Capital

Christmas Eve, the DVDs began arriving at houses in Pepys Road. Except it’s misleading to say DVDs, plural, because in truth they were all the same DVD. The case had a printed label saying ‘We Want What You Have’ but inside the DVD had nothing written on it.
    The footage was taken by a hand-held camera and began at the south end of the street, in front of the Kamals’ shop. From the fact that the street was entirely quiet, but that it was daylight, it was possible to deduce that the film had been shot very early in the morning on a summer’s day. At moments the low morning sun dazzled the camera and the picture went white.
    From the technical point of view, the film was a mess. The camera-work was jerky and not always focused. The colours were blurry. It was like an early film, from the time before film had been properly invented. Whoever was holding the camera had wandered from side to side in the street. Combined with the wobbliness and the movement and the low quality of the digital film, the effect was to produce a faint sensation of motion sickness. Sometimes the person with the camera had gone up close to specific houses; he (though of course there was no reason to think that it was a ‘he’) had gone right up to Petunia Howe’s front door, for instance, and held his focus on the door number. On other occasions he seemed to be standing in the middle of the road, and panning the camera from side to side, as when he stood outside number 27, the house belonging to Mickey Lipton-Miller. Or he would occasionally zoom right in on someone’s car, and look through the windscreen, like a thief on the prowl for a satnav to steal. He lingered, with extra lasciviousness, on the Younts’ Lexus S400, as if the camera wanted to be inside the car, running its hands over the leather upholstery. At other moments the cameraperson seemed to be taking a special interest in architectural details. No two houses in the street were identical, so the camera took a look at the pointing on number 36, and then later on the subtly different pointing five doors down at number 46. Or it showed the bay window at number 62, and then the differently shaped bow window at 55, which was polygonal. He or she seemed to take a particular interest in the big expensive double-fronted properties.
    Although there was nothing sinister in the content of the DVD, its effect was sinister – something about the idea of somebody watching the street, noticing it so closely. It could not be taken for anything to do with an estate agent or viral marketing. And there was an air of yearning about the film. It was like watching a child looking in the window of a toyshop. Not everybody watched the DVD, but those who did were left with the feeling that somebody somewhere did indeed want what they had.
    The DVDs came in jiffy bags. The postmarks on the bags were from all around London.

24
     
     
    Quentina was not a devout Christian, just as she was no longer a believing Marxist, but she did like going to church. She liked the language and the precious sensation of warmth, she liked the Zimbabwean curate at St Michael’s, the African Anglican church she went to in Balham, and most of all she liked the choirmaster, a beautifully firm-looking Botswanan called Mashinko Wilson, a teaching assistant (she’d discovered) with a voice so smoky and so sexy that it was made for singing hymns. The effect was not as noticeable with the African and African-influenced songs, but at Christmas, when he led the choir and congregation through the English Christmas hymns, it was mesmerising: ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ sung in this warm voice, clear and sensual and so evidently linked to his healthy, muscular body. Quentina had discovered the Mashinko–Christmas carol effect a week before the previous Christmas, and she’d been looking forward to it all year since. Advent and now Christmas Eve were fulfilling all expectations. Today, after the service, she was going to go up to Mashinko Wilson and declare an interest.
    As for the church itself, Quentina liked that too. It was built in a grey stone, not the same as the houses around – granite, maybe. The church had a narrow central aisle and high windows at the end, very traditional, but a section at the back had been glassed in to make a kind of sitting room and crêche, from which wailing and thumping sounds could often be heard during prayers and sermons. It was difficult for the preacher to compete.
    Back home,