John Lanchester - Capital

So now she was standing in front of a full-length mirror in what had been her childhood bedroom and was now a sort of spare room, even though no visitor had ever stayed there. She hadn’t brought any dressing-up clothes to London and was having to make do with the nicest floral dress she’d packed; it wasn’t ideal, and it might not be warm enough, but she would take along a cashmere cardy and it would have to do. Alan had suggested she bought herself something new but she drew the line at that. The fact that her mother was dying was no reason to go on a spending spree.

The doorbell rang. This too was part of what Alan had arranged. He knew that Mary wouldn’t go out unless someone she could trust was looking after Petunia, and knew too that there was no stranger who Mary would trust, so he had asked Graham to come and grandma-sit. Again, because Alan never asked anything of Graham – Mary was the one who did the worrying and fussing and checking-up and advice-giving – when he did, it was treated as a direct order. That was annoying, given what Graham was like with her. Anyway, here her son was. She went downstairs and opened the door.

It took a lot of effort and discipline not to exclaim in alarm at his clothes. Graham was wearing a no-longer-white white T-shirt with paint stains, a pair of torn, ragged, saggy jeans, and trainers. He could look so smart and handsome when he bothered to make an effort, Mary thought it was a real shame that three-quarters of the time he went around looking like a tramp.

‘Hi, Mum,’ said Smitty. ‘Sorry, I’ve been sitting in the car for ten minutes waiting for it to be six o’clock so that the wardens didn’t get me. One of those African ones was eyeing me up. Walking past pretending not to have seen me. I swear, it’s like the nicer your car, the more likely you are to get a ticket. Is that capitalism?’

‘Your grandmother’s asleep. She might go straight through the night from here but she also might wake up. You know what to do, yes?’

Mary had gone over this, at length, twice. The instructions were simple, since all Graham had to do was go and help his grandmother if she called for him. They had now installed a baby monitor so that the person downstairs could hear Petunia if she called out.

‘Sure I do, Mum. Chuck in a grenade and shoot the first one who comes running out. Off you go, off off. Dad said to tell you to take a black cab from the rank.’

‘Right,’ said Mary, who had no intention of doing any such thing. And then, since she couldn’t stop herself, since she was the one who did the family’s caring and worrying and asking and noticing and minding, and since Graham was looking so rough and so ragged – was looking a lot like someone who had lost their job, or didn’t have a job, and was in no hurry to get another one, she said:

‘Work… everything, everything OK at work?’

‘Never better, Mum. Off you go. Have a good time. I’ll keep away from the drinks cabinet.’ He held up his car keys and waved them as he said that. ‘Shoo. Hoick it. Scram. Vamoose. It’s your Big Night Out.’ So Mary had no choice except to pick up her clutch bag and go out into the evening.

When the door closed behind her, Smitty clenched his fist and made an arm-pumping gesture. Yes! Ker-ching! He had bet himself ten million pounds that however short their interaction on the doorstep, his mother wouldn’t be able to stop herself asking about his work, or how things were going, or something. He actually said it aloud, ‘I bet myself ten million quid.’ It was nice to be proved right. That was something you never got tired of. Making a joke of his mum’s way of carrying on made it less of a mind-fuck. From his dealings with his mother, Smitty had learned the following truth: the person doing the worrying experiences it as a form of love; the person being worried about experiences it as a form of control.

Smitty took a wander round the ground floor to see that everything was in order. It was – of course it was. If anything his mum was even tidier than his nan – though having said that, now that he was looking around the kitchen, there was clear evidence that she had taken up smoking again: a washed-up ashtray on the draining board, and the sort of tobacco smell you get when someone is trying to be careful about smoking near the window but doesn’t realise non-smokers will pick up odour anyway. Ha! Well, sort of ha. His mum taking up smoking would have been funny if the circumstances had been different. Her taking up smoking because she was sad and stressed about Nan dying wasn’t something to laugh about. He withdrew his mental ha.

The kitchen was the same as always. It had been funny to see it as a form of time travel to 1955 when his nan was just being his nan, as permanent and unchangeable as a piece of sculpture. From a certain perspective, his nan’s kitchen was a genius piece of camp. But it looked a little different now that she was dying and would probably, no, certainly, never use it again: never open the world’s oldest fridge, never stand by the stove waiting for the ultra-retro kettle to sing. The objects had Nan in them, her care and attention and her wanting them to be this way. She had chosen them (or more likely her husband had chosen them and then she had chosen to put up with them). While she was dying, it was as if they were dying too, the care and the wanting-them-this-way draining out of them. Now she’d never be in this room again.

Never was a hard word. Smitty’s art didn’t take much interest in never, and he found that it wasn’t something he wanted to spend much time thinking about.

From the sitting room, he could hear a faint echoing noise which he took a moment to figure out; it was the baby monitor. You could set it to go both ways, presumably so people could talk back to their babies – yes darling, ga-ga-goo-goo, or whatever it was people said to babies – but Mary had disabled the feature so she didn’t have to worry about making noise downstairs. He’d best go check on his nan. Taking the stairs two at a time, Smitty went up to her bedroom. She was lying on her back, propped up against the pillows, and her eyes were open.

‘Graham,’ she said. ‘Your mother said you’d be here. I didn’t mean to bring you up.’ Her speech, Smitty noticed, had a faint slur, like that of someone who’s had a few drinks and doesn’t yet realise they’re becoming pissed.

‘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.

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.