It happens quickly when it happens, and it had happened to Zbigniew and Matya. Now they were looking for a flat together. They were spending two evenings and one weekend afternoon a week flat-hunting – they had agreed to do it that way, and take as long as they needed to find a place which felt right, rather than blitz it and be worn down and give in to the first plausible thing they saw.
Zbigniew, who could see that work was beginning to dry up, had once or twice mentioned Poland, how cheap it was, how beautiful the countryside was, how warm and open-hearted his family were; to which Matya would reply by talking about the glories of Hungarian food and culture and landscape. And there was a serious language question over her learning Polish or his learning Hungarian. So it was London, now and for the foreseeable future, and for Zbigniew that was about as unexpected as finding Matya had been. The fact that this had come to be the place where he lived, not just where he was passing through or cashing in, had not formed any part of his plan. Matya had a new job as a translator – one of her employers was a senior executive at a building firm which employed many Hungarians and had just lost its former interpreter to a better offer from someone else. So Matya now spent her day in a yellow hard hat, earning twice what she’d earned before, with the prospect of taking that career forward and/or applying for a desk job. From what she said, they loved her and were desperate to keep her. Zbigniew did not find that at all hard to understand.
Even Piotr liked Matya. No, that was wrong – of course he liked (and fancied) Matya: who wouldn’t? What was remarkable was that even Piotr was willing to show pleasure in Zbigniew and Matya being together. They’d all been out to Sunday lunch at a Polish pub in Balham, and it had been a success. Piotr had brought his girlfriend, a girl from Krakow who worked as a teaching assistant in a primary school, and the whole occasion had been like a version of the old days which hadn’t actually happened like that the first time round, since they’d never lazed around and hung out with girlfriends in that way. Piotr’s view of Zbigniew seemed to have undarkened, and they would now spend time together without it feeling as if they were constantly having an unspoken argument.
A man with a clipboard came into Petunia’s garden. It was clear that he was in charge of the other four men: he stood and held out the clipboard and compared it to the evidence of work in progress in front of him. It was apparent that something wasn’t quite right. Two of the men straightened and came over, and a discussion between the three of them began, all the men nodding and pointing as they talked about what they would do with the garden once they had got rid of all the plants and greenery that Petunia Howe had loved. Zbigniew turned his attention away from the window and bent to his work.
102
Many things can go concealed in the hurly-burly of family life. Shahid and Usman had not spoken or interacted in any way for four months – and nobody else in the family had noticed. For the last two of those months, Usman had been in Lahore with their mother, taking a break from London, reacquainting himself with Pakistani life, and very nearly arranging to get married to a lawyer’s fourth daughter. He had been so close to deciding to do it that he had had to go away to think it over, so here he was in London again, and much more relieved to be back than he wanted to admit. Usman was coming to think that your roots were not necessarily the same thing as your home, but he didn’t yet know what to make of the thought.
On the morning after he got back, he went to see Shahid at his flat. He noticed that his brother had installed a CCTV camera over the door; there was a pause and he was buzzed in. Shahid was standing at the top of the stairs. It’s not easy to look dignified and outraged while wearing an open dressing gown with a pair of Y-fronts clearly visible, but Shahid was managing to do it.
‘You little shit,’ he said. ‘I know it was you.’
‘This is the part where I’m supposed to say, “Please let me explain,”’ said Usman.
‘Fuck you. Fuck your explanation. I was in a cell for nineteen days because of you. And don’t for a moment, don’t for a single moment, think I didn’t know right from the start who was to blame for that stupid stunt. In fact the only thing I blame myself for is not having realised the first time I saw those stupid postcards. “We Want What You Have”. I should have thought, let me see. Who’s stupid enough to think this is interesting, lazy enough so he doesn’t have a proper job so he has the time to do it, enough of a political cretin to think it’s a significant gesture of some sort, retarded enough to keep doing it even after it starts to get people worked up, and just enough of a geek to do it on the web? Stupid, lazy, politically cretinised, retarded, spends all his time wanking on the internet. Oh of course! My younger brother!’
Shahid was still standing at the top of the stairs.
‘Can I come up now?’ said Usman. Shahid stepped back from the stairwell and Usman took that as a yes. He trudged up. Shahid was stood at the sink with his arms folded. Usman sat down and took a breath.
‘Look, I know it makes no difference, and I know it’s too late, but I’m sorry. I’m genuinely and deeply sorry. When you were arrested I assumed it was to do with that idiot fake jihadi. It was only the day before you got out that the lawyer said something to mother and Ahmed about the blog and I realised that was involved. But it didn’t make any sense! I stopped doing that stuff back at the start of the year! I took the site down, everything. And then someone must have screen-scraped all the pictures because someone puts them back up again and starts doing that extra-freaky shit with dead birds and trashing cars and everything and I didn’t know what to think. I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t mean things to get out of hand. I didn’t think people would get themselves in such a twist. And all because they thought it might affect property prices! You make a point about Western obliviousness and they think it’s about property prices. You tell them they’re in a condition of complete moral unconsciousness and they worry about whether their house is still worth two million quid! Unbelievable. Then they decide you’re a terrorist.’
‘It wasn’t you who-’ began Shahid, and Usman held up his hand.
‘I know – it was you who ended up in Paddington Green. But that wasn’t the idea, they got it all wrong, it was that idiot Iqbal, if he hadn’t…’ Usman trailed off. Shahid just sat there.
‘You had my password,’ he said. ‘You were logged on through my IP address.’
‘I got it in the café downstairs,’ said Usman. ‘They get your wireless pretty much full-strength. I worked out your password.’
Shahid’s password, as it happened, was Shakira123.
‘I don’t believe you,’ he said.
‘Remember when you got the broadband put in? That summer? All the time you were singing and humming that Shakira tune. The one about “I’m on tonight” and “hips don’t lie”. For about six weeks it was all you talked about. I was going through a… through a strict phase and you did it to wind me up. So the first time I tried your password I guessed Shakira. But that didn’t work. So then I thought for a bit and remembered back when we were kids. Remember when you were about ten and I was five? You had a little electronic safe. Dad gave it to you not long before he died. Birthday present I think it was. And you and I spent a lot of time together at that point, you sort of looked after me and we were very close. And you told me your password was Usman123, so I remembered that and I tried it on Shakira. Shakira123.’
There was a long silence.
‘Fuck you,’ Shahid eventually said again. Usman smiled and got up. He fished out his wallet, took out a card and gave it to Shahid. It had a mobile phone number on it.