A Week in December

  There was something profoundly satisfying about pouring away alcohol, then refilling the wine bottles with a purer liquid – something closer to the heart of the almighty God. Hassan gargled with some of the wine and spat it down the seatless lavatory; then he splashed some down the front of his clothes to make himself smell like a kafir on a Christmas outing. He resealed the wine carton carefully with the brown tape so that it appeared unopened.

  The taxi took him back to the passenger terminal of the ferry, and he tipped the driver, though not so generously that it would stay in his mind. The next departure was not on the line he had come over with, but left in only half an hour; he bought a single ticket, disclosing his name again, then took the carton of hair conditioner to the Gents and dumped it in a cubicle.

  He was ready to go. He said a brief prayer, opened the lavatory door and made for the security area to which he had been directed by the ticket clerk.

  Two bored young men stood by the scanner and the metal detector. Hassan hoisted the wine box on to the conveyor belt and placed his jacket in a plastic tray behind it. In a moment of inspiration, he left his mobile phone in his trouser pocket, so that when he walked through the metal detector, it let out a screech. In the ensuing body search, the finding of the cellphone and the re-passing of the detector, nobody took any notice of the case of Bordeaux Rosé as it chugged slowly on the runners down to the end of the ramp.

  Hassan made male drinking noises, laughed and breathed fumes on the younger guard as he hoisted his ‘wine’ up and made his way over to the brightly lit waiting area. There were only three other foot passengers, and he expected a quiet crossing. He recited a few surah of the Koran silently to himself as he waited for the gates to the shuttle bus to open.

  Hassan al-Rashid knew the Koran very well. Scriptures you take in as a child, his father told him, are with you always; they provide the landscape of your life. So when he went to his first meeting with Salim at the Pudding Mill Lane Mosque he quickly saw that he was among people who either hadn’t read the book or who’d moved on from it. This surprised him. He’d expected the group to be scripturally-based.

  The atmosphere, though not really religious, was collegiate and warm. Salim introduced him to the others – about twenty-five, all men – and they went to pray. Afterwards, they had fruit juice and cigarettes while they listened to a speaker in the meeting room. The speaker referred to a famous book by Ghulam Sarwar, and Hassan remembered it from comparative religion classes at school in Renfrew. It was a basic text read by British schoolchildren of all faiths; its central claim was that in true Islam there was no distinction between religious belief and political action. Islam contained everything that was necessary for men to run and build their own societies. The only problem was that there was not yet a truly Islamic state anywhere in the world: kings, generals, dictators or Westernised democracy got in the way. It followed that, since religion and politics were coterminous, the task of the believer was a practical one: to build the true state – the pure Islamic model that had been absent since the last caliph.

  ‘That’s my simple proposal for you today,’ concluded the speaker, a softly spoken man of about thirty. ‘And it’s a more inviting life task than that available to the Christian or the Jew. They believe their political structures are separate from spiritual beliefs. They also believe they have already achieved civil perfection. Their idea of this is ... the United States of America.’

  There was some low satirical laughter.

  Hassan was not impressed by the speaker. When at the age of sixteen he’d first told his father about this idea of an Islamic state, Knocker had ridiculed it. ‘It’s not in the Koran,’ he said, ‘it’s a pure invention. Who’s filled your head with this nonsense?’

  ‘A book they teach us all at school.’

  Knocker was appalled. ‘And who wrote this rubbish?’

  ‘His name is Ghulam Sarwar.’

  ‘That joker!’ said Knocker. ‘He’s not an imam, he’s a business management lecturer! How come they pass that stuff around?’

  ‘I don’t know, but that’s what’s given out. To all the children. Of all faiths.’

  Shame-faced, Hassan had not mentioned the Islamic state again: he had readdressed himself to the central message of the Koran, which was to devote oneself to Allah or risk hellfire in all eternity. Of course, there was also practical advice: be kind to orphans, pay the alms levy, go to Mecca if you can, sleep only with the servant girls of your own house and not with other men’s. But the overwhelming, overpowering, message of the book, which Hassan knew from back to front and of which he could recite large sections in Arabic, was that Allah was the true and only God; that, while Abraham, Noah and Jesus were decent men, the Jews and Christians were wrong in their beliefs; and that if you did not believe in Allah and Islam then you would be tortured for all time after death.

  There was nothing in the Koran about the politics of building an Islamic state; the Prophet had not concerned himself with such things. So, as the discussion grew heated around him, Hassan found himself become detached from it. These young men reminded him of the members of the Left Student Group at college; there was a competition going on among them to see who could be more radical in his alignment. At college it had been a contest between the International Marxist Group, the Socialist Workers Party or the mysterious Red International. Here the name-drop of Muslim Youth International was finessed by World Islam League; Mid-East Forum was trumped by Jamaat-e-Islami. He also had misgivings about the way they referred to all non-Muslims as kafirs. It was all right for Jews to refer to non-Jews as ‘Gentiles’, but less so to call them ‘goys’. To Hassan’s ear, ‘kafir’ had a slur of assumed racial superiority about it.

  He sighed. At least the Pudding Mill Lane Mosque had a prayer area for women. That seemed an advance on some of the places he’d visited, where row upon row of battered men’s shoes were lined up outside with never a female slipper. After the political debate, matters moved into calmer waters as they read out news of football tournaments, youth camps and fund-raisers.

  Afterwards, Salim put his arm round Hassan’s shoulder as they walked towards the station.

  ‘Did you enjoy it?’ he said.

  ‘Up to a point,’ said Hassan. ‘I don’t agree with the political agenda. There’s no basis for it in the Koran.’

  ‘Religions move on,’ said Salim. ‘Even the word of God evolves through human interpretation. That’s what theology is for. Other religions are the same. Christ had only male apostles. Now the Church of England even has female ministers.’

  ‘I wouldn’t take the Church of England as a model for anything,’ said Hassan.

  Salim laughed. ‘Of course not. But you can look at it like this. True Muslims need to live in a society that respects their beliefs and gives them every chance of enjoying paradise when they die. Whether the Koran contains instruction to the last letter for making this new society is something the textual scholars can dispute. But meanwhile is it such a terrible aspiration to want to live in such a good place on earth or to want to help to build it?’

  ‘If you put it like that, then—’

  ‘I do put it like that,’ said Salim. His deep voice was reasonable and reassuring; he seemed to have reserves of eloquence he’d kept hidden at their first meeting in the juice bar.

  ‘Can I give you a lift? That’s my old banger over there by the fence. Where do you live?’

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Hassan. ‘I’ll take the train.’

  ‘It’s a DLR station. It’s probably not open at this time of the evening. Come on. Hop in. It’s no trouble.’

  As the ferry was leaving for Dover, a strange thing happened: it began to fill up rapidly. Several coaches must have caught it just in time, Hassan thought, as he tried to find a seat away from the slopping of alcohol. He was pushed out of the way by a fat woman in her sixties making for the Food Court. ‘Look at ’er go! Like a bloody greyhound!’ her jovial companion shouted. Amongst the crowd of
new passengers was a sense of hilarious relief at being homeward bound; a day on foreign soil had been enough. They carried pyramids of pale chips from the servery and ate them with their hands.

  Next to the Food Court was a Club Lounge, though you had to pay to go in: £15 to escape the rabble, read free copies of the tabloids and have ‘complimentary’ coffee. Hassan didn’t want to stand out from the crowd; he found a seat among the beer-drinkers downstairs and noticed that the woman opposite was the one who had sat next to him on the shuttle bus to the ferry: young, Indian, quite well dressed, reading a middlebrow bestseller – typical, he thought, of the new MI5 recruits.

  He looked down the deck to see if he could plausibly escape. There was a Café Bravo concession at the front of the ferry, but its queue had at least thirty people in it. At the other end of the deck was – of course – a giant bar. It was a nuisance to lug his heavy wine case down there, but he wanted to see if the suspicious woman followed.

  ‘Any spirit. Double it for an extra £1,’ said a notice behind the bar, where Hassan positioned himself, with a good view of the whole room.

  Some of the kafirs were so fat they could barely manage to get the trays full of lager and crisps back to their tables; many of them used sticks to help the knees that had given way beneath their weight. The younger ones sprawled on the red seats with their pierced bellies showing as they rolled down in lard layers over their low-cut jeans. Hassan noticed how many of the people in the bar were misshapen or deformed, though felt a slight unease at doing so, not sure at what point religious righteousness became a kind of racism. Above their heads came the fizzle and thump of a music video on a screen where a woman with dyed hair mimed fellatio on a microphone.

  Hassan thought of the Prophet’s life and of how in his religion God was immanent in all things, as he had been in the Sunna – the everyday actions of the Prophet; there was no disjunction between the sacred and divine because to a true believer all was holy, all was pure.

  But suppose the afterlife was not as the Book described but a low-ceilinged, strip-lit hell like this? Not a garden of peace but a kafir ferry?

  Hassan smiled as he placed his foot on top of his wine carton in a proprietary and confident way. He had no real concerns. His belief, at moments like this, was adamantine.

  At Dover, he had to wait on the cold, deserted platform for an hour for a train to Charing Cross. There was a security announcement about unattended parcels.

  With his own package tightly in his hand, Hassan walked up and down to keep warm. Through the glass door of the station manager’s office he saw bored men waiting for their cold shift to be over. How few human beings lived life as if it mattered, he thought; to most of them it was just a case of passing time.

  Eventually, the train came and he found an empty carriage. It was nearly nine o’clock and he had been on the go for fifteen hours. With his feet on the wine box, Hassan settled back against the headrest and fell asleep in the fug.

  Above his head was a picture of a lone red suitcase with the words ‘Increased threat to your security’.

  II

  Spike Borowski had arrived at the Worcester Park training ground at nine-fifteen that morning and parked his small German saloon. His customised large German saloon was on order from Bavaria and the dealer had lent him the embarrassing two-litre, two-door job in the meantime. In his kitbag he carried two pairs of boots, underwear, sweatshirts, gloves, a selection of crucifixes and two dictionaries. Max, the bootman, had told him on the phone there would be fluorescent bibs and a selection of team kit at the ground. Borowski looked up ‘bib’ in his Polish-English dictionary, where it offered ‘sliniaczek’. His English-English dictionary defined bib as ‘child’s food guard’; though ‘bib v’ was also defined as’drink alcohol to excess’. He’d heard a lot about English footballers’ habits, but he didn’t think the manager would kick off a training session by drinking to excess. Afterwards, maybe.

  At first, Spike thought his bossy German satnav had brought him to the wrong place. This was not what he understood by training ground, which had always been a hectare of rough grass with iron railings and a single-storey building with an outside urinal. This was something else entirely. For a start, there were seven football pitches, one with stands for spectators and one, AstroTurf, under cover of a giant tent. The building was painted white over three floors with a pillared portico; it reminded him of the country club in Connecticut he’d seen in an American comedy film. However, the security man on the gate seemed to recognise him and nodded him through with a smile.

  Inside the main building, on the first floor, was a canteen, where some of the first-team squad were eating a late breakfast. Spike had met a couple of them at the ground when he posed on the pitch after signing his papers and they nodded in his direction. One was eating toast with some sort of chocolate spread smeared on it, the other was spooning in cereal.

  Spike took a tray and pushed it along in front of the servery. He took a cup of tea. He had already eaten eggs and rye bread in the hotel in Chelsea where he was staying till they’d found him a flat, and they were lying heavy on his stomach.

  ‘Fancy a smoothie, love?’ said the woman behind the counter.

  ‘What?’

  She picked up a bottle and showed him.

  He shook his head and moved off. “‘Fancy a smoothie, love?”’ What did it all mean? The way these people spoke was not in the books; he was already aware of that, and had taken steps to understand them. Using the computer in the ‘office suite’ at his hotel, Spike had found a website called interbabel.com that linked into numerous thesauruses and colloquial translation engines. Interbabel.com certainly had the dope. It had so many possibilities, in fact, that he was spoilt for choice, over-informed. This didn’t stop him pursuing all the links and meanings, all the definitions and re-translations: he’d graduated in politics and economics before taking up football professionally; he owed his degree to his willingness to study thoroughly, and he carried the habit through to all parts of life. ‘Stubborn’ (‘przymiotnik’) or ‘dogged’ (’uparty’) were words the press in his own country applied to him.

  After breakfast, Spike went down the corridor, past numerous carpeted offices with shimmering flat-screen computers, including the private lair of the Turkish manager, Mehmet Kundak, to the team room. In sweatshirts and shorts, sipping glucose drinks, the first team lolled on rows of padded luxury-leather recliners. Kundak came in from a side door and told Archie Lawler, the coach, to start the video, which showed film of the last time they had played that evening’s opponents. Occasionally, Lawler would pause it and point out the shape of the opposing midfield, the triangles they played.

  After about five minutes, Spike began to panic. Although the score had apparently been 1–1, his team had never won the ball. Had he joined them on false pretences? Were they really that inept? Wave after wave of opposition attacks came crashing down on them, but as they watched it the players looked unembarrassed and Lawler much less alarmed than he needed to be.

  ‘Why we never have the ball?’ Spike asked an African sitting next to him.

  ‘We know how we play,’ he said. ‘The film just shows their moves. It’s cut.’

  Spike laughed. ‘Is big relief.’

  The African ignored him. After some brutal exhortation from Lawler about the evening game, Spike followed the other players downstairs through a huge carpeted vestibule and into a corridor from which led numerous treatment and changing rooms. He got ready, took one of the club tracksuits, size XL, crossed himself and trotted out on to the pitches.

  The first-team squad numbered thirty-eight, but without the nine on loan and the chronically injured there were twenty-five at the training ground. Seven reserves went off to train with the youth teams, leaving the eighteen-man squad, including Spike, for the evening league game. They gathered by the side of one of the pitches and bent themselves into postures like figures in a mediaeval depiction of hell. They locked hands round their ankles;
they pulled one foot up into the buttocks until they could bear it no longer; they reached for the sky and laid their hands flat on the ground while standing. Spike joined in, though not wholeheartedly. After forty minutes, when every muscle fibre had been tweaked, expanded, rested and stretched again, they were thought ready for some action.

  ‘We’re going to be working on set pieces,’ said Archie Lawler. ‘Spike, get on the far post.’

  For half an hour, Spike found himself doing things he hadn’t done since the youth team in Gdansk. He was marked by the reserve centre back, Charles Watiyah, a giant Liberian, who was keen to force his way into the first team. Every time Spike went to head the ball, he found himself pushed in the small of the back; it was nothing violent, just enough to unbalance him. On the occasions he became airborne, he found the Liberian’s head in his mouth. The crosses were provided by little Danny Bective, one of the few English players in the squad, a midfielder with what Archie Lawler had described to a television interviewer as an ‘unbelievable engine’. He kicked the ball over a wall of life-size plastic players in bright red shirts that Lawler had wheeled up and left only eight yards in front of him. There was no point in moving it back the mandatory ten, because that never happened in a professional game.

  ‘All right, Vladimir, you get on the far post now,’ said Archie. ‘Spike, you take a blow.’

  Vladimir Stoev was a Bulgarian who had been at the club for two seasons and had scored eighteen goals the year before. He had once been banned for three months when a drug test found traces of something he claimed had come from an anti-asthma medicine; this, and his origins, had got him the nickname Vlad the Inhaler. Spike watched how Vlad dealt with Charles Watiyah, by jumping up and down like an excited child, moving around so he was not in one place long enough to be fouled, then making sure he jumped early, as soon as Bective had begun his three-pace run-up to deliver the cross. Sometimes Vlad was already on the way down by the time the ball arrived, but he could often maintain his height by leaning on Watiyah’s shoulder. Finally, he elbowed him in the face and managed to head the ball past the stand-in goalkeeper.