Everybody was obsessed with the food. One of the fifteen demands of the inmates on hunger strike was for ‘edible food we can eat’. It was no joke. Quentina had not eaten like a princess at the Refuge, but that was a seven-star holiday resort compared to this. The meals did not merely fail to look appetising, they actually stank. The meat smelled off. There was no spicing to the food, no flavour. The desserts were even heavier and lumpier than the savoury courses. The only edible thing Quentina saw in her first two weeks at the detention centre was fruit – tired and bruised fruit, but nonetheless fruit, as welcome as a gift direct from heaven. She lost far more weight than she had ever lost when she was walking ten miles a day as a traffic warden.
When she said this to Makela, the Nigerian woman had smiled.
‘That’s how it begins,’ she said. ‘The first thing that makes people crazy is always the food.’
96
It might be today. Might it be today? Or not. It possibly wouldn’t happen at all. It might be better – no, it certainly would be better – if it didn’t happen. There was no reason to think that it would happen and even less reason to want it to happen so, on balance, it wouldn’t happen. But what if it did?
Matya was getting ready to go out on a date with Zbigniew. She was at her new shared flat in the bit of Brixton which was sort-of Herne Hill or vice versa, depending on whether the person you were talking to wanted to sound cool or posh. Her discovery of the place had been that rare thing, a positive experience of flat-hunting in London. The tip-off had come via a Hungarian friend. She had a colleague with a spare room who was looking for a sane, solvent, non-smoking female lodger, not allergic to cats, content not to have a television, willing during the owner’s work-related absences to check on the well-being of her widowed mother downstairs. The interview and checking of references took ten minutes: she offered Matya the flat on the spot, and she moved in the next day. Zbigniew borrowed Piotr’s van and brought round her stuff.
Zbigniew. He was the issue. Matya was dressing for a date with him, and by some process she wouldn’t analyse this had in her mind become the date on which he was going to make a pass and she either was or wasn’t going to go to bed with him. It was hard to examine exactly how they’d got to this point, how he’d gone from someone who she positively, definitely wouldn’t go out with, to someone she really liked. He ticked such a large number of negative boxes. He was a Pole, and Matya thought Poles complacent and self-absorbed. He wasn’t rich, and if there was a single box she definitely wanted ticked it was that a serious boyfriend would have serious money. He worked with his hands and – this overlapped with the money issue – Matya was keen to have a white-collar, desk-job boyfriend, someone as unlike all the boys she knew from home as possible.
And yet . . . there she was putting on her best knickers, pink ones with black trim, and her most effective bra, and the jeans she knew that men liked, the ones that got her most looks in the street or bar – the ones that were the most reliable indicator of whether she was carrying an extra kilo, because that made them instantly go from sexily snug to too-tight. She was putting on the beaded shirt Arabella had given her after a shopping splurge and was going to wear the suede jacket that made her waist look small and her tits look big. So why all this, if all these other things about Zbigniew were true? Well, it was the fact that his liabilities were also assets. His Polishness meant that he knew who he was. There was nothing fake about Zbigniew, no false notes to his talk or personality. It was refreshing, oddly so; most men these days felt as if they were trying to sell you something, some version of themselves, to try and get into your pants by pretending to be someone they were not. You were always trying to look beyond, look past the act, to see the real self. It was tiring, and Zbigniew wasn’t like that at all.
He wasn’t rich. That meant he knew the value of money: you could trust him with money, trust him to get the point of it. A rich boyfriend might make her own economies, her choices, her triumphs, seem petty. There were people in London who earned ten, twenty, fifty, a thousand times what she did – lots of people. How much did she really have in common with any of them? How would a boyfriend from that world feel about her flat-sharing, or know what to say when she lost her Oyster card with a full £30 on it? No problem of that kind with Zbigniew. His money values – his sense of what things cost – were completely in alignment with hers. That meant that their dreams were similar too. To people who are rich by London standards, the idea of a rose-covered cottage in the country with a garden seemed silly – they could buy one with half an annual bonus. But that wasn’t the way it seemed to Matya or to Zbigniew.
And then there was that question of working with his hands. Matya paused as she put on her eyeliner. If there had been anybody else present, she would have blushed. The plain truth was that Zbigniew’s work gave Zbigniew his body, and Zbigniew’s body was one of the things she liked best about him – put plainly, she liked its hardness. Zbigniew was not pumped up like some bodybuilder, some action hero on the television; he did not burst out of his clothes. But his body was firm and taut and whenever Matya had touched it or bumped into it she had always noticed that it was, simply, very firm. He was muscled and compact and clean and she could tell that his skin would feel lovely to the touch, smooth on top but taut underneath. It was not hard to imagine what he might be like in bed . . . He had a real sense of humour too, not like those English boys who would tire you out by always putting on a show, barely able to speak without trying to make a joke, but quiet and dry and quick to see the ridiculous side of things. He could do an impersonation of Mrs Yount changing her mind about the colour of the bathroom which made Matya cry with laughter.
And yet there were still things which added up to reasons for not fancying him. She had a vivid memory of what it felt like to consider Zbigniew unthinkable. This remembered Zbigniew would intermittently rise up and blot out her feelings for the Zbigniew who was in front of her at that moment. If he had known, he would have been very taken aback to learn that his biggest obstacle with Matya was her memory of the time when she had found him ridiculous. Because she had seen him first in a menial capacity, doing jobs for the Younts, a trace of that hung around him – he was in some sense, like her, servant-class. The fact that she was too made it worse, not better. Also, he was not good-looking: he had a broad flat blank Slavic face and hair a shade of brown that you couldn’t quite remember, so next time you saw him it was either a shade darker or a shade lighter than you expected. He wasn’t ugly, but he wasn’t good-looking. You just didn’t notice his looks.
97
Zbigniew had no idea that his deadliest rival was Matya’s former impression of him. He might have been relieved to hear it. As he saw it, his deadliest rival was the suitcase which, before going out on their date, he had taken out and dumped on his mattress at number 42 Pepys Road. The case had flipped open, and he was now sitting beside it. By some trick of memory, the amount of money in the suitcase looked bigger every time.
Perhaps the notes were expanding. Or perhaps it was because he was willing the money to be less of a problem. He was trying to squeeze it down in his mind. As a mental device this had some success, and he was able to go for stretches of time without thinking about what to do – except the actual money could not be compressed so easily, and looked bigger every time he checked on it.
Zbigniew was not prone to irrational fears, and he felt there was nothing irrational about his anxiety. He had held on to the money for far too long and now, whatever he did, he felt he had compromised himself. Not giving the money to Mrs Howe straight away had been a form of fault. At 5 per cent interest, £500,000 invested for three months was more than £6,000: that was how much money he had cost her in cash by not acting. By not doing anything he had stolen from her. He sold all the stocks in his modest portfolio, as a way of . . . as a way of . . . he wasn’t sure what it was a way of. The money he had invested in the course of his time in London had, thanks to the turbulent market conditions, shrunk
by about 15 per cent.
He should give the stolen money back. And yet . . . and yet what? There was the cottage, his father’s cottage, his parents’ golden years of retirement, the thing in all the world he most wanted for them, bought with stolen money. That was the problem. He would never be able to tell his father what he’d done; which meant that what he’d done would never seem right. It would be a lie, it would poison everything. He couldn’t do it. Yes, he should definitely give the money back. But he felt he couldn’t do that without telling someone. It must be the residual imprint of Catholicism. He had to confess. He had to have absolution. The weight of the secret was just too great to bear. And also there was a glimmering, flickering thought that he was reluctant to admit too directly, but which was certainly there. If he confessed to someone about the suitcase with half a million pounds in it, the suitcase which had never been missed, the suitcase whose owner had died long ago and which now belonged to someone who knew nothing about it and whose life would not be affected by its absence in any way, someone whose house was worth millions already, so someone (just to get this crystal clear) who was already rich, who didn’t need or know about or miss or suspect the existence of this money; and in the mean time the money was in the possession of him, Zbigniew, whose life it would transform utterly, whose many ambitions would be immediately fulfilled just by taking ownership of this cash – the years of ease and comfort for his parents, the chance to set himself up in life, the sudden access of capital which would let him move on, employ people, create wealth, share happiness, give his father one rose-covered cottage and give Matya another one, and a bed with a good firm mattress too – so there was on the one hand oblivious richness and on the other deep desiring and deserving need – well, maybe, if he confessed to a person about this predicament, this dilemma, maybe, just maybe, the person to whom he confessed would say, don’t be an idiot, you have to take the money for yourself, are you crazy? It would be an injustice not to. It would be theft – theft from yourself. That’s what the person to whom he confessed might say. Perhaps. He hoped. On the other hand – and Zbigniew had come to feel that this was more likely, even as he had grown resolved on his confession – she might think there was nothing to discuss. She might go the exact other way. She might say that it was so obvious that he had no choice but to hand over the money – that it was so morally clear-cut – that he had in effect stolen the money. She might conclude that Zbigniew was not the man she had thought he was, that anyone who could do such a thing as sit on a suitcase containing £500,000 of someone else’s money – she might think that a man who would do that could not be trusted. The conversation in which he told her about the suitcase might be the last conversation they ever had.
With these thoughts, full of apprehension, Zbigniew got dressed and went downstairs. Number 42 Pepys Road was almost finished. The paintwork downstairs needed touching up, then Mrs Leatherby had to look around and point out things that weren’t satisfactory, and then they were done. The Pepys Road era of Zbigniew’s life would be over. Maybe another part of his life would begin; he certainly hoped so. It all depended on what Matya said.
98
‘What, now? Right now? You don’t mean right now?’ said Zbigniew.
They were in a café on the high street, leaning with their heads close together. The agenda for the date had been coffee, film, dinner, and then who-knew-what. She had never looked lovelier. Now, though, it seemed there was a different plan.
‘Right now. This minute. From here – you take it from here and you go to see her. Call first. But you go to see her.’
‘But it’s Sunday afternoon!’
‘So what?’
Zbigniew blew out his cheeks.
‘Right now,’ he said. That was Matya’s solution to his problem. She had not judged or criticised or second-guessed – which, he realised, was what he had both expected and feared. She wasn’t the type to say, take the money and run. And he was glad that she wasn’t like that. He was even gladder that she hadn’t done a Piotr and denounced him or told him off. But she had been clear and firm on what to do next, and it wasn’t what Zbigniew had expected to hear. He had been braced for more of the agonising that had been going on inside him. Instead, she simply told him to take the suitcase to Mrs Leatherby straight away: right now.
Moving slowly, as if daring Matya not to stop him, he fished his mobile, the Nokia N60 which had changed his life, out of his pocket. She watched. He found the number, held it up in front of Matya so she could see. Matya made no gesture. So Zbigniew pressed the dial button.
The phone rang six times. OK, she was out. Zbigniew moved to break the connection and then –
‘Hello?’
‘This is Zbigniew. The builder. I need to come and see you. Now, today.’
‘Oh! What’s wrong?’ said Mrs Leatherby.
‘Nothing but I need to come and see you. I can’t say over the mobile. You are at home?’ Of course she was, that was where he had called her. Sounding about as worried as a person could possibly be, Mary confirmed that she was at home. Zbigniew said he would be there in about an hour and a half, depending on the train times.
‘And now you have to come with me,’ he said to Matya. This was his revenge.
‘Why?’ Matya folded her arms.
‘I can’t go to this place I’ve never been before, and by the way I have no idea where exactly it is, carrying a suitcase with half a million pounds in cash, on my own.’
That was his excuse, anyway. She had grumbled a little, and pretended to prefer the idea of sitting alone in her flat, listening to the radio, before giving in. They had left the café and gone back to Pepys Road, Matya’s first time there since leaving the employ of the Younts. Zbigniew had taken her up to the room where he was sleeping – which stank of paint, something he always noticed when he came in from outside – and showed her the suitcase. Matya had looked at it, then looked at him, and said, a little sadly:
‘This is probably the only time in our lives we’ll ever see that amount of money in cash.’
And now Matya sat across from Zbigniew in the rattling carriage of the train to Chelmsford. The train kept seeming to have got out of London into the countryside, before being reswallowed by the suburbs. At one point there was a stretch of green fields, and Matya thought they’d got out of the city, but then there was a long sequence of tower blocks. Some sections of the journey were as beautiful as anything in Hungary, and some were as ugly as anything in Hungary.
The trip was supposed to take forty-five minutes, but at one point the train stopped in a field, without explanation, for a quarter of an hour, so now it was late. The compartment was full. Across from them sat a young man, wearing a baseball cap pulled down, staring straight in front of him while he listened to music over headphones and chewed gum. There was a can of lager on the table in front of him. Zbigniew had thought about putting the suitcase on the overhead luggage rack, but then found his head filled with pictures of the train braking or jolting and the suitcase being thrown down and bursting open and the air filling with ten-pound notes, the passengers gaping at him while he crawled around scrambling to pick up the cash . . . so no, not the overhead rack. Not the space for luggage at the end of the compartment. In the end he put it in front of his seat with his legs folded over it and every time Matya looked at him she had the impulse to laugh.
They pulled into Chelmsford station. Outside there was a car park and a café. A solitary taxi was waiting at the rank. The cab driver had his eyes closed with a newspaper folded over his stomach. Matya pointed at the café.
‘I’ll wait for you there. If it looks like you’re going to be more than an hour or so, call me,’ she said. Then she leaned over, kissed him, and set off across the car park.
The cab driver gave a jolt when Zbigniew opened the door, then shook himself awake. The trip to Mrs Howe’s house took ten minutes, past houses which to Zbigniew’s eyes all looked very similar, bungalows and near-bungalows. He had thought it would be
more like a village but this was just a different sort of town. Zbigniew took the cabbie’s mobile number and paid him – five pounds, much cheaper than London. As he got out of the taxi he moved to shut the door, then realised, just as he was about to slam it closed, that he’d left the suitcase on the back seat. That would have been a very good way for the story to end.
99
Mary had been trying to keep herself busy since Zbigniew’s strange phone call. She was at the kitchen sink, washing up some pots which were in theory clean but which hadn’t been used for a bit, when she saw Zbigniew step out of the taxi and start walking up the drive.
Since her mother’s death, Mary had not been miserable all the time, but she had been flat. That was the word for it – flat. Of course she knew that what had happened was in one major way a relief: her mother had been set free of her suffering. Some people died lingeringly, horribly, for a period stretching into years. Petunia had suffered, and it had been too slow, but it wasn’t the worst of all deaths, and Mary was glad of that. And there was one kind of good news in her death – or what would have been good news if it could be considered in the abstract. The house had been valued at £1.5 million and the estate agent was bullish about the figure. Mary would never have to worry about money again. Indeed, if she didn’t want to, she’d never even have to think about it again. Alan’s garages did nicely and they were already well-off – exactly how well-off, she didn’t know, because it wasn’t the kind of question she liked to ask.
That was, for Mary, the trouble. The equation was too plain and too depressing. In the debit column, she had lost her mother; in the credit column, she now had a gigantic pile of cash. It felt as if her remaining parent had been taken away and in return she’d been given lots of money. Nothing else about her life had changed. Alan was still solid and dependable and, in his solid dependable way, a little distracted. Ben was still behind his wall of preoccupations, either in his bedroom doing God-only-knew-what on the internet or out doing God-only-knew-what with his friends; it wasn’t at all obvious to Mary which she liked less. The great positive addition to her life was her dog Rufus, a Yorkshire Terrier who was now three months old, and who was friendly, good-natured, not very bright, and the only living thing who seemed excited at the idea of being in Mary’s company. Now, as Zbigniew came up to the door, Rufus first ran to it, then back to Mary to check that she was aware of what was going on – come quick, developments! – and then back to the front door to yap at the prospective intruder. Keeping Rufus in position with her foot – which wasn’t hard, since the dog was mainly showing off his keenness – Mary opened the door.
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