And then the imam, having said these true things, would move on to some other truths. He didn’t care about the spies who would certainly be listening, the spies in the pay of the kafr government of Britain; he was above that. The imam simply told the truth. He was too intelligent to say that there was a global war against Islam. In Usman’s opinion, actually, there was, you could prove that there was, from Palestine to Kosovo to Afghanistan to Iraq, and then through the subtler examples of suppression in Egypt and Pakistan and Indonesia and everywhere else that Islam was not allowed to express itself democratically and fully – but you didn’t need to prove that. All you needed to do was ask a simple question. Was a Muslim life worth the same as a Christian or Jewish life? In the order of the world, did a dead Muslim child count for as much as a dead Jew? Was a Muslim death worth as much attention as a Christian death?
The answer was so obvious, it barely needed to be spoken. In the scales of the West – which meant according to the value system that ran the world – a Muslim life was worth a fraction of other people’s. A war on Islam – you could argue about that. The manifest truth that Muslims counted for less – that was not possible to challenge. Much followed from this.
Usman came to the mosque, pulled over onto the pavement and dismounted before his bike could ride up on it, because that would be
discourteous. He chained his wheels to a rack – this was a high-risk spot, he realised, because a thief seeing a bicycle locked up outside a mosque would guess where the owner was and how long he would be likely to be in for, but inshallah, either it would be stolen or it wouldn’t – and he joined the men heading into the building for the ablutions before prayer.
S
mitty liked to go against the grain, so where he might have been expected to have no desk, or something very modern – a workstation, with a sloped surface to sketch on and a laptop stand – instead he had a huge old Victorian partners’ desk made out of oak. He had no partner, of course, so both sides of the desk were his, and both were dominated by his filing system, which consisted of stacks of paper arranged by theme. On one side of the studio there was also a blackboard with curtains, so that whatever was being worked on could be hidden from casual view. There was also a £5,000 music system and a sixty-inch plasma flat-screen TV. Smitty was no Luddite. His assistant, his Nigel – who was always a ‘he’, because Smitty believed in a strict absence of sexual tension at work; he had no trouble pulling and didn’t need the extra hassle – had a corner of the office with a desk and phone and PC; he was allowed to roam around in the course of doing his business, but he wasn’t encouraged to allow his stuff to spread out and colonise Smitty’s space.
Sometimes the desk had ten or twelve huge mountains of paper, to do with either pieces Smitty was thinking about or what he called ‘admin crap’, a category which covered more or less anything that did not directly involve making art. At other times there was only a single pile. Today there were two stacks of paper on the desk, and both of them had been there for two weeks. One of them was the stuff he had
taken from his nan’s house, the We Want What You Have postcards and DVD. He had been flicking through these on and off all day since he got back from Pepys Road. The cards were a little like an installation, an artwork. The DVD, which was still in the player underneath the TV, was sort of the same thing as the cards, only in moving pictures. It consisted of lingering close-ups of houses in Pepys Road, shots of particular details of houses, tracking shots moving up and down the street. It looked as if it had been filmed in the early summer morning over two or three occasions. The DVD was about forty minutes long.
When he’d seen that, he Googled 42 Pepys Road and after a bit of clicking around found himself looking at a picture of his nan’s front door. The blog was, of course, called We Want What You Have. It had a list of numbers and when you clicked on the numbers you were taken to a photo of the house – sometimes the front door, sometimes a detail from the door such as a close-up of the number, or of the letter box, or the steps, or the doorbell. Some of the photos were taken from across the road, to frame the whole house; some of them were colour, indeed some of them were in heightened, super-real colour; others were black and white and amateurish. One or two of them seemed to have been taken with a pinhole camera held at waist height. In those photographs, the spy-like ones, you could just catch a glimpse of part of a person – a leg disappearing out of show, somebody’s shadow falling across a front gate. Other than that there were no people to be seen. Whoever was behind We Want What You Have was going to some trouble to leave the people out of it.
So that was part of what was on Smitty’s mind. The other thing was more immediately troubling, because the other thing was not a thing at all but a person. Smitty’s assistant. Smitty’s about-to-be-ex-assistant, who had been his about-to-be-ex-assistant in Smitty’s head for many weeks now, but who was no closer to being simply Smitty’s ex-assistant because Smitty hadn’t got round to firing him.
Smitty’s art was all about confrontation. It was about shocking people, jolting them out of their well-grooved perceptions. Parodies, defacements, obscenities, spray-painted graffiti of Picasso being sucked off by an octopus – that was what Smitty was all about. Right
up in your face. No prisoners. In person, though, Smitty did not like confrontation. He was a peacemaker, an accommodator, a finder of the common ground. It was a yin-and-yang thing. Balance was the key.
His art was about extremes, his life was about balance. The ideal thing for Smitty would have been if he could get an assistant to sack his assistant. Get a new Nigel to get rid of the old Nigel. That would be perfect. No point dreaming about that, though. This had been going on for long enough, and Smitty had decided that today was the day. On his desk, to the right of the pile of stuff from his nan’s, was a Post-it note with ‘GET IT DONE’ written on it. That note had been there for a week; which was too long. In his head, he had given the assistant a second and then a third chance, both of which he had blown. Now it was over. The decisive factor was his assistant’s way of making it clear that in his judgement, he and not Smitty was the person who should be treated as the famous artist. The fact that he hadn’t actually made any art since leaving St Martin’s, the fact that all he did was chores for Smitty, seemed in his mind to be a minor, disregardable detail. It was only a question of time before the world realised its mistake in being interested in Smitty rather than in him, and it was tiresome of Smitty to insist on the current hierarchical order of their relationship, which was so soon and so inevitably to be reversed. That was how he acted. Well, thought Smitty, he can piss right off with that. He thinks it should be about him. Today is the day when he learns that right here, right now, it is all about me.
That was how Smitty talked to himself to try and get into the right frame of mind.
He had a plan. The first step was to begin with a small gesture that today was not an ordinary day. He had tried to prime things by saying to his assistant that the two of them needed to have a chat about some stuff in the morning. Since that was not the kind of thing Smitty ever said, and since having a chat about some stuff was also not the kind of thing Smitty ever did, that was warning sign number one. The second gesture – the second thing he never, ever did – was to buy himself and his assistant a cappuccino each at the Italian café on the corner, on his way in to the studio. He was late on purpose so that the assistant
would already be there. Seeing the cappuccino bought for him by his employer, the assistant would know that something was wrong. That was the plan.
It didn’t work. Parker French came in with his earphones on and his bag and jacket both swinging over his right arm. He made a little performance of hanging them up, all without turning off his iPod, which was in his jeans pocket, or taking off his earphones, which were in his ears. So when Smitty crossed the room to offer him the cappuccino, he took it while still listening to his music and still in his oblivious, entitled, irritating bubble. If Smitty was having second thoughts, the fact that the little shit couldn’t even be bothered to say ‘thank you’ would have dispelled them. He stood there waiting for Parker to sort himself out and put his stuff away. That took a while. Then he sacked him.
It was pretty horrible – worse than he had expected. It occurred to Smitty about five minutes in that he had been an idiot not to do this at night, when the snotface was going home, rather than when he had just come in to work. But what really made it bad was the way his now-properly-ex-assistant had been so slow on the uptake.
‘We’re having a bit of a problem,’ Smitty had begun. ‘This is one of those it’s-not-you, it’s-me conversations.’ Every single person in the world knows that if someone uses those words a. it is you and b. you are being dumped. But Parker showed no sign of knowing this, this thing that every single person in the world knows. His face settled into a not quite sarcastic, but not sincerely deferential, pretending-to-listen-to-a-bollocking face. Authority figures had had words with him before, it was clear: parents, teachers, tutors. His manner implied that his charm and looks and brains (none of which in Smitty’s view was at all evident) had always got him through in the past, and would do so again. He would half-heartedly pretend to care for the duration of the bollocking, then he would go back to doing whatever he wanted – that was what his manner said.
About halfway through, Parker’s demeanour suddenly changed. He realised that this was not a could-do-better, untapped-potential, not-angry-just-disappointed, hate-to-see-you-wasting-your-talents talk of the type he was used to. Smitty’s words and tone were gentle because
his conclusions were final. What was going on here was something Smitty had seen before: a young person’s first real farewell to the world of school and college, where even if they are rebelling and faffing about and getting in trouble, the truth is that the whole experience is about them. They think that the whole world revolves around their needs, for the good reason that the institutions and authority figures in their world do, in fact, put them first. They’re not wrong to think they’re the centre of the universe. They’re just wrong to think it will stay that way. Then you get to the adult world, and at some point the penny drops. No one cares about you and most of the time they don’t even notice you’re there. It was this revelation that was now taking place in Smitty’s studio.
Parker’s expression began to crumple and darken. He looked much younger, like a rebuked schoolboy. It seemed as if he might even cry. He switched from looking cocky to looking numb and devastated. Smitty was aghast – he hadn’t wanted the kid to go skipping out the door, but he didn’t want to feel as if he’d just shot the little bastard’s puppy. He sped through the last part of his prepared speech, about maybe we’ll work together again one day, and handed him his envelope with a month’s pay and his P45. By now, no question, there were tears in the boy’s eyes. He collected his jacket and his bag and his iPod in a lot less time than he had taken to get them off, and was out the door without a further word.
Smitty thought, thank fuck that’s over.
A
t 42 Pepys Road, Petunia Howe was dying. Her condition was worse in every way. Her level of consciousness varied: at times she knew where she was and what was happening; at other times she was living through a delirium. Memories swam through her like dreams. Albert was alive and beside her, or she was already dead and in some place where he had gone before to wait for her. At other times, all she could feel was pain, pain so general and at the same time so intimate – as dental pain or earache is intimate – that there was no point at which the pain stopped and she began. Petunia spoke only in fragments and could only move with assistance. Her daughter had to help her to use a bedpan.
Mary tried not to think about what was happening. She kept herself as immersed as possible in the daily detail of her mother’s illness. Every now and then she would pull back and get a glimpse of things in the round, an overall look at the reality of these terrible days, and she would think: this is the worst experience of my life. My mother is dying horribly, I’m more tired than I’ve ever been, more tired than I was when the children were small, she is in pain, she doesn’t know who or where she is, and there’s no end in sight, because it’s dragging on and on, and the only release is for Mum to die, so I want Mum to die, which is a terrible thing to want, and it will happen to me too, one day, I will die too, and I’m stuck here in London and I’m lonely and frightened
and I have to lift my mum to the bedpan to have a shit and then have to wipe her bottom and put her back in bed and go to the toilet to empty her shit down it and then flush it and wash my hands and go back to bed and sit there staring at the ceiling waiting for sleep which I know will never come, and it won’t end until my mum dies, and then I’ll have to sell the house and it’ll be worth a million pounds and it will come to me and everything will be different, but if I think about that I’m a bad person so I mustn’t think about anything other than today, right now, the things I have to do right here and right now. And so Mary would return to the daily, immediate demands of the house, the sickroom, her mother’s death; and she would feel easier.
Her contact with home was through phone calls. She had to ration these because otherwise she called Alan ten times a day, mainly just to hear his voice. Ben, who was seventeen, was too grumpy to have a proper conversation with, and Alice was away at college, and Graham was off at his London life, so with all three of them she confined herself to a daily exchange of texts. (‘u ok?’ ‘yes k.’) Alan knew well what she was going through – he was good like that – but in the end there wasn’t much that could usefully be said.
‘I’m worried about you, Maggie.’ He was the only person who had ever called her that.
‘Sometimes I feel I can’t cope. Then I think: I’ve got no choice, I’ve got to cope. It’s one of those. It’s a cope.’