All through this, as Samad’s face contorted from anger, to despair, to near-hysterical grins, Magid had remained blank, his face an unwritten page.

‘You have nothing to say? This news does not surprise you?’

‘Why don’t you reason with them, Abba,’ said Magid after a pause. ‘Many of them respect you. You are respected in the community. Reason with them.’

‘Because I disapprove as strongly as they do, for all their lunacies. Marcus Chalfen has no right. No right to do as he does. It is not his business. It is God’s business. If you meddle with a creature, the very nature of a creature, even if it is a mouse, you walk into the arena that is God’s: creation. You infer that the wonder of God’s creation can be improved upon. It cannot. Marcus Chalfen presumes. He expects to be worshipped when the only thing in the universe that warrants worship is Allah. And you are wrong to help him. Even his own son has disowned him. And so,’ said Samad, unable to suppress the drama queen deep within his soul, ‘I must disown you.’

‘Ah, now, one chips, beans, egg and mushroom for you, Sammy-my-good-man,’ said Archibald, approaching the table and passing the plate. ‘And one omelette and mushrooms for me…’

‘And one bacon sandwich,’ said Mickey, who had insisted on breaking fifteen years of tradition in bringing this one dish over himself, ‘for the young professor.’

‘He will not eat that at my table.’

‘Oh, come on, Sam,’ began Archie gingerly. ‘Give the lad a break.’

‘I say he will not eat that at my table!’

Mickey scratched his forehead. ‘Stone me, we’re getting a bit fundamentalist in our old age, ain’t we?’

‘I said-’

‘As you wish, Abba,’ said Magid, with that same infuriating smile of total forgiveness. He took his plate from Mickey, and sat down at the adjacent table with Clarence and Denzel.

Denzel welcomed him with a grin, ‘Clarence, look see! It de young prince in white. ’Im come to play domino. I jus’ look in his eye and I and I knew ’im play domino. ’Im an hexpert.’

‘Can I ask you a question?’ said Magid.

‘Def-net-lee. Gwan.’

‘Do you think I should meet with my brother?’

‘Hmm. I don’ tink me can say,’ replied Denzel, after a spell of thought in which he laid down a five-domino set.

‘I would say you look like a young fellow oo can make up ’im own mind,’ said Clarence cautiously.

‘Do I?’

Magid turned back to his previous table, where his father was trying studiously to ignore him, and Archie was toying with his omelette.

‘Archibald! Shall I meet with my brother or not?’

Archie looked guiltily at Samad and then back at his plate.

‘Archibald! This is a very significant question for me. Should I or not?’

‘Go on,’ said Samad sourly. ‘Answer him. If he’d rather advice from two old fools and a man he barely knows than from his own father, then let him have it. Well? Should he?’

Archie squirmed. ‘Well… I can’t… I mean, it’s not for me to say… I suppose, if he wants… but then again, if you don’t think…’

Samad thrust his fist into Archie’s mushrooms so hard the omelette slithered off the plate altogether and slipped to the floor.

‘Make a decision, Archibald. For once in your pathetic little life, make a decision.’

‘Um… heads, yes,’ gasped Archie, reaching into his pocket for a twenty pence piece. ‘Tails, no. Ready?’

The coin rose and flipped as a coin would rise and flip every time in a perfect world, flashing its light and then revealing its dark enough times to mesmerize a man. Then, at some point in its triumphant ascension, it began to arc, and the arc went wrong, and Archibald realized that it was not coming back to him at all but going behind him, a fair way behind him, and he turned with the others to watch it complete an elegant swoop towards the pinball machine and somersault straight into the slot. Immediately the huge old beast lit up; the ball shot off and began its chaotic, noisy course around a labyrinth of swinging doors, automatic bats, tubes and ringing bells, until, with no one to assist it, no one to direct it, it gave up the ghost and dropped back into the swallowing hole.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Archibald, visibly chuffed. ‘What are the chances of that, eh?’

A neutral place. The chances of finding one these days are slim, maybe even slimmer than Archie’s pinball trick. The sheer quantity of shit that must be wiped off the slate if we are to start again as new. Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. And more blood. And more. And not only must the place be neutral, but the messenger who takes you to the place, and the messenger who sends the messenger. There are no people or places like that left in North London. But Joyce did her best with what she had. First she went to Clara. In Clara’s present seat of learning, a red-brick university, South-West by the Thames, there was a room she used for study on Friday afternoons. A thoughtful teacher had loaned her the key. Always empty between three and six. Contents: one blackboard, several tables, some chairs, two anglepoise lamps, an overhead projector, a filing cabinet, a computer. Nothing older than twelve years, Clara could guarantee that. The university itself was only twelve years old. Built on empty waste land – no Indian burial grounds, no Roman viaducts, no interred alien spacecraft, no foundations of a long-gone church. Just earth. As neutral a place as anywhere. Clara gave Joyce the key and Joyce gave it to Irie.

‘But why me? I’m not involved.’

‘Exactly, dear. And I’m too involved. But you are perfect. Because you know him but you don’t know him,’ said Joyce cryptically. She passed Irie her long winter coat, some gloves and a hat of Marcus’s with a ludicrous bobble on the top. ‘And because you love him, though he doesn’t love you.’

‘Yeah, thanks, Joyce. Thanks for reminding me.’

‘Love is the reason, Irie.’

‘No, Joyce, Love’s not the fucking reason.’ Irie was standing on the Chalfen doorstep, watching her own substantial breath in the freezing night air. ‘It’s a four-letter word that sells life insurance and hair conditioner. It’s fucking cold out here. You owe me one.’

‘Everybody owes everybody,’ agreed Joyce and closed the door.

Irie stepped out into streets she’d known her whole life, along a route she’d walked a million times over. If someone asked her just then what memory was, what the purest definition of memory was, she would say this: the street you were on when you first jumped in a pile of dead leaves. She was walking it right now. With every fresh crunch came the memory of previous crunches. She was permeated by familiar smells: wet woodchip and gravel around the base of the tree, newly laid turd underneath the cover of soggy leaves. She was moved by these sensations. Despite opting for a life of dentistry, she had not yet lost all of the poetry in her soul, that is, she could still have the odd Proustian moment, note layers upon layers, though she often experienced them in periodontal terms. She got a twinge – as happens with a sensitive tooth, or in a ‘phantom tooth’, when the nerve is exposed – she felt a twinge walking past the garage, where she and Millat, aged thirteen, had passed one hundred and fifty pennies over the counter, stolen from an Iqbal jam-jar, in a desperate attempt to buy a packet of fags. She felt an ache (like a severe malocclusion, the pressure of one tooth upon another) when she passed the park where they had cycled as children, where they smoked their first joint, where he had kissed her once in the middle of a storm. Irie wished she could give herself over to these past-present fictions: wallow in them, make them sweeter, longer, particularly the kiss. But she had in her hand a cold key, and surrounding her lives that were stranger than fiction, funnier than fiction, crueller than fiction, and with consequences fiction can never have. She didn’t want to be involved in the long story of those lives, but she was, and she found herself dragged forward by the hair to their denouement, through the high road – Mali’s Kebabs, Mr Cheungs, Raj’s, Malkovich Bakeries – she could reel them off blindfold; and then down under pigeon-shit bridge and that long wide road that drops into Gladstone Park as if it’s falling into a green ocean. You could drown in memories like these, but she tried to swim free of them. She jumped over the small wall that fringed the Iqbal house, as she had a million times over, and rang the doorbell. Past tense, future imperfect.