The Embassy of Cambodia Read Online Free PDF

my offices – I will ask for you. In the meantime, you come here. We’ll sleep in shifts. You can trust me. I respect you, Fatou.’
    But she did not have her Oyster Card; it was in the kitchen, on the fridge under a magnet of Florida, and she would rather die than go inthere. Fine: he could meet her at six p.m. at Brondesbury Overground station. Fatou looked at the grandfather clock in front of her: she had four hours to kill.
    ‘Six o’clock,’ she repeated. She put the phone down, took the rest of the guest passes from the drawer of the faux-Louis XVI console and left the house.
    ‘Weighed down a bit today,’ the girl at the desk of the health club said, nodding at Fatou’s collection of plastic bags. Fatou held out a guest pass for a stamp and did not smile. ‘See you next time,’ this same girl said, an hour and a half later, as Fatou strode past, still weighed down and still unwilling to be grateful for past favours. Gratitude was just another kind of servitude. Better to make your own arrangements.
    Walking out into the cold grey, Fatou felt a sense of brightness, of being washed clean, thatneither the weather nor her new circumstances could dim. Still, her limbs were weary and her hair was wet; she would probably catch a cold, waiting out here. It was only four thirty. She put her bags on the pavement and sat down next to them, just by the bus stop opposite the Embassy of Cambodia. Buses came and went, slowing down for her and then jerking forward when they realized that she had no interest in getting up and on. Many of us walked past her that afternoon, or spotted her as we rode the bus, or through the windscreens of our cars, or from our balconies. Naturally, we wondered what this girl was doing, sitting on the damp pavement in the middle of the day. We worried for her. We tend to assume the worst, here in Willesden. We watched her watching the shuttlecock. Pock, smash. Pock, smash. As if one player could imagine only a violent conclusion and the other only a hopeful return.



HAMISH HAMILTON
    Published by the Penguin Group
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    First published in the USA in the
New Yorker
2013
Published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton 2013
    Copyright © Zadie Smith, 2013
    The moral right of the author has been asserted
    Cover design: gray318
    All rights reserved
    Typeset by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes
    ISBN: 978-0-241-96768-3