Lion Heart Read Online Free Page A

Pater. I’m sure it will come in handy when I join the Navy.’
    He laughed: life is after all really just one cosmic joke.
    ‘That’s cool, man.’
    I hit him, knocking him off his chair. From the floor he appraised me for a moment. I was only just fourteen but had been doing a lot of rowing on the Thames, the college’s one and only area of excellence. He was against violence. He stood up, blood streaming from an eyebrow, and walked towards the door. He stopped.
    ‘I will write to the Commodore and tell him that all shore leave should be cancelled indefinitely. I won’t see you again until you write me an apology.’
    ‘I had shit in my mouth and hair. Can you imagine what that was like? And then they rubbed my balls with Cherry Blossom shoe polish.’ (It was oxblood brown.) ‘You should be writing me an apology.’
    I was sobbing, but my father was already on his way upstairs to rummage in his bathroom, whistling – I seem to remember – ‘Light my Fire’. He was probably stoned. I refused to go back to school and hitch-hiked to Deeside in Scotland, where I boarded with my father’s sister, Phoebe, and worked for the rest of the summer as a ghillie; my aunt, whose face was already being colonised by a light – not unpleasant – down, was well-read and kind, although preoccupied. Her husband had shot himself. Gamekeepers are prone to this as they have the weapons. She never told me what happened to my mother. When it was obvious that I wasn’t going home, she enrolled me at the local school, from where I won a bursary to Oxford four years later, qualifying as a Scottish student from a state school, and in this way helping the college in question with its admissions record.
    I leave the fire glowing a persistent toxic green as I take the box of reprieved papers inside.

3
    Jerusalem, Two Months Later
    Outside my room there is a small mosque. I can see its minaret – modest with a circlet of ironwork at the top – from my window. The first call to prayer – the adhan – is at five in the morning. Four times the muadhin calls out: Allahu Akbar . I lie in bed entranced by the call. Amplified by loudspeakers, the call to prayer makes my body tremble; it seems to enter my bones and agitate the marrow.
    What the adhan speaks of in this mad, beautiful, violent, restless city is the human longing for certainty. And why wouldn’t you want certainty if you lived here? This is a place where horrors, all of them in the name of a higher authority, have been committed for thousands of years, a place where countless people have died for their religion, where the walls have been built and destroyed and rebuilt constantly, where Armenian, Syrian and Orthodox priests sail blandly about – Quinqueremes of Nineveh – where observant Jews with side-locks wear their painful blank devotion on their pale faces, where creased Bedouin women in embroidered dresses and triangular jewellery sit patiently outside the Jaffa Gate to sell vegetables, where young Arab men, in strangely faded jeans and knock-off trainers, push trolleys of foodstuffs, where in countless cafés men contemplate what might have been, their hair failing, their faces turning to yellowed ochre, as though the tea they drink endlessly is staining them from the inside. Or perhaps it’s the water-cooled smoke from their hookahs that is doing it, smoking them from the outside. I think of the salmon smokeries up on the Dee. It was my job to take the clients’ salmon for smoking. I graduated to leading the Highland ponies, draped in dead stags, down the hillside. Sometimes I was trusted with driving the little Argocats, which could go anywhere, even fully laden with a stag and a couple of stout German hunters trimmed with forest green.
    I find the Old City constantly moving: it is astonishing to me that the Syrian priests use Aramaic, the language of Christ. All around I see the evidence of this urge to fix ourselves in the blind uncaring universe. It seems we are