‘I’m coming, sir,’ said Dean. There was a small clonk, and Dean froze. Slowly he rotated his eyes to the floor. Was it his imagination, or had one of those parking ticket gizmos slipped off the warden’s chest? Surely he— No, thought Dean; no one could survive the loss of so much blood.
He squelched in search of the equipment.
Life had been tough for Dean since that dreadful night in Wednesbury. The magistrates had grasped pretty clearly what had happened, and in some ways they were even sympathetic. But he was still convicted, in a juvenile court, of arson. Price launched an action with more than twenty separate complaints, including destruction of intellectual property. He claimed that he had produced a new kind of hard cheese, dense, nutty and as fissile as Parmesan.
It was going to be unmistakable, he said, and he had already ordered the British racing green wax in which it was to be coated. He painted a picture of a revolution in taste, and not just in Britain. His green spheres would pop up in delicatessens across the planet.
‘And what were you going to call this cheese?’ asked the magistrate.
‘It was going to be Old Wednesbury,’ said Price, with tears in his eyes.
The magistrate had a holiday house in Normandy. He understood the backwardness of the British in the matter of cheese. He was enough of a patriot to resent the loss of Old Wednesbury.
‘Four hundred hours’ community service,’ he said.
Shock and disappointment had now crowded in so fast on Dennis and Vie that Dennis had a kind of blip, a small cranial embolism that noticeably slowed him down, and Vie, poor Vie who had loved Dean, contracted ovarian cancer, cruel irony of fate. She faded to bones and was gone.
Dean left school. He felt, and sometimes claimed, that he had been vice-captain of the school’s water polo team, even though that office was not recognized in the school’s constitution. Otherwise his record was unblemished by achievement.
He fell in with a bad crowd while performing his community service. It was a soft job, scraping graffiti off gravestones, and his fellow-convicts, Wayne and Paulie, had no desire to move on to the next task, trying to move the gum which clung like huge pale lichen to Wolverhampton’s desolate piazzas, testament to the frustrated oral desires of office workers prevented from smoking. Wayne and Paulie told Dean about the horrors of this Sisyphean task, how even if the gum came off the flag, it adhered so grimly to the scraper that it seemed nothing would shift it but a tactical nuclear weapon. So every night, when the cemetery was locked, Wayne, Dean and Paulie would shin over the gate, have some drugs, and then, like Penelope with her loom, they would busily undo the work of the day.
Here was the mossy tomb of Hannah, beloved wife of Tobias Horton, departed this world in the year of grace 1869. ‘SCMU’, wrote Dean. He meant to write scum, but was so stoned that dyslexia was added to his list of troubles.
Here were the higgledy-piggledy headstones of the Arbuthnot family, sticking out of the earth like carious teeth. ‘Fuck off, wogs,’ wrote Dean on the Arbuthnots. In view of his complexes, well known to his social workers, he thought this act unlikely to be blamed on him.
Shorn of Vie’s mediation, his life at home had become almost satirically bad, he and Dennis timing their routines so as not even to meet in the kitchen. After a year of drifting, and rejecting every solution that Dennis could offer, Dean was, as the politicians like to put it, on the conveyor belt to crime. Twice on the urgings of Wayne and Paulie he had been involved in attempted joy riding. Once he had been caught. Once he had served as a look-out while Wayne and Paulie burgled a house in Willenhall, a bosky street with quiet villas set well back from the lamps, the residence, did he but know it, of his natural father, whose wiper business had been wiped out by Tory interest rates and who made a tidy living offering consultancy to fellow-victims on how to go bust in the most profitable possible way.
You could not really say that the state had failed young Dean, not for lack of resources.
If a heartless politician were to engage in gratuitous political point-scoring, he might note that Dean was cared for by a Substance Abuse Outreach Worker (£25,000 pa), a Crime Prevention Detached Youth Project Worker (£31,000), a Burglary Reduction Worker (£23,000), a Probation Officer (£26,000), a Vehicle Theft Reduction Worker (£28,000 plus cars) and a representative of DYSPEL, a state-funded body that sees to the needs of dyslexic young offenders (£36,000).
No single person really took an intelligent interest in him until one day some liberal genius in the Home Office came up with the FreshStart scheme. In a move evoking the excesses of 1970s Sweden, or the penal policies of Sir Wilfred Lucas-Dockery, the Home Secretary decided that there was only one way of getting Dean and his kind off their conveyor belt before they became fully assembled, galvanized and rust-proofed criminals.
The idea was that they should all be given a £10,000 FreshStart fund, at the expense of the taxpayer. Wayne, Paulie and Dean could hardly believe their luck. They immediately rented a large house, where they lived in scenes of unremitting squalor. They relieved the sudden tedium of affluence with drink and drugs. They bought an orange Vauxhall Astra, which they ineffectively souped up and rammed through the window of RitePrice in Bilston. Wayne sustained such serious injuries that he spent much of the next few years shuttling, at indescribable public expense, between Stoke Mandeville and assorted respite centres.
Dean and Paulie were still more or less in one piece; and the bulk of their FreshStart funds was used to compensate RitePrice. It was furthermore decided by the parole officers and social workers that in so far as Dean and Paulie still had a debt to RitePrice, they should repay it by working there, free, as part of a Youth Training Scheme called Passport2Jobs. Under Passport2Jobs some of the least employable young people in Britain were allowed to sit picking their noses and reading Fiesta in the stock rooms of firms willing to accept the subsidies attached.
Dean was in some ways a gifted shelf-stacker. He devised a way of booby-trapping the Pampers nappies, so that a shopper couldn’t pull out one of the plastic breeze blocks of Maxi-Pluses without the rest of them raining down on her, or, more gratifyingly still, on the head of the little brute in the buggy.
He was wholly absorbed, as though back at his Montessori school, in creating pyramids of oranges and nectarines. One week, to his shivering pleasure, a photocopied form was stuck on the board announcing that he was RitePrice’s most useful employee of the month of June.
‘Well done, Dean,’ said curly-haired Vanessa at the checkout, and Dean shot a glance at her.
She was beaming at him, showing loads of pretty white teeth. There seemed no question about her sincerity. ‘Thanks,’ he said. It wasn’t obvious, as he stomped over to the so-called Delicatessen section, but he was walking on air.
Over the next few days he started looking more closely at Vanessa who was — though he and Paulie argued about this to begin with — at least as pretty as some of the girls in the Daily Star. On any pretext he would wander past her checkout and make some remark, in the hope of eliciting a smile. He was usually successful. Every time he looked at her sweet oval face, and her tight white checkout coat, he felt the choky feeling in his lungs. Bashfully he would buy chocolates at her till, with his own money, and ching-ching he would present them to her.
One day he asked her to the pub with Paulie, and as they said good night, she actually stuck out her cheek for a kiss. He took her out again, and when he got home, he looked at himself in the mirror. He hadn’t told her his origins, and he wasn’t sure what to say. The interesting thing about his half-caste looks, he decided, was that he didn’t look Negroid.
He looked kind of Arab: dark skin, curly hair, a forceful but straight nose. Yes, for the purposes of conversation with Vanessa, he would be a sheikh.
One night in the pub he poured forth his life’s story: the misery of his existence with Dennis and Vie, the burning of Price’s cheesorium, the tragic ram-raid. He couldn’t believe how much she wanted to know, and how saddened s
he seemed by the details of his shocking finances. For the first time in his life, it occurred to him that he might be an interesting person.
“Ere Vanessa,’ said Dean, who was fairly sure he was on the right lines, ‘has anyone ever told you how lovely you are?’
‘Oh Dean,’ said Vanessa, ‘that’s reely reely sweet.’
‘Vanessa,’ said Dean, knitting his fingers, ‘I love you.’
‘Oh Dean,’ she said, and to his delirious stupefaction, she hugged him. But the following night, when he had summoned the bottle to ask her whether she would like, perhaps, to see a film, it turned out that she was busy. Something to do with her Nan, and a hip bath, and cuts in social services.
It was the same story the following night; or rather, it was a different story, but with the same result. This time there was something very slightly distant in her manner. That evening, when Paulie came back to their digs, Dean had a sudden suspicion. Next Monday evening came the moment of tragic revelation. It was not strictly true that it was a night he would never forget, since the memory became distorted over the years, depending on how much he wanted to torment himself.
Sometimes it was an X-rated scene, sometimes it was almost innocent. It involved Vanessa and Paulie, and a store room for cleaning things which they wrongly believed they had locked from the inside. Dean was so offended, so horrified, and of course so jealous that he could only think of one thing to do. He spent the rest of his brief career at RitePrice hiding in the store room to make sure it could never happen again. He was fired.
A few days later he was sitting at home, eating a pot noodle and watching Countdown when Paulie walked in. He was looking triumphant.
“Ere, look who I shagged.’
He was waving the Guardian, not a newspaper that normally came into this household. It was a long article by someone called Lucy Goodbody, in the G2 section, called ‘Breadline Britain’.
It was all about being a checkout girl in a shop in Wolverhampton, and how tough it was. He looked at the picture by-line. That wasn’t Lucy Goodbody.
That was Vanessa.
‘What’s this bollocks?’ he asked, and read, with mounting despair, Lucy Goodbody’s account of life in RitePrice Wolverhampton.
It seemed they were among the lowest paid workers in Britain, and according to Lucy Goodbody they all hated their jobs.
That’s not true, thought Dean. He’d rather enjoyed bits of it. Then he came to the passage about him. She described someone called ‘Dave, a young, painfully lost-looking Anglo-Caribbean with a beautiful smile’.
‘To my shame and embarrassment,’ recorded Lucy Goodbody in her diary-type report, ‘young Dave is developing a crush on me. He uses any excuse to come to my checkout till, and buys me presents he really cannot afford.’
Dean could read no longer. His eyes were too full.
‘I shagged her,’ said Paulie. ‘I shagged some reporter from the Guardian.’
That afternoon, Dean did something really stupid. It occurred to him that he knew where the Guardian was based. It was just down the road; at least it must be the local branch of the Guardian, because it had a big black and white sign over the shop front, saying The Guardian/The Observer. The luckless newsagent’s went the way of Price’s cheese lab.
He had been in Her Majesty’s Young Offenders’ Institution at Feltham for two weeks when he became aware of Islam. ‘What’s all those shoes doing there?’ he asked as he was walked down a dim corridor.
‘It’s the mosque, innit.’
Every Friday lunchtime he listened to the Khutab. He heard incredible things, and things that seemed to him to be obvious, that explained so much about the evils of his world. He couldn’t believe, really, that a preacher was allowed by the authorities to speak so frankly to prisoners.
Apparently there was a satanic Zionist freemason plot to ban the hijab, or headscarf. That didn’t seem too bad to Dean. He’d vaguely heard that they were doing something of the kind in France.
‘Britain is a society of divorce and adultery, where women are not taught to respect their own bodies,’ said the imam. Yeah. Dean felt sick as he thought of Vanessa writhing on the floor of the stock room.
‘Thirty-five per cent of women in Britain have been abused,’ said the imam, ‘usually by someone known to them. In the Muslim religion, women are to be loved and respected, and not treated like a piece of meat.’
Yeah. Dean thought of Vanessa/Lucy Goodbody (the very name was now a provocation) and how she treated her own sexuality. He thought how she had obviously liked the piece-of-meat approach, and he shuddered with horror and desire and incomprehension.
He discovered that Islam meant surrender. It meant obedience. It meant a union with God and with the word of God, unmediated by human agency. It also meant specifically a rejection of a world which had rejected him. When he left Feltham six months later, there were all kinds of outreach workers ready to reach out for him, but Dean was now on a different conveyor belt.
It was at the Finsbury Park Islamic Welfare Centre, where he went to pray, that he fell in with the man called Jones. Jones was the disciple and lieutenant of a one-eyed, one-armed cleric who had survived and prospered despite, or perhaps because of, all the hatred heaped upon him by the tabloid papers. Faith was flowering here, in the most unpromising surroundings. Hard by a thundering railway bridge was a kind of concrete cattle yard, and here the faithful came in their hundreds, from all over the world, five times a day, to hear the militant Islamic teaching of the one-eyed mullah.
‘The American Christian fundamentalists want to bring about Armageddon, which is preparatory to the second coming of Christ,’ said the priest. His audience sat on the tarpaulins, listening with glassy appreciation.
‘It is planned to have the first homosexual prime minister.
‘They wish to clone human beings.
‘They wish to legalize child prostitution.
‘Marriage with animals will become legalized.
‘The women will be allowed to beat the men with rods, like in the American jails.
‘There will be microchipping of the entire population.
‘GM crops will be introduced.’ Yeah, thought Dean: you should see some of the things we used to sell at RitePrice.
‘They want to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque.’
Slowly Dean became not just spiritually awakened and doctrinally literate. He became politically engaged. They had videos at the Islamic Welfare Centre, documenting the struggle against the Israeli occupation; and they had videos narrating and celebrating the sacrifice of the suicide bombers.
He learned of Richard Reid, the heroic young man from South London, who tried to blow up his own shoe. He heard of other would-be heroes, who had so far gone undetected by the authorities: the sock bomber, the pants bomber, the vest bomber, the biro bomber and — most rare and admirable —the bra bomber.
Sometimes, after he had been brought to an ebullition of anger, he started to wonder whether he might be made of the same stuff. And so did Jones — Jones the Bomb.
‘Remember,’ said this prince of philosophers after their first tutorial, ‘he who does not fight is not a true believer.’ Every word Jones uttered seemed to slide into place like a sweetly smacked nail. Now, as they sat in the Norman Shaw North car park, Jones the Bomb repeated those words. Dean found he needed no further prompting.
With dextrous shelf-stacker’s hands he assembled the team’s gear, like a man in charge of a parachute jump or a dive. They had a big DSR37OP Sony Camcorder, with no battery, to be carried by Habib. They had two big fluffy grey sound booms, though anyone who knew anything about TV would spot that this was unnecessary, and one of the sound booms was no longer grey.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Dean, for such, since his conversion, was the limit of his profanity, ‘the bloody warden has bleeding bled on everything.’
‘Never mind, Dean,’ said Jones.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
0924 HRS
‘All right,’
said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell to Colonel Bluett, ‘let’s be practical. The President is due to start speaking at ten a.m. In all candour, I think if we haven’t found this blasted ambulance by then, we should activate Option Minicab.’
Bluett winced. Minicab was the emergency exit. It meant bundling the two Permanent Protectees into the Black Hawk, flying straight to Northolt, and putting them aboard Air Force One, the blue-painted 747.
‘Shee-,’ he said. It would go down as one of the most lamentable lapses in Presidential security since they shot Ronald Reagan. ‘Let’s run that tape again,’ he said. Through the eye of a CCTV camera mounted on the Barry Tower of the House of Lords, they watched the ambulance make its jerky progress up Millbank. The shot was grey and fuzzy, but the licence plate L64896P was clear enough. Though they didn’t know it, they also watched Barlow and Ziggy Roberts, moving in ten-yard leaps and making Chaplinesque gestures.
‘That’s our guys,’ said Bluett, as they watched the ambulance being stopped by Joe and Matt the USSS men. ‘What are they frigging playing at?’
‘It’s no one’s fault,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell.
‘That,’ said Bluett, ‘may or may not turn out to be the verdict of history.’
‘So now it goes up Whitehall, and then I am afraid we lose it.’
‘We lose it?’ said Bluett.
‘Well, it seems one of the cameras has been vandalized.’
‘Sheee-it,’ said Bluett.
‘There’s a lot of ill-feeling against the congestion charge, you know.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
0926 HRS
The last Jason Pickel had seen of the ambulance was when it turned right, out of his field of vision, into Norman Shaw North. He had keen enough eyes to see that it had three Mediterranean or Middle Eastern types in the front seat, and though he knew he shouldn’t be prejudiced, he was getting those Dad flashbacks again.
Seventy-Two Virgins Page 10
