Capital: A Novel

by John Lanchester

  That was how Smitty talked to himself to try and get into the right frame of mind.

  He had a plan. The first step was to begin with a small gesture that today was not an ordinary day. He had tried to prime things by saying to his assistant that the two of them needed to have a chat about some stuff in the morning. Since that was not the kind of thing Smitty ever said, and since having a chat about some stuff was also not the kind of thing Smitty ever did, that was warning sign number one. The second gesture – the second thing he never, ever did – was to buy himself and his assistant a cappuccino each at the Italian café on the corner, on his way in to the studio. He was late on purpose so that the assistant would already be there. Seeing the cappuccino bought for him by his employer, the assistant would know that something was wrong. That was the plan.

  It didn’t work. Parker French came in with his earphones on and his bag and jacket both swinging over his right arm. He made a little performance of hanging them up, all without turning off his iPod, which was in his jeans pocket, or taking off his earphones, which were in his ears. So when Smitty crossed the room to offer him the cappuccino, he took it while still listening to his music and still in his oblivious, entitled, irritating bubble. If Smitty was having second thoughts, the fact that the little shit couldn’t even be bothered to say ‘thank you’ would have dispelled them. He stood there waiting for Parker to sort himself out and put his stuff away. That took a while. Then he sacked him.

  It was pretty horrible – worse than he had expected. It occurred to Smitty about five minutes in that he had been an idiot not to do this at night, when the snotface was going home, rather than when he had just come in to work. But what really made it bad was the way his now-properly-ex-assistant had been so slow on the uptake.

  ‘We’re having a bit of a problem,’ Smitty had begun. ‘This is one of those it’s-not-you, it’s-me conversations.’ Every single person in the world knows that if someone uses those words a. it is you and b. you are being dumped. But Parker showed no sign of knowing this, this thing that every single person in the world knows. His face settled into a not quite sarcastic, but not sincerely deferential, pretending-to-listen-to-a-bollocking face. Authority figures had had words with him before, it was clear: parents, teachers, tutors. His manner implied that his charm and looks and brains (none of which in Smitty’s view was at all evident) had always got him through in the past, and would do so again. He would half-heartedly pretend to care for the duration of the bollocking, then he would go back to doing whatever he wanted – that was what his manner said.

  About halfway through, Parker’s demeanour suddenly changed. He realised that this was not a could-do-better, untapped-potential, not-angry-just-disappointed, hate-to-see-you-wasting-your-talents talk of the type he was used to. Smitty’s words and tone were gentle because his conclusions were final. What was going on here was something Smitty had seen before: a young person’s first real farewell to the world of school and college, where even if they are rebelling and faffing about and getting in trouble, the truth is that the whole experience is about them. They think that the whole world revolves around their needs, for the good reason that the institutions and authority figures in their world do, in fact, put them first. They’re not wrong to think they’re the centre of the universe. They’re just wrong to think it will stay that way. Then you get to the adult world, and at some point the penny drops. No one cares about you and most of the time they don’t even notice you’re there. It was this revelation that was now taking place in Smitty’s studio.

  Parker’s expression began to crumple and darken. He looked much younger, like a rebuked schoolboy. It seemed as if he might even cry. He switched from looking cocky to looking numb and devastated. Smitty was aghast – he hadn’t wanted the kid to go skipping out the door, but he didn’t want to feel as if he’d just shot the little bastard’s puppy. He sped through the last part of his prepared speech, about maybe we’ll work together again one day, and handed him his envelope with a month’s pay and his P45. By now, no question, there were tears in the boy’s eyes. He collected his jacket and his bag and his iPod in a lot less time than he had taken to get them off, and was out the door without a further word.

  Smitty thought, thank fuck that’s over.

  47

  At 42 Pepys Road, Petunia Howe was dying. Her condition was worse in every way. Her level of consciousness varied: at times she knew where she was and what was happening; at other times she was living through a delirium. Memories swam through her like dreams. Albert was alive and beside her, or she was already dead and in some place where he had gone before to wait for her. At other times, all she could feel was pain, pain so general and at the same time so intimate – as dental pain or earache is intimate – that there was no point at which the pain stopped and she began. Petunia spoke only in fragments and could only move with assistance. Her daughter had to help her to use a bedpan.

  Mary tried not to think about what was happening. She kept herself as immersed as possible in the daily detail of her mother’s illness. Every now and then she would pull back and get a glimpse of things in the round, an overall look at the reality of these terrible days, and she would think: this is the worst experience of my life. My mother is dying horribly, I’m more tired than I’ve ever been, more tired than I was when the children were small, she is in pain, she doesn’t know who or where she is, and there’s no end in sight, because it’s dragging on and on, and the only release is for Mum to die, so I want Mum to die, which is a terrible thing to want, and it will happen to me too, one day, I will die too, and I’m stuck here in London and I’m lonely and frightened and I have to lift my mum to the bedpan to have a shit and then have to wipe her bottom and put her back in bed and go to the toilet to empty her shit down it and then flush it and wash my hands and go back to bed and sit there staring at the ceiling waiting for sleep which I know will never come, and it won’t end until my mum dies, and then I’ll have to sell the house and it’ll be worth a million pounds and it will come to me and everything will be different, but if I think about that I’m a bad person so I mustn’t think about anything other than today, right now, the things I have to do right here and right now. And so Mary would return to the daily, immediate demands of the house, the sickroom, her mother’s death; and she would feel easier.

  Her contact with home was through phone calls. She had to ration these because otherwise she called Alan ten times a day, mainly just to hear his voice. Ben, who was seventeen, was too grumpy to have a proper conversation with, and Alice was away at college, and Graham was off at his London life, so with all three of them she confined herself to a daily exchange of texts. (‘u ok?’ ‘yes k.’) Alan knew well what she was going through – he was good like that – but in the end there wasn’t much that could usefully be said.

  ‘I’m worried about you, Maggie.’ He was the only person who had ever called her that.

  ‘Sometimes I feel I can’t cope. Then I think: I’ve got no choice, I’ve got to cope. It’s one of those. It’s a cope.’

  At which point Alan, being Alan, started singing, or pretending to sing, ‘Did you ever know that you’re my hero?’ Which made Mary laugh, which in turn made her feel, when they had both rung off, much more lonely. Her mother was dying and she felt lonely. Mary told herself: they’re only in Essex. It’s only an hour and a bit away, it’s not like they’re in bloody Peru. But still she felt very much on her own.

  She also felt she had been here long enough. It was time for her mother to die; it was time for her to be able to go home. She’d thought she would be here for a week or two, and now it was the best part of two months later, and here she still was. But that was a terrible thing to think; it was terrible to be that person, the person who thought that. So she tried not to think it.

  It was lucky she was so busy. Because 42 Pepys Road was not a modern house, it was not easy to keep tidy; it was a place of nooks and corners, hard to vacuum, harder to dust, harder still to wash.
So tidying and cleaning took a lot of effort. Mary was aware that tidying was a trap, that it was her own version of her mother’s limited horizons, her stuck-within-herselfness; but the fact was that knowing that made no difference, she still liked things tidy, it made her feel better, it calmed the sense of things sliding away from her that was brought by untidiness, chaos, disorder, dirt. It brought a sense of accomplishment. Today, there was an extra reason to get things in order, because two visitors would be coming from the hospice to assess Petunia’s condition. There was a possibility that she might be taken in for respite care, to give Mary a break, or alternatively that she might be so ill she would be taken in to die. Or she might be fine as she was – but Mary didn’t think so.

  The drawing room, bedroom, and staircase were all fine, apart from the faint smell of sickness and disinfectant, which Mary only now noticed when she stepped back into the house from having a ciggie in the garden. Today’s task would be the kitchen, which was a dream of modernity and convenience from the fifties. Dad had been too mean to ever change it and it was the kind of thing about which Mum was either oblivious or defeated. Either way, the floor might have been designed to look permanently dirty; it looked clean only in the immediate aftermath of being washed. So Mary set out to wash it. She got out the mops and brushes and ran a bucket of warm water and set to. The water turned grey and so did the linoleum, as it always did at first. It looked cleaner when it was wiped down and began to dry. If the people from the hospice were late there might also be a chance to give the downstairs a quick vacuuming.

  Mary went out into the garden with her packet of Marlboro Lights and her shameful new plastic cigarette lighter (shameful because buying a lighter meant she had properly gone back to smoking). The spring warmth, combined with the wildness which her mother so surprisingly liked in her garden, combined with the fact that Mary hadn’t touched a thing since she arrived in February, made the colour and sense of profusion seem riotous; everything was overgrowing, bursting, fertile. Mary was looking at the garden but could not see it; she had enough on her plate. If it became another thing she had to take care of it would be just too much. The greenness did not reach into her. She lit her fag, drew deeply, coughed, drew again. It was going to be a warm day, humid too, she could feel it.

  The hospice people weren’t late. The doorbell rang at ten on the dot. By now the kitchen floor was shiny – gleaming – perfect. Mary went and let in the two women, one wearing a nurse’s uniform under an outdoor coat. The other one she had met before, when she took her mother to the hospital for an assessment. Mary poured tea and they made small talk. The woman she had met before said something nice about the garden, which Mary didn’t quite take in. Then the nurse said:

  ‘Might we go and see your mother?’

  Mary took them upstairs. The nurse and the other woman approached Petunia where she lay in bed. Because she spent large periods without moving, Petunia had developed sores on her side and back, which the nurse, whose name Mary had to her embarrassment already forgotten, spotted straight away.

  ‘Poor thing, she’s having awful trouble with those bedsores. Are you getting any help with that?’ she asked.

  ‘There’s the GP. I mean the GPs. It’s difficult for them, they don’t know me, I’m just some woman ringing up, the district nurses are nice, they say they’ll come, they mean it when they say it, I don’t know, it’s just sometimes that you feel you’ve fallen down a crack, you’re sort of invisible, they can attend to what’s directly in front of them but . . .’

  It wasn’t the question but its kindly tone, and the sound of despair in her own voice, that affected Mary, who found as she spoke that she was crying so hard she had to sit down. The two women from the hospice looked at each other. My mother’s dying and they have to give their attention to me, to worry about me, Mary thought, which made her cry harder. The truth was that Petunia’s GP surgery had been useless. Mary had been slightly shocked to find that her mother didn’t have a doctor as such – apparently that had changed since Mary was a child. Kindly, brisk Dr Mitchell had looked after her all her childhood. He had been one of those men who looked forty all his life, from his late twenties up until he retired, the year after she married Alan and moved to Essex. He had looked after her childhood sniffles, diagnosed her mumps, written her first prescription for the pill, been the witness for her first passport application. But it wasn’t like that any more. It was hard to tell who regarded themselves as being in charge of her mother’s care, and combined with the fact that the district nurses were clearly overwhelmed, this made it seem that there simply wasn’t any help. When she did speak to the nurses they kept pointing out that there was no pain involved in a brain tumour ‘because the brain doesn’t feel pain’, a fact which had been explained to Mary, she felt, twenty or thirty times too often. ‘It’s the bedsores I’m worried about,’ she said, but it was as if they weren’t hearing her; it was like talking to one of those people on the phone, on helplines or complaints lines, who are following set scripts and won’t listen to you unless you tick specific boxes in the dialogue. Mary’s fatigue and disorientation made it all much harder to deal with. Petunia hadn’t seen a nurse or doctor in nearly two weeks, and Mary was treating the bedsores by cleaning them and trying to get her mother to swallow the strongest ibuprofen-based painkillers she could find.

  ‘I think you could do with a little bit of a break,’ said the lady who she had met before, who was now squatting beside Mary on the floor and holding her hand. Mary started to cry again.

  48

  Freddy Kamo slid his cue back and forward, sent the white ball into the black ball, and the black ball into the pocket.

  ‘Bollocks!’ said Mickey Lipton-Miller. ‘Arse! Double bollocks! Jammy sod!’

  It was half past three in the afternoon. They were in Mickey’s private club, in West London. Freddy was wearing a tracksuit, Mickey a three-piece suit minus the jacket. The snooker room had wooden-panelled walls; around the sides were leather armchairs beside low tables with lights that carried red lampshades; it smelled of cigar smoke; it was perfect. Two friends of Mickey’s sat in chairs, nursing gigantic brandy snifters full of Hennessy X.O. He was parading his closeness to Freddy in front of them. In Mickey’s view, life did not get much better than this.

  Freddy put his cue back in the rack against the wall.

  ‘You must be calm,’ said Freddy. ‘Breathe, like this.’ He took a deep stage breath, then exhaled, slowly and theatrically. ‘You must take your own good advice and become a patient man.’

  Mickey lifted the cue again and pretended to swing it towards Freddy’s head. Then he sighed and let it fall back to his side.

  ‘Jammy sod,’ he said again, more quietly – knowing perfectly well that luck was nothing to do with it. He had seen Freddy pick up a cue for the first time in this very room two months ago. As with everything else Freddy did, he had looked awkward, gangly. In his hands, however, the stick went where he wanted it to go, and so did the ball. Freddy could already beat Mickey at snooker – and Mickey was rather proud of his snooker.

  ‘I must go home,’ said Freddy. ‘I have a lesson at four.’

  ‘But what about my revenge? OK, I’ll run you back. Adios, guys, be lucky,’ said Mickey. He put his arm on Freddy’s back and steered him towards the door; Freddy, being Freddy, wouldn’t go without shaking hands with everybody. They got into the Aston Martin and set out back to Pepys Road. Mickey was fine to drive, he had had three units of alcohol at most.

  Mickey’s tone with Freddy was different when he wasn’t showing off in front of his friends. He was less joshing and more paternal.

  ‘You won’t need these lessons much longer. It’s amazing, I wouldn’t have believed it. Four months. At this rate you’ll be speaking better English than I am.’

  ‘Same as snooker.’

  Mickey faked a sideways swipe towards Freddy with his left elbow.

  ‘Any word about Saturday?’

  Freddy shrugged and brief
ly pursed his lips – which given that Mickey was driving wasn’t the most helpful way of giving his opinion, but Mickey knew what he meant. Freddy had yet to start a game. The manager kept bringing him on in the second half, often when they were in control but had yet to score, or yet to open enough of a gap between them and their opponents. Freddy had been on the field nine times and had scored four goals and was becoming a favourite with the crowd – a ‘cult figure’ he was told, which sounded very strange to his ears but apparently meant something good. At the level of the Premiership, new players often have an impact that lasts only until opponents have them worked out: a winger who can cut in only in one direction, a striker with strong physical presence but a weak first touch, a disturbingly quick player who can be put off by being given a kicking early on. Opponents suss this out and a player’s impact diminishes. Very good players learn new tricks, or learn to extract full value from the ones they have. Mickey thought that was the reason the manager was holding Freddy back for the latter stages of games – he wanted to prolong the honeymoon period for as long as possible. Freddy felt that the manager’s reservations about him were to do with stamina or strength – he might not last ninety minutes, he might be shoved off the ball. Freddy didn’t feel that was fair; not that it made him angry or resentful, not yet anyway. But he liked to play football, and this was the only time in his life he had ever spent any time on the bench.