19 The Final Space -1
Thursday, 31 December 1992
So said the banner on the top of the newspaper. So proclaimed the revellers who danced
through early evening streets with their shrill silver whistles and Union Jacks, trying to whip up the
feeling that goes with the date; trying to bring on the darkness (it was only five o'clock) so that
England might have its once-a-year party; get fucked up, throw up, snog, grope and impale; stand
in the doorways of trains holding them open for friends; argue with the sudden inflationary tactics
of Somalian minicab drivers, jump in water or play with fire, and all by the dim, disguising light of
the street lamps. It was the night when England stops saying pleasethankyoupleasesorrypleasedidl?
And starts saying pleasefuckmefuckyoumotherjucker (and we never say that; the accent is wrong;
we sound silly). The night England gets down to the fundamentals. It was New Year's Eve. But
Joshua was having a hard time believing it. Where had the time gone? It had seeped between the
crack in Joely's legs, run into the secret pockets of her ears, hidden itself in the warm, matted hair
of her armpits. And the consequences of what he was about to do, on this the biggest day of his life,
a critical situation that three months ago he would have dissected, compartmentalized, weighed up
and analysed with Chalfenist vigour that too had escaped him into her crevices. He had made no
real decisions this New Year's Eve, no resolutions. He felt as thoughtless as the young men
tumbling out of pubs, looking for trouble; he felt as light as the child sitting astride his father's
shoulders heading for a family party. Yet he was not with them, out there in the streets, having fun
he was here, in here, careening into the centre of town, making a direct line for the
Ferret Institute like a heat-seeking missile. He was here, cramped in a bright red minibus with
ten jumpy members of FATE, hurtling out of Willesden towards Trafalgar Square, half listening to
Kenny read his father's name out loud for the benefit of Crispin who was up front, driving.
'"When Dr. Marcus Chalfen puts his Future Mouse on public display this evening he begins a
new chapter in our genetic future.""
Crispin threw his head back for a loud, "Ha!"
"Yeah, right, exactly," continued Kenny, trying unsuccessfully to scoff and read simultaneously,
'like, thanks for the objective reporting. Umm, where was I ... all right: "More significantly, he
opens up this traditionally secretive, rarefied and complex branch of science to an unprecedented
audience. As the Ferret Institute prepares to open its doors around-the-clock for seven years, Dr.
Chalfen promises a national event which will be 'crucially unlike the Festival of Britain in 1951 or
the 1924 British Empire Exhibition because it has no political agenda'."
"Ha!" snorted Crispin once more, this time turning right around in his seat so the FATE minibus
(which wasn't officially the FATE minibus; it still had ken sal rise family services unit in ten-inch
yellow letters on either side; a loan from a social worker with furry animal sympathies) only
narrowly missed a gaggle of pissed-up high-heeled girls who were tottering across the road. "No
political agenda? Is he taking the fucking piss?
"Keep your eyes on the road, darling," said Joely, blowing him a kiss. "We want to at least try to
get there in one piece. Umm, left here .. . down the Edgware Road."
"Fucker," said Crispin, glowering at Joshua and then turning back. "What ajucker he is."
'"By 1999," read Kenny, following the arrow from the front to page five, '"the year experts
predict recombinant DNA procedure will come into its own approximately fifteen million
people will have seen the Future Mouse exhibition, and many more worldwide will have
followed the progress of the Future Mouse in the international press. By then, Dr. Chalfen will have
succeeded in his aim of educating a nation, and throwing the ethical ball into the people's court.""
"Pass. Me. The. Fuck. Ing. Buck. Et," said Crispin, as if the very words were vomit. "What do
the other papers say?"
Paddy held up Middle England's bible so Crispin could see it in the rear-view. Headline: mouse mania
"It comes with a free Future Mouse sticker," said Paddy, shrugging his shoulders and slapping
the sticker on his beret. "Pretty cute, actually."
"The tabloids are a surprise winner, though," said Minnie. Minnie was a brand-new convert: a
seventeen-year-old Crusty, with matted blonde dreads and pierced nipples, whom Joshua had
briefly considered becoming obsessed with. He tried for a while, but found he just couldn't do it; he
just couldn't leave his miserable little psychotic world-of-Joely and go out seeking life on a new
planet. Minnie, to her credit, had spotted this straight off and gravitated towards Crispin. She wore
as little as the winter weather would allow and took every opportunity to thrust her perky pierced
nipples into Crispin's personal space, as she did now, reaching over to the driver's cab to show him
the front page of the daily rag in question. At one and the same time Crispin tried unsuccessfully to
take the Marble Arch roundabout, avoid elbowing Minnie in the tits, and look at the paper.
"I can't see it properly. What is it?"
"It's Chalfen's head with mouse ears, attached to a goat's torso, which is attached to a pig's arse.
And he's eating from a trough that says "Genetic Engineering" at one end and "Public Money" at
the other. Headline: chalfen chows down."
"Nice. Every little helps."
Crispin went round the roundabout again, and this time got
the turning he required. Minnie reached over him and propped the paper on the dashboard.
"God, he looks more fucking Chalfenist than ever!"
Joshua bitterly regretted telling Crispin about this little idiosyncracy of his family, their habit of
referring to themselves as verbs, nouns and adjectives. It had seemed a good idea at the time; give
everybody a laugh; confirm, if there was any doubt, whose side he was on. But he never felt that
he'd betrayed his father the weight of what he was doing never really hit him until he heard
Chalfenism ridiculed out of Crispin's mouth.
"Look at him Chalfening around in that trough. Exploit everything and everybody, that's the
Chalfen way, eh Josh?"
Joshua grunted and turned his back on Crispin, in favour of the window and a view of the frost
over Hyde Park.
"That's a classic photo, there, see? The one they've used for the head. I remember it; that was
the day he gave evidence in the California trial. That look of total fucking superiority. Very
Chalfenesque!"
Joshua bit his tongue. don't rise to it. if you don't rise
TO IT, YOU GAIN HER SYMPATHY.
"Don't, Crisp," said Joely firmly, touching Joshua's hair. "Just try to remember what we're about
to do. He doesn't need that tonight."
BINGO.
"Yeah, well
Crispin put his foot down on the accelerator. "Minnie, have you and Paddy checked that
everyone's got everything they need? Balaclavas and that?"
"Yeah, all done. It's cool."
"Good." Crispin pulled out a small silver box filled with all the necessaries to roll a fat joint and
threw it in Joely's direction, catching Joshua painfully on the shin.
"Make us one, love."
CUNT.
Joely retrieved the box from the floor. She worked crouching with the Rizla resting on Joshua's
knee, her long neck exposed, her breasts falling forward until they were practically in his hands.
"Are you nervous?" she asked him, flicking her head back once the joint was rolled.
"How d'you mean, nervous?"
"About tonight. I mean, talk about conflict of loyalties."
"Conflict?" murmured Josh hazily, wishing he were out there with the happy people, the
conflict-free people, the New Year people.
"God, I really admire you. I mean, FATE are dedicated to extreme action .. . And you know,
even now, I find some of the stuff we do ... difficult. And we're talking about the most firmly held
principle in my life, you know? I mean, Crispin and FATE.. . that's my whole life."
OH GREAT, thought Joshua, OH FANTASTIC.
"And I'm still shit scared about tonight."
Joely sparked the joint and inhaled. She passed it straight to Joshua, as the minibus took a right
past Parliament. "It's like that quote: "If I had to choose between betraying my friend or my country,
I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." The choice between a duty or a principle, you
know? You see, I don't feel torn like that. I don't know if I could do what I do if I did. I mean, if it
was my father. My first commitment is to animals and that's Crispin's first commitment too, so
there's no conflict. It's kind of easy for us. But you, Joshi, you've made the most extreme decision
out of us all ... and you just seem so calm. I mean, it's admirable .. . and I think you've really
impressed Crispin, because you know, he was a little unsure about whether
Joely kept on talking, and Josh kept on nodding in the necessary
places, but the hardcore Thai weed he was smoking had lassoed one word of hers calm and
reined it in as a question. Why so calm, Joshi? You're about to get into some pretty serious shit why so calm?
Because he imagined he seemed calm from the outside, preternaturally calm, his adrenalin
enjoying an inverse relationship with the rising New Year sap, with the jittery nerves of the FATE
posse; and the effect of the skunk on top of it all ... it was like walking under water, deep under
water, while children played above. But it wasn't calm so much as inertia. And he couldn't work out,
as the van progressed down Whitehall, whether this was the right reaction to let the world wash
over him, to let events take their course or whether he should be more like those people, those
people out there, whooping, dancing, fighting, fucking .. . whether he should be more what was that
horrible late twentieth-century tautology? Proactive. More proactive in the face of the future.
But he took another deep hit on the joint and it sent him back to twelve, being twelve; a
precocious kid, waking up each morning fully expecting a twelve hours until nuclear apocalypse
announcement, that old cheesy end-of-the-world scenario. Round that time he had thought a lot
about extreme decisions, about the future and its deadlines. Even then it had struck him that he was
unlikely to spend those last twelve hours fucking Alice the fifteen-year-old babysitter next door,
telling people that he loved them, converting to orthodox Judaism, or doing all the things he wanted
and all the things he never dared. It always seemed more likely to him, much more likely, that he
would just return to his room and calmly finish constructing Lego Medieval Castle. What else
could you do? What other choice could you be certain about? Because choices need time, the
fullness of time, time being the horizontal axis of morality you make a decision and then you wait
and see, wait and see. And it's a lovely fantasy, this fantasy
of no time (TWELVE HOURS LEFT TWELVE HOURS LEFT), the point at which
consequences disappear and any action is allowable (Tm mad I'm fucking mad for it\' came the cry
from the street). But twelve-year-old Josh was too neurotic, too anal, too Chalfenist to enjoy it,
even the thought of it. Instead he was there thinking: but what if the world doesn't end and what if I
fucked Alice Rodwell and she became pregnant and what if
It was the same now. Always the fear of consequences. Always this terrible inertia. What he was
about to do to his father was so huge, so colossal, that the consequences were inconceivable he
couldn't imagine a moment occurring after that act. Only blankness. Nothingness. Something like
the end of the world. And facing the end of the world, or even just the end of the year, had always
given Josh a strangely detached feeling.
Every New Year's Eve is impending apocalypse in miniature. You fuck where you want, you
puke when you want, you glass who you want to glass the huge gatherings in the street; the
television round-ups of the goodies and baddies of time past; the frantic final kisses; the 10! 9! 8!
Joshua glared up and down Whitehall, at the happy people going about their dress rehearsal.
They were all confident that it wouldn't happen or certain they could deal with it if it did. But the
world happens to you, thought Joshua, you don't happen to the world. There's nothing you can do.
For the first time in his life, he truly believed that. And Marcus Chalfen believed the direct opposite.
And there in a nutshell, he realized, is how I got here, turning out of Westminster, watching Big
Ben approach the hour when I shall topple my father's house. That is how we all got here. Between
rocks and hard places. The frying pan and the fire.
Thursday, December 31 at 1992, New Year's Eve
Signalling problems at Baker Street
No Southbound Jubilee Line Trains from Baker Street
Customers are advised to change on to the Metropolitan Line at Finchley Road
Or Change at Baker Street on to the Bakerloo There is no alternative bus service Last Train 02.00 hours
All London Underground staff wish you a safe and happy New Year!
Willesden Green Station Manager, Richard Daley
Brothers Millat, Hifan, Tyrone, Mo Hussein-Ishmael, Shiva, Abdul-Colin and Abdul-Jimmy
stood stock-still like maypoles in the middle of the station while the dance of the New Year went on
around them.
"Great," said Millat. "What do we do now?"
"Can't you read?" inquired Abdul-Jimmy.
"We do what the board suggests, Brothers," said AbdulColin, short-circuiting any argument
with his deep, calming baritone. "We change at Finchley Road. Allah provides."
The reason Millat couldn't read the writing on the wall was simple. He was stoned. It was the
second day of Ramadan and he was cai ned Every synapse in his body had clocked out for the
evening and gone home. But there was still some conscientious worker going round the treadmill of
his brain, ensuring one thought circulated in his skull: Why? Why get stoned, Millat? Why? Good
question.
At midday he'd found an ageing eighth of hash in a drawer, a little bundle of cellophane he
hadn't had the heart to throw away six months ago. And he smoked it all. He smoked some of it out
of his bedroom window. Then he walked to Gladstone Park and smoked some more. He smoked the
great majority of it in the car park of Willesden Library. He finished it off in the student kitchen of
one Warren Chapman, a South African skateboarder he used to hang with back in the day. And as a
result, he was so cai ned now, standing on the platform with the rest, so cai ned that he could not
only hear sounds within sounds but sounds within sounds within sounds. He could hear the mouse
scurrying along the tracks, creating a higher level of harmonious rhythm with the crackle of the tan
noy and the off-beat sniff of an elderly woman twenty feet away. Even when the train pulled in, he
could still hear these things beneath the surface. Now, there is a level of cai ned that you can be,
Millat knew, that is just so very very cai ned that you reach a level of Zen-like sobriety and come
out the other side feeling absolutely tip-top as if you'd never sparked up in the first place. Oh,
Millat longed for that. He only wished he'd got that far. But there just wasn't quite enough.
"Are you all right, Brother Millat?" asked Abdul-Colin with concern as the tube doors slid open.
"You have gone a nasty colour."
"Fine, fine," said Millat, and did a credible impression of being fine because hash just isn't like
drink; no matter how bad it is, you can always, at some level, pull your shit together. To prove this
theory to himself, he walked in a slow but confident fashion down the carriage and took a seat at
the very end of the line of Brothers, between Shiva and some excitable Australians heading for the
Hippodrome.
Shiva, unlike Abdul-Jimmy, had had his share of wild times and could spot the tell-tale red-eye
from a distance of fifty yards.
"Millat, man," he said under his breath, confident he couldn't
be heard by the rest of the Brothers above the noise of the train. "What have you been doing to
yourself?" g|
Millat looked straight ahead and spoke to his reflection in the 1jp train window. "I'm preparing
myself "|p
"By getting messed up?" hissed Shiva. He peered at the photocopy of Sura 52. he hadn't quite
memorized. "Are you crazy? It's hard enough to remember this stuff without being on the planet
Mars while you're doing it."
Millat swayed slightly, and turned to Shiva with a mistimed lunge. "I'm not preparing myself
for that. I'm preparing myself for action. Because no one else will do it. We lose one man and you
all betray the cause. You desert. But I stand firm."
Shiva fell silent. Millat was referring to the recent 'arrest' of Brother Ibrahim ad-Din Shukrallah
on trumped up charges of tax evasion and civil disobedience. No one took the charges seriously, but
everybody knew it was a not-so gentle warning from the Metropolitan Police that they had their eye
trained on KEVIN activities. In the light of this, Shiva had been the first one to beat a retreat from
the agreed Plan A, quickly followed by Abdul-Jimmy and Hussein-Ishmael, who, despite his desire
to wreak violence upon somebody, anybody, had his shop to think about. For a week the argument
raged (with Millat firmly defending Plan A), but on the 26th Abdul-Colin, Tyrone and finally Hifan
conceded that Plan A might not be in KEVIN'S long-term interest. They could not, after all, put
themselves in an imprisonment situation unless they were secure in the knowledge that KEVIN had
leaders to replace them. So Plan A was off. Plan B was hastily improvised. Plan B involved the
seven KEVIN representatives standing up halfway through Marcus Chalfen's press conference and
quoting Sura 52, "The Mountain', first in Arabic (Abdul-Colin alone would do this) and then in
English. Plan B made Millat sick.
"And that's it? You're just going to read to him? That's his punishment?"
What happened to revenge? What happened to just desserts, retribution, jihad?
"Do you suggest," Abdul-Colin solemnly inquired, 'that the word of Allah as given to the
Prophet Muhammad Salla Allahu "Alaihi Wa Sallam is not sufficient?"
Well, no. And so even though it sickened him, Millat had to step aside. In place of the questions
of honour, sacrifice, duty, the life and death questions that came with the careful plotting of clan
warfare, the very reasons Millat joined KEVIN in place of these, came the question of translation.
Everybody agreed that no translation of the Qur'an could claim to be the word of God, but at the
same time everybody conceded that Plan B would lose something in the delivery if no one could
understand what was being said. So the question was which translation and why. Would it be one of
the un trusty but clear Orientalists: Palmer (1880), Bell (1937-9), Arberry (1955), Dawood (1956)?
The eccentric but poetic J. M. Rodwell (1861)? The old favourite, passionate, dedicated Anglican
convert par excellence Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall (1930)? Or one of the Arab brothers, the
prosaic Shakir or the flamboyant Yusuf All? Five days they argued it. When Millat walked into the
Kilburn Hall of an evening he had only to squint to mistake this talkative circle of chairs, these
supposed fanatic fundamentalists, for an editorial meeting at the London Review of Books.
"But Dawood is a plod!" Brother Hifan would argue vehemently. "I refer you to 52:44: If they
saw a part of heaven falling down, they would still say: "It is but a mass of clouds!" Mass of clouds?
It is not a rock concert. At least with Rodwell there is some attempt to capture the poetry, the
remarkable nature of the Arabic: And should they see a fragment of the heaven falling down, they
would say, "It is only a dense cloud." Fragment, dense the effect is far stronger, accha?"
And then, haltingly, Mo Hussein-Ishmael: "I am just a butcher stroke-corner shop-owner. I can't
claim to know much about it. But I like very much this last line; it is Rodwell .. . er, I think,
yes, Rodwell. 52:49: And in the night-season: Praise him when the stars are setting.
Night-season. I think that is a lovely phrase. It sounds like an Elvis ballad. Much better than the
other one, the Pickthall one: And in the night-time also hymn His praise, and at the setting of the
stars. Night-season is very much lovelier."
"And is this what we are here for?" Millat had yelled at all of them. "Is this what we joined
KEVIN for? To take no action? To sit around on our arses playing with words?"
But Plan B stuck, and here they were, whizzing past Finchley Road, heading to Trafalgar
Square to carry it out. And this was why Millat was stoned. To give him enough guts to do
something else.
"I stand firm," said Millat, in Shiva's ear, slurring his words, 'that is what we're here for. To
stand firm. That is why I joined. Why did you join?"
Well, in fact Shiva had joined KEVIN for three reasons. First, because he was sick of the stick
that comes with being the only Hindu in a Bengali Muslim restaurant. Secondly, because being
Head of Internal Security for KEVIN beat the hell out of being second waiter at the Palace. And
thirdly, for the women. (Not the KEVIN women, who were beautiful but chaste in the extreme, but
all the women on the outside who had despaired of his wild ways and were now hugely impressed
by his new asceticism. They loved the beard, they dug the hat, and told Shiva that at thirty-eight he
had finally ceased to be a boy. They were massively attracted by the fact that he had renounced
women and the more he renounced them, the more successful he became. Of course this equation
could only work so long, and now Shiva was getting more pussy than he ever had as a kaffir.)
However, Shiva sensed that the truth was not what was required here, so he said: "To do my duty."
"Then we are on the same wavelength, Brother Shiva," said Millat, going to pat Shiva's knee
but just missing it. "The only question is: will you do it?"
"Pardon me, mate," said Shiva, removing Millat's arm from where it had fallen between his legs.
"But I think, taking into account your .. . umm .. . present condition .. . the question is, will you?"
Now there was a question. Millat was half sure that he was possibly maybe going to do
something or not that would be correct and very silly and fine and un-good.
"Mill, we've got a Plan B," persisted Shiva, watching the clouds of doubt cross Millat's face.
"Let's just go with Plan B, yeah? No point in causing trouble. Man. You are just like your dad.
Classic Iqbal. Can't let things go. Can't let sleeping cats die or whatever the fuck the phrase is."
Millat turned from Shiva and looked at his feet. He had been more certain when he began,
imagining the journey as one cold sure dart on the Jubilee Line: Willesden Green-" Charing Cross,
no changing of trains, not this higgledy-piggledy journey; just a straight line to Trafalgar, and then
he would climb the stairs into the square, and come face to face with his great-great-grandfather's
enemy, Henry Havelock on his plinth of pigeon-shat stone. He would be emboldened by it; and he
would enter the Perret Institute with revenge and revisionism in his mind and lost glory in his heart
and he would and he would and he
"I think," said Millat, after a pause, "I am going to vomit."
"Baker Street!" cried Abdul-Jimmy. And with the discreet aid of Shiva, Millat crossed the
platform to the connecting train.
Twenty minutes later the Bakerloo Line delivered them into the icy cold of Trafalgar Square. In
the distance, Big Ben. In the square, Nelson. Havelock. Napier. George IV. And then the National
Gallery, back there near St. Martin's. All the statues facing the clock.
"They do love their false icons in this country," said AbdulColin, with his odd mix of gravity
and satire, unmoved by the considerable New Year crowd who were presently spitting at,
dancing round and crawling over the many lumps of grey stone. "Now, will somebody please
tell me: what is it about the English that makes them build their statues with their backs to their
culture and their eyes on the time?" He paused to let the shivering KEVIN Brothers contemplate
the rhetorical question.
"Because they look to their future to forget their past. Sometimes you almost feel sorry for them,
you know?" he continued, turning full circle to look around at the inebriated crowd.
"They have no faith, the English. They believe in what men make, but what men make
crumbles. Look at their empire. This is all they have. Charles II Street and South Africa House and
a lot of stupid-looking stone men on stone horses. The sun rises and sets on it in twelve hours, no
trouble. This is what is left."
Tm bloody cold," complained Abdul-Jimmy, clapping his mit tened hands together (he found
his uncle's speeches a big pain in the arse). "Let's get going," he said, as a huge beer-pregnant
Englishman, wet from the fountains, collided into him, 'out of this bloody madness. It's on Chandos
Street."
"Brother?" said Abdul-Colin to Millat, who was standing some distance from the rest of the
group. "Are you ready?"
Till be along in a minute." He shooed them away weakly. "Don't worry, I'll be there."
There were two things he wanted to see first. The first of which was a particular bench, that
bench over there, by the far wall. He walked over to it, a long, stumbling journey, trying to avoid an
unruly conga line (so much hashish in his head; lead weights on each foot); but he made it. He sat
down. And there it was.