‘Of course, of course. Not half an ounce! It is a mystery. We must seek an explanation. But tell me – tell me how fast you walk, when you are at work.’
They were strolling, a nice evening pace. The pavements were busy.
‘About like this.’
‘Like this!’
‘Like this.’
Mashinko shook his head.
‘Too slow. No aerobic effect. Not working hard enough!’ Seeing Quentina’s expression, he hurried to add, ‘I don’t mean, not working hard enough at your work. I mean, not working hard enough to burn fat and lose weight. Science! You must burn calories to lose weight. Like this -’
and he started walking at about twice the speed, swerving around a group of single women who had come out of a bar and were leaning on each other, screaming, laughing, smoking, and coughing. Quentina let him get away for a few yards, then realised that he wasn’t going to slow down, and set off after him. He was fit, he did exercise – football, and although she hadn’t asked, he must do some gym things or press-ups or something too, because he had the upper body to show for it. Hard muscles, tight skin… She had to break into a trot to catch up and was annoyed by the time she did, but he stopped and his smile was so wide and so affectionate she felt her irritation fade.
‘Like that,’ he said.
‘Like it’s the Olympics.’
‘No, just more intense than you are used to. That’s what you need to do if you want to lose weight. Not that you need to!’
Quentina, the following morning, was acting on the advice. Not all day, naturally. When she first woke she was a slow and sleepy mover, not someone who hit the ground running, not quick out of the blocks – she liked to come awake gradually, over coffee and a bowl of the strange British cereal which someone had introduced into the refuge, the coarse meal-like dish known as – the word made her laugh – ‘porridge’. All this in her dressing gown, yawning, shuffling, the other residents doing much the same, except the Albanian Mira, already outside on the landing halfway through the day’s first pack of cigarettes, looking as if she had been up all night muttering to herself. Then back upstairs to dress slowly, the day beginning to take shape in her head, face and teeth to be cleaned, only a little make-up for a work day, pay day in two days’ time and a visit to the hairdresser booked for the day after, another date with Mashinko that same night, things to look forward to. No, it was right now that the new exercise regime could start! A brisk walk to Control Services to pick up her uniform, and then she was away! No dawdling! She was a whole new Quentina!
Of course, when she had to stop to write a ticket, she had to stop to write a ticket, but in the passages in between, she moved like a racing mamba. How she moved! She was rocket-powered! Well, not really. But she did push herself a little faster, down Pepys Road, back up Mackell Road, up the side street Lindon Road, back down the other way, all at a much brisker rate. Or at least she tried to – except that Quentina found she couldn’t stop herself breaking into this small, tight, irritating cough, every time she began to exert herself. I’m so unfit, she thought. I am an elephant. I started doing this just in time. Quentina didn’t mind the idea of turning into a generously built African grandmama one day, and no doubt she would end up like her mother and her mother’s mother, big womanly women, but not just yet. After children, after life settled. Mashinko Wilson would make a good husband, a man it was easy to imagine being good with children, good with money, good with a house, a good man to cook for and to have come home in the evening, a good man for a lie-in at the weekend…
In Mackell Road, Quentina found an Audi A8 with a one-day parking permit in the windscreen. The correct portions of the ticket had been scratched out, day and date and month and year, but the person using the permit had not written in their car licence-plate number. These were always difficult ones. On the one hand the Control Services policy was unambiguous: if the permit had not been filled out correctly and in full, issue a ticket. On the other, the reality was that this was clearly someone visiting someone who lived in the street, who had been handed the permit to park for a few hours and who hadn’t looked at it in sufficient detail. Quentina had a look in the car, and saw a dog-seat and a travel blanket. Someone had travelled some distance to get here. It didn’t seem entirely fair to her, but rules were rules, and if she wrote the ticket she was contributing to her quota, whereas if she didn’t write it, the next warden to come along would do so. Life was not fair. Also, on a lucky day, a fully specced three- litre Audi A8 had a chance of winning the contest for most expensive ticketed car. Quentina wrote the ticket, put it on the windscreen, took the photo. You had to be careful with photos of permits, to make sure the relevant detail was visible on the digital image.
Homesickness, Quentina found, was a strange sensation. Some at the hostel felt it as a constant nag or pang. It was what kept some of them silent, held them inside themselves. Like the feeling that makes people go quiet when they’re starting to feel sick. Quentina didn’t feel it like that. For her, she had specific bursts of homesickness, tied to specific sensations and specific memories. Today, turning the corner of Pepys Road, she caught the smell of burning wood, of hot ash, and was suddenly back on the outskirts of Harare, the smoke either from their own yard or from the neighbours’, a cooking fire or a cleaning fire or just a fire, the smell seeming to seek you out so it could cling to you. An odd time for someone to be burning wood in London; it must be a fire someone had held back because of the terrible weather. The wood was wet, which made the fire smell like autumn, and something other than wood was burning too – there was a chemical note. Plastic melting perhaps. Mother, father, my country, my exile: all this rushed in on Quentina. For a moment she could feel her home around her, the warmth, the dry high air of her home town, the wonderful knownness of the place which held her from her first memories to the day she was forced to leave. She stopped and closed her eyes for a moment. Exercise could take place later. The smoke gathered around her.
When she opened her eyes, Quentina could see two policemen at the other end of the street, on her side of the pavement, walking in her direction, not quickly but not slowly. Without any conscious thought taking place, she felt her stomach turn over. It was a consequence of her condition: police made her nervous. She wanted to have nothing to do with them; no good could come of it. I’ll gently make myself absent. She turned and made to go down Lindon Road, and as she did so a man crossed the street towards her, a smartly dressed young man in his middle twenties, clearly heading for her, and Quentina was, with a growing sense of alarm, wondering why he seemed to be looking at her, when she suddenly realised: it’s another policeman. She thought: change direction! Run away! And her body, seeming to act independently, began to cross the road, the other way from the plain-clothes policeman, so they would cross over without meeting; but he changed course again and stopped two yards in front of her. He was holding up a wallet with a card in it, in front of her face, and smiling slightly, giving an ironic edge to his words, as he said, ‘Ms Kwama Lyons?’
74
From Zbigniew’s point of view, it would be silly to take on extra work at the Younts’. He was struggling at number 42. There was no one aspect of the job which was in itself too much for him, not once he had subcontracted the specialist work to the people he was borrowing from Piotr’s crew – but the fact that all the responsibility devolved on him made the work more stressful than he had imagined. When things went wrong, there was no back-up. The fact that he was sitting on half a million pounds of someone else’s money in an old suitcase made the sense of stress and alienation worse. It was lonely and weird, and then he very nearly had a bad accident. Stripping wallpaper off the second-floor landing, Zbigniew had been horrified to find that chunks of the actual wall were coming away with it – whole lumps of plaster, one of them a ten-kilo chunk which only just missed his head.
It would have been an ugly death, killed by a piece of falling plaster in a house he was supposed to be renovating; his body wouldn’t have been found for days, rats would have eaten him, it would have been a horrible end, and then they would have found the ?500,000 in cash, and God knows what they would have thought… When the adrenalin of the near miss wore off, and the thought of how long it would have taken to find his body took hold of him, Zbigniew began to feel ill. Who, in truth, would have found him? He worked alone. He stayed in the house alone. He had no girlfriend. Mrs Leatherby lived in Essex and came down to London only at monthly intervals. Zbigniew called her once a week to keep her informed of progress – part of his do-what-British-builders-don’t-do
