Capital

A month after she began distributing leaflets and going to secret meetings, her father died of lung cancer. He wasn’t diagnosed, he just died of it. They found out about the disease through the autopsy.

Quentina’s political career lasted for nine months. It began with Aids, then spread into a campaign against arrests and beatings and all the other human rights abuses. Quentina thought it would be a race between getting caught and Zanu-PF turning against Mugabe, with the odds fairly equal, but she was wrong. At her final beating, she was told that the only thing preventing her from being raped to death was the status her father had once had; the protection offered by that was now void. So here she was, three years later, in a church in London listening to the descant singers trying to compete with Mashinko Wilson’s melody line in ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’.

The service came to an end and the congregation slowly drifted out of the church. People milled about, shaking hands, chatting. Quentina knew a few of her fellow worshippers but kept her greetings brief. She was on a mission. Mashinko as usual had a small fan club around him, chatting and praising. As usual he was glowing, warm, his rich skin alight. She could wait for the group to thin out, but that would involve so much loitering that it would be difficult not to look weak, dithering: unworthy. Humans make their own history, but not under circumstances of their choosing. Quentina went straight up to Mashinko, who was being held by the arm by a short woman of about sixty and was smiling indulgently. Quentina stood in front of him and did something she knew very well how to do: she got his full attention.

‘I just wanted to say, I thought that was beautiful,’ said Quentina. Mashinko’s face, which had already been shining, grew even more radiant. That was all she needed. He would remember her next time. ‘Goodbye. Happy Christmas,’ she said, and turned and left. Quentina went out into the cold dark of Christmas Eve in London.

Memory could not compete against hope. It was no contest. Even a small amount of hope would do.

25

‘cn i c u?’

the text had read. Shahid had no idea whose mobile this message was from, so he texted back:

‘ok bt hu r u?’

Shahid had to admit, he thought it might be a girl, a forgotten girl he had tried to pick up somewhere, or an old flame, who must be a bit keen on him because why otherwise would she have kept his number? There was a girl at Clapham South once, she’d dropped a whole bunch of papers on the platform as she got off the train, the rude commuters had just shoved past, of course, Shahid had picked them up, they’d got chatting, she was a law student, they’d gone for a coffee right there across the road, they’d swapped numbers, then about a week later he’d lost his mobile and he’d always wondered if she might have been the one… that was six months or so ago now. It might be her, it just might. He’d put a thing in ‘Lost Connections’ in Metro but had come up blank. But even if it wasn’t the law student, basically, if it was a girl, it was good news.

The reply was disappointing.

‘Iqbal hr When?’

Great. Just what I need, thought Shahid. Reminiscences about Chechnya from a Belgian-Algerian semi-weirdo jihadi I haven’t seen for over a decade. He texted back:

‘Tuesday at 6 ok 13 Pelham Rd’

Which was where he now was, on Christmas Eve, watching The Simpsons with one eye while trying to work out just how it was Iqbal seemed to have manoeuvred him into agreeing to put him up for a few days.

‘I mean I’ve been let down,’ Iqbal was saying. ‘My friend let me down. If it were not for that I would not be having to turn to you.’

He was angry and ingratiating at the same time, and seemed keen to convince, as if his anger were something he was selling. Iqbal had come to London to stay with a friend, but the friend had kicked him out, offering a complicated alibi to do with relations who might be visiting and for whom he needed to keep the spare room free, plus he had a big work thing coming up, etc. etc. It was coming back to Shahid, a little too late: in Chechnya they hadn’t got on all that well. Iqbal had been angry all the time about not just large issues and global injustices but about the fact that the hot water had run out or the only part of the bread left was the crust and he didn’t like the crust. He was quick to connect the two, as well: if a petrol station in Austria had a lavatory that was closed because the flush didn’t work, this was part of a planet-wide conspiracy to disrespect Muslims.

In Shahid’s view, the best way through difficult times, as through life in general, was just to go along with things. It was a rare problem that couldn’t be solved by being ignored. Iqbal would be difficult to ignore but if he put him up for a few days he would surely go away and things would return to normal.

‘Brothers should not treat each other like that. And we are brothers, aren’t we? Brothers should not behave in this way.’ Iqbal was pacing.

‘I’ve said you can stay,’ said Shahid.

Iqbal seemed to collect himself.

‘And I am grateful. I feel all appropriate gratitude. Forgive me if my anger got the better of me.’

‘It’s cool. I’m just going to watch the end of this and then I’ll show you where stuff is, how to set up the sofa bed and all that.’

‘You are a good man.’

‘No, it’s cool, really.’

Insistently, Iqbal said: ‘You are a good man. Perhaps you have forgotten this truth about yourself. Perhaps it is something other people do not see or encourage you not to see. But you are a good man.’

Well, put like that, it was hard not to think there might be something in this Shahid-as-good-man theory. Shahid gave a modest aw-shucks shrug just as Mr Burns did his steepled-fingers thing and said ‘Excellent.’

26

Hanging from a strap on the Jubilee line as he went home on Christmas Eve, Roger thought about when might be the best time to tell Arabella about his non-existent bonus. Arabella was good at making life seem easy, except when she suddenly and dramatically wasn’t. Roger had an intuition this might be one of those times.

It would have been better to have done it already, obviously. But on Friday he had just been too numb, too freaked, too incredulous, too sick. He was in no condition to have a long talk about his missing million pounds… And anyway, by the end of the day the impulse to blurt everything out had long since faded. A lesser man, Roger felt, would have gone home straight after being sick. Roger was made of sterner stuff, and anyway what would he do if he went home? Sit there blubbing and moping and waiting for Arabella to get back from the shops? No, he sucked it up, took it like a man, and spent the day hiding in his office and pretending to work.

Not that much work got done on 21 December at Pinker Lloyd, as the compensation committee broke its news. Every now and then he would peek through the window and survey the scene in the trading room. The noise was about a quarter of its usual level. People were just sitting there. One or two of them had their heads in their hands. Some others were just standing around in a demoralised little group. They looked like refugees or something. Sad, so sad. It was like… Roger stretched to find some metaphor for the scale of the grief, the comprehensiveness of the disaster. Being in some shithole in Iraq or somewhere, where some Yank pilot has dropped a bomb on you by mistake. Everybody’s blown into pieces, bits everywhere, limbs, blood, everything. And it’s not your fault. That was the key thing – not your fault. He hadn’t done anything wrong. But they went and dropped the bomb anyway. Those bloody Yanks…

Anyway: Friday had been too soon, and there hadn’t really been an opportunity over the weekend. It was the sort of news you had to steel yourself to break, you had to create a pause around the moment, and there hadn’t been an opportunity. Arabella had been out on Saturday, and he’d had a lie-in and then pottered about while the weekend nanny took Joshua and Conrad, then he’d gone to the gym in the afternoon and they’d had a takeaway after the kids were in bed, but things had by then felt too chilled out to spoil the mood, and then on Sunday they had a brunch date at the country club, and it had slid into the afternoon, and Roger had first been buzzed from a