Quentina agreed with all fifteen of the demands. But she had only just got there, was still dazed and bewildered from the immigration hearing, and just didn’t feel ready to pitch straight into a hunger strike. The causes were all right, all just, but they weren’t honestly her causes
– she was a new girl and hadn’t even known about the existence of the 71p allowance. Quentina felt that she hadn’t been in the detention centre long enough to get really angry about the conditions. For the moment she was just trying to survive.
That wasn’t the general feeling. The atmosphere at the Refuge in Tooting had been low, verging on depressed, with the emphasis on survival and endurance. Thrown in with that was an unspoken emphasis on the need to acknowledge the good intentions of their benefactors, who were keen to send the message that not all British people were as cruel as their government and their newspapers. That was not the mood at the detention centre. Here people were angry, fumingly angry, all the time. They hated the government, hated the press, hated the administrators of the detention centre. There had been riots the previous year, when warders had tried to prevent detainees from watching a documentary about conditions at the centre. It was easy to imagine that there could be riots again. In the mean time there was the hunger strike.
Quentina’s guide to this was Makela, a Nigerian doctor who had run a clinic for victims of female circumcision. Her application for asylum had been rejected because the authorities believed, or claimed to believe, that her life was not really at risk back in Nigeria. She was angry, but not with Quentina; she agreed that Quentina as a new arrival couldn’t pitch headlong into the centre’s politics. She also made it clear that in her view, over time, the politically aware detainees had a responsibility to make trouble, especially if they didn’t have children.
That would be in the future – perhaps a long time in the future. Quentina, for the first time since she had arrived in the UK, felt defeated. The air here was hard to breathe; it was thick with resentment and the lack of hope. That was why people were so angry: it gave an alternative to being completely beaten, broken, finished. All Quentina wanted to do was sit on her bed and look at the ceiling. Nothing seemed to have any point or purpose.
The immigration tribunal hearing had been a disaster. In her first sighting of the red-faced judge presiding over it, she had felt a flicker of hope: he looked like a man whose natural state was to be reasonable.
But as the first morning went on she saw that this was misleading. When he did ask questions they were pointed and implicitly sceptical. How exactly had she got into the UK? How exactly had she been supporting herself? When the government’s lawyers got on to the fact that she had been working illegally, she saw his manner harden. The pretence of friendly impartiality melted away. At that point, noon on the Monday morning, she realised that her application was going to be rejected.
At the end of the day’s hearing, her lawyer, a mild-mannered woman in early middle age, turned to her and made a grimace.
‘That was terrible,’ said Quentina, to save her the trouble.
‘I didn’t want to say anything,’ said the lawyer. ‘But he’s one of the toughest ones. I’m sorry. Don’t worry, if we lose, which we haven’t done yet, there’s still every chance for an appeal.’
They hadn’t lost yet – but they might as well have. Tuesday was just as bad as Monday, with the judge dwelling much more heavily on the subject of Quentina’s illegal employment than on the prospect of what had happened to her in Zimbabwe before she left, and what would happen to her if she was sent back. He moved through all those details briskly. It was no surprise when his judgement, as they received it on the following Monday, was that she should be deported. In practice that meant being sent to an immigration removal centre to await the result of her appeal.
She had been here now for two months. The drive down was in a minibus owned by the private security company that ran the detention centre, for a profit, on behalf of the government. Under other circumstances Quentina would have enjoyed the trip: a chance to admire the famous green fields of England, which she’d never actually seen before, unless you counted the Common. There were arable fields, cows, tractors. So England was not just London after all. Quite funny to find that out just before being forced to leave. Her first sight of the detention centre’s main building had given her a flash of optimism: a three-storey modern structure with a car park in front. To anyone familiar with the vernacular of contemporary British buildings, it looked like a motel or a conference centre, or maybe a sixth-form college. But
as with the judge, first impressions turned out to be deceptive. The immigration centre was a prison, with the twist that when people were discharged from prison they went somewhere better, but when they were discharged from here they were sent back to the place they had risked everything to escape.
Everybody was obsessed with the food. One of the fifteen demands of the inmates on hunger strike was for ‘edible food we can eat’. It was no joke. Quentina had not eaten like a princess at the Refuge, but that was a seven-star holiday resort compared to this. The meals did not merely fail to look appetising, they actually stank. The meat smelled off. There was no spicing to the food, no flavour. The desserts were even heavier and lumpier than the savoury courses. The only edible thing Quentina saw in her first two weeks at the detention centre was fruit – tired and bruised fruit, but nonetheless fruit, as welcome as a gift direct from heaven. She lost far more weight than she had ever lost when she was walking ten miles a day as a traffic warden.
When she said this to Makela, the Nigerian woman had smiled.
‘That’s how it begins,’ she said. ‘The first thing that makes people crazy is always the food.’
I
t might be today. Might it be today? Or not. It possibly wouldn’t happen at all. It might be better – no, it certainly would be better – if it didn’t happen. There was no reason to think that it would happen and even less reason to want it to happen so, on balance, it wouldn’t happen. But what if it did?
Matya was getting ready to go out on a date with Zbigniew. She was at her new shared flat in the bit of Brixton which was sort-of Herne Hill or vice versa, depending on whether the person you were talking to wanted to sound cool or posh. Her discovery of the place had been that rare thing, a positive experience of flat-hunting in London. The tip-off had come via a Hungarian friend. She had a colleague with a spare room who was looking for a sane, solvent, non-smoking female lodger, not allergic to cats, content not to have a television, willing during the owner’s work-related absences to check on the well-being of her widowed mother downstairs. The interview and checking of references took ten minutes: she offered Matya the flat on the spot, and she moved in the next day. Zbigniew borrowed Piotr’s van and brought round her stuff.
Zbigniew. He was the issue. Matya was dressing for a date with him, and by some process she wouldn’t analyse this had in her mind become the date on which he was going to make a pass and she either was or wasn’t going to go to bed with him. It was hard to examine exactly how they’d got to this point, how he’d gone from someone
who she positively, definitely wouldn’t go out with, to someone she really liked. He ticked such a large number of negative boxes. He was a Pole, and Matya thought Poles complacent and self-absorbed. He wasn’t rich, and if there was a single box she definitely wanted ticked it was that a serious boyfriend would have serious money. He worked with his hands and – this overlapped with the money issue – Matya was keen to have a white-collar, desk-job boyfriend, someone as unlike all the boys she knew from home as possible.
And yet … there she was putting on her best knickers, pink ones with black trim, and her most effective bra, and the jeans she knew that men liked, the ones that got her most looks in the street or bar – the ones that were the most reliable indicator of whether she was carrying an extra kilo, because that made them instantly go from sexily snug to too-tight. She was putting on the beaded shirt Arabella had given her after a shopping splurge and was going to wear the suede jacket that made her waist look small and her tits look big. So why all this, if all these other things about Zbigniew were true? Well, it was the fact that his liabilities were also assets. His Polishness meant that he knew who he was. There was nothing fake about Zbigniew, no false notes to his talk or personality. It was refreshing, oddly so; most men these days felt as if they were trying to sell you something, some version of themselves, to try and get into your pants by pretending to be someone they were not. You were always trying to look beyond, look past the act, to see the real self. It was tiring, and Zbigniew wasn’t like that at all.
He wasn’t rich. That meant he knew the value of money: you could trust him with money, trust him to get the point of it. A rich boyfriend might make her own economies, her choices, her triumphs, seem petty. There were people in London who earned ten, twenty, fifty, a thousand times what she did – lots of people. How much did she really have in common with any of them? How would a boyfriend from that world feel about her flat-sharing, or know what to say when she lost her Oyster card with a full £30 on it? No problem of that kind with Zbigniew. His money values – his sense of what things cost – were completely in alignment with hers. That meant that their dreams were similar too. To people who are rich by London standards, the idea of a
rose-covered cottage in the country with a garden seemed silly – they could buy one with half an annual bonus. But that wasn’t the way it seemed to Matya or to Zbigniew.
And then there was that question of working with his hands. Matya paused as she put on her eyeliner. If there had been anybody else present, she would have blushed. The plain truth was that Zbigniew’s work gave Zbigniew his body, and Zbigniew’s body was one of the things she liked best about him – put plainly, she liked its hardness. Zbigniew was not pumped up like some bodybuilder, some action hero on the television; he did not burst out of his clothes. But his body was firm and taut and whenever Matya had touched it or bumped into it she had always noticed that it was, simply, very firm. He was muscled and compact and clean and she could tell that his skin would feel lovely to the touch, smooth on top but taut underneath. It was not hard to imagine what he might be like in bed … He had a real sense of humour too, not like those English boys who would tire you out by always putting on a show, barely able to speak without trying to make a joke, but quiet and dry and quick to see the ridiculous side of things. He could do an impersonation of Mrs Yount changing her mind about the colour of the bathroom which made Matya cry with laughter.
And yet there were still things which added up to reasons for not fancying him. She had a vivid memory of what it felt like to consider Zbigniew unthinkable. This remembered Zbigniew would intermittently rise up and blot out her feelings for the Zbigniew who was in front of her at that moment. If he had known, he would have been very taken aback to learn that his biggest obstacle with Matya was her memory of the time when she had found him ridiculous. Because she had seen him first in a menial capacity, doing jobs for the Younts, a trace of that hung around him – he was in some sense, like her, servant-class. The fact that she was too made it worse, not better. Also, he was not good-looking: he had a broad flat blank Slavic face and hair a shade of brown that you couldn’t quite remember, so next time you saw him it was either a shade darker or a shade lighter than you expected. He wasn’t ugly, but he wasn’t good-looking. You just didn’t notice his looks.
Z
bigniew had no idea that his deadliest rival was Matya’s former impression of him. He might have been relieved to hear it. As he saw it, his deadliest rival was the suitcase which, before going out on their date, he had taken out and dumped on his mattress at number 42 Pepys Road. The case had flipped open, and he was now sitting beside it. By some trick of memory, the amount of money in the suitcase looked bigger every time.
Perhaps the notes were expanding. Or perhaps it was because he was willing the money to be less of a problem. He was trying to squeeze it down in his mind. As a mental device this had some success, and he was able to go for stretches of time without thinking about what to do – except the actual money could not be compressed so easily, and looked bigger every time he checked on it.
Zbigniew was not prone to irrational fears, and he felt there was nothing irrational about his anxiety. He had held on to the money for far too long and now, whatever he did, he felt he had compromised himself. Not giving the money to Mrs Howe straight away had been a form of fault. At 5 per cent interest, £500,000 invested for three months was more than £6,000: that was how much money he had cost her in cash by not acting. By not doing anything he had stolen from her. He sold all the stocks in his modest portfolio, as a way of … as a way of … he wasn’t sure what it was a way of. The money he had invested in
the course of his time in London had, thanks to the turbulent market conditions, shrunk by about 15 per cent.
He should give the stolen money back. And yet … and yet what? There was the cottage, his father’s cottage, his parents’ golden years of retirement, the thing in all the world he most wanted for them, bought with stolen money. That was the problem. He would never be able to tell his father what he’d done; which meant that what he’d done would never seem right. It would be a lie, it would poison everything. He couldn’t do it. Yes, he should definitely give the money back. But he felt he couldn’t do that without telling someone. It must be the residual imprint of Catholicism. He had to confess. He had to have absolution. The weight of the secret was just too great to bear. And also there was a glimmering, flickering thought that he was reluctant to admit too directly, but which was certainly there. If he confessed to someone about the suitcase with half a million pounds in it, the suitcase which had never been missed, the suitcase whose owner had died long ago and which now belonged to someone who knew nothing about it and whose life would not be affected by its absence in any way, someone whose house was worth millions already, so someone (just to get this crystal clear) who was already rich, who didn’t need or know about or miss or suspect the existence of this money; and in the mean time the money was in the possession of him, Zbigniew, whose life it would transform utterly, whose many ambitions would be immediately fulfilled just by taking ownership of this cash – the years of ease and comfort for his parents, the chance to set himself up in life, the sudden access of capital which would let him move on, employ people, create wealth, share happiness, give his father one rose-covered cottage and give Matya another one, and a bed with a good firm mattress too – so there was on the one hand oblivious richness and on the other deep desiring and deserving need – well, maybe, if he confessed to a person about this predicament, this dilemma, maybe, just maybe, the person to whom he confessed would say, don’t be an idiot, you have to take the money for yourself, are you crazy? It would be an injustice not to. It would be theft – theft from yourself. That’s what the person to whom he confessed might say. Perhaps. He hoped. On the other hand – and
Zbigniew had come to feel that this was more likely, even as he had grown resolved on his confession – she might think there was nothing to discuss. She might go the exact other way. She might say that it was so obvious that he had no choice but to hand over the money – that it was so morally clear-cut – that he had in effect stolen the money. She might conclude that Zbigniew was not the man she had thought he was, that anyone who could do such a thing as sit on a suitcase containing £500,000 of someone else’s money – she might think that a man who would do that could not be trusted. The conversation in which he told her about the suitcase might be the last conversation they ever had.