Capital

Quentina wanted to do was sit on her bed and look at the ceiling. Nothing seemed to have any point or purpose.
    The immigration tribunal hearing had been a disaster. In her first sighting of the red-faced judge presiding over it, she had felt a flicker of hope: he looked like a man whose natural state was to be reasonable. But as the first morning went on she saw that this was misleading. When he did ask questions they were pointed and implicitly sceptical. How exactly had she got into the UK? How exactly had she been supporting herself? When the government’s lawyers got on to the fact that she had been working illegally, she saw his manner harden. The pretence of friendly impartiality melted away. At that point, noon on the Monday morning, she realised that her application was going to be rejected.
    At the end of his day’s hearing, her lawyer, a mild-mannered woman in early middle age, turned to her and made a grimace.
    ‘That was terrible,’ said Quentina, to save her the trouble.
    ‘I didn’t want to say anything,’ said the lawyer. ‘But he’s one of the toughest ones. I’m sorry. Don’t worry, if we lose, which we haven’t done yet, there’s still every chance for an appeal.’
    They hadn’t lost yet – but they might as well have. Tuesday was just as bad as Monday, with the judge dwelling much more heavily on the subject of Quentina’s illegal employment than on the prospect of what had happened to her in Zimbabwe before she left, and what would happen to her if she was sent back. He moved through all those details briskly. It was no surprise when his judgment, as they received it on the following Monday, was that she should be deported. In practice that meant being sent to an immigration removal centre to await the result of her appeal.
    She had been here now for two months. The drive down was in a minibus owned by the private security company that ran the detention centre, for a profit, on behalf of the government. Under other circumstances Quentina would have enjoyed the trip: a chance to admire the famous green fields of England, which she’d never actually seen before, unless you counted the Common. There were arable fields, cows, tractors. So England was not just London after all. Quite funny to find that out just before being forced to leave. Her first sight of the detention centre’s main building had given her a flash of optimism: a three-storey modern structure with a car park in front. To anyone familiar with the vernacular of contemporary British buildings, it looked like a motel or a conference centre, or maybe a sixth-form college. But as with the judge, first impressions turned out to be deceptive. The immigration centre was a prison, with the twist that when people were discharged from prison they went somewhere better, but when they were discharged from here they were sent back to the place they had risked everything to escape.
    Everybody was obsessed with the food. One of the fifteen demands of the inmates on hunger strike was for ‘edible food we can eat’. It was no joke. Quentina had not eaten like a princess at the Refuge, but that was a seven-star holiday resort compared to this. The meals did not merely fail to look appetising, they actually stank. The meat smelled off. There was no spicing to the food, no flavour. The desserts were even heavier and lumpier than the savoury courses. The only edible thing Quentina saw in her first two weeks at the detention centre was fruit – tired and bruised fruit, but nonetheless fruit, as welcome as a gift direct from heaven. She lost far more weight than she had ever lost when she was walking ten miles a day as a traffic warden.
    When she said this to Makela, the Nigerian woman had smiled.
    ‘That’s how it begins,’ she said. ‘The first thing that makes people crazy is always the food.’

96
     
     
    It might be today. Might it be today? Or not. It possibly wouldn’t happen at all. It might be better – no, it certainly would be better – if it didn’t happen. There was no reason to think that it would happen and even less reason to want it to happen so, on balance, it wouldn’t happen. But what if it did?
    Matya was getting ready to go out on a date with Zbigniew. She was at her new shared flat in the bit of Brixton which was sort-of Herne Hill or vice versa, depending on whether the person you were talking to wanted to sound cool or posh. Her discovery of the place had been that rare thing, a positive experience