‘It’s a gift to the Dodie Gimballs of this world.’
But whatever he wore, whatever he said, the Dodie Gimballs of this world would attack him for it; a series of hostile discourtesies for which the Dodie Gimballs of the next would answer. Besides, he liked the jacket. He thought it took a couple of years off; pushed him the right side of forty.
Now, to the
His phone was back in his pocket. Tyson Bowman stood as he approached, and they hugged briefly, a one-armed embrace – ‘Tyson.’ ‘Boss.’ – then sat at opposite sides of the small table, its cloth the ubiquitous red-and-white squares pattern; its ornament a cutlery holder into which sachets of ketchup and brown sauce had also been stuffed. He remembered bringing Karim here, back in the day; his younger brother not yet the aspiring martyr, but already, in Zafar’s twenty-twenty hindsight, distancing himself from what had been, until then, the everyday: people drinking tea and sharing jokes, living ordinary, godless lives. Zafar felt then what he still felt now. That there were better ways of achieving your goals than wrapping yourself in a Semtex vest.
Be that as it may, Karim’s story was not yet over. And the country he’d grown to despise remained in desperate need of betterment.
Zafar said, ‘No problems, then?’
Tyson shook his head.
‘When will it all be ready?’
‘Couple of days.’ He rubbed two fingers against his thumb. ‘On payment.’
Close up, the aspiring pol disappeared. It wasn’t that Tyson looked a thug – though he’d been anointed as such during his first two assault hearings – and it wasn’t that he looked an aspiring terrorist, though having been radicalised during his second prison term, he’d served a third for possession of extremist literature. Nor was it the colour of his skin, the close-shaven head, or even, particularly, the face tattoo – a usually reliable hallmark of forthcoming violence. No, thought Zafar; it was the attitude bottled within that package; one suggesting that social interaction of any kind was unwelcome. Except with Zafar Jaffrey, who had reached out a helping hand when Tyson Bowman had been jobless, homeless and friendless. Zafar alone put a light in Bowman’s eyes; one he should, he knew, feel guilt at exploiting.
The waitress was hovering, pad at the ready. ‘Morning, Mr Jaffrey.’
‘Angela,’ he said. ‘Radiant as ever.’
‘You said that yesterday, Mr Jaffrey. You want to watch that. People’ll think you’re not sincere.’
He reached a hand out and touched hers. ‘People can think what they like, Angela. You’ll always be radiant to me.’
And now she smiled, and her sixty-something years fell away. ‘Will you still come here for breakfast when you’re mayor?’
‘While you’re serving, yes. But just coffee this morning, thank you.’
When she’d gone, he gave his full attention to Tyson. His bagman: a word not quite rinsed of its shadier connotations. But Tyson did, after all, carry bags on occasion.
His coffee arrived, and they talked of changes to the day’s schedule: one meeting cancelled, another brought forward. A five-minute slot on local radio would now happen in a van, not the studio, saving everyone concerned, van driver apart, thirty minutes. Each day was busier than the previous, but then the election was in three weeks. Jaffrey was an independent candidate, and though he had ‘disappointed’ the prime minister by refusing to adopt the party’s mantle – despite having been appointed to two select committees in recent years – the pair remained ‘close personal friends’, the PM’s oft-used tactic, when he couldn’t get popular figures to endorse him, being to endorse them instead, and hope something rubbed off. Jaffrey accepted this unsought chumminess in the same way he did the Opposition leader’s frequently mentioned ‘respect’: in politics, ticking the no-publicity box was not an option. Besides, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, neither of those worthies were deluded enough to imagine their own candidate had a snowball’s chance in hell: unless the polls were even more disastrously askew than last time, or the time before that, at the end of the month Zafar Jaffrey would assume the mayoralty of the West Midlands.
