The Disappeared Page 10

  The older man spat disgustedly and turned away.

  ‘We don’t know anyone called Muhibbah,’ the young one said.

  ‘Oh? But you resemble her so closely. You could be her brother.’

  In the hidden recesses two men raised their voices. Justin assumed the language to be Pashto. One of the women was eyeing him across her veil like an alarmed animal. There was a sweet smell of cinnamon in the air, and the walls were hung with lengths of cloth that flapped a little in the breeze from the doorway. The flat seemed full of objects that demanded an explanation and could not provide one. There were some spherical trinkets of silver, on a little cabinet veneered in velvet. A long stick with an ivory handle lay on a narrow table against one wall. Small cubical boxes covered in gold leaf were stacked in one corner. And on the doors, carefully painted in ornamental script, were passages of Arabic – perhaps verses from the Koran. It was an uncompromisingly inner place, a place of privacy and closure – Haram, as Muhibbah had taught him, forbidden, as was everything of herself that she did not explicitly give. A queer vertiginous feeling came over him, as though he stood on the edge of an abyss. He looked in silence at the young man, who returned his look with a frown.

  ‘We don’t know her, I said. Satisfied?’

  He closed the door slowly, withdrawing his face by degrees and keeping his eyes fixed on Justin, as though to memorise the features for some future use.

  Justin stood without moving for a few moments, and then walked slowly away. He descended the stairs with irresolute step; their walls of greenish wash were scrawled all over with graffiti and from time to time he paused to study them, though they made no sense, having only an oblique relation to written words. On the fifth floor he passed a girl going in the opposite direction. She was slim, blonde, fragile looking, and was wearing the uniform of St Catherine’s Academy. She was out of breath, and staring fixedly ahead as though in flight. He wondered why she did not use the lift. Afterwards he recalled her pale pretty features with a strange feeling of sadness, as though it were she and not Muhibbah who were asking to be rescued. And in truth he had no more grounds to think that Muhibbah was interested in his protection than to think the same of that girl.

  After this visit everything in Justin’s life changed. He had glimpsed in that dark interior the antidote to all his dreams. What was the purpose of cleaning the world, when the reality was Angel Towers? Why provide eco-friendly houses for the middle-classes, when the old mess fell into the hands of newcomers determined to exploit it as it was? Why litter the landscape with wind farms and the roofs with solar panels, when the only effect was to encourage the belief that resources were inexhaustible, and mankind could go on squeezing into every available corner of the earth? And why devote your heart and soul to loving and protecting a single person, when that person refused to belong to you or to the place that was yours?

  A mood of cynicism overcame him. He began to neglect his work, and to lose interest in the scheme for the carbon-neutral houses. The loss of Muhibbah’s computer had thrown the office accounts into disarray, and he could not bring himself to rectify the matter. Instead he spent his days staring into the corner where she no longer sat, and where her accountancy textbook still lay on the desk above a little stack of papers. And in the evenings he would wander from pub to pub until he had drowned the thought of her, or sit with his iPod, listening to his favourite bands.

  Ever since his teenage years Justin had treated Heavy Metal as his fortified refuge, into which he would retreat as into a castle keep from the rabble that had breached his walls. Ordinary pop-fans were defeated by the fierce asymmetries of Metal, ordinary guitarists had neither the skill nor the understanding required by the soaring melisma of the solo guitar, ordinary drummers would fall from their perch under the machine-gun kick-back of the drum kit. And as for the vocals and the lyrics that were wrapped in them, these were like venom under the tongue – to be spat, shouted, forced out from throat and larynx like the primeval curse of a once usurped but now revenging deity. Justin had received his musical education at a minor public school, had learned piano, classical guitar and the basics of harmony. But it was only when he encountered the world of Metal that the urge to create, to combine, to plunge into the musical flux and to splash there side by side with his peers and rivals, really took hold of him.

  He was not a good singer, but he could croak with the best of them, and at every stage of his life he had found a small band of enthusiasts with whom he could get together for a gig. He loved the feel of the bass guitar on his neck and fingers, he loved the rushing bass lines that would emerge, when the whole tonal spectrum lay bare like a plundered landscape before him, its places of rest wiped out by the savagery of the solo guitar. In Metal, he discovered, harmonies were no longer confined by a key or a mode. The stacked chords in Metallica, for instance, didn’t work like the added note chords in jazz, to impart a kind of directionless haze to the melody. They were destinations, redoubts secured against the enemy, places from which the raid could continue across the whole of musical space.

  Justin was not given to hero-worship. But a photograph of the Norwegian bassist Lars Norberg, stepping from black curtains into the searing white glare of the stage, occupied a special place on the wall of his bedroom. He studied Norberg’s virtuoso bass lines, aspiring to match them but always falling short. And he listened in wonder to the tracks made by Spiral Architect, the group that Norberg founded way back in 1995. The rhythms in Spiral Architect were not the regular four in a bar of Rock or Indie music, moving the herd forward through pastures of comforting grass. There were bars with five beats, six beats, seven beats or seven and a half. There were frenzied riffs in which a single chord, altered up and down by a semitone, was arpeggiated across bar-lines, flung at the drum kit like a rag doll thrown to a dog, mangled and torn to shreds and yet still retaining its vulnerable and poetic expression like the ghost of the murdered Petroushka.

  And then there were the lyrics: not the highest poetry, to be sure, but touching something otherwise rarely visited in Justin, an inward loneliness, a hurt masculinity, a need to assert himself against the soft machine. Already at university, when he first got involved in environmental causes, joined protests against animal experiments, adopted a vegan diet and wore long hair in a ponytail, there was a Viking streak in his temperament that sided with the warrior bands and the carnivores.

  Metal was his way of expressing this. It was the armour in which he sallied forth to battle, singing with James Hetfield and Metallica ‘of Wolf and Man’. For his real battles were not with the polluters and the animal abusers, nor were they fought on behalf of the gentle causes that had united the student body against the Chief Executives and the profiteers. His real battles were with himself. He fought against the soft and indiscriminate compassion through which he kept all commitments at bay. He had been happy at Copley Solutions, not because of the work but because, settled into a routine of doing good, he could go on caring for no one but himself. He knew this, and therefore would turn away from time to time, to look inward to the frothing pool of loneliness.

  When Spiral Architect sang of ‘the kind of lie/ to subdivide, petrify, dehumanize,/ Spinning, twisting, circling on’ he joined in the song and made it his own. He too had been spinning, and the humane causes that fed his complacency were also a denial of his inner self. Women had seen this. It was why Caitlin had been important to him: it was not the philanthropic businessman whom she had loved but the angry adolescent who emerged armour-plated behind the lance of a bass guitar. And it was from this angry masculinity that his love for Muhibbah was born.

  As the autumn drew on, therefore, and the pain of Muhibbah’s exit began to ease, Justin turned ever more frequently to his guitar. He had nimble fingers, and could span the whole range of the bass with the Phrygian scale on E in less than three seconds. He got together again with the band in which he had played, Mike the solicitor and Dave the physics teacher on guitars, and Kieran, who had done time f
or drugs but was now a successful electrician, on drums. There was a club, the Crustafarian, in the City Centre where they played every other Thursday, and a small crowd of metallurgists would come to hear them.

  At first they tried to play numbers that the audience knew. But except for a few solid classics, like Metallica’s ‘Master of Puppets’, in which Mike and Dave had worked the two solos to perfection, the music defied their powers of imitation. Melodies and chords charged into and alongside each other so closely that no line could be easily disentangled from their twisted rope. Justin began to write the words himself, and to sing them aloud in short broken phrases. Kieran would often sing along with him, at a fourth below, and once the others had grasped the chord sequence they would clamber into the flow like eager soldiers falling into line against the enemy.

  In his songs Justin ran headlong towards the devils who tormented his Muhibbah; he surrounded her with electric walls and sheets of lightning; he shot paralysing chords and spikes of melody into the imagined bodies of her captors. And from the wreck of his emotions he built the image of a new self, of Justin Fellowes as the primal male. One evening in December, after a day’s rehearsal at the weekend, the band performed the song of which he was most proud, ‘The Disappeared’, at the Crustafarian. It began with a slow accompanying figure on the bass, a web of fourths over two octaves, introducing phrases of jagged melody which suddenly clattered into a full assault, as the drum-kit entered under the crucial words.

  You appeared from nowhere

  You disappeared to somewhere,

  And now there is revenge,

  Their revenge and mine, Habibah…

  And when singing that last word on B, over a sus chord on E, he at last perfected his pronunciation of the ‘Ha’ that summarized Muhibbah.

  The audience applauded loudly after this performance. One woman, who was in the habit of sitting close to the band alongside the small square of floor reserved for dancing, and who stared intently as though at a religious ritual, made her feelings known with a loud yelp of excitement and a burst of frenzied clapping. Justin had often noticed her, on account of her total involvement in the event: she came alone, spoke to no one, and sat at her table with a gin and tonic, eyes fixed on the band. Her large round face, which she embellished with eye-shadow and powder, had a look of defiant loneliness, and when she stood up and her pale green tunic fell across her substantial form like a curtain, she made a regal impression, as though waiting for the world to bow before her, yet uncertain whether it would.

  In the interval that followed ‘The Disappeared’ she came across to Justin and introduced herself as Iona, a long-time Metal fan, who had been struck by that little word, that multicultural reference, which had lifted Justin’s song out of the Anglo-Saxon ghetto and into the real world in which all of us are foreigners. As they talked Justin felt a surge of sympathy for this lonely person who had survived as he had survived, by hiding behind a façade of official philanthropy. And when he learned that Iona’s job as a social worker took her frequently to Angel Towers he wanted to be her friend.

  They began to meet for the occasional drink or dinner and as spring approached Iona, who lived alone and did not cook, would drive him in her Land Rover to a little place on the edge of the moors. In this place was a restaurant that had become popular by offering a view of farmland criss-crossed by dry-stone walls and punctuated by tree-fringed farmyards of stone. But since Justin had installed the wind-farm next door only a few customers came out from the city.

  The place appealed to Iona, because it was situated on the edge of things, and manifestly dying. She made it clear that, unlike those who were stuck in grooves of fruitless nostalgia, she at least was moving on. Justin greeted this information with a comfortless smile. He too was moving on, not from Muhibbah, but from the life that preceded her and which she had thrown into disarray.

  He doubted everything he had done, the wind farms included. Did the fear of global warming justify the aesthetic pollution that he witnessed in the failing light from the restaurant window? What if the whole thing was a fraud? The newspapers had been full of stories about the manipulation of statistics by those defending the global warming story. Justin had no confidence that the stories were untrue, and in any case was beginning to revise his attitude to ecology. The environment, he thought, is degraded by nomads – by the people who graze the meadows to death and then move on.

  He had sensed this in Angel Towers. But he too was an example: moving from one flat to another, from one girlfriend to another, and always restless, always consuming, always alone. To find the one person who matters, to settle down with her, and then to care for the beauty and the lastingness of the home that you make together – that, surely, was the solution. We protect what is ours, and we do so by loving it: and when we lose what is ours, as the villagers on the edge of the moors had lost their landscape, then we cease to care. Love and beauty, only these two mattered, and he repeated it to himself in the words that she had taught him: Habb wa jmal, the two things for which people die. She had said it with a smile, taunting him with that unpronounceable ‘Ha’, which stood proxy for the unpronounceable being that was hers.

  All those thoughts would run through Justin’s mind as Iona talked of her life as an active social worker and a passive metallurgist. She had been drawn to both pursuits at a university in the Midlands, where she had studied sociology and where she had been involved, like Justin, in left-wing causes. She had been chairperson for a while of the university Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Society, not that she was particularly lesbian, she gave him to understand, but because she wanted to work for a new society in which people were no longer singled out for their sexuality or made to feel suicidal because they did not fit in. And she had been a keen follower of Metal for just the same reason, which is that men, in her view, needed an outlet for their macho feelings, so as to let off steam without doing damage.

  She had gone into social work partly in reaction to her own dysfunctional family, her dad being a philandering bank manager, her mother a silent couch potato, and her brother a layabout who saw no reason to work when he could lie on his bed in his parents’ house and claim board and lodging for free. She had seen the bad effect of selfishness and privilege, and she wanted to play her part in shaping the new society, in helping those who had nowhere to turn to, and in establishing a genuinely multicultural working class.

  While she talked Iona fixed her eyes on Justin with an expression of lively interest. For the first two months of their friendship he hesitated to speak of what was on his mind. His encounter with Superintendent Nicholson had left him with the feeling that the official attitude to Muslim immigrants was to leave well alone, for fear of the thought police. He had no way of knowing which side Iona would take, in the conflict between Muhibbah and her family. But he knew enough of social work to conclude that the thought police had its headquarters there.

  The official doctrine was a mass of contradictions – so he had learned. We were to be feminists, believing in the rights of women, and also respecters of the sharia which, as Justin saw it, made women the property of men. We were to put freedom, tolerance and choice above all rooted values, but also to offer freedom to the intolerant and choice to the enslavers. In everything there was only one measure of what was right, which was whether the old, settled, British way of life forbade it. So women became property by default, for the reason that it was racist to prevent it.

  It was not until a cold evening in March that Justin was led to broach the topic of Muhibbah. Iona was a dedicated carnivore, and had agreed readily to a Chateaubriand for two and a bottle of Burgundy. The wine softened her features, and gave a light-hearted and mischievous look to her small brown eyes. She talked gaily of her difficult cases – most of which concerned children taken into care by the Council, and then placed here and there around the city, often in the sink estates from which they would have to be rescued again. She too, over the years, had become cynical, holding on to her belief
s only by default and because no better ones had appeared to replace them. Nevertheless she was adamant that Britain was a racist society, and that we must still do what we can to protect each generation of immigrants from the deplorable desire – which she had witnessed in her parents – to send them back where they came from.

  She spoke that evening of a boy, a young Pakistani, with whom she had been involved at university and who, before dumping her in order to a marry a girl from his community back home, had taught her a thing or two about Muslim men.

  ‘For orthodox Muslims the masculine and the feminine are separate spheres, which touch only at the perimeter. It says in the Koran that men are guardians over women, while the virtuous woman is obedient, protecting the man’s interests in the home. It is there, for your information, in verse 35 of the Surah called Woman, an-Nisa’. I don’t say I go along with that. But in my job you have to be aware of cultural differences, and this is the greatest cultural difference of all.’

  ‘But don’t you want to rescue girls from that kind of domination?’

  ‘Yes, if they want to be rescued. But most of them don’t. It is only domination if it feels that way. For some girls it feels like freedom – to be protected by your parents, and then protected by a husband, sounds like the perfect deal, especially when you are in a foreign country where no one is to be trusted.’

  ‘But what do you do if they want to be rescued?’

  Something in Justin’s tone alerted her, so that she sat back, raised her glass to her lips, and peered at him across the red meniscus with an expression of professional interest. She took a sip, put down the glass and then leaned towards him, her elbows on the table and her face resting on her hands. He was suddenly struck by an attractive quality in her. There was, in her dancing eye and large soft face, a kind of hard-won confidence in her role that had no doubt appealed to that Pakistani boy, and which had been a support to him in the great enterprise of not belonging – the enterprise that was also Muhibbah’s.