Capital

because if he did, he, Roger, would be exposed, and sacked or demoted. The system was this: Mark did the work, Roger got the credit.
    It was time to do something about that.
    The train got to Godalming and he got off. His father was waiting for him in the car park. It was typical of his father not to come into the station to greet Mark, but to wait outside, standing beside the brown Volvo in his brown trousers. He had caught a touch of sun, or had been outside a lot, which gave his face a trace of brown also; to Mark this made him look blurry, faded. Again he thought of mediocrity, of all the things he had had to work so hard to get away from.
    ‘Mark!’ said his father, who always started strongly and then faded. ‘Hello, it’s, um, nice to see you.’ He bounced his arms against his sides, the gesture of a much younger man, as if he would have offered to carry a bag if Mark had one, which of course, since he was only coming down for lunch, he didn’t.
    Mark got in the car and sat there for the twenty-minute drive while his father made excruciating attempts at small talk. They got home to the ‘chalet-bungalow’ – a phrase which made him feel ill every time he heard either of his parents use it – where he had grown up. His father pulled up outside the garage and his sister, eleven years younger than him at eighteen, jumped up out of the front-garden deckchair where she’d been sitting reading Heat and ran up to him. Clare had the fairest hair of anyone in the family and had the kind of puppy fat which might well turn out to be the other kind of fat, unless she started to do something about it soon. She put her arms round his neck, which he suffered without making a counter-movement, kissed him several times, and then ruffled his hair, hard, which she knew perfectly well he hated.
    ‘Marky Marky Marky,’ she said. ‘Have you got a girlfriend yet?’
    He began smoothing his hair back down.
    ‘Stop acting twelve,’ he said.
    ‘You make me feel twelve, big brother,’ said Clare, pivoting her leg on tiptoe while pretending to simper and twiddle a non- existent ponytail. She had always had a talent for knowing how to irritate him, and to establish, completely, the fact that part of him was still an irritated teenager. That was part of what he hated about going home and being home: how stuck it made him feel. In Godalming, everyone, including himself, acted as if he was still fifteen.
    His mother came to the door. He was braced for it; he knew it was going to happen; he had rehearsed it in his head; and yet all of that was no help. As with his father, as always, she started big and then faded.
    ‘Mark!’ she said. ‘You look . . .’ – eyes sliding, certainty level ebbing – ‘. . . nice?’ she finished, as if it were a question, with her eyes flickering. He told himself that with every second that passed, this experience, like everything else, was getting closer to being over. Tomorrow he would begin to make his move. As Andrew Carnegie wrote, ‘The rising man must do something exceptional and beyond the range of his special department. HE MUST ATTRACT ATTENTION.’

35
     
     
    ‘I’ve got a new system to organise the Islamic calendar,’ said Shahid to the table at large: Ahmed and Usman, Rohinka, Fatima and Mohammed. ‘Instead of dating things from the hegira, we begin to date things from when that moron Iqbal moved into my flat. So instead of being the year 1428 it’s actually the day 95. It makes sense. He’s so boring that he can cause a fundamental disruption of the space-time continuum. He’s so boring he’s a one-man walking injustice. He leaves a deep sense of grievance everywhere he goes just because the people he’s been with realise they’ve just spent time that they’re never going to get back. He’s a nightmare. And he’s in my flat! He’s stinking up the place with his smelly feet and his I-already-had-a-shower-this-month!’
    Ahmed, good older brother, lost no time in saying, ‘It’s your fault for inviting him.’
    ‘I didn’t invite him, he invited himself.’
    ‘Then it’s your fault for allowing him to invite himself.’
    ‘I didn’t allow him to invite himself, he just invited himself.’
    ‘I don’t see a difference.’
    ‘That’s because you’re a plonker too.’
    Usman snorted a reluctant laugh through his unkempt, I’m-more-devout-than-you beard. Rohinka said, ‘Boys, boys.’ Fatima chanted, ‘Fight, fight!’
    It was Saturday and the