5. The Pills of Ali Yusuf
Ali Yusuf came to Britain twenty seven years ago. The timing was everything - in the forties and fifties, the waves of Indian and Caribbean exiles had been greeted far from enthusiastically. The dark skin and bright teeth could only be sinister, the strange lilting accents could only be full of connotations, and Mr. and Mrs. Concerned from Tunbridge Wells were left wondering how the government could have let in so many ‘pakis’ and ‘wogs’, and when exactly were they going to be sent ‘back home’.
So too had Ali missed the more recent exoduses from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Far East (and anywhere East of Kent was certainly trouble to a generation who had fought off Jerries, Japs and Commies). This latest wave gave the BNP a great deal of ammunition, passing leaflets through Ali’s letterbox warning how ‘they’ were taking all of ‘our’ jobs. He even found himself slipping in the length of his British citizenship at unlikely opportunities - ‘Yes, madam, I have been a proud British citizen for 27 years now, here is your change.’
Yes, timing for Ali had been very fortunate. He arrived in Heathrow from Istanbul in the early eighties, not the most profitable time for anyone in the cold grey country - and in those days it was always cold and grey - but for a man with a degree in chemistry, a lot of determination, and a slightly misplaced love of England, it was profitable indeed. The Indian immigrants had built their shops, their mosques, their restaurants, and sent their children to medical school or ‘back home’ for a proper spouse. The Caribbeans had founded their churches, exported their music, and even begun to appear on TV. In short, they were not going ‘back home’, and the natives of the island were, somewhat grudgingly, realising this was the case. So how was one more bright-teethed, darker-than-can-be-trusted-skinned man going to make a difference?
Ali had loved Britain for years before he had ever stepped foot on it’s cold grey earth. As a boy, he had watched dubbed Merchant Ivory films, flickering in a sweaty Anatolian cinema, and he had decided THAT is where he wanted to go, over there, where people spoke with just their mouths, and ladies kept their backs stiff when they walked, and no one ever shouted, and, and, and…. It was a much better place to raise a family than out here, where Jew killed Muslim, and Greek killed Turk, and everyone killed Kurds. That place, in the films, was a good, decent place to raise a family. And raise a family he did.
Ali married Pinar Adivar the next year. Pinar (Penny to anyone not Turkish) was a second-generation Turkish Cypriot who, having been brought up to believe all Greeks were out to kill her in her sleep, could not listen to Zorba’s Dance without getting a sweat. Nine months later, they were blessed with a son.
When Ali envisaged how his family would turn out, he had always imagined a well-turned out, quintessentially ENGLISH family. There was no Qur’an in the Yusuf house, no talk of foreign cultures (except for Pinar’s occasional rants against the Greek Devils), no hajib, no meze, no kebab… And yet… Ali’s oldest son, William, had a criminal record (driving without a license, driving without insurance, driving without an MOT, giving false information to a police officer). The second son, Harry, hung around with the black youths, wore gold jewellery, had a black girlfriend and called himself a ‘brutha’. His daughter, Diana, was seven months pregnant. And then there was the youngest son, Charles, whom most relatives kindly did not talk about. In conversation he was politely sidestepped, the way people will sympathetically not talk about a recently deceased child. Charles was at university. Studying fashion. Ali had, therefore, successfully raised a very ENGLISH family indeed...
His degree in chemistry (first class) qualified Ali to reach the heady heights of opening his own chemist’s. Windsor Chemist’s was the finest chemist’s in Brentwich. It was here that his family came in very handy indeed - they were his most loyal customers. They also gave him the idea that made Ali’s shop do so well. Staying open till late. You see, most chemist’s closed their doors by six. This, Ali knew, was their mistake. It was during the evening that an overstressed businessman was mostly likely to get a pounding headache, during the night that a red-faced and flustered young man would hurriedly pay for a box of Durex, and during the early morning that a tousle-haired girl with smudged eyeliner would want a morning-after pill.
Ali was helped in his business by William, whose task as first-born was to take over the family business one day (and with a criminal record and no GCSEs, there weren’t a great deal many other options), and occasionally by Pinar, who would sit and read Heat while painting her long, well-manicured talons, and sighing if anyone disturbed her from reading about the state of Brad and Angelina’s relationship (Angelina played a Greek once. Whore). In truth, Ali was more than competent enough to handle the shop by himself, and the Times crossword was more than enough company through the long night, but he needed someone to restock the boxes of Tampax. Women’s things were not for him.
On this night, Ali sat with the counter digging into the paunch of his stomach, the lights reflecting off his no-longer-quite-full head of hair, trying to think of a five letter word for ‘idolatrous sceptic’. Next to him, William pretended to be reading a copy of The Guardian, inside which was the far more interesting ‘Horny Asian Babes’. Had Ali looked up and through the plate glass windows at the other end of the shop, out onto the yellow-lit Burton Street, he would have seen two teenage boys, fists shoved in pockets, engaged in conversation just outside.
“Why me? Why can’t you do it?” asked Michael, his tone already slipping from forceful to resigned.
“I told you,” Gabriel reasoned, “I’m a regular, Ali’ll recognise me. He’ll just chuck me out.”
“But… I can’t, I haven’t done it before…” Michael was slipping, his glance darting back and forward between Gabriel and the door.
Gabriel seized the advantage. “Look, it’s simple. Just go in, find something strong, slip it in your pocket and walk out. I’ve done it loads of times, easy. Just act normal.” And then, seeing Michael teetering on the brink, he added his coup de grace: placing his hand on Mike’s arm, looking him dead in the eye, smiling his trust-me smile, he said “You’ll be fine, Mike.”
And with that, Michael lost the battle and trudged, vanquished, into Windsor Chemist’s.
Michael had always wondered whether late-night shops, hospitals and refrigerators shared the same light-bulb supplier. The white light bleached the colour from everything. He could almost see the smell of disinfectant. The chemist’s was long and thin, with an aisle each side of a single (white) shelving unit in the middle. Ali and William perched at the counter at the back, glancing curiously up when the bell above the door rang to announce Michael’s entrance, and then again every few minutes. They both seemed more interested in their reading material than their customer, which suited him fine.
Like any performance, acting normal is much harder than actually being normal. When you rumble a surprise Christmas present at the back of your parents’ wardrobe, it’s always impossible to judge what sort of reaction to make when you open it on the day. Too much surprise is just obvious, too little will disappoint the people who saved up for months and fought tooth and nail with a crowd of last-minute shoppers to get you the gift. You can never recreate the natural reaction you had when you discovered it.
The same principle applies to acting ‘normal’, except this performance is much more subtle, and far more difficult to capture. Michael had seen De Niro do ‘anger’, Streep do ‘misery’, Tautou do ‘joy’ and Hopkins do ‘creepy cannibal serial killer’, but he had not for the life of him seen anyone do ‘just browsing in a late-night chemist’s and certainly not looking to nick anything’. This was going to have to be an original performance.
Michael too-casually wandered along the aisle, not wanting to get too close to the counter, and too-casually browsed between shelves of incontinence pads, cough sweets and Vicks VapoRub, scanning for anything that said ‘warning - do not exceed dose’. Or maybe ‘deadly if swallowed’. Or even ‘taking too much of this product is a really bad idea’.
Ali took a furtive glance at the shifty-looking boy. There was no item of clothing Ali hated more than the hoodie. Hoodies meant gangs and knives and smashed glass and other things a darker than white person had to be careful of in this day and age. This one was a little different (and Ali considered himself an expert on the identification and classification of hoodie wearers). This one didn’t have the swagger, the lazy foot drag, the shoulders hoarded inwards, the constant scowl. So Ali gave him the benefit of the doubt, and took pity on his too-casual browsing.
“Condoms on the other side,” Ali muttered, eyes still on 7 down - ‘a lasting after-effect of trouble’.
Michael felt his cheeks grow warm. “Oh, I’m not… I mean, I don’t… I’m just…” he stuttered, letting his shaking head communicate more than his mouth could, and went back to too-casually scanning the shelves.
Ali shrugged without looking up. A pause. “KY Jelly on that side as well.”
Michael realised he had nowhere left to look but the aisle on the other side, and, cheeks glowing with humiliation, marched over to the aisle on the other side, spotting the shelves of pills and stopping in his tracks - not realising that he also stood directly in front of a rack of blue-tubed KY Jelly.
Ali glanced up and nodded sagely to himself.
Michael was much more interested in the boxes of pills. Pills of every kind for every ailment and every orifice, pills for headaches, pills for thrush, pills for the side effects of other pills. He was overwhelmed, his fingers reached out and danced in front of the boxes and packets and bottles. Something strong… something strong enough…
And there, in a bright yellow box, Anadin Extra Strong. Not just strong, but Extra Strong! Michael tentatively took hold of a large box, and the foil packets rattled inside. His eyes darted to Ali. Mistake.
If there is one thing Ali loathed in this world more than hoodies, black girlfriends and fashion students, it was shoplifters. He had built this business up with his own two hands, and no quick-fingered little buggers where going to take it away, not one packet of pills.
“You’d best be paying for that, Sunny Jim,” Ali murmured, laying down his crossword halfway through writing ‘cocktail’ - 15 across.
Michael froze. The expression ‘deer caught in headlights’ is an overused one but, in his mind, nothing could better convey the eternity squeezed into that two and a half-seconds, the box halfway to his pocket, Ali’s threatening gaze boring into him, and the immense and overwhelming feeling of ‘Oh. Shit.’ So he did the only thing he could do at that point: stuffed the box in his pocket and ran, the bell above the door ringing above his head like an alarm.
Ali was on his feet and round the other side of the counter surprisingly quickly for an overweight Turkish man. “What are you waiting for?!” he barked at his oldest son, smacking him round the back of the head and causing ‘Horny Asian Babes’ to slip onto the floor and land open at a particularly gynaecological spread of Mei-Lin from Taiwan (via Hackney). “Get after him, you lazy bugger! You expect me to run along after him?! He could have a knife! Now get your arse in gear!”
William Yusuf got his arse in gear, copping a quick glace at Mei-Lin (whose hobbies included traditional theatre) before following his father out the front door.
Gabriel, who had been pacing the street wondering how many pills exactly he was going to have to swallow, and what if he needed to drink a whole lot of water, and what if he pissed himself when he was passed out, managed to catch hold of Michael by the sleeve, swinging him round to a halt like a wrestler against the ropes.
“Whoa! What happened?! Slow down, slow down!”
Just as Michael opened his mouth ready to describe how he had been well and truly busted, the bell rang again, and two faintly foreign looking men - one middle-aged, stout and red-faced, one twenty something, lanky and languid, one in a tight shirt and trousers, one in Adidas trainers and a Ben Sherman coat - erupted onto the street.
One glance was all it took. Ali locked eyes on Gabriel and his expression flicked from recognition to complete contempt in record time. “You!” he hissed, his finger wavering at Gabriel, “I should have known, you bloody thieving little arse-bandit!”
“Alright Ali?” Gabriel grinned back, then turned in one fluid movement and ran off down Burton Street, dragging Michael along by the sleeve.
“Well, what the bloody hell are you waiting for?” Ali roared at William. “Orders from the Queen?! Go after them!”
Gabriel sprinted along the street for a good two hundred metres, past a halal butchers, a florists, two off licences and a Chinese takeaway, Michael struggling to keep up a couple of yards behind, their footsteps slapping and echoing through the silent town. Further back, Ali’s son was going through the motions of a chase, his Adidas trainers never having been used for the purpose of running before. At the first junction, Gabriel veered off to the left, down Yarborough Road, Michael almost losing balance at the abrupt change of direction. Further down Yarborough, and he slipped into crooked little side alley between two mock-Tudor shops (Crenshall’s Traditional Sweets and A.P. Lee Traditional Medicine), pulling Michael inside with him. It was black, narrow, and perfect for hiding from pursuing Yusufs. Gabriel crouched to the floor, signalling Michael to follow suit by tugging down on the leg of his jeans, and attempted to control his breathing.
Lucky for them, William wasn’t exactly enjoying his role as impromptu security guard. Michael heard the half-hearted slap of his footsteps, slowing from a jog to a grudging walk. Then he heard the a voice mutter ‘fuck this, he can go after the poxy little bum boys next time’, before the receding echoes of Adidas on concrete.
Michael breathed out long and hard, titling his head back and knocking it on the wall behind. Gabriel was already standing up, his silhouette peering around the corner, watching William traipse back. Michael pulled himself back up, and joined Gabriel, peering over his shoulder.
“Well,” Gabriel muttered, his voice smiling, “that was a bit of excitement, eh?” He turned round to face Michael, who backed off at the sudden face-to-face intimacy. “So, you get the pills then? Tell me you got the pills.”
Michael put his hand into the pocket of his hoodie and triumphantly revealed the box of Anadin Extra Strong. Gabriel’s eyes darted between the box and Michael’s face, his face twitching between bemusement and confusion, before he burst into a fit of giggles, doubled over like a saddle on a horse, laughing silently, the only sound the puffs of air wheezing in and out of his lungs. His legs gave way, and he crumpled into a hysterical heap at Michael’s feet.
Michael, looked down, not quite sure what he was supposed to be laughing at, but wanting in on the joke. “What?” he smiled, crouching down next to Gabriel. “What?!”
Gabriel tried and failed three times to explain, each time getting no further than indicating towards the box, before collapsing again in another fit of giggles. Eventually, between hiccups of laughter, he managed to say “Going to… need… bit more than that…!”
Michael looked dejectedly down at the box of aspirin. Then he threw it into the darkness. Below him, Gabriel wiped a tear out of his eye and sighed loudly, grinning up at him.
And despite himself, despite the disappointment, embarrassment and failure, Michael smiled back.
