Saving a Child From God Read online

  “Abdullah!”

  Ibrahim took a step toward his son with an outstretched arm as the bird cawed and adjusted its feet to get a better grip on his skull cap. Abdullah had frozen with hunched shoulders, but was slowly turning his head to try to get a better look up at the bird.

  “Abdullah, just...”

  What if it pecked him in the eye? Or passed on some disease? Ibrahim took another step, stopping as he saw his son nod slightly, show the bird the key and whisper something.

  Then it took off, called three or four times in quick succession, and was gone.

  He ran over and scooped him up.

  “Abdullah...”

  “It’s OK, daddy. Don’t worry. The bird was just saying hello.”

  Ibrahim released him and knelt down in front of him, examining the top of his head. All he could see was some faint black marks left on the cloth by the crow’s feet.

  “Did it hurt you?”

  Abdullah laughed. “Of course not! The birds would never hurt me, daddy. They’re my friends. Look!” He opened his hand to show the golden key. “Look what it brought me. Let’s show mother.”

  Ibrahim carefully examined it. It was a lever lock key about three inches long with an intricately patterned bow.

  “How... interesting. What do you think it’s for?”

  “Give it back! Give it back!” Abdullah snatched it and ran around whooping again.

  “Abdullah...”

  He watched his energetic burst, waiting for him to tire or calm. This was all so strange. First a cross and now a key. What could it possibly mean? It had to mean something because Allah controlled everything from the rising of the sun to the movement of the fish in the sea.

  “I’m going to keep it on me all the time!”

  “Really...?” Ibrahim looked up as three low-flying seagulls noisily passed overhead. “You’re not going to put it with the rest of your collection?”

  “No, I must keep it on me all the time. Wait till I show them at school. Whoopee!” He threw the key up in the air and caught it. “The crow told me it’s from Allah.”

  “What?”

  “It is a gift, daddy. A gift from Allah.”

  ****

  Chapter Two

  On the giant HD plasma screen TV, the sharks were circling.

  Professor James Jeggert carefully swirled the cinnamon vodka at the bottom of his glass as the pair of terrified scuba divers onscreen bobbed back to back, kicking out and yelling whenever a fin broke the surface.

  “Not long now, my old chums...”

  He smiled, took another sip of the expensive alcohol and relished the trail of warmth it left down his throat.

  Oh yes, Open Water really was a marvellous movie, an existential nightmare of extraordinary simplicity in which two romantically involved divers surface only to find their tourist boat long gone. Dehydration, despair and sharks all follow as the pitiless Queensland sun beats down on their unprotected heads. Constantly framed by the endless expanse of sea and sky as little more than microscopic blobs of life, they have no choice but to focus on the impending doom etched ever larger on each other’s blanched faces.

  Professor Jeggert put the tumbler on the armrest, grabbed the Bombay Bad Boy Pot Noodle from between his legs, and stuffed a spicy forkful into his mouth.

  The movie’s message was clear: the universe was cruelly indifferent to your fate. It didn’t matter whether you lived or died. You might think you were a worthy individual but in the great scheme of things your life actually meant nothing, no more significant than a bug flying through the air one moment and splatting against a windscreen the next.

  The truth about human existence was right here in this eighty-minute exercise in cinematic dread, not some holy book.

  “Yes,” he murmured, pausing to lick at an elusive smear of hot curry sauce drying on his goatee. He grabbed the glass again.

  “Yes...”

  He raised a toast to the couple’s futile struggle as one of the dead-eyed monsters beneath the waves silently drew closer to a pair of dangling, irresistible legs and tore out a chunk.

  ****

  After turning off the home entertainment system with a satisfied sigh, Professor Jeggert spent a leisurely forty minutes constructing the left-hand corner of the Coliseum on his latest 1000-piece Wonders of the World jigsaw puzzle. Next he completed a cryptic crossword in his well-thumbed Jumbo Book of Brainteasers, a little relieved that the words had come so easily. Then he won a very tricky level eight game of Chess Titans on his Apple laptop in which he’d only needed the undo button four times.

  “I’m a professor!” he crowed at the screen as its female voice congratulated him and timidly asked if he wanted to play again. He gave it the finger. “Don’t you know that?”

  He sat back in the armchair and steepled his fingers, wondering what to do next. A bit more work on the hyponymy and hypernymy section of his lexical semantics paper? A good-natured grapple with that logic-based favourite, Sudoku? Or he could always add a bit more flesh to his skeletal (but very exciting) idea to set up The Tiverby Sceptics.

  He chewed a nail, glancing at the two-inch thick Chomsky biography lying by the bottle of Smirnoff on the coffee table alongside. He’d left it at the point during the Faurisson affair when the great man’s rallying cry for unconditional free speech was being misconstrued and abused by his dull-witted enemies.

  So many choices for cerebral nourishment. It was tragic how some people allowed their brains to wither or just used them in the wrong way. What was that Woody Allen movie in which he said the brain was his second favourite organ? Funny, although of course Woody should have said it was his favourite organ. That would have been much more apt. Oh yes, discipline, logic and rationality – the holy trinity upon which every day must be built.

  “Won’t catch me tittering over some skateboarding cat video on a smart phone,” he mumbled, rubbing his temples. “Use it or lose it! Those things... A brain... you see... A brain... Yes...” He frowned, the chain of words having disappeared into the haze.

  He looked at the Smirnoff again, felt saliva flood into his mouth and reached for the half-full bottle.

  “Nowt wrong with a little treat if it’s been earned... After all, all work and no play makes Jamesykins a dull boy.” He grinned while pouring a healthy measure. “Na zdorovie!”

  He picked up The Telegraph, immediately drawn to a story about a Christian-run bakery in Northern Ireland that had come under fire for refusing to make a wedding cake with rainbow icing and two grooms on top holding hands.

  Interviewed at length, the bakery manager insisted that marriage could only possibly be a union between a man and a woman.

  ‘This order for a cake was against my beliefs and at odds with the teachings in the Bible,’ he said. ‘A Christian running a business should be allowed to follow his or her Christian beliefs and principles.

  ‘If people like me don’t take a stand against such things, where will we all be further down the road? You’ve got to take a stand.’

  Professor Jeggert smiled and reached onto the table to retrieve the bulging scrapbook, along with the scissors and Pritt Stick. Flicking through its pages, he glanced at some of the more choice headlines.

  Witchdoctor ordered albino body parts. Pope urges rethink on contraception. Mecca crane collapse kills 107. Pro-lifer shoots abortionist. Fifth ‘atheist blogger’ hacked to death in Bangladesh. Church slammed for changing Lennon lyric to ‘one religion’. Hajj stampede toll rises to 2,400. Intelligent Design thrown out by judge. ‘Soldiers of Allah’ jailed for Rigby killing.

  Above a newspaper article about a pair of Siamese twins fused at the forehead, he’d written God Creates Life while above a story about a rise in the number of miscarriages, he’d written But Sometimes He Changes His Mind.

  He found an empty page, neatly cut around the bakery article and glued it in. With the scrapbook open on his lap to allow it to dry, he polished off the glass of neat vodka and let his head loll back.

  “It’s the 21st century!” he shouted at the ceiling. “Does anyone... Any of you dunderheads know?”

  ****

  Professor Jeggert woke with a start.

  He looked at his living room with some confusion while rolling his tongue around his gluey mouth.

  He’d had a dream, something about floating at a dizzying height over the hot sands of a desert trying to make it to somewhere better.

  What day...?

  He took off his glasses and pinched the sides of his nose.

  Tuesday. Yes, Tuesday, that was it.

  He glanced at his watch. 11.15am. Work was calling. Couldn’t be late again, especially as he had Little Ms By The Book to sort out. She’d finally granted him a meeting and no doubt he’d soon be back teaching hungry undergraduates instead of painfully spoon feeding the language to raw recruits.

  Oh, how he missed the buzz of a lecture theatre! Was there anything more invigorating than pushing through the swing doors armed with his trusty laser pointer to take his place at the front of hundreds of students, all eyes upon him as they waited for his compelling insights into second-language acquisition and linguistic anthropology?

  He would return. He would show the uptight likes of Little Ms By The Book that he still had it, even if it were the last thing he did...

  He got to his feet, swaying and blinking as he tried to remember what he’d been going to do. His head seemed full of thick, heavy clouds. Fresh air. Yes, that’d do him the world of good. Plus a bit of sunlight. He left the living room and walked to the kitchen, stopping by the cellar door.

  It was ajar.

  Strange, he always kept it locked. Had he been down there recently? He pushed the creaking door open and looked at the half-rotten flight of wooden steps t
hat fell away into darkness.

  The cellar was a damp, unused corner of the house with a faintly fetid odour that he’d never got around to doing anything with. Vague plans to turn it into a well-stocked wine cellar or a games room complete with pinball machine and jukebox had remained just that. He’d never even sorted out the junk down there.

  He pulled the light cord. Nothing happened. Bulb must have blown.

  He put a hand on the makeshift banister that was little more than a plank of wood diagonally nailed to the wall when he thought he heard something.

  A vague cooing or cawing.

  He looked around and rubbed his fuzzy head, unsure if the muted sound were even emanating from the cellar.

  “Hello...?”

  He paused with a foot on the first step as the soft, pulsing noise came again.

  Was that a bird down there?

  He waited, listening intently.

  Nothing.

  “Aah...”

  He flapped a dismissive hand at the stairs and shut the door. He turned the key, making a mental note to change the bulb later. Then he opened the kitchen door and took a few deep breaths of the morning air. The sunlight on his face was warm and invigorating.

  He stretched, noticing the garden was getting ramshackle, if not badly overgrown. The lawn really needed mowing and the hedge had lost its rectangular shape. He stepped out and stretched again, breaking off when he saw a couple of Coke cans lying on the grass.

  Bloody people.

  There was a litter bin on the corner of the street right outside his house and yet he still had to put up with thoughtless idiots slinging over their crap.

  He picked up the cans and lobbed them back over the high wall, listening with mild satisfaction as they hit the pavement. He dusted his hands.

  “See how you like it...”

  He patted the wall and turned to gaze at his three-bedroom Edwardian property with its heritage-listed features. What a fine home. Worth a pretty penny, too. The high wall, which ran around three sides, was undoubtedly one of its best attributes as it ensured privacy while keeping out the hoi polloi. Of course, they instinctively sensed there was something better on the other side and that’s why they threw their rubbish over.

  Pathetic, really.

  He went back inside, changed into an argyle tank top and purple tie, and grabbed his briefcase. He left the house, hesitating as he passed the car. He did feel a little groggy. Perhaps it would be a good idea to drive while getting his head together to the chilled sounds of Golden Brown or Always the Sun. No, it was a nice April day and a walk would be better. After all, there was no excuse for failing to exercise after having given his mind such a vigorous workout.

  At the end of the driveway he struggled with the latch on the gate. For some reason the usual lift and push manoeuvre didn’t quite cut it and he ended up pretty much shaking it open. One day he’d fix it.

  He closed the gate behind him and did a dozen curls with his briefcase, pretending it was a five-kilo dumbbell as he watched a lorry struggle to negotiate the tight bend just before the small stone bridge that spanned Tiverby’s river.

  He set off, stopping at the litter bin. The two Coke cans had landed a little distance from it. One was standing upright in the middle of the pavement while the other had rolled into the gutter. He frowned and glanced up at an approaching middle-aged woman in a red skirt as she walked a Dalmatian.

  “We all have to live together, you know,” he muttered.

  “Sorry...?” she said, stopping. The dog immediately began sniffing his shoes and wagging its tail. “Did you say something?”

  He pointed at the bin. “We... They keep...” He gave her his best smile. “Doesn’t matter.”

  He shuffled toward the cans and put them in the bin.

  ****

  Professor Jeggert began the fifteen-minute walk to the campus by crossing the one-way road and strolling up the narrow High Street. He passed the little Catholic church, the hairdressers, the four star hotel, the post office and the Raven’s Beak pub before stopping by the big chestnut tree. As a kid, he’d thrown sticks and anything else he could lay his hands on up into its branches in a bid to dislodge its prized seeds. Did they still allow kids at school to play conkers nowadays? Probably not, cowed by the threat of injuries, litigious parents, unfavourable media coverage and the faintest possibility of anaphylactic shock.

  Pah. Let kids be kids. So what if they picked up a few bruises along the way?

  He walked on, reaching the gently curving stretch of road that accommodated his old secondary school. As usual, he slowed outside the green railings to watch the youngsters play. A group of boys with their arms outstretched like wings were loudly dive-bombing an uneven row of dustbins as its defenders returned fierce machinegun fire, although the battle had to be interrupted when some girls began jumping rope in their flight path. A harassed-looking female teacher carrying a hand bell was forced to intervene in the ensuing argument.

  He smiled, the sight of the kids’ boundless energy never failing to take him back to the days when he’d enjoyed jumper-ripping games of British Bulldog on the very same playground followed by a well-earned bag or two of Hula Hoops.

  Had it really been almost four decades since he left?

  It was a shame the headmistress had never got back in touch regarding his suggested pep talk. He’d explained over the phone that he was quite happy to chat to the pupils about growing up in Tiverby, certain they could benefit from his experience. Why, just look at what could be achieved by firing up the old brain cells and staying on the straight and narrow. Maybe one day they too could become professors!

  And to keep things light and breezy, he’d emphasised that not only would he do the talk in full academic dress but the students could pose with him for photos afterward. Children loved that sort of horseplay.

  However, instead of snapping his hand off, the headmistress had said she’d discuss it with the governing body and get back to him.

  That had been a month ago.

  Well, it was her loss. Or more correctly the pupils’. Still, he tried to empathise. She had sounded much younger and was probably a bit intimidated by his cultured voice, not to mention vastly superior qualifications and educational experience.

  He leaned against a stone pillar, fished out his wallet and unfolded a photocopy of The Tiverby Recorder’s news story about the day he’d received his PhD. There he was in gown and mortarboard beaming like all his birthdays had been rolled into one. Not a bad-looking guy, even if he did say so. Plus, he’d barely gained a pound since it was taken.

  Maybe he should have another go at trying to set up a talk by posting the article to the headm – “Hey, Briefcase! Wotcha doing?”

  He started, unaware of a bunch of older boys who’d crept up on the other side of the railings. They were all wearing loosely knotted ties and black jumpers with the sleeves rolled up. One of them was Asian, Chinese or Korean by the look of him, and a bit taller with spiky hair. They hadn’t had kids like that during his time there.

  “Nothing,” he replied, straightening. “I was just – ”

  “You some kind of paedo?” the Asian kid barked, causing his mates to double up.

  The professor sighed as he refolded the photocopy and slipped it back into his wallet. Clearly there wouldn’t be any point in continuing this conversation. He started walking away as he heard the distant sound of sirens.

  “Where you going, Briefcase?”

  The sirens grew louder. Up by the High Street Pharmacy an old lollipop man dwarfed by the size of his stick stepped into the road to begin shepherding across two women laden with plastic bags of shopping. A few seconds later a fire engine with flashing red and blue lights came round the corner. The women nipped back onto the kerb but the lollipop man remained in the centre of the road with his back to it urging the women to cross.

  Professor Jeggert frowned. The dunderhead was actually blocking the fire engine, forcing one of the crew to lean out of the passenger window.

  “Get out of the way!” the fireman bellowed over the din of the siren. “Can’t you see we’re on a job?”

  Unbelievably, the lollipop man continued to beckon to the nervous-looking women. The firemen were shaking their heads and mouthing obscenities. The moustachioed driver reversed the massive red and yellow truck and tried to edge around, but the lollipop man simply sidled in front of it again.