The Walking Dead

Ramzi had never before been so close, shoulder to shoulder, with a Crusader, an enemy. The family had no friends outside their own community. At his schools, the kids had all been Muslim and dominated by lessons on the Faith. At college, before he had dropped out of the computer-studies course — eight months into a two-year curriculum — the other students' families had originated from Pakistan and Bangladesh. The benefit office he used was staffed from the ghetto. The shops he, his mother and his sisters went to were inside the ghetto. Where he worshipped, where he had been recruited, the evils of the morally corrupt society of the Crusaders had been drilled into his mind. The television he watched came on the satellite, and the websites he visited trumpeted the successes of martyrs in the fight against the enemy.

It was a soft voice, a Birmingham accent. 'You want a sandwich? Sorry, sorry…I'm a daft bugger, they're ham. But there's rock cakes my missus made, and the flask's coffee.' He had wolfed three cakes, and drunk from the mug on top of the Thermos, and he had learned of the life of the driver, and his family's life, and their home in the Smethwick suburb of Birmingham, and the holiday he was looking forward to—'Can't come bloody fast enough, know what I mean?'—in a caravan park on the Yorkshire coast, and the job he did delivering shelf supplies to supermarkets. He had been driven into Tamworth, and a sign for the rail station had been pointed out.

'You'll be all right now, but better when you've had a wash and brush-up. Been good knowing you.'

He had stepped down from the cab. He had seen the smile above him, and the little wave. Should he have said it? Should he have told the kind Crusader, the generous enemy, not to go with his family next Saturday morning into the centre of Birmingham? It had been in his mind, deep in his throat…But the lorry had pulled away, and the warning was left unspoken.

The first train of the morning service out of Tamworth had brought Ramzi home. He had fled because he was condemned. Not in words…Where I fight, a cell must be secure or it will fail, and failure comes when respect inside the cell is lost. Trust was placed in you. Should I doubt that trust? The hand had been gentle on his shoulder, and a smile had been at the mouth. The words had been honeyed, not the eyes. The eyes had told him he was condemned — perhaps not that day, perhaps the day after, because Ramzi had lost respect, and trust in him was doubted, and the eyes had pierced him and had spelt out their contempt. He was dead if he stayed so he had run. If he walked slowly, he would reach his home within fifteen minutes, and he would hit the door with his fist and a sister or his mother would unlock it, and the story of his failure would be prised from him. They would learn of his disgrace, his shame, his humiliation. His old boasts replaced by a stuttered confession. Their old pride in him gone.

He sat on the bench and the cold sank into his body.

* * *

The handler was always the first in his home to rise, shower, shave and dress. A biscuit for the grand old lady, retired, in her basket. Then the kettle on, a pot of tea made, a mug taken, up to his wife, a bang on the doors of his kids' rooms and protest groans as a reward. It was still dark. He heard the six o'clock news on the radio every morning unless he was on early turn and already at work. He ate toast and listened to the news, then climbed into his waterproofs. On his pager, he read a bald text of an increased security alert down south in the capital, but the spin-off was that he was tasked to show the flag and let his spaniel sniff round the city's railway station and the bus terminus. It had been a regular routine since Seven-Seven, since the bombers had taken an early train into the heart of London with explosives in rucksacks on their backs. The radio told him that the Dow was down overnight, that big redundancies were forecast in the north-west, there had been a homophobic attack in the south-west, a junior minister was entangled in scandal, two suicide bombs in Iraq…The handler barely took in the litany of gloom. He savoured the tea, the toast and the quiet. By being dressed in time for the six o'clock news he was able to enjoy the peace of the house, and he would have said, if asked, that it was the time of day he enjoyed most, particularly in autumn, winter and spring when it was still dark outside, and he could think and reflect.