Capital

ritual. It was a dismissal too.
    ‘Happy Christmas,’ said the man, turning back to his screen.
    ‘The same to you,’ said Quentina, as she left the room, pulling the door behind her, and as always getting out of there with a mixed sense of shame and relief. She had succeeded in not learning anything new or in any way getting further involved, which was an unmixed positive. She ran down the stairs and was out of there. Quentina couldn’t have been in the building for more than ninety seconds. That was a good thing.
    Quentina’s situation was this. In Harare in the summer of 2003 she had been arrested, interrogated, beaten, released by the police, snatched by goons on her way home, taken to a house, told that she had seventy-two hours to leave the country, then beaten and left by the roadside. After being treated in hospital she had been smuggled out of the country by missionaries, and came to England on a student visa which she had always intended to overstay. To make a long story short, she had overstayed on purpose, applied for asylum, been rejected, been arrested and sentenced to deportation, but the judge at the final appeal had ruled that she could not be sent back to Zimbabwe because there were grounds for thinking that if she was she would be killed. At that point Quentina had entered a legal state of semi-existence. She had no right to work and could claim only subsistence-level benefits, but she couldn’t be imprisoned and deported. She was not a citizen of the UK but she could not go anywhere else. She was a non-person.
    The limbo state in which she was supposed to live did not correspond with reality: she had no right to do the things she needed to do to stay sane and solvent. Fortunately, Quentina’s lawyer knew of a charity that took in people like her, the Refuge. This was a group that addressed the needs of stateless people and owned a series of properties around the country. It was in this way that Quentina had come to be living in a terraced house in Tooting with six other stateless women and a house manager. The charity split nationalities up because it didn’t like the idea of national cliques developing in the different houses and it thought that refugees learned English more quickly if they weren’t with their own language group. That was a mistake in Quentina’s view, but it was their charity, not hers, so she shared the house with a Sudanese woman, a Kurd, a Chinese woman who had arrived the day before and so far had not spoken, an Algerian, and two Eastern European women whose precise nationalities Quentina did not know.
    Living in the Refuge house with these people was not straightforward. Work was even less so. The charity supplied food to its ‘clients’ – that was the word – but could not, legally, pay them. Quentina found she had no ability to do nothing all day and that sitting around the house, and not having any disposable income of her own, gave her acute claustrophobia – a sense of being trapped, powerless, inside her own head. This was made worse by the fact that she was, in actuality, genuinely powerless, with no ability to affect her own destiny in any of the relevant important ways. So she decided that she would have to do something with her days, would have to work, in order not to go insane.
    There was a kind of grapevine among the refugees on exactly this issue, and that was how she came to encounter ‘Kwame Lyons’. He was known as someone who knew someone who could get identity papers for you and therefore through whom you could find work, as long as you were willing to pay him his cut. Quentina had no idea for how many people he provided this service, but she knew there was no way she was Lyons’s only – that word again – ‘client’. She didn’t know and didn’t want to know how many ‘clients’ Lyons had, how he got hold of the identity papers, whether he used the identity ‘Kwame Lyons’ with all his clients, how much money he was making, or his real name.
    Quentina had been told that one of the best places to go and work was a minicab company known to hire drivers with dodgy paperwork, but she also heard that a. they didn’t employ women and b. the company was owned by one of the big South London crime families, as a way of laundering cash. The fake ID papers were enough illegality for Quentina, who was temperamentally law-abiding and who also thought that staying on the right side of the law was good practical policy. There was a