the last mullah
(3,630 words)

It was his mother who had started it. Calling him Yusuf. The beautiful, the lover, the dreamer. It had been the fashion back then. To name a child after one of the old prophets in the hope that thereby their future would be mapped out before them. With a single blow from the knife's edge, Yusuf cracked open the egg shell and let the contents slurp into the hot fat of the frying-pan. Over thirty years, he'd perfected the technique of cracking eggs. Some in the city called him a sufi, some, a maulana and others, a mad hatter. That was up to them. Only God knew the truth. The sky beyond the window was uniformly cloudy. It was that season between seasons which could exist only in Glasgow, the city where winter intruded into mid-summer and where the river had always been a dun grey.

Many years ago, he'd had a dream, that the entire city was being washed away by the rain, and that the white marble of gravestones was being dissolved and was flowing, in a silver stream, into the Clyde. He'd told no-one of his dream, but a week later, in Ibrox, his brother had been killed because he'd stepped off the kerb, just a moment too late. Yusuf closed his eyes. He'd walked past the spot, countless times since, but the anger had never left him and would well up behind his ribs so that he would feel as though his chest was about to explode. He remembered his brother's face, the way he'd smiled, the sound of his voice, as though the boy was just over the ridge of his shoulder. Yusuf had sent him on an errand, to buy a dozen eggs from Zafar's Delicatessan. They sold them big, fresh and dark-brown, the way he liked them. But that day, as he'd discovered later, his brother hadn't been able to find the eggs there, and had wandered further and further afield in search of a twelve-pack. In some way - no-one had figured out quite how - he had ended up in Ibrox, amidst the shadows of the over-arching football stadium and the ghosts of long-dead steel ships. Yusuf had pictured the scene behind his closed lids, every day of his life, for fifteen years.

His brother was about to cross Edmiston Drive where the lanes converged into one, just beyond the last roundabout. The road gleamed wet from the long night's rain and the sunlight shone in 22 carat morning gold and the car was a speck of dirty white. He felt the breeze blow cold on his brother's cheek, he sensed the giant shadows of the brick stadium, the smell of rotting lager and stale urine, of games, lost. The shadows, enlarging and stretching across the road like a black hand. The screech of car tyres, the impact, the darkness … The fat spat into his face. He opened his eyes. The egg was burning brown around the edges. Yusuf exhaled, and turned the gas up. He watched as the flame sputtered out from beneath the edges of the frying-pan. Eggs and prophets.

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He lived as close to the sky as it was possible to live, without being a falcon or a cloud, on the top floor of Canonbie High Flats in what once, a long time ago, had been known as the Gorbals. House 17/10. They'd first arrived there in the (?autumn) of Nineteen Sixty-Eight, in the middle of a hurricane. He spooned some oil over the yolk, just enough so that the yellow wouldn't harden, and then he put down the spoon and stepped back. He removed a paper hankie from the front pocket of his jeans and wiped the steam off the window. He gazed out across the city. In the Sixties, everyone had dressed in a perpetual dark bottle-green. Spirit green. Wee, grim-faced men in big Irish buses, always heading home through the rain. In some ways, Yusuf thought, the city had bypassed the zany decade, altogether and like Elvis, had gone straight from 'Fifty-Nine to 'Seventy-One. From soldiers to sequins. The only things Glasgow had got from the Sixties were high flats and teenage pregnancies. The family had arrived in what had seemed like the middle of Kiamath, but that same winter, once the winds had settled, Yusuf remembered gazing up one morning at the tower-block and seeing an eagle, perched right at the top, right on the edge of the big glass plates. In the bright sunshine, it had seemed to shine, white and gold. It had remained perched there for a moment, and then had flapped its wings and taken off, heading north like the arrow on a weather-vane, towards the snow and the ice and the big, dark lochs. He had never seen it again.

The flats had survived in spite of themselves, but recently, something strange had begun to happen. At first, it was just junkies, alkies and the like - and no-one really misses them. But then, other people had begun to disappear. Like the old woman with the torn stocking and the crusty chin (he couldn't bring to mind her name). One day, she was there; the next, she was gone. Her morning home-help had turned up, and had found that not only the old woman, but the entire floor had vanished. Yusuf had met the home-help on the landing at the top of the stairs. He'd expected her to be surprised, shocked, non-plussed. But she had just shrugged and said something like, There's no accountin fur folk, and had left, telling Yusuf that her contract didn't permit her to chap on doors, looking for flats which had obviously disappeared. One less client, he'd supposed. After that, the lifts just kept going up and down all day, in response to mysterious short circuits. It seemed as though the building had been wired for invisibility.

The egg was ready. Yusuf scooped it out of the pan and onto a plate. He'd always eaten his eggs, neat. No toast, no frills. Just perfect circles of white and yellow. He left the kitchenette and carried the plate over to the unfolded dining table where he sat down. Using his fork, he punctured the skin of the yolk. Watched, as it seeped.

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At school, he'd been a kind of a cross between a waster and a swot. He'd never run with the young, guilt-ridden Mosquers, nor with the ragged street-gangs which for years had roamed like dogs across the south-west of the city. At the same time, he'd not been into anything which the teachers had taught, but rather, had immersed himself in all things quantal, esoteric, liminal. He would lie in his bedroom with his back against the wall and would day-dream endlessly. On one of these occasions, behind a loose skirting-board, Yusuf had discovered a cache of old black-and-white photos. They must have been hidden there by some previous tenant. The paper was heavy, and when he flipped the photographs over, he found that the backs had turned a dirty yellow, as though they'd been in a fire. Perhaps someone had rescued them from the fire and iron of the old tenements. Yet the images themselves were as clear as if they had been taken only the day before. There was one, in particular. Even through the monochrome, Yusuf could make out that it had been seared into the paper during some long-forgotten summer morning celebration. Bunting and streamers had been strung across the narrow street and there was something in writing pasted to a wall which Yusuf hadn't been able to make out. The dresses were long - it was before cars - and the street was filled with crones and babies and moustachio'd men in battered bowler hats. No-one was smiling. There was a woman who seemed almost alive. She was slightly off-centre, and was leaning against the stone wall of one of the tenements. She must've been in her late twenties and her features were clear and sharp; her nose, her eyes, her long, curling brown hair, the breasts which were hidden behind a tight, dark dress …

Somehow, he'd found himself drawn, again and again, to the old photograph. To the woman. When he'd gaze at her long enough, she would seemed to smile at him. Just for an instant. It was a wry, knowing smile. He'd told his brother about the photographs and they had spent hours poring over them. After his brother had been killed, Yusuf had gone and pulled the photos out from behind the skirting board and had climbed up onto the top of the tower block where no-one was supposed to have gone and up there, amidst the glass and the wind and the emptiness, he had flung the photographs, one by one, off the edge. He hadn't looked at the faces.

The egg tasted mature - vintage, almost - and Yusuf chewed slowly, to savour it all the more. It was the last. The fridge, the cupboards, the bread-bin - everything was empty. He would have to buy some food for the house. For himself. It was so hard, to cook for one. And anyway, eating had come to seem pointless. It had become merely a ritual. Like the concept of God, it had been emptied of purpose. From where he was sitting, he was able to gaze south, towards Cathcart and the cemetery where his mother had been buried. It had been nearly ten years and yet still he found it difficult to think of her lying beneath all that earth … she, who had started it all. And some days, if he closed his eyes and dreamed hard enough, he was just about able to catch the lemon dust scent of Lahore from whence his ancestors had come in the middle of the last century. He let the lids close, and the pungent taste of egg against the roof of his palate became almost unbearable. He swallowed, twice. One thing leads to another, he thought. For thirty years, you imagine you're living in one place, and then, one day, you wake up and find that really you've been somewhere else, all along. Everything has changed. The strange thing was, from the outside, the building looked intact. It was only when he'd ventured up the stairwell, as he did every day, that he had begun to notice that the seventh floor was where the fifth floor ought to have been, and that the tenth had replaced the ninth, and so on. He had taken to observing the angle which the rising sun made against the line of the building and he had noted that considering the phases of the moon, it was possible, using the Arabic alphabet, to work out exactly which floor would vanish next. The thing was, it worked just as well, using Ogham, Hebrew or Cuneiform scripts (though not the Latin). The only conclusion that he had been able to draw from all of this, was that there was something universal going on in Canonbie flats and that since the Anglo-Saxon tongue does not approximate God, the Housing would never be able to discover what it was.

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He'd written letters to the local councillor, but had received no reply. He'd even gone to visit his MSP, a rather plump man with a face like a cherry who had listened politely but who had informed Yusuf that it wasn't really his department and that he would be better to approach the Housing. The Housing (somewhat less politely) had told him that the people who had left the tower-block must not have had enough points, or else must have had too many points. He had told them that it was they, the Housing, who were missing the point, but that had got him nowhere. Just more satin green walls and the backsides of dumb terminals. He'd even been to the mosque but had been advised that this was a secular matter. When Yusuf had asked just when the division between that which was deemed, sacred and that which was worldly had arisen, the young imam with a womb-fresh beard had given him a look redolent of that of the long-suffering Hazrat Ayub and had quoted him a passage from the old story of Hazrat Daud and the Merchant Brothers who had disputed an inheritance. As if to say, Dinnae try and out-mullah me, Jimmy. Like everyone else, the imam had known all about Yusuf's father and his slow descent into the depths of a whisky bottle. His papa had always partaken of a tipple on dark winter evenings, but following the death of Yusuf's brother, his tippling had become a waterfall. He'd ended up shambling from one hostel to another, and had become a well-known face at the George Square late-night soup kitchen. There was a kind of idiotic fame involved in his father's self-destruction. Yusuf wondered whether such things might run like destiny though families. He had even considered writing to the Herald about the vanishing tower-block, but had refrained from doing so; he had always detested those who had nothing better to do than immerse themselves in the cracked fragility of the present. He spent as little time as he could down there amidst the teeming crowds and the swirling river, not because he felt superior in any way to other men - his sins were as heavy as the moon - but because below his small flat were sixteen identical, but empty houses. He was the last tenant in Canonbie flats, built only forty years ago and opened, as the scratched plaque near the lifts said, by James Patrick Donaghy, the Depute Head of Building Works of Glasgow Corporation (neither aristocracy nor celebrity had ever ventured within a salmon-leap of the high-rise).

So, he'd thought to himself, the Canonbie flats are disappearing as so many far grander monuments have disappeared before them, but in the greater scheme of things, in the ebb and flow of the song of the worlds, if it was happening, then there must be a reason for it. And as he'd always done in times of trouble, he had immersed himself in the works of the great Al Ghazzali and he had gazed at himself in the still waters of the pool of Maimonides and had meditated on the face of Aya Maryam, the mother of Issa, who had smiled beatifically at him across the centuries. They had been the contours of his mother's smile, and they had cradled him in the sleek white and red of their crescent. He'd seen her grow visibly smaller and older, the day they had lowered the body of her youngest beneath the grass. She'd never again spoken his brother's name. Yusuf left the empty plate with its hardening egg-stains, on the table and went into the bathroom.

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The silver backing of the bathroom mirror had peeled off at the bottom right-hand corner. It had been like that for years. He gazed at himself in the half-lit room, and smoothed his fingers over the stubble. Two days, he thought. It's two days since I've shaved. His face seemed to have become longer than he remembered it. The cheeks were shadowed and gaunt. His hair reached to the arteries of his neck, and was straggly and unkempt. He'd have to pay a visit to the barber. He hadn't bent his back in prayer for weeks. It had come to seem futile. One more dream, among so many. His face. There was something, not quite right. There were bits missing. He held his breath and peered more closely, so that his nose was almost touching the invisible surface of the glass. All over the mirror, the silver had begun to peel off, so that it was covered in tiny brown specks. It was as though the glass had fragmented without breaking. As though blindness was corroding through the light, slowly destroying the mirror. He became aware of his heartbeat and felt his head grow light. A skeletal face. He could taste the glass. Then it misted over. He drew back. Closed his eyes. Took a few deep breaths. Felt the blood pound through the arteries in his temples. Behind the skin of his tightly-closed lids, Yusuf found that he could make out the contours of his brother's smile and the colour of his mother's lips. The touch of her skin, as they kissed …

The smell of soap and toothpaste returned. He felt an indefinable sense of relief, as though he had just stepped back from the edge of a deep pool.

He ran the cold tap. Let it run, so that the water would be freezing when it hit his skin.

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The last to leave had been a family of junkies. Urine, fags and glaikit looks. Even the toddlers were on painkillers and (street-name for) valium. White analgesia. He had seen it in their faces. The sag of their jaw-lines. An old despair. They should've had enough points to have got them anywhere in the city, but they were so stoned most of the time that they had kept forgetting to fill in the right forms and so they had been overlooked until the week before, when he'd seen them one night at three a.m. being frog-marched out, through what once had been the concierge post and away, towards oblivion. But later, he figured he must have dreamed it. Either way, now he was alone in the middle of a big, white cube. That's what it was. He'd worked it out, the morning after. Everything was tending towards a state of perfection. Ellipses were becoming circles, diamonds were changing into triangles and high-rises were flattening down into cubes. He went over, and switched on the TV. Turned it up to full volume. Babble. Grinning faces. He returned to the window, taking the remote with him. From here, he could see all of Glasgow and could trace the roads, the rivers and the contours of the hunch-backed hills which lay beyond. He wondered whether the houses outside of the city were also changing. Melting away, like in his dream. He wondered how many secrets the darkness of the Clyde held within. Deep waters, the clanging of old chains … faces.

He couldn't breathe. He felt trapped. He paced about the room, smashed his fists against the walls. Changed direction. Picked up the phone. It was dead. Then he remembered. It had been cut off, weeks earlier. The TV in the corner rambled on like a dement. The door was shut. Gloss white. The handle had been removed. He had removed it. He would have to eat, sometime. Pay his bills. He would have to leave this house which was the last house, he would have to leave the window and go down to the city. But the buildings, the roads, the shops, the parks weren't there anymore. Like the Canonbie Flats, like a newly-cracked egg, everything was resolving, was becoming symmetrical, perfectly-ordered. Yusuf, the man of dreams, the mullah who had reached beyond all mullahs, had dreamed the city into the past and now only the river was left, carrying the silver and black of the headstones right around the spherical entity into which, in the slow blink of an archangel's eye, everything was being transformed. The dank moss stink of the Clyde rose and slipped through the windows, and he closed his eyes and he smelled it, the stench of centuries, of lives, uncounted, of loves and joys and death. Of desperate longing. Of blood and stars. He was a bird, soaring high above the old, darkened tenements of the Gorbals as they had been, before the hurricane. And before them, the shadows of still earlier slums, the angle of the house where the woman in the photo had lived a century before, the pools of her knowing eyes which still gazed at Yusuf like those of a lover. She, too, had balanced on the edge of the morning, and she, too, had stepped out, and had flown.

Yusuf lay down on the cold, hard, cold floor and gazed out the newly-cleaned windows as the days, the centuries, spread out above and around him. He watched the shadows of the dead dance on the walls between the scars of long-vanished graffitti alphabets. The Anglo-Saxon tongue does not approximate God.
William loves Annie
Fuck ya Fenian bastard
Lang Laird ae the bulls,
Arise!
And beneath the cotton and wool of his robes, beneath his maulana skin, he felt the fall and rise of the bones and they were old bones, white, hard, worm-chewed. And he let the lids close and open over the balls of his eyes, and he saw, he felt, no difference. The day was slipping away, and the night was entering into the city of the green hand. He dissolved into the eyes of the tenement woman whose name once had been Johnina, and he saw with her eyes and he loved with her body and through her soul. And the last thing Yusuf-Johnina dreamed was from high up, above the spire of old cathedral, the one before Longshanks, before mac Alpin, the echoing temple tomb of dark, northern stone. The shadows which for an age had lurked beneath the green bens and which had entered skulls only through moments of dreamless sleep and inhumation, once again were dancing the first dances and singing the songs of the bards. And then the shades spun around in a huge circle and moved faster and faster and as they did so, they joined and became one great shadow and the shadow moved across the land and the waters so that there was only spherical darkness.

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