The thing which most irritated Ahmed about his younger brother was the self-righteousness. Usman could not prevent it from being clear that he thought he was a better Muslim, a better person, than his two brothers, thanks to his new religious scruples. That was hard to take, all the more so because it was written on his face and in his body language rather than said out loud where it could be shouted down. His expression when he was putting magazines like
Zoo
or
Nuts
on the shelf, or giving change to a customer who’d just bought a bottle of wine – he looked like a Rottweiler chewing a wasp. On some days when Usman had been on in the evening, or when he’d done the first
shift at the weekend, Ahmed would find the men’s magazines hidden at the back of the shelf, behind the car and computer mags. It was obvious that Usman had done it, though when Ahmed had asked him about it he had blamed the customers. It was supposed to be a shop, you were supposed to sell people things, not try to see how many people you could deter from buying Special Brew by the sheer force of your scowling. Usman stood behind the counter with his shoulders hunched and his stupid unkempt new beard, looking like something from a Wanted poster.
On the subject of scowling, Ahmed could hear footsteps thumping down the stairs. From the weight of them and the determined way they were being whacked down on the steps he knew it was Fatima. He looked at the clock: it was six; she often woke around now. And sure enough his daughter came into the front of the shop, cross, and stood with her hands on her hips.
‘Daddy! Daddy! What is the time!’
‘Early, darling, very early. Wouldn’t you like to go back to bed? It’s cold down here and Daddy’s working.’
‘Daddy! No! I want breakfast!’
‘It’s a little early for breakfast, my flower.’
‘I’ll wake Mummy! She’ll give me breakfast!’
‘No, darling, you mustn’t do that.’
‘I’ll wake Mohammed and he’ll wake Mummy and then she’ll give me breakfast but it will be Mohammed’s fault that she’s awake!’ explained Fatima.
‘OK, darling, I’ll give you some breakfast. You can have some tea, too,’ this being a new special treat, and something that made Fatima feel especially grown-up. Ahmed took his daughter by the hand and led her into the kitchen. When he went he took the last few papers, the batch for Pepys Road, to scribble addresses on them so that they’d be ready for the delivery boys. As he picked them up he saw something on the floor of the shop, a card which must have been pushed through the postbox while he’d been working. Some idle bastard wanting an ad put up on the noticeboard and too lazy to give it in by hand or too stupid to realise that the shop was already open, thought Ahmed. But
then he looked at the card, still holding Fatima’s hand, and saw it was a photo of the shop, and written on the back were the words ‘We Want What You Have’. For about three seconds Ahmed wondered what the significance of the card was, and then his daughter, holding his hand and leaning at forty-five degrees, giving herself entirely over to gravity in an attempt to force her father to follow her, succeeded in dragging him away.
S
hahid Kamal, who was due to work a shift at the family shop between eight o’clock in the morning and six o’clock in the evening, walked down the street at a brisk clip. He was early, and had several things he could be doing with this extra half-hour: he could have stayed in bed; he could have sat in the café downstairs from his flat reading a book; he could have spent half an hour on the net catching up on the news and his Myspace page and his discussion boards; but instead he chose to take a brisk walk. Five years ago their father had died suddenly in Lahore, struck down by a heart attack at sixty-two, and his brother Ahmed was already beginning to look a little like their dad: paunchy, tired, unfit, indoorsy. Shahid could read the omens and knew the family body type; now that he was in his thirties he was going to have to take exercise if he was not to turn into yet another ghee-fattened South Asian with a gut and high blood pressure. So here he was, going the long way round, and at speed. There was lots of traffic on the pavement, most of it people on the way to work, heads down in the cold, most of them carrying briefcases and shoulder bags or handbags. Shahid had no bag, he liked to move unencumbered.
Just before the corner of Pepys Road, Shahid crossed to the other side of the street – to reduce the chance that Ahmed might see him and call him to come and help with the pre-work rush – and turned towards the Common. He still had twenty minutes. It was cold, but
Shahid had nothing against the cold as long as he could keep moving. He came out on the Common, passed the Church and its billboard of advertisements for itself, and headed out for the bandstand; there and back would be about twenty minutes and he’d be bang on time. Commuters came hurrying towards the Tube station from every point of the compass, with cyclists weaving in and out among them. Although he too was heading to work, Shahid was glad he wasn’t dragging himself off to some office job. Shahid’s view: anybody who had to wear a suit to work died a little inside, every day.
Shahid was the free spirit of the Kamal family: a dreamer, an idealist, a wanderer on the face of the earth – or, as Ahmed would put it, a lazy fuckwit. He had been offered a place at Cambridge to read physics but cocked it up by missing his required A-level grades, owing to a bad case of not doing any work at all for his final school year. He’d gone to Bristol instead but dropped out after a year and went on a mission to save his brothers in religion in Chechnya. He’d been gone for four months. Although no member of the Kamal family ever referred to this as anything other than a joke, it hadn’t felt like a joke at the time to Shahid. Chechnya itself had been horrible, a brutal disillusionment – Shahid mainly remembered being shouted at, a permanent sense of moral ambiguity where he’d expected to find a shining light of virtue, a feeling that it was hard, among the good guys, to tell who the good guys were, and being cold and hungry and frightened, right up until he came down with diphtheria and was smuggled back out the same way he’d come in. But the trip there had been sensational, the best time of his life: he’d set out on his own, hooked up with some fellow idealists in Brussels, and then they travelled out by cadging lifts and bumming rides all the way to the Russian border, before blagging their way onto a convoy and riding the scary, exhilarating trail through Russian-held territory, through Chechen lines into the besieged homeland. He hadn’t really had a clue what he was doing, other than expressing a vague sense that his brothers were in danger and that Muslims were being killed and no one was doing anything about it, so it was his duty to do something – but it was a rule of life that you were allowed to do silly, half-baked, idealistic things when you were eighteen. The
best thing about it had been the sense of purpose, of a shared goal and larger meaning, that they’d all had on the trip there, he and two blokes from Birmingham, a French-Algerian called Yakoub, and three Belgian Muslims, two of whom were converts, all of them high on the sense of purpose and discipline and willingness to fight for a cause. He almost never thought about Chechnya but he often thought about the trip there. Shahid was also aware of the irony that he who prized his freedom and willingness to seek truth had been happiest when he had a defined purpose, a sense of duty and obligation, and a specific destination in mind.
Since then he hadn’t done anything much, or nothing which would look like much on a CV. He spent a couple of months recovering from his stomach bug, and one large irony was that his system could no longer tolerate alcohol – it instantly gave him the runs. So after giving up on his mission to save the
umma
he was now doomed to be a lifelong teetotaller. Not that he had ever been a heavy drinker but he did like a glass of cider every now and then … After getting better he’d worked in the shop and pursued a series of interests, many of which had looked like turning into jobs: he’d been a martial arts bum, learning first t’ai chi, then wing chun, then karate, and had spent every conscious non-working moment for several years in one dojo or another. He liked the discipline and the implicit spirituality of the martial arts, and the way respect and courtesy were built into their fabric: it had the rigour of religious practice but no supernatural or political baggage. Also you learned to kick the shit out of people. But his interest in karate faded just at the point when he’d taken and passed his karate black belt exam; that would have been the moment at which he took up teaching, and something about the idea of being in authority over people, telling them what to do, bossing them about – that, to Shahid, just wasn’t him.
After his martial arts phase Shahid got interested in computers. This was the end of the nineties and the internet was starting to take off. He taught himself HTML and began helping people to make websites – first friends and friends of friends and then gradually building up a word-of-mouth business. It was a time when you could make a living by having read roughly two books about writing code, so he
did, and earned more money than at any other time in his life. Perhaps that was the problem. Somewhere deep in Shahid’s sense of himself was the idea of being a seeker, a drifter, a man not tied down; he could feel the cash, four-figure sums in a good week, starting to tether him. Shahid could tell that it wouldn’t be long before he wanted the life to go with the money, so on the day he was offered a proper, full-time job – setting up a website for a friend’s cousin, who’d made a shedload importing cloth, and was planning to make several shedloads more – instead he just stopped writing code. These days he spent very little time surfing the web, which now seemed, on reflection, a giant collective conspiracy to waste time. Given infinite freedom of intellectual movement, it turned out that what people mainly want to do is look at pictures of Kelly Brook’s tits. Shahid enrolled at Birkbeck and did another year of physics before dropping out again – as Ahmed pointed out, at this rate he was well on course to graduate in 2025. It was the daily slog across London, more than the work, which made the educational fight go out of him. After that, Shahid mainly read books and worked in the shop. He was OK with that. He felt full of potential.
Shahid came to the shop and checked his watch: bang on time. More and yet more commuters were scuttling past, the morning rush building up, a few of them taking a sharp turn sideways to go into the shop, preferably without breaking step or losing speed. Bless them, every one. He followed one of them through, and saw that a queue had already built up at the counter. He came through and grunted a greeting at Ahmed in return for the fact that Ahmed had done no more than grunt one at him. Ahmed was doing that thing of wearing every piece of clothing he owned. Together they served ten customers, the typical morning crowd, buying newspapers and energy drinks and topping up their Oyster cards, the queue to pay on the right side of the central shelves and the queue to exit on the left. Then there was a lull.
‘Cup of tea?’ said Ahmed, thawing slightly. He gestured behind him towards the living quarters with his soft right hand. Shahid nodded his thanks and went through.
Ahmed did not know this, but Shahid was not free of envy at the domestic side of his brother’s life, and he felt a jab of it as he saw
Rohinka stirring something on the stove while Fatima, looking prim and businesslike in her school uniform, sat at the kitchen table drawing a flower on a piece of paper with a yellow marker pen. Mohammed sat in his high chair in a bright red Babygro, looking with deep, reverent concentration at the palms of his hands. He had what appeared to be mashed banana on his nose.
‘Mohammed, say hello to your uncle,’ said Rohinka.
‘Nun-nun,’ said Mohammed, without looking up from his hands. Something about them was possessing him; it was as if he’d never seen them before. He began turning them from side to side. ‘Un-un,’ he added.
‘So what’s new?’ Shahid asked his sister-in-law. There was a sexy gentleness to Rohinka that Shahid approved of very much. She was so much nicer than his stiff brother, it was ridiculous. Rohinka could tell that he liked her and in turn liked him back.
‘Nothing in my life is new,’ said Rohinka. ‘Why would anything be new? Where would such newness come from?’ The words were those of complaint but the tone was happy. Rohinka was happy and did not feel any need to keep the fact secret. ‘And now – time for school. Mohammed, we’re off to get changed. Fatima, it is time to do your toilet business. Shahid, see you later.’
Fatima lifted up her drawing and said: ‘Finished!’ As with everything else she said, this came out sounding proud and fierce.
‘What a lovely flower! And the drawing is lovely too,’ said Shahid, who was shy with girls but flirted effortlessly with children. Fatima put her hands on her hips.
‘Fatima!’ warned her mother. Rohinka went upstairs carrying Mohammed, who was still looking at his hands, Fatima went into the loo, and Shahid went into the shop to take over from his grumpy overweight brother.
A
t number 51 Pepys Road, Mrs Arabella Yount, who had once read a book about how women were better than men at multitasking, was doing four different things at the same time: she was putting up some shelves in the tiny storeroom she liked to call her pantry; she was looking after her two lovely children, Joshua and Conrad; she was shopping for clothes over the internet; and she was making plans to give her husband a nasty fright.
Two of those tasks Arabella had subcontracted to other people. The shelves were being put up by her Pole, Bogdan the builder, whom she had started using after a recommendation from a friend and had now adopted as her own. He worked twice as hard as a British worker, was twice as reliable, and cost half as much. Something similar could be said about Pilar, their Spanish nanny, who was looking after her two boys, Conrad and Joshua. Arabella had got Pilar through an agency. She had a qualification in childcare (in fact had a degree), a valid driving licence, could cook, didn’t mind doing her share of the housework, got on famously with Maria the cleaner, which was good because otherwise it could be a bit embarrassing on the two days they were both in the house, and, most importantly – it went without saying that it was by far the most important – was just heavenly with her two boys. Conrad and Joshua positively doted on Pilar. They loved the games she made up for them, the Spanish nursery rhymes she taught them,
and her willingness to submit to local custom and cook them two different meals three times a day, since they were inflexibly committed to never liking the same food. At the moment, Conrad would eat nothing that wasn’t doused in soy sauce, and Joshua would eat no vegetables, and Pilar was an absolute genius at dealing with all that.