at all. She had known that Roger had lost his job. It would have been impossible not to know: from one day to the next he had gone from being invisible at home to being omnipresent. Roger’s size made him hard to ignore: in the most basic way, he took up a lot of space. His noise footprint was large. The house seemed immediately smaller. He was constantly in the kitchen, crashing up the stairs to his study to listen to his punk compilation CD at a too- high volume. From wearing, in the week, nothing but classic suits, he was now never to be found in anything except a dressing gown or horrible knee-length khaki shorts with huge sagging pockets. He was always offering to help, and, Matya could not fail to notice, never missed an opportunity to check her out, especially from behind, and especially especially when she had to bend over to stack the dishwasher, load the washing machine, or do anything with the children. It was a bit much.
Knowing that Roger had suddenly and dramatically lost his job, it wasn’t hard to work out that her job was likely not to be long in following. So as soon as Arabella had asked her for ‘a little chat’, Matya had suspected what was coming. It was later, in the course of the afternoon, that she began to think about what it really meant. She would be traipsing around looking for work – something she hadn’t done for some time, and about which she had no illusions. It would be a boring ordeal of smiling and making nice while trying to work out if the prospective employers were sane and reliable and whether their children were the kind she could imagine looking after for nine hours a day. That was a chore but she knew it was one she could do, because she had done it before. The thing which made it worse was that her flat-share had finished and she was having to look for somewhere new to live. That, in London, was more than a chore – the actual physical process of looking, the Tubes and buses and the trudging around, the small ads and want ads and Craigslist-surfing and free-sheet-poring, the texts and appointments and interviews, the vetting of addresses and then rooms and then flatmates, all of it, was exhausting, depressing, remorseless, one of those things which made you feel the oppressive scale of London – but again, it was something she knew. She had done it before.
What she hadn’t done before, what was unknown, was leaving Joshua. All day she tried not to think about it; all day it was on the edge of her mind. She could feel a great pit of gloom opening up beneath her. Who could resist a three-year-old, bursting with love, whose idea of complete happiness was to come and snuggle up with you? Their love affair wasn’t in the early stages any more – it wasn’t quite in early-dates territory; her heart didn’t skip a beat when she saw him – but she was happier with Joshua than she had been with anyone else she had ever known. Matya was aware that this was connected with her childhood: she was rediscovering her lost parents through the love she was able to express for Joshua. It was a way of getting her parents’ love back, of reincarnating them inside herself. But so what? Who cared what the reasons were? What was real was the feel of his hand in hers when they went out in the afternoon to pick up Conrad from primary school. Or the calm, measured way in which he would look upward and say, ‘I love you, Matty’ – and the words had more impact than they ever had from a boyfriend.
So that was what hit her when she got home to the flat at half past six. Unusually, she closed the latch on the door behind her. She sat on the small odd leather sofa – a gift from Arabella, who had bought it for her dressing room and then gone off it – and put her head in her hands and cried. Not for her job or for the other changes in her life, but for Joshua, who she knew she would miss so unbearably much.
90
There was a rattle – a now-familiar rattle – and Shahid’s breakfast was pushed through the slot in the door of his cell. Shahid had been sitting on the floor, not thinking about anything much, since saying his dawn prayers. He had a watch now, but ‘dawn’ here meant whenever Shahid woke up. That usually wasn’t much after six. Breakfast arrived at seven, so there was a decent gap to sit and think.
Shahid thought about Iqbal and how stupid he’d been to let him into his flat. He wondered where he was. He hoped that when the police found him they would kick the living shit out of him.
He thought about what he would do to the person responsible for We Want What You Have when he got hold of him.
He thought about the cell, how he had never known any room he had been in as well as he knew this one. He wondered if a time would come when it wasn’t still imprinted on his mind, every detail of it: a crack in the corner of the ceiling and small fibrous marks on the walls which spread down and outwards so that they looked like the map of a river delta. A patch of damp to the left of the sink which was sometimes cold and wet to the touch. The pipes, which made a rackety clanking noise that at times almost fell into a rhythm, a syncopation – clunk BANG, clank clunk BANG.
He thought about Mrs Principle the solicitor, as he called her to himself. She had the kind of upright, strict, buttoned-up and clipped British manner which made it impossible not to speculate about her sex life. It would be something kinky, definitely, it had to be. Spanking perhaps. Or she dressed up in leather and wielded a whip and made men crawl around the floor saying ‘Yes, mistress.’
Shahid thought about his own sex life – whether he would ever have one again. He had never felt his sex drive so absent. Maybe it was true, maybe they did put something in the food. But he knew that when/if he got out, he would like to have A Girlfriend. He didn’t have anything more specific in mind than that. A nice well-brought-up Muslim girl, a virgin, incredibly keen on sex, would be ideal. But it was more a question of someone to hang out with, to wake up with, to watch TV with, to go clubbing with, to go to Gap and pick out T-shirts with. A girl. That girl from the Underground, the one he’d tried to find via ‘Lost Connections’, the one he still sometimes thought about.
He thought about Ahmed and Rohinka and Mohammed and Fatima and was able to admit that he envied his fat, slow, sedentary, cautious older brother.
He thought about Mrs Kamal and was almost able to smile at the idea of what she must be putting everyone else in the family through. Also any policemen or lawyers or anybody else who got within earshot.
He thought about what he was going to do with the rest of his life when/if he got out of here. Sue them for wrongful imprisonment, for abusing his rights, for locking him up for no reason… that was one thing he could do. But Shahid knew that he wouldn’t. He felt time passing here, felt it strongly, more sharply than he ever had. Time going past, purely going past. It was a paradox of the place. You were locked up, and every day was the same, and nothing happened except the same questions being put to you and you giving the same answers back, so every day was a slow-motion wallow in itself, every hour felt days long – it was so far beyond boring that it was a whole other state. And yet it made you aware, cruelly aware, of how time was shooting past. Shahid could feel his life slipping away. He was thirty-three, and what had he done? How big a hole would there be in the world if he never got out of here? He needed to do something – get back into proper work, not the shop, but go back and finish his degree and get a real job, have a real life.
He thought about the fact that this was his nineteenth day in jail, the nineteenth day since he’d been arrested.
And then he thought about breakfast. It would be cold by now, but then it was never much more than tepid when it came through the door. Today it was scrambled eggs and toast. The eggs had been overcooked, so they were granular and smelled faintly of sulphur. One piece of toast had a very thin layer of butter, barely a scraping, and the other had a compensatory smear of butter about half an inch thick. The tea was undrinkable even when it was hot, so Shahid ignored it as he ate the cold food, much more slowly than he would have done at home.
Some police and warders you heard coming, others you didn’t. This was the second kind. There was a scraping and the cell door was opened by a policeman with a huge circular keyring, a cartoon-like keyring, in his left hand.
‘Ready?’ said the policeman.
Shahid shrugged. ‘For what?’ This was his new thing – wherever possible, to answer a question with a question.
‘Got your stuff together?’
‘For what? What are you talking about?’
‘Didn’t they tell you?’ Now the policeman seemed to be playing the same question-with-a-question game.
‘Does it look like they told me? Whatever it is?’
‘Oh.’ The policeman gave a short bark-like laugh. ‘Now that, that really is typical. You’re getting out today. In
