13.2
‘Don’t speak to me,’ Sukhbir had barked when Siddique approached him on his way to his car.
‘What’s up with you, man?’ he had sniggered back.
Sukhbir had snarled at him and pushed him away: ‘If you ever lay a finger on my sister again,’ he said, ‘I’ll kill you.’
‘What’s up with you, man? You were going to do the same thing. We were just trying to cheer you up, man. She deserved everything she got. You said it yourself, man.’
‘If you even speak to her, I’ll kill you.’
Climbing into his car, he had slammed the door shut and revved his engine noisily. Seconds later, after reversing out of his space, he had squealed away, speeding off like a maniac. Neither an ambulance nor a fire engine had ever experienced urgency like this, and even a police car would have struggled to catch him. Weaving nimbly around parked cars and bollards, squeezing between the humps in the road and dashing the wrong way down a one-way street, all the hours playing Super Mario Kart had finally paid off. Sliding to a halt outside his father’s shop ten minutes later, ramming a wheel against the curb to lock it in place, he had emerged with a thumping chest, his veins pulsating all the way up his arms.
Now he stood beside a compact fridge-freezer, glancing around wordlessly, watching men on stepladders attempting to suspend a large cardboard sign from an air vent. In garish pink, a fat italic font announced a great sale on selected items, a hovering asterisk referencing two lines of exceptions in print too small to read.
‘Can I help you?’ asked a bald man he did not know, wearing a uniform he did not recognise, his skin the wrong colour, his smile the wrong shape.
‘I’m looking for my dad,’ replied Sukhbir confoundedly, troubled by the commotion all around him.
‘Now which one was he?’ grinned a young man acerbically from the top of his ladder, ‘Mr Singh, Mr Singh, Mr Singh, Mr Singh or Mr Mohammed?’ He let out a chortle. ‘I gather none of them were related, but you’d never have known.’
‘He’s the manager,’ muttered Sukhbir irately.
‘You’re Mr Entwistle’s son? No, I don’t think so. His son is thirty-three and drives a Jaguar XJS convertible. Is that wreck out front yours?’
As he stood there, Sukhbir noticed the men slowly circling him, staring at him curiously. ‘He must mean Vijay,’ laughed an older man, rattling through his toolbox in search of a crosshead screwdriver. ‘Didn’t you see the sign on the door?’ he asked him, pointing towards another affixed to the counter: ‘Under new management, it says.’
‘I told you we’d have to make it bigger,’ tittered the bald man, ‘or else everyone will think Mr Entwistle is Mahbub Ali every time he comes back from Majorca.’
Sukhbir’s muted reaction was evidence that he had weightier concerns on his mind, for in normal circumstances, he would have thumped somebody by now. Glancing at all of the faces at once, he hoped for a sensible retort. ‘Can you tell me where he went?’ he asked, spying his father’s car still in the reserved space outside.
‘You’ve missed him by about half an hour as it happens,’ said an even older man, dragging on a cigarette and slurping tea from a mug in turn.
‘Aye,’ said the bald man, ‘he’d been trying to teach us everything he knew, which as you can imagine took all of three minutes. Meanwhile his computer lesson lasted nigh on three hours, though to be fair, it was mostly the fault of that pile of crap he said he paid a fortune for. Imagine using that old pile of junk for your accounts in the age of the PowerBook 160. You have to laugh. Another consignment for the skip.’
‘So which way did he go?’ growled Sukhbir impatiently, staring back into the street.
‘Last seen heading for the docks,’ snorted the bald man conceitedly. ‘A good idea, I say. Let’s hope it’s homeward bound.’
Sukhbir would not remain there long enough to see the zany comedians double up, amused by their own hilarity, but he would manage to pull a poem from the deepest recesses of his mind on his way out. ‘Wat a devilment a Englan!’ he spat back at them, scraping the door closed behind him.
