As for football, Usman loved the fact that Freddy Kamo lived a few houses away – well, a hundred yards away – in the very same street. The first time he’d heard of Freddy he had been incredibly excited for more than one reason, since Freddy was a brother Muslim, and there was something extra-cool about that, even though this was a fact that he’d never seen mentioned anywhere in the press, not once. Nobody
seemed to know where Freddy went to mosque. It would be cool to go to the same mosque, to worship next to him at Friday prayers, maybe to fall into conversation afterwards, discover the Pepys Road connection, maybe even become mates … Freddy was Usman’s favourite footballer and he had watched YouTube clips of him dozens, maybe even hundreds of times. He loved the way he looked as if he was crap but then you actually realised he was brilliant. He loved his youth too. As the youngest brother, Usman was always on the side of the youngest person or entity. Islam was the world’s youngest major religion and the only one that told the truth – see?
It was desperately sad about what had happened to Freddy. The game had been televised and Usman had been watching at a mate’s house; an old mate from school, whose lifestyle was unIslamic because he drank alcohol, but he and Usman had known each other for so long that he was, in his mind, partially exempt from the rules. Besides, he had Sky Sports. The tackle which smashed Freddy’s leg was shown, in the usual way, about ten times, and it was something that made you feel sick when you looked at it. Freddy had always seemed vulnerable; that was part of what was so thrilling about him, that he looked vulnerable but never got caught or hurt. Now that he had been, it all felt different.
Usman wouldn’t have minded having a look at some clips of Freddy in his prime, but this particular technique for surfing the net was too slow for that. He had broadband, obviously, but there were some things he didn’t like to do over his own internet connection. Usman was, always had been, careful about stuff like that. A neighbour had until recently had an unencrypted wireless connection which he used for his own surfing when he wanted to do something that couldn’t be traced, but the neighbour – he didn’t know who but he guessed it was the flat in the basement – had wised up and gone to WPA encryption about three months ago. So now Usman used a pay-as-you-go 3G mobile phone which he’d bought for cash and was therefore untraceable, and tethered it to his laptop. He ran the browser with all its privacy settings on, via an anonymising service. An electronic spy or eavesdropper would have no way of knowing who he was.
Not that Usman did anything against the law on the net – nothing illegal, not exactly. Looking at or downloading Al Qaeda training
manuals, for instance, was a criminal offence. Usman had no wish to go that far, even in the privacy of his own head. As for whether the people who did go that far were all wrong, well, he would once have said that if you have no other way of getting attention for your grievances, then it may be regrettable but there was sometimes no other way than violence. But now, without fully adopting another position, he had gone a long way to abandoning that one. The bombings of 7/7 had been in large part responsible for that. Seen at close hand in the city where he lived, the violence was too stupid and too random to be a viable course of action. The engineer in him rebelled at the sight of something so ugly and wasteful and so – in his heart he could admit this – wrong.
He still had an appetite for the conversation, though. He still liked to know what the angry people were saying. A global conspiracy to destroy Islam was something he no longer believed in, but the idea that there was a fundamental anti-Muslim bias in the attitudes of the developed world was, in Usman’s view, manifestly true. Mind you, if anything could put you off that idea, it was the kind of people you found contributing their rants to some of these websites. Usman had contributed a few times himself, but even when he was hiding behind a pseudonym and using a completely anonymised technique for accessing the net, it made him nervous. Too nervous to keep on doing it. A common theme, indeed a common obsession, on the sites was how thoroughly they were penetrated by spies and provocateurs and informers. No doubt that was true. Contributing to these forums when so many of the people on them were trying to find out who you were and get you in trouble, to trick you into saying things or giving things away – that was scary. And then there was the fact that the (by local standards) moderate and reasonable arguments he was making immediately generated flame wars in which people accused him of everything from being a stooge to a phoney Muslim to being himself a spy/provocateur/informer – that was too much. Usman stopped posting. Now he just lurked.
There wasn’t much to read today. Iraq and Afghanistan and the global conspiracy and all the usual. A long rant about how Al Jazeera
was a tool of Western oppression and how the Qataris who funded it weren’t real Muslims. The connection over the 3G was slow today, and Usman found his taste for the debate just wasn’t there. He logged off the site he was reading and went back to his Google home page. On impulse, just for old times’ sake, he typed in ‘We Want What You Have’ and told Google that he was feeling lucky. To his amazement, there the blog was, hosted on a new platform, but with everything that had been on it before and a whole load of new stuff too. Usman was so surprised it was as if someone had jumped out of the computer and shouted Boo! He clicked on the links and looked through the pages that came up. More images, some of them now with virtual graffiti. Nasty stuff for the most part. Abuse was tagged onto most of the houses in the street. Even – sacrilege! – to the house where Freddy Kamo lived. An image of their own shop at number 68, the old image that had been on the site before, was defaced with the word ‘Bell-end’.
That made Usman smile. His brother could certainly be a bit of a bell-end. But what had happened to the site was weird and disturbing, and Usman didn’t understand it at all.
I
t would not be entirely fair, Rohinka realised, to blame Mrs Kamal for every single thing that was wrong with the Kamal family dynamics. But it would be a little bit fair. Taking in the deliveries at five o’clock in the morning, she found herself reflecting on the fact that she had been braced for irritation, had psychologically prepared herself to feel irritated, to breathe deeply, to rise above it – and yet here she was, unpacking cartons of milk, stripping the wrapping off newspapers with a Stanley knife, waiting for the grocery truck, irritated.
That was the main thing wrong with Mrs Kamal. She spent such an extraordinary amount of mental energy feeling irritated that it was impossible not to feel irritated in turn. It was oxygen to her, this low-grade dissatisfaction, shading into anger; this sense that things weren’t being done correctly, that everything from the traffic noise at night to the temperature of the hot water in the morning to the progress of Mohammed’s potty training to the fact that Fatima wasn’t being taught to read Urdu, only English, to the fact that Rohinka served only two dishes at dinner the night of her arrival to the cost of the car insurance for the VW Sharan to the fact that Shahid didn’t have a ‘proper job’ and seemed to have no intention of getting one, let alone a wife, to the unfriendliness of London, the fact that it was an ‘impossible city’, to the ostentatious way she complained about missing Lahore, especially at dinner time, giving meaningful, sad, reproachful looks at the
food Rohinka had cooked. I should poison the bitch, that’ll show her. In her head, Rohinka growled and muttered and seethed with – and she was well aware of the irony – irritation.
She could hear movement upstairs. There was no way this could be a good thing: either it was Mrs Kamal, preparing to announce that she had had no sleep, which was a declaration that she would be in an even filthier temper than usual, or it was Fatima, announcing that she was now awake, and required entertaining. The steps paused for a moment, as if in thought, and then headed towards the stairs: a small person making thumpy steps: Fatima. She came around the bottom of the stairwell.
‘Mummy, I’m freezing.’
‘It’s quarter past five in the morning. You should be in bed.’
Fatima put her hands on her hips.
‘I couldn’t sleep.’
‘I bet you could if you tried. Think how warm and cosy it is in bed. Under the duvet. With your toys.’
‘I hate my toys!’
This was such a lie that Rohinka just looked at her. Fatima took a moment to listen to what she herself had just said.
‘Not all of them,’ Fatima admitted. ‘I don’t hate Pinky,’ a doll she’d been given for her last birthday. ‘I could get in bed with Daddy, I bet it’s extra-warm.’
Inside Rohinka there was a violent but short pitched battle between her conscience, which told her she should wrestle her daughter back into bed, and her wish for a quiet life, which told her to let Fatima get into bed with Ahmed, and maybe, just maybe, they’d both sleep; knowing perfectly well that she was likely to wake him and try to make small talk for an hour or two. She looked at the piles of work she still had to do.
‘Maybe you should try Daddy,’ said Rohinka. I’ll make it up to him, she thought. Fatima rocked her weight from foot to foot while she considered the proposition.
‘Don’t want to,’ she said. Rohinka sighed. She hated the feeling of being already tired from the day’s events, right at its very start, before
the real day had even begun, but she pointed to Fatima’s favourite stool. ‘Ten minutes, and back to bed,’ Rohinka said. ‘Or you’ll be too tired to go to school.’ Then, when her daughter hopped up and down, clapping with delight at being allowed to stay with her, she felt guilty.
Rohinka had wanted to be married, had wanted to have a husband and a family, and a family’s life together, and as the middle of five children had a pretty good idea, she thought, of what family life meant; but nothing had prepared her for the sheer quantity of emotion involved, the charge of feeling. There could be wild mood swings, tantrums, exhilaration, giggling laughter, a sense of the complete futility of all effort, a grinding realisation that every hour of the day was hard, the knowledge that you were wholly trapped by your children, and moments of the purest love, the least earthbound feeling she had ever had – and all this before nine o’clock in the morning, on a typical day. It wasn’t so much the intensity of the feelings as the sheer quantity of them for which she had been unprepared. Rohinka had a guilty secret: sometimes, out walking or shopping with Fatima and Mohammed, she would look around at people who didn’t have children and think: you don’t have the faintest idea what life is about. You haven’t got a clue. Life with children is life in colour, and life without them is black and white. Even when it’s hard – when Mohammed is sitting in the supermarket trolley breaking open yoghurt cartons, and Fatima is screaming at me because I won’t let her stock up on sweets at the checkout, and I’m so tired my eyes are stinging and I’ve got my period and my back hurts from carrying the children and stacking shelves and everyone is looking at me thinking what a bad mum I am, even then, it’s better than black and white.
And maybe that’s what had happened to Mrs Kamal. Maybe it was the sheer quantity of feeling that had got to her; that had somehow mismatched with what she had expected life to be, what she had wanted for herself. Or maybe it was like a chemical reaction gone wrong. She was supposed to feel x but instead she felt y. The things that were supposed to mature her had instead curdled her, so instead of being older and wiser she had got older and more and more irritated, so that now she had become someone who carried irritation around
with her like a smell. The irritation was catching in the way that yawning was catching. Rohinka could see, now, that this was why the Kamal boys were the way they were. All of them were, in most of their dealings, reasonable men (with the exception of Usman, who was in many respects still an adolescent). They were calm and sane and functioned well; men who could be talked to, reasoned with, who saw things in proportion. With each other, though, and with their mother, and in everything to do with the Kamal family, they were all irritated, all the time. It wasn’t that they rubbed each other up the wrong way, it was that things always started up wrong and never improved. Ahmed, who was annoyed by very little – his disposition was so even, it verged on being a culpable passivity, a failure to get-up-and-go – was annoyed by his siblings and his mother. It was as if, in each other’s company, the Kamals all went into their special irritation room, like the panic room in the Jodie Foster film.
Blame the mother – that’s right, blame the mother. Since becoming a mother herself, Rohinka had been sensitised to just how many explanations for everything that happened boiled down to: blame the mother. It couldn’t be the real answer for things nearly as often as people said it was. But on this occasion, she did think it was true that Mrs Kamal was to blame. Rohinka wouldn’t be like that with her own children, definitely not. She looked around the room at the undone work, the papers still unwrapped, the shelves still unstacked, the first customers due before long, and sighed again.
‘Are you cross, Mummy?’ said Fatima.
‘No, I’m not cross. Not with you. I was thinking about grown-up things.’
So now it was time for Fatima to give a big, theatrical sigh. Rohinka beckoned her onto her lap, and her daughter hopped up.
‘I’m never cross with you, not deep down. Even when I’m cross I still love you.’
‘I know that, Mummy,’ said Fatima, who did. She bounced and wriggled on Rohinka’s lap to get more comfortable, and it was from that position, in a moment of complete happiness, that Rohinka looked up to see the door opened, tentatively at first, and then very abruptly,
and then shouting men dressed in black and blue came into the room, several of them, moving quickly and loudly and creating such an impression of violence and disorder that it took her a few seconds – it can only have been a few seconds, but at the time it felt much longer – to realise that the men were shouting ‘Armed police!’