A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks Page A

with cold, in her unheated bedroom as she lay naked at last beneath the duvet. Hassan was scared they might be interrupted by one of the flatmates, all of whom, this being a Friday night, were stupefied with drink. It wasn't at all how he had hoped it might be. Dawn insisted on turning out the bedside lamp, depriving him of the stimulus of sight. When he lay down on top of her, she seemed to shudder a little; he thought perhaps she was crying. He told her that they didn't have to go ahead, but she replied that now they had got this far he might as well finish it off. Hassan felt the pent desires of seven years since puberty compressing to a hard explosive point. Then as Dawn's cold hands stroked his back without enthusiasm, the moment seemed to pass him by. After twenty minutes or more of fumbling and apology and desperate measures, he managed something - a sort of end point without any preceding sensation. He was too ashamed of himself to see her again.
    A few weeks later, he found his attention increasingly focussing on a tall and amusing Iranian called Shahla Hajiani, and it seemed to him that his interest was reciprocated. But by then he'd found religion, or a political version of it. When, after a student party, Shahla placed a modest but flirtatious hand on his arm, he explained to her that he must lead a pure life. She looked at him with sad eyes, in which there was still laughter, but also a little hurt and bafflement. 'I'll be your friend, then,' she said. 'If that's allowed?'
    'Of course it is.'
    And she had been a good friend, too, he had to admit. Shahla's father was a Westernised Tehran businessman who had left the country with the fall of the Shah; her mother was English, of part Jewish descent. Shahla, though nominally Muslim, didn't understand or approve of Hassan's mosque life; but she had been solicitous and kind at college, generous with her time and company, swinging through the canteen on her long legs, shoulder bag flying, to settle down beside him over lunch. Sometimes Hassan thought he could still see a glimmer of hope, or lust, or something, in her deep brown eyes. Mostly, she asked him innocent questions or told him what play or film she'd been to see and gave an animated account of it.
    Thinking of the eternal fires that waited for the unbeliever, particularly an apostate like Shahla, Hassan felt he should ignore her. Yet her friendliness was so unassuming that he found himself, against his better judgement, absorbed by what she said.
    Although his understanding of Islam forbade Hassan physical contact, no amount of prayer could quell his twenty-one-year-old desires.
    The kafir press and media were degraded by images of sex. On quiz shows, talk shows, game shows, the most highly paid and respected presenters, with millions of taxpayers' pounds in their back pockets, talked of masturbation, genital size and sodomy. They did so with a twinkle, with a laugh, slapping their guests on the thigh, as though that made it all right.
    On the commercial channels, products were sold to the credulous kafirs in the ad break by women mimicking fellatio or commenting with breathy voiceovers. A cheap shampoo was flogged to the sound of a female orgasm; so was a breakfast cereal, with a series of kafir women howling on their backs, and this was supposed to be 'fun' or 'saucy' or something. In a way, Hassan didn't mind; it merely convinced him that he was right.
    What troubled him more were the subtler insinuations of girls and women into his consciousness. There was a half-breed, perhaps Eurasian, presenter who seemed to crop up on almost all channels at about eight o'clock. She didn't go in for the filthy talk, but her skirts were short and Hassan found her wholesomeness unsettled him. Sometimes he felt the world was just too full of women, girls, females of every kind who'd been put on earth by God to test his resolve. The black-haired waitress in the Italian cafe, Barbara, whom he saw having her cigarette break