London, the week before Christmas, 2007. Over seven days we follow the lives of seven major characters: a hedge fund manager trying to bring off the biggest trade of his career; a professional footballer recently arrived from Poland; a young lawyer with little work and too much time to speculate; a student who has been led astray by Islamist theory; a hack book-reviewer; a schoolboy hooked on skunk and reality TV; and a Tube train driver whose Circle Line train joins these and countless other lives together in a daily loop.
With daring skill, the novel pieces together the complex patterns and crossings of modern urban life. Greed, the dehumanising effects of the electronic age and the fragmentation of society are some of the themes dealt with in this savagely humorous book. The writing on the wall appears in letters ten feet high, but the characters refuse to see it – and party on as though tomorrow is a dream.
Sebastian Faulks probes not only the self-deceptions of this intensely realised group of people, but their hopes and loves as well. As the novel moves to its gripping climax, they are forced, one by one, to confront the true nature of the world they inhabit.
Sebastian Faulks is best known for the French trilogy, The Girl at the Lion d’Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray (1989–1997) and is also the author of a triple biography, The Fatal Englishman (1996); a small book of literary parodies, Pistache (2006); and the novels Human Traces (2005) and Engleby (2007). He lives in London with his wife and their three children.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781446412909
Version 1.0
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Vintage
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at
global.penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © Sebastian Faulks 2009
Extract from Where My Heart Used to Beat © Sebastian Faulks 2015
Sebastian Faulks has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Hutchinson in 2009
www.vintage-books.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099458289
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Sebastian Faulks
Praise
Title
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Extract from Where My Heart Used to Beat
Copyright
With thanks to:
Gillon Aitken, Rachel Cugnoni, Caroline Gascoigne, Gerry Howard, Chloë Johnson-Hill, Andrew Kidd, Emma Mitchell, Gail Rebuck and Steve Rubin for helping this book to publication in various ways. On finance: Matthew Fosh, Glenn Grover, Will Hutton, John Reynolds, Paul Ruddock. On Internet ‘reality’ games: Tim Guest, in person, and his book Second Lives (Vintage). On teaching: Sabrina Broadbent, Tabitha Jay, Rebecca Terry and colleagues. On football: Giles Smith; Roy Hodgson and Jaki Stockley at Fulham FC. On the London Underground: Andy Daugherty, Ben Pennington, Donna Sarjant, Albanne Spyrou. On music, Internet and other matters: my children, William, Holly and Arthur. Also, merci to Jill Lewis.
Particular thanks on finance to Kevin Davis, a friend for over thirty years, from the Lower Fifth to the Upper West Side; and to Dr Duncan Hunter, for his patience with a frequently slow pupil. Any errors or inconsistencies of fact in the financial or other detail are entirely my responsibility.
Thanks also to my wife, Veronica, for literary and many other kindnesses.
Quotations from the Koran are from the Penguin edition, translated by N. J. Dawood. Milestones by Sayyid Qutb, referred to in the novel, is published by Islamic Book Service; I am also indebted to The Crisis of Islam by Bernard Lewis (Phoenix). Karen Armstrong writes affectingly of the eagerness of seventh-century Arabs in the Peninsula to discover a voice-hearing prophet of their own in Islam: A Short History.
I would like to acknowledge how much I enjoyed, and learned from, Michael Lewis’s writing on finance in his book about the 1980s bond market, Liar’s Poker, and in a November 2008 Vanity Fair article, ‘The End’, on the American sub-prime loans crisis.
One of the characters in this book reflects that ‘Newspaper interviews and […] literary biographies focus[sed] almost exclusively on the extent to which the contents of a serious novelist’s books [are] drawn from his own experience and the characters “based on” people known to him …’
In view of this, it might be worth stressing more than ever that: Although reference is made to real events and people, and such reference is intended to be accurate, the characters in this book, and their actions, are invented; any similarity between any of them and any real person, living or dead, is coincidental.
S.F. London, 2005–2009.
Five o’clock and freezing. Piledrivers and jackhammers were blasting into the wasteland by the side of West Cross Route in Shepherd’s Bush. With a bare ten months to the scheduled opening of Europe’s largest urban shopping centre, the sand-covered site was showing only skeletal girders and joists under red cranes, though a peppermint facade had already been tacked on to the eastward side. This was not a retail park with trees and benches, but a compression of trade in a city centre, in which migrant labour was paid by foreign capital to squeeze out layers of profit from any Londoner with credit. At their new ‘Emirates’ Stadium, meanwhile, named for an Arab airline, Arsenal of North London were kicking off under floodlights against Chelsea from the West, while the goalkeepers – one Czech, one Spanish – jumped up and down and beat their ribs to keep warm. At nearby Upton Park, the supporters were leaving the ground after a home defeat; and only a few streets away from the Boleyn Ground, with its East End mixture of sentimentality and grievance, a solitary woman paid her respects to a grandfather – come from Lithuania some eighty years ago – as she stood by his grave in the overflowing cemetery of the East Ham Synagogue. Up the road in Victoria Park, the last of the dog-walkers dragged their mongrels back to flats in Hackney and Bow, grey high-rises marked with satellite dishes, like ears cupped to the outside world in the hope of gossip or escape; while in a minicab that nosed along Dalston Road on its way back to base, the dashboard thermometer touched minus two degrees.
In his small rooms in Chelsea, Gabriel Northwood, a barrister in his middle thirties, was reading the Koran, and shivering. He practised civil law, when he practised anything at all; this meant that he was not involved in ‘getting criminals off’, but in representing people in a dispute whose outcome would bring financial compensation to the claimants if they won. For a long time, and for reasons he didn’t start to understand, Gabriel had received no instructions from solicitors – the branch of the legal profession he depended on for work. Then a case had landed in his lap. It was to do with a man who had thrown himself under a Tube train, and concerned the extent to which the transport provider might be deemed responsible for failing to provide adequate safety precautions. Almost immediately, a second brief had followed: from a local education authority being sued by the parents of a Muslim girl in Leicester for not allowing her to wear traditional dress to school. With little other preparatory work to do, Gabriel thought he might as well try to understand the faith whose demands he was about to encounter; and any educated person these days, he told himself, really ought to have read the Koran.
Some yards below where Gabriel sat reading was an Underground train; and in the driver’s cab a young woman called Jenni Fortune switched off the interior light because she was distracted by her own reflection in the windscreen. She slowed the train with her left hand on the traction brake control and, just before she drew level with the signal, brought it to a halt. She pressed two red buttons to open the doors and fixed her eyes on the wing mirror to watch the passengers behind her getting in and out.
She had been driving on the Circle and Metropolitan lines for three years and still felt excited when she clocked in for her eight-hour shift at the Depot. She felt sorry for the poor passengers who sat and swayed behind her. Sideways on, they saw only bags and overcoats, hanging straps and worn plush under strip lights with suffocating heaters locked on max. They endured the jostle and the boredom, with occasional stabs of fear when drunken, swearing youths pushed on.
From her view, Jenni saw soothing darkness, points, a slither of crossing rails and signals that glowed like red coals. She rattled the train through the tunnels at forty miles per hour and sometimes half expected skeletons to loom out from the wall or bats to brush her face. Head-on, she saw the miracles of London engineering that no passenger would ever glimpse: the corbelled brickwork through which the tunnels had been cut or the giant steel joist that held up a five-floor building above the entry to the platform at Liverpool Street.
The week before Christmas was the worst time of year for people throwing themselves on the track. Nobody knew why. Perhaps the approaching festivity brought back memories of family or friends who’d died, without whom the turkey and the streamers seemed a gloomy echo of a world that had once been full. Or maybe the advertisements for digital cameras, aftershave and computer games reminded people how much they were in debt, how few of ‘this year’s must-have’ presents they could afford. Guilt, thought Jenni: a sense of having failed in the competition for resources – for DVDs and body lotions – could drive them to the rails.
Books were what she was hoping to find beneath her own tree. Her favourite authors were Agatha Christie and Edith Wharton, but she read with undifferentiated glee – philosophy or airport novels. Her mother, who had come from County Cork, had barely owned a book and had been suspicious of Jenni’s reading habits as a teenager. She urged her to get out and find a boyfriend, but Jenni seemed happier in her room with 600-page novels with titles in embossed gold lettering that told how a Russian pogrom had led, two generations later and after much suffering and sex, to the founding of a cosmetics dynasty in New York. Her father, who was from Trinidad, had left ‘home’ when Jenni was eight months old.
After her shift she would return to the novel that had won the big literary prize, the 2005 Café Bravo, which she was finding a bit thin. Then, after making something to eat for herself and her half-brother Tony, if he was there, she would log on to Parallax, the newest and most advanced of alternative-reality games, where she would continue to create the life of her stand-in, or ‘maquette’ as the game had it, Miranda Star.
Two years before, when she was still new to the job, Jenni had had a jumper. She was coming into Monument when a sudden flash of white, like a giant seagull fluttering from the platform edge, had made her brake hard. But it was too late to prevent her hitting a twenty-year-old man, whose leap had cleared the so-called suicide pit but not taken him as far as the positive rail on the far side. Don’t look at their faces was the drivers’ wisdom, and after three months’ counselling and rehabilitation, Jenni had resumed her driving. The man, though seriously injured, had survived. Two months later, his parents brought a civil action against Jenni’s employers, claiming negligence, because their lack of safety precautions had been responsible for the son’s injuries. They lost the case, but had been granted leave to appeal, and the thought of the imminent second hearing – tomorrow there would be another meeting with the lawyer, Mr Northwood – darkened the edges of Jenni Fortune’s days.
At that moment in the wealthy inner suburb of North Park, ‘located’, as the estate agent had it, ‘between the natural advantages of Heath and Green’, Sophie Topping had just made a cup of tea for herself and her husband Lance, who was working in his study. He had done this every Sunday afternoon since becoming an MP in the recent by-election. Sophie wasn’t sure how he could concentrate on constituency paperwork with the football blasting out from the television in the corner and she suspected that he sometimes nodded off to the excited yet soporific commentary. For fear of discovering him slumped with his mouth open, she always knocked before taking in his tea.
‘I’m just finalising the places for Saturday,’ she said, handing him a blue china cup with what he called ‘builders’ tea’ in it.
‘What?’ he said.
‘The big dinner.’
‘God, yes. I’d quite forgotten,’ said Lance. ‘All under control?’
‘Yes, I think it’ll be a night to remember.’
Sophie retired to her desk and looked at the list of names she had printed out from her computer. At first, she’d meant to have an intimate evening with a few powerful people, just so that Richard Wilbraham, the party leader, could see the sort of company Lance moved in. But when she got down to it, there seemed no end to the number of important people she and Lance knew – and wanted the leader to know they knew.
Looking down the names, Sophie began to sketch a table plan.
The remaining guests were Jennifer and Mark Loader, both in finance; two women drawn from Sophie’s repertory company of singles; and three other couples she’d met when their children were at school together. One, the McPhersons, had bought and sold a chain of busy coffee bars, Café Bravo, before diversifying into other ventures; another, the Margessons, had invented an Internet site for lonely teenagers, called YourPlace; the third, the Samuels, had bundled up and sold on other people’s debts. Sophie couldn’t understand who the buyers for such things were – why would you buy debt? – but all three couples lived nearby and she ‘owed’ all of them hospitality.
At her bedroom window, looking over the houses of North Park, Sophie felt a sudden shiver. She was so used to Christmas being hot and wet that the sudden Arctic winds were hard to deal with; she put on another sweater and settled herself on the bed. The novel she needed to read for her book club was a typical Jennifer Loader selection; it was set in Chile and appeared to be written with all the sentences rolled into one.
Sophie didn’t care about this man Javier and his life in Central or South America, whichever one Chile was in, she wasn’t sure, it was sometimes hard to remember …
She snapped the book shut. She was sure that Jennifer had only chosen the book to impress R. Tranter, the professional reviewer; that was why she always picked books with haphazard narrators and unreliable punctuation. But, Jennifer had pointed out when her selection had been queried, this one had not only been short-listed for the Café Bravo and the Allied Royal Bank prizes, it had also been nominated for the Pizza Palace Book of the Year. You could barely see the photo on the jacket – a barefoot waif in a bomb site – for the prize sponsors’ bright stickers. ‘Hmm,’ Lance had said, sniffing it briefly before tossing it back to her, ‘more endorsements than your driving licence, Soph.’
John Veals, the hedge-fund manager, was meanwhile looking at one of the four flat-screen monitors banked above his desk. His office was in a tall, blank building in Old Pye Street – the only such block in an otherwise quiet, residential road in Victoria – with a view over to the miniature Byzantine domes and piebald brickwork of Westminster Cathedral, where the bells were tolling for early evening Mass.
The weekends allowed Veals time to be alone in his office, without interruption. This was when he tried to let his market instinct find its true north, with no e-mail or telephone or colleagues to break the spell. It was not that it was ever a noisy office; even during the busy week, most visitors remarked on its calm. Veals himself spoke little because he was so aware of security risks. Although the office was regularly swept for bugs, he had trained himself never to say anything that he couldn’t bear to have overheard. Much of his most delicate business was conducted in the Folger’s coffee shop in Victoria station, in the Moti Mahal beneath a sooty bridge in Waterloo or through one of his six cellphones in an alleyway that ran off Old Pye Street, behind the Peabody Buildings. Marc Bézamain, his man in New York, told him that ninety-five per cent of successful prosecutions brought by regulators stemmed from their reading of incriminating e-mail traffic.
Veals didn’t do e-mail. To clients or counterparties too powerful to ignore, he offered the vague execl@hlcapital.com as an address, but to make sure he couldn’t reply even to the most provocative messages, he had had the back office disable his ‘send’ capacity. There was one other ruse. The company which supplied the screens and their data also offered an e-mail service; and this was neither stored nor checked by the authorities.
The secretaries at High Level Capital were chosen for soft-footedness. The managers worked in soundproof offices with solid doors; Veals did the rounds each day, but avoided large meetings. The analysts came and went, then wrote their reports on silent keyboards. All of them were thin. Veals couldn’t stand fatness; it riled the ascetic in him. The men wore charcoal grey suits, never navy, and he stipulated no pink shirts; the women’s skirts were knee-length, their nylons black. In summer the air conditioning was turned up high; in winter the radiators were too hot to touch. Veals took thirty per cent of his investors’ profits annually; but he also took three per cent a year of the value of funds (before leverage) as a management fee, so even by doing nothing, no new trades at all, he could make many millions a year. The electricity bill was not an issue.
In his twenty-seven years in finance, one thing remained constant in Veals’s view: the only way to make money was to have an edge. No trader, however brilliant or intuitive, could outperform the market over a sustained period. Veals had read all the books on ‘rational’ markets: he’d read the theories of Merton, Black and Scholes on the valuation of stock options; he’d weighed on the one hand their two Nobel prizes and on the other hand the trillion-dollar black hole left by the collapse and humiliation of the hedge fund for which all three had worked.
‘Theory’ was all, in John Veals’s opinion, piffle. If you play blackjack every day for a year, the house will always win. Veals knew this for a fact since in his first experience of markets, at the age of fourteen, he was the house. His uncle was a bookmaker in Hendon and showed young John how to set the odds in a ten-horse race so that any outcome made a profit for the book. The keys, he taught John, were speed of reaction and constant recalculation. At the latter, John was a prodigious pupil. From the age of thirteen he could work out in his head what odds should be offered on an eleven-part yankee before his uncle could do it with paper and pencil. Horse racing taught him that the only way to beat the house was to have information. If you knew that Stardust Rosie had been held back by her jockey for three races till her odds were 18/1 for the next outing but on that occasion the jockey would give the horse her head, then you really could beat the bookie by backing her to win. No computer model, no algorithmic forecast, could outperform such knowledge.
Veals was viewed as old-fashioned by his peers in believing that the ‘real economy’ of mills and factories and making things did still have a function – which was to generate a deal flow for the financiers. And these deals, he pointed out, did generate real revenue, which in turn generated tax (some tax anyway, depending on how efficient your tax-avoidance department was) for hospitals, roads, all that.
Where Veals gained an edge on most of his rivals was by knowing that the word ‘inside’ in the phrase ‘inside information’ had a surprisingly strict legal meaning. He had known many bankers who hadn’t properly understood how much ‘inside’ information they were legally permitted to acquire, and had thus unnecessarily handicapped themselves. He didn’t tell them. They, too, could have studied the book if they’d chosen to. There was kosher inside and iffy inside. ‘Know the rules’ was Veals’s own favourite rule.
The second obvious step towards getting a sustainable edge was to stay away from regulation. In his years as a futures trader and a banker Veals had chosen to operate in areas where regulation was either minimal or non-existent. It was only a matter of time in his own mind before he moved into the world of hedge funds, because here legal supervision was at its lightest: sophisticated investors needed flexible arrangements, not fussy inspectors.
Another obvious precaution, taken by most senior people he knew, was not to pay tax. When it came to running his own hedge fund, he naturally, therefore, based it offshore. He had chosen Zurich, because it was under the jurisdiction neither of the Financial Services Authority in London nor of the European Union. The large profits of High Level Capital were kept in the fund and rolled up abroad; it was structured so that it generated no taxable income. Vanessa, John Veals’s Anglo-American wife, was for tax purposes not domiciled in Britain, and there were legal ways of making sure that the income they needed each year should be classified as foreign earnings in her name. A remittance of funds from abroad could alert the taxman, it was true, but the Veals family didn’t need much income: John had no power boats or polo ponies; no collections of Sumerian stone tablets or early Picassos; no mortgage, no hobbies and no interests outside work. He hadn’t even dug out the basement of his house to stick in a swimming pool. Petty cash could be also bled out of the fund through a web of trusts held in the names of his two children, Bella and Finn. Well, it wasn’t his fault; he didn’t make the laws.
He disliked the famous remark made by a New York billion-airess that taxes were for the ‘little people’. It sent out the wrong signals. John Veals did, however, share the more elegantly phrased view of many of his senior colleagues in the London hedge fund and banking world that ‘income tax is voluntary’.
As the bells tolled, he closed his eyes and contemplated the magnificent good fortune of his life. The quiet in the office was wonderful. Two senior colleagues worked abroad, Duffy in Switzerland and Bézamain in New York, where how they behaved was their own affair (Bézamain wore espadrilles to work and sang French folk songs under pressure). But in the cathedral calm of Old Pye Street, Veals’s partner Stephen Godley was the only person allowed to be voluble; he siphoned off the tension from the others: the billion-dollar sweats bloomed only in his armpits. Since the day they’d met at a New York investment bank in 1990, Veals had seen in Godley’s open, sporting jollity something he himself was lacking: clients warmed to him in a way that no one ever warmed to Veals. He talked to them in sporting metaphors (‘I think we’ll put the other side in to bat first’), and he was the only Englishman in New York who seemed genuinely to understand baseball and gridiron as easily as he did golf and cricket. In the course of raising funds to start their hedge fund in 1999, Veals had learned to let Godley do the talking. Who cared what madman was in the attic so long as the door was firmly locked and the key was in smiling Stephen Godley’s pocket?
The long association meant Steve Godley knew the details of each trade made by John Veals for more than fifteen years, which allowed him to make unamusing jokes about bodies and where they were buried. On the other hand, Veals had seen Godley build his first personal £10 million at the bank by exploiting (first to his employers’ advantage, then, through annual bonuses, to his own) the information that leaked through the bank’s flimsy Chinese walls and by putting on his own trades a fraction before exercising identical ones requested by a client. This was regarded as simple exuberance, the fog of war; it was nothing like the distasteful insider dealing of the bond department. Everyone did it. Chinese people, as Godley remarked, tend to be short, and their walls are easy to look over.
Veals brought his mind back to the present. High Level had had a difficult six months. One of the fund’s perennial problems was its sheer size (it had over £12 billion under management, of which about a quarter was Veals’s own reinvested money): it was often hard to find market inefficiencies so glaring that they could make a real impact on returns. Then they had, frustratingly, not been able to profit from the mortgage market that was causing tremors in America. After much consultation with Marc Bézamain in New York, Veals had been convinced in 2005 that American mortgage companies had dangerously oversold mortgages to poor people (‘sub-primers’) who would be unable to make the monthly repayments if anything – anything – went wrong.
High Level therefore bought hundreds of millions of dollars of ‘put’ options on the relevant housing index, the ABX. The ‘puts’ gave Veals the right to sell the index at a pre-agreed price in the future if he so chose; his profit was to be on the difference between that price and the much lower level to which he was convinced the market would fall. But the index didn’t move. It seemed impossible. People were losing their jobs, defaulting on their payments; interest rates and thus monthly repayments were set to rise – but still the index wouldn’t fall.
One of the marks of a good manager, everyone agreed, was to know when he is beaten, and in the summer of 2006 Veals had ditched the trade. It took another nine months for the index to collapse. He took no pleasure in being proved ‘right’ eventually about the fall and still thought he had been wise to pull out: the market’s ability to behave irrationally had outlasted his patience, and he had done the professional thing. He recouped some of his losses by short-selling two individual mortgage providers, but even here he closed the position and returned the borrowed stock with the price twenty points above its final nadir. This could happen.
Yet could he now be sure, in the cold December darkness, that he was not being influenced, even minutely, by a vestigial wound to his pride? He gazed from the window towards the cathedral and screwed up his eyes. This long introspection was a ritual. Not until he was sure that his motives were pure – driven in other words only by an unemotional and rigorous assessment of profitability – would he commit himself.
Somewhere in the passageways of John Veals’s mind, beyond the thoughts of wife, children, daily living, carnal urges, beyond the scar tissue of experience and loss, there was a creature whose heart beat only to market movements. He couldn’t be happy as a man if his positions weren’t making money. For John Veals, the analysis of a potential position was therefore more than a business or a mathematical problem; it involved something painfully close to self-knowledge. His life depended on it.
In the rear carriage of Jenni Fortune’s Circle Line train Hassan al-Rashid sat staring straight ahead. Normally, without a book to read, he would move his head up and down so that the reflection of his face in the convex window opposite would develop panda eyes, elongate like an image in a fairground mirror and then pop. But this was not the day for such frivolity: he was on his way to buy the constituents of a bomb.
Two white-skinned teenagers opposite him were kissing, sticking their tongues out and laughing when they touched. Although they were absorbed by one another, there was a challenge in their public intimacy. A black-skinned youth with feet in padded white trainers the size of small boats was leaning forward. From his earplugs came a hissing, thumping noise. Hassan could sense that this youth’s eyes, though looking down, were ready to lock on to those of anyone who caught them, so he was careful to keep his own gaze somewhere to the left of the hunched shoulders.
To Hassan’s left, in the standing area by the central doors, were Japanese and European tourists. It was Sunday, Hassan thought; most of these people should have been in church, but these days Christians viewed cathedrals as monuments or works of art to be admired for their architecture and paintings, not as the place where they could worship God. Their final loss of faith had happened in the last ten years or so, yet in the kafir world it had passed with little comment. How very strange they were, he thought, these people, that they had let eternal life slip through their hands.
Where Hassan had grown up in Glasgow, the Christians (he hadn’t by then adopted the word ‘kafir’) blasphemed and drank and fornicated, though most of them, he knew, still more or less believed. They were unfaithful in hotel rooms, but they got married in churches. They went on Christmas Day or when they buried a friend; they took their babies to be named there, and when they were dying they still sent out for a priest. Now you could read statistics in newspaper surveys which confirmed what anyone could see: that they’d given up God. And barely a kafir seemed to have noticed.
The conviction that the rest of the world lived in a dream was one that grew in Hassan each day. With the exception of those in his group and some of the more committed members of the Pudding Mill Lane Mosque, he viewed everyone he knew as deluded. It was perplexing to him that people paid so little heed to their own salvation; he was puzzled by it in the way he might have been by the sight of a mother feeding whisky to a baby. There might have been some short-term benefit in the respite from crying, but it wasn’t something that a reasonable person would do. Yet the truth of life, and of life after death, was not exactly hidden.
Hassan licked his lips and swallowed. Although the individual parts that made up the bombs were easy enough to find and buy, he was aware that the grimiest corner shops these days had CCTV cameras. The purchase of even three or four bottles of soft drinks at once might be remembered by the man at the counter, then recalled from the digital memory of the camera. He was therefore spreading his custom right across London, one bottle at a time. The hardest thing to get his hands on had been syringes. Eventually, he’d gone to the casualty department of his local hospital and feigned an acute pain in what he thought was the appendix area. He gave the triage nurse an invented name and address. After an hour, he was escorted from the waiting area into a more actively medical part of the building, with nurses, beds and stores; here he was put in a cubicle behind a curtain and told that a doctor would come. Then, ten minutes later, he peered out. There was no one in the linoleum-floored corridor. Ready to say, if challenged, that he was looking for a bathroom, Hassan set out to explore. Two large West Indian nurses rolled by, but neither stopped him. He could see a room with cardboard kidney dishes on a counter. In the cupboard over them, above boxes of antiseptic wipes, he found an open carton of syringes. He took a dozen, stuffed them in his jacket pocket and went quickly back to his cubicle. Nobody came to see him, so after twenty minutes in the airless, overheated little room, he retraced his steps to the waiting area and went unchallenged back into the world.
At Gloucester Road, Hassan stepped off the train and went up into the street. Batteries and disposable cameras were easy and cheap enough to find; the only thing he was having trouble with was hydrogen peroxide. But he had a plan for that.
In a first-floor flat of what had once been a railway worker’s cottage in Clapham, Hassan’s face in a photograph was being stared at by a young woman called Shahla Hajiani.
Shahla’s father, an Iranian businessman, had bought the one-bedroom flat as an investment, and, rather than have the trouble of letting it out, permitted his daughter to live there for nothing. Shahla, who had previously lived in Hackney with three fellow postgraduates, wasn’t sure she liked it. She sometimes felt lonely, particularly on a Sunday.
‘Oh, you silly boy,’ she said out loud as she put down the picture of Hassan. It was just a snap taken at a friend’s graduation party, but it showed him laughing, before he had become religious. Shahla herself was an atheist, having followed neither her mother’s Anglo-Judaism nor her father’s selective version of Islam.
The French professor had persuaded her to take a second degree after her success in the first, and now she saw a pathway into the academic world beginning to open up before her feet. She had agreed to do a PhD on the poetry of the surrealist Paul Éluard, but felt wary of the idea of teaching and of institutions that would naturally follow. She liked parties too much; she liked travelling and big cities, and her fortunate knack with literature could also be a snare, she thought.
She had met Hassan when he was a dedicated left-winger at student rallies, and she had at once been drawn to his passion and his soft manner. Behind his rhetorical certainties, she saw someone who had at some stage in his life been wounded. It puzzled and intrigued her, while the way he would let no one come too close to him suggested to Shahla a degree of fear. Yet up to a certain line – an invisible but passionately defended boundary – he was irresistible. His large hands with their thin, hair-covered wrists, his humorous, deep voice, his eyes so candid and willing to engage until the moment they took fright … She saw all these things in the photograph, and she sighed, a broken exhalation, as she replaced it in a drawer and went to make her duty Sunday phone call to her mother.
At six o’clock Ralph Tranter was gathering his armful of Sunday papers from the Iraqi newsagent, his pulse rate elevated by the weight of newsprint as well as by the thought of what it might contain. He lived with a cat called Septimus Harding in a flat in Ferrers End, a suburb that straddled the North Circular. Traffic hurried through it on its way to places of importance – Tottenham, Edmonton, Harringay – or north to the open spaces beyond the crawl of blackened bridge, gridlock and speed camera. Tranter’s road was called Mafeking Street and was occupied mostly by Kurds. A trip to the newsagent, Tranter told people, was like a walk through the history of the late twentieth century: here was the fallout of wars hot and cold; here was the collateral displacement of free markets and porous frontiers.
He had had a slow start to Sunday, finishing a book before going out late for the papers. His route to the high street took him through three near-identical roads of modest houses built for another London, a place long gone. He sometimes tried to picture those first tenants: manual workers who commuted to the smog-producing factories of Bermondsey or Poplar, then returned at night to their modest white enclave; but it was hard to imagine them now in these car-lined streets: that homogeneity was not in nature any more.
R. Tranter was always known by his first initial only, though very old friends might call him ‘Ralph’. Work colleagues and acquaintances called him ‘RT’. It had started when he submitted some reviews on spec to a small magazine, Outpost, soon after he had left Oxford. Finding themselves short of material at the last minute, they had printed one, but he had signed it only ‘R. Tranter’ and they had not been able to reach him by phone to find out what his first name was. When, a month later, a second magazine, Actium, rang to say they were also using an article by him and asked how he would like to be billed, he opted for reasons of continuity and superstition to go with ‘R. Tranter’. He had never liked his first name anyway, and it had been the subject of a lifelong confusion as to whether it rhymed with ‘Alf’ or ‘safe’.
He occupied the first floor of a two-storey building, and, although the house was a sooty brick nonentity, one of a row that varied only in external paint colour and size of TV aerial dish, his rooms were painted a pleasant magnolia and had simple furniture from a Finnish brownsite warehouse. To this clean modern look, the odd mahogany gateleg table or 1950s standard lamp from various second-hand shops had added, he felt, an original note.
Tranter logged on to the e-mail at his white PC. There was the usual Sunday horoscope from Stargazer. ‘Hi, Bruno Banks! A good week awaits you. Venus is in the ascendant, which means you are going to get lucky in love! Professional openings are abundant. Use your fabled charm to make the most of them. Have a good one, Bruno Banks! With best wishes from All the Team at Stargazer.’ Tranter envied Bruno his auspicious life. Unfortunately, Bruno was a fictional character Tranter had invented for a novel he’d abandoned two years earlier. As inspiration waned, he had looked to the Internet for help and hoped that signing up to a horoscope as Bruno Banks would give him ideas. It hadn’t. Eventually, Tranter e-mailed Stargazer to tell them Bruno had died, been hit by a meteor, had met an unexpected – an unforetold – end, but to no avail: the predictions kept on coming.
The sitting room was entirely lined with bookshelves that Tranter had made himself, sawing up furlongs of dusty MDF, wearing a face mask from the hardware shop on Green Lanes, then propping lengths of undercoated shelf on the sport and finance sections of spread-out newspapers. His woodwork had won steady praise in his schooldays, more than thirty years before, and, when the shelves had been painted white and fitted to the wall, they were able to support, without sagging, Tranter’s 2,000 piece library, ranged in alphabetical order from Achebe, Chinua to Zweig, Stefan. He sometimes regretted all the books he’d sold on to Bellswift, the sullen second-hand dealer in Lamb’s Conduit Street, but he knew that it was the half price he got for them that enabled him to continue to live in Europe’s most expensive city, albeit in Mafeking Street.
There was no television in the sitting room, merely a glass-topped coffee table with back numbers of the weekly papers, and a couple of armchairs upholstered in navy blue. One of these was usually occupied by the slothful Septimus, named after a character in The Warden, Tranter’s favourite Trollope novel. The cat added a touch of warmth to a room that might otherwise have been intimidating in its single-mindedness: the size of Tranter’s library meant there was no space on the walls for pictures or posters. The closest he had come to ornament was a wooden bust of G. K. Chesterton from a shop in Sicilian Avenue, which sat between the end of the Us (Upward, Edward) and the beginning of the Vs (van Vechten, Carl).
In November, Tranter had invited Patrick Warrender, the literary editor who gave him his staple work as a reviewer, to come and have dinner. He had also invited a married couple he had known since Oxford and a woman novelist of his own age, who made her living by broadcasting in a vein both maternal and minatory that was favoured by the radio, where she described Moby-Dick as ‘boysy’ and Anna Karenina as ‘badly written’. Patrick was gay, so there had been no need to find more women, and the conversation had continued successfully till one o’clock.
Tranter had written two reviews in the armful of Sunday papers he brought back from the newsagent. One of them had suffered the usual trimming, with some of his better thrusts cut back or modified; the other was untouched – usually a sign that Patrick Warrender, late back from lunch at his gentlemen’s club, had miscalculated the space and so had been obliged to let Tranter run on to his full extent. In any event, both were satisfactory. Tranter felt he had not only explained why the books were flawed, but had also managed to demonstrate that both writers were, in some essential way, fraudulent.
He went through to the small kitchen that overlooked the backyards of the terrace. A woman in Muslim headgear (what was the word for it? Hijab? Burkha?) was hanging washing on a line. Were they allowed to do that? he wondered. At some level, Tranter was confused between Muslim women in traditional dress and nuns. Was either group, for instance, allowed to ride a bicycle or play ping-pong? Would that be blasphemous, or merely comic?
In the next garden, the Bosnian war criminal was stripping down his motorbike, while from beyond him came the shrieking voices of the fast-breeding Catholic Polish family, as four boys attempted a football game on the tiny lawn.