felt his mood lift.
‘Think of the hur, the black-eyed virgins of Paradise, Dean. Would you like seventy-two black-eyed virgins, whose chastity has been violated neither by man nor djinn? Would you like that, Dean?’
The ambulance slowed as it approached a red and white boom that controlled access to their intended car park. Habib smiled, and so did Haroun.
Yeah, said Dean, he guessed he would like that, really.
It was no coincidence that Dean was born in March 1988, nine months after Margaret Thatcher’s last election victory. His father was the manager of a previously union-ridden Black Country autoparts factory, and believed he had much to celebrate that night.
Already he relied on immigrant labour, many of them Muslim women, and it made his blood freeze to think of a return to the closed shop. Dean never knew his name or occupation, and for the time being all we need to know is that towards 3 a.m. on the morning of Friday 9 June a Midlands businessman called Sammy, of Viper Wipers, was cruising the Bilston Road in search, as he put it, of a ‘bit of black’.
There is no need here to rehearse the details of that melancholy transaction: the slow prowling of the Ford Granada Ghia 2.1 down the sooty sodium streets, over bridges and culverts that had been here since the age of Telford and Macadam. We must take it that Dean’s biological father cruised on, his eyes like an unblinking snake, past pairs of white girls in white socks, shivering on corners, until he found what he wanted. Neither party would remember exactly where or how Dean had been conceived. Was it beneath this spindly smokestack which 200 years ago had been a symbol of England’s industrial dominance?
Was it beneath this hideously echoing arch, dripping with slime? And how did life begin? Was it a burst condom, that triumph of nature over artifice, or did Dean’s father pay some trifling bonus for unprotected sex?
And yet when the feature writers came to look back at Dean’s childhood and adolescence, they had to admit that England had done him proud. His mother had almost immediately given him up for adoption, and since he was only the faintest coffee colour, he was fostered with a white family who appeared on the face of things to express all that was most honourable about bourgeois Britain.
Dennis and Vera (or Vie) Faulkner were in their late forties when Dean came into their lives. They were considered by the system to be towards the upper limit of the age range, but there was some sympathy for Vie in the chilly hearts of the adoptocrats. She had been one of the would-be mothers who participated in Robert Winston and John Steptoe’s first attempts to create a test-tube baby. It had worked for the others. It had worked for Louise Brown. It hadn’t worked for Vie.
She loved little Dean. She boiled eggs for him every day (in fact, his first act of rebellion was to announce, ‘No more eggs!’) and Dennis, a fanatical monarchist whose family roots were in Northern Ireland, would puff around the garden, teaching him football and cricket. He went to a Montessori school, and learned to glue bits of spaghetti on paper, the discipline now known as Key Stage One. He went to Wolverhampton Grammar School, and though academically undistinguished he showed some talent for water polo.
You simply could not pretend that he was unhappy in that quiet house in Wednesbury. He went on holiday with Dennis and Vie, and learned to put up with the curious glances. When people at school made the mistake of asking ‘where he was really from’ he learned to blank them and to say that he was really from Wolverhampton. From time to time – about once every three years – he would receive small sums of money in badly hand-addressed envelopes, and Dennis would hand them over with a grimace.
All children probably fantasize, from time to time, that they are not really the offspring of their parents. Is there any half-sensitive kid who has not speculated that he was in fact discovered in a capsule in the Himalayas, concealed among the eggs of mutant pterodactyls from the planet Krypton? It was different for Dean. From the word go, Dean had unambiguous physical evidence that he was the subject – the victim – of a swap, and all his life he had to cope not with narcissistic fantasies of otherness, but with the secret thought that he wasn’t meant to be here at all.
It wasn’t as if he didn’t love Dennis and Vie. Mostly he did love them. It was just that sometimes he couldn’t help wondering if they loved him as much as they would love a natural child; and then he felt alienated. Matters came to a head shortly after his sixteenth birthday. He was growing tall, with an honest and engaging smile, and his skin, after some early unruliness, was clear and good. He went with Dennis to the golf club, and earned tips for caddying.
He helped Vie in the Sue Ryder shop. Dennis was an executive with Otis elevators, or had been until his retirement, and hoped that Dean might one day join the company. ‘Get with Otis,’ he would tell his adoptive son, ‘get with Otis and go up in the world!’
It all went wrong for Dean when his adoptive parents became involved in a war. It was a war with the neighbours, and it was as full of malevolence as anything that took place in Bosnia. Next door was a man called Mr Price, who was, sociologically speaking, not so very unlike Dennis Faulkner. Instead of working for Otis elevators, Peter Price had been quite big in the Milk Marketing Board. The high moment of his career had come in the 1970s, when he had helped to formulate Lymeswold cheese, the Heatho-Walkerian plan to deal with the Milk Surplus. Alas, Lymeswold never caught on. It was likened fatally by Auberon Waugh, the journalist, to banana toothpaste, and as a piece of import substitution it was no match for the soft blue cheeses of France and Italy, let alone the great wagon wheels of industrially produced cambozola, the German cheese that trundled across the channel with the ruthless housewife appeal of a BMW. Like Dennis Faulkner, Peter Price was pensioned off early. But instead of just watching the television, or doing his roses. Price the Cheese was a man with a dream.
In his garage he had a row of vats and centrifuges and skimmers and strainers. Day in, day out, he would clank and prod, sniffing and pressing and squeezing. From the age of ten or so, Dean would go and see Price the Cheese, and his extraordinary machines.
‘Go on,’ Price would say, ‘try this one.’ Price would cut the coagulum into strips, and Dean would put the latest radioactive isotope on his tongue.
‘Or try this one, my dear sir,’ the caseomaniac would say. ‘I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.’
‘Mmmmbmm,’ said Dean.
‘Have you heard of Auberon Waugh?’
‘No, sir.’
‘You wouldn’t say this tasted like banana toothpaste, would you?’
‘No.’
One day. Price told himself, the garage would produce a cheese so startlingly magnificent that the humiliation of Lymeswold would be avenged. Tesco would buy it. Waitrose would certainly buy it. No one, not even a posh git like Auberon Waugh, would dare to brush his teeth with this one. This cheese would be pungent, and that was the problem. Most days, in fact 90 per cent of the time, his garage exuded nothing to trouble the nose. On a very few days, when he hadn’t been perhaps quite liberal enough with the Milton disinfectant, there would be the faintest bouquet of udder, as of two lactating cows standing close to each other in a warm milking parlour. And once in a blue moon, when Price the Cheese hit on something sensationally ripe, he would open the garage door and emit.
On a still, hot summer’s evening, he was capable of producing an odour that was probably bacteriologically identical to the substance generated between the fourth and fifth toes of a squaddie who has marched for twenty-four hours in the desert in rubber-soled boots. One these occasions Mr Faulkner complained, though if the truth be told the objection was not so much to the cheesy aromas. The real protester
