Seventy-Two Virgins

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 she 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