A Week in December

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘Don’t worry, Finn,’ Gabriel heard her whisper. ‘We’ll look after you.’

  ‘All right, Gabriel,’ said Rob, emerging from the darkness. ‘You can come and see him now.’

  ‘Thanks, Rob. This is Jenni by the way.’

  ‘Hi. Don’t fret if Adam seems a bit odd. They were all upset by the boy who came in. It may take Adam a while to settle.’

  They went down the dark corridor, through the dining area, in whose unlit air Gabriel could just make out the figure of Violet, still standing at the window, her arm forever raised in greeting, or farewell.

  Adam was called from the smoky day room and the television’s roar. Rob showed him into the visitors’ lounge where Gabriel and Jenni sat.

  ‘Hi, Adam. This is a friend of mine I’ve brought to see you – Jenni. We got you these.’ He held out some cigarettes and chewing gum, which Adam took without speaking.

  Far from being upset, Adam seemed cogent and relaxed.

  ‘Who sent you?’ he asked, eyeing Jenni.

  ‘No, no. She’s ... She’s a friend,’ said Gabriel.

  ‘You should marry,’ said Adam. ‘It’s permitted to marry two or three people.’

  ‘Is it?’ said Jenni.

  Gabriel tried to catch her eye, to warn her not to engage too literally in conversation.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Adam. ‘But the penalty for adultery is severe.’

  ‘Is this in the Bible?’ said Jenni.

  ‘No. Axia told me.’

  ‘Who’s Axia?’

  ‘The ruler.’ Adam spoke as a teacher to a slow child.

  ‘And you know this Axia, do you?’ said Jenni.

  ‘Of course. There is also the Disaster-Maker. You can’t understand the Disaster-Maker. When he comes to us, you’ll be scattered like flies.’

  ‘Like some tea, Adam?’ said Gabriel.

  ‘If your life’s been wrong, he will punish you.’

  ‘Who?’ said Jenni. ‘Axia?’

  ‘The Disaster-Maker. You can’t know what it’ll be like. Shall I tell you what it’s like?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jenni.

  ‘It’s a scorching fire.’

  At that instant Gabriel knew what the relentless voice of the Koran had reminded him of: it was his brother.

  While Adam went on to explain his eschatology to Jenni – who was saved and who would burn, how power and the chance of salvation rained down upon the world and how he alone was the channel of the truth – Gabriel cast his mind back over what he’d read, and saw in all of it a common thread. He remembered the awesome nature of the Prophet’s experience as he received the visitation in the chapter named ‘The Star’. And when he had stressed to Jenni how the difference between his reality and Adam’s was that Adam’s was so much more confident and secure, he could have been speaking equally of the Prophet’s experience – in its intensity and its vehement exclusion of all doubt.

  The same certainty was there also in biblical leaders – in Abraham instructed by a voice to sacrifice his son, instructed by another voice to save him; Abraham had never doubted the reality of the voice, as Adam had never doubted Axia, it was only the detail of the order that was a worry. All the great Jewish prophets heard voices and were led by them. Three times in the night the infant Samuel went to the prophet Eli, having heard his name called by the old man; three times Eli was asleep. John the Baptist, raving, all but naked, unkempt, eating insects ... He was like the poor man Gabriel had seen wrapped only in a black bin bag one winter night near Waterloo Bridge soon after the psychiatric hospitals had been closed and their patients thrown out to ‘care in the community’. It was a brutal shame. And then, in the Bible at least, the hearing of voices had become less common, so that when Christ arrived he was welcomed as the first true prophet in generations, the first man to have heard God’s voice clearly. How badly the Arabs of the Peninsula had needed a voice-hearer of their own, and how long their 600-year wait must have seemed. And then, when God came ... he came with hard threats, saying: It is so because I say so.

  Shortly after eight o’clock, Hassan secured his rucksack for the final time. It had eight disposable cameras whose batteries had been hollowed out and their contents replaced with HMTD; four were ‘operational’ and four were spares. He had checked and rechecked them and there was nothing left to do. They had agreed a place to make their rendezvous at Glendale, at the maintenance shed some 200 yards from the building called Wakeley. Two of them would enter through the front door of the main hospital, which had the typical laissez-aller attitude of all large NHS buildings, with staff, visitors, trade, maintenance and outpatients coming and going unchallenged, at least in the communal downstairs areas. Just in case of difficulty, one of the four, Seth, would approach from the open-plan psychiatric side of the site and one, Hassan, would scale an eight-foot perimeter wall. He was chosen for the climb because his load was the lightest.

  He sat down on his bed. This was to be the last night of his life.

  There seemed nothing he could do that was momentous enough to mark such an event. He smiled. Should he reread a favourite book? Telephone a special friend? Or even an old girlfriend. Dawn! He laughed out loud. Or Rania – though she’d never technically been his girlfriend. Or Shahla, maybe. Why had he suddenly thought of her? She was an apostate, she was worse than a kafir.

  He opened his laptop and went to babesdelight.co.uk. He checked Olya for any last message, but her spread legs showed only pink. He looked at one or two of the other girls, then closed the screen down.

  Hassan held his face in his hands. This was going to be a little harder than he’d imagined, to leave behind everything in the world.

  He picked up the paperback Koran, and it fell open at a marked passage.

  ‘Never think that those who were slain in the cause of God are dead. They are alive, and well provided for by their Lord; pleased with His gifts and rejoicing that those they left behind, who have not yet joined them, have nothing to fear or to regret; rejoicing in God’s grace and bounty. God will not deny the faithful their reward.’

  Hassan knelt by the side of the bed and held his head tight between his hands.

  At 9.15 exactly in a room full of old-master paintings, the chairman of HOPE rose to his feet to begin the auction of prizes to the assembled members of the financial world. Hire of the famous gallery had cost £250,000, with HOPE further agreeing to cover the extraordinary insurance premium incurred by the risk that a futures trader lighting up a crafty smoke might accidentally ignite a Titian.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please. We have thirty lots to get through in this year’s auction, so as usual we must begin promptly. Do enjoy your dinner, but please be as quiet as you can so that the auction can run smoothly. I know you’ll be delighted to hear that it’s not me who’ll be conducting the auction, but a mystery celebrity I shall be introducing to you at any moment. And he’s going to introduce you later to tonight’s surprise star guest.’

  The chairman was the chief executive of a bank, whose television advertisements featured black and white footage of a Pennine town, while their investment arm had bought billions of pounds’ worth of febrile derivatives in new Asia. The head of the department responsible for helping the bank avoid tax had been paid £42 million in salary and bonus that year. Being domiciled abroad, he did not pay income tax on this sum.

  Beneath a fifteenth-century painting of the Return of the Prodigal Son sat the London chief executive of the financial services division of a giant American insurer. Of his own $30 million annual remuneration, the CEO had earmarked $500,000 for spending, con brio, at the HOPE auction. He could probably reclaim it on expenses, he thought, if the year-end results were good (not likely as of that moment). A colleague had set his previous year’s bid off against tax, but that was of no interest, the chief exec pointed out testily, if you didn’t pay tax.

  ‘... outstanding support from the financial community,’ the chairman continued. ‘I would especially li
ke to thank John Veals of High Level Capital, who has been a long-time supporter of our work. John can’t be here tonight, but has made a most generous gesture in booking three tables at twice the going rate and then releasing them to us to sell again. John has always shown great commitment to pensioners’ causes.’

  Some tables were growing restive. It was amusing enough to dress up in black tie and diamonds, to drink the champagne stipulated by petulant rock stars for their dressing rooms, but the attention spans of the assembled guests were short and they needed the stimulus of action: they wanted to see large sums of money changing hands, soon. The equities division of one of the brasher banks began to rattle its table, making a cacophony of china, glass and cutlery. A young sell-side analyst with a lapel badge saying ‘Call Me Gus’ raised his head from his lap, where he had snorted a line of cocaine from the back of the stiff printed menu, wiped his nose with the back of his hand and, in a burst of chemical exhilaration, shouted, ‘Show me the Money.’

  ‘... without further ado,’ the chairman swiftly concluded, ‘I would like to introduce you to your host for the evening, fresh from the travails of the television studio, Mr Terry O’Malley!’

  From behind a wide black screen that held a fragment of a fresco under glass, Terry, with grey curls and ruddy jowls, came bounding out in a green velvet bow tie.

  ‘All right, you fat capitalist bastards,’ he began. ‘Time to put your hands in your pockets. Quiet now. Honestly, you lot, you’re worse than the nutters in the Barking Bungalow. I’ll have the whole lot of you under sedation if you’re not careful. And just so we can get the question of what happened last night out of the way: yes, it was unfortunate, no it’s not our fault, and yes we are insured ... I’ll tell you about Lisa’s reaction later. Poor girl, you’d think she’d never been face to face with a stiff before ... All right. First up. It’s a cultural package. You get two tickets for one night at Bayreuth. No, sir, it’s not the capital of Lebanon, it’s the capital of Wagner. You get a behind-the-scenes tour of the Royal Ballet, plus two tickets to the performance of your choice. You have a signed print by one of Britain’s most famous artists, Liam Hogg. And finally you get to have lunch at the award-winning Green Pig restaurant, as featured on TV, with the leading novelist and critic – it says here – Alexander Sedley. Let’s start the bidding at £25,000. Come on, you tight bastards. I warn you, the early lots are the bargains. You’ll look back and think, Why did I miss that when I’ve ended up paying twice the final amount for something half as good? Over there. Table five. Thirty thousand? Good. With you, madam.’

  For the sum of £95,000, the lot was won by ‘Call Me Gus’, who started to make his way to the podium to receive his envelope.

  ‘Before you come up here, mate,’ said Terry O’Malley, ‘I’d like to introduce our surprise star guest. You’ve no idea how much it cost to fly her here all the way from Hollywood. But expense is no object when it comes to HOPE, and in fact I’m pretty sure this is a girl the boys on table fourteen wouldn’t mind blowing their whole wad on ... Yes, it’s the one and only ... Evelina Belle!’

  There was a roar from the diners, many of whom rose to their feet, as the shy-looking actress, so small and pale in reality, was led on by two shaven-headed thugs with curly wires behind their ears.

  She stood beneath a mighty oil of Judith and Holofernes, painted by the inhabitant of one of the new county lunatic asylums in 1862.

  ‘Why, thank you, everybody,’ Evelina said, her huge red mouth opening to show her blinding white teeth. ‘I hope y’all will consider it an incentive to bid higher knowing that you get to shake my hand.’

  ‘Ah, go on, Evelina,’ said Terry. ‘Give the man a kiss.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Evelina, offering Gus a cheek. ‘Are you an opera kinda guy?’

  ‘No, I never ’eard of any of these people,’ said Gus. ‘I was just hoping to impress my date.’

  ‘Well, good luck, honey,’ said Evelina.

  ‘And if your date won’t put out for ninety-five grand,’ said Terry, ‘don’t come crying to me!’

  At 9.45 in the Sir Francis Drake Suite in the Park Lane Metropolitan, a man in a maroon nylon jacket with a black bow tie placed a microphone in front of the chief executive of Pizza Palace, Nigel Salisbury, and banged it a few times with his finger, making the noisy diners turn their heads and concentrate.

  R. Tranter felt a tightening in his belly and a loosening in his bladder. His palms spurted moisture, while Penny McGuire laid a calming hand on his forearm.

  Nigel Salisbury had originally voted against sponsoring a prize for books, as he couldn’t see what it had to do with selling more pizza. Over the last few years, however, he had come round to thinking that the publicity was good value. Each year, his head chef devised a new topping somehow connected to the winner of the prize. A travel book about the Australian outback had naturally given birth to an ‘Ozzie Hot’, featuring slices of barbecue-seared meat (allegedly kangaroo) on a dark brown vegetable-extract base; a biography of Hitler had led to a vegetarian layer. Neither had sold well, but the publishers had been pleased.

  From behind his raised glass, Tranter surveyed the room. Dinner had seemed never-ending, and he had long ago tired of explaining to Mrs Jones, the wife of Mr K. R. Jones (regional development), who Alfred Huntley Edgerton was. The collar of his shirt was too tight and he had become aware during the rack of lamb with over-reduced jus and string beans that his body heat was starting to call up the ghosts of banquets past from the serge of his hired jacket.

  After a speech about the sales growth of Pizza Palace and the number of new outlets in the north-west, Nigel Salisbury handed over to the chairman of the judges, the former transport minister who allegedly read books.

  After telling his audience how honoured he was, the Literate Politician went on to describe how extremely difficult the task faced by the panel had been.

  Tranter dug his fingernails into his palms. Dear God, he had begun by thinking, please bring this to an end; but after a bit, he found to his surprise, that, mixed with the extended agony, there was a kind of exhilaration. It was as though everything in his life had been leading up to this moment and he didn’t mind prolonging it. He knew now that he was going to win. His diligence as a schoolboy had been the start of it all; although they didn’t rank the kids officially it was obvious that Tranter had been top of the class. Secondary school, Oxford, the early years ... He had stuck firmly to what he believed. His excoriating reviews in newspapers, magazines and in The Toad had served a high critical purpose: to purge the world of the ‘higher bogus’, to rip the scales from readers’ eyes, to attack the lazy assumptions of the ‘literary establishment’. He had sought neither fear nor favour – if that was the expression he wanted. It had taken real courage to write – albeit anonymously – and explain why this year’s darling of the press was an empty hype, a hollow vessel; why that old fool, laden with honours, was just one of the old gang of mutual ... mutual ... Whatever. Tranter took another swig of the Metropolitan house Rioja.

  And his critics said he had nothing to offer but derision. Well, he had shown them. He had found a real writer, examined his life and presented it to the public with a full commentary on the novels, explaining in detail how Shropshire Towers, for instance, was a work hugely superior to anything published in the last twenty years.

  He heard a falling note in the Literate Politician’s voice that suggested he was about to end his speech and name the winner. The man took an envelope from his pocket. Tranter looked down at the half-eaten crème caramel on his plate. There was a ringing in his ears, a pounding of blood. Every particle of his body was now straining and craving for the desired vowel-sounds that made the name of Alfred Huntley Edgerton. His inner ears were flaming with desire. ‘And the winner is ...’ And then, all at once, the longed-for vowels were his, laying their soft blessing on his ravenous hopes. He pushed his chair back and clambered modestly to his feet; he had gone no more than two paces when he felt his
coat-tails being vigorously pulled by Penny McGuire, hissing, ‘Sit down, you idiot.’ Resuming the seat of his banqueting chair, open-mouthed, Tranter looked up towards the Literate Politician in time to see him hold out his hand to a flushed woman of a certain age, and in a moment of terrible clarity Tranter replayed the announcement in his mind and heard almost the same vowels form not the name of his subject, but of Alfie the Humble Engine, and gathered from the loud and standing ovation that Sally Higgs was the winner of the Pizza Palace Book of the Year prize and that the 400 people gathered in the Sir Francis Drake suite were mightily pleased for old Sally, a much-loved toiler in the garden of that humble genre, the children’s picture book.

  It was 10.30 by the time Gabriel and Jenni boarded the train back to Victoria, having eaten at the local Pizza Palace. It was either that or the Everest Nepalese, and they had had Indian the night before. Jenni insisted on paying, though since she drank water because she was driving the next day and Gabriel tactfully had only one glass of wine, it was not expensive.

  Jenni was shocked by what she’d seen in Glendale, but was wary of upsetting Gabriel by asking him too much. He seemed very resigned, she thought. If this tragedy had come to her brother, she would have been outraged, appalled, distraught. It intrigued her that Gabriel could seem so detached.

  ‘Don’t you find it depressing?’ she’d asked over her pizza.

  ‘The institution? Yes, I do. But there are things that you can’t understand in life. There are things where your sympathy, however passionate, is not going to make a difference. It’s terribly frustrating because I feel that Adam, the Adam I knew, is still somewhere inside that body. Occasionally I catch a glimpse of him, but I can’t reach him. And then he’s gone again.’