Men Like Khalil, Page 3

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  Men like Khalil understood the burden of having others look to them. At one simple request they would drop everything and their world would widen. Their only choice was to be with their tribe.

  Samuel had to pedal up Bury New Road, the steepest uphill path out of the city, in order to be with his. But this was no symbolic, defining moment for a country illuminated by a summer sky. This was a pain in the arse during a darkening November rush hour.

  Six months before Khalil was summoned to the mosque following the murder of a soldier in London, Samuel was told of a flash demonstration outside Mordechai. The worsening situation in Gaza, following the Jabari assassination, had been bound to take its toll, but Samuel never expected it to come about like this.

  Emails, text messages and then calls; yellow, orange and then red alerts. At first Mrs Marshall was courteous, even professional in her updates that afternoon. Samuel replied promptly and with gradually increasing reassurance, to match her mounting desperation. But as their correspondence drew to its natural close, Samuel came to realise he wouldn’t be spending that evening, the one day of the week where he didn’t compel himself to an activity, at home alone with his books, wine and music.

  By four he gave in, deserting his booth in the office and reaching for his helmet and luminous vest. Damn the BBC for moving to Salford Quays, he thought, as he weaved between stationary cars and crossing pedestrians. This would not have happened had they kept the Oxford Street studios, which had absorbed all Muslim discontent during the previous Gaza conflict.

  Instead, Samuel was pedalling furiously out on the street, doing well to avoid the usual hazards; the sudden opening of car doors, large reversing vans, men shifting rolls of carpet from one side of the road to another. After screaming pointlessly at their lack of respect for cyclists, Samuel felt the thickening sweat on his back, and he hadn’t yet reached the steep incline past the car showrooms.

  The whole thing had caught him out, but he was hardly going to condemn himself as a sloppy soldier. The role he had assumed at this synagogue was more through fate than his own calling. But had there ever been a difference between the two? There he was, watching the lines on the road sweep beneath his tyres, one by one, giving him the illusion that this was a road to somewhere. But where was he going?

  Samuel had arrived in Manchester four years earlier. When his grandfather died and his marriage to Fiona ended, his parents saw the two events as linked by some form of divine arrangement. Samuel was persuaded to move to the house left behind as a chance for him to get out of London and start afresh; a handy argument when the state of the market meant it was out of the question his grandfather’s house could be sold.

  His history made his welcome into the Prestwich community warmer. Word had gotten around that he was a veteran of the IDF, and that it was a service of distinction and some length, it being rare a foreigner spend more than two years in Israel.

  The community at Mordechai misunderstood him when he played it down. They thought he dismissed it too lightly, when in fact it ran so deep he couldn’t talk about it, certainly not while coming to terms with the humiliating position he had wound up in; back at the mercy of Mum and Dad after blowing his chance at a happy marriage.

  But he was still flattered by the invitation from Mrs Marshall to be the synagogue’s security guard if ever one was needed; a proposition Samuel accepted as so utterly pointless it would be rude to turn it down. With the increasingly approachable police and regular support of a network of security advisers to all synagogues in the country, it was nothing more than a whimsy, nominal idea.

  Until now.