A Private Business (33 page)

“I got your number from your dad ages ago, when I heard that your husband had died, but then I didn't call. I am such a moron!” she heard Mark say.

“You're busy.”

“I'm a moron,” he corrected. “God, Mumtaz, I was so horrified to hear about your husband. Fuck, man, to just be killed like that! And you were there, I—”

“So, Mark, your shows are amazing!” Mumtaz said. She didn't want to go over Ahmed again. If it were ever humanly possible she never wanted to even think about it. “All that stuff we learned at uni really sank in, didn't it.”

There was a pause. He couldn't understand why she didn't want to talk about her husband. But then, almost audibly, she sensed him reasoning it out, coming to a conclusion that had to be wrong but which worked for Mark and his chain of logic.

“Yes, the show,” he said. “Psycho-magical-behaviorism.”

She laughed.

“David Blaine without the sense of humor bypass,” he said. “I'm lucky.”

“You're clever.”

“Yeah, but
you
know how I do it, don't you.”

“Oh, not always. Not now.”

“It's been a long time.”

“Yes.”

Neither of them spoke. There had been a kiss, just the
once, long ago. It had sat between them ever since, not knowing what to do. It had unnerved them both.

“So …” She gesticulated, trying to find the right words. “Why the call?”

“Why now? I'm at Mum's,” he said.

Mark's mum lived at Gants Hill, just a couple of miles down the road. Mumtaz felt her blood pump at his closeness.

“I live in Cornwall now,” he said. “Mousehole. It's fantastic. Good for a so-called magician too. Lots of legends and all the King Arthur thing and of course loads of crazy hippies and pagans running around wearing bits of trees and stuff. But Friday I'm off to Germany, for a TV thing, and I'm catching a flight from City Airport. So I thought I'd spend a few days with Mum.”

“That's nice.”

“Tazzie, if you've got any time, I'd love to see you,” he said.

No one had called her “Tazzie” for years. Only Mark and her old uni friends had ever used that name. She didn't see any of them any more.

“Oh, Mark, I have a job …” She also had Shazia and she covered her head and there were … problems too. What would he make of her now?

“Oh.” He sounded disappointed. Mumtaz was disappointed too.

“And anyway it might not be safe,” she continued. She
was disappointed but she was also afraid. “These riots …”

“Yes! Shocking! Looting and everything. But then if you build up people's material expectations and then tell them they have to face redundancy …”

“You think the riots are about the recession? What about the man who was shot by the police?”

“Poor bloke, but it's gone way beyond him,” Mark said. “Fuck knows where it's going. Tazzie, I could come over and see you. I wouldn't expect you to come here. Forest Gate, isn't it?”

It was all too much! Her three o'clock appointment had been a lady who needed evidence against her violent, straying husband, yesterday if possible; then there was all the drug chaos with Shazia, the weird neighbor and then there was also …

“Tazzie?”

Lee had told her what his brother had said about the Chapel of the Holy Pentecostal Fire. He'd said that Roy could very easily be lying. He didn't trust him in the slightest. But what he'd told Lee had very much played into Mumtaz's fears about the church. The psychology on show had gone beyond the “ordinary” for a religious service. Why? Mark had had a particular interest in cults and what was known as the “group mind” at university. Should she maybe take him into her confidence, or was she just finding an excuse to see him again?

“OK.” She thought she heard a sigh of relief. “But I work
in Upton Park—Green Street. Could you meet me there?”

“I could.”

“I should finish at five tomorrow,” Mumtaz said. “I could meet you at the tube station. We could … Look, I've got a stepdaughter, my late husband's child. I have to get back for her but I can spare an hour.” He didn't answer. Had her apparent coolness put him off? “There's a pie and mash shop we could go to …”

The pause continued for a while and then he said, “Sure. Yes, that'd be great. Yeah, brilliant.”

“So I'll see you then?”

“Upton Park at five? Looking forward to it.”

They both said goodbye and then Mumtaz put the phone down. Mark had sounded disappointed at being given so little time with her, but she couldn't help that. Between work, Shazia and the police operation to trap Martin Gold there was a lot to do. Apparently neither of Shazia's friends were going to speak to her again once it was all over. But then youngsters got angry very quickly and then changed their minds even more rapidly. Not that that observation had stopped Shazia bursting into tears and going to her room with no food inside her. In her mind her peer group had just gone at a stroke. The fact that neither she nor any of the other girls was going to be arrested seemed to make no difference. If Shazia did but know it, the whole situation could have been so much worse.

Mumtaz went into her kitchen and made a cup of tea,
picturing Mark's face in her mind. Not conventionally handsome—he was far too thin and had hair that was way too mad for that—the thought of seeing him again nevertheless made her shiver with anticipation.

Vi reached down and picked the young man up off the pavement. She tried to ignore the fact that he looked like a total twat but it was difficult. With his “ironic” old school blazer, several sizes too small, plus his expensive old-man brogues and his waxed handlebar mustache he was the epitome of a local tribe some called “hipsters.” Rare in Newham, these privileged middle-class youngsters were common in Hackney, especially around Mare Street, parts of which were now on fire.

“Come on, mate,” Vi said as she pulled him to his feet, “up you get.”

“Oh,” he said, clearly shocked, “you're a woman.”

Vi had been at Lakeside with Shazia for just under an hour when she got the call to say that all leave was canceled. She'd had to dump Shazia home, get to the station and it was then that she was bundled into a van to come over to Hackney. Now on Mare Street in full riot gear, she'd already had a chair leg chucked at her head and these bloody posh kids were just getting in the way.

“A boy took my bike,” the young man said. “What are you going to do about it?”

A rubbish bin burned brightly on the opposite side of
the road. It was surrounded by girls who all wore oversized earrings and swore, loudly.

Vi looked at the young man and sighed. “Description?”

“He was wearing a hood.”

“Oh really?” Vi put her hands, one of which held a riot shield, on her hips and said, “Go home. Sir.”

“Yes, but my bike …”

Something, possibly a car, exploded down near the library. A great cheer went up. “Look, just fuck off, will you?” Vi said to the young man and then she headed off in the direction of the explosion. As she ran, she was passed by what looked like a whole family making off with a massive flat-screen television. A man had been shot, cities were in flames and all people cared about was the size of screen they watched
EastEnders
on. Vi wanted to take it off them but there was a fire in the middle of the road and so she had to just let them get on with it.

Two coppers with northern accents ran alongside her and one said to the other one, “I was thinking of transferring down south. Don't think I'll bother.”

A bottle containing what smelt like piss hit the ground in front of them and sprayed all over Vi's boots.

She called herself “Sita.” It was a Hindu name which had the double advantage of both hiding her true identity and being a bit of a two fingers up to who she really was. A Muslim girl from Ilford, her real name was Saida and, as
she always told the other girls she worked with, “I ran away from an arranged marriage to a big fat slob so I could dance for other big fat slobs instead.” Sita was a lap dancer and she'd just finished her shift at the Pussy Palace down on Dace Road, on the edge of the Olympic site.

Sita lit a cigarette as she made her way down toward the canal. She lived over on Abbey Lane, Stratford and so crossing the canal and then heading up the Greenway was her quickest route home. It was late, but she wasn't tired; punters had been thin on the ground, partly because it was early in the week and partly because large parts of London were experiencing riots. Even the eastern European construction workers from the site had stayed away. If only to get a break from the grim hostels and bedsits they all lived in, they usually turned up whatever the day of the week. But people were scared. As she walked across the bridge over the canal, Sita strained her ears to try and catch any noises of violence, but there was only silence.

The ramp up to the Greenway on the other side of the canal was obscured by bushes and at night she didn't much like it. But Sita also prided herself on her courage and so she made a point, even in the dark, of not rushing up it. As soon as she got to the top she'd be able to see the new stadium which would have a load of workers clustered round it, and so her risk was a calculated one. Sita sauntered. She could do little else in what she liked to call her “tranny shoes.” Six-inch stilettos in red faux snakeskin,
her mate Tammy said they had a very “seventies cross-dresser vibe” which had made Sita laugh. That said, they were bastards to walk in. As she began her ascent of the slope she made a mental note not to forget her ballet pumps to walk home in next time. And then suddenly, from the left, almost in her face, was a man's penis.

“Oh, what the—” Like everyone in the area she'd heard about the Olympic Flasher. Oh God, how on earth could she be a bloody victim of him! Unafraid, she pushed the small, pale member out of her way with her handbag. “For fuck's sake …”

She had expected him to run away immediately. The Olympic flasher had not, after all, actually done anything to any of his victims to date. But he didn't move and for a moment Sita felt her heart begin to speed up. What if she was going to be the exception? What if she was going to be raped? Well, if that was going to happen, she was going to get a bloody good look at him first. Sita lifted her head and stared him straight in the face. She just saw him before he ran. And when she did see him, she realized why he'd paused after she'd slapped his knob away. He'd seen her face too.

Sita took her tranny shoes off and began to run after him. “Oi you,” she yelled as she got to the top of the ramp. “I bloody know you! Stop!”

Mumtaz spent the morning sitting in Lee's car outside the house of a woman known only as Pat who may or may not be entertaining a man called Hardev Singh. His wife, a very capable, organized and yet deeply hurt Sikh lady had been Mumtaz's three o'clock the previous day. Pat's house, which was on Browning Road, East Ham had a front garden full of old mattresses and some dead pot plants by the street door.

Mumtaz looked at her phone for what felt like the hundredth time and then put it back down beside her on the passenger seat again. Like all the Met Police officers, Vi Collins was now on riot duty for the foreseeable future. Even the officer who had been watching the house next door had left halfway through the evening to go off somewhere. Policemen and -women were coming to London from all over the country, trying to stop what seemed to be unstoppable. None of this helped Shazia, alone in the house and miserable. Mumtaz had left her that morning, apparently asleep, but she knew that Shazia had spent
most of the night ranging around the house crying. How could that dreadful old man, Mr. Gold, make her do such a thing?

In return for telling no one about their smoking habits, Mr. Gold had blackmailed Shazia into keeping the curtains and windows open in the living room while they all got stoned. Out in the garden, hidden by the trees, he'd happily masturbated. It was disgusting and it meant that not only had Shazia been forced to smoke dope by her friends, she'd also been suckered into putting them and herself inside some sick old man's fantasy. Shazia, if at a distance, had been abused and that was a very difficult thing for Mumtaz to think about. Albeit through her busyness, Mumtaz had let Shazia down.

Lack of movement around Pat's house made her mind wander. Mr. Gold was one of Maria Peters' tenants and so when it all came out, that would mean more trouble for her. Mumtaz's phone began to vibrate and she saw that it was Lee who said, “My old mate's boyfriend at Barking Council says there's no building conversion or planning permission or anything in the name of either Paul Grint or the Chapel of the Holy Pentecostal Fire,” he said. “There's nothing coming up for any Christian place of worship.”

“So the new church, if nothing else, is a lie?”

“Seems like it,” Lee said.

“So where do we go from here?” she asked. She thought about Maria and how sick she'd looked whenever she'd
seen her recently and she wondered what they, this faux church, were doing to her.

“With all the coppers on riot duty, nowhere, right at the moment,” Lee said. “But I will give Vi the nod when I can. I'll see you later.”

Mumtaz put her phone back on the passenger seat and went back to half reading the newspaper she'd bought that morning. But it was full of pictures of people in hoods waving Adidas trainers about like trophies which made her feel sick. Was it any wonder that people were attracted to religion, even if it was extreme and manipulative, if this was the alternative?

Mark had been fascinated by religion and what some psychologists called “group mind” experiences. The particular example Mumtaz always remembered was that of Fatima in Portugal in 1917. Three children claimed to have had visions of the Virgin Mary which culminated in seventy thousand people “seeing” a miracle. At the behest of the Virgin, the sun had “danced” in the sky, pinwheeling across the heavens and flashing with every color on the spectrum. Seventy thousand people. That was some religious fervor.