Capital: A Novel

by John Lanchester

  The internet was, in these days when he was getting used to the numb shock of being sacked, unemployable and on the way to broke, Roger’s salvation; or if not his salvation, exactly, it was what he did with most of his time. His favourite thing was reading pieces about the implosion of Lehman Brothers – the amazing idiots, the total fuckwits – and his second-favourite was playing poker online. When he had been in work, supervising a room full of traders all week and therefore responsible for tens of millions of pounds of, in effect, bets, this had had no appeal. Now, though, it was as if the gambling side of his personality needed an outlet, and found it here. He had put £1,000 from his credit card into his Poker Stars account, and was already up by £500. He was loose and aggressive against a lot of amateurs who played tight-weak. It was fun.

  Then, five days after talking to Percy, Roger pulled himself together. He went for a walk on the Common, had a double espresso, got his spreadsheet and reran the numbers. Then he called Arabella on the house phone and asked her to come into his study to see him. That, they both knew, meant a Money Talk. It helped that the room had two leather armchairs and a (largely token) cigar humidor, and a vintage nude print of a Parisian whore kneeling on a chair facing away from the viewer, exposing her temptingly large, temptingly white behind. Once his wife came in, Roger simply gave her a sheet of paper with a list of things on it – all her discretionary spending, from shoes to Botox to one-on-one home-visit Pilates instruction.

  ‘These are all the things which are going to have to go,’ said Roger. It was satisfying. Arabella went pale.

  ‘We’re broke,’ she said.

  ‘No. Or yes. As good as, in some respects.’

  In a deep dark part of Roger’s brain, one he was reluctant to admit to himself, this felt great. Felt fantastic. It was payback – hard to work out exactly why, but it definitely felt as if it was – for what she had done at Christmas.

  And then a thought came to Arabella.

  ‘What about Matya?’ she said. Roger had known this was coming and had prepared for it. His countess, his lost countess. A masochism strategy, but one that would hurt Arabella more than it would hurt him.

  ‘We’re going to have to let her go,’ said Roger. ‘It’s clear from the numbers. Matya is a luxury’ – a voluptuous, silky, heart-lifting luxury, a sexier woman and a better mother to our children than you will ever be and the woman I would happily have made love to twice a day for the rest of my natural life – ‘… a luxury we can’t afford.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Arabella.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Roger. ‘So you’re going to have to be mummy. All night, all day. The whole deal. It’s in the numbers – we have no choice.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Arabella again. In his head Roger was dancing a gloating, jeering tarantella of victory.

  89

  It happened very quickly. The Younts gave Matya her notice. The agreed period was a month; Matya said she was sad, but understood. So in a few weeks’ time she would stop working for them, and Arabella would be a 24/7 solo mother for the first time.

  When she heard the news – Roger and Arabella sitting across from her at the kitchen table with cups of tea that she had made, while the boys sat in the media room watching a DVD of Shaun the Sheep – Matya felt nothing at all. She had known that Roger had lost his job. It would have been impossible not to know: from one day to the next he had gone from being invisible at home to being omnipresent. Roger’s size made him hard to ignore: in the most basic way, he took up a lot of space. His noise footprint was large. The house seemed immediately smaller. He was constantly in the kitchen, crashing up the stairs to his study to listen to his punk compilation CD at a too-high volume. From wearing, in the week, nothing but classic suits, he was now never to be found in anything except a dressing gown or horrible knee-length khaki shorts with huge sagging pockets. He was always offering to help, and, Matya could not fail to notice, never missed an opportunity to check her out, especially from behind, and especially especially when she had to bend over to stack the dishwasher, load the washing machine, or do anything with the children. It was a bit much.

  Knowing that Roger had suddenly and dramatically lost his job, it wasn’t hard to work out that her job was likely not to be long in following. So as soon as Arabella had asked her for ‘a little chat’, Matya had suspected what was coming. It was later, in the course of the afternoon, that she began to think about what it really meant. She would be traipsing around looking for work – something she hadn’t done for some time, and about which she had no illusions. It would be a boring ordeal of smiling and making nice while trying to work out if the prospective employers were sane and reliable and whether their children were the kind she could imagine looking after for nine hours a day. That was a chore but she knew it was one she could do, because she had done it before. The thing which made it worse was that her flat-share had finished and she was having to look for somewhere new to live. That, in London, was more than a chore – the actual physical process of looking, the Tubes and buses and the trudging around, the small ads and want ads and Craigslist-surfing and free-sheet-poring, the texts and appointments and interviews, the vetting of addresses and then rooms and then flatmates, all of it, was exhausting, depressing, remorseless, one of those things which made you feel the oppressive scale of London – but again, it was something she knew. She had done it before.

  What she hadn’t done before, what was unknown, was leaving Joshua. All day she tried not to think about it; all day it was on the edge of her mind. She could feel a great pit of gloom opening up beneath her. Who could resist a three-year-old, bursting with love, whose idea of complete happiness was to come and snuggle up with you? Their love affair wasn’t in the early stages any more – it wasn’t quite in early-dates territory; her heart didn’t skip a beat when she saw him – but she was happier with Joshua than she had been with anyone else she had ever known. Matya was aware that this was connected with her childhood: she was rediscovering her lost parents through the love she was able to express for Joshua. It was a way of getting her parents’ love back, of reincarnating them inside herself. But so what? Who cared what the reasons were? What was real was the feel of his hand in hers when they went out in the afternoon to pick up Conrad from primary school. Or the calm, measured way in which he would look upward and say, ‘I love you, Matty’ – and the words had more impact than they ever had from a boyfriend.

  So that was what hit her when she got home to the flat at half past six. Unusually, she closed the latch on the door behind her. She sat on the small odd leather sofa – a gift from Arabella, who had bought it for her dressing room and then gone off it – and put her head in her hands and cried. Not for her job or for the other changes in her life, but for Joshua, who she knew she would miss so unbearably much.

  90

  There was a rattle – a now-familiar rattle – and Shahid’s breakfast was pushed through the slot in the door of his cell. Shahid had been sitting on the floor, not thinking about anything much, since saying his dawn prayers. He had a watch now, but ‘dawn’ here meant whenever Shahid woke up. That usually wasn’t much after six. Breakfast arrived at seven, so there was a decent gap to sit and think.

  Shahid thought about Iqbal and how stupid he’d been to let him into his flat. He wondered where he was. He hoped that when the police found him they would kick the living shit out of him.

  He thought about what he would do to the person responsible for We Want What You Have when he got hold of him.

  He thought about the cell, how he had never known any room he had been in as well as he knew this one. He wondered if a time would come when it wasn’t still imprinted on his mind, every detail of it: a crack in the corner of the ceiling and small fibrous marks on the walls which spread down and outwards so that they looked like the map of a river delta. A patch of damp to the left of the sink which was sometimes cold and wet to the touch. The pipes, which made a rackety clanking noise that at times almost fell into a rh
ythm, a syncopation – clunk BANG, clank clunk BANG.

  He thought about Mrs Principle the solicitor, as he called her to himself. She had the kind of upright, strict, buttoned-up and clipped British manner which made it impossible not to speculate about her sex life. It would be something kinky, definitely, it had to be. Spanking perhaps. Or she dressed up in leather and wielded a whip and made men crawl around the floor saying ‘Yes, mistress.’

  Shahid thought about his own sex life – whether he would ever have one again. He had never felt his sex drive so absent. Maybe it was true, maybe they did put something in the food. But he knew that when/if he got out, he would like to have A Girlfriend. He didn’t have anything more specific in mind than that. A nice well-brought-up Muslim girl, a virgin, incredibly keen on sex, would be ideal. But it was more a question of someone to hang out with, to wake up with, to watch TV with, to go clubbing with, to go to Gap and pick out T-shirts with. A girl. That girl from the Underground, the one he’d tried to find via ‘Lost Connections’, the one he still sometimes thought about.

  He thought about Ahmed and Rohinka and Mohammed and Fatima and was able to admit that he envied his fat, slow, sedentary, cautious older brother.

  He thought about Mrs Kamal and was almost able to smile at the idea of what she must be putting everyone else in the family through. Also any policemen or lawyers or anybody else who got within earshot.

  He thought about what he was going to do with the rest of his life when/if he got out of here. Sue them for wrongful imprisonment, for abusing his rights, for locking him up for no reason . . . that was one thing he could do. But Shahid knew that he wouldn’t. He felt time passing here, felt it strongly, more sharply than he ever had. Time going past, purely going past. It was a paradox of the place. You were locked up, and every day was the same, and nothing happened except the same questions being put to you and you giving the same answers back, so every day was a slow-motion wallow in itself, every hour felt days long – it was so far beyond boring that it was a whole other state. And yet it made you aware, cruelly aware, of how time was shooting past. Shahid could feel his life slipping away. He was thirty-three, and what had he done? How big a hole would there be in the world if he never got out of here? He needed to do something – get back into proper work, not the shop, but go back and finish his degree and get a real job, have a real life.

  He thought about the fact that this was his nineteenth day in jail, the nineteenth day since he’d been arrested.

  And then he thought about breakfast. It would be cold by now, but then it was never much more than tepid when it came through the door. Today it was scrambled eggs and toast. The eggs had been overcooked, so they were granular and smelled faintly of sulphur. One piece of toast had a very thin layer of butter, barely a scraping, and the other had a compensatory smear of butter about half an inch thick. The tea was undrinkable even when it was hot, so Shahid ignored it as he ate the cold food, much more slowly than he would have done at home.

  Some police and warders you heard coming, others you didn’t. This was the second kind. There was a scraping and the cell door was opened by a policeman with a huge circular keyring, a cartoon-like keyring, in his left hand.

  ‘Ready?’ said the policeman.

  Shahid shrugged. ‘For what?’ This was his new thing – wherever possible, to answer a question with a question.

  ‘Got your stuff together?’

  ‘For what? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Didn’t they tell you?’ Now the policeman seemed to be playing the same question-with-a-question game.

  ‘Does it look like they told me? Whatever it is?’

  ‘Oh.’ The policeman gave a short bark-like laugh. ‘Now that, that really is typical. You’re getting out today. In fact, right now. Your brief and your family are here to pick you up.’

  Shahid did not think it was possible for a thought, a feeling, so be so strong a physical sensation. He felt his heart race, his head fill with blood, he jerked upright and knocked the table, hard, with his thighs. The undrinkable tea spilled on the floor of his cell.

  ‘You’re joking.’

  But the policeman was enjoying the fact of the cock-up so much that there was no possibility he was joking. The cock-up had confirmed his world-view, and in the process made him very happy.

  ‘Typical, that is. Whatever it is, whoever it most concerns, that’s the person they never tell. Don’t get around to telling. Typical. Classic. That’s this place all over.’

  Shahid picked up his prayer shawl, his prayer mat, his Qur’an, his toothbrush, and his sweater. He pulled on his shoelaceless trainers.

  ‘I’m ready,’ he said.

  ‘Typical,’ said the policeman one last time, not to Shahid but to the air at large, still happily shaking his head. He led Shahid out of the cell, down the corridors Shahid was starting to know so well, and to the lift. They went down four floors to an office with a counter, on top of which Shahid’s tracksuit bottoms – the ones he’d been wearing when he was arrested – were sitting. The custody sergeant, a fat man with cold eyes, gave him a clipboard with a form to sign, and he signed it. Then the other policeman led him through a glass-metal-mesh door and there were Ahmed, Usman, Rohinka, Mrs Kamal and Mrs Principle, all of them jumping to their feet as soon as they saw him and all of them looking worried, happy, shiny-eyed. Then Shahid’s own eyes began to blur too.

  ‘Who’s running the shop?’ he tried to say, but his voice cracked halfway through and it came out as a sob, as Shahid burst into tears.

  91

  It sometimes seemed to Rohinka as if she got no sleep at all – literally none, ever. She knew that she must, of course, because if she didn’t – if she literally never went out, not for a second – she would by now have died or gone mad. But there were times when those two states didn’t seem all that far away. And as for the fact that she never slept, well, one sign of it was that whenever Fatima came into the room in the morning – any time from half past five – Rohinka could hear her coming. Perhaps it was only that she was so attuned to her daughter’s waking that the first footfall woke her from her shallow, expectant sleep. That was more likely, Rohinka supposed. Not that it felt as if it made much difference: either way, all day and every day, she was on the ragged edge of exhaustion.

  She was always already awake by the time her daughter came in the room and began her patented three-step process for rousing her mother: first, for about a minute, simply stand beside the bed – very very close to the edge of the bed, ideally about a quarter-inch or so – and wait for the first sign of life. Second, begin to tap her mother on the shoulder with the flat of her hand, a cross between a tap and a pat, not violent, respectful even, but firm, insistent. Third, she would simply clamber over Rohinka, using her as a climbing-obstacle-cum-plaything like something at the recreation centre, and launch herself into the gap in the bed beside her. By that point there was no longer any mileage for Rohinka in pretending to be asleep.

  Today was the same. She heard Fatima coming from the landing, her feet light but purposeful, in no hurry – she knew what she was doing. Mohammed, in his cot in their room, showed no sign of waking, as he tended not to do – a blessing, Rohinka supposed. At 5.30 a.m., one child was enough.

  So today was the same as always. But today was different too, because today was the day that Mrs Kamal was taking a plane back to Lahore. Usman would be travelling with her, a trip with several overlapping agendas: he would help Mrs Kamal with the journey (though anyone less in need of help Rohinka couldn’t think of – still, her notional frailty had sometimes to be deferred to); he was himself claiming that he wanted to ‘chill out in Lahore for a bit’; and he had succumbed to his mother’s bullying to go and meet some potential marriage partners. Well, maybe it would work out for him. Usman had not been quite himself recently. Not that he spoke more, or showed more interest in the children, or anything like that, but he was less angry and more preoccupied. He had trimmed his beard and stopped irri
tating Ahmed by pretending to refuse to serve alcohol. Perhaps it was no more than that he was growing up a little.

  As soon as Fatima came in the room and stood by the bed, Rohinka did something which amazed her daughter: she got up.

  ‘Mummy!’ said Fatima. ‘What are you doing?!’

  ‘Mamaji leaves today,’ said her mother. ‘There’s lots to do. You can help me.’

  ‘Shall I go and wake her up?’

  Fatima, for all her indefatigability, her unstoppability, her take-no-prisoners approach to life, was very wary of her grandmother. (Who, predictably, doted on Mohammed.) She did not go into her room uninvited. It was tempting to let Fatima be Mrs Kamal’s early-morning alarm call; tempting, but probably not a great idea. Woken up in the wrong way, Mrs Kamal could start her last day in a bad mood and colour her departure for everyone. For a moment, Rohinka allowed herself to think about how nice it would be to get her home back: to get past that sense of always having somebody in your space. No one to encounter on a midnight trip to the bathroom, no one to hide birth-control medication from, no one extra to have to cook for or wash up after or do laundry for; it would be nice to have Mohammed back in his room, nice to just have their home back to themselves. Normality had never seemed more attractive. Only the four of them – even the thought felt like a long, relieving exhale.