Capital

certain irony that her entire existence was lawless and stateless, but never mind. So she acted on advice from a traffic warden she met in the street, a man from Zambia, who told her about Control Services and the fact that they hired a high proportion of West and Southern Africans. She had taken her fake ID, filled out a form, filled out another form as part of a test, and got the job, and here she was eighteen months later with the lowest rate of upheld appeals of any Control Services employee.
    Quentina began to feel tired as she got closer to the hostel. She had been on her feet all day, and though she was used to it, they still ached. With luck there would be some hot water left; she was the only one of the ‘clients’ with a regular job and therefore the only one who arrived at home after five wanting a bath or shower. Quentina had always been clean and fastidious, but she had never really understood baths until coming to this cold country. Now a soak in steaming water was a significant physical pleasure. Tomorrow would be a day off; one of the blessings of work was that it made free time feel like a treat. She would watch a movie on the DVD player, have a drink, maybe go out dancing and look for a party. Quentina knew that she should probably call her lawyer to hear if there was any news, being as it was the Friday before Christmas and things would slow to a halt over the holidays, but she couldn’t quite face it. If there was good news she would hear it and if there was bad it would not be made any worse by being delayed. And the overwhelming probability was that there would be no news, that her state of not-ness would continue. If you are lukewarm I will spit you out of my mouth. That’s what the Bible said. Quentina did not think of herself as lukewarm, but it was hard to deny that she had been spat out.
    At the end of the road where she lived an African woman with a gigantic bag of what looked like yams, maybe from Brixton Market, was pausing for a breather. The woman looked at Quentina assessingly as she walked past. I wouldn’t mind some of whatever she’s going to cook tonight, thought Quentina. Never mind, nearly home. Well, not home, but where she lived. She turned the corner, still in her traffic warden’s uniform, still the most unpopular woman in the street, still spreading fear and confusion wherever she went.

22
     
     
    When Roger had something important on at work, he did something that he never told people about because it was so feminine-sounding: he made a huge deal of his washing and grooming in the morning. He showered and shaved as usual, shampooed and conditioned his hair; then he moisturised with a face mask which he left on for ten minutes, trimmed any stray nose or ear hair, rubbed some oil into his legs and chest, took some vitamins, took some artichoke pills for his liver, did some stretches, went downstairs in his dressing gown and ate a bowl of microwaved porridge. Then he dressed in his best clothes: his softest, lushest Savile Row shirt and its matching tie, a pocket square, antique cufflinks Arabella had found on eBay, the suit he’d had made bespoke after a bonus, the handmade shoes and underneath it all, the slinkiest secret of them all, his special lucky silk underpants, brought back by Arabella from a shopping junket to Antwerp. The paradoxical effect of all this pampering was to make him feel fortified, defended, ready for trouble.
    It was thus armoured that, on Friday 21 December, Roger went into the conference room at Pinker Lloyd ready to open the envelope that would tell him what he would be getting for his bonus. Going into the room, with its white noise switched on so that it was scientifically impossible to eavesdrop, and with the walls turned opaque for the meeting, Roger felt confident, fit and healthy, braced for whatever would come.
    In the room was Max, the head of the compensation committee. Junior employees receiving their bonuses would tend to have more than one person in the room, in case they flipped out in a bad year, which meant that they had to have more than one person in the room in good years too, so that the number of people in the room didn’t become an immediate give-away as to the size of the bonus. Heads of department got more credit than that, so Roger knew he’d be talking to one person only and guessed that it would probably be Max. The protocol for this meeting was that direct line managers didn’t usually come to it.
    Max was