Ajaq sat on the floor. Its hardness, through the carpet, pinched his buttocks, and he waved for the boy to come and take a place beside him. He pushed aside the little tray in which the food sauces still lay, the paper bag and some clothing. The boy lowered himself, nervously, and their bodies were close.
'You travelled well?'
'I did, my leader, and always there were people who helped me.'
'You remember when we met?'
'I remember.'
'What did I say to you?'
'You asked me who I was and where I was from and what I did — was I strong?'
'And you told me?'
'I hoped to be strong. You said I was chosen. You said that you looked for a man who walked well and that I did.'
'And before you left me, to begin your journey, I said?'
'You told me that I was chosen for a mission of exceptional value, for which I would be honoured and respected. Without my dedication and obedience the mission would fail and that would make a great victory for our enemies…I told you of the martyrdom of my brothers, and I said that I would seek to 'equal their dedication and be worthy…'
'You remember it well.'
Ajaq knew that it was necessary to keep those in love with death, the volunteers, in the company of others who shared their certainty so that the will for martyrdom was not permitted to dribble away. With others around him, it was harder for a man to trip away from the boasts he had made, or the promises…But the boy, Ibrahim, had seen eleven others bounce away in the back of two pickups and had now been effectively alone for seven full days, seven nights. Did the strength to continue still exist? He had to know. Perhaps his own life, certainly his freedom, depended on the answer. In Iraq, where he had fought and where a price of many thousands of American dollars rested on his head, others would have decided whether strength had gone. Himself, he cared as little for the individuality of a martyr as for a shell loaded into a breach or a mortar missile into a tube or a bullets' belt into a machine-gun…but here there was no other man to make that decision for him. Ajaq was not in Iraq but in a first-floor room of a cheap, rundown hotel to be found in a network of side-streets close to the Paddington terminus in London. He forced himself, and it was an effort, to play-act sincerity.
'Are you strong, Ibrahim?'
'I promise it.'
He took the hands of the boy, his long, sensitive fingers, and held them locked in his own fists, which were calloused and rough, those of a fighting man.
'You know of the haughtiness of Britons?'
'I do.'
'And you know of the aggression of the Crusaders, who are British?'
'I do. I have been told it by the imam at our mosque in Jizan.'
'Because you have been chosen from many, you are privileged. Ibrahim, you walk at the front of our struggle, God's struggle. The British are a people of corrupt unbelievers and you will teach them a lesson that will be long spoken of among the faithful followers of God. For what you will do, you will be taken to the table of God. Already there are the men who were your brothers on earth, with whom you were before I chose you. They are at the table, they keep a place for you and their welcome awaits you. You will have their respect for what you will have done and where you will have been. And I believe that young women of great beauty, in the gardens of Paradise, also await your coming. There you will be honoured — and you will be honoured on earth, wherever the Faith exists. Your name will be sung, your photograph will be shown, and your name and your photograph will fortify the courage of so many…Ibrahim, to sit at God's table and to lie in the gardens of Paradise is only for the strongest. Are you among them?'
'I hope to be.' Emotion, sincerity, played on the boy's face.
The agenda of revenge of Muhammad Ajaq had little to do with a table set with fruits and a fable of women who fucked endlessly behind shrubs in gardens. Because of the blood in his veins, and the lightness of his skin's texture, he had answered the call and had journeyed to the heartland of an enemy. He was the product of the seed of his father, that blood and that skin pallor. His father — he knew it now but had not known it for the many years of his childhood — was William Jennings, from Yorkshire in northern England, an engineer who had worked on the building of modern sewage plants in Jordan thirty years before. His father, the bastard Jennings, had seduced his mother, who was a secretary at the ministry in Amman that oversaw the modernization of Jordan's infrastructure. His father, Jennings, had been repatriated before his mother could no longer hide her pregnancy. She had gone back to her home — in the north of Jordan, near to the town of Irbid — with her disgrace and her shame, had borne the boy-child and suckled him, had left him in her room and gone. On a winter's morning, his mother had walked out into the desert sands, had stripped off her clothes and lain down naked so that hypothermia would claim her life quickly. She had died there and her skeleton — stripped of flesh by scavenging foxes — had not been found until the spring came. He had been brought up through childhood by his grandparents, his mother's family. On his nineteenth birthday, in the hour before he left home in Irbid by bus for the paratroops' training depot in the south, he had been told of his father's flight and his mother's death…and at that moment his character had been fashioned. Hatred ruled him, not God and not Faith.
'You have to stay strong, Ibrahim, to justify the trust placed in you., 'I will.'
He believed him. He did not think it would be necessary to use the hoax, with honeyed words, of a 'delayed time switch'. Some of the volunteers, so others told him, would buckle as they approached the day when they would walk or drive to their target. Those who showed weakness were given the he by the Engineer that they should reach the target, then dump a bag or park a car, and press the switch: they had a minute, or five minutes, to run before the explosion. There was, of course, no 'delayed time switch', and it was an unsatisfactory procedure. He believed the boy sought martyrdom and, without deception, would achieve it.
He ran his fingers through the boy's hair, left him and returned quietly to his room.
Left alone, Ibrahim listened to the stirring sounds of the building beyond the door, the street beyond the window and the yard's walls. He still sat on the floor.
A harsh noise, new, filled his ears and eddied in the darkness around him.
Ibrahim fought the noise, tried to rid himself of it. He held the palms of his hands over his ears. He thought of the table and his brothers, of the empty chair and the place set for him, but he could not lose the noise.
It disgusted him.
It was above him.
Bedsprings squealed with growing intensity and a faster beat. What he knew about sex, about the physical matter of copulation, had been learned from textbooks in the library of the School of Medicine. He had never talked of it with his father, or — of course not — with his sisters: his parents' bedroom, when his mother was alive, had been at the far end of the villa from his own room and solid walls would have blocked out the sounds of lovemaking. Above him, over the now swaying lightshade, there was a thin layer of plasterboard, then planking, a similarly worn carpet, a bed with springs that sank and rose and howled. He had the image, and it had been hard in his mind since the imam had talked of it, of the young women who waited for a martyr in the gardens of Paradise, and their nakedness, but — in his mind — when he advanced on them and bent to touch them, there was always a distraction that snatched them away. He had never touched a woman. Boys who had been with him at the university, or at school in Jizan, had talked endlessly of women, even told stories of prostitutes they had paid in the cities, but Ibrahim had thought they lied.
It fascinated him.
Before he went to the gardens, where virgins waited for him, he would never know the feeling of a woman's body. His hands' palms were tighter against his ears. He summoned the image of his father, whom he loved, and called to him shrilly in the night. From a great distance, his father seemed to smile on him. He heard his father speak of pride in his youngest, the same pride he had spoken of when the eldest and the middle sons had been reported dead in the jihad against the infidels of Russia and America. He saw his father sitting in the deep-cushioned chair in front of the wide-screen television with the cinema-standard speakers, and thought- his father blessed him for his courage.