sketchiest understanding of how the detailed mathematics of their trading worked. He was technically blank in a job that was all about technical things. That was unforgivable.
Mark should not lie to himself – a great man did not lie to himself. Roger was a dickhead and he, Mark, was a genius. He was rotting away as Roger’s deputy, because Roger would not give him full credit, and the reason Roger wouldn’t give him full credit was because if he did, he, Roger, would be exposed, and sacked or demoted. The system was this: Mark did the work, Roger got the credit.
It was time to do something about that.
The train got to Godalming and he got off. His father was waiting for him in the car park. It was typical of his father not to come into the station to greet Mark, but to wait outside, standing beside the brown Volvo in his brown trousers. He had caught a touch of sun, or had been outside a lot, which gave his face a trace of brown also; to Mark this made him look blurry, faded. Again he thought of mediocrity, of all the things he had had to work so hard to get away from.
‘Mark!’ said his father, who always started strongly and then faded. ‘Hello, it’s, um, nice to see you.’ He bounced his arms against his sides, the gesture of a much younger man, as if he would have offered to carry a bag if Mark had one, which of course, since he was only coming down for lunch, he didn’t.
Mark got in the car and sat there for the twenty-minute drive while his father made excruciating attempts at small talk. They got home to the ‘chalet-bungalow’ – a phrase which made him feel ill every time he heard either of his parents use it – where he had grown up. His father pulled up outside the garage and his sister, eleven years younger than him at eighteen, jumped up out of the front-garden deckchair where she’d been sitting reading
‘Marky Marky Marky,’ she said. ‘Have you got a girlfriend yet?’
He began smoothing his hair back down.
‘Stop acting twelve,’ he said.
‘You make me feel twelve, big brother,’ said Clare, pivoting her leg on tiptoe while pretending to simper and twiddle a non-existent ponytail. She had always had a talent for knowing how to irritate him, and to establish, completely, the fact that part of him was still an irritated teenager. That was part of what he hated about going home and being home: how stuck it made him feel. In Godalming, everyone, including himself, acted as if he was still fifteen.
His mother came to the door. He was braced for it; he knew it was going to happen; he had rehearsed it in his head; and yet all of that was no help. As with his father, as always, she started big and then faded.
‘Mark!’ she said. ‘You look…’ – eyes sliding, certainty level ebbing – ‘… nice?’ she finished, as if it were a question, with her eyes flickering. He told himself that with every second that passed, this experience, like everything else, was getting closer to being over. Tomorrow he would begin to make his move. As Andrew Carnegie wrote, ‘The rising man must do something exceptional and beyond the range of his special department. HE MUST ATTRACT ATTENTION.’
35
‘I’ve got a new system to organise the Islamic calendar,’ said Shahid to the table at large: Ahmed and Usman, Rohinka, Fatima and Mohammed. ‘Instead of dating things from the hegira, we begin to date things from when that moron Iqbal moved into my flat. So instead of being the year 1428 it’s actually the day 95. It makes sense. He’s so boring that he can cause a fundamental disruption of the space-time continuum. He’s so boring he’s a one-man walking injustice. He leaves a deep sense of grievance everywhere he goes just because the people he’s been with realise they’ve just spent time that they’re never going to get back. He’s a nightmare. And he’s in my flat! He’s stinking up the place with his smelly feet and his I-already-had-a-shower-this-month!’
Ahmed, good older brother, lost no time in saying, ‘It’s your fault for inviting him.’
‘I didn’t invite him, he invited himself.’
‘Then it’s your fault for allowing him to invite himself.’
‘I didn’t allow him to invite himself, he just invited himself.’
‘I don’t see a difference.’
‘That’s because you’re a plonker too.’
Usman snorted a reluctant laugh through his unkempt, I’m-more-devout-than-you beard. Rohinka said, ‘Boys, boys.’ Fatima chanted, ‘Fight, fight!’
It was Saturday and the Kamals were having lunch together, something they didn’t often do. Ahmed’s friend Hashim was looking after the shop downstairs, and Ahmed found that he could, with an effort of will, put out of his mind for as much as five minutes at a time the thought of Hashim running up incorrect amounts on the till, taking orders for expensive part-works without getting the customer’s full details, selling alcohol to fifteen-year-olds, and forgetting how to operate the lottery machine and the Oyster top-ups, while the queue backed out the door and regular customers vowed never to come to the shop again…
‘Iqbal seems all right to me,’ said Usman. ‘He takes things more seriously than you do, that’s all. It doesn’t seem to me such a bad characteristic.’
‘Get a shave,’ said Shahid.
Rohinka brought another casserole over from the stove and put it on the table. There was barely space for it: the table already carried two oven-hot dishes, one of chicken in cumin and the other of stewed aubergines, both of them resting on heatproof mats; a platter of naan wrapped in a kitchen cloth to keep them warm; and a bowl of dal, one of Rohinka’s specialities, something she cooked almost every day and never twice to exactly the same recipe. She lifted the lid of the new dish and a beautifully complex smell of lamb and spices, her recipe for achari gosht, floated above the table in a cloud of fragrant steam. The men made varying murmurs and groans of appreciation. The achari gosht was intended to change the topic of conversation, but it didn’t work.
‘That smells great but if I eat a single thing more I’ll explode,’ said Shahid. ‘Look, the thing about Iqbal is the way he’s just so oblivious. I come in, I hear the television upstairs, I know it’s going to be tuned in to one of the news channels, him watching some latest atrocity or other, or ranting to himself about the kafr media, or he’s going to be on the internet muttering and typing and he shuts the screen as soon as I get in, as if I care about his stupid life and his stupid MSN chats with his stupid friends in stupid Belgium or stupid Algeria or stupid wherever. He just acts like he thinks everything he says and does is a big deal and he’s this man of mystery; meanwhile he’s sitting with his feet on the sofa, and leaving dishes in the sink, and he’s like this child who hasn’t grown up yet and doesn’t even realise it.’
Rohinka and Ahmed exchanged a look. Both of them were thinking that this would not be an entirely inaccurate description of Shahid himself. Shahid saw the look and knew perfectly well what it meant, but didn’t care, because he knew he was right.
‘Do you think he is, maybe, I don’t know quite how to put it, up to something?’ asked Rohinka.
Shahid didn’t want to think about that. It touched too directly on the things he had done when he was younger and had been, not exactly a jihadi, but a fellow traveller in jihad, and the companion of people who were certainly up to things then, and were probably still up to them now, if they were still alive. Iqbal was a blast from that particular past. For Shahid, he was therefore both a reminder of it and a reminder of how much he didn’t want to go there in his head. So he found himself not really asking too closely about who Iqbal really was and what his motives really were.
‘I hope not,’ was all Shahid said.
‘Would it be such a bad thing if he were’ – Usman waggled his fingers in contemptuous inverted commas – ‘“up to something”? Would it be so bad if somebody were doing something? Rather than just passively accepting a state of injustice and oppression?’
‘You are a child,’ said Ahmed, instantly very angry. ‘You don’t have any real opinions, you just strike attitudes to try and create an effect. It would be a boring enough habit in a teenager but in a man your age it’s pathetic.’
