In that capacity, her current problem was Cho. She had arrived in the winter, when a client called Hajidi was deported back to Somalia – politically and ethically a sad thing, but on a personal level something Quentina found hard to lament too much simply because Hajidi had been such an awful person, a liar and bully and thief and all-round magnet for trouble. Start to finish, her battle with the legal system had lasted five years, but she had lost and been taken to Heathrow in manacles. In her place had come Cho. She was a Chinese woman in her mid-twenties, the only survivor of a group of Fukienese immigrants who had been smuggled into Britain in the container of a lorry. The lorry had developed a hairline crack in its exhaust system which leaked carbon monoxide fumes into the space where the seven would-be refugees were hidden. Customs at Dover inspected the lorry; when they opened the back they found six people dead, and Cho. She recovered in hospital and entered the legal system for deportation, but she couldn’t physically be sent back to China because the Chinese, in accordance with their policy on people who had fled overseas, wouldn’t take her.
Cho understood some English but would not speak it. She had had a shared room for the first few weeks, as was standard practice at the Refuge, but her room-mate had cracked under the strain of the silence and begged to be moved in with someone, anyone, else – so now Cho had the room to herself, at the top of the house where heat accumulated, in what would once have been the loft. The room’s ceilings sloped and it was a difficult space for tall women, but Cho was about four feet eleven. She did not go out of the house, or even, willingly, out of her room. The one exception was when there was football on the television, and she was noticeably snobbish about that – Premiership or Champions League only, no FA Cup or England games. She could be angry, or depressed, or culture-shocked, or so consumed with regret she found it impossible to think about anything else. There was no way of knowing.
Today, football was Quentina’s excuse to engage Cho in conversation. Quentina had no interest at all in the game, but Arsenal were playing Chelsea and it gave her a reason to knock on Cho’s door. The response was a grunt – not a grunted ‘Yes’ or a grunted ‘Come in’ or a grunted ‘What is it?’, just a grunt. Quentina opened the door. Cho looked at her for a moment, and then blinked. It was as if she were making a tremendous physical effort to drag her attention back to this present moment, right here, right now. Then she grunted again, meaning, it seemed, something along the lines of ‘Yes?’
‘Just wanted to check you knew about the game on tonight. The “derby”’ – Quentina loved that word. ‘Arsenal–Chelsea.’
Cho looked at her for a moment and then nodded. The nod meant she knew about the game. Quentina had various gambits planned for dragging her out conversationally; nothing too fancy, more along the lines of who did she think would win? But there was no leeway for that here. Cho was as immobile as a lizard sunbathing on a rock. Not for the first time, Quentina found herself entertaining the thought that Cho’s difficulties, or difficultness, might be partly a race thing. The Chinese had a reputation for racism, especially about Africans. Perhaps she was just speechless with loathing at having to share this space with a black woman. Well, if that was the case, then she could go boil her head. Quentina nodded back and began closing the door. Just as it was clicking shut, Quentina heard Cho grunt again. This time it could almost be mistaken for ‘Thank you.’
37
Quentina’s system for life was to always have something to look forward to. That was just as well, because that morning, after checking in on Cho and before going to work to put on her 1905 Ruritanian customs colonel’s uniform, she had a call on the Refuge’s communal phone from her lawyer. The Kurd took it and summoned her.
‘Hello, I’m in a rush,’ her lawyer began, as he often did, ‘but there’s some news I wanted you to have and it’s not good news I’m afraid: there’s a rumour the high court is going to rule that it’s legal to deport failed asylum-seekers back to Zimbabwe. It’s because of the election there. They’re reversing the ruling that was made in July 2005. Letters will be sent out to the relevant people. That means you. I’m sorry.’
With five minutes’ warning, Quentina might have had a few questions. With none, she had none. Her lawyer hung up. It didn’t sound as if there was anything much she could do about it, so rather than spend her day worrying about what was going to happen, she instead decided to spend it thinking about the date she was going on that evening with Mashinko Wilson from the church choir, he of the voice and the shoulders, the defined muscles . . . The Black Eyed Peas had a song which Quentina thought was hilarious: ‘My Humps’. There was a line in it about ‘my humps, my humps, my lovely lady lumps’. It made Quentina smile and it made her think of her date with Mashinko. He was going to take her to the African bar in Stockwell to listen to a band from South Africa called the Go-To Boys. Life was sweet. In her heart she didn’t think she would be returning to Zimbabwe until the tyrant was dead. Something told her that. In the mean time, my humps, my humps . . . my lovely lady lumps . . .
‘Kwama Lyons’ clocked in five minutes late at the office of Control Services and headed out for her shift. Quentina would be working until 8.30 p.m. today, a profitable time because many of the residents’ parking streets had only recently shifted over from 5.30 to 8.30 as the time for parking limits to end, and many, many visitors hadn’t yet realised the change. It was not especially fair, in Quentina’s view, but then, if there was one thing about life which was unequivocally clear to Quentina, clearer by the day, it was that she didn’t make the rules. If she did, she would make sure that life was fair. She would see to it. At the top of the to-do list if she was in charge of the world would be the item: Make Life Fair. But she wasn’t and it wasn’t.
The weather, very important to a warden on the beat, wouldn’t settle. One moment, the sky was clear, the sun was out, and Quentina was sweating inside her ridiculous uniform. Summer was around the corner! Not real summer of course, but its British imitation. Then the sun would go in, the wind would rise, and all would be dark and grim, wintry, another British imitation, not snow and ice and wolves and drama but just grey dark cold.
At about eleven, Quentina found a ten-year-old Land Rover, a diesel, in a loading bay outside an electronics shop around the corner from the high street. The back of the vehicle was open; Quentina could see a jumble of cardboard boxes. This was a place where many tickets could be issued for people parking, which wasn’t permitted, as opposed to loading, which was. From the licence plate Quentina could see that the car had been bought at a garage in Cirencester. That made sense because no Londoner would leave a car boot open and unattended for as long as this. She stood there for a minute and then a man in a green waxed jacket came out at speed. A younger woman, his daughter perhaps, came after.
‘Sorry sorry,’ said the man. ‘Got to drop some stuff off. Clearing out for my daughter. Two more loads. Hope that’s all right?’
Loading was taking place.
‘OK,’ said Quentina. ‘You have an honest face.’
The man was good enough to smile about that. He and his daughter picked up another couple of boxes. Quentina walked off, or tried to, because ten yards away a woman in a tracksuit blocked her. She had flushed indoor skin and crinkly, angry hair.
‘That’s right,’ she said, ‘that’s right. Let those snobs park anywhere they like. Ordinary people, you stick a ticket on them without looking twice, don’t care if they’re in the bay they belong in or not, stick a ticket on them, meet your quota, let them appeal if you’re wrong, you don’t care, yeah, just meet your quota, all it is, only got your job in the first place because of positive discrimination, ordinary working people pay the price, pay the fines, but get snobs in their big car and you let them do what they like.’
Quentina felt that she had some experience of the world, and of people other than at their best, but she had never known a subject on which people became irrational as quickly and completely as that of parking in this absurdly ri
ch, absurdly comfortable country. When you gave people a ticket they were angry, always and inevitably. And the anger could spread, and become catching, as it had with this plainly mad woman, crazed with resentments. There were times when she wanted to say: Get down on your knees! Be grateful! A billion people living on a dollar a day, as many who can’t find clean drinking water, you live in a country where there is a promise to feed, clothe, shelter and doctor you, from the moment of your birth to the moment of your death, for free, where the state won’t come and beat or imprison you or conscript you, where the life expectancy is one of the longest in the world, where the government does not lie to you about Aids, where the music is not bad and the only bad thing is the climate, and you find it in yourself to complain about parking? Woe, woe! Down on your knees in gratitude that you can even notice this minor irritation! Praise God for the fact that you resent getting this ticket, instead of rending your clothes with grief because you lost another child to dysentery or malaria! Sing hosannas when you fill out the little green form in the envelope stuck to your windshield! For you, you of the deservedly punished five-minute overstay, you of the misinterpreted residents’ bay area, you of the ignored Loading Only sign, are of all people who have lived the most fortunate!
Instead Quentina said,
‘Loading is taking place.’ She held out her hand and as in a dumbshow, the countryman and his daughter came out of the electrician’s struggling with a visibly heavy object wrapped in cardboard, which from its shape and dimensions was probably a fridge. With great effort they dropped this on the backboard of the Land Rover and began pushing it in.
‘Why don’t you just fuck off back to nig-nog land, go eat your fucking bananas in a tree and die of Aids, you nigger bastard? Eh? What the fuck are you doing here anyway?’
‘Have a nice day, madam,’ said Quentina. She walked away, angry and sick but not surprised, and then did the thing experience had taught her to do: she turned, photographed the car and the loading bay (and as it happened the man and his daughter, who were now extracting another large package from the car, with difficulty, because it was partly wedged in by the fridge – they really weren’t very good at what they were doing). Then she took out her notebook and wrote down what the woman had said, and the time and place. Then she went about her business for the rest of the day, a day on which she had something to look forward to. So while there was no denying that the things which happened happened, there was always that other more important thing in the future. Mashinko . . . my humps . . .
38
Zbigniew woke up and for a moment felt good. It was six, which was early, and a crack of light had come though a gap in the curtains and hit his face where it lay on the pillow – which was fine by Zbigniew, an early riser, a getter-up. His initial feeling on coming awake was a happy sense of busyness, with a day to be conquered, things to be done, tasks to be ticked off, progress to be made. He had three or four projects on the go. His stock portfolio was doing well. There was an English expression Zbigniew loved, a saying which was so good it could almost qualify as Polish: it’s a good life if you don’t weaken. So when he woke, while he was coming to full consciousness, Zbigniew had several seconds of being completely happy.
Then he felt that he was not alone in the bed. His body sensed it before his mind, that there was another body in the bed; he knew this as an animal knows it; and then he realised that he was not in his own bed; and then he knew who it was and where he was and what was happening, and he was immersed in a disconnection which had started out being a small thing, a joke, a quirk, but had escalated to the point where it was the bane of his day, the thing which was wrong with his life, the black sun overhead. His body was happy. He was in bed with Davina, the girl whom he had met in Uprising before Christmas. He had taken her out twice over the holiday, they had had sex for the first time in January, they had been seeing each other ever since. It was a disaster. A disaster of a complicated type, and one which Zbigniew had never experienced before, because from one point of view, and one point of view only, he was ecstatically happy: his body liked what was happening. Right from the first time, when Davina had come screaming at exactly the moment he came into her, they had had amazing sex; the best sex of Zbigniew’s life. This was not a question of tricks or specific acts; it wasn’t any single thing Davina did that no other girl had ever done; it was just that they somehow worked together. It was hard not to reach for engineering metaphors. The mechanism simply worked. Perfectly. And repeatedly. Every time. It was, considered purely as sex, the best sex of his life: the most inventive, the dirtiest, the most satisfying, the noisiest. His body was crazy about what was happening.
The trouble was that his mind, his spirit, his soul, his feelings, were in convulsions. The thing was – he couldn’t stand Davina. He had noticed this at an early point, a very early point, indeed during their first conversation; if it came to that, he had noticed it before he even spoke to her, since she smoked and he couldn’t stand smoking, even if it did look sexy. He had mentioned this to her after a few weeks and – she had given up! There and then! That was how bad the situation was!
It wasn’t that Davina was overtly clingy. But she was completely, irrevocably dependent. He was her world; he knew that because she told him so. ‘You are my world.’ That made no sense to Zbigniew, as a thing to say, because it could never be true. People were people, one by one, individuals, and the world was the world. That was the whole point of it, that it was everything else. A person could not be your world. That was the whole point of what people and the world were.
The dependency, which appeared only after they had slept together for the first time, was a big issue. Every time they met – which if it had been up to her would be every day, in fact if it were up to her they would already have moved in together, in fact if it were up to her they would already be married – she would ask what he had been doing and wait on the answer with her eyes large, her mouth slightly parted, as if ready to be thrilled, amazed, aghast. There was a note of paranoia and jealousy there right from the start. She was jealous of his work, his friends, his stock portfolio, Piotr, everything. She tried not to show it, or tried to show it in a way that looked like a convincing attempt not to show it.
All this, while obviously not all right, might have been bearable, if it were not for two other traits which interacted with and magnified each other. The first was her theatrical way of acting everything out. She did everything with a consciousness of being watched. She exaggerated everything she said or felt, often by pretending to underplay her reactions; this was a particularly epic phenomenon when she was pretending not to be hurt or upset. When Zbigniew had through pressure of work to cancel a ‘drink’, i.e. a bottle of wine followed by sex followed by a bitter contest over whether he stayed the night at her flat, the next time they met she would act like a cat greeting an owner who had gone on holiday: looking away, shrugging and saying ‘Nothing’ when he asked what was wrong, saying ‘Whatever’ to any suggestions or plans of any sort. (‘Shall I ask for the bill?’ ‘Whatever.’) Then there would be strenuous, tumultuous reconciliation sex.
The second trait, the one which finally meant that Zbigniew found his girlfriend impossible to be with for any time without wishing he were somewhere else, was her gloominess, what she called her ‘black dog’. (Even the way she said that, theatrically, looking down or away, as if the subject was too difficult, too painful, as if the very words themselves were a burden which a man as coarsely at ease with himself as Zbigniew would have difficulty imagining . . .) Once every three or four meetings, she would be lost in herself, barely able to speak – or that was how she acted. But her histrionic side meant that it was impossible to tell. She might not have had anything much on her mind at all, but just been wanting a little more attention – this is what he often thought was the case. Or she might have been a bit down and needing cheering up, but instead of just asking for cheering up, she had decided to exaggerate how down she was on the basis that it was a
more effective way of getting his attention, only to find that instead it had the effect of making him shut down, switch off, and turn away; which was what it did. Depressed people bored and annoyed Zbigniew; back home he knew too many of them, and their charms had long since worn off. Or she might have been genuinely, but briefly, depressed – except that to be as depressed as she seemed, she would have to be clinically depressed, in which case what she needed was a doctor and some pills, not a Polish boyfriend to sit across the table and be unhappy at.
Capital: A Novel Page 19
