He ripped it from the calendar, squeezed it into the tight leather of his trousers and told Mrs B. to get in the side car.
‘He who would valiant be, ’gainst all disaster!’ sang Mrs B. as they zipped along Lambeth Bridge, heading for Trafalgar Square. ‘Let ’im in constancy, follow de master! ’
Ryan made sure to signal a good minute before turning left so that the Kingdom ladies in the minibus behind wouldn’t get confused. He made a quick mental inventory of the things he’d put in the van: songbooks, instruments, banners, Watchtower leaflets. All present and correct. They had no actual tickets, but they would make their protest outside, in the cold, suffering like true Christians. Praise be to God! What a glorious day! All portents were good. He even had a dream last night that Marcus Chalfen was the devil himself and they were standing nose to nose. Ryan had said: Myself and yourself are at war. There can be only one winner. Then he had quoted the same piece of scripture at him (he couldn’t recall precisely what it was now, but it was something from Revelation) over and over and over again, until the devil/Marcus had become smaller and smaller, grown ears and a long forked tail, and finally scurried away, a tiny satanic mouse. As in this vision, so it would be in life. Ryan would remain unbending, unmoving, absolutely constant, and, in the end, the sinner would repent.
That was how Ryan approached all theological, practical and personal conflicts. He didn’t move, not an inch. But then, that had always been his talent; he had a mono-intelligence, an ability to hold on to a single idea with phenomenal tenacity, and he never found anything that suited it as well as the church of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Ryan thought in black and white. The problem with his antecedent passions – scootering and pop music – was there were always shades of grey (though possibly the two closest things in secular life to a Witness preacher are boys who send letters to the New Musical Express and those enthusiasts who pen articles for Scooters Today). There were always the difficult questions of whether one should dilute one’s appreciation of the Kinks with a little Small Faces, or whether Italy or Germany were the best manufacturers of spare engine parts. That life seemed so alien to him now he hardly remembered living it. He pitied those who suffered under the weight of such doubts and dilemmas. He pitied Parliament as he and Mrs B. scooted past it; he pitied it because the laws made in there were provisional where his were eternal…
‘There’s no discouragement, shall make ’im once relent, his first avowed intent, to be a Pilgrim! ’ trilled Mrs B. ‘Who so besets him round, with dismal stories… do but themselves confound, his strength the more is.. .’
He relished it. He relished standing nose to nose with evil and saying, ‘You yourself: prove it to me. Go on, prove it.’ He felt he needed no arguments like the Muslims or the Jews. No convoluted proofs or defences. Just his faith. And nothing rational can fight faith. If Star Wars (secretly Ryan’s favourite film. The Good! The Evil! The Force! So simple. So true) is truly the sum of all archaic myths and the purest allegory of life (as Ryan believed it was), then faith, unadulterated, ignorant faith, is the biggest fuck-off light sabre in the universe. Go on, prove it. He did that every Sunday on the doorsteps and he would do precisely the same to Marcus Chalfen. Prove to me that you are right. Prove to me that you are more right than God. Nothing on earth would do it. Because Ryan didn’t believe in or care about anything on earth.
‘We almost there?’
Ryan squeezed Mrs B.’s frail hand and sped across the Strand, then wound his way round the back of the National Gallery.
‘No foe shall stay his might, though he with giants fight, he will make good his right, to be a Pilgrim! ’
Well said Mrs B.! The right to be a pilgrim! Who does not presume and yet inherits the earth! The right to be right, to teach others, to be just at all times because God has ordained that you will be, the right to go into strange lands and alien places and talk to the ignorant, confident that you speak nothing but the truth. The right to be always right. So much better than the rights he once held dear: the right to liberty, freedom of expression, sexual freedom, the right to smoke pot, the right to party, the right to ride a scooter sixty-five miles an hour on a main road without a helmet. So much more than all those, Ryan could claim. He exercised a right so rare, at this the fag-end of the century, as to be practically obsolete. The most fundamental right of all. The right to be the good guy.
On: 31/12/1992
London Transport Buses
Route 98
From: Willesden Lane
To: Trafalgar Square
At: 17:35
Fare: Adult Single ?0.70
Retain Ticket for Inspection
Cor (thought Archie) they don’t make ’em like they used to. That’s not to say they make them any worse. They just make them very, very different. So much information. The minute you tore one from the perforation you felt stuffed and pinned down by some all-seeing taxidermist, you felt freeze-framed in time, you felt caught. Didn’t use to be, Archie remembered. Many years ago he had a cousin, Bill, who worked the old 32 route through Oxford Street. Good sort, Bill. Smile and a nice word for everyone. Used to tear off a ticket from one of those chug-chug big-handled mechanical things (and where have they gone? Where’s the smudgy ink?) on the sly, like; no money passed over; there you go, Arch. That was Bill, always helping you out. Anyway, those tickets, the old ones, they didn’t tell you where you were going, much less where you came from. He couldn’t remember seeing any dates on them either, and there was certainly no mention of time. It was all different now, of course. All this information. Archie wondered why that was. He tapped Samad on the shoulder. He was sitting directly ahead of him, in the front-most seat of the top deck. Samad turned round, looked at the ticket he was being shown, listened to the question and gave Archie a funny look.
‘What is it, precisely, that you want to know?’
He looked a bit testy. Everyone was a little testy right now. There’d been a bit of a ding-dong earlier in the afternoon. Neena had demanded that they all go to the mouse thing, seeing as how Irie was involved and Magid was involved and the least they could do was go and support family because whatever they thought of it a lot of work had gone into it and young people need affirmation from their parents and she was going to go even if they weren’t and it was a pretty poor show if family couldn’t turn up for their big day and… well, it went on and on. And then the emotional fall-out. Irie burst into tears (What was wrong with Irie? She was always a bit weepy these days), Clara accused Neena of emotional blackmail, Alsana said she’d go if Samad went, and Samad said he’d spent New Year’s Eve at O’Connell’s for eighteen years and he wasn’t going to stop now. Archie, for his part, said he was buggered if he was going to listen to this racket all evening – he’d rather sit on a quiet hill by himself. They’d all looked at him queerly when he said that. Little did they know he was taking prophetic advice he’d received from Ibelgaufts the day before:
28 December 1992
My dearest Archibald,
’Tis the season to be jolly… so it has been claimed, but from my window I see only turmoil. At present six felines, hungry for territory, are warring in my garden. Not content with their autumnal hobby of drenching their plots in urine, the winter has brought out a more fanatical urge in them… it is down to
