‘There’s no discouragement, shall make ’im once relent, his first avowed intent, to be a Pilgrim! ’ trilled Mrs B. ‘Who so besets him round, with dismal stories… do but themselves confound, his strength the more is.. .’
He relished it. He relished standing nose to nose with evil and saying, ‘You yourself: prove it to me. Go on, prove it.’ He felt he needed no arguments like the Muslims or the Jews. No convoluted proofs or defences. Just his faith. And nothing rational can fight faith. If Star Wars (secretly Ryan’s favourite film. The Good! The Evil! The Force! So simple. So true) is truly the sum of all archaic myths and the purest allegory of life (as Ryan believed it was), then faith, unadulterated, ignorant faith, is the biggest fuck-off light sabre in the universe. Go on, prove it. He did that every Sunday on the doorsteps and he would do precisely the same to Marcus Chalfen. Prove to me that you are right. Prove to me that you are more right than God. Nothing on earth would do it. Because Ryan didn’t believe in or care about anything on earth.
‘We almost there?’
Ryan squeezed Mrs B.’s frail hand and sped across the Strand, then wound his way round the back of the National Gallery.
‘No foe shall stay his might, though he with giants fight, he will make good his right, to be a Pilgrim! ’
Well said Mrs B.! The right to be a pilgrim! Who does not presume and yet inherits the earth! The right to be right, to teach others, to be just at all times because God has ordained that you will be, the right to go into strange lands and alien places and talk to the ignorant, confident that you speak nothing but the truth. The right to be always right. So much better than the rights he once held dear: the right to liberty, freedom of expression, sexual freedom, the right to smoke pot, the right to party, the right to ride a scooter sixty-five miles an hour on a main road without a helmet. So much more than all those, Ryan could claim. He exercised a right so rare, at this the fag-end of the century, as to be practically obsolete. The most fundamental right of all. The right to be the good guy.
On: 31/12/1992
London Transport Buses
Route 98
From: Willesden Lane
To: Trafalgar Square
At: 17:35
Fare: Adult Single £0.70
Retain Ticket for Inspection
Cor (thought Archie) they don’t make ’em like they used to. That’s not to say they make them any worse. They just make them very, very different. So much information. The minute you tore one from the perforation you felt stuffed and pinned down by some all-seeing taxidermist, you felt freeze-framed in time, you felt caught. Didn’t use to be, Archie remembered. Many years ago he had a cousin, Bill, who worked the old 32 route through Oxford Street. Good sort, Bill. Smile and a nice word for everyone. Used to tear off a ticket from one of those chug-chug big-handled mechanical things (and where have they gone? Where’s the smudgy ink?) on the sly, like; no money passed over; there you go, Arch. That was Bill, always helping you out. Anyway, those tickets, the old ones, they didn’t tell you where you were going, much less where you came from. He couldn’t remember seeing any dates on them either, and there was certainly no mention of time. It was all different now, of course. All this information. Archie wondered why that was. He tapped Samad on the shoulder. He was sitting directly ahead of him, in the front-most seat of the top deck. Samad turned round, looked at the ticket he was being shown, listened to the question and gave Archie a funny look.
‘What is it, precisely, that you want to know?’
He looked a bit testy. Everyone was a little testy right now. There’d been a bit of a ding-dong earlier in the afternoon. Neena had demanded that they all go to the mouse thing, seeing as how Irie was involved and Magid was involved and the least they could do was go and support family because whatever they thought of it a lot of work had gone into it and young people need affirmation from their parents and she was going to go even if they weren’t and it was a pretty poor show if family couldn’t turn up for their big day and… well, it went on and on. And then the emotional fall-out. Irie burst into tears (What was wrong with Irie? She was always a bit weepy these days), Clara accused Neena of emotional blackmail, Alsana said she’d go if Samad went, and Samad said he’d spent New Year’s Eve at O’Connell’s for eighteen years and he wasn’t going to stop now. Archie, for his part, said he was buggered if he was going to listen to this racket all evening – he’d rather sit on a quiet hill by himself. They’d all looked at him queerly when he said that. Little did they know he was taking prophetic advice he’d received from Ibelgaufts the day before:
28 December 1992
My dearest Archibald,
’Tis the season to be jolly… so it has been claimed, but from my window I see only turmoil. At present six felines, hungry for territory, are warring in my garden. Not content with their autumnal hobby of drenching their plots in urine, the winter has brought out a more fanatical urge in them… it is down to claws and flying fur… the screeching keeps me up all through the night! I cannot help but think that my own cat, Gabriel, has the right idea, sat atop my shed, having given up his land claims in exchange for a quiet life.
But in the end, Alsana laid down the law. Archie and the rest were going whether they liked it or not. And they didn’t. So now they were taking up half the bus in their attempts to sit alone: Clara behind Alsana who was behind Archie who was behind Samad who was sitting across from Neena. Irie was sitting next to Archie, but only because there wasn’t any more space.
‘I was just saying… you know,’ said Archie, attempting the first conversation to broach the frosty silence since they left Willesden. ‘It’s quite interesting, the amount of information they put on bus tickets these days. Compared with, you know, the old days. I was just wondering why. It’s quite interesting.’
‘I have to be honest, Archibald,’ said Samad with a grimace, ‘I find it singularly uninteresting. I find it terminally dull.’
‘Oh, right,’ said Archie. ‘Right you are.’
The bus did one of those arching corners where it feels the merest breath will topple it over.
‘Umm… so you wouldn’t know why-’
‘No, Jones, I have no intimate friends at the bus garage nor any inside knowledge of the progressive decisions that are no doubt made daily within London Transport. But if you are asking me for my uneducated guess, then I imagine it is part of some huge government monitoring process to track the every movement of one Archibald Jones, to ascertain where and what he is doing on all days and at every moment-’
‘Jesus,’ Neena cut in irritably, ‘why do you have to be such a bully?’
‘Excuse me? I was not aware you and I, Neena, were having a conversation.’
‘He was just asking a question and you have to come over all arsey. I mean, you’ve been bullying him for half a century. Haven’t you had enough? Why don’t you just leave him alone?’
‘Neena Begum, I swear if you give me one more instruction today I will personally tear your tongue out at the root and wear it as a necktie.’
‘Steady on, Sam,’ said Archie, perturbed at the fuss he had inadvertently caused, ‘I was just-’
‘Don’t you threaten my niece,’ Alsana chimed in from further down the bus. ‘Don’t you take it out on her just because you’d rather be eating your beans and chips’ – Ah! (thought Archie, wistfully) Beans and chips! – ‘than going to see your own son actually achieving something and-’