Good as Dead

FORTY-TWO

Paul had always tanned more easily than she did on holiday. Not that they’d taken too many holidays together, a couple of weeks in Greece and two more at a falling-down villa in Majorca. But when they had, he was always the jammy so-and-so who ended up nut-brown, while more often than not she would look as though they’d been away to Iceland or somewhere, with shoulders and thighs the colour of a smacked arse unless she lathered on a fresh layer of Factor 30 every half an hour.

Paul would wind her up and she would get increasingly annoyed.

‘It’s not fair,’ she would say on the last day. ‘You look like you live here and I look like I’ve just got off the sodding plane.’

He would say something about wrinkles or not getting skin cancer, but it didn’t help. Then she would look at him lying on the bed and grinning at her, unshaven and shirtless and more tanned than a hard-arsed London copper had any right to be, and it was impossible to stay angry for very long.

‘I feel like one of those desperate women who’s come on holiday on her own and found some local fisherman to shag her… ’

Alfie had thankfully inherited the tanning gene, and now, as the three of them walked along the beach, Helen cast a sideways glance at father and son, the same long legs and skinny chests, bronzed and beautiful in multi-coloured shorts, and for once the sun felt good on her face.

The sea was that colour you only ever see in the brochures.

Someone was cooking on the beach just up ahead, fresh fish for her and steak for Alfie and Paul.

They were all laughing…

Helen opened her eyes.

Akhtar turned from the sink where he was rinsing out the mugs they had drunk tea from half an hour before. ‘I did not mean to wake you.’

‘I wasn’t asleep,’ Helen said.

Akhtar nodded and wiped his hands on a grubby-looking tea towel. ‘Yes, of course.’ He turned and picked up the box of tissues from the desk, stepped across and held it out towards her.

Helen had not realised she was crying. She reached out to take a couple of the tissues and nodded her thanks. Her fingers brushed his wrist and his face was no more than two feet from her own.

It had been a while since he had picked up the gun.

Backing away from her, he nodded around the storeroom. ‘It is definitely a lot more pleasant to spend time in your mind than it is in here,’ he said. ‘I have been doing the same thing myself.’

‘What do you think about?’ She needed to ask before he did.

‘Just remembering things, that’s all. Growing up, you know?’

‘What part of India are you from?’

He sat down at the desk. ‘Actually, I grew up in Aden. South Yemen.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘My family moved there from Bombay in the twenties and we did not go back to India until after the British left Yemen in 1967. Things became difficult. There was some trouble over independence, you understand?’

Helen knew nothing whatsoever about it, but nodded anyway.

‘My father died at around the same time, so the whole family moved back to Bombay. He had his own business, you know? Importing rice and sugar from Australia.’ He nodded to himself, remembering. ‘Dropped dead at forty-two.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘Just got up from the chair and fell on his face. So, we went home… everyone in the family still thought of Bombay as home… and two years later I came to the UK. When I was nineteen.’

‘Why did you come?’

‘To make money,’ he said, as though it were obvious. ‘With my father gone, the family was relying on me and I could not make enough in Bombay, simple as that. We sold some of the furniture in my mother’s house to pay for the ticket and that was it.’ He smiled again. ‘I went to Finchley! Straight from Heathrow on the train, because that was what everybody told me. Go to Finchley, because there are plenty of Indians there and somebody will help you. It sounds funny, I know, but they were right. I found a guesthouse on the first day and I managed to get myself some small jobs, washing cars and cleaning in a restaurant and what have you. And I remember being shocked… really shocked to see British people working, doing the same things I was. Because back at home, we were the ones that did all the work.

‘It was not easy to find anything better, because back then, in the early seventies, it was not always easy for an Indian to be accepted. There was still a lot of… tension. Rivers of blood and all that carry-on. But eventually I was lucky and I got a good job in a bank on the Euston Road. Eight pounds a week, that was. Eight pounds a week and I was still sending money home, because there were fifteen or sixteen people relying on me back in Bombay. My mother and everyone else over there waiting for the money to arrive every month.’ He waved a hand. ‘But it was fine, you know? That was the reason I had come, after all.’ He paused for a few seconds. Shook his head. ‘I was at that bank for eighteen years altogether, though I should say the wages did go up a little, and after a while the family started coming across in dribs and drabs. My mother, my sisters, my uncles. I got them settled over here and got a small loan for a flat. A very small loan for a very small flat!

‘Then, I met Nadira.’

Helen saw his face change, a wash of pleasure. ‘How did you meet?’

‘It was through someone at the bank. Someone senior to me. She was from a very well-off family, very respectable, so of course her father wanted to make absolutely sure I was suitable. He came to see my flat and spoke to people at the bank. It was not arranged, but it was approved.

‘Thank heavens…

‘I stayed on at the bank for another year or so, but a cousin of mine had a shop in Bristol and after I had been to stay with him, Nadira and I decided that we would try to do the same. It was eighty thousand pounds plus the stock to get the shop and we could not get a loan, so we remortgaged our house. It was a big risk, but we had to take it.’ He pressed a hand to his chest. ‘ I had to take it, if you want the truth. I wanted my own business, the same as my father. We already had my eldest son and daughter by then and Nadira was pregnant with Amin.’ He swallowed, tried again. ‘With Amin… ’

‘It can’t have been easy,’ Helen said.

‘Not easy, no.’

‘With a young family.’

‘Nadira would have to bring the children in of course and I remember very clearly that she was working in the shop until the very last day of her pregnancy. Sitting behind that counter, the size of a house! Nowadays, she helps out if I need to go to the cash-and-carry, but most of the time it’s just me and to be honest, that suits me fine. I have plenty of time to read and listen to the radio, or just to think about things, you know? Perhaps too much time, lately.’

‘Don’t you ever take a holiday or anything? I mean, you never seem to be closed.’

Akhtar shook his head. ‘I get up at a quarter to four and get here an hour after that. I sort out the newspapers, do the paper round then get back to open the shop ready for the morning rush. I stay open until half-past six Monday to Friday, five o’clock on Saturdays, two o’clock on Sundays. No holidays.’

‘Bloody hell,’ Helen said.

‘I think I have worked hard.’ Akhtar’s face had changed again. He leaned forward in his chair, angry suddenly. ‘I thought that would make me the sort of person that deserved to be taken seriously. That would be respected. I thought I was the kind of person, that we were the kind of family, the law should be protecting.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Helen said.

‘ Now they are taking me seriously though.’ He picked up the gun and pointed it. ‘This thing gets you plenty of bloody respect.’ He stared at her for a few moments, then looked at his watch. Said, ‘They should be calling again soon.’

Helen closed her eyes.

She leaned her head back against the radiator and tried to forget about the metal cuff eating the flesh from her wrist, the stiffness in her back and neck and the terrible cramp in her legs.

She tried to empty her mind.

To get back to that beach, and her two beautiful boys.