Chapter 4: Bikes

Mo spent the bus ride to school trying to work out what was going wrong. There were hardly any Muslims in Luxembourg, for one thing, and most of them weren’t from Pakistan either. The place was FULL of racist unbelievers! Why had his father brought them here? His mother hardly had anyone to talk to either, even after his father had given her permission to go out whenever she liked.

It was a bit weird going into school on a Saturday, too, just to meet a pair of white girls and a white guy, all of them a couple of years younger than him. It was a bit undignified, apart from the idea of getting with a girl, and to be honest he was having doubts about his original plan for that.

He kept replaying yesterday’s events in his mind. He realised Grace must be in the same year as Mia and Paul, so she wasn’t thirteen or fourteen, even though she looked like it. She must be fifteen. That had to be why she wasn’t behaving the way his brothers had said.

A vision of Grace as she’d arrived yesterday morning swam into his mind. She’d been so excited ... that face all happy and alive, her incredible hair and those pale blue eyes beaming at him. Then Mia had arrived and spoiled everything. Dressed like that. He couldn’t get the image of those thighs out of his mind.

If she’d been a Muslim girl that would never have been allowed to happen: she’d have been decently covered and with a hijab over that hair too, like his sister. Mia wasn’t the only one either. It was as though these white girls knew he was only allowed to marry a Moslem and deliberately flaunted the forbidden fruit in front of his face!

He worried about his clothes. He’d thought his chinos, shirt and jacket were fine until Mia had turned up in that blue outfit, looking as though she’d come for a photoshoot - either to be the model, or to direct it telling everyone what to do!

But Paul had been in his completely slobby kit and somehow that hadn’t mattered - he’d hardly said anything and what he had said was just agreeing with the girls, but they’d ended up more on his side than Mo’s; or more together with him anyway. Well Paul was white of course and a fellow unbeliever.

It had been a mistake to try and get that time alone with Grace so she’d begin to think of him as her boyfriend. He should’ve known the Italian bitch would say something. She’d humiliated him and then he hadn’t been able to think straight.

Oh, here was his stop. Right. Men are in charge of women by what Allah has given one over the other. He was gonna make that work. Women are deficient in intellect - narrated Abu Said Al-Khudri.

“Hi,” Grace smiled at Mohammad as he came into the cafeteria, which had a few other people in today getting ready to do stuff. Really he was SO good-looking, though he seemed a bit tense, almost as if he could tell Mia and Paul had come early to make quite sure she’d be alright.

At least Mia and Paul said ‘Hi’ too as Mo sat down, and he said “Hi” back even if he didn’t really smile. He seemed to be someone who didn’t smile a lot, which was a shame because it was so beautiful when he did.

“Okay what have we got?” he was asking her.

“He works in the University, and we’ve got a photo,” she told him. “He’s in a research group called Education, Culture, Cognition and Society. So we can watch at going-home time and just follow him where he goes. We need a bit of luck, but somebody or other has to visit the animals every day at least once, don’t they? Twice, quite likely.”

“Well done,” Mo praised her.

Grace didn’t really react and there was a moment’s silence.

“So it’s a question of how to follow,” said Mia, “when he’ll probably be in a car and we don’t have one.” Mo had noted she wasn’t in her model’s outfit this time, just a jacket and jeans and trainers, like Grace and Paul too. Mo felt he fitted in today, on the clothing front at least.

“We can take a taxi,” he tried to sound decisive and be in charge of the girls as Muhammad (peace be upon him) had decreed. Paul clearly wasn’t in charge.

“If a bunch of teenagers jump in a taxi and say ‘Follow that car!’ what’s gonna happen?” Mia grinned. Grace and Paul grinned with her.

Mo was sure that if he and Grace were in a taxi he could get the driver to follow a car, but he didn’t want to say so. Anyway obviously Mia was determined to humiliate him, whatever he said. He could feel his face going red.

“I was wondering if you have a bike, Mo?” Grace asked him. She’d stopped grinning, at least, and was just looking steadily at him, with those eyes.

“Yes I do.” It was a relief to give that positive answer. He couldn’t keep up with a car on a bike of course, but something in her eyes made him not say that, just yet.

“Cos with four of us, depending, you know, which way he goes, we could follow him for a little way, and then next day be waiting further up the road, at the next junctions...”

“We could cover four junctions,” he said as he realised. “That could be quite a long way.”

“That’s right,” she smiled at him. “Well seven actually, cos we can skip alternate ones, unless they’re a crossroads, cos we’d know he’d gone past one of us and not the next. We three don’t have bikes yet but we can hire them. Or I might buy one, I like cycling.”

Paul was watching the interplay, trying to work out how things were going to go. Was Mohammad a Muslim? He hadn’t said so. Maybe he was just an asshole. The way he acted with Grace made him want to punch him in the face.

What about Mia? Weren’t most Italians Catholic? He wasn’t sure. He suspected that if Mia was Catholic she wouldn’t exactly be devout, in any case. There was something in her attitude: how she looked at him and this feeling that at some point she might just help herself, kinda thing. She had this physicality, somehow, suggesting she had experience and ... well ... what his pastor would likely call ‘carnal appetite’.