Fourth Horseman (16 page)

Three hours later, after thorough security checks and a lot of waiting around, Alex and Mum boarded the plane. The cabin crew were prowling the aisles and checking seat belts when one last, breathless passenger appeared at the cockpit end of the aisle. It was Javed.

The plane doors closed. Fifteen minutes later it was airborne.

The rest we knew, and filled in for him. Alex nodded thoughtfully. ‘Javed’s uncles must have known it was going to happen,’ he said. ‘One of them must have made that phone call to warn us.’

Mum had her wits about her when they got to Heathrow. She and Alex were ushered through like royalty with the cricket team, but Javed was taken aside by the police. Mum asked what they wanted and they told her that they needed to ask Javed a few questions. Mum refused to leave him. After a long argument they agreed that she could be present during the interview, but not Alex. He didn’t know how long it would take so he decided to come through and wait for her in the arrivals lounge.

It wasn’t just Javed who was being questioned, clearly. It was a long, long time before we saw any people with dark skin emerging, and then there were long intervals between them. We learned later that some Shasakstani nationals had been detained for several days, but Javed, luckily, wasn’t one of them. He and Mum arrived about forty minutes later. We were all delighted to see each other, but our celebrations didn’t last long. They couldn’t. Someone who ought to have been there was missing. Manir was still stranded in Shasakstan, and none of us knew how long it would be before we would see him again.

I
T WAS THE STRANGEST
Christmas ever. Dad, who had been shocked into reality by the fear of losing Alex, took a break from the lab. He went over once a day to look after the squirrels and check his cultures, but came straight home and swung into action, making endless phone calls to the Home Office, the Foreign Office, the Shasakstani embassy and anyone else he could think of who might be in a position to find out what had happened to Manir. Attiya was doing the same thing on her own phone with about as much, or as little, success as Dad. At every step they were stone-walled. No one, it seemed, had any influence whatsoever with this new government.

When he reached the end of the line with that, Dad wandered around the house, tidying in his usual ineffectual way, and asking regularly if Mum wanted him to do anything. But, uncharacteristically, Mum was equally dithery. Occasionally she tried to put her mind to the festive occasion, but with all that was going on in our world and in the wider world beyond, it was hard for her, or for any of us, to get into the spirit of feasting.

It was Attiya who rescued the day. She dropped round with Javed on the morning of Christmas Eve and invited us all to spend the following day at her house.

‘I propose we all opt out for the day,’ she said. ‘Turn off the TV and the radio and leave the religious maniacs to slug it out between them. We’ll have a nice, secular feast, just for the hell of it. And the only rule will be that we are not allowed to talk about politics.’

She must have been aware of the shock we all felt at her words. With her husband out of contact and her country at the heart of a new world disorder it seemed almost callous to turn her back on it like that. She laughed at our expressions of disbelief.

‘Worry never robbed tomorrow of its sorrows,’ she said. ‘It only robs today of its strength.’

So we dressed in our everyday, comfortable, secular clothes and went over to the Maliks’. For a non-Christmas. It was a great day. Attiya had laid on a wonderful meal of varied origins, and for the first time in days we put the worries of the world out of our minds and enjoyed ourselves. We played cards and charades and board games instead of watching TV, and Attiya, as always, had us all in stitches. But for all she had said about worry, and for all her clowning and laughing, I glimpsed, from time to time, the sadness in her eyes. There was no doubt that she missed Manir terribly.

At about midnight Mum and Dad began to make ‘time to go’ sort of noises, and Alex asked if he could stay the night with Javed. Attiya said he could, and that I could as well, if I wanted to. The boys seemed keen, so I agreed. Attiya dropped Mum and Dad home because she was the only adult who hadn’t been drinking, and the rest of us went upstairs to Javed’s room. I assumed I’d be sleeping in the spare room, but Javed dragged a chair-bed into his room from the landing and made it up for me.

We got into our beds and lay in snug silence for a while. Then Javed said, ‘It’s after midnight. It’s Boxing Day. We can talk about whatever we like now.’

I wasn’t sure I wanted to be reminded of all those things I had worked so hard at forgetting, but after a while Alex took the lead.

‘So, it looks as if we were right about the horsemen all along,’ he said.

‘Right about what?’ said Javed.

‘About what they were telling us,’ said Alex.

‘Well, what were they telling us?’ said Javed.

‘You know. What we said. About the empire and the rebellion and everything. That’s what happened, isn’t it?’

I waited for Javed to respond to that, but he said nothing.

‘I think they might have been warning Dad not to let Alex and me go to Shasakstan,’ I said. After all, if I had gone, who would have had the last ticket home?’

‘I wish you had gone,’ said Javed. ‘I wish I was still there with Dad. I didn’t want to leave him.’

‘But if I hadn’t been there either, then you would both be back here.’ Javed didn’t respond to that, and Alex went on: ‘He’ll be OK, Javed. I know he will.’

We had been through this endlessly, Alex and I. We had decided that Javed’s uncle, whichever of them tipped Manir off, would have manoeuvred himself into a safe position within the new government, whatever his personal philosophy. He would make sure Manir wasn’t harmed.

‘I wish I could be so sure,’ Javed said. A bright spark of anger flickered in his eyes. It wasn’t aimed at us, but it unsettled us all the same.

‘So you don’t think the horsemen meant anything?’ said Alex. ‘You don’t think they were warning Dad against letting us go to Shasakstan?’

‘I don’t know what they were doing there,’ said Javed. ‘I didn’t see them.’

I experienced a twinge of anger myself at that. ‘You didn’t see them so you don’t believe I did either. Is that what you’re saying?’

Javed softened. ‘I didn’t mean that. I just meant that I can’t get worked up about it. If they had told us how to stop the coup happening it might be different.’

I hated what was happening to us. We’d had such a great day, with everyone entering into the spirit of Attiya’s politics ban. But now we had been drawn straight back into the storm at the centre of world affairs and all of us, especially Javed, were still being affected by it. I sensed that he felt the horsemen belonged to a more innocent past, as if they were a game that we had once played or a Famous Five mystery that we had tried to solve together. There was no point now in trying to revive that lost interest. I had to go along with the interpretations we had put on their appearance, but I didn’t believe that we had seen the last of them. They were with me constantly those days, standing like a backdrop to the political situation and to all my thoughts connected to it. Still hovering around the woods, watching the project. Still waiting for something. But for what?

D
ESPITE THE RESTRICTIONS IMPOSED
by the new government a certain number of eye-witness reports did get out of Shasakstan. There were a few journalists there with satellite phones and for a while at least they were able to send out messages. Other accounts were smuggled out across the borders and sent from neighbouring countries. Most of them were in agreement on the immediate aftermath of the coup. There had been arrests and detentions but very little bloodshed: at least, not yet. But severe new religious laws had been passed which affected the way people lived, and they were being strictly enforced. The general consensus of the reports was that the people were knuckling under and keeping their heads down. What would happen in the longer term was anybody’s guess.

Meanwhile the US government was coming under pressure at home and abroad to come up with a peaceful solution. More and more critical voices were heard in the media, expressing the view that the rise of Islamic fundamentalism was a response to the policies of the West in Muslim countries. It was time, almost everyone agreed, for America to take the lead in making some significant changes. Since there was no military option available to it this time, the US administration had no alternative but to adopt the diplomatic route. The White House issued a succession of strong statements asserting that it would never give in to terrorism, but it was well known that negotiations about the release of the prisoners and the withdrawal of US forces from the Middle East were taking place at undisclosed locations. In the meantime the stalemate continued, and the world held its breath and waited to see what would happen.

During the week between Christmas and the New Year Dad took more time off work. He spent no more than an hour or two there each morning, and the rest of the time he was at home with us. I was delighted. The trauma we had lived through had clearly freed his mind from whatever hold the horsemen had on him, and he was himself again. Not acting, not distant and scary. He was my dad again and I capitalized on it. I got him out to the cinema, and for walks and cycles. We had a few centimetres of snow one day, and he joined Alex and me in making a snowman. I laughed at his jokes even if I’d heard them before. Maybe I was the one who was acting now, but it felt great, having him back.

I spent a lot of time with Mum as well, but I still didn’t manage to tell her about the horsemen. In one sense, the global one, they were more present than ever. But in another, now that Dad was fully with us again, they seemed less significant. I wasn’t needed in the lab those days so I didn’t have to pass those creepy woods and imagine what might be lurking in them. I couldn’t see any purpose in dragging myself and Mum into that darkness, particularly as there was a chance that we wouldn’t have her at home for much longer.

On the first day of the new year she was due to go to a conference in New Zealand called ‘Developments in the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Serious Sporting Injuries’, but now she was in two minds about going. The conference only lasted three days but she had arranged with some of her colleagues months ago that they would take an extra week or so to have a bit of a holiday while they were there, so she was due to be gone for a fortnight. The flights and the conference had been paid for by the management of the team but, given the situation, they had left it up to Mum to choose whether she would go or not.

She had pretty much decided not to, but by New Year’s Eve the situation in Shasakstan hadn’t changed. The nuclear holocaust we had all half expected hadn’t happened. Shasakstan was still the top item on the news every day, but the researchers were hard pressed to come up with any new angles. It looked like being a long-term stalemate rather than the sudden and total collapse of civilization that some commentators had been predicting. In view of that, there was nothing to be gained by Mum hanging around at home, and although her employers were putting no pressure on her, she felt under an obligation to them. Alex and I were getting on with our lives and Dad was planning to get back to some serious work in the lab the following week. In the end, with our blessings, Mum made the decision to go.

I
DON’T KNOW WHY
it was that Mum was never there when the most momentous things happened. For some reason she had no part to play in the drama that had started to unfold and that was soon to reach its climax. And since she had no part to play, there was no need for her to get mixed up in any of it. At least, that was what her fate seemed to have planned for her: to be the one who heard about it all after it had happened, and who had to help pick up the scattered pieces of her family’s lives. Perhaps it was her punishment for having been away from us so much. After the fire she gave up her job anyway. She had to, because someone had to look after Dad.

Javed, however, was clearly destined to be involved. Why else would he have been at our house the night Dad got that critical phone call from Mr Davenport? If Mum had been there instead of in New Zealand that night, she might have talked sense into Dad and the whole horrendous thing might have ended there and then. But she wasn’t there, and Javed was, and he was the one who twigged it in the end and gave us that one last chance of saving Dad from himself.

Mum left as planned on New Year’s Day, and that afternoon Javed came round. Dad and I made a huge Sunday dinner, which we had early, then he went off to his office to do something or other and the boys cleared a space in the sitting room and did some aikido. They were out of practice, and the classes were due to start again the following Saturday.

The phone rang. Dad took it in the hall. I noticed that the boys had become harder and faster in their sparring. Before, it had been something like dancing. Now it was definitely fighting. They still had scrupulous manners and they never hurt each other, but I was in no doubt that they could have, if they’d wanted to.

Dad came in and sat on the arm of the sofa. ‘That man’s a basket case,’ he said.

‘Who?’

‘Davenport. Look at the state of the world and all he can worry about is red squirrels.’

‘What did he want?’

‘Oh, the usual. How is it going and how much longer? But he’s definitely losing it. He offered me a massive bonus if I can get it up and running before the end of the month.’

‘How much?’ said Alex.

‘Oh, silly money,’ said Dad. ‘Enough to pay off the mortgage, anyway.’

‘Enough to put up your chalet in the garden?’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘Enough to turn the shed into an aikido dojo?’ said Alex.

‘Yes,’ said Dad.

‘Wow,’ I said. ‘And can you do it?’

Dad shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s in the lap of the gods at this stage.’