said Robert.
He was beginning to find this conversation oppressive. You would have thought she would have put up a bit more of a fight for Christian values. He got to his feet and went to the window. The German next door was mowing his lawn. Beyond him the Patersons were playing tennis against the Joneses.
Why couldn’t they find another way to compete with each other?
thought Robert.
Like – who could jump off the highest building head first.
Over to the left, a huge plane tree, dulled by the August heat, cast dappled shadows on his father’s lawn. Badger was lying on his back doing complicated cycling movements with all four legs. As Robert watched, the dog righted himself, shot out his tongue to the left of his snout and chomped his jaws together smartly.
He had never planned on staying in Wimbledon. He had always thought, somehow, that, like his friends and contemporaries, he would go somewhere glamorous and far away. York, say, or Brighton. He had applied, years ago, to a polytechnic in North Wales. They had not even replied to his letter. He was still here, eight years after leaving school, in the beautifully kept room with the pink duvet, the twenty or thirty paperbacks and all the loving tributes to his childhood. ‘
We’re the lost generation!
’ Martin Finkelstein, the clever boy from South Wimbledon, used to say. ‘
We’re the children of the eighties! We have no hope!
’ At least Finkelstein had gone on to get a scholarship to Cambridge. Maisie and Robert were people who had even managed to go missing from the lost generation.
He felt just as much a Muslim as he felt like any of the other things he occasionally owned up to being.
‘There’s a guy called Malik,’ he said. ‘He’s sort of my spiritual mentor. I’d like you to meet him.’
It was only as he said this that Robert realized that he really did like Mr Malik. Almost more than anyone he had met in the last five years. Not that he had met many people in the last five years.
‘I’d love to meet him,’ said Maisie. ‘Is he young?’
It occurred to Robert that he had absolutely no notion of Mr Malik’s age. He could have been anything from twenty-five to fifty. Was this, perhaps, in part due to his religion?
‘Is he Pakistani?’ said Maisie. ‘I adore Pakistanis! Is he like Imran Khan?’
‘I’m not sure what he is,’ said Robert. ‘He’s not English, that’s for sure.’
Except that there was something quite incredibly English about Malik.
Maisie was peering at the manuscript. ‘Read me a bit,’ she said in the slightly bossy squawk she acquired whenever she was genuinely excited.
Robert screwed up his eyes and gestured to the first page. ‘All that,’ he said, ‘is about your breasts. Or her breasts, rather – Hoj’s woman’s breasts.’
Maisie looked at the letters dubiously. She held the manuscript out in front of her at arm’s length. ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘you have to hold it upside down or back to front in order to read it. They do write back to front, don’t they?’
‘They do,’ said Robert crisply, anxious to get off the subject of Arabic, ‘but I quite often read the Koran in English.’
Maisie’s eyes flickered. She seemed impressed. ‘You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?’ she said.
‘Very serious,’ said Robert, whipping Mr Malik’s Koran from his jacket pocket. ‘I never go anywhere without a copy of this. Believe you me, it makes quite a read!’
Maisie shook her head in something like wonder. The most interesting thing about Robert, up to this moment, her face seemed to suggest, was his impression of John Major. But now . . .
Robert flicked through the Koran’s pages. It looked pretty menacing stuff, even viewed at high speed. It also seemed worryingly long.
‘You’re not reading it backwards!’ cried Maisie, in an accusing voice, ‘you’re holding it the right way up!’
‘It’s in
English
!’ said Robert.
Not that reading it upside down or back