Capital

‘There are a few things we need to eliminate,’ the doctor said. ‘A brain tumour is the first of them.’

‘I have a brain tumour?’ asked Petunia. She saw a tiny flicker in the man which showed that he did in fact think it possible that was what she had; it might even have been the thing he thought likeliest. But he didn’t admit that, what he said, in a patient, irritated way, was:

‘No. When we talk about “eliminating” something we mean ruling it out as the cause of an illness. So we go through the list of possible causes, and we eliminate them one by one and the one we’re left with is what’s wrong with you, you understand? It’s not to do with curing the tumour; it’s about finding out whether you have one. Is that clear?’

He was so much more important than her, Petunia felt, perhaps that was all that it came down to. He was important, his time was important, and she wasn’t – not that she wasn’t important in her own eyes, necessarily, just that it was clear that she was much less important than him. His lateness, his haste, his impatience, everything about him was calculated to show that he mattered more than whoever it was he was talking to.

Petunia had always been prone to seeing things from the other person’s point of view. This was supposed to be a virtue but Petunia herself sometimes wondered if it had in her become a fault; like her quietness and modesty, her reluctance to draw attention to herself or get above herself, it was a positive quality which she had taken too far. She had a glimpse of how she must seem to this confident, cross man: a small old mousy woman who needed to have things said twice, who took up very little space; she was just one of the dozens of people with whom he’d have dealings today.

‘I understand. Do you think I have a tumour?’ said Petunia. The doctor looked at her, his red face immobile, and was clearly giving her some credit for understanding what was at stake, as well as for her directness. Petunia felt, with a twinge of self-dislike, that she liked the fact that the doctor was taking more notice of her.

‘I think you may. I wouldn’t say that it is probable, but it is possible and it is something which we can eliminate fairly quickly. You will have to have a CAT scan, and that’ll tell us.’

‘Is that the one where you go into a sort of tunnel?’

The doctor did not smile but his expression lightened a little.

‘Yes. I hope you don’t have claustrophobia?’

She could tell he’d asked the question before.

‘I’ve seen it on television,’ said Petunia.

The doctor began doing things on his computer. He gave Petunia a date for the scan, ten days away. Now that he was well on the way to getting rid of her, he became more friendly. He asked for her appointment card and wrote the date on it.

‘Now you won’t forget, will you?’ said the doctor. He was trying to be nice; for him this was flirtatious. Petunia, who had spent so much of her life appeasing, managing, a difficult man, couldn’t find it in herself to do anything other than play along.

She rode downstairs in the lift and spent forty minutes waiting before a minicab came and took her home.

20

Usman came into the shop at quarter past four on Friday, a little out of breath. Shahid was waiting for him behind the counter. Even though he was late, Usman paused for a moment inside the door. He could never quite get used to how much sheer stuff there was in the shop: piled and stacked and arrayed. There was something offensive and impure about this sheer amount of stuffness.

‘Salaam, dickhead,’ Shahid said to his brother. ‘You’re late.’

‘Sorry. Traffic. They’re digging up every street in South London.’

‘And because you’re late,’ Shahid said, picking up his coat and lifting the counter flap to let himself out and his brother in, ‘I’m going to be late, and if I’m late for prayers, it being Friday afternoon, I’m well on the way to not being a Muslim, and it’s your fault.’

‘You’d have to miss two more Friday prayers.’

‘With an unreliable idiot like you to rely on, that’s all too possible.’

‘I said I was sorry,’ said Usman, taking his place behind the counter. Usman spoke with some ill grace, since he was by no means sure that Shahid was actually going to mosque: they attended different mosques and he didn’t know for sure how regularly his brother went to prayers. But since he and Shahid basically got on, unlike he and Ahmed, he didn’t want to make too big a thing of it.

‘Laters,’ said Shahid in the high girly voice he used for saying that word to his younger brother. He held the door open for a mother with an enormous three-wheel pram. Then Shahid was gone; as it happened, to mosque, for Friday prayers.

Brixton Mosque had acquired a bad reputation thanks to a few idiots. There had always been an anger to the rhetoric, more outside the mosque than inside, often, but inside too, and there was no point denying it: the imam was not everyone’s cup of tea. These things drew attention that you didn’t want and Shahid couldn’t help wondering, at times, just how many of his fellow worshippers were MI5 or Special Branch, operatives or informers or provocateurs or plants. And some of this had been self-inflicted by the community. Having a former worshipper plot to blow up a transatlantic jetliner via an exploding shoe – even if you believed only one word of every ten in the kafr media, this was bad PR. But Shahid had been going to Brixton Mosque for almost fifteen years, and was not about to stop now. He unlocked his bike – on dry days he chained it to the railings in front, where he could see it from behind the shop counter – and rode the first twenty yards along the pavement, then swerved into the road at the zebra crossing.

The traffic was strangely light, given that London in general was mad at the moment, everyone running around shopping as if their lives depended on it: the next three days were going to be insane, on every high street in the country, spending running up to however many billion it was. About half the people on the street were carrying shopping bags. The idea that the Christians thought this was a religious festival was hilarious; it was the most openly pagan thing Shahid had ever seen. Ahmed had been unable to prevent Fatima joining in the hoopla, so although the Kamals didn’t celebrate Christmas the children still got presents. Little Mohammed would grow up to enjoy the bounty created by his demanding sister. No doubt she wouldn’t be shy about telling him so. Shahid weaved through the traffic, skipping two red lights and having only one near-death experience, when a car came out of a side street on Acre Lane without seeing him or stopping. He cut up the one-way street on the pavement to Gresham Road and was in good time for ablutions before prayers.

Standing next to him at the basins was a Caribbean bus driver whose name Shahid didn’t know but who he’d seen on and off at the mosque for more than a decade. The man had a meditative, half-a-beat-slow way of wringing his hands under the taps. Shahid had noticed it before, the bus driver slowing himself down with the cleaning ritual before prayers. That was what he liked about Friday prayers: the sense of continuity within his own life, the ritual stretching into the past and into the future, and the familiar faces and the friendliness. Some of the rhetoric and especially the anger no longer felt quite right to him, was no longer the good fit with his mood and temper that it had once been; but the other things mattered more. He’d never been an especially good listener. But he loved praying, the physical act of prostration. Not five times a day, obviously, not any more – who had time for that? But when he was praying, it was one of the only times in his life when he felt fully there. It was not a sense of transcendence: he didn’t go out of himself and he had no intuitions of other orders of reality. Some said that the self could be left behind; that Paradise could be glimpsed in the raptures of the most fervent, devout prayer. That wasn’t Shahid’s experience. But while he was praying, he was praying, fully given over to his own presence in the words and motions and the ritual. It was the best he could do, and for him it was enough.

The reading was from the Thunder sura, Al-Ra’ad, and Shahid could more or less follow it in his sort-of-OK Arabic.

‘Allah is the One who raised the heavens without pillars that you can see, then assumed all authority. He committed the sun and the moon, each running for a predetermined period. He controls all things, and explains the revelations, that you may attain certainty about meeting your Lord.

‘He is the One who constructed the earth and placed on it mountains and rivers. And from the different kinds of fruits, He made them into pairs – males and females. The night overtakes the day. These are solid proofs for people who think.’