Roger might have been nervous at going over the software problems with Lothar in the room. Everyone in business knows that everything to do with new software is a guaranteed nightmare. But Mark never approached Roger with a problem to which he did not have, if not a solution, then an idea about where a solution might possibly be sought. The department was working with the IT department and an external contractor to develop a new, custom-made software package to display information on traders’ screens: the holy grail was the maximum amount of information with the minimum clutter, and the greatest amount of individual customisation (since the traders all had their own views about how they wanted their screens to look) combined with the shortest learning curve. This didn’t interest Roger particularly, but then not much of his work did, and he was always ready to take a view in his amiable, even-tempered way. That didn’t seem to be necessary here. In this instance, Mark’s tone implied that he knew Roger was busy, that it was not all that urgent a query, and that it would be entirely legitimate for Roger to wait for a new, improved version of the software before he deigned to look at it. So he was making it clear that his enquiry was pro forma, except that if it was too obviously pro forma it might look as if he did not value Roger’s opinion, which he did, he deeply did. All this was part of the way Mark was a perfect deputy, almost uncannily so. Lothar made no move to take the file. For a moment Roger thought it would be more expressive of confidence in his deputy, and therefore a better example of Deconstructed Management, if he didn’t look at the papers, but then a bat-squeak of instinct told him to play it the other way.
‘Let’s have a shufti,’ said Roger. Mark slid some screenshots in front of his superior. Sure enough, the screenshots were a little cluttered and busy. One of them displayed eight different graphs. Roger and his deputy looked at each other. Neither of them looked at Lothar, who in Mark’s case was his boss’s boss.
‘No,’ said Roger. ‘Still too much.’
Mark bowed his head slightly. Because he was at the same moment doing something to his pen, this made him seem as if he was wringing his hands in a gesture of self-abasement.
‘I’ll bounce it back to them and tell them you said so.’ He nodded and backed out of the room towards the trading floor.
‘Good,’ said Lothar – one of the only things he ever said which came across with a faint flavour of German: ‘gut’.
Roger got up, stretching to his full height, and moved towards the door, which Mark had closed as he went out. He pressed the button that made the blinds go up and looked out into the space where his colleagues were all in their various work postures – leaning into their screens, slouched and tilted backwards, or occasionally standing and moving as they talked into their headsets. The sun had gone down and the lights in the other tower of Canary Wharf seemed brighter; but the only people looking out the window were simultaneously on the phone, buying and selling. One or two of his people nodded or grimaced at Mark as he walked past. Roger momentarily found himself thinking about his million pounds, before wrenching his attention back to Lothar.
‘They’re a good bunch,’ he said. ‘Work hard play hard, same way all kids are these days.’
‘Figures look pretty gut,’ said Lothar in a neutral tone.
Roger thought: yes!
4
Ahmed Kamal, who owned the shop at the end of Pepys Road, number 68, came awake at 3.59 in the morning, one minute before his alarm clock was set to go off. Through long habit he was able to reach out and press down the button on top of the digital clock without coming fully awake. Then he rolled back and lay snuggled up behind his wife Rohinka, who he could tell was still a long way down into sleep.
Ahmed was used to waking up early and did not mind it all that much, but he didn’t like getting out of bed when Rohinka was so warm and the house was so cold. In the distant epoch before they had kids, the heating would have been timed to come on as he was getting up, but the house was small, with two rooms upstairs and two down, and their children’s bedroom was immediately over the tiny downstairs kitchen. When the boiler came on, it made a noise which, though not loud, through some dark magic of sound conduction woke their son Mohammed as if it were a backfiring motorbike. Mohammed, who was eighteen months old, could then be guaranteed to wake four-year-old Fatima, who would march straight into the bedroom and wake Rohinka, and the day would be well on the way to disaster by one minute past four in the morning. The solution was to leave the heating off until later in the morning, and wear more clothes. This Ahmed did. But before getting up he lay in the warmth of the marital bed and counted slowly to a hundred.
Exactly on a hundred – this was part of the drill, because he told himself that if he waited a second longer he wouldn’t get up at all – Ahmed climbed out of bed. He put on two Gap T-shirts, one medium and the second extra-large, a thick cotton shirt his mother had sent him from Lahore, a cashmere sweater Rohinka had bought him for Christmas, a pair of boxer shorts, two pairs of socks, a pair of thick brown trousers, and finally a pair of fingerless gloves. Rohinka thought these hilariously tatty, but they were a big help with accomplishing the first task of the day, getting in the newspapers, cutting the wrappers and plastic tape off them, and getting both the deliveries and the daily displays ready. Ahmed went downstairs slowly, stepping over the third, fifth and eighth steps, all of which creaked, and making it to the kitchen without waking Mohammed. The preacher at Wimbledon mosque sometimes talked about the jihad against your smaller temptations and lazinesses, the jihad to get up and say your prayers in the morning. Ahmed, by the time he got downstairs before the dawn, felt that he knew what the imam meant.
He made tea, took some of yesterday’s naan out of the bread bin and went through to open the shop and bring the papers in. Ahmed loved his shop, loved the profusion of it, the sheer amount of stuff in the narrow space and 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.