the Tube, not too far from the Lido, and handy for shops and amenities. There was a kitchen and two communal areas, one of them dominated by a large old cathode-ray television, the other furnished with battered sofas. The garden was untidy but functioning; it was possible to sit out there, but hardly anyone ever did. There were eight bedrooms, with eight people staying in them, including a house manager who was a paid employee of the charity. If it had been a domestic residence it would have been worth upwards of a million pounds. Instead it was a hostel for stateless failed asylum-seekers, and locals felt, bitterly, that it had a suppressing effect on house prices.
By now, Quentina had lived there for the best part of two years, and she had a good acquaintance with the range of types who came into contact with the charity. All of them were damaged by their experiences, some grievously, and many of them could barely function. Some were too angry: their rage was on a hair-trigger. These were the likeliest to get into real trouble. A Sudanese woman from the Refuge who kept getting into fights over perceived insults – proper fist fights, like a man – had gone to jail for three months for assault, after she punched a woman who she thought had jostled her while they were both sheltering from the rain under a butcher shop’s awning. She would normally have been deported at the end of her sentence, but thanks to the Human Rights Act she couldn’t be because it wasn’t safe for her to go back to Sudan, so when she came out of prison she had been taken in by another branch of the Refuge, this time in North London. Quentina did not foresee a happy ending for her. Other ‘clients’ were defeated by the burden of their own grievances and could think of very little else. The symptoms of this condition were silence, and then, in the face of kindness or interest or understanding, torrential unburdening. Ragah, the Kurd, was like that. She had no mode in between brooding on her losses and telling all about them, at length, in English which as she got more excited Quentina found impossible to understand, and which in any case she would often drop to lapse into Kurdish, apparently without realising that she was doing so. Ragah had lost her family, Quentina gathered, but that was all she knew, because beyond that she lost the thread of the story. By now she could hardly ask.
Silence was hard to diagnose because it was such a common symptom. In their heads, some of the refugees were still in whichever country they had left; they hadn’t yet caught up with their own lives. Others were culture- shocked and had no idea what to make of London; they were blank. That was usually OK because it usually wore off with time. Others still were silent because they were depressed. There had been only one suicide recently in the South London refuge, an Afghan who had hung herself in the bathroom. That was the week after Quentina arrived. One suicide in two years was good going. Others were simply possessed by a feeling that they had made a catastrophic mistake. They had made an irreversible error in coming to England, and their lives would never recover – their lives would never again be their lives, but the story of this huge mistake that they had made.
Quentina didn’t fit any of these categories. Perhaps what was decisive was that she was fully resolved to take part in her new life in London. She was determined to make a go of it. At the same time she was not planning to be in London for ever. Mugabe could not live for ever. Chinese peasants might once have thought Chairman Mao was immortal, but no one except the tyrant himself believed that Mugabe was. If he died the whole system might collapse overnight, or there might be a transition period, but Quentina felt sure that anyone who had had to flee him would be welcome back. So Quentina, however hard things currently were, felt sure that she had a future, and consequently she was the client of the Refuge who functioned best, a fact which was openly acknowledged by the charity workers and the other clients. She was not angry, she was not insane, she had a job (albeit an illegal one), she spoke good English, people could talk to her. As a result she had an informal but real role as a liaison and go- between for the refugees and the charity that was helping them. Quentina liked that: it appealed to the side of her that enjoyed administering and running things, getting involved. When the small committee of the charity had its weekly meeting to talk things over, she would be present as the clients’ representative. Martin, the house manager, a shy Northerner with a bossy streak, would chair the meetings. New clients didn’t often arrive at the Refuge – because to do so someone would have to leave, which they only did when they won a judgment allowing them leave to legally stay, which never happened, or they were forcibly deported, which had happened twice in two years. When new clients did arrive, they would be given a case worker to look after them, and then Quentina too would be asked to keep an eye on them. So Quentina was unofficially the leader of the Refuge, or anyway of its clients.
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
