John Lanchester - Capital

Zbigniew was planning to go home in early January and had already booked a Ryanair flight for 99p plus tax. His mother would make a fuss over him and his father would take a day or two off work. It would be good to be home; Zbigniew hadn’t been to Warsaw since the previous spring. He would see some friends and dandle some babies on his knees and dream about the time he would be able to come back as a wealthy man.

‘That one,’ said Piotr. The pub had no Polish beers so both men were drinking Budvar, in their view the only good thing to come out of the former Czechoslovakia.

‘The blonde? Too short. Almost a dwarf.’

‘No, not the blonde, the one next to her. With dark hair. I am in love.’

‘You are always in love.’

‘Love is what makes the earth go around the sun.’

‘No, that’s gravity,’ said Zbigniew. This was an old debate between them and they barely listened to each other. Piotr fell in lust very easily and made no distinction between that and falling in love. He would conceive a crush on a girl, go and talk to her, fall madly in love, undergo a passionate and violently see-sawing affair, experience extremes of elation undreamt of by most mortals, have his heart broken, go through bitter depression, and recover to await the next encounter, all in about forty-five minutes. When he did actually go out with a girl it was the same cycle, but spread out over a longer time. At the moment Piotr was between love affairs and so coming to the pub with him was, Zbigniew felt, an act of conscious kindness – it would involve listening to him fall in love with girls at least twice in the course of a typical evening. He was not shy, either. If he saw a girl he liked he never failed to ask her out, the first time he spoke to her. It wasn’t that Piotr didn’t mind rejection; he hated it. It was just that he recovered very quickly.

Zbigniew took a different approach. Women were a practical issue, a real-world problem, and like other problems were best solved with a methodical and pragmatic approach. Zbigniew had, not rules, but maxims. He would chase a girl only if he had good reason to think she was already interested. He had never been in love. He said he didn’t believe in it. His philosophy was that if you were clean and financially solvent and not ugly you were already in the top 30 per cent of men. If in addition you listened to what women said to you, or were able to fake doing so convincingly, you were in the top 10 or even 5 per cent. Then all it took was to apply common sense: don’t seem desperate, don’t get drunk, do let the girl get drunk, and harness the power of texting. And then other things, like going out midweek when there was less competition. It was all to do with improving your percentages.

A man in a three-quarter-length dark coat came into the pub, looked around, and went over to the dark-haired girl Piotr liked. They kissed and she reached round behind him to squeeze his bottom.

‘My life is over,’ said Piotr, finishing his beer.

‘Not necessarily,’ said Zbigniew. On the other side of the unused fireplace where they were standing, two young women were looking round the room, flicking their hair, and holding huge 250 ml glasses of white wine. Zbigniew had already twice made eye contact with the girl who was facing him. She had blonde highlights and had taken out a pack of cigarettes and put it on the mantelpiece. Her coat looked expensive and she had a big handbag of the type that was in fashion. Her friend was doing most of the talking. There was something about the blonde girl that Zbigniew liked. Perhaps it was the cigarettes – which were disgusting, for their smell and everything else, but also, when attached to a woman, inexplicably sexy, because of the hint of recklessness that went with them; the hint of not-caring. She was a little untidy with it, her coat open at an odd angle. Zbigniew gestured with his bottle to Piotr and then finished his drink. Piotr took a look.

‘Time to improve our English,’ said Zbigniew. This was code. It was well known that the best way to improve your English was to have an English girlfriend. This was not easy but got much easier once you had a bit of money and spoke good English yourself – but then it was hard to really get good at English without an English girlfriend – so it was not easy. Zbigniew had learned most of his English from a girl called Sam whom he had met when he changed a car tyre for her on King’s Avenue during a rainstorm. He had seen her for six months and it had done wonders for his English. She had been cheating on her boyfriend, but that didn’t seem to bother her and so it didn’t bother Zbigniew either, and they only split up a week before her wedding.

‘I’m going home tomorrow,’ Piotr said.

‘I thought I was supposed to be the practical one.’

‘Yes, but I’m going home tomorrow.’

‘Just get her number then. You’re only away for two weeks. She can be something to look forward to when you get back.’

‘I just told you, my life is over.’

‘And yet it goes on.’

Piotr sighed. ‘Oh, all right.’

Zbigniew was a quiet man, but like his friend Piotr he was not shy. He leaned across to where the handbag girl was standing and said,

‘It’s terrible, isn’t it? The ban.’

She smiled, looked away, looked back. Her friend turned to look. She had very dark hair, black, and wore dramatic red eye make-up. Zbigniew thought her movements were off-puttingly quick, but then she wasn’t his type to start with. The two women looked at each other and some female communication passed between them, and they both turned to face Zbigniew and Piotr. And then it went on from there.

Patrick Kamo didn’t like the card which had come to their door on the second morning, the one with a photograph of their house and the caption ‘We Want What You Have’. Patrick found it sinister; he thought it disturbing that Mickey had no explanation for it and didn’t know what it meant. To Freddy, on the other hand, it was obvious. Who in the world wouldn’t want what he had?

Freddy’s first two days in London slid past in a series of meetings and tests and measurements, the most prolonged of which was the medical for his insurance. He was taken to a room in a private hospital that was the cleanest, brightest, whitest place he’d ever seen, where a team of three brisk doctors, working through his interpreter, saw him prodded and weighed and assessed. His teeth and eyes were looked at, his knees tapped with a hammer, his fingernails and tongue and gums inspected. He was covered in wires and made to run on a treadmill. He was made to stretch and hop and jump. Freddy could feel his father beginning to bristle at all this, at seeing his son so comprehensively treated as a piece of meat, but Freddy didn’t mind. Football was real, but most other things were not real; most things were just games people played. It was simplest to smile and go along. He was here to play football and the time for that would come soon.

The Wednesday before Christmas, Freddy’s third day in London, was his first day at training. He had been out to the training ground in Surrey before, on his acclimatisation visits, but this was the first time he was going for real, and all the way there he couldn’t stop smiling – so much so that his father, who was beside him in the back of the Range Rover, looking solemn and serious and worried in his aeroplane-best suit, would himself lose his game face and start grinning as he looked across and saw Freddy’s expression cracking like an idiot. Mickey was driving and the translator sat in the front beside him, giving a running commentary on where they were as they headed out of town.

Freddy was impressed by how green everything was, even under the dark grey sky, which was almost the same colour as the roofs on the houses. There were many, many trees; and then they were out of London driving across a heath, which seemed unexpectedly wild and bare to Freddy.