That was the birth of Manic Parker. This was someone she didn’t recognise at all. He was fizzing with… with… Daisy didn’t know quite what it was, but he was fizzing with something. She would wake up in the morning to find Parker already awake beside her; which was strange enough in itself, since Parker was never awake before her, and certainly not awake like this, staring at the roof, sometimes smiling but not with his usual cheeky look, instead looking like a not very nice person relishing a private joke at somebody else’s expense. Once or twice she had even been woken by Parker tapping his feet or jiggling his legs in bed – which was so strange, so not-Parker, that she hardly knew what to think. She was confident that she knew him well enough to be able to read the signs if he was having an affair, or had run out of money gambling on the internet, or something specific like that; but this she couldn’t decode. When she asked, he was brisk about saying that there was nothing wrong; equally brisk the one time she had asked him about when he was going to start looking for work. More than brisk: he’d said, ‘I’ve still got savings left, but if you don’t feel I’m contributing enough, I can move out.’ That meant, don’t ask again. So she didn’t, but she wasn’t happy. Manic Parker kept about his business, visibly scheming and making plans and cooking things up and, it sometimes seemed, cackling to himself in entirely private, entirely secret glee. She once or twice had the thought that she preferred Speechless With Grief Parker.
As if in answer to that thought, or in punishment for having had it, another version of Parker then turned up. This version was the one with whom Daisy was still living. This was the one who had Daisy making a Yes and No list while listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue on her iPod. He did not appear overnight, but Manic Parker first had moments, then hours, then days, when he transformed into what he was now, Dostoevsky Parker. This version of Parker first arrived in the form of nail-chewing, distraction, and an appearance of shifty preoccupation during times when he was supposed to be doing something else – paying attention to her, for instance, which had formerly been one of his strengths, but had for some months now seemed something he’d either forgotten to do or had lost interest in. She would go into the kitchen where he was supposed to be cooking the dinner, and find him just standing there gnawing the inside of his lip while the vegetables he was supposed to be stir-frying turned to charcoal. One of Dostoevsky Parker’s new pieces of body language was to sit at the table with his head in his hands. Instead of waking up early, Dostoevsky Parker couldn’t sleep: he had trouble falling asleep (which Daisy knew was a sign of anxiety), he woke up early and couldn’t go back to sleep (which Daisy knew was a sign of depression), and during the rare middle bits when he was asleep, he thrashed around like a breakdancing dervish. Dostoevsky Parker even looked different from Normal Parker: he was heavier and paler and more earthbound. He looked as if he subsisted exclusively on carbohydrates and ill feeling.
So what was going on? Daisy had no idea. But one big difference between this Dostoevsky Parker and Grieving Parker was that this one didn’t seem to be mourning a specific loss so much as suffering a general and all-consuming sense of gloom and, unless Daisy was mistaken, guilt. He was fretting not about something which had been done to him, but something he’d done.
‘I wish you’d tell me what’s the matter, baby,’ Daisy said to him one evening in November, when she’d got home knackered from work and had wanted nothing more than to have supper cooked for her, maybe a back rub, and then to watch some junk TV with her boyfriend of long standing. Instead here she was sitting in silence over a ready meal she herself had microwaved, acting as the equivalent of an unpaid psychiatric nurse. She wanted to yell, but that didn’t work with Parker; he would just retreat further. So she did her best to gentle him out of himself. She also knew that there wasn’t much more of this she could take, and that she couldn’t face doing it for much longer. She couldn’t think of any more things to list under No.
What she didn’t know was that Parker was longing to tell her, was desperate to tell her. He wanted nothing more than to confess. He wanted to break down all the barriers he had artificially built up, to knock down his jerry-built edifice of silence and secrecy and false self; to blurt and blub and let it all out. The need to confess rose in his throat like a nausea. And yet he couldn’t speak, and so the two young people who loved each other stayed stuck and miserable.
95
If Quentina had been asked what she expected from the detention centre, she might have got several things right straight away. She could for instance have guessed that there would be no privacy, that male guards would feel free to barge into women’s rooms and search their belongings whenever they felt like it, and that many of the women, some of them devout Muslims, would be outraged. No surprise there. She would have expected the food regime to be poor – not that they couldn’t get anything to eat after five o’clock, or that the children, of whom there were many, would sometimes be crying with hunger. She knew that the place was a prison and would feel like one. But what she hadn’t expected was the politics – the internal politics. When she arrived, she found that a large group of prisoners was on hunger strike to protest against conditions at the prison and they had a list of fifteen demands, including that the authorities give back the birth certificates that they’d taken away from children born in the UK, and also that they reinstate the daily allowance of 71 pence. And they wanted access to legal information, since the majority of them had no legal representation.
Quentina agreed with all fifteen of the demands. But she had only just got there, was still dazed and bewildered from the immigration hearing, and just didn’t feel ready to pitch straight into a hunger strike. The causes were all right, all just, but they weren’t honestly her causes – she was a new girl and hadn’t even known about the existence of the 71p allowance. Quentina felt that she hadn’t been in the detention centre long enough to get really angry about the conditions. For the moment she was just trying to survive.
That wasn’t the general feeling. The atmosphere at the Refuge in Tooting had been low, verging on depressed, with the emphasis on survival and endurance. Thrown in with that was an unspoken emphasis on the need to acknowledge the good intentions of their benefactors, who were keen to send the message that not all British people were as cruel as their government and their newspapers. That was not the mood at the detention centre. Here people were angry, fumingly angry, all the time. They hated the government, hated the press, hated the administrators of the detention centre. There had been riots the previous year, when warders had tried to prevent detainees from watching a documentary about conditions at the centre. It was easy to imagine that there could be riots again. In the mean time there was the hunger strike.