Capital

rather he’d known than not known, and just gone back to his studio, back to work, just like on any other day, back to his desk, his known surroundings, his incredibly annoying assistant whom he’d sacked not long after.
    ‘Anyway, when it started up again, I didn’t hear about it at first. My nan had died and there wasn’t anyone in the house except the builders. But then my mum went to a meeting and found out it had been going on and getting worse. Then I saw something in the local paper. I start wondering about who’s behind it, and it hits me, an idea comes to me. And I’m pretty certain I know who it is. I don’t know how he got started, but I had a folder of stuff about the cards and the blog and the DVD at my studio, and I’m pretty certain that’s where he saw it. My former assistant, who I sacked, just before all this stuff started getting nasty. A nasty little toerag trying to get back at me. Trying to get into my head. Trying to be an artist. And all without realising that I didn’t even know it was going on. Silly little shit. But I can’t come to you because I can’t say who it is without saying who I am, and who I am is the single biggest thing in my life – the fact that people don’t know it’s what gives my work its edge and purpose. Which has now been taken away, thanks to our wonderful media. Which is the worst thing which has happened to me in years, thanks for asking. But it does mean I could come and tell you what I know.’ Smitty puffed out his cheeks and sighed. ‘Anyway, that’s his name.’ And Smitty slid across the table a piece of paper with his ex-assistant’s name and address.

105
     
     
    All the internees said that it was an important moment when you had grown used to the food. Some said this was a bad moment, a sign that you had been there too long; others said it was a good moment, a sign that you had become philosophical about your fate. People did not stop complaining about the food when they passed through this moment but they did not complain in the same angry way; they were more resigned, and the big change was that they now ate. For Quentina, the moment came with a jelly. She had been eating nothing but bread and fruit for about a month and was feeling gassy, bloated and unhealthy, and then she saw this jelly. It was red and had pieces of fruit in it. It was the fruit which convinced her. It wasn’t that the jelly looked especially tempting; but it did look edible. She ate it: it was sweet. It tasted like jelly. She managed to get it down. The moment of defeat or of acceptance had occurred. There was a sense of psychological discomfort when she swallowed the first mouthful but after that it was OK.
    Quentina had found a mental trick to help herself to get through her days in the detention centre. It was simple in its way. All she did was say to herself, over and over, whenever the need or occasion arose, the same words: this will not last for ever: this is the hardest thing you will ever do. This will not last for ever: this is the hardest thing you will ever do. She found herself saying it after she woke up in the morning and had a few seconds of not knowing where she was – and sometimes, in the happiest version of those seconds, she was back at home with her mother and father in their bedroom, except the door wasn’t where it should be, and the window was on the wrong side of the bed, and there was something strange about the light, and then she would come fully awake to the reality of the detention centre, England, internment, statelessness, being a non-person in a non-place waiting her way through non-time.
    These things were not harder than each other. They were all equally hard. It was very difficult being in the same place as the hunger strikers. Some of the first hunger strikers had given up, one or two of them, in particular a Kurdish woman with two children whose husband had been killed by Saddam, coming right to the very edge of death, her eyes huge and their irises a strange grey colour, bizarre against the sallow near-yellow of her slack but stretched skin. If it hadn’t been for her children she would have starved herself to death, Quentina was sure; in the event she went too close to the edge, had kidney failure and nearly died anyway. Others had joined the hunger strike, so there were different internees at different stages of this war of nerves with the authorities. It was like the boys’ game of chicken – except that it wasn’t