Capital

solicitor, as he called her to himself. She had the kind of upright, strict, buttoned-up and clipped British manner which made it impossible not to speculate about her sex life. It would be something kinky, definitely, it had to be. Spanking perhaps. Or she dressed up in leather and wielded a whip and made men crawl around the floor saying ‘Yes, mistress.’
    Shahid thought about his own sex life – whether he would ever have one again. He had never felt his sex drive so absent. Maybe it was true, maybe they did put something in the food. But he knew that when/if he got out, he would like to have A Girlfriend. He didn’t have anything more specific in mind than that. A nice well-brought-up Muslim girl, a virgin, incredibly keen on sex, would be ideal. But it was more a question of someone to hang out with, to wake up with, to watch TV with, to go clubbing with, to go to Gap and pick out T-shirts with. A girl. That girl from the Underground, the one he’d tried to find via ‘Lost Connections’, the one he still sometimes thought about.
    He thought about Ahmed and Rohinka and Mohammed and Fatima and was able to admit that he envied his fat, slow, sedentary, cautious older brother.
    He thought about Mrs Kamal and was almost able to smile at the idea of what she must be putting everyone else in the family through. Also any policemen or lawyers or anybody else who got within earshot.
    He thought about what he was going to do with the rest of his life when/if he got out of here. Sue them for wrongful imprisonment, for abusing his rights, for locking him up for no reason . . . that was one thing he could do. But Shahid knew that he wouldn’t. He felt time passing here, felt it strongly, more sharply than he ever had. Time going past, purely going past. It was a paradox of the place. You were locked up, and every day was the same, and nothing happened except the same questions being put to you and you giving the same answers back, so every day was a slow-motion wallow in itself, every hour felt days long – it was so far beyond boring that it was a whole other state. And yet it made you aware, cruelly aware, of how time was shooting past. Shahid could feel his life slipping away. He was thirty-three, and what had he done? How big a hole would there be in the world if he never got out of here? He needed to do something – get back into proper work, not the shop, but go back and finish his degree and get a real job, have a real life.
    He thought about the fact that this was his nineteenth day in jail, the nineteenth day since he’d been arrested.
    And then he thought about breakfast. It would be cold by now, but then it was never much more than tepid when it came through the door. Today it was scrambled eggs and toast. The eggs had been overcooked, so they were granular and smelled faintly of sulphur. One piece of toast had a very thin layer of butter, barely a scraping, and the other had a compensatory smear of butter about half an inch thick. The tea was undrinkable even when it was hot, so Shahid ignored it as he ate the cold food, much more slowly than he would have done at home.
    Some police and warders you heard coming, others you didn’t. This was the second kind. There was a scraping and the cell door was opened by a policeman with a huge circular keyring, a cartoon-like keyring, in his left hand.
    ‘Ready?’ said the policeman.
    Shahid shrugged. ‘For what?’ This was his new thing – wherever possible, to answer a question with a question.
    ‘Got your stuff together?’
    ‘For what? What are you talking about?’
    ‘Didn’t they tell you?’ Now the policeman seemed to be playing the same question-with-a-question game.
    ‘Does it look like they told me? Whatever it is?’
    ‘Oh.’ The policeman gave a short bark-like laugh. ‘Now that, that really is typical. You’re getting out today. In fact, right now. Your brief and your family are here to pick you up.’
    Shahid did not think it was possible for a thought, a feeling, so be so strong a physical sensation. He felt his heart race, his head fill with blood, he jerked upright and knocked the table, hard, with his thighs. The undrinkable tea spilled on the floor of his cell.
    ‘You’re joking.’
    But the policeman was enjoying the fact of the cock-up so much that there was no possibility he was joking. The cock-up had confirmed his world-view, and in the process made him very happy.
    ‘Typical, that is. Whatever it is, whoever it most