Capital

Much followed from this.
    Usman came to the mosque, pulled over onto the pavement and dismounted before his bike could ride up on it, because that would be discourteous. He chained his wheels to a rack – this was a high-risk spot, he realised, because a thief seeing a bicycle locked up outside a mosque would guess where the owner was and how long he would be likely to be in for, but inshallah, either it would be stolen or it wouldn’t – and he joined the men heading into the building for the ablutions before prayer.

46
     
     
    Smitty liked to go against the grain, so where he might have been expected to have no desk, or something very modern – a workstation, with a sloped surface to sketch on and a laptop stand – instead he had a huge old Victorian partners’ desk made out of oak. He had no partner, of course, so both sides of the desk were his, and both were dominated by his filing system, which consisted of stacks of paper arranged by theme. On one side of the studio there was also a blackboard with curtains, so that whatever was being worked on could be hidden from casual view. There was also a £5,000 music system and a sixty-inch plasma flat-screen TV. Smitty was no Luddite. His assistant, his Nigel – who was always a ‘he’, because Smitty believed in a strict absence of sexual tension at work; he had no trouble pulling and didn’t need the extra hassle – had a corner of the office with a desk and phone and PC; he was allowed to roam around in the course of doing his business, but he wasn’t encouraged to allow his stuff to spread out and colonise Smitty’s space.
    Sometimes the desk had ten or twelve huge mountains of paper, to do with either pieces Smitty was thinking about or what he called ‘admin crap’, a category which covered more or less anything that did not directly involve making art. At other times there was only a single pile. Today there were two stacks of paper on the desk, and both of them had been there for two weeks. One of them was the stuff he had taken from his nan’s house, the We Want What You Have postcards and DVD. He had been flicking through these on and off all day since he got back from Pepys Road. The cards were a little like an installation, an artwork. The DVD, which was still in the player underneath the TV, was sort of the same thing as the cards, only in moving pictures. It consisted of lingering close-ups of houses in Pepys Road, shots of particular details of houses, tracking shots moving up and down the street. It looked as if it had been filmed in the early summer morning over two or three occasions. The DVD was about forty minutes long.
    When he’d seen that, he Googled 42 Pepys Road and after a bit of clicking around found himself looking at a picture of his nan’s front door. The blog was, of course, called We Want What You Have. It had a list of numbers and when you clicked on the numbers you were taken to a photo of the house – sometimes the front door, sometimes a detail from the door such as a close-up of the number, or of the letter box, or the steps, or the doorbell. Some of the photos were taken from across the road, to frame the whole house; some of them were colour, indeed some of them were in heightened, super-real colour; others were black and white and amateurish. One or two of them seemed to have been taken with a pinhole camera held at waist height. In those photographs, the spy-like ones, you could just catch a glimpse of part of a person – a leg disappearing out of show, somebody’s shadow falling across a front gate. Other than that there were no people to be seen. Whoever was behind We Want What You Have was going to some trouble to leave the people out of it.
    So that was part of what was on Smitty’s mind. The other thing was more immediately troubling, because the other thing was not a thing at all but a person. Smitty’s assistant. Smitty’s about-to-be-ex-assistant, who had been his about-to-be-ex- assistant in Smitty’s head for many weeks now, but who was no closer to being simply Smitty’s ex-assistant because Smitty hadn’t got round to firing him.
    Smitty’s art was all about confrontation. It was about shocking people, jolting them out of their well-grooved perceptions. Parodies, defacements, obscenities, spray-painted graffiti of Picasso being sucked off by an octopus – that was what Smitty was all about. Right up in your face. No prisoners. In person, though, Smitty did not like confrontation. He