With the Knowledge, you insert the pound coin, and the screen flares into a map of the world (vividly modelled on Risk – one of the most addictive boardgames of my childhood); you advance from your assigned starting point, Poland, say, or Peru, and you try to invade contiguous countries by answering three multiple-choice questions (and getting on the road to winning a small cash prize). After half an hour, and after much failure, we were poised to complete the conquest of Irkutsk (worth two quid), and had only one more question to go. Now the screen said:
When in Islamic history did the Sunni–Shia schism take place?
a) After the Sykes–Picot Agreement in 1916
b) After the Alhambra Decree in Spain in 1492
c) After the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 AD
None of us had any idea. What schism? What was Shia and what was Sunni? And remind us – who exactly was the Prophet Muhammad? As the clock ticked we hurriedly conferred: 1916 looked too recent, 632 too ancient, so we opted for 1492. Wrong…Quite a while later, when we were on our third round of drinks (and about £25 down), the question reappeared (questions quite often reappeared); and this time we went for 1916 and Sykes–Picot. Wrong again.
‘…So quite a while back,’ concluded Steve.
‘Yeah, they must’ve done it first thing,’ said Mike. ‘They didn’t hang about.’
The TV on its perch above the mirrored bar was not silently devoted to snooker or golf or darts, as it normally was. On the screen we saw the sulphurous hole in the flank of the Pentagon. This image was then supplanted by the priestly and prissy beauty of Osama bin Laden.
‘Well. One thing we do know,’ said Mike. ‘It’s all off now.’*5
‘Now it’s all off,’ said Steve.
And I agreed that now it was definitely all off.
Hanif and the great sea
On my way back to the mews (to freshen up before going home) I stopped at Hanif’s Service Store on Portobello Road for a fresh wallet of Golden Virginia. Hanif, the owner–manager, had come to Britain four decades ago from the city of Gujarat (there were, and are, more Muslims in India than in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, and Hanif’s father was one of them). He and I had regular exchanges, in the warm, courteous, rather literary, no, in fact strikingly high-style English characteristic of the Subcontinent, so I was planning to say something like Well, Hanif? It seems, does it not, that yet again the violent have borne it away? But there were other customers to be served, and while I waited I reached down for an Evening Standard (whose front page confronted you with 09.03, September 11, 2001, and the moment of climactic kinesis, as the second plane hits the South Tower in ballooning parachutes of flame), not the copy on the top of the stack, which was wet and frayed, and not the copies immediately under it, which were curled and damp; no, I boldly seized the spine of a copy about halfway down, and tried to ease it free…
Now it was already a family joke, the promptness – the instantaneity – of my reaction to any resistance whatever on the part of inanimate objects. Just the other Sunday I came down to breakfast and my wife and daughters (trying not to laugh) presented me with a fresh item of evidence. Exhibit A, this time, wasn’t a bent door key or a scragged toilet roll. It was an allegedly resealable ice-cream carton that I had briefly struggled to open the night before. The rectangular plastic lid bore the crosswise gashes of a carving knife. Even Inez, at twenty-five months, had come to see this sort of thing as extremely funny. In other words, at the slightest show of dumb insolence from the non-organic world, I turned at once to uninhibited force.
So now I am reaching down for that stacked Standard, and pulling on it. And encountering recalcitrance – followed by intransigence. My internal mutter was as usual Christ – what’s in it for YOU? and with fingers that were always impatient, always tremulous (Eliza called them ‘too wobbly’), I tensed myself in a half-crouch and tugged with maximal strength.
My grasp slipped and my hand flew wildly up and drove its knuckle into the rusty iron bracket of the shelf above – scab first.
Hanif hurried over, tearing at a little packet of paper tissues. The Standard’s front page was being steadily and audibly dotted with blood.
‘Here, my friend.’
‘Thank you. Thanks.’ I sighed. ‘So I add my drops…’
‘…to the great sea.’
‘Yes, Hanif. To the great sea.’
For twenty minutes in the kitchen of his workplace he wearily sluiced his wound under the cold tap. Outside, high, high up in the sky, a dark shape cleaved its way through the colourlessness.
Was it a Bird? No. Was it a Plane? No, not really. Was it Superman? Or perhaps one of Superman’s enemies – the Joker, Black Zero, Mr Mxyzptlk…?
Osama had unveiled a new target: human society (in all its non-Koranic forms).
…Martin knew that for the rest of his life he would never see a low-flying aircraft with his original eyes. And what lay beneath? A place where every building was a vulnerability and every citizen was a combatant. A place where everyone was dreaming they were naked.
Which they were.
*1 This was 2001, and of course everything seen from a distance in time looks innocent, and is innocent, comparatively (because the opposite of
