John Lanchester - Capital

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.

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.