Capital

that all about?
    He drifted back to where Ali and the other guys were discussing the Premiership, the usual Chelsea–Arsenal–Man United circular babble. They were like Sufis, if they kept it up for long enough they’d be able to levitate. Then someone said something so out of order, so libellous and grotesque, about Ashley Cole that Shahid had no choice but to enter the debate.

21
     
     
    On Friday the 21st at five o’clock, Quentina Mkfesi BSc MSc picked up her pay cheque from the offices of Control Services Limited. The cheque was for £227 and it was payable to Kwama Lyons. Quentina put it in her inside jacket pocket and set off on foot towards Tooting. It took about half an hour to walk there. London was full of pre-Christmas bustle, which Quentina approved of: in a place where there was so little natural brightness and colour, it was good to create it through neon and optic fibre and shop windows and Christmas trees.
    Quentina was still wearing her uniform; she was in a hurry and didn’t want to change. As it was dark, she didn’t trust the trip straight across the Common, and so stuck to the pavement on the side. The pub on the Common was already busy, people knocking off early to have a couple of pre-Christmas drinks. With Christmas on Tuesday, plenty of people would be starting the holiday today, and getting a full two weeks off. Quentina felt no resentment. She envied people’s work, not their leisure. It was cold but she had a T-shirt, a shirt and a sweater under her ridiculous Ruritanian army jacket, and Quentina had learned long ago that the secret to keeping warm in the English winter was to keep moving. Once she got past Balham, she cut left-right-left through domestic streets, Christmas wreaths on the doors and lights on, trees lit up too, this domestic version of London looking warmer and more welcoming than the city actually was. It looked cosy, like TV Dickens, whereas the real place was cold and disconnected. Quentina found that she liked the softening illusion.
    She came to the house she was looking for, a mid-terrace property with the multiple bins that signalled multiple occupancy. She rang the third buzzer up and was buzzed in without a word spoken. The hallway was narrow and smelt damp. A small table by the side of the door bore a stack of miscellaneous post and junk mail. Every time she came here the piece of paper on top of this pile was always a flyer advertising pizza. The English obviously ate an extraordinary amount of pizza.
    Quentina jogged up the first flight of stairs, paused to get her breath back and then went up to the second floor. The door opposite was propped open so she went into the flat, which as she knew from previous visits was bigger than it looked, L-shaped, with a sitting room at the front and two bedrooms plus a kitchen round the corner. The front room was decorated with film posters, one for Battleship Potemkin – Quentina didn’t read Russian but she had asked – and another for Mandingo . That presumably was a joke. At a desk opposite the door, his back to Quentina, a large African man sat at a computer screen with a mobile phone held to his right ear, and his left hand in the air, in a gesture which very eloquently asked Quentina not to make a sound while he finished his conversation.
    Remarkable: this man had one of the loudest voices Quentina knew. Yet standing across the room from him, she couldn’t hear what he was saying into the phone. She was glad of that, because everything Quentina thought and felt about this man could be very simply summed up: the less Quentina knew about this man who claimed to be Kwame Lyons, or ‘Kwama Lyons’, as his name appeared on her pay cheques, the better.
    The man snapped his phone shut and swung around in his chair. He was fortyish and wore an Adidas tracksuit. He opened his arms expansively and smiled with his mouth but not his eyes.
    ‘Beautiful,’ he said.
    ‘I have your cheque,’ said Quentina, matching her actions to her words as she took the piece of paper out and stretched across. The man nodded, took the cheque, read it carefully, then reached behind him for his wallet, opened it, and counted out £150 in ten-pound notes. Then he counted the money again. Then he handed it to Quentina.
    ‘I am happy to be able to take this risk for you,’ he said in his rich baritone.
    ‘I am happy also,’ said Quentina, which was a flat lie, but this exchange, or something similar to it, had become a sort of