The woman reached around Irie and delivered the right change to the counter with an angry smash. ‘For fuck’s sake!’

‘I can’t help it if that’s what they want – supply, demand. And bad language, I won’t tolerate! Simple economics – mind your step on the way out, dear – and you, no, don’t come back, please, I will call the police, I won’t be threatened, the police, I will call them.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’

Irie held the door open for the double buggy, and took one side to help carry it over the front step. Outside the woman put her hairpins in her pocket. She looked exhausted.

‘I hate that place,’ she said. ‘But I need hairpins.’

‘I need hair,’ said Irie.

The woman shook her head. ‘You’ve got hair,’ she said.

Five and a half hours later, thanks to an arduous operation that involved plaiting somebody else’s hair in small sections to Irie’s own two inches and sealing it with glue, Irie Jones had a full head of long, straight, reddish-black hair.

‘Is it straight?’ she asked, disbelieving the evidence of her own eyes.

‘Straight as hell,’ said Andrea, admiring her handiwork. ‘But honey, you’re going to have to plait it properly if you want it to stay in. Why won’t you let me plait it? It won’t stay in if it’s loose like that.’

‘It will,’ said Irie, bewitched by her own reflection. ‘It’s got to.’

He – Millat – need only see it once, after all, just once. To ensure she reached him in pristine state, she walked all the way to the Iqbal house with her hands on her hair, terrified that the wind would displace it.

Alsana answered the door. ‘Oh, hello. No, he’s not here. Out. Don’t ask me where, he doesn’t tell me a thing. I know where Magid is more of the time.’

Irie walked into the hallway and caught a sneaky glance of herself in the mirror. Still there and all in the right place.

‘Can I wait in here?’

‘Of course. You look different, dearie. Lost weight?’

Irie glowed. ‘New haircut.’

‘Oh yes… you look like a newsreader. Very nice. Now in the living room, please. Niece-of-Shame and her nasty friend are in there, but try not to let that bother you. I’m working in the kitchen and Samad is weeding, so keep the noise down.’

Irie walked into the lounge. ‘Bloody hell!’ screeched Neena at the approaching vision. ‘What the fuck do you look like!’

She looked beautiful. She looked straight, un-kinky. Beautiful.

‘You look like a freak! Fuck me! Maxine, man, check this out. Jesus Christ, Irie. What exactly were you aiming for?’

Wasn’t it obvious? Straight. Straightness. Flickability.

‘I mean, what was the grand plan? The Negro Meryl Streep?’ Neena folded over like a duvet and laughed herself silly.

‘Niece-of-Shame!’ came Alsana’s voice from the kitchen. ‘Sewing requires concentration. Shut it up, Miss Big-Mouth, please!’

Neena’s ‘nasty friend’, otherwise known as Neena’s girlfriend, a sexy and slender girl called Maxine with a beautiful porcelain face, dark eyes and a lot of curly brown hair, gave a pull to Irie’s peculiar bangs. ‘What have you done? You had beautiful hair, man. All curly and wild. It was gorgeous.’

Irie couldn’t say anything for a moment. She had not considered the possibility that she looked anything less than terrific.

‘I just had a haircut. What’s the big deal?’

‘But that’s not your hair, for fuck’s sake, that’s some poor oppressed Pakistani woman who needs the cash for her kids,’ said Neena, giving it a tug and being rewarded with a handful of it. ‘OH SHIT!’

Neena and Maxine had a hysteria relapse.

‘Just get off it, OK?’ Irie retreated to an armchair and tucked her knees up under her chin. Trying to sound offhand, she asked, ‘So… umm… where’s Millat?’

‘Is that what all this is in aid of?’ asked Neena, astonished. ‘My shit-for-brains cousin-gee?’

‘No. Fuck off.’

‘Well, he’s not here. He’s got some new bird. Eastern-bloc gymnast with a stomach like a washboard. Not unattractive, spectacular tits, but tight-assed as hell. Name… name?’

‘Stasia,’ said Maxine, looking up briefly from Top of the Pops. ‘Or some such bollocks.’

Irie sank deeper into the ruined springs of Samad’s favourite chair.

‘Irie, will you take some advice? Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve been following that boy around like a lost dog. And in that time he’s snogged everyone, everyone apart from you. He’s even snogged me, and I’m his first cousin, for fuck’s sake.’

‘And me,’ said Maxine, ‘and I’m not that way inclined.’

‘Haven’t you ever wondered why he hasn’t snogged you?’

‘Because I’m ugly. And fat. With an Afro.’

‘No, fuckface, because you’re all he’s got. He needs you. You two have history. You really know him. Look how confused he is. One day he’s Allah this, Allah that. Next minute it’s big busty blondes, Russian gymnasts and a smoke of the sinsemilla. He doesn’t know his arse from his elbow. Just like his father. He doesn’t know who he is. But you know him, at least a little, you’ve known all the sides of him. And he needs that. You’re different.’

Irie rolled her eyes. Sometimes you want to be different. And sometimes you’d give the hair on your head to be the same as everybody else.

‘Look: you’re a smart cookie, Irie. But you’ve been taught all kinds of shit. You’ve got to re-educate yourself. Realize your value, stop the slavish devotion, and get a life, Irie. Get a girl, get a guy, but get a life.’

‘You’re a very sexy girl, Irie,’ said Maxine sweetly.

‘Yeah. Right.’

‘Trust her, she’s a raving dyke,’ said Neena, ruffling Maxine’s hair affectionately and giving her a kiss. ‘But the truth is the Barbra Streisand cut you’ve got there ain’t doing shit for you. The Afro was cool, man. It was wicked. It was yours.’

Suddenly Alsana appeared at the doorway with an enormous plate of biscuits and a look of intense suspicion. Maxine blew her a kiss.

‘Biscuits, Irie? Come and have some biscuits. With me. In the kitchen.’

Neena groaned. ‘Don’t panic, Auntie. We’re not enlisting her into the cult of Sappho.’

‘I don’t care what you’re doing. I don’t know what you’re doing. I don’t want to know such things.’

‘We’re watching television.’

It was Madonna on the TV screen, working her hands around two conically shaped breasts.

‘Very nice, I’m sure,’ sniped Alsana, glaring at Maxine. ‘Biscuits, Irie?’

‘I’d like some biscuits,’ murmured Maxine with a flutter of her extravagant eyelashes.

‘I am certain,’ said Alsana slowly and pointedly, translating code, ‘I don’t have the kind you like.’

Neena and Maxine fell about all over again.

‘Irie?’ said Alsana, indicating the kitchen with a grimace. Irie followed her out.

‘I’m as liberal as the next person,’ complained Alsana, once they were alone. ‘But why do they always have to be laughing and making a song-and-dance about everything? I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.’

‘I don’t think I want to hear that word in this house again,’ said Samad deadpan, stepping in from the garden and laying his weeding gloves on the table.

‘Which one?’

‘Either. I am trying my level best to run a godly house.’

Samad spotted a figure at his kitchen table, frowned, decided it was indeed Irie Jones and began on the little routine the two of them had going. ‘Hello, Miss Jones. And how is your father?’

Irie shrugged on cue. ‘You see him more than we do. How’s God?’

‘Perfectly fine, thank you. Have you seen my good-for-nothing son recently?’

‘Not recently.’

‘What about my good son?’

‘Not for years.’

‘Will you tell the good-for-nothing he’s a good-for-nothing when you find him?’