The DC came back from the bar and put down the drinks. Mill took a swig of his no-alcohol lager.
‘So, this is about Pepys Road,’ Smitty said. ‘Where my nan lived.’
‘Exactly. And where there’s been a long-running campaign of harassment, postcards, graffiti, videos, a blog, and now acts of damage and vandalism and animal cruelty.’
As he had done with Shahid Kamal, Mill was looking very closely at Smitty while he said this. The artist’s reaction didn’t seem to be one of guilt or concern. Mill opened his briefcase and took out a folder with photocopies of the inquiry’s Greatest Hits, mainly postcards and stills from the DVD but also pictures of the graffiti and the defacements and a series of photos of the dead birds and scratched cars. Smitty looked at the pictures.
‘I remember this stuff starting, what, must have been about a year ago. Before my nan got ill. I went around there, she’d had a few cards with pictures of her house. And then she’d just had a DVD which she hadn’t played because she didn’t have a DVD player. I passed them on to my mum and that’s the last I heard of it. I assumed it had just stopped. My mum did the place up and then she sold it. We Want What You Have. A good line, I remember thinking. Funny that it kept going.’
‘We wondered if it might have something to do with you. It feels like your kind of thing.’
Smitty snorted. ‘My arse it does. Animal cruelty? I was a vegan for five years and I still hardly ever eat anything with a face. And I assure you I’m very bloody careful about not breaking the law. I have quite a lot to lose, guys. I can see why this feels arty and see why you made the connection but trust me, it’s two plus two equals eleven.’
He kept on looking through the pictures. Smitty’s mind went back to the time he had gone and seen his grandmother, the last time he had seen her in full health – if indeed she had been in full health, because in retrospect he’d thought that she seemed a little weak, a little peaky. If he’d only known, then… then what? Then, not necessarily anything different. But he still would rather he’d known than not known, and just gone back to his studio, back to work, just like on any other day, back to his desk, his known surroundings, his incredibly annoying assistant whom he’d sacked not long after.
‘Anyway, when it started up again, I didn’t hear about it at first. My nan had died and there wasn’t anyone in the house except the builders. But then my mum went to a meeting and found out it had been going on and getting worse. Then I saw something in the local paper. I start wondering about who’s behind it, and it hits me, an idea comes to me. And I’m pretty certain I know who it is. I don’t know how he got started, but I had a folder of stuff about the cards and the blog and the DVD at my studio, and I’m pretty certain that’s where he saw it. My former assistant, who I sacked, just before all this stuff started getting nasty. A nasty little toerag trying to get back at me. Trying to get into my head. Trying to be an artist. And all without realising that I didn’t even know it was going on. Silly little shit. But I can’t come to you because I can’t say who it is without saying who I am, and who I am is the single biggest thing in my life – the fact that people don’t know it’s what gives my work its edge and purpose. Which has now been taken away, thanks to our wonderful media. Which is the worst thing which has happened to me in years, thanks for asking. But it does mean I could come and tell you what I know.’ Smitty puffed out his cheeks and sighed. ‘Anyway, that’s his name.’ And Smitty slid across the table a piece of paper with his ex-assistant’s name and address.
105
All the internees said that it was an important moment when you had grown used to the food. Some said this was a bad moment, a sign that you had been there too long; others said it was a good moment, a sign that you had become philosophical about your fate. People did not stop complaining about the food when they passed through this moment but they did not complain in the same angry way; they were more resigned, and the big change was that they now ate. For Quentina, the moment came with a jelly. She had been eating nothing but bread and fruit for about a month and was feeling gassy, bloated and unhealthy, and then she saw this jelly. It was red and had pieces of fruit in it. It was the fruit which convinced her. It wasn’t that the jelly looked especially tempting; but it did look edible. She ate it: it was sweet. It tasted like jelly. She managed to get it down. The moment of defeat or of acceptance had occurred. There was a sense of psychological discomfort when she swallowed the first mouthful but after that it was OK.
Quentina had found a mental trick to help herself to get through her days in the detention centre. It was simple in its way. All she did was say to herself, over and over, whenever the need or occasion arose, the same words: this will not last for ever: this is the hardest thing you will ever do. This will not last for ever: this is the hardest thing you will ever do. She found herself saying it after she woke up in the morning and had a few seconds of not knowing where she was – and sometimes, in the happiest version of those seconds, she was back at home with her mother and father in their bedroom, except the door wasn’t where it should be, and the window was on the wrong side of the bed, and there was something strange about the light, and then she would come fully awake to the reality of the detention centre, England, internment, statelessness, being a non-person in a non-place waiting her way through non-time.
These things were not harder than each other. They were all equally hard. It was very difficult being in the same place as the hunger strikers. Some of the first hunger strikers had given up, one or two of them, in particular a Kurdish woman with two children whose husband had been killed by Saddam, coming right to the very edge of death, her eyes huge and their irises a strange grey colour, bizarre against the sallow near-yellow of her slack but stretched skin. If it hadn’t been for her children she would have starved herself to death, Quentina was sure; in the event she went too close to the edge, had kidney failure and nearly died anyway. Others had joined the hunger strike, so there were different internees at different stages of this war of nerves with the authorities. It was like the boys’ game of chicken – except that it wasn’t like a game at all.
One of the hardest things for Quentina was the sheer blankness of passing time. That was, after all, what had driven her to get the job as a traffic warden in the first place, the incredible temptation of having something to do, combined with the chance to earn a little spending money. Here, though, she found herself wondering why people were so agitated about the restoration of the 71p daily allowance. It wasn’t that the sum was so small, it was that there was nothing to spend it on. Visitors were allowed, but they weren’t allowed to bring anything in. There were charities which arranged visits so that internees had some point of contact with the outside world – for some internees these were the only British people they had ever spoken to who were not agents of the state. But Quentina couldn’t be bothered with that. She didn’t want to make small talk with a stranger and she even less wanted to complain to someone who had nothing to offer but sympathy. Makela the Nigerian doctor urged her to sign up for friends’ visits, as they were called, but Quentina resisted.
‘You’re making a mistake,’ said Makela, the kind of person who prided herself on her own frankness. ‘You’re turning in on yourself. I’ve seen it happen before.’
‘I thank you for your advice,’ said Quentina, and Makela knew enough to stop there.
There was a small library, mainly put together by donations from charities, presided over by one of the warders and by an Egyptian intellectual whose husband had been tortured in prison. The warder and the inmate got on well, the only instance of any such relationship in the internment centre. Quentina took out some books and tried to read, but this was yet another activity whose point she couldn’t see. The non-fiction stories were too boring or too depressing – a history of the International Monetary Fund, a book about a young woman suffering abuse from her stepfather – and the fiction suffered from an irredeemable fault: it was all made up. Quentina couldn’t, in her current frame of mind, see the point of anything that was made up. Makela said that books helped her to escape, but that didn’t make any sense. A book couldn’t get you out of the detention centre, or land like a helicopter and carry you off, or magically turn into a UK passport which gave you the right of residency. Escape was very precisely, very specifically what a book couldn’t help you do. Not in any literal sense. And the literal sense of escape was the only one that interested Quentina.