Capital: A Novel

by John Lanchester

  Apart from that, his first day at training was the best day of his seventeen years and four days on the planet. They had begun with stretches and then a game in which two players stood in the middle of the circle of five others, who tried to keep the ball away from them by passing. It was fun and good technical practice too, but the real buzz for Freddy came when he was sent for his turn in the middle at the same time as the £20 million midfielder, and the two of them set out to intercept the ball. The exciting thing was simply looking across and seeing this world-famous player and seeing that he was human, real, right there next to him, and that this was now to be Freddy’s world from here on.

  After the two-in-the-middle game, there was an hour and a half of fitness training: a warm-up run, then some interval running, then shuttle sprints. Freddy had spent the last two years working to the personalised diet and fitness programme sent to him by the club, so it was fine. He was used to being the quickest player anywhere he ran, so it was startling to be in the middle of the pack or a little behind – but in any case he was still growing, and Freddy knew very well that one of the bases of his game was that he could run as quickly with the ball as he could without it.

  Once they’d finished the running they did some skills work, and then they finished off with a game whose name was so odd that Freddy had to ask the translator to tell him it three times: cochon au milieu, he kept saying: pig in the middle. Freddy took his turn running around trying to tag the others and they took their turn in the middle too, grown men running and skipping and dodging and laughing, the oldest of them in his early thirties putting as much gusto into it as the youngest, Freddy himself, panting and giggling at the same time. And then the coach blew his whistle and training was over. The players headed for the changing room, and for their busy afternoons of shopping and gambling and meeting their agents and sex.

  19

  Petunia sat waiting to see the doctor – no, not just the doctor, but the consultant. She was on the eighteenth floor of a tower block in South-East London and so far no aspect of her day had gone well. She was feeling weak and dizzy most of the time, and there was also a new and horrible symptom – horrible because so disconcerting – that her vision was somehow being affected, as if a shadow or blur were intruding on the left side of her eyesight. It was such a strange sensation that at times she thought she might be imagining it and at other times she was sure she wasn’t. Going out of the house at all was something of a challenge, so getting all the way across here hadn’t been possible without taking a minicab, which was not something she liked to do – it was one of the subjects about which she agreed with Albert, he who had never, not once in his life, taken a taxi. Part of the trouble was that she would have to take a minicab back and although there would be a freephone in the hospital from which she could order one Petunia knew that this was certain to involve quite a lot of anxious waiting, wondering if the cab had been stolen by someone else, struggling to find somewhere to sit, and all while she was dreading the thought of another bad turn.

  When she got there, having tried to be stoical, it was much worse than she had imagined, because the skyscraper forecourt of the hospital suffered from a wind-tunnel effect. There was a genuine gale-force wind raging across the piazza, carrying near-horizontal rain into the chaos of ambulances and taxis and patients and visitors and wheelchairs. Every other person seemed to have a clear idea of where they were going and of how to get there and a keen sense of their own rightness about the need to get there in a hurry, which was daunting for Petunia who had none of those things except an awareness that she needed to find the lifts and get to the eighteenth floor.

  The first lift had a huge crowd outside it. Petunia couldn’t get in. For the second lift, she was closer to the front of the queue, but some people overtook and got in first and then a man with a wheelchair and a leg in plaster said ‘Excuse me’ and went in front of her and then there was no more room. She did manage to get in the third lift, because a nurse took pity on her and created a space by holding her arm in front of the door so Petunia could slip past. The nurse smiled at Petunia as the lift began to go up, while four very tall young male doctors talked about a rugby game they had coming up that weekend.

  She got out at the eighteenth floor and queued for five minutes to tell the woman on the desk that she had arrived. The woman asked her name and then typed it into a computer and then without saying anything wrote on a card and gave it to Petunia, who gathered from that that she was supposed to sit and wait until her name was called. So Petunia went and sat on a plastic chair in the waiting room. The chair was bright orange with a hole in the back and its seat was canted forward so that Petunia was constantly having to shuffle her bottom and adjust her position in order not to slip off. On the five seats next to Petunia, an Asian family of five sat waiting, a grandmother and her daughter and son-in-law and her two grandchildren. They had brought books, video game thingies for the children, magazines, and a plastic bag of snacks; their equipment for the wait and their obvious experience at waiting made Petunia feel very amateurish.

  After about an hour, Petunia summoned up the nerve to go and ask if she had been forgotten. No one ever admitted that they had actually forgotten you, but the fact was that reminding people of your existence did sometimes have an effect. The woman at the counter looked up from her computer very briefly and looked down again before answering.

  ‘There’s a queuing system,’ she said.

  ‘Only my appointment was for one thirty and it’s now a quarter to three.’

  ‘All Dr Watson’s clinic appointments are for one thirty,’ said the woman.

  ‘Oh well, that’s all right then,’ said Petunia. The woman looked up at her briefly again, and Petunia went and sat back down with her heart beating harder and more quickly.

  Forty-five minutes later the woman called out, ‘Miss Hoo, er, Miss Howe.’ Petunia went in to see the consultant. A young woman doctor in a white coat – Petunia could see she was a doctor because of her stethoscope – smiled and said hello while in the corner of the room a man in his fifties sat at a computer screen typing. There was a lot of complicated-looking equipment in the room, machines with wires and screens, a couch with a drawn-back screen and a shiny metal device on a stand hanging over it, which instantly made Petunia think of something on a television nature programme, but gone wrong, like a huge steel insect.

  The woman doctor indicated a chair and said, ‘He won’t be a minute.’ The older doctor sat and typed for five minutes and then said,

  ‘Yes, hello. You are?’

  ‘Mrs Howe.’

  The doctor looked at the notes.

  ‘Symptoms worse?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Raising his voice, as if the fact that she had not immediately understood the doctor’s question meant that she was deaf, he said:

  ‘Have the symptoms you reported got any worse? The things that you felt were wrong with you, are they worse? Are they different? Are there any new things?’

  Petunia described her symptoms. When she came to the one about the vision in her left eye, she had the feeling that the doctor was listening to her with more attention. He had brown hair of the shade which in youth was probably red, and his face was reddish too; he looked like a drinker and he also looked like a man who was often angry, and who used anger to get his way. An effective man. He had the air of an over-quick listener, someone who makes up his mind about what is being said to him very quickly, and then doesn’t entirely listen to the rest of what is being said. Petunia, perhaps because she had spent so much of her own life in what felt like passive states, attendant on other people who were better at expressing their wishes and needs, had always been very conscious of people’s ways of waiting while other people were talking or doing things. This doctor was truly terrible at that. He was vibrating with impatience.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘And the tiredness and balance? Feel tired, dizzy?’

  Petunia described the ways in which that was
true. As she spoke she felt herself becoming more anxious. Something about describing her own symptoms made her wonder, for the first time, if she might truly be ill; if she might be going to die. The thought had flitted through her mind before but now it seemed to be settling in. It was embarrassing, to have got to the age of eighty-two without having these thoughts before, but Petunia was now beginning for the first time to imagine what it would be like to die. It was talking to this doctor which was making her do so. Perhaps because he was so bored and so impersonal, he brought to mind the final impersonality of death – the way in which it was the same for everybody. An intimate event which was identical for all and could not be escaped.

  ‘There are a few things we need to eliminate,’ the doctor said. ‘A brain tumour is the first of them.’

  ‘I have a brain tumour?’ asked Petunia. She saw a tiny flicker in the man which showed that he did in fact think it possible that was what she had; it might even have been the thing he thought likeliest. But he didn’t admit that, what he said, in a patient, irritated way, was:

  ‘No. When we talk about “eliminating” something we mean ruling it out as the cause of an illness. So we go through the list of possible causes, and we eliminate them one by one and the one we’re left with is what’s wrong with you, you understand? It’s not to do with curing the tumour; it’s about finding out whether you have one. Is that clear?’

  He was so much more important than her, Petunia felt, perhaps that was all that it came down to. He was important, his time was important, and she wasn’t – not that she wasn’t important in her own eyes, necessarily, just that it was clear that she was much less important than him. His lateness, his haste, his impatience, everything about him was calculated to show that he mattered more than whoever it was he was talking to.

  Petunia had always been prone to seeing things from the other person’s point of view. This was supposed to be a virtue but Petunia herself sometimes wondered if it had in her become a fault; like her quietness and modesty, her reluctance to draw attention to herself or get above herself, it was a positive quality which she had taken too far. She had a glimpse of how she must seem to this confident, cross man: a small old mousy woman who needed to have things said twice, who took up very little space; she was just one of the dozens of people with whom he’d have dealings today.

  ‘I understand. Do you think I have a tumour?’ said Petunia. The doctor looked at her, his red face immobile, and was clearly giving her some credit for understanding what was at stake, as well as for her directness. Petunia felt, with a twinge of self-dislike, that she liked the fact that the doctor was taking more notice of her.

  ‘I think you may. I wouldn’t say that it is probable, but it is possible and it is something which we can eliminate fairly quickly. You will have to have a CAT scan, and that’ll tell us.’

  ‘Is that the one where you go into a sort of tunnel?’

  The doctor did not smile but his expression lightened a little.

  ‘Yes. I hope you don’t have claustrophobia?’

  She could tell he’d asked the question before.

  ‘I’ve seen it on television,’ said Petunia.

  The doctor began doing things on his computer. He gave Petunia a date for the scan, ten days away. Now that he was well on the way to getting rid of her, he became more friendly. He asked for her appointment card and wrote the date on it.

  ‘Now you won’t forget, will you?’ said the doctor. He was trying to be nice; for him this was flirtatious. Petunia, who had spent so much of her life appeasing, managing, a difficult man, couldn’t find it in herself to do anything other than play along.

  She rode downstairs in the lift and spent forty minutes waiting before a minicab came and took her home.

  20

  Usman came into the shop at quarter past four on Friday, a little out of breath. Shahid was waiting for him behind the counter. Even though he was late, Usman paused for a moment inside the door. He could never quite get used to how much sheer stuff there was in the shop: piled and stacked and arrayed. There was something offensive and impure about this sheer amount of stuffness.

  ‘Salaam, dickhead,’ Shahid said to his brother. ‘You’re late.’

  ‘Sorry. Traffic. They’re digging up every street in South London.’

  ‘And because you’re late,’ Shahid said, picking up his coat and lifting the counter flap to let himself out and his brother in, ‘I’m going to be late, and if I’m late for prayers, it being Friday afternoon, I’m well on the way to not being a Muslim, and it’s your fault.’

  ‘You’d have to miss two more Friday prayers.’

  ‘With an unreliable idiot like you to rely on, that’s all too possible.’

  ‘I said I was sorry,’ said Usman, taking his place behind the counter. Usman spoke with some ill grace, since he was by no means sure that Shahid was actually going to mosque: they attended different mosques and he didn’t know for sure how regularly his brother went to prayers. But since he and Shahid basically got on, unlike he and Ahmed, he didn’t want to make too big a thing of it.

  ‘Laters,’ said Shahid in the high girly voice he used for saying that word to his younger brother. He held the door open for a mother with an enormous three-wheel pram. Then Shahid was gone; as it happened, to mosque, for Friday prayers.

  Brixton Mosque had acquired a bad reputation thanks to a few idiots. There had always been an anger to the rhetoric, more outside the mosque than inside, often, but inside too, and there was no point denying it: the imam was not everyone’s cup of tea. These things drew attention that you didn’t want and Shahid couldn’t help wondering, at times, just how many of his fellow worshippers were MI5 or Special Branch, operatives or informers or provocateurs or plants. And some of this had been self-inflicted by the community. Having a former worshipper plot to blow up a transatlantic jetliner via an exploding shoe – even if you believed only one word of every ten in the kafr media, this was bad PR. But Shahid had been going to Brixton Mosque for almost fifteen years, and was not about to stop now. He unlocked his bike – on dry days he chained it to the railings in front, where he could see it from behind the shop counter – and rode the first twenty yards along the pavement, then swerved into the road at the zebra crossing.

  The traffic was strangely light, given that London in general was mad at the moment, everyone running around shopping as if their lives depended on it: the next three days were going to be insane, on every high street in the country, spending running up to however many billion it was. About half the people on the street were carrying shopping bags. The idea that the Christians thought this was a religious festival was hilarious; it was the most openly pagan thing Shahid had ever seen. Ahmed had been unable to prevent Fatima joining in the hoopla, so although the Kamals didn’t celebrate Christmas the children still got presents. Little Mohammed would grow up to enjoy the bounty created by his demanding sister. No doubt she wouldn’t be shy about telling him so. Shahid weaved through the traffic, skipping two red lights and having only one near-death experience, when a car came out of a side street on Acre Lane without seeing him or stopping. He cut up the one-way street on the pavement to Gresham Road and was in good time for ablutions before prayers.

  Standing next to him at the basins was a Caribbean bus driver whose name Shahid didn’t know but who he’d seen on and off at the mosque for more than a decade. The man had a meditative, half-a-beat-slow way of wringing his hands under the taps. Shahid had noticed it before, the bus driver slowing himself down with the cleaning ritual before prayers. That was what he liked about Friday prayers: the sense of continuity within his own life, the ritual stretching into the past and into the future, and the familiar faces and the friendliness. Some of the rhetoric and especially the anger no longer felt quite right to him, was no longer the good fit with his mood and temper that it had once been; but the other things mattered more. He’d never been an especially good listener. But he loved praying, the physical act of prostration.
Not five times a day, obviously, not any more – who had time for that? But when he was praying, it was one of the only times in his life when he felt fully there. It was not a sense of transcendence: he didn’t go out of himself and he had no intuitions of other orders of reality. Some said that the self could be left behind; that Paradise could be glimpsed in the raptures of the most fervent, devout prayer. That wasn’t Shahid’s experience. But while he was praying, he was praying, fully given over to his own presence in the words and motions and the ritual. It was the best he could do, and for him it was enough.

  The reading was from the Thunder sura, Al-Ra’ad, and Shahid could more or less follow it in his sort-of-OK Arabic.

  ‘Allah is the One who raised the heavens without pillars that you can see, then assumed all authority. He committed the sun and the moon, each running for a predetermined period. He controls all things, and explains the revelations, that you may attain certainty about meeting your Lord.