John Lanchester - Capital

Abruptly and without warning, Parker swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. This was the other side of his comatose sleeping, and it was something Daisy had never got used to, even though she must have seen it a thousand times: when Parker woke, he immediately came to full consciousness and began to be physically active. There was no transition period; it was as if he had an off/on switch. He stood up stark naked, stretched his arms over his head, and headed for the en suite loo. Already, merely seconds after getting up, his body language was slouchy and downbeat and depressed. His trim, narrow-shouldered, compact body didn’t look like its usual self. Daisy felt rays of gloom emanating off him. Oh, yes, that was another thing Parker was good at: projecting his negative moods.

Daisy, as she had done many times before, listened to the noise of Parker’s extraordinarily powerful and lavish weeing – that was another part of his skill set, he had a bladder like a carthorse – and then to the noise of his electric toothbrush. When he came back into the room she had sat up slightly in bed with the top sheet pulled up just over her tits, in the faint hope that this might give him ideas.

‘What shall we do today?’ she asked.

But Parker was still doing Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen. He shrugged.

‘Don’t mind.’

‘We could go and walk to that village with that church that has the dirty statue you told me about. The pagan one where she’s opening her legs and showing her vulva, the old pre-Christian artefact. What’s it called, a Sheela-na-gig?’ This, Daisy knew, was right up Parker’s street: he had spoken about it before, more than once. Her idea was the equivalent of offering a child an ice cream.

‘Could do,’ he said. And these two words were almost a declaration of war. Parker and Daisy had both grown up in Norfolk, where the most boring people she had ever known would use this phrase as a way of sucking the oxygen out of any conversation, discussion or plan. ‘Could do’: it was, as it was intended to be, an intellectual passion-killer. Parker knew how much she hated it, and knew how it summed up the safe, stale, provincial childhood world they’d both tried so hard to get away from. ‘Could do’: right.

‘Look,’ said Daisy, pulling more covers up over her. ‘I’m sorry you lost your job, I really am. It’s not fair. I’m sure you did everything you were asked to very well. But there are other things which aren’t fair too, and one of them is acting as if I’ve done something wrong, when I’m trying to be nice to you and get you out of yourself and give us a nice time for a weekend. That’s all I’m trying to do – something nice. You don’t have to treat me as if I’m your aunt forcing you to do the washing-up.’

Parker sat on the bed. There was a merciful, welcome glimpse of him turning back into normal, non-convulsed-by-grief Parker.

‘Sorry. I don’t mean to be such a downer.’

Daisy immediately felt herself melt.

‘Oh baby, I know, and you’re not a downer, you’re never a downer.’

‘No, I am, I have been, I know. It’s that I didn’t see it coming, you know? I wasn’t braced for it. Out of nowhere. One minute it’s all, you know, London’ – and this was an important word for both of them, a code for Escape, for the World, for the Big Life and the open road and the possibilities of things that were larger than home – ‘and the next it’s just, I don’t know, it’s like I’m suddenly on the rubbish heap. I’m nobody. I’m back to being nobody again.’

‘You’re not nobody to me.’

‘No, I know,’ said Parker, and for the first time in a few days gave a version of his real smile, a small but cheeky smile which was one of the things Daisy did genuinely love about him. ‘I’m not nobody to you. I’m not nobody. He can’t take that away from me.’

Daisy patted the bed. Parker, still in his birthday suit, sat beside her and took her hand.

‘Unreachable and blank with misery,’ she said, ‘not good. Able to talk about it, much better.’

‘I just don’t want to get boring, and there’s loads I can’t say.’

‘I know. But this other way of doing it is much, much more boring.’

‘OK. I’ll do my best,’ said Parker, giving her hand a squeeze of the type which was a form of farewell, so that he could let it go and cross the room and start putting his clothes on.

‘Come on, fatso, I want to get some of this breakfast that we’ve paid for.’

Daisy pulled down the covers and got out of bed.

‘You seem much jollier all of a sudden,’ she said.

‘Yeah, I am,’ said Parker, pulling on his jeans. She had noticed the night before that he was the only man in the hotel wearing jeans, but never mind. ‘When I was in the loo I remembered an idea I had in the night.’

‘An idea?’

‘Well, more like a plan, really. A sort of plan. Anyway, let’s go and get some breakfast and then go and see that old bint’s tumpsy.’

Daisy threw a pillow at him. She missed.

Freddy Kamo had been told on the Wednesday that he would be playing in the first team on Saturday. It was going to be his first start. He had wanted this moment, longed for it, pined for it, dreamed about it, and been angry that it hadn’t come yet. He was ready. Patrick, who had always tried to take a calm, philosophical long view about when Freddy’s first full game would come, found himself just as excited as his son. He’s going to play a whole game! In the Premiership! My little boy! Help!

To Freddy, Patrick said, ‘I am pleased for you. You will make us all very proud.’

Patrick sometimes resented Mickey’s relationship with his son. He knew perfectly well that Mickey was indispensable, and that he genuinely cared about Freddy; but he was only human, and couldn’t help feeling, however faintly, displaced by him. It was a little as if Freddy had acquired another father. Today though, with the news, he knew there was only one person in the world who would be as giddy as he was, and that was Mickey, so once Freddy came back from training, and headed up to the games room to play with one of his consoles, Patrick was straight on the phone to the fixer.

‘Do you think he’s ready? Really ready?’ asked Patrick. That morning they had had another one of the cards which he disliked so much, the ones which said people wanted what they had. Normally they made him feel full of apprehension, but today was different. Patrick knew that plain envy was an appropriate thing to feel about what was going to happen to Freddy.

‘He’s going to eat them alive,’ said Mickey. He was even more excited than the two Kamo men: he couldn’t stop smiling, his legs were jiggling at twice their usual rate, and he kept making little jerking movements with his head, as if he were competing for the ball in the air in an imaginary game of football. Tucking one in at the near post, or flicking the ball on for his striking partner. ‘He’s more than ready. He’s super-ready. He’s not just ready, he’s red-hot.’ As if he now owned the idea of Freddy’s readiness, and was trying to sell it back to Patrick.

With some reluctance, Patrick said, ‘I don’t worry about his body, but about his mind.’ He didn’t much want to share this confidence, but he had no one else to say it to. He didn’t like to let Mickey in to his feelings, and this was the first real time he had ever done so; and Mickey, who was a delicate man under his noisiness, recognised this, and took what Patrick said completely seriously.

‘If I thought he knew what a big deal it is, I’d be worried too,’ said Mickey. ‘But he’s seventeen. He can’t know. For him it’s just another game – a big game, the biggest he’s ever had, but just another game. We’re the ones it’s hard on. He’s going to be fine. In ten years’ time, he’ll look back on it and be amazed at how he just took it as the natural next thing.’