“Smile,” the man said, and Zahra moved her mouth into a rictus that no one could mistake for happiness.

  “Call that a smile?” he said, but she continued to look at the camera with that frozen grin and deliberately deadened eyes. You took what forms of subversion you could get away with in a place like this. She’d heard about this guard from a colleague in Legal who’d recently visited the detention center—You’ll know him by the tattoo of Van Gogh surrounded by sunflowers on his arm, her colleague had said. He made everyone smile for the photographs that he slipped into lanyards for ID purposes, even people coming to say goodbye to loved ones they might never see again.

  He handed her the lanyard, the vein on a bicep cutting through Van Gogh’s cheek, and placed a band that said visitor around her wrist. She walked the few paces to the desk where she had to hand in the book she’d brought. The guard at the desk was dressed as all the others were—big black boots, black trousers, and black shirt emblazoned with the logo of the private security company that ran the detention center—but her smile was friendly, and then turned genuinely regretful as she weighed the book and said it was over the limit.

  When Zahra picked the book, she hadn’t considered the weight limit of personal items that each detainee was allowed. Britain’s Best Bakes tipped Azam’s scales over the cutoff point.

  “But only by seventy grams,” the woman said. Surely that was a figure low enough to be forgiven but, no, she reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a pair of scissors. Zahra and the guard looked at the table of contents, trying to work out what was dispensable. Scones? Buns? Fancy biscuits? In the end, Zahra cut out the introduction and Soufflés and Fruit Cakes, and the woman bagged the book and said the detainee would get it after it had been inspected to make sure it wasn’t hiding any contraband.

  The December cold assailed her as she walked out of the structure, leaving behind its Disney murals and Christmas tree and the perverse check-in sign above its desk as though this detention center were just another terminal of the airport beside which it had been constructed. As she crossed the parking lot, Zahra could see the runway through a wire fence, a British Airways airplane taxiing along it, taking people on holidays or business trips or to long-awaited reunions. She felt the shame of being part of that world, so unthinking about the luxury of coming and going.

  She walked up to the warehouse-like building toward which she’d been directed and used her shoulder to push open the heavy door marked visits. It should have been a relief to get out of the cutting wind, but indoors felt more oppressive than outdoors. There was one room after another, one guard after another, checking her visitor number, checking her lanyard, sending her through a scanner that didn’t beep but still was followed by a complete pat-down. Her mouth inspected, the skin behind her ears inspected, hair lifted off her neck even though it barely covered her neck. You felt criminal simply for being here. Through another door, another door, a waiting room, another door, and finally into the detention block. The door to the block opened with a high-pitched scream as though the building were an animal in fear or rage, and then the door closed and the silence within was absolute. No birdsong, no planes, nothing of life beyond this space. More doors, stairs, guards, checks, and finally she was in the visitors’ room with its low ceiling and one drooping potted plant. The guard at the far end instructed her to sit at that table there, next to the window, although there was no one else here and no reason why she shouldn’t be allowed to choose where to sit.

  The window overlooked a yard. This was where the vans brought detainees it had rounded up; and this was where it filled up vans to take them to charter flights that would fly them back to the countries they had left, often fled. The door through which the detainees came and went from these vans had a sign over it saying we are one happy family no matter who we are. What kind of mind would think to put up a sign like that? The cruelty of this place made her set aside all the usual words—immoral, unfeeling, playing politics with people’s lives—and land instead on evil.

  “Thank you for coming,” she heard, and looked up to see a man in a tracksuit and flip-flops. Azam, so altered. He’d lost a great deal of weight, his eyes shadowed with exhaustion, and the smile he gave her was weak, as though he were too out of practice with smiling to know how to do it properly anymore.

  She handed him the cup of coffee she’d bought at the vending machine outside this room, using the five pounds she’d been allowed to bring through for this purpose—all her other belongings were in a locker in check-in.

  He opened the lid, sniffed it luxuriously. “Who needs a double macchiato with oat milk?” he said, and briefly he was familiar again.

  “I bought you the book you asked for,” she said. “But it was too heavy, so I had to cut out soufflés and fruit cakes and . . . something else, what was it?”

  “Not éclairs, I hope?”

  “Azam, I’m not an animal.”

  “You are an angel.” She saw him glance at her wrist and take in the bracelet he’d given her.

  “I’m going to set up a bakery,” he said. “In Kabul. They’ve never eaten such things. Chocolate tart with candied lemon. Fondants filled with salted caramel. I’ll be a millionaire. The BBC will come to interview me. I’ll say, Your country sent removal vans for me—like I was a piece of old furniture.” He leaned back and closed his eyes, as if that burst of optimism had taken everything out of him.

  The judge who had heard his appeal had said she would have ruled that he could stay if that one punch had been the only reason for refusal. But then he’d gone and worked illegally, leaving her no choice but to uphold the Home Office’s decision. His lawyer was trying every avenue of further appeal, but Zahra had spoken to the lawyer and knew there was no real hope of reprieve.

  “I’m sorry,” Azam said to her. “I know I let you down.”

  She shook her head, unable to say anything.

  “All this because I was working in a kitchen for six pounds an hour. If I hadn’t, I would be at the bakery right now, waiting for Mr. Bose to come in for his afternoon coffee and lemon drizzle cake. Texting Ray across the road about the footie. Thinking about what the missus and I were going to do for dinner.” He raised empty hands and lowered them, indicating the impossibility of it all now, the ordinary details of his life a miracle he’d never experience again. Zahra remembered dinners in her adolescence, passing her father a saltshaker and wondering if it would be the last time, if tomorrow someone might come to take him away.

  “How long will they keep me here? I’m going mad.”

  “I wish I knew,” Zahra said. There was no time limit on detention. It could be days or weeks or months. She’d heard of cases where it was years. CCL had been trying for ages to change the laws. “Are the conditions they’re keeping you in very bad?”

  “Six of us in a cell. With a toilet. And no privacy. Why can’t they put a screen around the toilet, why can’t they do that? They want us to know we’re animals to them, nothing better than animals.”

  He was looking across the courtyard as he spoke, toward the two footballs stuck in the razor wire above the boundary wall. Zahra thought she knew what went on in places like this, but no one had ever mentioned the toilets without privacy. Perhaps it was a new indignity, perhaps there were so many indignities that went on here that no one could bear to list them all.

  “She’s going to stay here, isn’t she?”

  He meant his wife, Shaz. She knew Kabul only as the place her parents had risked so much to flee. Her family was in London—her parents, siblings, nephews, and nieces. All her friends, every known thing in the world was here. Everything but Azam.

  “She thinks I don’t know. She’s not going to tell me while I’m in here. People keep trying to kill themselves, sometimes they succeed.” Azam sat up, rubbed his eyes with the heel of his palm. “I’m sorry, this isn’t why I asked you to come. There was a man here. He said he knew you. He said things about you I didn’t like. I almost hit him, but then I thought you don’t want me hitting another person. Do you know someone called Jimmy?”

  “Jimmy’s here?” she looked up at the door, half expecting him to walk through it.

  “Not anymore. They put him on a plane back to Pakistan. But he was saying ridiculous things about you. That you work with the Home Office to get people deported from England. He told me that you must have told them to reject my application because his rejection was exactly the same reason—bad character and conduct—and he knew you were behind that.”

  “That’s absurd,” she said automatically. “There must have been a specific reason for his rejection.”

  “Yes, he said it was something he’d done years ago.”

  She raised the heels of her boots off the floor and pressed the soles of her feet hard against the carpet to absorb the energy running quick through her. “How many years?” Her voice a little breathless.

  “When he first came here. Five, six years? He didn’t pay a bill. Less than ten pounds it was, and for that they threw him out of the country.”

  Her relief was enormous.

  “I don’t work with the Home Office, Azam.”

  “You don’t think I believed him! I just thought you should hear about it. He said he knows who your father is and he’s going to tell him what you did.”

  I’ll tell your father. That was all he had in his arsenal, like a flailing schoolboy who knows there’s no way to fend off the punch coming at him. She almost found it in her to feel sorry for him. A ten-pound bill!

  Azam hadn’t liked Jimmy. Jimmy said anyone who tried to appeal their cases was a chutiya—Azam apologized for using the term of abuse, but that was what Jimmy had said. He said the appeal system was rigged. It would drag on for years, forcing you into some kind of crime like Azam had committed, and in the meantime all your savings would go to lawyers. He said Azam was a double chutiya for sitting in here thinking his lawyer was going to find a way to get him out before the government got round to finding a chartered flight to put him on. Jimmy hadn’t appealed his case, but he also hadn’t bought himself a ticket back to Karachi when his leave to remain was denied. His daughters were in London, living with his ex-wife. He knew she wasn’t going to send his daughters to visit him in Pakistan.

  So Jimmy had ignored the notices telling him to leave the country until armed men broke down his door in the middle of the night and brought him here. Every weekend his daughters came to visit him in the detention center. Immigration officials also came to see him. They knew he had the money to buy a plane ticket; if he did that, they would let him walk onto a PIA flight and leave respectably. But no, he wanted those weekend visits with his daughters, as many as he could get.

  Zahra looked across the room. One other table was taken now. A man dressed like Azam was seated on one side, another man in a three-piece suit, very dapper, across from him. They were both in their sixties, maybe even their seventies. The first man had his arms wrapped around his body, the second man was sitting on his own hands. They were both silent, looking at each other in a way that anyone who had ever been in love would recognize. The first man’s chest rose, and a long sigh left him. The second man bent his head. The first man extended his palm and caught his lover’s tear, brought it to his lips.

  “Seven weeks,” Azam said. “Jimmy was here seven weeks. Could you do that?”

  Could she endure seven weeks in a place like this for the sake of one visit per week with anyone? Who would that anyone even be?

  “I didn’t like him,” Azam said again. “But he didn’t deserve this. None of us deserve this.” It had been eleven days, and he was broken already. Seven weeks.

  She turned her face away from Azam to look at the footballs impaled on the wire, and then at the blue sky above; a plane cut through the expanse, its tail fin unfamiliar. She imagined the men and women in window seats seeing England for the last time, and then she imagined the ones who kept their eyes locked straight ahead, not wanting to look at the lives lost to them forever.

  The Christmas tree was beginning to droop, a scattering of pine needles on the floor near the sliding glass door that led into the garden. Maryam slid Christmas ornaments off the branches, tossed the robust ones into a polar-bear-patterned backpack, handed the fragile ones to Zahra to wrap. Nusrat Fateh Ali sang about intoxication through speakers so small their power was astonishing, which was not a thing anyone had ever said about that great mountain of a singer. It was the final evening of the year. Zola and Layla had been gone three very long days. Maryam took down a wolfhound ornament, looked across the living area to Woolf, snoring on her pillow bed.

  “She’ll be lonely when you’re in the office,” Zahra said, following the direction of her gaze.

  “She’s already getting so much love from the neighbors. They have a group chat set up to coordinate who’ll visit her every midafternoon when she’s used to Zola and Layla coming home from school. My dog is more popular than me.”

  “There, there, pup. I like you.” Zahra patted Maryam’s head.

  It had been years since they’d spent New Year’s Eve together. Zahra was usually out with Rose and that crowd, Maryam at home with Layla and Zola and Mark and his family. But this year Zahra had started talking about what they’d cook together for their New Year’s meal, as if it had already been decided that it would be just the two of them. Now the scent of lamb biryani was beginning to permeate the room, a subtle undernote to the jasmine candles that were arranged all around, on counters and tables and even the floor, making it unnecessary to turn on any lights but the ones on the Christmas tree.

  Zahra placed a wrapped crystal bauble back in its box, picked up her glass of red wine, and sniffed at its wide bowl. She raised her eyebrows at Maryam—you didn’t have to be a connoisseur to know this wasn’t the usual twelve-pound Côtes du Rhône that was Maryam and Layla’s house wine. Probably closer to a thousand pounds, though Maryam wasn’t about to mention that. A Christmas gift from Margaret Wright, unusually lavish, in recognition of the windfall from the Imij sale. Layla had refused to drink it—the pressure of doing it justice with her appreciation was too high, she’d said.

  “Jimmy’s residency was refused,” Zahra said. She’d walked over to the glass sliding door, standing where Maryam couldn’t see her.

  “Oh?” Maryam was unwinding the loop of a cassette-tape ornament that had tangled on the pine needles.

  “He ended up at the same detention center as Azam before they flew him out. He was claiming I got the Home Office to reject him.”

  Maryam glanced over her shoulder at Zahra. Zahra was looking at something in the sky. It wouldn’t be midnight for a while, but Londoners from all the surrounding neighborhoods must already be gathering on Primrose Hill to get into the prime position for seeing the fireworks over the Thames. Perhaps someone had started to release sky lanterns, red on black, floating high.

  “I’m not sure what’s happening here,” Maryam said, tapping on her phone to turn down the volume of the music.

  “Happening where?”

  “Are you telling me something or asking me something?”

  “What would I be asking you?”

  “Okay,” Maryam said, turning back to the tree.

  A few moments later: “If I were asking you something, then?”

  “Then I’d tell you not to worry. I kept your name entirely out of it.”

  Maryam tossed the wooden cassette tape into the bag, looked wearily at how many ornaments remained. She and Layla were always careful not to spoil Zola; her life was ridiculous enough already compared to her friends’ at state school—Layla’s insistence, the state school—but the Christmas tree was an exception. Ten feet high, its branches laden; they’d need a stepladder to get to the top of it. Why wasn’t Zahra helping?

  “He was rejected over an unpaid bill. A ten-pound bill.” Zahra had turned toward Maryam now, was frowning a little, as if irritated by something she felt she should be able to work out, but couldn’t.

  “Telling or asking?”

  “Asking.”

  She opened the Imij app, entered Hentucky Fried Chicken in the search bar, clicked the “history” option, and moved the date sliders to the position she wanted. Zahra remained standing where she was, so Maryam went over to her and held the phone up so they could both watch the CCTV video that had been posted five years ago. It had been the last video in the folder Golden Boy had sent her, and she’d clicked on it drained of hope that she’d find anything she could use. A man leering at girls in a nightclub wouldn’t be enough, she knew.

  And then she’d seen this: A man in a Hentucky Fried Chicken–branded shirt put a rectangle of paper on a Formica-topped table, talking amiably to two customers. He walked away, and a few seconds later one of the men—Jimmy—inclined his head toward the door and the two men stood and ran out.

  free hfc super meal for anyone who can identify these men, the post said.

  “Engineer’s salary and he won’t pay for fried chicken,” Maryam said. “Such a colossal loser.”

  Zahra pressed play and the scene repeated itself. She rubbed her hand over her face, clearly forgetting about the eyeliner she’d worn to make the evening feel festive.

  “How did you find this?”