Capital

the sense of security it gave him – The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph and The Sun and The Times, and Top Gear and The Economist and Women’s Home Journal and Heat and Hello! and The Beano and Cosmopolitan, the crazy proliferation of print, the dozens of types of industrially manufactured sweets and chocolates, the baked beans and white bread and Marmite and Pot Noodles and all the other inedible things that English people ate, and the bin-liners and tinfoil and toothpaste and batteries (behind the counter where they couldn’t be stolen) and razor blades and painkillers and the ‘No Junk Mail’ stickers which he’d only got in last week and had already had to reorder twice, the laser-print-quality 80 g paper and the A4 envelopes and the A5 envelopes which had become so popular since they changed the way postal pricing worked, and the fridge full of soft drinks and the adjacent fridge of alcohol, and the bottles of Ribena and orange squash, and the credit card machine and the Transport for London card-charging device and the Lottery terminal – it all felt snug and cosy and safe, his very own space, and never more so than first thing in the morning when the shop was his alone. Mine, he thought, all mine. Ahmed turned down the volume on the CD player behind the counter and then pressed play: Sami Yusuf’s ‘My Ummah’ came on at low volume. Later in the day he would turn to Capital Gold, because not everyone liked Sami Yusuf, but nobody disliked oldies. Then came the day’s first irritation: that little bastard Usman had done it again. The shelves beside the counter where the shop’s alcohol was on display were covered by a blind. So was the section of the fridge devoted to beer and white wines.

Usman was Ahmed’s younger brother, a not very grown-up (in Ahmed’s view), argumentative (in everybody’s view) 28-year-old who divided his time between working in this very shop and studying (in Ahmed’s view that should be ‘studying’) for an engineering doctorate. Either Usman was going through a devout phrase or – Ahmed’s view – he was pretending to. Whichever it was, he was making a big deal of his dislike of selling alcohol and magazines with naked women on their covers. Muslims were not supposed to blah blah. As if everybody in the family were not well aware of these facts and also well aware of the economic necessities at work. There was no reason for the blind to have been pulled down. The only reason to pull it down was to make it clear that alcohol could not be legally sold outside the licensing period; but last night the shop had been shut at eleven and they had a licence to sell alcohol until eleven. The last person inside the shop the night before was Usman, and his latest trick was, when Ahmed was absent, pulling down the blind so that it would not be clear whether or not his scruples had on this occasion allowed him to sell alcohol to the unbelievers. It was a wind-up.

Ahmed unlocked the front door and pulled up the bottom of the shutter, which was always the hardest bit; then he shoved it up under the shop awning, as gently as he could. It was a cold day and his breath steamed freely. From just around the corner he could hear the whirr of the electric milk cart. He must have just missed it. Ahmed dragged the papers inside, puffing slightly, and pulled the door to. On a bad day when Rohinka was busy with the children and he was minding the shop all day, that would be the only exercise he would get in the whole twenty- four hours.

While he got on with the business of unpacking and setting out the newspapers, and then putting together the bundles for the three delivery boys who would be arriving at any time after six o’clock or so, Ahmed grumbled to himself. He loved Usman, of course he did, but there was no question that he was an annoying little bastard. If his precious conscience wouldn’t allow him to serve alcohol he should plainly say so, and then Ahmed could give him a bollocking and – this of course was the real reason Usman wouldn’t come out and say so plainly – get on Skype to their mother in Lahore. Hah! That would be a good one. That would be a classic. Mrs Kamal would scream. She would yell. She would denounce every single bad thing Usman had ever done, omitting nothing and minimising nothing, and then describe every single good thing that had ever been done for him, and then would invite Allah to inform her of what she had done, given the extraordinarily total contrast between his badness and his family’s goodness, what they had done to deserve such a thing. She would invite Allah to strike her dead rather than witness any further displays of ingratitude. She would go into orbit. And that would be just the warm-up. That would be her just getting going. She would give Usman such a bollocking there would be a real chance he’d drop dead right there on the spot. The world would realise that Pakistan had no real need of its nuclear deterrent since they already had the elder Mrs Kamal.

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 when 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.

5

Shahid 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 cafe 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.