Capital

is about. You haven’t got a clue. Life with children is life in colour, and life without them is black and white. Even when it’s hard – when Mohammed is sitting in the supermarket trolley breaking open yoghurt cartons, and Fatima is screaming at me because I won’t let her stock up on sweets at the checkout, and I’m so tired my eyes are stinging and I’ve got my period and my back hurts from carrying the children and stacking shelves and everyone is looking at me thinking what a bad mum I am, even then, it’s better than black and white.
    And maybe that’s what had happened to Mrs Kamal. Maybe it was the sheer quantity of feeling that had got to her; that had somehow mismatched with what she had expected life to be, what she had wanted for herself. Or maybe it was like a chemical reaction gone wrong. She was supposed to feel x but instead she felt y. The things that were supposed to mature her had instead curdled her, so instead of being older and wiser she had got older and more and more irritated, so that now she had become someone who carried irritation around with her like a smell. The irritation was catching in the way that yawning was catching. Rohinka could see, now, that this was why the Kamal boys were the way they were. All of them were, in most of their dealings, reasonable men (with the exception of Usman, who was in many respects still an adolescent). They were calm and sane and functioned well; men who could be talked to, reasoned with, who saw things in proportion. With each other, though, and with their mother, and in everything to do with the Kamal family, they were all irritated, all the time. It wasn’t that they rubbed each other up the wrong way, it was that things always started up wrong and never improved. Ahmed, who was annoyed by very little – his disposition was so even, it verged on being a culpable passivity, a failure to get-up-and-go – was annoyed by his siblings and his mother. It was as if, in each other’s company, the Kamals all went into their special irritation room, like the panic room in the Jodie Foster film.
    Blame the mother – that’s right, blame the mother. Since becoming a mother herself, Rohinka had been sensitised to just how many explanations for everything that happened boiled down to: blame the mother. It couldn’t be the real answer for things nearly as often as people said it was. But on this occasion, she did think it was true that Mrs Kamal was to blame. Rohinka wouldn’t be like that with her own children, definitely not. She looked around the room at the undone work, the papers still unwrapped, the shelves still unstacked, the first customers due before long, and sighed again.
    ‘Are you cross, Mummy?’ said Fatima.
    ‘No, I’m not cross. Not with you. I was thinking about grown-up things.’
    So now it was time for Fatima to give a big, theatrical sigh. Rohinka beckoned her onto her lap, and her daughter hopped up.
    ‘I’m never cross with you, not deep down. Even when I’m cross I still love you.’
    ‘I know that, Mummy,’ said Fatima, who did. She bounced and wriggled on Rohinka’s lap to get more comfortable, and it was from that position, in a moment of complete happiness, that Rohinka looked up to see the door opened, tentatively at first, and then very abruptly, and then shouting men dressed in black and blue came into the room, several of them, moving quickly and loudly and creating such an impression of violence and disorder that it took her a few seconds – it can only have been a few seconds, but at the time it felt much longer – to realise that the men were shouting ‘Armed police!’

70
     
     
    It would be impossible to list all the ways in which Shahid’s quality of life had improved since Iqbal had moved out, but one of the particularly important changes, for Shahid, was that he was sleeping better. He had always been a champion sleeper, which was just as well since he needed his sleep to function properly; but the toxic Belgian, lounging around the flat, blocking the route to the bathroom, had got into his head enough for him to be aware of his movements at all times. That was bad, because Iqbal moved around a lot at night, using the kettle, running taps in the kitchen and the bathroom, putting on the television at a volume where it was too low to hear exactly what he was watching (usually – when Shahid went through to check – some rank action movie: Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal).