John Lanchester - Capital

Everybody was obsessed with the food. One of the fifteen demands of the inmates on hunger strike was for ‘edible food we can eat’. It was no joke. Quentina had not eaten like a princess at the Refuge, but that was a seven-star holiday resort compared to this. The meals did not merely fail to look appetising, they actually stank. The meat smelled off. There was no spicing to the food, no flavour. The desserts were even heavier and lumpier than the savoury courses. The only edible thing Quentina saw in her first two weeks at the detention centre was fruit – tired and bruised fruit, but nonetheless fruit, as welcome as a gift direct from heaven. She lost far more weight than she had ever lost when she was walking ten miles a day as a traffic warden.

When she said this to Makela, the Nigerian woman had smiled.

‘That’s how it begins,’ she said. ‘The first thing that makes people crazy is always the food.’

It might be today. Might it be today? Or not. It possibly wouldn’t happen at all. It might be better – no, it certainly would be better – if it didn’t happen. There was no reason to think that it would happen and even less reason to want it to happen so, on balance, it wouldn’t happen. But what if it did?

Matya was getting ready to go out on a date with Zbigniew. She was at her new shared flat in the bit of Brixton which was sort-of Herne Hill or vice versa, depending on whether the person you were talking to wanted to sound cool or posh. Her discovery of the place had been that rare thing, a positive experience of flat-hunting in London. The tip-off had come via a Hungarian friend. She had a colleague with a spare room who was looking for a sane, solvent, non-smoking female lodger, not allergic to cats, content not to have a television, willing during the owner’s work-related absences to check on the well-being of her widowed mother downstairs. The interview and checking of references took ten minutes: she offered Matya the flat on the spot, and she moved in the next day. Zbigniew borrowed Piotr’s van and brought round her stuff.

Zbigniew. He was the issue. Matya was dressing for a date with him, and by some process she wouldn’t analyse this had in her mind become the date on which he was going to make a pass and she either was or wasn’t going to go to bed with him. It was hard to examine exactly how they’d got to this point, how he’d gone from someone who she positively, definitely wouldn’t go out with, to someone she really liked. He ticked such a large number of negative boxes. He was a Pole, and Matya thought Poles complacent and self-absorbed. He wasn’t rich, and if there was a single box she definitely wanted ticked it was that a serious boyfriend would have serious money. He worked with his hands and – this overlapped with the money issue – Matya was keen to have a white-collar, desk-job boyfriend, someone as unlike all the boys she knew from home as possible.

And yet… there she was putting on her best knickers, pink ones with black trim, and her most effective bra, and the jeans she knew that men liked, the ones that got her most looks in the street or bar – the ones that were the most reliable indicator of whether she was carrying an extra kilo, because that made them instantly go from sexily snug to too-tight. She was putting on the beaded shirt Arabella had given her after a shopping splurge and was going to wear the suede jacket that made her waist look small and her tits look big. So why all this, if all these other things about Zbigniew were true? Well, it was the fact that his liabilities were also assets. His Polishness meant that he knew who he was. There was nothing fake about Zbigniew, no false notes to his talk or personality. It was refreshing, oddly so; most men these days felt as if they were trying to sell you something, some version of themselves, to try and get into your pants by pretending to be someone they were not. You were always trying to look beyond, look past the act, to see the real self. It was tiring, and Zbigniew wasn’t like that at all.

He wasn’t rich. That meant he knew the value of money: you could trust him with money, trust him to get the point of it. A rich boyfriend might make her own economies, her choices, her triumphs, seem petty. There were people in London who earned ten, twenty, fifty, a thousand times what she did – lots of people. How much did she really have in common with any of them? How would a boyfriend from that world feel about her flat-sharing, or know what to say when she lost her Oyster card with a full £30 on it? No problem of that kind with Zbigniew. His money values – his sense of what things cost – were completely in alignment with hers. That meant that their dreams were similar too. To people who are rich by London standards, the idea of a rose-covered cottage in the country with a garden seemed silly – they could buy one with half an annual bonus. But that wasn’t the way it seemed to Matya or to Zbigniew.

And then there was that question of working with his hands. Matya paused as she put on her eyeliner. If there had been anybody else present, she would have blushed. The plain truth was that Zbigniew’s work gave Zbigniew his body, and Zbigniew’s body was one of the things she liked best about him – put plainly, she liked its hardness. Zbigniew was not pumped up like some bodybuilder, some action hero on the television; he did not burst out of his clothes. But his body was firm and taut and whenever Matya had touched it or bumped into it she had always noticed that it was, simply, very firm. He was muscled and compact and clean and she could tell that his skin would feel lovely to the touch, smooth on top but taut underneath. It was not hard to imagine what he might be like in bed… He had a real sense of humour too, not like those English boys who would tire you out by always putting on a show, barely able to speak without trying to make a joke, but quiet and dry and quick to see the ridiculous side of things. He could do an impersonation of Mrs Yount changing her mind about the colour of the bathroom which made Matya cry with laughter.

And yet there were still things which added up to reasons for not fancying him. She had a vivid memory of what it felt like to consider Zbigniew unthinkable. This remembered Zbigniew would intermittently rise up and blot out her feelings for the Zbigniew who was in front of her at that moment. If he had known, he would have been very taken aback to learn that his biggest obstacle with Matya was her memory of the time when she had found him ridiculous. Because she had seen him first in a menial capacity, doing jobs for the Younts, a trace of that hung around him – he was in some sense, like her, servant-class. The fact that she was too made it worse, not better. Also, he was not good-looking: he had a broad flat blank Slavic face and hair a shade of brown that you couldn’t quite remember, so next time you saw him it was either a shade darker or a shade lighter than you expected. He wasn’t ugly, but he wasn’t good-looking. You just didn’t notice his looks.

Zbigniew had no idea that his deadliest rival was Matya’s former impression of him. He might have been relieved to hear it. As he saw it, his deadliest rival was the suitcase which, before going out on their date, he had taken out and dumped on his mattress at number 42 Pepys Road. The case had flipped open, and he was now sitting beside it. By some trick of memory, the amount of money in the suitcase looked bigger every time.

Perhaps the notes were expanding. Or perhaps it was because he was willing the money to be less of a problem. He was trying to squeeze it down in his mind. As a mental device this had some success, and he was able to go for stretches of time without thinking about what to do – except the actual money could not be compressed so easily, and looked bigger every time he checked on it.