7
At ten o’clock Shahid was stacking unsold men’s magazines behind the counter, prior to returning them to the wholesaler, when the only customer in the shop fainted. She was a little old lady who had come in and was looking at the dairy products in the fridge. Or at least that’s what she was doing one moment. The next thing Shahid knew, there was a thumping sound and she had fallen sideways in the right-hand aisle. It was not a loud noise but it was an unnatural one – the unmistakable noise of a body falling over. Ahmed, who had been in the kitchen doing paperwork, came running through and joined him as he lifted the counter flap and hurried to her.
The old lady was already stirring where she lay; she couldn’t have been out for long. Perhaps she hadn’t even lost consciousness. Shahid didn’t think he’d ever seen her before, but he had the young man’s obliviousness to the old – to him, everyone over the age of sixty looked the same. Ahmed on the other hand did seem to know her, because as he bent down to help, he said, ‘Mrs Howe!’
‘I’m all right, dear,’ said the old lady, not sounding the least bit all right. She was doing that thing people do when they have accidents, of pretending nothing had happened and that they were completely fine. ‘Don’t trouble yourself. Wobbly for a second but I’m fine. Right as rain!’
‘Take your time,’ said Ahmed. ‘Sit for a moment.’ He sat beside her with his arm on her shoulder, looking a little uncomfortable at the intimacy he had offered. Shahid went behind the counter. On the CCTV camera underneath the till, Ahmed and Mrs Howe looked strange, like something out of a Crimewatch reconstruction: the Asian man crouched on the floor next to the old white lady, neither of them moving. If it had been a film you would have soon tired of it. For the next quarter of an hour Ahmed sat talking to the old lady while Shahid served three customers with a Daily Mirror, an Oyster top-up, and five scratchcards respectively. It was a strange lull, Shahid carrying on normally while his brother squatted beside the ill woman like a paramedic. Ahmed was a pompous dickhead in many respects, but Shahid had to admit, it was his brother’s good side that he knew who the woman was and didn’t treat her just as a nuisance to be cleared up as briskly as possible.
‘I’m going to help Mrs Howe home,’ said Ahmed, coming behind the counter to pick up his jacket. ‘She’s just around the corner. Back in five.’
‘I’ll hold the fort,’ said Shahid, saluting. Ahmed didn’t seem to think that was funny.
Ahmed gave Mrs Howe his arm and helped her lever herself up off the floor. Old people were right to dread falls. His first thought when he saw that she had fallen was that she must have broken something, a leg or a hip, which at that age could be the beginning of the end, but she seemed to be physically intact. Ahmed picked up her bag and, with Mrs Howe still holding on to his arm, the two of them headed for the door. Ahmed knew that Mrs Howe lived in Pepys Road but didn’t know in which house.
‘I’m about halfway down the road,’ Petunia said. A couple of hundred yards. At the rate they were travelling, that was going to take a while. ‘I’m so grateful and so very very sorry.’
‘It is me who should be grateful. If I weren’t with you I would have to be doing my accounts. I hate doing my accounts.’
‘I don’t know what came over me. Everything just started whirling. Next thing you know I was on the floor. Do you know, that’s the first time I’ve ever fainted. Managed to get to eighty-two without doing it. Bad luck for you, eh?’
‘I won’t hear of it,’ said Ahmed.
The day was clear and cold. The light was so bright that Ahmed had to hold up his hand to block it out when they crossed the road. He could feel Mrs Howe’s thinness; he could feel her trembling, either with cold or shock or fatigue or a little of all three. Petunia knew that he could feel her shaking and was also conscious that this was the first time she had touched a man other than her son-in-law and grandsons since Albert died.
For Ahmed, who felt that he was always in a rush, that any given day was at its heart an equation with too many tasks and too few minutes, the list of things to do never shrinking while the time in which to do things constantly contracted, there was something very strange about moving so slowly. It was like one of those exercises where they make people walk backwards, or wear blindfolds in their own houses, to make the familiar feel different. He could feel – he couldn’t help himself – a wave of the irritation he so often felt, at so many different things, in the course of an ordinary day. At the same time he managed to slow himself down and check the irritation, by telling himself that there was no point in doing a good deed if all it made you do was feel bad-tempered.
‘Just suddenly everything was going round,’ said Petunia, still on the subject of her first-ever faint. Then she said, ‘Here we are,’ and opened the gate of number 42. The window had some old-fashioned coloured glass in it, an abstract circular pattern. Ahmed – he couldn’t help himself – wondered for a moment what the house was worth. If it was tatty on the inside but structurally sound, which would be his best guess, one and a half million.
‘I’m fine from here,’ said Petunia.
‘Let me see you in,’ said Ahmed. He helped her over the threshold. His guess had been right. There was clean but old carpet and ugly wallpaper with a flower pattern, and a telephone in the hallway. One million six. Ahmed reprimanded himself and gave Mrs Howe his full attention. There was some back-and-forth about whether he should call her daughter for her, or call a doctor, and her saying she wouldn’t hear of it, and then to get rid of him Petunia had to promise that he could bring the newspaper around on days when she wanted it – she didn’t get a daily delivery because she didn’t want a daily paper. They were mostly full of rubbish and why would she want to keep up anyway?
‘OK, OK,’ said Ahmed. ‘Let me write the telephone number down.’ He had a biro but no paper, and went to look for some in the scraps on the table beside the doorway, next to the telephone. There were leaflets for pizza and curry; he took one up and wrote the number on the back.
‘I’ll put it by the phone,’ he said. ‘Call!’ As he was replacing the leaflet on the hall table he noticed that Petunia too had a card with a picture of her house on it.
‘We had one of those this morning,’ he said. ‘“We Want What You Have.”’
‘When you’re my age, nobody wants what you have,’ said Petunia, and Ahmed laughed.
‘We older people have to stick together, Mrs Howe,’ he said. Normally she would have made a joke back, but she was too preoccupied, too deep inside herself, to properly register what he had said.
8
The most unpopular woman in Pepys Road walked slowly down the pavement, taking her time, spreading fear and confusion. She looked from right to left, she looked ahead and back, and no detail escaped her. She seemed to have all the time in the world yet also to be possessed with a sense of mission and purpose. She did not look conscious of the fear and confusion she spread and yet she was, deeply so.
Quentina Mkfesi BSc, MSc (Political Science, University of Zimbabwe, thesis subject: Post-Conflict Resolution in Non-Post-Colonial Societies, with special reference to Northern Ireland, Spain and Chile) was on the lookout for non-residents parked in residents’ parking areas, for business permit-holders parked in residents’ areas and vice versa, for expired permits of both types, for people who had overstayed their paid parking or – and this was a particularly fruitful issue in Pepys Road – for people who had misinterpreted the parking signs and paid for parking but were not parked in the dual-use, residents’ or paid-parking area, but were instead parked in the residents-only area. She was alert to cars parked carelessly, protruding into the public thoroughfare or with one wheel on the pavement. She could also issue tickets for out-of-date vehicle duty. She was not a cruel warden – she regularly allowed a period of grace for out-of-date residents’ permits and unpaid road tax. But she was a very sharp one. She was dressed in a dark green uniform accessorised with webbing in a paler shade of green, trousers which had whit
e strap-like detailing on the bottom of the legs, and a peaked cap. She looked like the Marx Brothers’ idea of a colonel in the Ruritanian customs service from 1905.
The government, the council, and the company Quentina worked for all publicly and repeatedly denied that there was a quota for issuing parking tickets. That was, as everybody knew, a flat lie. Of course there was a quota. Quentina’s was for twenty tickets a day, yielding £1,200 in revenue if all the violators paid within the two weeks’ grace period, and usually more because many of them did not. If there were no appeals upheld – and Quentina, who was good at her job, had the lowest level of upheld appeals of any current employee of Control Services – the revenue in practice would be worth about £1,500 a day. If she worked 250 days a year that meant Quentina was generating revenue of £375,000 per annum. In return for that she was, in theory, paid £12,000, with four weeks’ paid holiday and no health or pension benefits.
Today was showing signs of being a good day. Not because she had already written ten tickets, all of them rock-solid valid, and it wasn’t yet ten o’clock in the morning – no, that was easy, that was, for a warden of Quentina’s talents and experience, routine. It was showing signs of being a good day for another reason. Quentina and four other of the African employees of Control Services played a game whose rules were simple: the person who gave out a ticket to the most expensive car was the winner. Photos were required for proof. Sometimes the prize involved a free drink or a £5 bet, sometimes it was played for honour alone. Quentina had been on a losing streak. But now it seemed her luck was on the move. 27 Pepys Road was, Quentina happened to know, owned by a solicitor who worked for a Premiership football club based in West London. The club sometimes rented the house from him; it had properties nearer their training ground in Surrey but people occasionally wanted to live in town. Quentina had long thought this might be a good place to find a very expensive car without a resident’s permit, so she made a point of regularly visiting Pepys Road, which was otherwise only an averagely productive area from a warden’s point of view. But not today. In the visitors’ parking section there was a Range Rover with only twenty minutes left and a silver Golf with ’05 licence plates which had to move in the next hour – nothing much of interest there. But three parking spaces along from the football solicitor’s house there was the car of Quentina’s dreams, an Aston Martin DB7, a James Bond car with an on-the-road price of £150,000. What made it even better was that the man driving it had bought a parking ticket but – clearly he didn’t know the most recent set of changes in Pepys Road – he had parked in the residents-only area, not the residents-and-visitors area. He had made the classic Pepys Road parking mistake.
With no one in the street and no reason to think she was about to be interrupted, Quentina would normally have gone straight up to the car, written the ticket and taken the pictures and been done. Sometimes, though, it paid to be cunning. She was not a warden who often resorted to tricks but sometimes you had to be street-smart, and so Quentina walked another fifty or so metres past the car, making a mental note of the number and make and model, and then as-if-absent-mindedly tapped the data into her PDA. People were less likely to come running out shouting if they didn’t see you standing right there by the car. The invalid ticket on the car had another hour to run so she should have had plenty of time before the driver came out but you could not be sure; it paid to be careful. Quentina printed the ticket out and wrapped it in the plastic envelope. Now it was game on. She turned, moved briskly to the gleaming, recently washed silver car, snapped up the windscreen wiper – even that felt expensive – and stuck down the violation notice, then, stepping up and down off the kerb and moving backwards to get the relevant parking sign into shot, snapped off four digital photos. As the locals would say: Result!
Everybody hated being ticketed, just as everyone hated all the traffic on the roads except themselves. Everyone knew that the city would grind to a halt without restrictions on where cars could and couldn’t park, and everyone knew that everybody would disobey all the laws without compunction if they weren’t enforced. It was just that nobody wanted the laws to apply to them. Part of the problem, as Quentina had been told several times, was that ‘the laws against drivers are the only fucking laws that are ever fucking enforced’. But that, Quentina felt, wasn’t her problem. She had no fear of confrontation, which was just as well as it was a very unusual workday that did not feature at least one or two altercations with upset or furious or hysterically weeping or racially abusive or threatening or not entirely sane freshly ticketed motorists. Still, it was better for everyone to avoid ugly scenes, and Quentina was in a good mood as she moved off down Pepys Road. Because she was in a good mood, and because it would have no effect on the quota either way, she merely noted a ten-days-out-of-date resident’s permit on an ’03-reg A-class Mercedes, and magnanimously took no action. Quentina went to spread fear and confusion somewhere else. It was going to be fun after work, showing the photo of the Aston Martin. Quentina planned to tell people she’d personally ticketed James Bond himself. In his tuxedo. And that he’d been with the woman from Casino Royale.
9
Michael Lipton-Miller, ‘Mickey’ to his friends, stood in the investment property he owned at 27 Pepys Road with a clipboard under his left arm, a BlackBerry held to his right ear, an iPhone vibrating in his left jacket pocket, a dehydration headache, a solicitor’s letter setting up an appointment to discuss his divorce terms in his right jacket pocket, and a briefcase at his feet. Of all these things, the one which caused him to feel least thrilled with life in general was the clipboard, which held a list of all the things which should have been done at the house to make it ready for a new arrival. Mickey was a qualified solicitor who no longer practised the law but instead worked full-time as a factotum, fixer and odd-job man for a Premiership football club. He loved his work and loved the sense of himself as a man who got things done, whose approach to life was a bit flashy, a bit wide – but had the other connotations of the word ‘wide’ too, a sense of breadth, of generosity, of largeness of spirit. His ideal sense of this did not involve checking over an itemised list of crockery, DVD equipment and toilet paper, but he had sacked his assistant last week (the search for a replacement would be what the vibrating phone was about – there were times, Mickey liked to joke, when putting the phone on vibrate was the nearest thing to sex he got all week) so here he was mired in the daily detail of making spoilt footballers happy. He was fifty years old.
In front of Mickey was the woman from the contract cleaning agency, whose job it had been to supervise the cleaners. She was tall and lean and had high cheekbones: fit. To Mickey’s eye she looked East African. She had that disconcerting African patience as she stood there while Mickey ranted and bollocked somebody else over the phone; she did not look like someone waiting for a verdict to be passed on her work. Standing next to her, Mickey had a thought he often had about good-looking young women: he was amazed that more of them did not sell their bodies for sex. It would surely be easier and much more lucrative than working – certainly than this sort of work – and could it really be so bad? People would pay hundreds of pounds to have sex with this woman, so why on earth would she instead want to clean houses for £4.50 an hour or whatever the sodding minimum wage was? Maybe he should put in an offer. And then Mickey, in the privacy of his own head, told himself: only joking.
‘Right right, sorry sorry,’ said Mickey. ‘Shall we have a look? I’m sure it’s all fine, darling,’ Mickey said, being Good Cop, ‘but you know the powers that be . . .’
The cleaner was not falling for any charm. She just gave a minimally polite nod.
Mickey started taking the tour. Because the house was not usually lived in for more than about three months at a time, often less, and because the people who lived there came from all over the place, it was decorated in a semi-expensive version of Hotel-Room Neutral. The players often came from families with no money and their only encounters with affluent style came
from hotels, so that was a style they felt was aspirational. The walls were a complicated shade of Swedish white, the furniture was a mixture of modern stuff, the video and sound system were some Japanese make Mickey had never heard of but were also wired under the floorboards so that no one could accidentally forget that they belonged to the landlord and not the tenant. This time it was an African kid who was coming to London and was going to bring his dad. ‘Kid’ really did mean kid – he was seventeen. The boy was going to be starting on twenty grand a week with options to go higher or break the contract after a year. Mickey, who was fluent in money, who had grown up wanting to make money and thought that everything about making shedloads of money was fine, was admirable, was a high and noble goal – even Mickey sometimes felt ill when he thought about how much money was knocking around in football these days.
Capital: A Novel Page 5