issue. Zbigniew found it important to have no feeling about his clients one way or another, and was about to say this to Piotr, with some smugness, and for about the hundredth time; but since he was also going to be spending a significant part of the evening complaining about his predicament with Davina, he didn’t feel this was a good moment to point out a philosophical error on Piotr’s part.
There was a burst of noise from one of the card tables; two of the middle-aged men sitting at it had their arms above their heads, in victory or horror. The other two were looking at each other and the noise mixed laughter from one side, protest from the other, and general incredulity. One of the men with his arms in the air lowered them to the table and began raking in money. The man to his left, shaking his head and muttering, began to shuffle the cards. Money, money. Sometimes Zbigniew had to remind himself that that was the whole reason he was here in London, earning more in a month than his father had ever earned in a whole year. His real life was back home in Poland. This was a place he was in order to make money. That thought often brought Zbigniew some ease, when he was fed up with some aspect of his immigrant life; today, it didn’t help. Woman trouble was what it was.
Piotr knew that Zbigniew had been seeing Davina – he could hardly not know – but he was tactful, as he always was; it was one of the things Zbigniew loved about him. He was waiting to be told. So Zbigniew took a deep swig of his new beer and told him the details. It took quite a bit of time.
He had been expecting Piotr to laugh. Perhaps that was even what he was needing to hear from his friend – that the whole thing was ridiculous, and that he’d brought it on himself, and that it served him right, and so on. Piotr did indeed smile a bit, and Zbigniew did the best he could to try and make the story sound funny, the determined non-romantic trapped by great sex in a terrible relationship. But his smile faded as Zbigniew talked on. Then Zbigniew finished and went back to the bar to get another four drinks for the two of them. If nothing else, he’d get drunk tonight.
When he got back to the table Piotr was flipping the beer mat over with his large fingers. Zbigniew raised his glass of vodka and downed it in one. Neither man said anything. Perhaps this confession was going to be received in silence.
‘I suppose you thought I’d think it was funny,’ said Piotr, and from his tone, which didn’t resemble anything Zbigniew was expecting to hear from his old friend, he knew that this was not going to be the comic, consoling, making-light talk he had hoped to have. ‘But I don’t. You know I love you like a brother and always have. But you have a grave fault in your character. You see people not as people but in terms of how useful they are to you. You say I am a romantic, always falling in love, and all that. It’s a joke between us, a set piece. Very well, it’s true enough. But at least I can fall in love. With you, I’m not so sure. You use women. You use them partly for company, when you need it, but you mainly use them for sex. I’ve always known this would cause trouble one day and now it has. You’ve trapped this vulnerable English woman into falling in love with you, and you are going to hurt her very badly; you are doing her real damage. I hear it in the way you talk about her.’
Zbigniew, because he had not been expecting this, and because so much of it was right, felt himself become very angry. His head filled up with blood; he was exalted and exhilarated by rage.
‘You say this because you are a priest? A priest hearing my confession, or giving a denunciation from the pulpit?’
Piotr got up and walked out. And that was that. Zbigniew sat there and drank his beer and vodka, then another round, then another, and went home drunker than he had been for a long time.
45
On Friday evening, after doing a shift in the shop, Usman set out across the Common on his bike, to go to the mosque for evening prayers. This is what he saw.
An advertising poster with a woman lying naked on purple sheets, her hindquarters on full display, with the slogan ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ A poster with a woman eating a chocolate as if she were fellating it. A poster on the side of a bus with an advertisement for a horror film, with a stamp across it saying ‘Banned! To See Full Trailer Go Online’. A poster with a woman bending over and looking back at the camera through her legs, advertising tampons.
Two lesbians holding hands while out walking their dogs.
A young woman with her trousers so low that more than half of her bottom was exposed to the air, bending, while smoking a cigarette, over a pram, and saying as she did so, ‘Where have you hidden it, you little sod?’
Many women whose breasts were almost fully visible under, over or through their thin summer clothes.
A newspaper headline saying ‘Muslim terror cell loose in capital says Met chief’.
Many people outside the public house on the Common, openly drinking alcohol.
As Usman stopped to cross at a red light, he found himself looking at a man standing at a bus stop reading a newspaper. On the page facing out toward Usman was a picture of a completely naked woman, above an advertisement for a car-leasing company. The ad promised a BMW 3 series for a payment of ?299 a month.
Usman carried on. Many people were drinking alcohol in the bars beside the Common, women smoking, women and men kissing. Alcohol everywhere. Because it was only six o’clock, most of the people drinking were not yet drunk; it wasn’t the way it would be at ten or afterwards, when, especially at weekends, the whole area would be like a combat zone, a contest between man and alcohol which alcohol won, every time. No, alcohol didn’t just win, alcohol reigned: it presided over weekend evenings like a king, like a malign archangel. And although there was grumbling about this, the occasional complaint, it was the very British kind of complaint that was more like moaning, and expressed a deep accommodation with the thing being complained about; it contained no rage, no outrage, no desire for change. Whereas to Usman, this looked like a society that was turning itself into a version of hell, in the interest of people who made money through selling alcohol.
The imam at Usman’s mosque was an angry man, but he was not stupid, and society had given him one overwhelmingly powerful advantage: the first thing he said on most subjects was true. He railed against capitalism and the cheapening of sex and the degradation of women through the pornographic imagery which was, in this country at this time, now, everywhere. He spoke about things that had become so taken for granted it was as if people literally did not see them any more. But Usman, who had after all grown up in this country, who was no alien – he saw them.
Usman had come to believe that the imam was right: these were symptoms of decadence. Sex being used to sell things, the corruption of the fundamental human impulse to love, sex being turned into a vehicle of yet more capitalist debasement – sex was everywhere. It was never real sex, as Usman understood it to be, an ecstatic state such as that enjoyed in paradise, a transcendent experience; instead it was naked women, coupled with an attempt to sell something. Sex was fundamentally linked with money. And then the imam would start in on the subject of an intoxicated society. Here, too, he was saying something that everyone knew to be truthful. Usman had done holiday jobs as a hospital porter, and had seen with his own eyes that any A &E unit on a Saturday night was like an encyclopedia of all the different things you could do to yourself when drunk. Men and women fighting, puking, men hitting each other, men hitting their women or being hit by them, men raping and women being raped, both sexes contracting diseases, hurting their children, crashing vehicles, killing themselves, killing themselves with drink. And why did this society have such a deep need for intoxication? Because it knew it was lost, it was on the wrong path, and it had to blot out that knowledge with all the means at its disposal.
And then the imam, having said these true things, would move on to some other truths. He didn’t care about the spies who would certainly be listening, the spies in the pay of the kafr government of Britain; he was above that. The imam simply told the truth. He was too intelligent to say that there was a global war against Islam. In Usman’s opinion, actually, there was, you could prove that there was, from Palestine to Kosovo to Afghanistan to Iraq, and then through the subtler examples of suppression in Egypt and Pakistan and Indonesia and everywhere else that Islam was not allowed to express itself democratically and fully – but you didn’t need to prove that. All you needed to do was ask a simple question. Was a Muslim life worth the same as a Christian or Jewish life? In the order of the world, did a dead Muslim child count for as much as a dead Jew? Was a Muslim death worth as much attention as a Christian death?
The answer was so obvious, it barely needed to be spoken. In the scales of the West – which meant according to the value system that ran the world – a Muslim life was worth a fraction of other people’s. A war on Islam – you could argue about that. The manifest truth that Muslims counted for less – that was not possible to challenge. Much
