camera and the picture went white.
From the technical point of view, the film was a mess. The camera-work was jerky and not always focused. The colours were blurry. It was like an early film, from the time before film had been properly invented. Whoever was holding the camera had wandered from side to side in the street. Combined with the wobbliness and the movement and the low quality of the digital film, the effect was to produce a faint sensation of motion sickness. Sometimes the person with the camera had gone up close to specific houses; he (though of course there was no reason to think that it was a ‘he’) had gone right up to Petunia Howe’s front door, for instance, and held his focus on the door number. On other occasions he seemed to be standing in the middle of the road, and panning the camera from side to side, as when he stood outside number 27, the house belonging to Mickey Lipton-Miller. Or he would occasionally zoom right in on someone’s car, and look through the windscreen, like a thief on the prowl for a satnav to steal. He lingered, with extra lasciviousness, on the Younts’ Lexus S400, as if the camera wanted to be inside the car, running its hands over the leather upholstery. At other moments the cameraperson seemed to be taking a special interest in architectural details. No two houses in the street were identical, so the camera took a look at the pointing on number 36, and then later on the subtly different pointing five doors down at number 46. Or it showed the bay window at number 62, and then the differently shaped bow window at 55, which was polygonal. He or she seemed to take a particular interest in the big expensive double-fronted properties.
Although there was nothing sinister in the content of the DVD, its effect was sinister – something about the idea of somebody watching the street, noticing it so closely. It could not be taken for anything to do with an estate agent or viral marketing. And there was an air of yearning about the film. It was like watching a child looking in the window of a toyshop. Not everybody watched the DVD, but those who did were left with the feeling that somebody somewhere did indeed want what they had.
The DVDs came in jiffy bags. The postmarks on the bags were from all around London.
24
Quentina was not a devout Christian, just as she was no longer a believing Marxist, but she did like going to church. She liked the language and the precious sensation of warmth, she liked the Zimbabwean curate at St Michael’s, the African Anglican church she went to in Balham, and most of all she liked the choirmaster, a beautifully firm-looking Botswanan called Mashinko Wilson, a teaching assistant (she’d discovered) with a voice so smoky and so sexy that it was made for singing hymns. The effect was not as noticeable with the African and African-influenced songs, but at Christmas, when he led the choir and congregation through the English Christmas hymns, it was mesmerising: ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ sung in this warm voice, clear and sensual and so evidently linked to his healthy, muscular body. Quentina had discovered the Mashinko-Christmas carol effect a week before the previous Christmas, and she’d been looking forward to it all year since. Advent and now Christmas Eve were fulfilling all expectations. Today, after the service, she was going to go up to Mashinko Wilson and declare an interest.
As for the church itself, Quentina liked that too. It was built in a grey stone, not the same as the houses around – granite, maybe. The church had a narrow central aisle and high windows at the end, very traditional, but a section at the back had been glassed in to make a kind of sitting room and creche, from which wailing and thumping sounds could often be heard during prayers and sermons. It was difficult for the preacher to compete.
Back home, Quentina had gone to the Christmas Eve service at St Mary’s Cathedral in Harare every year, with her mother. Mama was the family Christian: Quentina’s father used to say that she believed enough for the rest of them added together. She would take one child, Quentina or her brother or sister, to church with her on Sunday, and didn’t seem to mind which, as long as it was one of them. She preferred but did not insist that they all come for Easter Sunday and Christmas. Quentina’s father she left alone, by peaceable mutual consent. Quentina liked it, because it was one of the only times she got to be on her own with her mother, and she liked the high-flown language of the old Bible, and the exotic imagery of the distant dark cold Northern Christmas; there was an irony in the fact that now she was in the cold north, the thing she liked most about Christmas was the sense of warmth, the lights, the colour, the cosiness.
The baby as the most powerful person in the world. This idea had a deep resonance for Quentina, because she had experienced it first-hand, twice. Quentina herself was a child of the revolution, born in the year Zimbabwe gained its independence, 1980. Her brother Robert was born five years later, and she could still recall the sense of sheer injustice at her own displacement, and at the same time the magic sense of life being rearranged around this new arrival. Robert had had a squashed angry face and the inside of his mouth, which was often visible because he spent so much time howling, was the pinkest thing anyone had ever seen; and his mother and father’s gentleness and devotedness were extraordinary to see. Much later Quentina realised that that was how they would have been with her too. At the time she only felt the injustice and envy and resentment of her displacement by this horribly powerful interloper.
She hadn’t minded her sister’s birth so much. It was hard to resent Sarah, who seemed sweet and placid when she was born and still seemed sweet and placid twenty years later. Robert had been furious, which Quentina at the time had thought was great. Let him get a taste of how it feels. The terrible power of the newborn baby. The defenceless child who rules the world. The bundle in the crib who is President of the World. Deal with that, little brother!
It was no doubt because Quentina felt Robert’s terrible, unforgivable youngerness so strongly that his death hit her so hard. His first symptom was a cough that simply would not go away, followed by a cascade of other symptoms, none of which seemed big at the start, none of which ever resolved or improved, until he was, within a year, covered in sores, blind, breathless, visibly dying, and within another three months, dead. Aids, of course. What else? The young man who had once been the baby at the centre of the world, the Christ-child in his crib.
Perhaps that in and of itself would not have been enough to change Quentina’s direction of life. His death made her philosophically angry, angry with life, but that wasn’t the same thing as specific anger, the kind of anger that brought not just a wish for change but the will to act on the wish. That didn’t come until Quentina broke her ankle in a fall and was taken to hospital. She was treated by a doctor who told her she hadn’t broken it, just strained it.
‘The best treatment is rest,’ said the doctor. ‘Will you go out with me?’
‘No.’
Quentina spent the next six weeks pretending to evade his attentions, with steadily less zeal. He was called John Zimbela and was, Quentina gradually came to realise, the most admirable person she had ever known, and also just about the angriest, ecstatic with rage at the Mugabe government’s Aids policy, or anti-policy, since its principal pillars were evasion and falsehood. With several friends he belonged to an underground network which illegally printed and distributed leaflets about HIV, safe sex, infection rates, the course of the illness, and the treatment regimes which were available in the rich countries. He was risking his livelihood and perhaps his life, and though when she had met him Quentina had known about Aids, she had thought that her brother’s death was a kind of accident, a too common accident perhaps, but basically an act of God, whereas she now realised it was the result of a set of policies that amounted to institutionalised manslaughter – not murder, you couldn’t quite call it that, but manslaughter. And then she had got angry too, and had joined John and his network, and had begun to work against Mugabe, to stop just studying politics and start living them.
Quentina’s father had fought in the bush during the revolution: he hadn’t been a paper revolutionary but the real thing, living off mealies and carrying a gun for five years. Now he was a fairly senior member of Zanu-PF with a good job at the education ministry, education having been a priority and a pride for the young country of Zimbabwe. Quentina did not grow up in the back seat of a Mercedes, and there was no sense of entitlement anywhere about her family’s life, but she was in her way secure, comfortable, a member of the established order. Now that changed. She became a kind of secret outlaw, and was risking her family’s status in the process, and it was that which caused her deepest worries about what she was doing: she could admire her courage on her own behalf, but on the part of her family she felt at times it was almost an indulgence. She occasionally asked herself what Robert would have wanted, but came up with no answer. All she could really remember about her brother was his birth and his death. She felt she had no real recollection of what Robert had actually been like. It was as if Robert’s death had taken not just Robert but all memories of him too.
