John Lanchester - Capital

‘Bullshit,’ said Amir. ‘Total bullshit. Catch-22. The fact that there’s nothing on him is proof that he’s a trained operative? Bullshit.’

‘He has the history,’ said the MI5 liaison.

‘No he doesn’t. He has the archaeology – more than ten years ago. So he went to Chechnya. Big deal. There’s nothing else here. There’s no form. Nothing from our people at the mosque, nothing on his record of travel, no pattern of any kind. He would have to be some weird kind of sleeper agent who does nothing for a decade. When he was in Chechnya, Al Qaeda didn’t exist. All bullshit.’

‘Until we find Iqbal Rashid, he’s not going anywhere,’ said the MI5 man. And that was where the situation rested. Shahid had been held in prison for ten days, and did not have to be charged for another eighteen.

‘I feel a little bit sick,’ said Matya. ‘What’s it called? Like being in a car. Or on a boat. Sick from the movement.’

‘ Cierpiący na morską chorobę ,’ said Zbigniew. ‘I don’t know what it’s called in English.’

They were on the London Eye, more than halfway up. Stepping onto the wheel had been, to Zbigniew’s surprise, slightly disconcerting: the implacable way it couldn’t be stopped or slowed. Matya, obviously feeling the same thing, put a hand above his elbow as they stepped on. That was good. Up they went in the clear capsule. They weren’t alone: a number of tourists – seven Japanese and a few southern Europeans – were in the same bubble. The Japanese were jockeying to take mobile-phone photographs of themselves and the view.

The city spread out around them and Zbigniew started by pretending to look at the views – because his real reason for being there was to be with Matya, and he wasn’t that bothered about anything else – and then found himself getting genuinely interested. He had worked in London for three years now but had no idea about most of what he was looking at. London was big and low in the middle, with a higher edge in both directions, like a gigantic saucer. North and south weren’t where he expected them to be and the patch of green, higher, but not much higher, say twenty metres above the river, three or four kilometres away, must be the Common. Zbigniew, who had no feelings about London that he was aware of, was nonetheless impressed. One thing about London: there was a lot of it.

The mobile phone thing had worked perfectly for Zbigniew. He waited for two hours: went home, checked his portfolio at the kitchen table, ate the beef stew which one of Piotr’s crew had cooked, and then, just as he thought he was going to have to take the initiative, the phone rang. The ringtone was ‘Crazy’ by Gnarls Barkley – which might mean that she was a girl who liked her music. Interesting. The number being shown on the screen was his number and it took him a moment to get his head around it: that meant not that he was calling himself but that Matya was calling him, i.e. calling herself, using his phone. The moment of confusion was useful because it meant he didn’t have to act confused.

‘Um, yes, who is this?’ said Zbigniew.

‘Who is that? Why do you have my mobile?’ said Matya.

‘Why do I have your mobile? Why do you have my mobile?’

They sorted it out from there. Bless Nokia for the popularity and ubiquity of the N60. Zbigniew knew that this was a moment to be gallant, and made no secret about the fact that it was all his fault, so he would make everything all right by bringing the phone to her, right now. So she would go to the pub about two hundred metres away from her and he would meet her there in about half an hour.

Zbigniew knew the pub, a cattle market just off the Common. He got there in twenty minutes and took up a position at the bar; she was on time.

‘Completely my fault,’ said Zbigniew, raising his hands. ‘A hundred per cent. Didn’t think, didn’t check.’

‘Well, it doesn’t matter, thanks for bringing it back straight away,’ said Matya, who had changed out of her daytime jeans into a slimline dress which Zbigniew found he both wanted to look at and couldn’t bear to look at, at the same time. She really was lovely. He wished he could think of clever or funny things to say, but all he could come out with was ‘Can I buy you a drink?’

‘No,’ she said, but smiling, looking down and up, before adding, ‘Not tonight.’ And Zbigniew, understanding what that meant, felt a flash of real happiness for the first time in a long time. So they made a date for a week later, she left, and he floated home. Perfect. Could anything be more perfect?

Zbigniew thought long and hard about what to do with Matya on their first date together. Zbigniew’s sense of himself, in the privacy of his own mind, was that he was about as unromantic as it was humanly possible for a person to be. Matter-of-fact, practical, unemotional, temperate, sane. There were few activities which could not be approached as if they had a secret user’s manual. Attraction to the opposite sex and the need to find a mate were practical realities of life and it would be better if they were approached as such. Zbigniew had noticed, however, that this was not the way the world worked. Besides, something about Matya made him feel as if there were perhaps something in this idea of romance after all… And he knew for sure – he could detect – that the right way to treat her was as if she were special. She was not like other girls.

Lurking in this was his memory of Davina. She had been an education in the truth that people did not, in practice, come with a user’s manual. He would not go down that route again; he would not use Matya. He would feel for her what he felt and would not let things get away from him again. He would try to be more like a man. He wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but he felt that the idea imposed obligations on him.

The simplest way of treating Matya differently would be to do the things he had never bothered to do with anyone else – the things he had not exerted himself to do. Going to a film would be too easy, not romantic enough, and it was something he had tried before. Restaurants were romantic but also expensive and he did not feel at ease in the kind of places Matya would want to be taken to – French places, Italian places. She would be able to feel his concern about money. Women could sense that kind of thing. A long walk in the park? Too romantic. Too like something out of a film. He would seem desperate, as if he were on the verge of proposing marriage. A trip to the seaside, to Brighton, would be something he had never done before himself, therefore romantic, with the thrill of discovery, but also with much potential to go wrong, and expensive too.

So he took her for a walk along the South Bank. This was something Zbigniew knew people did but had never done himself and when he suggested it, over the phone, Matya paused for a moment and then said Yes, sounding surprised and pleased. He had won points by coming up with something she had not expected from him. (Polish men – very unromantic. That was what Matya’s friend had told her.)

The river scene gave Zbigniew, for the first time, a feeling of being in the middle of London. It was like: London? Here it finally is! He had seen heaving pubs and bars, bodies strewn all over the Common during the freak intervals of good weather, packed Tube carriages, the high streets of South London in their full Saturday-night mayhem; but this was different. This was people from all over the world, in the middle of the city, because they had come there to be there, with Parliament across the dark grey river, tourist buses coughing diesel on the access road, the theatres and museums and concert halls, the railway bridge, road bridge and pedestrian bridge, all busy in both directions, the restaurants packed, jugglers and mime artists wasting everybody’s time and taking up space, children running about, a skateboard park for the teens to show off to each other, couples holding hands everywhere, a policewoman walking up and down with a horse with a child protection phone number written on a cover on its back, presumably because this area was riddled with pimps on the lookout for girls to exploit, street stalls selling tourist junk and portable food, musicians, and lots of people not doing anything much, just being there because they wanted to be there. For once it wasn’t raining and there came a time when the clouds even parted.