19 The Final Space -2

Twenty minutes later the Bakerloo Line delivered them into the icy cold of Trafalgar Square. In

the distance, Big Ben. In the square, Nelson. Havelock. Napier. George IV. And then the National

Gallery, back there near St. Martin's. All the statues facing the clock.

"They do love their false icons in this country," said AbdulColin, with his odd mix of gravity

and satire, unmoved by the considerable New Year crowd who were presently spitting at,

dancing round and crawling over the many lumps of grey stone. "Now, will somebody please

tell me: what is it about the English that makes them build their statues with their backs to their

culture and their eyes on the time?" He paused to let the shivering KEVIN Brothers contemplate

the rhetorical question. lH

"Because they look to their future to forget their past. Sometimes you almost feel sorry for them,

you know?" he continued, turning full circle to look around at the inebriated crowd.

"They have no faith, the English. They believe in what men make, but what men make

crumbles. Look at their empire. This is all they have. Charles II Street and South Africa House and

a lot of stupid-looking stone men on stone horses. The sun rises and sets on it in twelve hours, no

trouble. This is what is left."

Tm bloody cold," complained Abdul-Jimmy, clapping his mit tened hands together (he found

his uncle's speeches a big pain in the arse). "Let's get going," he said, as a huge beer-pregnant

Englishman, wet from the fountains, collided into him, 'out of this bloody madness. It's on Chandos

Street."

"Brother?" said Abdul-Colin to Millat, who was standing some distance from the rest of the

group. "Are you ready?"

Till be along in a minute." He shooed them away weakly. "Don't worry, I'll be there."

There were two things he wanted to see first. The first of which was a particular bench, that

bench over there, by the far wall. He walked over to it, a long, stumbling journey, trying to avoid an

unruly conga line (so much hashish in his head; lead weights on each foot); but he made it. He sat

down. And there it was.

Five-inch letters, between one leg of the bench and the other. iq bal It wasn't clear, and the

colour of it was a murky rust, but it was there. The story of it was old.

A few months after his father arrived in England, he had sat on this bench nursing a bleeding

thumb, the top sliced off by a careless, doddering stroke from one of the older waiters. When it first

happened, in the restaurant, Samad couldn't feel it because it was his dead hand. So he just wrapped

it in a handkerchief to stem the flow and continued work. But the material had become soaked in

blood, he was putting the customers off their food and eventually Ardashir sent him home. Samad

took his open thumb out of the restaurant, past theatre land and down St. Martin's Lane. When he

reached the square he stuck it in the fountain and watched his red insides spill out into the blue

water. But he was making a mess and people were looking. He resolved instead to sit on the bench,

gripping it at the root until it stopped. The blood kept on coming. After a while, he gave up holding

his thumb upright and let it hang down to the floor like hal al meat, hoping it would quicken the

bleeding process. Then, with his head between his legs, and his thumb leaking on to the pavement,

a primitive impulse had come over him. Slowly, with the dribbling blood, he wrote iq bal from one

chair leg to the next. Then, in an attempt to make it more permanent, he had gone over it again with

a pen knife, scratching it into the stone.

"A great shame washed over me the moment I finished," he explained to his sons years later. "I

ran from it into the night; I tried to run from myself. I knew I had been depressed in this country .. .

but this was different. I ended up clinging on to the railings in Piccadilly Circus, kneeling and

praying, weeping and praying, interrupting the buskers. Because I knew what it meant, this deed. It

meant I wanted to write my name on the world. It meant I presumed. Like the Englishmen who

named streets in Kerala after their wives, like the Americans who shoved their flag in the

moon. It was a warning from Allah. He was saying: Iqbal, you are becoming like them. That's

what it meant.

No, thought Millat, the first time he heard this, no, that's not what it meant. It just meant you're

nothing. And looking at it now, Millat felt nothing but contempt. All his life he wanted a Godfather,

and all he got was Samad. A faulty, broken, stupid, one-handed waiter of a man who had spent

eighteen years in a strange land and made no more mark than this. It just means you're nothing,

repeated Millat, working his way through the premature vomit (girls drinking doubles since three

o'clock) over to Havelock, to look Havelock in his stony eye. It means you're nothing and he's

something. And that's it. That's why Pande hung from a tree while Havelock the executioner sat on

a chaise longue in Delhi. Pande was no one and Havelock was someone. No need for library books

and debates and reconstructions. Don't you see, Abba? whispered Millat. That's it. That's the long,

long history of us and them. That's how it was. But no more.

Because Millat was here to finish it. To revenge it. To turn that history around. He liked to think

he had a different attitude, a second generation attitude. If Marcus Chalfen was going to write his

name all over the world, Millat was going to write it BIGGER. There would be no misspelling his

name in the history books. There'd be no forgetting the dates and times. Where Pande mis footed he

would step sure. Where Pande chose A, Millat would choose B. Yes, Millat was stoned. And it may

be absurd to us that one Iqbal can believe the breadcrumbs laid down by another Iqbal, generations

before him, have not yet blown away in the breeze. But it really doesn't matter what we believe. It

seems it won't stop the man who thinks this life is guided by the life he thinks he had before, or the

gypsy who swears by the queens in her tarot pack. And it's hard to change the mind of the

high-strung woman who lays responsibility for all her actions at the feet of her mother, or the

lonely guy who sits in a fold-up chair on a hill

in the dead of night waiting for the little green men. Amidst the strange landscapes that have

replaced our belief in the efficacy of the stars, Millat's is not such odd terrain. He believes the

decisions that are made, come back. He believes we live in circles. His is a simple, neat fatalism.

What goes around comes around.

"Ding, ding," said Millat out loud, tapping Havelock's foot, before turning on his heel to make

his hazy way to Chandos Street. "Round two."

December 31st 1992

He that increase th knowledge increase th sorrow Eccles. ch. 1, v. 18

When Ryan Topps was asked to assemble the Lambeth Kingdom Hall's Thought for the Day

desk calendar for 1992, he took especial care to avoid the mistakes of his predecessors. Too often in

the past, Ryan noted, when the assembler came to choose quotations for entirely famous, secular

days, he let sentiment get the better of him, so that on Valentine's Day 1991 we find there is no fear

in love; but perfect love cas teth out fear, I John 4:18, as if John were thinking of the paltry feeling

that prompts people to send each other Milk Tray and cheap teddy bears rather than the love of

Jesus Christ, which nothing surpasseth. Ryan took very much the opposite approach. On a day like

New Year's Eve, for example, when everybody was running around making their New Year

resolutions, assessing their past year and plotting their success for the next, he felt it necessary to

bring them to earth with a bump. He wanted to offer a little reminder that the world is cruel and pointless, all

human endeavour ultimately meaningless, and no advancement in this world worth making besides

gaining God's favour and an entry ticket into the better half of the after-life. And having completed

the calendar the previous year and forgotten much of what he'd done, he was pleasantly surprised

when he ripped off the 3oth and looked at the crisp white page of the 31st at just how effective the

reminder was. No thought could have been more apt for the day ahead. No warning more propitious.

He ripped it from the calendar, squeezed it into the tight leather of his trousers and told Mrs. B. to

get in the side car.

"He who -would valiant be, 'against all disaster!" sang Mrs. B. as they zipped along Lambeth

Bridge, heading for Trafalgar Square. "Let 'im in constancy, follow de master!"

Ryan made sure to signal a good minute before turning left so that the Kingdom ladies in the

minibus behind wouldn't get confused. He made a quick mental inventory of the things he'd put in

the van: song books, instruments, banners, Watchtower leaflets. All present and correct. They had

no actual tickets, but they would make their protest outside, in the cold, suffering like true

Christians. Praise be to God! What a glorious day! All portents were good. He even had a dream

last night that Marcus Chalfen was the devil himself and they were standing nose to nose. Ryan had

said: Myself and yourself are at war. There can be only one winner. Then he had quoted the same

piece of scripture at him (he couldn't recall precisely what it was now, but it was something from

Revelation) over and over and over again, until the devil Marcus had become smaller and smaller,

grown ears and a long forked tail, and finally scurried away, a tiny satanic mouse. As in this vision,

so it would be in life. Ryan would remain unbending, unmoving, absolutely constant, and, in the

end, the sinner would repent.

That was how Ryan approached all logical" title="a.神学(上)的">theological, practical and

personal conflicts. He didn't move, "not an inch. But then, that had always been his talent; he

had a mono-intelligence; an ability to hold on to a single idea with phenomenal tenacity, and he

never found anything that suited it as well as the church of Jehovah's Witnesses. Ryan thought in

black and white. The problem with his antecedent passions scootering and pop music was there

were always shades of grey (though possibly the two closest things in secular life to a Witness

preacher are boys who send letters to the New Musical Express and those enthusiasts who pen

articles for Scooters Today). There were always the difficult questions of whether one should dilute

one's appreciation of the Kinks with a little Small Faces, or whether Italy or Germany were the best

manufacturers of spare engine parts. That life seemed so alien to him now he hardly remembered

living it. He pitied those who suffered under the weight of such doubts and dilemmas. He pitied

Parliament as he and Mrs. B. scooted past it; he pitied it because the laws made in there were

provisional where his were eternal.. .

"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 pounds 70 pence 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 Me

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. Me 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 oufa more fanatical urge in them ...

it is down to claws and flying far.. . 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