‘So who is minding our shop?’
I
n a café in Brixton, holding himself as still as he could in front of his plate of bacon, eggs, sausages, beans, chips and toast, sat Smitty. Smitty had a fabricator whom he employed to make the things he used in his pieces. He gave the man the designs, they had a conversation, the man knocked up some 3D images on the computer, then made a prototype, then he made the object for real. His factory was in Brixton, so when they had a piece on the go, Smitty would regularly be schlepping backwards and forwards on the Victoria line, if he was in a hurry, or in his Beemer, if he wasn’t. At the moment the man was working on perfecting a nine-foot-high dildo in concrete treated to look as if it was plastic, or silicone, or whatever it was dildos were made out of. Smitty wasn’t yet entirely sure what this was for. He just liked the idea of this thing which looked as if it had to be made out of one thing which was by definition lightweight and pleasant to the touch, which turned out to be this other thing which was immovably heavy and nastily abrasive. Dildos were private, statues were public. It would be a piece about, about, about … about something. The tricky thing would be moving the nine-foot concrete dildo into place, but that was a problem for another day. Smitty had two more immediate concerns.
The first was that he’d come to the factory and his man wasn’t there. The building, a former warehouse a bit like Smitty’s own studio, was chained and locked. No reply on the entryphone. There had been
a cock-up. He’d have liked to blame the fabricator, but he couldn’t, because this just wasn’t the sort of thing his guy got wrong. So the cock-up was almost certainly at his end. Probably it was his new knob-head assistant, the replacement for his old knob-head assistant. To be fair, as knob-heads went, this new Nigel was much less of one than the last Nigel. Humanly, he wasn’t a knob-head at all, and had the great virtue of showing a proper respect to his betters, i.e. to Smitty. But he did make knob-head-type mistakes, and the timing of this meeting looked like being one of them. So Smitty was going to give it another half-hour and then piss off back to Shoreditch.
The result was that Smitty was sitting in a café a hundred metres down the road from the warehouse, having a cup of tea and putting himself outside a Full English. That wasn’t a typical breakfast for Smitty, he was more a slow-carb, bowl-of-microwaved-porridge person, but he was having this monster fry-up because of the second thing which was wrong with his day: his colossal, reeking, throbbing, ear-ringing, cloth-mouthed hangover. A mate had had a do the night before, there was an eighties theme, and it had been good fun. There were people dressed as New Romantic pirates and dandies, there was Duran Duran and Wham!, and as a further concession to the theme, there were tequila slammers. At some point early on in the evening, that had seemed like a good idea. Smitty was, as a rule – it really was a rule – as careful with drink as he was with drugs, but a tequila slammer and an eighties theme night was just something you had to go with. The result was the way he felt now.
Smitty made a point of never taking a day off when he’d overdone it. Part of the reason he was so careful about not overdoing it was because of this rule, so it was a win-win: he got off his face less often, and he got more work done. Because you could have lie-ins and free time whenever you wanted as an artist, the temptation was there to go it slightly too large, slightly too often. Smitty had mates who did that. So it was part of his samurai-style code that he had forced himself across town to this meeting, which was why it was doubly annoying that the whole thing was a cock-up.
Unfortunately, telling yourself you were adhering to a samurai-style
code did not help you feel any less hung-over. From that point of view, things were touch and go. The fry-up had looked challenging when it arrived, generously coated with visible grease, but he had felt better after the first couple of mouthfuls. Then he had started to feel worse again. Now Smitty was taking a moment before returning to his plate.
Seemed like a good idea at the time
. That would make a good name for the giant-concrete-dildo piece.
The café was rough, the kind of place Smitty liked. It had one of the things Smitty always thought a good sign in a café, restaurant or pub: a table of four men all wearing yellow high-visibility jackets. A radio was tuned to Heart FM. It would all have been perfect, if he wasn’t having to concentrate so hard on not being sick. To take his mind off his waxing nausea, Smitty picked up the
South London Press
. The front page was about a stabbing at a bus stop, a black teenager. Smitty had long been of the view that if middle-aged white people were stabbed with the regularity of black teenagers, the army would be on the streets. Page two was objections to a new Tesco somewhere – no prizes for guessing who would win that one – page three was people getting their knickers in a twist about parking (‘local residents say they are at breaking point’), page four was protests about a prospective library closure, and page five was, at the top of the page, a picture of a child sitting on a donkey at a fairground, and on the bottom, a short item about the road where his nan had lived and We Want What You Have. Apparently the cards and whatnot had kept coming, and there had been a Neighbourhood Watch meeting.
Smitty sat up. He had mentioned the cards to his mother, and she in turn had mentioned them back once or twice, but the house was being done up by a builder now and he had no idea there had been what the paper called ‘a sustained campaign’ or that it had included ‘graffiti and obscene abuse’ as well as ‘criminal damage’ and ‘items sent through the post’. The paper said that a copper called Detective Inspector Mill had promised ‘prompt investigation and decisive action’, which sounded to Smitty like rozzer-speak for ‘we haven’t got a clue’. Smitty still had the folder of cards and the DVD back at his studio. He’d been interested in it, whatever it was. Graffiti, obscenity – it was his kind of thing.
As he had that thought, Smitty had another one. It came unbidden and he couldn’t have said how exactly he knew what he knew, but even as he had the idea Smitty felt certain that he was right: that he knew who was the person behind We Want What You Have. That it was this person didn’t make complete sense – there was something funny about the chronology – but at the same time he was sure. Yes: he knew. And he also knew that there wasn’t a blind thing he could do about it. He could go to the cops, yes, but the cops would immediately want to know who Smitty was and how he knew, so there was no way he could do that without giving away the secret of his identity, the single most precious thing he had. Oh, it was clever. It was evil. Clever evil weaselly fucker. Part of the point, Smitty guessed, was that he would work out who it was, and how limited his options were. Well, that had happened. Smitty knew who it was, and he couldn’t do a thing about it. He put down the newspaper, pushed away his fry-up, and picked up his car keys. He felt an overwhelming need to be somewhere else.
‘B
ogdan!’ said Arabella, opening the door of number 51 to Zbigniew, her mobile tucked under her ear. ‘Darling! You don’t need one of those parking thingies, do you? Five seconds, literally five seconds, OK?’
She showed him through to the drawing room and retreated back into the hall. Why would she think I need a parking permit? wondered Zbigniew, as he looked around the room, which seemed substantively unchanged from the last time he had done some work for the Younts. Today, Arabella had asked him in to see if he could ‘chuck a few splashes of paint about’, which he guessed meant repainting one or more of the bedrooms and perhaps the hall too. At a guess – since she liked him – he would be the only person tendering at this stage, so he would not have to give his most competitive quote. Well, he didn’t need the work anyway, now that Mrs L had given him the job at number 42 and he had half a million pounds in cash hidden in a suitcase to worry about. He would have a look-see and politely turn it down. But there was no cost attaching to finding out the size and nature of the job, and if he passed it someone else’s way he would accrue credit in somebody’s favour-bank.
After a moment he realised that something about the room was different. Zbigniew had a strong visual memory and noticed these things. Perhaps there was a new sofa, or a new table, or something. No, it was
a new mirror, antique and gilt, on the far side of the room. The mirror faced the door, and as Zbigniew was looking at it, a very small child, a small child, and a slim young woman with black hair came into the room. The small child and the woman stopped and the very small child came over to him and put one hand on his leg and said,
‘You’re It.’
Zbigniew, taken by surprise, didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything. The slim young woman, who was Matya, gave him a moment and then came towards him to take charge of Joshua. A typical useless man, she thought. He can’t be bothered. Zbigniew thought: that is the most attractive woman I have ever seen. I want to have sex with her.
‘We were playing a game,’ she said, not liking the fact that she felt herself wanting to explain, but managing at the same time to imply to Zbigniew that he was emotionally stunted, frozen, imbecilic, full of himself, and if it were up to her, he wouldn’t be allowed in the house.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am here to see Mrs Yount. I—’ he found that he had temporarily forgotten the English word for painting, so he made an up-and-down motion with an invisible roller brush. Joshua and Conrad were now clinging to Matya’s legs, one to each of them, both of them with their thumbs in their mouths, both of them looking up at Zbigniew as if he were something entirely new.
Joshua took his thumb out of his mouth. ‘I haven’t done a poo today,’ he said, kindly, to help break the ice.
Zbigniew grunted. It was supposed to indicate mild amusement, but came out sounding surly. Joshua put his thumb back in his mouth. Zbigniew wondered what to say. Well done? That’s good? I too have been to the toilet, would you like me to tell you about it? What were you supposed to say to children? And also: I wonder what she thinks of me? If he had known what Matya was thinking he would have been mortified, because what she was thinking was: typical arrogant Pole, can’t be bothered, thinks Warsaw is the capital of the universe, useless with children, vain, conceited, lazy about everything except work. Matya hadn’t yet found what she was looking for in London, but since her evening out with Roger she had a clearer idea of what it was –
something to do with money, and space, and a bigger perspective. Something to do with looking out the window of a black cab in the small hours of the morning, and a house with a garden with roses in it, and children of her own. It was not to do with Polish builders who hadn’t grown up yet.
Zbigniew, if he had known, would have thought that very unfair. He thought he had changed a lot; he thought he was a much more mature person than six months ago. The old lady’s death, the horrible thing with Davina, had marked him, he felt. Also, he was spending hours a day wondering what to do about his magic windfall. His thoughts began with the practical – how to launder the cash and get it paid into a bank account, how to put it to use – and then slowly, as if by their own volition, turned to the question of just how morally wrong it would be to take the money. He started with rationalisations for why it was all right: because the Leatherbys didn’t know the money was there, it was in effect already lost, ownerless; because they had no need of it, given that the house was worth millions; because his father was a good man and deserved what the money would bring. But then his grip on the rationalisations would weaken, his self-justification would start to slip through his fingers, and he would, by an act of will, force himself to think about something else. He was struggling with this, every day. So Matya’s thoughts would have seemed a terrible injustice, and even though he didn’t know them, he could tell that first impressions weren’t going well. In his experience with women, it was difficult to recover once things began to go wrong – once they had unreasonably decided that you were a person with whom they were not under any circumstances ever going to have sex.
Arabella came back in the room.
‘Mi dispiace, darlings, I’m racked with guilt, do forgive me Bogdan, I’m now absolutely a hundred per cent all yours. Can I show you my little thingies?’ With that, she ushered him out to the hall, and then up the stairs to the bathroom he had painted for her seven months before. She wanted to change the colour to ‘one of those Swedish types of white, you know, they’ve got sixteen different ones, this is sort of
warmish, clean but not antiseptic, like, I don’t know, apple juice or something, only white’.
Zbigniew told Mrs Yount that he would think about it and give her a quote. It made no sense to take the job on, but he hated to turn work down, and a voice in the back of his mind told him that by coming to the house he would have another chance with the sexy nameless nanny.
O
n Sunday morning at his flat, Usman opened up his laptop and took out his 3G mobile to do a bit of net-surfing. This was his preferred way of getting news and entertainment. He did not like or trust the kafr media and for the most part avoided it. The two exceptions were football and
The X Factor
, which he had first watched when babysitting Fatima and Mohammed one Saturday night. Fatima had heard about the programme from her peers and was able to insist that everybody watched it. Usman wasn’t sufficiently experienced as an uncle to see through the manoeuvre. So the first time he saw the programme was on the TV next to the counter, with Mohammed asleep upstairs and Fatima sitting on the floor, her chin on her fists, utterly rapt. It was rubbish, of course it was, but there had been one or two occasions since when he happened to be near a TV on Saturday night, and there didn’t happen to be anything much else on, and he happened to find himself watching it, not in any concentrated way, obviously, but keeping an interest, staying in touch with the distractions of the masses … Know your enemy …