Millat parked his tiny backside on the brown plastic seat. ‘Ooh! Cold seat! Cold seat! Frozen bum!’
‘Millat, where are Magid and Irie?’
‘Coming.’
‘Coming with the speed of a train or coming with the speed of a snail?’
‘Eeek!’ squealed Millat, in response to a virtual blockade that threatened to send his red car spinning off into oblivion.
‘Please, Millat. Take this off.’
‘Can’t. Need one, oh, two, seven, three points.’
‘Millat, you need to begin to understand numbers. Repeat: ten thousand, two hundred and seventy-three.’
‘Men blousand, poo bumdred and weventy-wee.’
‘Take it off, Millat.’
‘Can’t. I’ll die. Do you want me to die, Abba?’
Samad wasn’t listening. It was imperative that he be at school before nine if this trip were going to have any purpose whatsoever. By nine, she’d be in class. By nine-oh-two, she’d be opening the register with those long fingers, by nine-oh-three she’d be tapping her high-mooned nails on a wooden desk somewhere out of sight.
‘Where are they? Do they want to be late for school?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Are they always this late?’ asked Samad, for this was not his regular routine – the school run was usually Alsana’s or Clara’s assignment. It was for a glimpse of Burt-Jones (though their meeting was only seven hours and fifty-seven minutes away, seven hours and fifty-six minutes away, seven hours…) that he had undertaken the most odious parental responsibility in the book. And he’d had a hard time convincing Alsana there was nothing peculiar in this sudden desire to participate fully in the educational transportation of his and Archie’s offspring:
‘But Samad, you don’t get in the house ’til three in the morning. Are you going peculiar?’
‘I want to see my boys! I want to see Irie! Every morning they are growing up – I never see it! Two inches Millat has grown.’
‘But not at eight thirty in the morning. It is very funnily enough that he grows all the time – praise Allah! It must be some kind of a miracle. What is this about, hmm?’ She dug her fingernail into the overhang of his belly. ‘Some hokery-pokery. I can smell it – like goat’s tongue gone off.’
Ah, Alsana’s culinary nose for guilt, deceit and fear was without equal in the borough of Brent, and Samad was useless in the face of it. Did she know? Had she guessed? These anxieties Samad had slept on all night (when he wasn’t slapping the salami) and then brought to his car first thing so that he might take them out on his children.
‘Where in hell’s name are they?’
‘Hell’s bells!’
‘Millat!’
‘You swore,’ said Millat, taking lap fourteen and getting a five-oh-oh bonus for causing the combustion of Yellow Car. ‘You always do. So does M’ster Jones.’
‘Well, we have special swearing licences.’
Headless Millat needed no face to express his outrage. ‘NO SUCH THING AS-’
‘OK, OK, OK,’ back-pedalled Samad, knowing there is no joy to be had in arguing ontology with a nine-year-old, ‘I have been caught out. No such thing as a licence to swear. Millat, where’s your saxophone? You have orchestra today.’
‘In the boot,’ said Millat, his voice at once incredulous and disgusted: a man who didn’t know the saxophone went in the boot on Sunday night was some kind of a social retard. ‘Why’re you picking us up? M’ster Jones picks us up on Mondays. You don’t know anything about picking us up. Or taking us in.’
‘I’m sure somehow I will muddle through, thank you, Millat. It is hardly rocket science, after all. Where are those two!’ he shouted, beeping the horn, unhinged by his nine-year-old son’s ability to recognize the irregularity in his behaviour. ‘And will you please be taking that damn thing off!’ Samad made a grab for the Tomytronic and pulled it down around Millat’s neck.
‘YOU KILLED ME!’ Millat looked back in the Tomytronic, horrified, and just in time to witness his tiny red alter-ego swerving into the barriers and disappearing in a catastrophic light show of showering yellow sparks. ‘YOU KILLED ME WHEN I WAS WINNING!’
Samad closed his eyes and forced his eyeballs to roll up as far as possible in his head, in the hope that his brain might impact upon them, a self-blinding, if he could achieve it, on a par with that other victim of Western corruption, Oedipus. Think: I want another woman. Think: I’ve killed my son. I swear. I eat bacon. I regularly slap the salami. I drink Guinness. My best friend is a kaffir non-believer. I tell myself if I rub up and down without using hands it does not count. But oh it does count. It all counts on the great counting board of He who counts. What will happen come Mahshar? How will I absolve myself when the Last Judgement comes?
… Click-slam. Click-slam. One Magid, one Irie. Samad opened his eyes and looked in the rear-view mirror. In the back seat were the two children he had been waiting for: both with their little glasses, Irie with her wilful Afro (not a pretty child: she had got her genes mixed up, Archie’s nose with Clara’s awfully buck teeth), Magid with his thick black hair slicked into an unappealing middle-parting. Magid carrying a recorder, Irie with violin. But beyond these basic details, everything was not as it should be. Unless he was very much mistaken, something was rotten in this Mini Metro – something was afoot. Both children were dressed in black from head to toe. Both wore white armbands on their left arms upon which were painted crude renditions of baskets of vegetables. Both had pads of writing paper and a pen tied around their necks with string.
‘Who did this to you?’
Silence.
‘Was it Amma? And Mrs Jones?’
Silence.
‘Magid! Irie! Cat got your tongues?’
More silence; children’s silence, so desperately desired by adults yet eerie when it finally occurs.
‘Millat, do you know what this is about?’
‘ ’Sboring,’ whined Millat. ‘They’re just being clever, clever, snotty, dumb-bum, Lord Magoo and Mrs Ugly Poo.’
Samad twisted in his car seat to face the two dissenters. ‘Am I meant to ask you what this is about?’
Magid grasped his pen and, in his neat, clinical hand, printed: IF YOU WANT TO, then ripped off the piece of paper and handed it to Samad.
‘A Vow of Silence. I see. You too, Irie? I would have thought you were too sensible for such nonsense.’
Irie scribbled for a moment on her pad and passed the missive forward. WE ARE PROSTESTING.
‘Pros-testing? What are Pros and why are you testing them? Did your mother teach you this word?’
Irie looked like she was going to burst with the sheer force of her explanation, but Magid mimed the zipping up of her mouth, snatched back the piece of paper and crossed out the first s.
‘Oh, I see. Protesting.’
Magid and Irie nodded maniacally.
‘Well, that is indeed fascinating. And I suppose your mothers engineered this whole scenario? The costumes? The notepads?’
Silence.
‘You are quite the political prisoners… not giving a thing away. All right: may one ask what it is that you are protesting about?’
Both children pointed urgently to their armbands.
‘Vegetables? You are protesting for the rights of vegetables?’
Irie held one hand over her mouth to stop herself screaming the answer, while Magid set about his writing pad in a flurry. WE ARE PROTESTING ABOUT THE HARVEST FESTIVAL.
Samad growled, ‘I told you already. I don’t want you participating in that nonsense. It has nothing to do with us, Magid. Why are you always trying to be somebody you are not?’
There was a mutual, silent anger as each acknowledged the painful incident that was being referred to. A few months earlier, on Magid’s ninth birthday, a group of very nice-looking white boys with meticulous manners had turned up on the doorstep and asked for Mark Smith.