Capital: A Novel

by John Lanchester

  ‘Yeah, Mum’s gone out. She’s on a large one,’ said Smitty, sitting down on the chair beside the bed. ‘You all right?’ And then he realised as soon as he’d said it how stupid that was. His nan just smiled at him, as if she hadn’t heard, but it was a sad smile, which meant that she probably had. He didn’t say anything else; there wasn’t any need to. His nan looked at him for a bit, then closed her eyes. Not long after that, her breathing changed, and Smitty saw that she’d fallen asleep.

  Smitty went back downstairs, wandered out into the garden, which was looking good, as far as he could tell, which wasn’t very far, since as he liked to joke, ‘I’m not competitive enough to be interested in gardening.’ He went back inside and turned the TV on, but everything was shite and his nan (of course) didn’t have Sky, so there wasn’t much choice, so he went back into the kitchen again and there on the table, along with some junk mail which his mother hadn’t yet chucked, he saw one of those cards saying ‘We Want What You Have’. It was another photo of the front door. Smitty picked it up and stared at it, and couldn’t tell whether what he was feeling was foreboding or sadness.

  44

  At the Polish club in Balham, Zbigniew sat with a bison-grass vodka and a bottle of Żywiec beer, waiting for Piotr. Zbigniew did not repress things, he believed in letting complaints out to give them some air. So he was going to tell Piotr what was going on with Davina. Zbigniew felt that he was going to have to tell Piotr what was happening, because if he didn’t his head was going to explode, but the cost of doing that would be to suffer Piotr’s amusement. He knew that Piotr would think what had happened in his love life, or his sex life, was hilarious; he would think it was a punishment for his pragmatic and deliberately unromantic approach to women.

  This was made very much worse by the fact that a tiny part of Zbigniew thought there might be some truth in Piotr’s view. But knowing that you had gone wrong, and knowing how you had gone wrong, were not the same thing as knowing how to put it right.

  The bar was half-full. It was a popular spot with the older generation of London Poles, the ones who had come over during the war – there were even people here who remembered that time first-hand. Favourite fact: one-third of all the planes shot down during the Battle of Britain were shot down by Polish pilots. So it was a place for old men to play cards and watch the Polish TV and generally carry on as if they were still back in the old country. The younger generation hadn’t yet colonised the club, which was one of the things Zbigniew liked about it. Without really examining the feeling, Zbigniew was aware that the club reminded him of his parents, of the evenings when his father had his friends over for Zechcyk and his mother pottered about in the kitchen, pretending to complain about how late they would keep her awake.

  Piotr came in, looked over, saw what he was drinking, made a sign with two fingers pointing up in curls at the sides of his head – their private gesture for bison, therefore for bison-grass vodka – and came over from the bar with two more vodkas and two more Żywiecs. They touched glasses and downed the vodkas and then took a shot of beer.

  In Polish, Piotr said, ‘This Chelsea job stinks. It’s like that job we did in Notting Hill where Andrzej wanted to leave a dead rat in the cavity wall. Remember them, the fat music producer with the skinny blonde wife? These ones are the same. They’re the kind of rich people who fight you over every penny and because he’s a crook he thinks everyone else is too. She acts as if she has the authority to make decisions, then he comes the next day and reverses everything she said and claims that we shouldn’t have acted on her authority so we should carry the costs. It’s like watching a divorce in slow motion and being expected to pay for the privilege. I was a moron to take the job.’

  ‘Good money though.’

  Piotr gave a sharp shrug which indicated that while this was true it was also obtuse since it wasn’t the point at issue. Zbigniew found it important to have no feeling about his clients one way or another, and was about to say this to Piotr, with some smugness, and for about the hundredth time; but since he was also going to be spending a significant part of the evening complaining about his predicament with Davina, he didn’t feel this was a good moment to point out a philosophical error on Piotr’s part.

  There was a burst of noise from one of the card tables; two of the middle-aged men sitting at it had their arms above their heads, in victory or horror. The other two were looking at each other and the noise mixed laughter from one side, protest from the other, and general incredulity. One of the men with his arms in the air lowered them to the table and began raking in money. The man to his left, shaking his head and muttering, began to shuffle the cards. Money, money. Sometimes Zbigniew had to remind himself that that was the whole reason he was here in London, earning more in a month than his father had ever earned in a whole year. His real life was back home in Poland. This was a place he was in order to make money. That thought often brought Zbigniew some ease, when he was fed up with some aspect of his immigrant life; today, it didn’t help. Woman trouble was what it was.

  Piotr knew that Zbigniew had been seeing Davina – he could hardly not know – but he was tactful, as he always was; it was one of the things Zbigniew loved about him. He was waiting to be told. So Zbigniew took a deep swig of his new beer and told him the details. It took quite a bit of time.

  He had been expecting Piotr to laugh. Perhaps that was even what he was needing to hear from his friend – that the whole thing was ridiculous, and that he’d brought it on himself, and that it served him right, and so on. Piotr did indeed smile a bit, and Zbigniew did the best he could to try and make the story sound funny, the determined non-romantic trapped by great sex in a terrible relationship. But his smile faded as Zbigniew talked on. Then Zbigniew finished and went back to the bar to get another four drinks for the two of them. If nothing else, he’d get drunk tonight.

  When he got back to the table Piotr was flipping the beer mat over with his large fingers. Zbigniew raised his glass of vodka and downed it in one. Neither man said anything. Perhaps this confession was going to be received in silence.

  ‘I suppose you thought I’d think it was funny,’ said Piotr, and from his tone, which didn’t resemble anything Zbigniew was expecting to hear from his old friend, he knew that this was not going to be the comic, consoling, making-light talk he had hoped to have. ‘But I don’t. You know I love you like a brother and always have. But you have a grave fault in your character. You see people not as people but in terms of how useful they are to you. You say I am a romantic, always falling in love, and all that. It’s a joke between us, a set piece. Very well, it’s true enough. But at least I can fall in love. With you, I’m not so sure. You use women. You use them partly for company, when you need it, but you mainly use them for sex. I’ve always known this would cause trouble one day and now it has. You’ve trapped this vulnerable English woman into falling in love with you, and you are going to hurt her very badly; you are doing her real damage. I hear it in the way you talk about her.’

  Zbigniew, because he had not been expecting this, and because so much of it was right, felt himself become very angry. His head filled up with blood; he was exalted and exhilarated by rage.

  ‘You say this because you are a priest? A priest hearing my confession, or giving a denunciation from the pulpit?’

  Piotr got up and walked out. And that was that. Zbigniew sat there and drank his beer and vodka, then another round, then another, and went home drunker than he had been for a long time.

  45

  On Friday evening, after doing a shift in the shop, Usman set out across the Common on his bike, to go to the mosque for evening prayers. This is what he saw.

  An advertising poster with a woman lying naked on purple sheets, her hindquarters on full display, with the slogan ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ A poster with a woman eating a chocolate as if she were fellating it. A poster on the side of a bus with an advertisement for a horror film, with a stamp across it saying ‘Banned! To See F
ull Trailer Go Online’. A poster with a woman bending over and looking back at the camera through her legs, advertising tampons.

  Two lesbians holding hands while out walking their dogs.

  A young woman with her trousers so low that more than half of her bottom was exposed to the air, bending, while smoking a cigarette, over a pram, and saying as she did so, ‘Where have you hidden it, you little sod?’

  Many women whose breasts were almost fully visible under, over or through their thin summer clothes.

  A newspaper headline saying ‘Muslim terror cell loose in capital says Met chief’.

  Many people outside the public house on the Common, openly drinking alcohol.

  As Usman stopped to cross at a red light, he found himself looking at a man standing at a bus stop reading a newspaper. On the page facing out toward Usman was a picture of a completely naked woman, above an advertisement for a car-leasing company. The ad promised a BMW 3 series for a payment of £299 a month.

  Usman carried on. Many people were drinking alcohol in the bars beside the Common, women smoking, women and men kissing. Alcohol everywhere. Because it was only six o’clock, most of the people drinking were not yet drunk; it wasn’t the way it would be at ten or afterwards, when, especially at weekends, the whole area would be like a combat zone, a contest between man and alcohol which alcohol won, every time. No, alcohol didn’t just win, alcohol reigned: it presided over weekend evenings like a king, like a malign archangel. And although there was grumbling about this, the occasional complaint, it was the very British kind of complaint that was more like moaning, and expressed a deep accommodation with the thing being complained about; it contained no rage, no outrage, no desire for change. Whereas to Usman, this looked like a society that was turning itself into a version of hell, in the interest of people who made money through selling alcohol.

  The imam at Usman’s mosque was an angry man, but he was not stupid, and society had given him one overwhelmingly powerful advantage: the first thing he said on most subjects was true. He railed against capitalism and the cheapening of sex and the degradation of women through the pornographic imagery which was, in this country at this time, now, everywhere. He spoke about things that had become so taken for granted it was as if people literally did not see them any more. But Usman, who had after all grown up in this country, who was no alien – he saw them.

  Usman had come to believe that the imam was right: these were symptoms of decadence. Sex being used to sell things, the corruption of the fundamental human impulse to love, sex being turned into a vehicle of yet more capitalist debasement – sex was everywhere. It was never real sex, as Usman understood it to be, an ecstatic state such as that enjoyed in paradise, a transcendent experience; instead it was naked women, coupled with an attempt to sell something. Sex was fundamentally linked with money. And then the imam would start in on the subject of an intoxicated society. Here, too, he was saying something that everyone knew to be truthful. Usman had done holiday jobs as a hospital porter, and had seen with his own eyes that any A&E unit on a Saturday night was like an encyclopedia of all the different things you could do to yourself when drunk. Men and women fighting, puking, men hitting each other, men hitting their women or being hit by them, men raping and women being raped, both sexes contracting diseases, hurting their children, crashing vehicles, killing themselves, killing themselves with drink. And why did this society have such a deep need for intoxication? Because it knew it was lost, it was on the wrong path, and it had to blot out that knowledge with all the means at its disposal.

  And then the imam, having said these true things, would move on to some other truths. He didn’t care about the spies who would certainly be listening, the spies in the pay of the kafr government of Britain; he was above that. The imam simply told the truth. He was too intelligent to say that there was a global war against Islam. In Usman’s opinion, actually, there was, you could prove that there was, from Palestine to Kosovo to Afghanistan to Iraq, and then through the subtler examples of suppression in Egypt and Pakistan and Indonesia and everywhere else that Islam was not allowed to express itself democratically and fully – but you didn’t need to prove that. All you needed to do was ask a simple question. Was a Muslim life worth the same as a Christian or Jewish life? In the order of the world, did a dead Muslim child count for as much as a dead Jew? Was a Muslim death worth as much attention as a Christian death?

  The answer was so obvious, it barely needed to be spoken. In the scales of the West – which meant according to the value system that ran the world – a Muslim life was worth a fraction of other people’s. A war on Islam – you could argue about that. The manifest truth that Muslims counted for less – that was not possible to challenge. Much followed from this.

  Usman came to the mosque, pulled over onto the pavement and dismounted before his bike could ride up on it, because that would be discourteous. He chained his wheels to a rack – this was a high-risk spot, he realised, because a thief seeing a bicycle locked up outside a mosque would guess where the owner was and how long he would be likely to be in for, but inshallah, either it would be stolen or it wouldn’t – and he joined the men heading into the building for the ablutions before prayer.

  46

  Smitty liked to go against the grain, so where he might have been expected to have no desk, or something very modern – a workstation, with a sloped surface to sketch on and a laptop stand – instead he had a huge old Victorian partners’ desk made out of oak. He had no partner, of course, so both sides of the desk were his, and both were dominated by his filing system, which consisted of stacks of paper arranged by theme. On one side of the studio there was also a blackboard with curtains, so that whatever was being worked on could be hidden from casual view. There was also a £5,000 music system and a sixty-inch plasma flat-screen TV. Smitty was no Luddite. His assistant, his Nigel – who was always a ‘he’, because Smitty believed in a strict absence of sexual tension at work; he had no trouble pulling and didn’t need the extra hassle – had a corner of the office with a desk and phone and PC; he was allowed to roam around in the course of doing his business, but he wasn’t encouraged to allow his stuff to spread out and colonise Smitty’s space.

  Sometimes the desk had ten or twelve huge mountains of paper, to do with either pieces Smitty was thinking about or what he called ‘admin crap’, a category which covered more or less anything that did not directly involve making art. At other times there was only a single pile. Today there were two stacks of paper on the desk, and both of them had been there for two weeks. One of them was the stuff he had taken from his nan’s house, the We Want What You Have postcards and DVD. He had been flicking through these on and off all day since he got back from Pepys Road. The cards were a little like an installation, an artwork. The DVD, which was still in the player underneath the TV, was sort of the same thing as the cards, only in moving pictures. It consisted of lingering close-ups of houses in Pepys Road, shots of particular details of houses, tracking shots moving up and down the street. It looked as if it had been filmed in the early summer morning over two or three occasions. The DVD was about forty minutes long.

  When he’d seen that, he Googled 42 Pepys Road and after a bit of clicking around found himself looking at a picture of his nan’s front door. The blog was, of course, called We Want What You Have. It had a list of numbers and when you clicked on the numbers you were taken to a photo of the house – sometimes the front door, sometimes a detail from the door such as a close-up of the number, or of the letter box, or the steps, or the doorbell. Some of the photos were taken from across the road, to frame the whole house; some of them were colour, indeed some of them were in heightened, super-real colour; others were black and white and amateurish. One or two of them seemed to have been taken with a pinhole camera held at waist height. In those photographs, the spy-like ones, you could just catch a glimpse of part of a person – a leg disappearing out of show, somebody’s shadow falling across a front gate. Other than th
at there were no people to be seen. Whoever was behind We Want What You Have was going to some trouble to leave the people out of it.

  So that was part of what was on Smitty’s mind. The other thing was more immediately troubling, because the other thing was not a thing at all but a person. Smitty’s assistant. Smitty’s about-to-be-ex-assistant, who had been his about-to-be-ex-assistant in Smitty’s head for many weeks now, but who was no closer to being simply Smitty’s ex-assistant because Smitty hadn’t got round to firing him.

  Smitty’s art was all about confrontation. It was about shocking people, jolting them out of their well-grooved perceptions. Parodies, defacements, obscenities, spray-painted graffiti of Picasso being sucked off by an octopus – that was what Smitty was all about. Right up in your face. No prisoners. In person, though, Smitty did not like confrontation. He was a peacemaker, an accommodator, a finder of the common ground. It was a yin-and-yang thing. Balance was the key.

  His art was about extremes, his life was about balance. The ideal thing for Smitty would have been if he could get an assistant to sack his assistant. Get a new Nigel to get rid of the old Nigel. That would be perfect. No point dreaming about that, though. This had been going on for long enough, and Smitty had decided that today was the day. On his desk, to the right of the pile of stuff from his nan’s, was a Post-it note with ‘GET IT DONE’ written on it. That note had been there for a week; which was too long. In his head, he had given the assistant a second and then a third chance, both of which he had blown. Now it was over. The decisive factor was his assistant’s way of making it clear that in his judgement, he and not Smitty was the person who should be treated as the famous artist. The fact that he hadn’t actually made any art since leaving St Martin’s, the fact that all he did was chores for Smitty, seemed in his mind to be a minor, disregardable detail. It was only a question of time before the world realised its mistake in being interested in Smitty rather than in him, and it was tiresome of Smitty to insist on the current hierarchical order of their relationship, which was so soon and so inevitably to be reversed. That was how he acted. Well, thought Smitty, he can piss right off with that. He thinks it should be about him. Today is the day when he learns that right here, right now, it is all about me.