Capital

news.
    The reply was disappointing.
    ‘Iqbal hr When?’
    Great. Just what I need, thought Shahid. Reminiscences about Chechnya from a Belgian-Algerian semi-weirdo jihadi I haven’t seen for over a decade. He texted back:
    ‘Tuesday at 6 ok 13 Pelham Rd’
    Which was where he now was, on Christmas Eve, watching The Simpsons with one eye while trying to work out just how it was Iqbal seemed to have manoeuvred him into agreeing to put him up for a few days.
    ‘I mean I’ve been let down,’ Iqbal was saying. ‘My friend let me down. If it were not for that I would not be having to turn to you.’
    He was angry and ingratiating at the same time, and seemed keen to convince, as if his anger were something he was selling. Iqbal had come to London to stay with a friend, but the friend had kicked him out, offering a complicated alibi to do with relations who might be visiting and for whom he needed to keep the spare room free, plus he had a big work thing coming up, etc. etc. It was coming back to Shahid, a little too late: in Chechnya they hadn’t got on all that well. Iqbal had been angry all the time about not just large issues and global injustices but about the fact that the hot water had run out or the only part of the bread left was the crust and he didn’t like the crust. He was quick to connect the two, as well: if a petrol station in Austria had a lavatory that was closed because the flush didn’t work, this was part of a planet-wide conspiracy to disrespect Muslims.
    In Shahid’s view, the best way through difficult times, as through life in general, was just to go along with things. It was a rare problem that couldn’t be solved by being ignored. Iqbal would be difficult to ignore but if he put him up for a few days he would surely go away and things would return to normal.
    ‘Brothers should not treat each other like that. And we are brothers, aren’t we? Brothers should not behave in this way.’ Iqbal was pacing.
    ‘I’ve said you can stay,’ said Shahid.
    Iqbal seemed to collect himself.
    ‘And I am grateful. I feel all appropriate gratitude. Forgive me if my anger got the better of me.’
    ‘It’s cool. I’m just going to watch the end of this and then I’ll show you where stuff is, how to set up the sofa bed and all that.’
    ‘You are a good man.’
    ‘No, it’s cool, really.’
    Insistently, Iqbal said: ‘You are a good man. Perhaps you have forgotten this truth about yourself. Perhaps it is something other people do not see or encourage you not to see. But you are a good man.’
    Well, put like that, it was hard not to think there might be something in this Shahid-as-good-man theory. Shahid gave a modest aw-shucks shrug just as Mr Burns did his steepled-fingers thing and said ‘Excellent.’

26
     
     
    Hanging from a strap on the Jubilee line as he went home on Christmas Eve, Roger thought about when might be the best time to tell Arabella about his non-existent bonus. Arabella was good at making life seem easy, except when she suddenly and dramatically wasn’t. Roger had an intuition this might be one of those times.
    It would have been better to have done it already, obviously. But on Friday he had just been too numb, too freaked, too incredulous, too sick. He was in no condition to have a long talk about his missing million pounds . . . And anyway, by the end of the day the impulse to blurt everything out had long since faded. A lesser man, Roger felt, would have gone home straight after being sick. Roger was made of sterner stuff, and anyway what would he do if he went home? Sit there blubbing and moping and waiting for Arabella to get back from the shops? No, he sucked it up, took it like a man, and spent the day hiding in his office and pretending to work.
    Not that much work got done on 21 December at Pinker Lloyd, as the compensation committee broke its news. Every now and then he would peek through the window and survey the scene in the trading room. The noise was about a quarter of its usual level. People were just sitting there. One or two of them had their heads in their hands. Some others were just standing around in a demoralised little group. They looked like refugees or something. Sad, so sad. It was like . . . Roger stretched to find some metaphor for the scale of the grief, the comprehensiveness of the disaster. Being in some shithole in Iraq or somewhere, where some Yank pilot has dropped a bomb on you by mistake. Everybody’s blown into pieces, bits