Quentina had found a mental trick to help herself to get through her days in the detention centre. It was simple in its way. All she did was say to herself, over and over, whenever the need or occasion arose, the same words: this will not last for ever: this is the hardest thing you will ever do. This will not last for ever: this is the hardest thing you will ever do. She found herself saying it after she woke up in the
morning and had a few seconds of not knowing where she was – and sometimes, in the happiest version of those seconds, she was back at home with her mother and father in their bedroom, except the door wasn’t where it should be, and the window was on the wrong side of the bed, and there was something strange about the light, and then she would come fully awake to the reality of the detention centre, England, internment, statelessness, being a non-person in a non-place waiting her way through non-time.
These things were not harder than each other. They were all equally hard. It was very difficult being in the same place as the hunger strikers. Some of the first hunger strikers had given up, one or two of them, in particular a Kurdish woman with two children whose husband had been killed by Saddam, coming right to the very edge of death, her eyes huge and their irises a strange grey colour, bizarre against the sallow near-yellow of her slack but stretched skin. If it hadn’t been for her children she would have starved herself to death, Quentina was sure; in the event she went too close to the edge, had kidney failure and nearly died anyway. Others had joined the hunger strike, so there were different internees at different stages of this war of nerves with the authorities. It was like the boys’ game of chicken – except that it wasn’t like a game at all.
One of the hardest things for Quentina was the sheer blankness of passing time. That was, after all, what had driven her to get the job as a traffic warden in the first place, the incredible temptation of having something to do, combined with the chance to earn a little spending money. Here, though, she found herself wondering why people were so agitated about the restoration of the 71p daily allowance. It wasn’t that the sum was so small, it was that there was nothing to spend it on. Visitors were allowed, but they weren’t allowed to bring anything in. There were charities which arranged visits so that internees had some point of contact with the outside world – for some internees these were the only British people they had ever spoken to who were not agents of the state. But Quentina couldn’t be bothered with that. She didn’t want to make small talk with a stranger and she even less wanted to complain to someone who had nothing to offer but sympathy. Makela
the Nigerian doctor urged her to sign up for friends’ visits, as they were called, but Quentina resisted.
‘You’re making a mistake,’ said Makela, the kind of person who prided herself on her own frankness. ‘You’re turning in on yourself. I’ve seen it happen before.’
‘I thank you for your advice,’ said Quentina, and Makela knew enough to stop there.
There was a small library, mainly put together by donations from charities, presided over by one of the warders and by an Egyptian intellectual whose husband had been tortured in prison. The warder and the inmate got on well, the only instance of any such relationship in the internment centre. Quentina took out some books and tried to read, but this was yet another activity whose point she couldn’t see. The non-fiction stories were too boring or too depressing – a history of the International Monetary Fund, a book about a young woman suffering abuse from her stepfather – and the fiction suffered from an irredeemable fault: it was all made up. Quentina couldn’t, in her current frame of mind, see the point of anything that was made up. Makela said that books helped her to escape, but that didn’t make any sense. A book couldn’t get you out of the detention centre, or land like a helicopter and carry you off, or magically turn into a UK passport which gave you the right of residency. Escape was very precisely, very specifically what a book couldn’t help you do. Not in any literal sense. And the literal sense of escape was the only one that interested Quentina.
The one thing that did help was doing shifts in the crèche. It wasn’t that Quentina had any special liking for children, or special gift for them, or they a special liking for her. But it was, in a basic and straightforward way, something to do. She would help out for three hours in the morning on every second day – that was all the opportunity there was, because people were so desperate for activity that the competition for places to work in the crèche was ferocious, and there was a waiting list: Quentina only won her start when a detainee was sent back to Jordan. She helped set up little play zones, tidied up bricks of Duplo, refereed at the small sandpit and indoor dollhouse, and sat in story
corner to read stories to any child who would listen. Those nine hours a week, ten to one on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, went past quicker than any other hours – which only made the rest of the time seem slower, heavier, like glue.
It might have been enough to break her, and without one crucial ingredient, it probably would have been. But Quentina had a secret weapon: she knew things could not be like this for ever. The tyrant could not live for ever. In Quentina’s view, the rumours that he had syphilis were true, and explained his descent from tribal partisanship to outright evil; even if he didn’t die, he was old and getting older, his country was desperate and getting more so, and he was going to die or be deposed one day, perhaps one day soon. When the tyrant goes, everything changes. Quentina had promised herself that the very day she heard news of that she would volunteer for deportation. She would go home. And it was that thought which kept her sane, and kept her functioning, in this no-time, no-place, which was designed to be, and succeeded in being, unbearable. This is the hardest thing I will ever do. But this will not last for ever.
‘Y
ou do not have to say anything,’ said DI Mill, ‘but if you do say anything it may be taken down and used in evidence against you. It may harm your defence if you do not mention anything on which you later come to rely in court.’
It was difficult to get through the formal warning. The young man Mill was talking to was weeping uncontrollably. It was less like arresting someone and more like telling someone they’d been bereaved. If you’re this upset, thought the DI, why the hell did you do it in the first place?
With another part of his mind, he knew the answer. Mill’s experience was that while it was true that some people wanted to be caught, there was another category, less well known, of people who wanted to have been caught. In other words they did not go out of their way to be nicked, but once they had been, they went to pieces with guilt and relief. This looked like being one of those. Mill took out a packet of paper tissues and, catching the eye of his DC who was sitting next to him with his notebook out, handed them over to the suspect. Mill said, ‘There, there.’ The man took out a tissue, blew his nose loudly and at length, then looked around for a bin, couldn’t see one – even though this was his own flat – and dropped the tissue on the floor.
‘I didn’t mean any harm,’ said Parker French, Smitty’s ex-assistant. ‘It got out of hand. I really didn’t mean to upset anybody.’
‘Start at the beginning,’ said Mill. While the kid had been crying, Mill had had a good long look around the room. It was a sitting room/dining room/kitchen with one bedroom and you could see that it was shared with a girlfriend. The flat was in Hackney and could not be cheap-cheap so either she worked at a paying job or one of them had some family cash. Parker’s accent was neutral educated middle-class, very similar to Mill’s, though just for a pleasant change he both was and looked younger than the DI. There were more CDs than usual for someone his age, and there were quite a few books too, all of them shelved in an orderly way. The TV was a couple-sized normal TV rather than a single man’s monster flat-screen. The biggest piece of decoration was a poster for the Tate’s exhibition of Picasso and Matisse.
‘I hadn’t been thinking about it until Smitty … until he sacked me. I’m sorry but he was such a total … he was just horrible to me. Treated me like all I could do is go out and get his coffee. I’m an artist too! I’ve got the same training he has! He didn’t run around making people coffee, did he? If he wants respect, he should give respect. It’s got to be earned. But no, he’s Smitty, he doesn’t have to do any of that. And then, without warning, I mean completely without warning, he tells me I’m fired. Like, totally assassinates me. I’m supposed to just go off and crawl into a hole and die.’
Parker took out another tissue and went through the same routine of blowing his nose on it and then dropping it on the floor.
‘I got so angry. Not so much that day but later. I got really furious. The disrespect, you know? The disregard. I didn’t matter. Like that thing they call it in Iraq, collateral damage. I was just collateral damage. I was barely shit on his shoes. Well, I got angry, and then I thought about it, and I decided that I wasn’t having it. I decided I was going to do something to get back at Smitty. And make a name for myself at the same time, you know? Do something with a bit of edge. Smitty was always giving these sermons about how the art world worked, how commodification worked, how you had to do something so strange that people noticed it but that didn’t make it look like you were desperate to sell stuff. So that’s what I decided to do. And I wanted it to be something which messed with his head as well. His meaning Smitty’s.
I wanted to get into his head and make him feel he was being messed with and he didn’t know why.’
‘Pepys Road,’ said Mill. Parker nodded.
‘Where his granny lived. There had been these postcards. He was freaked out by them, I could tell. But also fascinated. It was like an art project, it was his kind of thing. He had this folder of stuff on his desk and kept looking at it. It was there for weeks. I looked at it too. The idea didn’t come straight away. But I was looking at the blog and then I saw it hadn’t been updated for a bit and I thought, bugger it. I screen-scraped all the stuff that was already on there. You know what that means, right? I copied it so I could repost it. And then the site was taken down, just like that. Disappeared. So I thought, sod it, and started it up again. Put it on a different blogging platform but gave it the same name. Then I put back up the original material. Then I began adding, with the graffiti and all that. I started with Smitty’s house.’
‘His grandmother’s house,’ said Mill. Parker looked uncomfortable.
‘Anyway. I started with that. But I wanted it to get darker. To have more edge. These wankers, who do they think they are, you know? Do they think they’re, you know, the kings of the world, or something? People are like, starving. People haven’t got jobs. Children haven’t got medicine, you know? And there these posh wankers are … I just wanted to say something, you know? Make a statement.’
‘Was Smitty’s grandmother a posh wanker?’ asked the DI.
‘Well Smitty was a posh wanker, much more than he let on,’ the boy snapped back. ‘It was him I wanted to mess with. I didn’t think his nan would be that bothered.’
‘Did the fact that she died in May make no difference to you?’
Parker was visibly startled by that. His head jerked up. He didn’t reply.
‘The house has been empty for months. Those cards, DVDs, all that, have been going to a vacant address. We talked to Smitty. He had absolutely no idea about what had been going on.’
And now his mouth was flapping open and closed like a fish. A sense of sadness washed over Mill; the boy was about to pay very severely for his misplaced energies.
‘Did someone help you with the graffiti?’ That was the first edge to cross: criminal damage.
‘No. Just me,’ he said in a very quiet voice. ‘I only did it once. I thought the risk of being caught was too high. It’s the cans, the way they rattle when you shake them. It’s hard to do in an occupied area. Once was enough.’
‘The time in May,’ Mill said, while his DC kept writing.
‘Mm,’ said the boy. This would appear as a declarative statement by the time his words had been written up.
‘And the birds, that was you too?’
Now the kid did look embarrassed. He dropped his gaze and muttered something.
‘I missed that,’ said Mill.
‘The first one came from home. My parents’ place. In Norfolk. It had flown into the window, killed itself. I went there for the weekend, it happened that morning. My mum was upset. I said I’d dispose of it but then I was taking it to the compost when I thought, I don’t know what I thought, I thought about Joseph Beuys, you probably don’t know him, he’s an artist and a big hero, I wondered what he would have done, I thought it would be a strong statement. Then the other ones I got from a taxidermist. I don’t know where he got them from. There were only six or seven of them, anyway … It was stupid and I shouldn’t have done it, I saw that afterwards.’
Mill caught the DC’s eye while he kept writing. If the parents confirmed that account there would be no animal cruelty charge. There would be something to do with misuse of the post, maybe. As things stood the kid was guilty but probably wouldn’t go to jail. One big issue left, and Mill could tell that the DC was thinking along similar lines. Occasionally, very occasionally, Mill found himself wishing that suspects did what was right by their own interests rather than what was right by the law. That was what he felt now. This kid needed a lawyer and a few minutes to think what was the prudent thing to say, rather than just to go on relieving his soul. If Mill had been on his own, he might not have pressed the issue; he might have given the boy time to collect himself. The irony was that a real criminal in this position
would never, under any circumstances, have said the wrong thing. The law is a brilliant mechanism for catching people who don’t know what to say and do when they are in trouble. With more seasoned criminals it works much less well. Mill said, as gently as he could,
‘And the cars? Was that you on your own too?’
There was no direct evidence linking the vandalism of the cars to the rest of the campaign. Nothing on the postcards or blog had mentioned the incident in which a set of keys had been scratched down the side of cars in the street – an act that had stood out as by far the biggest criminal incident of all in Pepys Road. One probably big enough to guarantee a custodial sentence for the person who had done it, in the very very unlikely event the police caught him. Mill wanted to catch this kid, but he didn’t particularly want him to go to jail, which is why his heart sank when he heard the whispered words,