Extract
A weak November sun pushed through the dirt filmed high window of Amin High Street Carpets, glanced off the peeling Islamic prayer mirror that hung on the high shop interior wall, and scattered weak pools of pale light downwards, dappling the blue, industrial cord carpet floor where a bored Karim Amin was scuffing his shoes.
With the warehouse closed, they were holding all their stock here. Roll on roll of carpet leaned proudly on walls, soared into the roof space. The cocktail of smells soothed Karim: the heavy fumes of rubber underlay, the lighter sniff of the foam backeds, the classy aroma of the Wool Twists and Berbers, the wincing snort of the cheaper nylons; all wafted and mingled by the shop's cranky central heating. And did he imagine it or could he also detect his father's loose leaf tea, the chappati and dahl they had shared for lunch and, lurking low, the sour goat's milk of his damp Nike trainers? 'You have an overeducated nose,' Karim thought to himself. 'And an undereducated brain, Karim!' he imagined Mr Millar, his ex-college tutor joining in with a scowl. Karim was not short of critics.
He looked across at his bear of a father. Pops needed to diet. His Dad was ancient -at least sixty-two years old, perhaps even seventy. No one was sure of the exact age because his passport age was just a guess. Karim wanted him to lose at least a stone. When he fetched their lunch every day at Marhaba, Karim had the cooks drawing off the excess ghee and not buttering the nan bread. His father complained the cooks were skimping and did they take him for a fool, thank goodness for your mother and he would eat fish, chips and mushy peas rather than put up with this dry nan, dry as a river bed during drought!
The ideal, Karim thought would be to get Pops on a treadmill. The only exercise he currently took was from the door of his ageing Mercedes to the door of their carpet shop, and now he had the shape of many old Punjabi men. His stomach was ten centimetres ahead of his nose when he came through a door, and it pushed upwards into his chest. His legs were still strong at the thigh, but spindly below the knee. Karim did not like to see his Dad lift carpets onto customers' roof racks or into taxis any more. The weight of an average hessian backed carpet - a five by five Wilton for instance- would burst his fatty heart one day. His father claimed he felt no strain, but Karim had seen the glaze on his face as he hefted carpet onto his shoulder; seen that glaze become a sweaty torrent as he staggered with it, his mouth set in a deathly grimace, towards the customer's vehicle. The last time it had happened, Karim had hung the Closed sign up and blasted him - threatened to go back to college - warehouse burn down or no warehouse burn down. His father had raged, but finally relented: while Karim was working in the shop his Dad never lifted carpets. And he'd been true to his word. One of the few of their battles Karim had won. He was determined his Dad was not going to die on him any time soon. For one, Mum would never recover. He still remembered his mum at granddad's funeral. All that wailing. Then tears every morning for months.
It was a lazy, late Friday afternoon, almost closing. The shop had been quiet all day. His older brother, Shafiq, was out in the van, touring wholesalers. It beat sitting in the shop watching dust circling. Dad and Shafiq ran the shop, but they were barely on speaking terms. Shafiq thought, wrongly, that Dad blamed him for the fire - an electrical fault in a storage heater - but they were pulling in different directions anyway on which way the business should go. The fire was one and a half years ago and Dad had underinsured. They had to sell off the warehouse building and switch Shafiq to the driving job. For two years Dad had been seeing bankruptcy advisors. 'Trading Insolvently' his accountants had pronounced before Dad sacked them. Only now had the banks stopped ringing daily.
His dad called out to him:
-Karim, what are the advantages of cord carpet over linoleum?
-Cord is softer on the feet, looks better, more civilised, Dad.
-What are the advantages of Axminster over cord carpet?
-Harder wearing. Warms the house. They put it in castles, mansions, and stately homes.
-What are the advantages of Wilton over Axminster?
-The Queen of England walks on these. They lay it in Buckingham Palace, Five Star Hotels, the Taj Mahal.
-Good. What are the advantages...
Karim rested at his small, clear varnished pine table looking across at his father who was sat at the battered oak desk with the cash till and orders spike. When things were quiet his Dad liked to grill him like this. Sales training he called it. Karim knew the answers off by heart - five months repetition had seen to that. It was centuries out of date sales thinking, but it pleased his father; they could have been reciting prayers, so well did they each know the lines.
-Karim, are you a goldfish? Concentrate now. What are the advantages of wool twist over man-made?
-Easy...
His father's face was like the dial pad of a push button table telephone. Or the inside of a sliced pomegranate. Or the surface of an old pineapple. The pockmarks were strangely regular, so a blind man feeling his face would be confused that maybe there was a hidden message in Braille or Morse there. His eyes were what Karim admired most. Why had he not inherited them? While his own eyes were wide and open and bafflingly cute no matter how mean he tried to look, his father's eyes had the narrow, arrow-shaped swagger of an 80's Bollywood movie star. His thick, silvery moustache completed the effect. Without the pocks on his face, he might have had a chance at stardom if he had been born into a Delhi film dynasty and not a tribe of carpet sellers from Peshawar.
-Karim, why do you young people not come into the carpet shop? I don't see one in three months. Nobody getting married, setting up house?
-They want wood floors now.
-What? his father asked, incredulous.
-It's good business. Houses here are as old as dinosaurs. Floorboards are wonky, all covered in paint, dust and stuff. So they take up the carpet and they put new flooring over the old floor. New wood floor.
-Isn't it expensive?
-Not laminate. Looks like new wood.
-Why do they want to do that? Their feet will raw without carpet.
-Nah, it's warm, you put insulation under. All the soap characters have it now. East Enders. Coronation Street. Wood laminate. It's... the new Axminster.
-Strange, his father wondered out loud.
-It's modern. It's warm and no carpet bugs therefore no asthma. Spills just wipe up and it makes a room look bigger. At the cheap end, the price is the same as good carpet.
-I am a modern man, son. We must think about stocking this laminate. Where do they put it? Lounge? Bathroom?
It was good to see Dad's face light up again. Since the fire he had been carpeting all hours. It was like a mania. He would talk to you any place, any time so long as it was carpets. And after the fire, everything was insured to the hilt. He'd even bought an electronic gizmo from B & Q and tested every appliance, shop and home, monthly, in a solemn ritual. One evening Karim was wanking under the blankets when his dad walked in. Pops just carried on to the sockets with the electrical tester, plugged the tester in, checked the reading and walked out again. Glided in and out without a beat while he had been rubbing himself furiously.
Idly, Karim watched the yellow Burnham Evening News van pull up and the driver whip the latest Burnham Evening Chronicle headline sheet into the knee high advertising board outside the shop opposite. Riots Latest. More Arrests. Last Karim had heard, the Asian lads who had been caught on the police's mobile CCTV van lobbing bricks were being picked up. They had not yet tracked down any of the white people. Karim was about to nip across the road and buy the paper when his mobile rang. He grinned: it was playing the Bollywood ringtone he'd just bought. He did a little jig, which made his father look up from his Daily Jang and tut. It was a text from Wasif:
Going on the Strip. Meet me 6pm. With car, yaar!
Karim replied with:
Bit cold 4 it 2day?
Straight back came the reply:
Plenty Gal Out there!
The Strip was what Wasif called the main Asian food shop road in Burnham, one of his many California-isms. It was where the young, gifted and gilded Asian folk of Burnham strolled and associated, even on a wet November. With a quick excuse, Karim took off from the shop.
Karim, your gloves! his Dad called. But he was gone.
Karim had met Wasif at secondary school. They were both good at Art and wore their hair the same, dragged back, raked through, close crop way. Wasif wanted to be Britain's David Blaine. He said magic was all tricks but people wanted to believe, you could see it in their eyes, and all you did was give them the opportunity to believe. Eyes were Wasif's speciality. He had a hypnotic gaze. When he made eye contact people rarely looked away. And they believed his tricks. Mostly he did card tricks on the street like his hero.
With Wasif beside him, Karim's own dream of becoming Major Studio film producer no longer sounded far-fetched. Wasif would go through the steps he had to take to make the plan become a reality: Get a digital video camera. Learn to use it. Make a showreel. Find an agent. When Wasif broke it down and believed in him like that, he himself believed. 'If you can dream it, you can do it', was Wasif's favourite saying. He could make the office buildings of Burnham become the New York skyline, he could make a walk in a park a Hitchcock adventure. He could make you feel you were a millionaire even when you had only two pound coins in your pocket.
The wind gulled, flapped and swooped on the crowd at the bus stop, jettisoning hard, ice rain with each swoop that stabbed into Karim's face. The rain bleached the heavy concrete mass of the Burnham civic centre and the looming CarpetWorld and B&Q Warehouse sheds into the uniform grey sky. Inside the bus shelter were raucous homebound school kids, nattering biddies, zombie office workers, shivering shop assistants and the Aldi bag toting unemployed and refugees. The ice wind herded them, the dark circled them and the rain sodded them.
Bus stops were one of the few places all the cultures mixed. Asians, whites, refugees and blacks all came together in these tin and glass shacks to be let down equally by the fictitious schedules of AnyBus. An Equal Opportunities bus service: it let everyone down.
Karim thought again about a car. He could drive, his Dad had taught him in his brother's car, and he'd passed his test first time. He just couldn't afford the insurance. He'd always assumed Pops would pay for it. And he would have done, until the fire. The damn fire.
Just then, he saw a figure walking through the rain, walking as if bathed in Californian sunshine: feet kicked out in an 'I own the sidewalk' stride, shoulders back, head up the better to display the mile wide collar of his shirt, a spring in his heel. One hand was stuffed lightly in a pocket, the other easy at his side. Karim stepped out of the bus shelter:
-Wasif!
Wasif's big grin came on, he swerved over and he gave Karim a pat on the back and a gentle handshake, which Karim held.
-Still good for tonight? said Wasif.
-Sure. What do I wear?
-The usual.
Wasif squeezed Karim's hand a little tighter, then let go. He ran his hand through his hair, then rubbed his hands together. He opened his hands.
Karim grinned.
He'd magicked a coin into them.
-OK, gotta go, Wasif said, and he strolled off into the dark. - Laters! he called back with a wave.
By the time Karim was off the bus, snow was falling. He loved this town, this landscape, even if it didn't love him back. He looked at the snow carpet and his heart flipped with joy. Objectively, it was frozen wet stuff, guaranteed to turn to slush and floods soon as it melted. But right now, it was magic. It transformed everything: the ugly frogs of the derelict mills, the snug, dark terrace houses, the huge mansions in the hills, the farms up on the hills, the school playing fields, the smashed up cars on churned up verges, the slithery, up and down, twisting roads. This big tufted, spanking white 1000 x 10000 carpet of snow. Karim chased swirling flurries of snowflakes, kicked up snow with his shoes, caught a flake on his hand. He stood and watched them: fat flakes, larging it in the air, hang gliding to their millions of mates on the frozen ground. Allah the Painter was giving everything a lick, making thousands of blinding bright surfaces of it all.
He reached the top of his street and slowed, bent his head. He was walking the white end. The first Asians to move in here were Indians, getting away from the lower class Pakistanis in the deprived areas. The Indians lowered the tone in the eyes of the whites. Then Pakistanis moved in, like themselves, lowering the tone in the eyes of the Indians. Then the Bangladeshis came and the Pakistanis thought the Bangladeshis lowered the tone and the Bangladeshis thought the Sudanese and Albanians lowered the tone. The vibes showed up in the number of parking space wars that broke out and whose kids were not allowed to play with who else's. It puzzled Karim. Why was it like this now when years back when he was a kid they had all got on fine? He remembered going to his friend Anthony's party...
A December morning, almost Christmas. He was nine and a half. He looked out of his bedroom window, excited. He'd begged and begged and finally cried until, muttering curses under his breath, Dad had finally relented.
On the morning of the party, the house was quiet. Karim got up and looked out of his attic window. A great quilt of blue sky was embroidered with silk streaks of airplane vapour, and a big button moon. He could almost reach out and scoop it in his hand. Dad rose early for a Saturday and washed the car. It was a big, four-wheel drive that he was hiring to see if he wanted to buy it. Karim waited an eternity before he was allowed to climb into the passenger seat. Dad drove proudly in it to the Pear Tree Estate.
The houses were a storey lower than their own house, and all the same: doors all the same colour, gates the same, fencing all the same. There were dozens of cars scattered along the road that looked abandoned, though someone got in one and drove it off. There were little kids wandering the street without gloves or coats. Christmas lights shone everywhere, winking in windows, draped over roof tops, in gardens, over doors, and plastic Father Christmas figures, and plastic snowmen. The lights did all kinds of light patterns: meshes, waves, red-green-blue sequences. It was like a film.
They arrived at Anthony's. Dad chatted to Anthony's dad, Anthony's mum came up and wrapped her arms around me - her smell was chocolate and margarine. Embarrassed at his mum, Anthony turned away and laughed. Dad looked back nervously as he got back into his hire car.
Inside Anthony's there were seven others: five friends from school, and two friends of Anthony's who lived local. He had cake and red pop on a red table. His mum had them sing happy birthday to Anthony before she allowed them the cake and pop. Anthony blew out the ten candles on his birthday cake, then they gave him presents, most of them gave him a card with a five-pound note in it, Karin among them. Anthony’s house was already criss-crossed with Christmas cards on strings. He put his birthday cards under a real Christmas tree that smelt like toilet freshener. The tree was in a plastic bucket with bricks to hold it up. They talked while his mum was there. When she left, they had a game of tag but the Christmas tree toppled over and his mum shoo-d the boys out to play football. That was when the best bit of the party happened, the bit that ended in the mad chase.
Anthony led his birthday gang to this piece of tarmac that was fenced off, but the fencing was all wrecked, in the middle of a grassed playing field the size of two football pitches. They got onto it and there was enough white paint left to tell the five a side pitch. A few little kids with a yappy little dog made way when the gang arrived. Karim was on Anthony's side. He wanted him to win because it was his birthday but he was rubbish at football and Karim had to play hard just to keep the scores in touch. The little Pear Tree Estate kids gathered again. They watched at first, then started chucking things. The gang chased after them. They came back with older kids. The two gangs lobbed stuff at each other, bricks, branches, cans, till finally there were too many of the local kids against them and Anthony’s gang all ran back to Anthony's house, breathless and glowing.
His mum shouted at Anthony. His friends all laughed.
- Just wait, I know their Mums! she cried. Then burst into tears. And for the first time they thought maybe it wasn't OK what happened. On the drive home, Karim’s Dad told Karim he couldn't go to Anthony's again. It was the best birthday party ever. Cake, football and a fight. It set the standard through the rest of primary school....
Karim kicked the snow off his shoes and entered the hallway. He shouted to his mum he was home the way she liked him to. The house smelt of Friday cooking. The carrot steam had only just reached the hallway so it was nowhere near to ready. He went straight up. He needed to change and get ready. If she hadn't cooked by five thirty he wouldn't eat. There was no point trying to grab something from the fridge, better starve than get ear-bashed. He went to the bathroom and showered, shaved though he hardly needed to, then returned to his bedroom and opened his wardrobe. Downstairs he could hear his older brother and Dad, arguing. Every Friday evening it was like this with them. He listened as he arranged his clothes:
-I won't wait any longer, Shafiq said, his voice bridling with indignation.
-You sign the cheques now? Dad countered.
-Under five hundred.
-Is that not responsibility?
-With a turnover of five hundred thousand, profit at twenty three percent, before costs?
-Well? Dad said in Punjabi. He did not understand what Shafiq had said.
-It's chicken shit! How will I gain experience if you don't give me responsibility?
-First you must learn the job, Dad continued in Punjabi.
-Is eight years not enough?
-You've done well.
-And?
-You have to avoid doing mistakes.
-I never do mistakes. I don't do anything. I'm just a fucking driver.
-A mobile ambassador for the company.
-A driver!
-Some mistakes can kill you.
-Like when you underinsured the warehouse?
Dad swore. -Thieves. Thieves with briefcases, he exclaimed.
-Or a foolish, out of touch, miserly old peasant?
There was a beat. Then Shafiq continued, softer, but firmly, like he was in charge. So Dad had kept calm. Karim continued listening upstairs.
-Let us deal in fact and reason, said Shafiq.
Dad sighed. Shafiq meant 'let me hit you with some big words you won't understand'.
-My heart is old underlay, Dad said, sounding wounded. Every sentence was a sigh now. His father had sat down, Karim knew, and was holding his head in his hands. -A thousand heels have pounded it, and now it is crumbling, it won't stretch to hold more pain, it will snap, and then where will we all be?
-Facts! Shafiq rapped, like he was telling off a schoolboy.
-You will take over the business. Do you want? If you don't want, I have two sons.
Why drag him into it?
-You want that knucklehead Karim to take over the business? Shafiq scoffed. He meant his lofty intellect soared over both the peasant ruminations of his father and the stupidities of his college quitting younger brother.
- He has ideas, modern ideas, Dad said.
-Now you're making me laugh.
-I'll give you responsibility. Only the streets of business are full of thieves and trickery. When times go bad, rats flood the streets of commerce and you need all the experience in the world to repel them.
- The market is changing. We need to-
-You rush me to the grave.
-You're taking the business to the grave as it is. Let go a little, father: Budyaa noo jawaan khaa jandai nai.
'The young eat the old' The expression brought a smile to Karim's lips. The poetry of it. Shafiq spoke beautiful Punjabi, English and Urdu, the proper, educated stuff. People stopped to listen, enrapt, when he quoted poets. He made everyone else sound uncouth and clumsy. Dad smiled too, at the phrase, despite himself. He tried to come back to Shafiq, but he had only his blunt old weapons against Shafiq's sword thrusts.
-I sold door to door when you were in nappies. I never ate lunch - no time - I walked the council estates bitten by dogs. Paki! ringing in my ears, doors slammed on my nose, walking home ten mile, fifteen mile, my feet two boiled chickens in the rain!
-This is nostalgia, not a business plan!
- Chop! Chop! Chop! Your tongue is mixer blades. You make an old man lonely.
It was two fools kicking around an empty plastic bag, Karim thought. The idea of Dad handing over the business reins to Shafiq was as absurd as the idea of Dad in Bermuda shorts sipping a Pina Colada. He would keep going till he dropped. Shafiq had simply deluded himself into thinking Dad was serious when he said he was going to walk away from underlay and roll ends. It was all Dad knew.
-A business not invested in, dies! Shafiq lectured.
Shafiq wanted the business to compete with the national chains like CarpetRite and CarpetLand, and wanted the family to borrow a shed-load of money to start the transformation. Dad wanted a slower expansion. Shafiq had probably met some grasping chancer at a warehouse this evening who had praised his plan as a work of genius and declared his father an idiot for not seeing it.
The ding-dong went on. The whining of Shafiq's voice countered by Dad's thick, low syrup. Dad's despairing monotone always met with resonant certainty by Shafiq. -Borrowing is against Islam, Dad said at one point, -Your mother would die of worry, he said at another. Each defence was weaker than the last, but he staggered on.
Why didn't they settle it once and for all with a boxing match, slug it out till one of them dropped instead of this verbal boxing? Karim began hearing it as a boxing match. Shafiq his brother, buzzing round the ring whipping out jabs as Dad plodded on, his face bloodied, throwing heavy slow haymaker punches that could never land. Shafiq's business school jargon snapped out in English, the words a foreign language within a foreign language to Dad. Punjabi swear words from Dad blunt the cut of Shafiq's dictionary stuff, which his Dad admired even when he didn't understand, like a boxer with too much respect for his opponent. But Dad had his knock out punch. Any moment Karim knew, Dad would feign angina, and Shafiq, out of shame, would relent. Dad only ever won by stopping fighting. Shafiq had no fancy shuffle that could dodge Dad's tears.
-My heart is old underlay... Dad repeated, cornered, his gloves up against the blows.
Karim heard the downstairs door creak wider. His mum had entered. -What is distressing you, my love? What has Karim done this time? Mum said, in Punjabi.
I wasn't even there!
-What is the matter with your father, Shafiq? she continued.
-He was telling me about his old times in the business.
-Oh, papa, your foolish memories. Come rest your head on my lap. I remember. You used to carry a carpet on each shoulder up the blocks of flats. You wore out three pairs of shoes every month.
-What kind of sons have you brought me into the world, Dad moaned, -oh Allah who knows all things. One rushes his own father to death, the other a delinquent good-for-nothing.
-I will pray for you at the mosque, said Shafiq piously. He attended regularly and always performed his Jumuah.
-I am his hall carpet. He wipes his feet on me every time he visits, Dad moaned on.
-You want tea?
-No, damn woman, can't you see I'm in pain? -There is no time for drinking tea. I must work if I want to leave anything to my sons.
By which Dad meant 'I am enjoying luxuriating in my sorrows, please pat my head some more.' Dad loved it when Mum fussed over him, but always said the opposite. Did all families have these rituals?
From his wardrobe Karim had selected his burgundy shirt with the silver trim collar. His mum had ironed it brilliantly. She knew it was his favourite shirt. Tonight was showbiz. He stood at the full length mirror as he pulled it over his shoulders then buttoned it, trying not to crease it, getting the tucks right.
-Karim, what are you doing up there? Your dinner's ready! Mum called up at him.
-Coming, he replied, in English.
Mum drove Karim crazy. Her life was drudge: cooking, cleaning, ironing, washing, looking after children, sweeping, making tea, making beds. Maddeningly, she gloried in it. When the warehouse burnt down she liked how Dad had to work from home for weeks. She liked they couldn't afford to heat the house because it meant everyone snuggled up to her for warmth. When Dad bust his back hulking a roll of carpet up some winding staircase she loved having him marooned in bed where she could mop his brow, spoon feed him dahl, deliver his four times a day Cocodamol tablets. She smiled through every disaster.
Karim went downstairs. His little sister, Samira looked up at him from the settee and smiled. He hadn't even known she was there. He smiled back at her, soothed.
-Out tonight? she asked.
He nodded. -You want chocolate?
-A Twix.
His younger sister was gobsmackingly beautiful. She had looked like a doll as a baby and still had the porcelain skin and elegance. He worried about her being married off. He had heard his mum nattering to his aunts that she thought sixteen to nineteen was the right age. -After that they can't be moulded, they're too set in their ways, she'd said, laughing. Samira was almost sixteen now. Did they have to let some slavering old cousin from Pakistan gets his paws on his little sister? The thought made Karim's head spin. Samira was popular. She could do better than that. She had lots of boys always phoning. Which was why she was locked in the house permanently after school.
This house of grunts and sobs and sighs. This house of smothered lives. It was driving him crazy. He had to get out.
-Hey, brother what's with the long face? Where d'you get that shirt? Shafiq said to him.
-Why?
-I want one.
-Don't take the piss.
-I'm serious. You're a fabulous dresser. Me? I have to wear this suit all the time because I 'm no good at fashion. I look bad in everything. Don't I always say that you've got style coming out of every pore? Right, Karim?
Karim smiled -Yeah, he said to his brother, because it was true. And he looked up and loved and hated his older brother in the same moment and wondered how his brother did that, made him like him, even when he didn't want to.
-You think it would look good on me, then?
-Nah, stick to the suit, Karim said.
Samira laughed and Shafiq gave him a brotherly pat on the back.
Shafiq always took firm strides into the world. He had got married, passed exams, set up an on-line fruit juice business. Everything he did he did well, as if he had the formula for life in his back pocket. Everybody showered praise on him. Everybody wanted him to visit them so they could bask in his success. If the two of them were in the room people hardly noticed Karim. He became like a hat stand. It was all: -Shafiq give me your coat, Shafiq what do you want to drink? Shafiq, sit here I have plumped up the cushion. Oh Karim, take Shafiq's scarf and hang it up. Yes, Karim, the cloak room attendant. Even if his brother died they'd still all be at it: -Look what a good corpse Shafiq makes, see how he lies so neat and still in the casket. What a handsome star he'll be in Paradise.
Dad walked in. Karim saw Shafiq prickle. Quickly, he pressed home his advantage.
-I'm taking the car. Any objections? Karim said.
As expected, neither brother nor father replied, each intent on the other. Quickly Karim closed the living room door behind him. He fished his brother's car keys from the entrance hall table and took off. He had asked. Samira had heard and would be his witness tomorrow. Time to party.
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