This for Mark was a certainty: his being had a quality in it which other people did not have in theirs. And he worked in one of the only places in modern Britain in which it was acceptable to demonstrate your superiority; one of the few areas in which doing better than other people was the whole point. Everything should be perfect. And yet – Mark prided himself on never lying to himself – everything was not perfect. He was stuck in a job in which his abilities were not acknowledged, working for a boss who, in Mark’s considered view, was a throwback or hangover from how things used to be, a pointlessly tall, contentlessly smooth public-school twat, a bluffer and chancer and lightweight, doing a job which Mark could do a thousand times better. Roger was good at managing upwards – he must be, because he was head of department, and he hadn’t been sacked, which had to mean that something was going on out of sight. The only aspect of this Mark saw directly was that Roger could kiss Lothar’s arse as if he had a genuine taste for it. Apart from that he was a waste of space, and it was clear to Mark that Roger had only the 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 Heat and ran up to him. Clare had the fairest hair of anyone in the family and had the kind of puppy fat which might well turn out to be the other kind of fat, unless she started to do something about it soon. She put her arms round his neck, which he suffered without making a counter-movement, kissed him several times, and then ruffled his hair, hard, which she knew perfectly well he hated.
‘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.