“It’s your sisters’ fault,” Farooq said one afternoon when they were sitting side by side in green bucket seats in the betting shop, watching a bank of screens with greyhounds racing around a track and sweating men in another time zone walloping a cricket ball in the direction of sponsors’ billboards. The volume was off, allowing for some pleasing moments of synchresis, such as when the dogs were released from their cages just as the front door was hurled open by a drunk, or when the strip light overhead started to buzz and the on-field umpire batted midges away from his face. Farooq had placed three phones on Parvaiz’s leg between knee and hip, and each time one pinged with a text message he’d glance down and go to the counter to place another bet. It was good training for Parvaiz to stop fidgeting, he said the first time he did it. Parvaiz always kept his legs so tensed up during those betting shop sessions he had trouble walking afterward. “They want you in the house, doing their shopping and mowing the garden, so they’ve tried to keep you a boy, a child in need of a mother. That older one particularly, you know what I mean? The one who claims to be a good Muslim, and thinks she has the right to decide whether or not you can live in your own house. Tell her it is written in the Quran, ‘Men are in charge of women because Allah has made one of them to excel the other.’ And by Allah’s law, you, not your women, dispose of your property.”
Your women. Parvaiz turned the phrase in his mouth while Farooq placed another bet. He liked how it felt. Though that didn’t mean he’d be stupid enough to try to quote the Quran to Isma, particularly when it came to the roles of men and women. He was a Muslim, of course; he believed in God, and went to the mosque for Eid prayers, and put aside 2.5 percent of his income for zakat, which he split between Islamic Relief and the library campaign, but beyond that, religion had, since early childhood, been a space he’d vacated rather than live in it in the shadow of Isma’s superiority. But in Farooq’s company he came to see there was such a thing as an “emasculated version of Islam, bankrolled in mosques by the British government, which wants to keep us all compliant,” and there was more than a little satisfaction in knowing this.
“Where are you these days?” Aneeka asked him one night, climbing up the ladder he’d propped against the garden shed to get onto the roof with his phone, headphones, and pride and joy, the secondhand shotgun mic. A favorite perch since childhood that allowed a clear view of the trains pulling in and out of Preston Road. The bodies of the trains were shadows in the darkness but the long windows revealed illuminated snapshots of life passing by. Every so often there was a jagged break in the conventions of tube behavier: a man throwing a punch, a kiss so concentrated that train carriage or gondola ride or bedroom were irrelevant details, someone pressing a palm against the glass, leaning toward the boy on the garden shed as though fate wanted them together but the wheels of plot weren’t allowing it. Nearly two years ago he had started working on a project that would eventually be a 1,440-minute track that his ideal listener would play between midnight of one day and the next—a soundscape of every minute of a day from this perch.
He stopped the recording, took off his headphones, scribbled in his notepad. It might be nice to leave in that Where are you these days between 20:13 and 20:14. Aneeka’s was the only human voice scattered through his audio files of Preston Road Station Heard from the Garden Shed.
“I’m here. You’re the one who’s hardly around.”
“I meant where are you here?” She reached out to tap his head. “And here.” She rested her hand on his wrist, at his pulse point, in the old childish way, but he didn’t reciprocate. “Is this about moving to Aunty Naseem’s? I know you’re upset about losing this spot, but at least we’ll still be in the neighborhood.”
We, she said, but he wondered how often she’d be around. There was hardly a week when she didn’t spend at least one night at Gita’s. He knew Aneeka well enough to recognize she was laying the groundwork for staying out more and more often—and it wouldn’t always be with Gita either.
“This is our home,” he said.
She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Always so senti. You should join me in convincing Isma we should sell. You could afford to go to uni with the money we’d get. That’d make up for the loss of More of the Same Heard from the Garden Shed, wouldn’t it?”
“They only gave you a scholarship because you tick their ‘inclusive’ and ‘diverse’ boxes,” he said, wounded enough to vocalize a sentiment Farooq had recently dredged out of his unconscious.
“Since when are you so white?” She flicked his earlobe with her thumb and forefinger.
“Muslim women, particularly the beautiful ones, need to be saved from Muslim men. Muslim men need to be detained, harassed, pressed against the ground with a heel on our throat.”
“None of these things has ever happened to you.”
“How many times have I been stopped and searched by police? Compared to you?”
“Twice. Only twice, P. And you said yourself it was no big deal either time, so stop whining about it after the fact.” She jumped down from the ladder, with that physical confidence that always made his breath stop in terror for her safety. “Isma’s right, you know. It’s time for you to grow up.”
Previously he would have gone after her and turned it into a shouting match that would continue until they’d exhausted themselves into reconciliation. But now he remained where he was, watching all the lives within their narrow frames slide past on the tracks in the darkness, allowing the wound to fester so that tomorrow he could tell Farooq about it and receive the antiseptic of his new friend’s indignation.
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Farooq sent a text asking him to come to the flat in Wembley where he lived with two of his cousins, though not the one who had mugged Parvaiz. It felt momentous enough for Parvaiz to go home from the greengrocer’s, scrub the dirt out from beneath his fingernails, and put on a fresh shirt.
When he pushed open the unlocked door at Farooq’s address he smelled chicken grease from the fast-food joint downstairs, and familiar cologne. A window was rattling in its frame, not because of any breeze but as a consequence of the traffic on the street below. Farooq’s baritone voice told him to stop waiting for a gold-plated invitation and come in.
The furnishings consisted of three mattresses piled on top of one another and pushed against a wall and two green plastic chairs, which faced a flat-screen TV hooked up to a video game console. The kitchen area had a microwave and an electric kettle, the open door of a cabinet offering a glimpse of rolled black T-shirts and black socks. A punching bag hung from a thick bolt in the ceiling, a slight creaking as it oscillated almost imperceptibly. There was a bolt in the floor, similar to the one in the ceiling, that didn’t seem to serve any purpose. He remembered Farooq’s texts—the ones he didn’t know how to respond to—about wanting to chain up women from the American reality TV show, and looked away. An ironing board served as makeshift table for a lamp and a pair of boxing gloves. On the floor beside it, an iron rested on a base the size of a bread box.
“It’s the Ferrari of irons,” Farooq said, proudly, seeing Parvaiz looking at the appliance. “Only one setting so you never burn your clothes. You ever want to iron something, bring it here. Sit, sit, make yourself at home. You are at home. No, on the chair, on the chair.”
Parvaiz sat down, tried to smooth the creases of his shirt. Farooq smiled, cuffed him on the side of the head, and handed him a mug of tea.
“Wait for me. I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he said, and walked out.