Sitting on the steel table, Ishaq placed three fingers on his upper arm to test its throbbing. He placed more relieving compression on the pressure dressing and padded wrap. Once Marwane had helped him into A&E the triaging nurse had rushed him through, more concerned by the fact that he wasn’t responding well to simple questions rather than the sight of blood.
Once satisfied they sat him in a curtained area, waiting for an hour. Between the gaps of furrowed curtains he saw other patients being wheeled past. An old man was trolleyed-in and placed in the section beside. Ishaq caught a glimpse of blighted, swollen, eyes that started red at the base but ended in fungal mounds of black. Ishaq watched as the man’s white hairs, on an even paler chest, poked up then retracted. An attendant closed his curtain, but the man’s breathing accompanied Ishaq’s thoughts, a syrupy hoarseness that peaked and troughed.
They moved Ishaq to his current room where they stuck two drips into him, one in each elbow. One took blood, and Ishaq looked on as red essence looped upwards, sucked out as through a straw. The other elbow held a cannula that put fluids back in. He was told that they needed some time to take tests and his blood count.
Minute by minute he started to feel better, his head and vision was clearing. His breathing was stronger. He caught sight of himself in a full-length mirror. Sallow skin, his eyes drooped and sunken. A pathetic sight. He looked away.
‘I’m Doctor Faisal, and I’ll be dealing with you.’ The doctor had a strong accent and friendly eyes. He bore a large wiry beard and a zabiba or ‘raisin’, a darkened patch of hardened skin on his forehead that showed where he prostrated during prayer. ‘You’ve had a bit of a scare tonight.’
Ishaq was unsure whether this was a statement or an inquiry so just nodded, thinking a silent rebuttal would deflect any further inquest.
‘So what exactly happened here?’ insisted the doctor.
‘I was messing about with a friend and I tripped over and cut myself on a chucked beer bottle. It was a bit freakish.’ Ishaq hoped that a slightly trenchant tone would convey that he knew how pathetic an answer this was but also that he did not want to engage further.
The doctor smiled. ‘Must have been a very long, straight, and sharp broken bottle, and you must have landed right on top…’ He stared at Ishaq for a reaction. ‘You know I should report this?’
‘It’s all under control, it was just an accident. I’m near my finals at Uni, so I can’t afford any hassle.’
The doctor appraised Ishaq, looking over his tracksuit and face. ‘Hmm Hmm, well, you’re lucky. The police have their hands full at the moment. As we have, too, with everything that’s happening. Lots of stupid people hurting each other. Where are you from?’
‘The Estate.’
‘No, I mean where are you originally from?’
‘London.’
Still not satisfied, the doctor consulted his notes.
‘The Estate? That’s rough, I heard there were raids there last month. Boys. Your lot.’
‘There’s always something going on. And it’s not my lot.’
‘The police said that they have evidence of them buying-up chemicals.’
Seriously give me a break. Ishaq’s shoulders dipped and his body buckled slightly. ‘They are not my lot. I don’t know anything about it.’
Ishaq heard a sharp scream from outside the door. The tannoy sounded soon after: DOCTOR TO RESUS. The doctor grabbed his stethoscope and rushed out of the door. Ishaq was left alone once again. He still had a pulse oximeter on a finger and leads on his chest. For amusement he studied the monitor beside him. The numbers, high and low, were incomprehensible but the lines and waves of his heart rate were fascinating: red, green, and blue pulses, that pinged up and down like in a video game. Ishaq first held his breath and then, after a moment, panted rapidly, testing to see if he could make the display change, but had to stop after once again feeling faint.
He thought about Mujahid, still confused by his behaviour. He remembered one of the last circles that Mujahid had attended. Mujahid would always go on and on about Islam’s golden history and how everything was perfect in those halcyon days, snatching random names from history as evidence.
Mujahid had said, ‘We should be be proud, and respect our heritage. Gain some dignity from the achievements of people with our beliefs who came before us. Our societies. I was reading how we invented the zero, we should be proud.’
He remembered joking and throwing the arguments back. It seemed so light-hearted but, looking back, it wasn’t. There was something fundamental at stake. Deep-seated ways of looking at the world that were at odds.
‘I read too, Mujahid. Indians and Hindus can claim to have invented that too, and people like al-Kindi brought it over. I’m not saying that what happened back then wasn’t amazing, like ibn Hatham creating the scientific method…’
‘See, Ayub. The boy is disrespectful,’ Mujahid had said, kissing his teeth.
Marwane had laughed as usual. ‘Mic drop.Don’t mess with Ishaq, boy.’
Ayub had tried to make a soft, smiling intervention, ‘Yes, the West would like to believe they invented everything and, yes, we should talk about it and learn this history ourselves, and make sure it’s not forgotten or discarded, but I’m not sure we should link it to anything deeper.’
Ishaq said, ‘See, Mujahid, the Greeks made amazing breakthroughs and they worshipped multiple idols. Isaac Newton was an extremist Christian nut, yet that didn’t stop him being a genius, scientifically.’ Ishaq remembered the feeling of showing-off, that he was pushing it too far. ‘Arabs use it for nationalism, which is a joke, too, when half of the famous guys like Al-Khwarizmi, the algebra guy, and ibn Hayyan, the chemistry one, were Persian. Just like they go on about Saladin and forget he was Kurdish.’
Ishaq had shown him up, but still, he didn’t deserve being here in this disinfected room. He saw that old scene as through a mist, time blurred and replayed. Speech sounded low-pitched and elongated. He remembered Marwane’s chuckles and Mujahid’s abashed look around, before a silent withdrawal. There was still some comfort in harking back to that past.
The doctor returned.
‘I thought you had forgotten about me.’
‘Sorry about that. We are really understaffed. I’m a locum myself. They like getting foreigners like me in. We are disposable. You can easily blame us if anything goes wrong. Ha, ha.’
‘Was it the old man? What happened?’
‘Why do you want to know what happened? What does it matter to you?’ The doctor took off the pressure pad and examined the clotted wound. He took a swab and some iodine and started to cleanse the area. He then relented to Ishaq’s obvious curiosity ‘He died.’
Ishaq wondered about what kind of life the man had lived and whether he had family. He thought of how little we knew of our end and, in our finality, how death was the absolute equaliser.
As if reading his thoughts, the doctor said, ‘You shouldn’t be so morbid. It ends for all of us, sometime. But not yet for a young man like you, not tonight.’
The doctor consulted his notes and checked the monitor. Assured, he took the leads off Ishaq. Talking his way through the procedure, he took a syringe with some local anaesthetic and injected some either side of the wound.
‘Ok, we have to wait a few minutes for the anaesthetic to kick in. Ishaq? That’s a strong name. A prophet’s name. Ishaq, Yaqoob, Ibrahim. Do you know where I am from?’
‘Egypt.’
The doctor smiled, tickled and pleased by the correct answer. ‘How do you know?’
Ishaq looked at the much older man. The dome of his head shining, but cosseted by greying and white bolsters of hair. ‘Your accent, a guess from the way you look and, I heard in the corridor, you sometimes pronounce ‘j’ as ‘g’.’
‘Ah, so you are familiar with Arabs? And your parents are from…?’
Ishaq was now feeling relaxed, brain-fog lifting, so submitted to the inevitable. He was used to the interest from English people who lived outside London, and co-religionists who were overly-familiar. ‘Pakistan. They’re from Pakistan.’
‘Good. Good.’ The doctor’s tone lowered and he peeked around, even though the room was empty. ‘By the way, you’re right not to trust the police, they make things up all the time.’
The Doctor was warming to this conversation. First the distrust, then a sudden rush into confidence and now he was his co-conspirator in idle discussion. Ishaq nodded timidly, forcing a smile. The Doctor carried on stitching and talking, talking and stitching. Ishaq wanted to ask him to stop the chat and concentrate on the task at hand but thought better of it as he looked at latex-gloved hands sewing the wound,metal forceps in one, to hold his mutilated skin together, and a curved needle with nylon thread in the other.
‘Ok…so will I get a scar?’
‘Oh, yes, but it’s a pretty clean cut. You might get away with a faint line,’ the doctor said, as he smiled like someone hoping something away in the face of incontrovertible proof.
The doctor examined the sutures once again, looking at them intently, rubbing his forehead.
‘Whoever did this likes jokes, too, I think. Or maybe the cinema.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Well, look at the cut. It’s marked like a Z. Have you been fighting with Zorro?’
Ishaq took a look at the railroad of stitches, that turned one way then another. It did look strikingly like a Z. But did he really mean to cut him like that? Ishaq remembered his jokes about the spelling of ‘Muslim Boyz’, but he never told Mujahid. ‘Well, maybe more like a wannabe Robin Hood.’
The doctor fetched a fresh dressing from a cupboard. ‘Out of interest, those boys on the estate? Do you really believe that they were making and buying stuff to hurt people?’
‘I don’t know what to believe anymore.’
‘I think it’s all made up,’ repeated the doctor.
Ishaq was exhausted. His brain felt muddled. The constant fluctuation between the compulsions of fight and flight, assessing friend or foe, was depleting. Conversations like this exacted a toll. Each time, the intrusion took a chunk, a slight bite, of you. And it didn’t matter what the issue was, it was always somebody else’s fault. The whole world thought themselves innocent, everyone thought they were doing their best while impotent in the face of the bigger picture, yet people still did bad things. Shit was still happening yet no one was to blame. How does any of it happen, if no one is ever to blame? No one was ever in error. Everyone was human. Everyone had flaws. Were we supposed to just give shrugs of the shoulder, be decent and accept that we were powerless, and get on with scratching along, fumbling in the dark, sitting, chatting and bemoaning, stewing in uncertainty, and be intimidated by complexity. And who did that leave? The only people who could rise above and break outside were kooks and extremists. People with surety and visions so clarifying, so dazzling, that they bleached out those things of the most importance: other people. It was not acceptable.
Ishaq took another look at himself in the mirror. He saw someone weak and subdued. A boy in a stupor. He decided to take charge of his features: rearrange them so that he had control.
Ishaq said, ‘The thing is, we do have dodgy people among us. The thing with these conspiracies is that you can’t prove them, one way or another.’
The doctor stopped and responded as if Ishaq had just made an accusation. ‘I’m not into conspiracies. I’m a realist. I don’t trust anything. You can’t keep on denying all conspiracy theories, as so many are true. Just look on the Internet.’
Great. That wonderful invention, the Internet. Where every issue seemed so serious that in the end nothing was. Where spreading falsehood and abuse felt as substantial as throwing air.
‘Yes, but…’
‘If you send an email, or say certain words on the phone, do they track you?’
‘Yes.’
‘In Birmingham, did someone write a fake letter about Muslim schools, and did they once put traffic cameras around the whole community to check who was coming in and out?’
‘Yea..’
‘So what do we do when all the conspiracies are true?’
Ishaq shook his head. The doctor sounded like a more educated form of Mujahid. Even among men like this conspiracies spread. And he was right, what do you say when so many conspiracies are true? When paranoia is a sensible awareness?
Ishaq looked at the doctor and the room around him. Doctors and teachers were once the last position of trust in society. Now, it wasn’t uncommon to hear about a doctor trying to bomb an airport. Now, it wasn’t uncommon for academics in their ivory towers to debate torture. One Harvard law professor pontificated on how one could cause excruciating pain without lasting damage; he surmised that it was ok for sterile needles to be pushed under nails with agonizing force. Needles like the one the doctor had used, on people like Ishaq and everyone he loved. Now it was ok for your own university to spy on you.
‘It’s all a mess…but still…you have to try and live a life, right?’
‘Maybe.’ The doctor nodded, and seemed to take in and accept it. Ishaq was relieved. The doctor checked the cut a final time and, happy, he placed a bandage on it and then some padding, and covered it with a white dressing. Smiling, he handed Ishaq a leaflet. ‘This will tell you how to look after the stitches and wound. Make sure they are clean and you don’t get them wet. No scratching, as the irritation will make it worse. You can go to your GP and get the stitches taken out in a few days. Please keep out of trouble.’
He took off his latex gloves and shook Ishaq’s hand. Ishaq walked to the seat where his shirt lay, now stiffened by flakes of blood. He put it back on, hoping Marwane had gone and fetched some new clothing. He gave one last look to the doctor, who was still speaking ‘….but these boys making that stuff and then storing it in that garage, I still think the police could have used a computer to change the image of their faces.’
Ishaq stared blankly at him in disbelief…and then it popped into his head, diverting his train of thought: the Z: the only people he could remember joking about it were Marwane…and Shams.