John Lanchester - Capital

There wasn’t much to read today. Iraq and Afghanistan and the global conspiracy and all the usual. A long rant about how Al Jazeera was a tool of Western oppression and how the Qataris who funded it weren’t real Muslims. The connection over the 3G was slow today, and Usman found his taste for the debate just wasn’t there. He logged off the site he was reading and went back to his Google home page. On impulse, just for old times’ sake, he typed in ‘We Want What You Have’ and told Google that he was feeling lucky. To his amazement, there the blog was, hosted on a new platform, but with everything that had been on it before and a whole load of new stuff too. Usman was so surprised it was as if someone had jumped out of the computer and shouted Boo! He clicked on the links and looked through the pages that came up. More images, some of them now with virtual graffiti. Nasty stuff for the most part. Abuse was tagged onto most of the houses in the street. Even – sacrilege! – to the house where Freddy Kamo lived. An image of their own shop at number 68, the old image that had been on the site before, was defaced with the word ‘Bell-end’.

That made Usman smile. His brother could certainly be a bit of a bell-end. But what had happened to the site was weird and disturbing, and Usman didn’t understand it at all.

It would not be entirely fair, Rohinka realised, to blame Mrs Kamal for every single thing that was wrong with the Kamal family dynamics. But it would be a little bit fair. Taking in the deliveries at five o’clock in the morning, she found herself reflecting on the fact that she had been braced for irritation, had psychologically prepared herself to feel irritated, to breathe deeply, to rise above it – and yet here she was, unpacking cartons of milk, stripping the wrapping off newspapers with a Stanley knife, waiting for the grocery truck, irritated.

That was the main thing wrong with Mrs Kamal. She spent such an extraordinary amount of mental energy feeling irritated that it was impossible not to feel irritated in turn. It was oxygen to her, this low-grade dissatisfaction, shading into anger; this sense that things weren’t being done correctly, that everything from the traffic noise at night to the temperature of the hot water in the morning to the progress of Mohammed’s potty training to the fact that Fatima wasn’t being taught to read Urdu, only English, to the fact that Rohinka served only two dishes at dinner the night of her arrival to the cost of the car insurance for the VW Sharan to the fact that Shahid didn’t have a ‘proper job’ and seemed to have no intention of getting one, let alone a wife, to the unfriendliness of London, the fact that it was an ‘impossible city’, to the ostentatious way she complained about missing Lahore, especially at dinner time, giving meaningful, sad, reproachful looks at the food Rohinka had cooked. I should poison the bitch, that’ll show her. In her head, Rohinka growled and muttered and seethed with – and she was well aware of the irony – irritation.

She could hear movement upstairs. There was no way this could be a good thing: either it was Mrs Kamal, preparing to announce that she had had no sleep, which was a declaration that she would be in an even filthier temper than usual, or it was Fatima, announcing that she was now awake, and required entertaining. The steps paused for a moment, as if in thought, and then headed towards the stairs: a small person making thumpy steps: Fatima. She came around the bottom of the stairwell.

‘Mummy, I’m freezing.’

‘It’s quarter past five in the morning. You should be in bed.’

Fatima put her hands on her hips.

‘I couldn’t sleep.’

‘I bet you could if you tried. Think how warm and cosy it is in bed. Under the duvet. With your toys.’

‘I hate my toys!’

This was such a lie that Rohinka just looked at her. Fatima took a moment to listen to what she herself had just said.

‘Not all of them,’ Fatima admitted. ‘I don’t hate Pinky,’ a doll she’d been given for her last birthday. ‘I could get in bed with Daddy, I bet it’s extra-warm.’

Inside Rohinka there was a violent but short pitched battle between her conscience, which told her she should wrestle her daughter back into bed, and her wish for a quiet life, which told her to let Fatima get into bed with Ahmed, and maybe, just maybe, they’d both sleep; knowing perfectly well that she was likely to wake him and try to make small talk for an hour or two. She looked at the piles of work she still had to do.

‘Maybe you should try Daddy,’ said Rohinka. I’ll make it up to him, she thought. Fatima rocked her weight from foot to foot while she considered the proposition.

‘Don’t want to,’ she said. Rohinka sighed. She hated the feeling of being already tired from the day’s events, right at its very start, before the real day had even begun, but she pointed to Fatima’s favourite stool. ‘Ten minutes, and back to bed,’ Rohinka said. ‘Or you’ll be too tired to go to school.’ Then, when her daughter hopped up and down, clapping with delight at being allowed to stay with her, she felt guilty.

Rohinka had wanted to be married, had wanted to have a husband and a family, and a family’s life together, and as the middle of five children had a pretty good idea, she thought, of what family life meant; but nothing had prepared her for the sheer quantity of emotion involved, the charge of feeling. There could be wild mood swings, tantrums, exhilaration, giggling laughter, a sense of the complete futility of all effort, a grinding realisation that every hour of the day was hard, the knowledge that you were wholly trapped by your children, and moments of the purest love, the least earthbound feeling she had ever had – and all this before nine o’clock in the morning, on a typical day. It wasn’t so much the intensity of the feelings as the sheer quantity of them for which she had been unprepared. Rohinka had a guilty secret: sometimes, out walking or shopping with Fatima and Mohammed, she would look around at people who didn’t have children and think: you don’t have the faintest idea what life is about. You haven’t got a clue. Life with children is life in colour, and life without them is black and white. Even when it’s hard – when Mohammed is sitting in the supermarket trolley breaking open yoghurt cartons, and Fatima is screaming at me because I won’t let her stock up on sweets at the checkout, and I’m so tired my eyes are stinging and I’ve got my period and my back hurts from carrying the children and stacking shelves and everyone is looking at me thinking what a bad mum I am, even then, it’s better than black and white.

And maybe that’s what had happened to Mrs Kamal. Maybe it was the sheer quantity of feeling that had got to her; that had somehow mismatched with what she had expected life to be, what she had wanted for herself. Or maybe it was like a chemical reaction gone wrong. She was supposed to feel x but instead she felt y. The things that were supposed to mature her had instead curdled her, so instead of being older and wiser she had got older and more and more irritated, so that now she had become someone who carried irritation around with her like a smell. The irritation was catching in the way that yawning was catching. Rohinka could see, now, that this was why the Kamal boys were the way they were. All of them were, in most of their dealings, reasonable men (with the exception of Usman, who was in many respects still an adolescent). They were calm and sane and functioned well; men who could be talked to, reasoned with, who saw things in proportion. With each other, though, and with their mother, and in everything to do with the Kamal family, they were all irritated, all the time. It wasn’t that they rubbed each other up the wrong way, it was that things always started up wrong and never improved. Ahmed, who was annoyed by very little – his disposition was so even, it verged on being a culpable passivity, a failure to get-up-and-go – was annoyed by his siblings and his mother. It was as if, in each other’s company, the Kamals all went into their special irritation room, like the panic room in the Jodie Foster film.