‘If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.. .’

She loved him, of course. But he used to say to her: ‘Thing is, people rely on me. They need me to be Millat. Good old Millat. Wicked Millat. Safe, sweet-as, Millat. They need me to be cool. It’s practically a responsibility.’

And it practically was. Ringo Starr once said of the Beatles that they were never bigger than they were in Liverpool, late 1962. They just got more countries. And that’s how it was for Millat. He was so big in Cricklewood, in Willesden, in West Hampstead, the summer of 1990, that nothing he did later in his life could top it. From his first Raggastani crowd, he had expanded and developed tribes throughout the school, throughout North London. He was simply too big to remain merely the object of Irie’s affection, leader of the Raggastanis, or the son of Samad and Alsana Iqbal. He had to please all of the people all of the time. To the cockney wide-boys in the white jeans and the coloured shirts, he was the joker, the risk-taker, respected lady-killer. To the black kids he was fellow weed-smoker and valued customer. To the Asian kids, hero and spokesman. Social chameleon. And underneath it all, there remained an ever present anger and hurt, the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere. It was this soft underbelly that made him most beloved, most adored by Irie and the nice oboe-playing, long-skirted middle-class girls, most treasured by these hair-flicking and fugue-singing females; he was their dark prince, occasional lover or impossible crush, the subject of sweaty fantasy and ardent dreams…

And he was also their project: what was to be done about Millat? He simply must stop smoking weed. We have to try and stop him walking out of class. They worried about his ‘attitude’ at sleepovers, discussed his education hypothetically with their parents (Just say there was this Indian boy, yeah, who was always getting into.. .), even wrote poems on the subject. Girls either wanted him or wanted to improve him, but most often a combination of the two. They wanted to improve him until he justified the amount they wanted him. Everybody’s bit of rough, Millat Iqbal.

‘But you’re different,’ Millat Iqbal would say to the martyr Irie Jones, ‘you’re different. We go way back. We’ve got history. You’re a real friend. They don’t really mean anything to me.’

Irie liked to believe that. That they had history, that she was different in a good way.

‘Thy black is fairest in my judgement’s place.. .’

Mrs Roody silenced Francis with a raised finger. ‘Now, what is he saying there? Annalese?’

Annalese Hersh, who had spent the lesson so far plaiting red and yellow thread into her hair, looked up in blank confusion.

‘Anything, Annalese, dear. Any little idea. No matter how small. No matter how paltry.’

Annalese bit her lip. Looked at the book. Looked at Mrs Roody. Looked at the book.

‘Black?… Is?… Good?’

‘Yes… well, I suppose we can add that to last week’s contribution: Hamlet?… Is?… Mad? Anybody else? What about this? For since each hand hath put on nature’s power, Fairing the foul with art’s false borrow’d face. What might that mean I wonder?’

Joshua Chalfen, the only kid in class who volunteered opinions, put his hand up.

‘Yes, Joshua?’

‘Make-up.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Roody, looking close to orgasm. ‘Yes, Joshua, that’s it. What about it?’

‘She’s got a dark complexion which she’s trying to lighten by means of make-up, artifice. The Elizabethans were very keen on a pale skin.’

‘They would’ve loved you, then,’ sneered Millat, for Joshua was pasty, practically anaemic, curly-haired and chubby, ‘you would have been Tom bloody Cruise.’

Laughter. Not because it was funny, but because it was Millat putting a nerd where a nerd should be. In his place.

‘One more word from you Mr Ick-Ball and you are out!’

‘Shakespeare. Sweaty. Bollocks. That’s three. Don’t worry, I’ll let myself out.’

This was the kind of thing Millat did so expertly. The door slammed. The nice girls looked at each other in that way. (He’s just so out of control, so crazy… he really needs some help, some close one-to-one personal help from a good friend…) The boys belly-laughed. The teacher wondered if this was the beginning of a mutiny. Irie covered her stomach with her right hand.

‘Marvellous. Very adult. I suppose Millat Iqbal is some kind of hero.’ Mrs Roody, looking round the gormless faces of 5F, saw for the first time and with dismal clarity that this was exactly what he was.

‘Does anyone else have anything to say about these sonnets? Ms Jones! Will you stop looking mournfully at the door! He’s gone, all right? Unless you’d like to join him?’

‘No, Mrs Roody.’

‘All right, then. Have you anything to say about the sonnets?’

‘Yes.’

‘What?’

‘Is she black?’

‘Is who black?’

‘The dark lady.’

‘No, dear, she’s dark. She’s not black in the modern sense. There weren’t any… well, Afro-Carri-bee-yans in England at that time, dear. That’s more a modern phenomenon, as I’m sure you know. But this was the 1600s. I mean I can’t be sure, but it does seem terribly unlikely, unless she was a slave of some kind, and he’s unlikely to have written a series of sonnets to a lord and then a slave, is he?’

Irie reddened. She had thought, just then, that she had seen something like a reflection, but it was receding; so she said, ‘Don’t know, Miss.’

‘Besides, he says very clearly, In nothing art thou black, save in thy deeds… No, dear, she just has a dark complexion, you see, as dark as mine, probably.’

Irie looked at Mrs Roody. She was the colour of strawberry mousse.

‘You see, Joshua is quite right: the preference was for women to be excessively pale in those days. The sonnet is about the debate between her natural colouring and the make-up that was the fashion of the time.’

‘I just thought… like when he says, here: Then will I swear, beauty herself is black… And the curly hair thing, black wires-’

Irie gave up in the face of giggling and shrugged.

‘No, dear, you’re reading it with a modern ear. Never read what is old with a modern ear. In fact, that will serve as today’s principle – can you all write that down please.’

5F wrote that down. And the reflection that Irie had glimpsed slunk back into the familiar darkness. On the way out of class, Irie was passed a note by Annalese Hersh, who shrugged to signify that she was not the author but merely one of many handlers. It said: ‘By William Shakespeare: ODE TO LETITIA AND ALL MY KINKY-HAIRED BIG-ASS BITCHEZ.’

The cryptically named P. K.’s Afro Hair: Design and Management sat between Fairweather Funeral Parlour and Raakshan Dentists, the convenient proximity meaning it was not at all uncommon for a cadaver of African origin to pass through all three establishments on his or her final journey to an open casket. So when you phoned for a hair appointment, and Andrea or Denise or Jackie told you three thirty Jamaican time, naturally it meant come late, but there was also a chance it meant that some stone-cold church-going lady was determined to go to her grave with long fake nails and a weave-on. Strange as it sounds, there are plenty of people who refuse to meet the Lord with an Afro.

Irie, ignorant of all this, turned up for her appointment three thirty on the dot, intent upon transformation, intent upon fighting her genes, a headscarf disguising the bird’s nest of her hair, her right hand carefully placed upon her stomach.

‘You wan’ some ting, pickney?’

Straight hair. Straight straight long black sleek flickable tossable shakeable touchable finger-through-able wind-blowable hair. With a fringe.