took the charges seriously, but everybody knew it was a not-so gentle warning from the Metropolitan Police that they had their eye trained on KEVIN activities. In the light of this, Shiva had been the first one to beat a retreat from the agreed Plan A, quickly followed by Abdul-Jimmy and Hussein-Ishmael, who, despite his desire to wreak violence upon somebody, anybody, had his shop to think about. For a week the argument raged (with Millat firmly defending Plan A), but on the 26th Abdul-Colin, Tyrone and finally Hifan conceded that Plan A might not be in KEVIN’s long-term interest. They could not, after all, put themselves in an imprisonment situation unless they were secure in the knowledge that KEVIN had leaders to replace them. So Plan A was off. Plan B was hastily improvised. Plan B involved the seven KEVIN representatives standing up halfway through Marcus Chalfen’s press conference and quoting Sura 52, ‘The Mountain’, first in Arabic (Abdul-Colin alone would do this) and then in English. Plan B made Millat sick.
‘And that’s it? You’re just going to read to him? That’s his punishment?’