Capital

Quentina had gone to the Christmas Eve service at St Mary’s Cathedral in Harare every year, with her mother. Mama was the family Christian: Quentina’s father used to say that she believed enough for the rest of them added together. She would take one child, Quentina or her brother or sister, to church with her on Sunday, and didn’t seem to mind which, as long as it was one of them. She preferred but did not insist that they all come for Easter Sunday and Christmas. Quentina’s father she left alone, by peaceable mutual consent. Quentina liked it, because it was one of the only times she got to be on her own with her mother, and she liked the high-flown language of the old Bible, and the exotic imagery of the distant dark cold Northern Christmas; there was an irony in the fact that now she was in the cold north, the thing she liked most about Christmas was the sense of warmth, the lights, the colour, the cosiness.
    The baby as the most powerful person in the world. This idea had a deep resonance for Quentina, because she had experienced it first-hand, twice. Quentina herself was a child of the revolution, born in the year Zimbabwe gained its independence, 1980. Her brother Robert was born five years later, and she could still recall the sense of sheer injustice at her own displacement, and at the same time the magic sense of life being rearranged around this new arrival. Robert had had a squashed angry face and the inside of his mouth, which was often visible because he spent so much time howling, was the pinkest thing anyone had ever seen; and his mother and father’s gentleness and devotedness were extraordinary to see. Much later Quentina realised that that was how they would have been with her too. At the time she only felt the injustice and envy and resentment of her displacement by this horribly powerful interloper.
    She hadn’t minded her sister’s birth so much. It was hard to resent Sarah, who seemed sweet and placid when she was born and still seemed sweet and placid twenty years later. Robert had been furious, which Quentina at the time had thought was great. Let him get a taste of how it feels. The terrible power of the newborn baby. The defenceless child who rules the world. The bundle in the crib who is President of the World. Deal with that, little brother!
    It was no doubt because Quentina felt Robert’s terrible, unforgivable youngerness so strongly that his death hit her so hard. His first symptom was a cough that simply would not go away, followed by a cascade of other symptoms, none of which seemed big at the start, none of which ever resolved or improved, until he was, within a year, covered in sores, blind, breathless, visibly dying, and within another three months, dead. Aids, of course. What else? The young man who had once been the baby at the centre of the world, the Christ-child in his crib.
    Perhaps that in and of itself would not have been enough to change Quentina’s direction of life. His death made her philosophically angry, angry with life, but that wasn’t the same thing as specific anger, the kind of anger that brought not just a wish for change but the will to act on the wish. That didn’t come until Quentina broke her ankle in a fall and was taken to hospital. She was treated by a doctor who told her she hadn’t broken it, just strained it.
    ‘The best treatment is rest,’ said the doctor. ‘Will you go out with me?’
    ‘No.’
    Quentina spent the next six weeks pretending to evade his attentions, with steadily less zeal. He was called John Zimbela and was, Quentina gradually came to realise, the most admirable person she had ever known, and also just about the angriest, ecstatic with rage at the Mugabe government’s Aids policy, or anti-policy, since its principal pillars were evasion and falsehood. With several friends he belonged to an underground network which illegally printed and distributed leaflets about HIV, safe sex, infection rates, the course of the illness, and the treatment regimes which were available in the rich countries. He was risking his livelihood and perhaps his life, and though when she had met him Quentina had known about Aids, she had thought that her brother’s death was a kind of accident, a too common accident perhaps, but basically an act of God, whereas she now realised it was the result of a set of policies that amounted to institutionalised manslaughter – not murder, you couldn’t quite call it that, but manslaughter. And