Capital

Or he would be on the computer. A faint light under the door, a silence that wasn’t quite silence, all this at three or four in the morning – this meant that Iqbal was surfing the net. As for dawn prayers, forget about it. The problem wasn’t that Iqbal got up to pray: if it had been that regular, Shahid would have learned to tune it out. The problem was that he got up to pray when he felt like it. Some weeks that was every day, other weeks it was no days, or it was day-on, day-off, or two-on one-off, or the other way around, or whatever. And this wasn’t something you could complain about, especially as a non-dawn-prayer yourself. Excuse me brother, but would you mind regularising your fajr schedule, because IT’S DRIVING ME INSANE.
    All now a thing of the past. For the first four days after Iqbal left – which he only managed to get around to the day before Mrs Kamal arrived, stalling and digging in right to the end – Shahid slept the beautiful, untroubled sleep of the just. Then he’d wake and for a moment he would get ready for the first irritation of the day, the trip to the bathroom, with the unwanted Belgian jihadi sprawled on the sofa in his greying underpants – and then, joy! He would realise that Iqbal wasn’t there! No one was there! It was his flat, his very own flat, peeling paint and creaking windows and semi-functioning stereo system and all, all his! He could go to the toilet naked! He could do a handstand in the sitting room! No one to stop him! It was the sensation of pure happiness that came from waking up and realising that a bad dream wasn’t real. And Shahid had this sensation for four days in a row, and felt that he was enjoying some of the best sleep and the happiest wakings of his adult life.
    The fifth morning was different. Shahid went to bed at about twelve, read a Stephen King for about fifteen minutes to help knock him out, then put out the light and slept like a baby until about half past four, when he began to have a dream, a dream which, even inside the world of the dream, felt strange and violent, a thriller gone wrong, something about armed men, about shouting, about people breaking into his flat, and then abruptly it wasn’t a dream but it was real, there were shouting policemen in his room and two guns were pointed straight at his face from no more than two feet away. ‘Armed police!’ was what the men were shouting – it was quite hard to make that out because several of them were shouting it and they tended to overlap each other. There were crashing noises from elsewhere in the flat. Well, somebody certainly has screwed up, big time, Shahid thought, as one of the policemen reached forward and pulled the duvet off him. He felt his consciousness split into several different parts, different voices, with one part of his brain crying out, Please don’t shoot me, while another said, I’m glad I put on clean boxers last night, and another said, I wonder whose fault all this is, and another said, It’ll make a good story one day, and another said, It would be much easier to understand them if they stopped shouting. And then in addition to all these voices there were the plain facts of the matter, which were that five armed policemen were in his room pointing guns at his head.
    ‘Turn over, turn the fuck over,’ shouted the nearest policeman. Behind and outside he could hear an extraordinary amount of banging and crashing. Shahid had once, when he was in bed with flu, seen a television programme in which a group of people with ambitions to be builders had knocked down and torn out everything inside a house except the supporting walls. The noises they had made were similar to those now coming from his sitting room and kitchen. That was part of what he said to himself; while at the same time, and suddenly, he felt a surging, physical fear. I might die here, right now, today. He turned over. Something – with a man’s full body weight behind it – pressed down on the point between his shoulder blades, while his arms were very roughly pulled behind his back. There was a touch of cold plastic and a click as what must be handcuffs were put on him. What they never showed you on television was how much the position of being cuffed hurt, and how uncomfortable it was, and how completely vulnerable it made you feel. Face-down and cuffed, he was as immobile and trapped as a beetle on its back.
    Two or more sets of hands pulled Shahid up and began shoving him out of the