Detective Inspector Mill unwillingly found himself thinking about his superior officer’s exposed behind. The image made him want to smile.
‘Maybe that stroppy Asian guy was right,’ said Mill. ‘I’m not sure that we need harassment now that we’ve got criminal damage to the cars.’
‘Yeah, well, let’s just keep everything we have in the tool kit. We don’t know what we might need.’
With that, and without a farewell, the Chief Superintendent was off in the other direction, trailing smoke – to a meeting? To the pub? To the bookies? To a mistress? He was the kind of man whom you couldn’t ask. Mill was amused by his senior officer, and tried not to let it show, out of an intuition that he would dislike being thought of as a source of private entertainment.
‘Can I trouble you for a moment?’ said a voice. A sharp-featured middle-aged man in a light summer suit had come up to the DI while he was watching the Chief Superintendent disappear across the Common.
Mill assessed the new arrival rapidly: good citizen, well-off, something he wants to confide or complain about. That was one thing he was still unsure about, in his job: the view of your fellow Britons it gave you, from the sheer amount of whining and complaining and lying you heard.
‘Of course,’ said Mill.
‘Michael Lipton-Miller,’ said Mickey Lipton-Miller, his manner confidential and blokey, that of a man well used to having a sidebar with the police. ‘Just came out of that meeting you were in. Wanted to have a quiet word.’ He had come close enough to the DI to cover him with his umbrella.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Detective Inspector Mill.
‘I’ve got a theory about who might be responsible for this,’ said Mickey. Oh, sweet Mary and Jesus and all the saints, he’s a nutter after all, thought Mill. He said:
‘How interesting.’
As he said this Mickey took out his wallet and took a card out and handed it to the DI, not easy to do while holding the umbrella above both their heads. DI Mill looked at the card, saw that Mickey was a solicitor, and became aware of the need to be professionally careful.
‘I know what you’re thinking. I’m not a nutter,’ said Mickey. ‘It’s only this. Whoever’s doing this knows the street well, yes? Has gone up and down Pepys Road lots of times. Practically lives there, if he or she doesn’t actually live there. A fixture. Someone who fits in, part of the landscape. Not someone you notice. Comes and goes without a trace. Fits in. Yes? Like one of those detective stories, nobody notices the postman. Who does that sound like? Not the postman, obviously. You’d notice him going around with a bloody great camera filming everything. So, another angle. Who’s got a camera? Comes and goes, nobody notices, has a camera. No idea, fine. Add something else. Comes and goes, one. Camera, two. Three, whoever it is has a grudge. Yes? Right? It’s obvious. This isn’t the work of Norman Normal, this is someone with a major beef. With society, with the world, with Pepys Road. Angry. Who’s angry, in general? The kind of person everyone is angry at. It’s one of those turnaround things. Right. So who’s a. got a
reason to be in the street, b. got a reason to have a camera, c. angry at everyone because everyone is angry at them? Once you see it like that, it’s obvious: a traffic warden. Or wardens, plural.’
‘So this is all the work of an angry traffic warden.’
‘Or plural, wardens. Everybody hates them, so they hate everybody. It’s clear enough once you spell it out.’
Mill had a talent for extricating himself from situations: he thanked Mickey and said goodbye at the same time, nodding energetically as he turned and headed back to the station. Mickey thought: that’s a polite young detective. Mill thought: that man is a little bit mad, but it’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard, and it certainly falls under the category, the important category, of being seen to do something. Mill would open yet another file, talk to a few people at the Post Office, talk to somebody on the web side of things, talk to a traffic warden or two, and then go back to hoping the whole business went away.
E
xperience had taught Rohinka Kamal that the most useful way to think about visits from her mother-in-law, Mrs Fatima Kamal, was as a form of natural disaster. Just as you could take sensible precautions against earthquakes, tsunamis, forest fires, floods, but there was no real point in worrying about them, similarly, there was no point dreading Mrs Kamal’s biennial trip to London. You could take steps to mitigate the effect, maybe, but the steps might not work, and either way it wasn’t worth losing sleep over.
This would be Mrs Kamal’s fourth visit to London since Rohinka had married Ahmed, and although the focus had changed from nagging, criticising and undermining them about when they were going to have children, to nagging, criticising and undermining them about how the children were being brought up, the emotional dynamic was as it had always been. Mrs Kamal would start complaining and being difficult on the way back from the airport – no, she would probably start at the airport; she would have detailed, passionate grievances about the food on the plane, or the in-flight entertainment, or turbulence, or the state of Heathrow, or the rudeness of the immigration officials, or the traffic. Whatever had happened would be the fault of whomever she was talking to – though there was often a tremendous subtlety to the way she did that, for instance in her talent for complaining to Rohinka about Ahmed in a manner which made it clear,
while also leaving it entirely unspoken, that the reason he was such a useless man was that she was such a useless wife.
In advance of the visit, Rohinka and Ahmed had fallen into doing what they usually did, which was to make jokes about how awful it would be, as a means of reducing the strain on their relationship when Mrs Kamal ran through her repertoire. Her talent, her genius, was for what Rohinka called ‘needles’. These were comments designed to be hurtful, but not so much so that the recipient felt he or she could draw attention to them.
The night before she was due to arrive, Rohinka lay on her side in bed facing Ahmed and, keeping her voice down so that it wouldn’t wake light-sleeping Mohammed, said:
‘It’s like she thinks I’m just intelligent enough to notice, but not intelligent enough to say anything back to her. So she says, “Ahmed is looking very well-fed,” or whatever – I don’t have her gift, I can’t get the perfect example, but it’ll be something like that – no, I can remember one, from last time, she said, “Fatima looked so lovely yesterday in her dress.” Of course she is stressing the “yesterday” because Fatima was wearing the same dress that day because the washing machine was broken. So what I am supposed to say is, “Thank you very much for telling me that my husband is fat and my daughter is filthy. What a fortunate daughter-in-law I am!” I’m supposed to be just enough aware to hear the sting in what she says, but not enough to say anything back to her. I’m supposed to collaborate in putting myself down! I lend her the use of my own brain to get the point of the barbs she sticks into me!’
Ahmed chuckled, which made the bed gently bounce.
‘What do you mean, well-fed?’ he said.
‘Fat boy,’ said Rohinka, poking him in the side with her finger. ‘It’s the way she can say ten critical or negative things in a row. You can actually count them, add up the sequence. She’s a machine for denigrating people.’
‘She lives in Lahore.’
‘Not for the next few weeks she doesn’t,’ said Rohinka, and rolled away to her other side.
The next morning there was a family summit meeting, prior to setting
out for the airport. All three brothers, Rohinka, and the two children sat around the kitchen table while a friend of Shahid minded the counter. It had been decided that the whole family would turn out to meet Mrs Kamal. The last time, Ahmed had gone to meet the 8 a.m. flight on his own – which wasn’t so unreasonable, he felt. He had to get up at six to make sure he was there on time, and he went on his own because Rohinka was fully engaged with Mohammed who had just been born, and because somebody was needed to look after the shop. Mrs Kamal was still referring to her ‘unenthusiastic’ reception when she set off back to Pakistan a month later. (‘I’ll make my own way to the airport, I know how inconvenient it is for all of you to make the effort.’)
‘Shock and awe,’ said Shahid. He was in a good mood. He had been able to use the fact of his mother’s arrival to get rid of the Belgian, Iqbal, whose ability to ignore hints and suggestions and open but polite requests to leave had gone from being annoying to borderline psychotic. Seven months!
‘Moving on soon’ was what he would say when Shahid brought it up. ‘Moving on soon.’
But the imminent arrival of Mrs Kamal had done for him. Shahid was proud of his own brilliance here. He knew that Iqbal knew that the whole family was genuinely frightened of her – or maybe frightened was the wrong word; maybe they just dreaded her. Whichever it was, Iqbal knew that she was a living terror. Shahid didn’t have to lie about that. All he had to do was lie about where she was going to stay when she came to London, and stick to the lie – and that’s what he had done. As soon as Mrs Kamal had said she was coming to visit, Shahid had gone steaming straight to his flat, told Iqbal he had to get out, and given him the date. Iqbal, amazingly, had had the front to complain, and to act as if it wasn’t fair. The Belgian had more front than Selfridges. With bad grace, he had eventually conceded that he had to go. And then, yesterday, most amazing thing of all – he had gone! Moved out! Vamoosed! Iqbal was out of there! Elvis had left the building! The fat lady had sung! Mandela had been freed! Shahid had his life back! He could lie on the sofa watching his own TV programmes, surfing his own websites, breathing the smell of only his own socks and farts! They think it’s all over! It is now!
‘We will overwhelm her with our love and devotion,’ Shahid went on, to the family breakfast table. ‘She won’t know what hit her.’
‘That doesn’t sound like Mamaji,’ said Usman. This was hypocritical, since he was Mrs Kamal’s favourite, for no reasons the other brothers could understand except that he was the youngest – the bad-tempered, sulky, charmless, semi-fanatical youngest. Ahmed gave Usman a warning look: he and Rohinka were careful not to speak ill of Mrs Kamal in front of her grandchildren. They had a strict no-badmouthing policy about her. This was partly to set a good example for their old age, and partly because they were worried that Fatima would pass on anything they said.
‘We’ll love-bomb her,’ said Shahid. ‘It’ll be like the Moonies.’
‘Lub bob!’ said Mohammed.
‘Everybody ready?’ asked Ahmed. Rohinka slid around the table, attending to their breakfast plates so briskly and efficiently she might have been a Hindu goddess with more than one set of arms, clearing and stacking and sweeping and racking, and then bumping the dishwasher door closed with her hip before setting it going. Fatima was in a bright green dress – a clean bright green dress – and Mohammed was wearing his smartest red jumpsuit. He was carrying his favourite Power Ranger. The two younger brothers were dressed as if for manual labour, and Ahmed was wearing pressed jeans and a smart leather jacket. They piled out into the people carrier, Ahmed’s huge VW Sharan, and set off for Heathrow, the traffic predictably rubbish, the weather predictably rubbish.
As they crawled out through West London, Ahmed was reminded of how his world had contracted around work and the children. The shop, the kids – it felt at times as if that was all there was. Even though the big car was full of his family, he felt a sense of the bigger city around him as they struggled past the amazing size and variety of London, the feeling that everything had a history, and the press of the present too: roadworks, billboards, a small accident where a white van had driven into the back of a milk float and the police had closed a lane, as well as that good old favourite, ‘sheer weight of traffic’. Sheer weight – how much of life was sheer weight of something? Then the traffic eased and they were out towards the elevated section of the M4,
and the road rose and curved through office buildings that had once looked like someone’s idea of the future. It was a different London from the one Ahmed knew, and he liked it.
Shahid decided to make his own entertainment.
‘Let’s have a bet on what she’ll say first.’
Usman scowled: gambling was unIslamic.
‘Not a real bet, dip—’ and then remembering Mohammed and Fatima and cutting himself off before he could say ‘dipshit’, ‘stick. Dipstick.’ Ahmed tried to give a silencing glare via the rear-view mirror, but Rohinka spoiled everything by chuckling, which Shahid took as permission to go ahead. ‘I’ll go first. It’ll be: “Ahmed, you are fatter than ever.” ’
‘Daddy fatty!’ said Mohammed.
‘ “The flight was a horror,” ’ said Rohinka, adding some Lahore and deepening her voice half an octave and, it had to be said, sounding unsettlingly like Mrs Kamal.
‘ “Hello!” ’ said Fatima. ‘She’ll say hello!’ There was applause, and it was agreed that she was a clever girl – and Shahid realised that he had better be careful what he said.
Heathrow, never a pleasure to visit, was even worse than usual, thanks to a combination of roadworks and increased security measures. Ahmed could feel his stress levels rising as they sat immobile, moved ten yards, then sat immobile again. The smells emanating from the very back of the car indicated that Mohammed, who seemed entirely content and was looking out the window from his child seat with a certain lordly calm, had nonetheless had an incident in his nappy.
‘We’re going to be late,’ said Usman. The unhelpfulness of this observation was compounded by its truth. They had allowed two hours to get to Heathrow, but it wasn’t going to be enough. Ahmed could feel their mother’s visit sliding towards disaster before it had even begun – because if there was ever a person capable of spending four weeks punishing you for turning up late to meet her at the airport, that person was Mrs Ramesh Kamal of 29 Bandung Street, Lahore. Ahmed tried to imagine what he could do; but they weren’t even through the Heathrow access tunnel yet – they weren’t even at the roundabout
where there used to be a model of Concorde, before the plane crashed and was withdrawn from service – and they’d never make it on time on foot, even if they were allowed through the tunnel on foot, which Ahmed didn’t think people were. He could turn around and go home and pretend to have got the day wrong … no, what was he thinking?, the others would never keep that secret. And then suddenly, in its mysterious way, the traffic eased. The brake lights of the cars in front went out, the cars first bumbled, then crawled, then they were actually, genuinely moving. Allah be praised. The policemen with machine guns standing at a checkpoint were, for whatever policemen’s reason, now letting all the traffic through. Ahmed turned into the short-stay car park, a little too briskly so the near front wheel rode up on the divider, took the ticket, parked, shooed his family out of the car, helped Rohinka unfold the pushchair and load it with Mohammed, who took all this fussing with great equanimity, and hurried everybody over the concrete walkway, following the signs, rushing, Ahmed pushing the pushchair, Rohinka pulling Fatima by the hand, the two younger brothers behind, Shahid laughing and Usman scowling, through the crowd and the professional drivers holding signs and the tearfully hugging silent couples, the tour party gathering around a raised umbrella, the family group all crouched by a wheelchair, rushing into position by the arrivals area, the oddly free-form Heathrow arrivals area where it’s hard to tell arrivals from arrived, exit from concourse, and just as they arrived, just as they started to compose themselves, there was Mrs Kamal, frowning and pushing a trolley with three suitcases on it, her expression not changing as she caught sight of them and steered the heavy luggage towards them, all six of her family, three sons and two grandchildren and daughter-in-law, all with their greeting faces on. Mrs Kamal pulled the baggage trolley to a halt and said: