Capital: A Novel

by John Lanchester

  5

  Shahid Kamal, who was due to work a shift at the family shop between eight o’clock in the morning and six o’clock in the evening, walked down the street at a brisk clip. He was early, and had several things he could be doing with this extra half-hour: he could have stayed in bed; he could have sat in the café downstairs from his flat reading a book; he could have spent half an hour on the net catching up on the news and his Myspace page and his discussion boards; but instead he chose to take a brisk walk. Five years ago their father had died suddenly in Lahore, struck down by a heart attack at sixty-two, and his brother Ahmed was already beginning to look a little like their dad: paunchy, tired, unfit, indoorsy. Shahid could read the omens and knew the family body type; now that he was in his thirties he was going to have to take exercise if he was not to turn into yet another ghee-fattened South Asian with a gut and high blood pressure. So here he was, going the long way round, and at speed. There was lots of traffic on the pavement, most of it people on the way to work, heads down in the cold, most of them carrying briefcases and shoulder bags or handbags. Shahid had no bag, he liked to move unencumbered.

  Just before the corner of Pepys Road, Shahid crossed to the other side of the street – to reduce the chance that Ahmed might see him and call him to come and help with the pre-work rush – and turned towards the Common. He still had twenty minutes. It was cold, but Shahid had nothing against the cold as long as he could keep moving. He came out on the Common, passed the Church and its billboard of advertisements for itself, and headed out for the bandstand; there and back would be about twenty minutes and he’d be bang on time. Commuters came hurrying towards the Tube station from every point of the compass, with cyclists weaving in and out among them. Although he too was heading to work, Shahid was glad he wasn’t dragging himself off to some office job. Shahid’s view: anybody who had to wear a suit to work died a little inside, every day.

  Shahid was the free spirit of the Kamal family: a dreamer, an idealist, a wanderer on the face of the earth – or, as Ahmed would put it, a lazy fuckwit. He had been offered a place at Cambridge to read physics but cocked it up by missing his required A-level grades, owing to a bad case of not doing any work at all for his final school year. He’d gone to Bristol instead but dropped out after a year and went on a mission to save his brothers in religion in Chechnya. He’d been gone for four months. Although no member of the Kamal family ever referred to this as anything other than a joke, it hadn’t felt like a joke at the time to Shahid. Chechnya itself had been horrible, a brutal disillusionment – Shahid mainly remembered being shouted at, a permanent sense of moral ambiguity where he’d expected to find a shining light of virtue, a feeling that it was hard, among the good guys, to tell who the good guys were, and being cold and hungry and frightened, right up until he came down with diphtheria and was smuggled back out the same way he’d come in. But the trip there had been sensational, the best time of his life: he’d set out on his own, hooked up with some fellow idealists in Brussels, and then they travelled out by cadging lifts and bumming rides all the way to the Russian border, before blagging their way onto a convoy and riding the scary, exhilarating trail through Russian-held territory, through Chechen lines into the besieged homeland. He hadn’t really had a clue what he was doing, other than expressing a vague sense that his brothers were in danger and that Muslims were being killed and no one was doing anything about it, so it was his duty to do something – but it was a rule of life that you were allowed to do silly, half-baked, idealistic things when you were eighteen. The best thing about it had been the sense of purpose, of a shared goal and larger meaning, that they’d all had on the trip there, he and two blokes from Birmingham, a French-Algerian called Yakoub, and three Belgian Muslims, two of whom were converts, all of them high on the sense of purpose and discipline and willingness to fight for a cause. He almost never thought about Chechnya but he often thought about the trip there. Shahid was also aware of the irony that he who prized his freedom and willingness to seek truth had been happiest when he had a defined purpose, a sense of duty and obligation, and a specific destination in mind.

  Since then he hadn’t done anything much, or nothing which would look like much on a CV. He spent a couple of months recovering from his stomach bug, and one large irony was that his system could no longer tolerate alcohol – it instantly gave him the runs. So after giving up on his mission to save the umma he was now doomed to be a lifelong teetotaller. Not that he had ever been a heavy drinker but he did like a glass of cider every now and then . . . After getting better he’d worked in the shop and pursued a series of interests, many of which had looked like turning into jobs: he’d been a martial arts bum, learning first t’ai chi, then wing chun, then karate, and had spent every conscious non-working moment for several years in one dojo or another. He liked the discipline and the implicit spirituality of the martial arts, and the way respect and courtesy were built into their fabric: it had the rigour of religious practice but no supernatural or political baggage. Also you learned to kick the shit out of people. But his interest in karate faded just at the point when he’d taken and passed his karate black belt exam; that would have been the moment at which he took up teaching, and something about the idea of being in authority over people, telling them what to do, bossing them about – that, to Shahid, just wasn’t him.

  After his martial arts phase Shahid got interested in computers. This was the end of the nineties and the internet was starting to take off. He taught himself HTML and began helping people to make websites – first friends and friends of friends and then gradually building up a word-of-mouth business. It was a time when you could make a living by having read roughly two books about writing code, so he did, and earned more money than at any other time in his life. Perhaps that was the problem. Somewhere deep in Shahid’s sense of himself was the idea of being a seeker, a drifter, a man not tied down; he could feel the cash, four-figure sums in a good week, starting to tether him. Shahid could tell that it wouldn’t be long before he wanted the life to go with the money, so on the day he was offered a proper, full-time job – setting up a website for a friend’s cousin, who’d made a shedload importing cloth, and was planning to make several shedloads more – instead he just stopped writing code. These days he spent very little time surfing the web, which now seemed, on reflection, a giant collective conspiracy to waste time. Given infinite freedom of intellectual movement, it turned out that what people mainly want to do is look at pictures of Kelly Brook’s tits. Shahid enrolled at Birkbeck and did another year of physics before dropping out again – as Ahmed pointed out, at this rate he was well on course to graduate in 2025. It was the daily slog across London, more than the work, which made the educational fight go out of him. After that, Shahid mainly read books and worked in the shop. He was OK with that. He felt full of potential.

  Shahid came to the shop and checked his watch: bang on time. More and yet more commuters were scuttling past, the morning rush building up, a few of them taking a sharp turn sideways to go into the shop, preferably without breaking step or losing speed. Bless them, every one. He followed one of them through, and saw that a queue had already built up at the counter. He came through and grunted a greeting at Ahmed in return for the fact that Ahmed had done no more than grunt one at him. Ahmed was doing that thing of wearing every piece of clothing he owned. Together they served ten customers, the typical morning crowd, buying newspapers and energy drinks and topping up their Oyster cards, the queue to pay on the right side of the central shelves and the queue to exit on the left. Then there was a lull.

  ‘Cup of tea?’ said Ahmed, thawing slightly. He gestured behind him towards the living quarters with his soft right hand. Shahid nodded his thanks and went through.

  Ahmed did not know this, but Shahid was not free of envy at the domestic side of his brother’s life, and he felt a jab of it as he saw Rohinka stirring something on the stove while Fatima, looking prim and businesslike in her school uniform, sat at th
e kitchen table drawing a flower on a piece of paper with a yellow marker pen. Mohammed sat in his high chair in a bright red Babygro, looking with deep, reverent concentration at the palms of his hands. He had what appeared to be mashed banana on his nose.

  ‘Mohammed, say hello to your uncle,’ said Rohinka.

  ‘Nun-nun,’ said Mohammed, without looking up from his hands. Something about them was possessing him; it was as if he’d never seen them before. He began turning them from side to side. ‘Un-un,’ he added.

  ‘So what’s new?’ Shahid asked his sister-in-law. There was a sexy gentleness to Rohinka that Shahid approved of very much. She was so much nicer than his stiff brother, it was ridiculous. Rohinka could tell that he liked her and in turn liked him back.

  ‘Nothing in my life is new,’ said Rohinka. ‘Why would anything be new? Where would such newness come from?’ The words were those of complaint but the tone was happy. Rohinka was happy and did not feel any need to keep the fact secret. ‘And now – time for school. Mohammed, we’re off to get changed. Fatima, it is time to do your toilet business. Shahid, see you later.’

  Fatima lifted up her drawing and said: ‘Finished!’ As with everything else she said, this came out sounding proud and fierce.

  ‘What a lovely flower! And the drawing is lovely too,’ said Shahid, who was shy with girls but flirted effortlessly with children. Fatima put her hands on her hips.

  ‘Fatima!’ warned her mother. Rohinka went upstairs carrying Mohammed, who was still looking at his hands, Fatima went into the loo, and Shahid went into the shop to take over from his grumpy overweight brother.

  6

  At number 51 Pepys Road, Mrs Arabella Yount, who had once read a book about how women were better than men at multitasking, was doing four different things at the same time: she was putting up some shelves in the tiny storeroom she liked to call her pantry; she was looking after her two lovely children, Joshua and Conrad; she was shopping for clothes over the internet; and she was making plans to give her husband a nasty fright.

  Two of those tasks Arabella had subcontracted to other people. The shelves were being put up by her Pole, Bogdan the builder, whom she had started using after a recommendation from a friend and had now adopted as her own. He worked twice as hard as a British worker, was twice as reliable, and cost half as much. Something similar could be said about Pilar, their Spanish nanny, who was looking after her two boys, Conrad and Joshua. Arabella had got Pilar through an agency. She had a qualification in childcare (in fact had a degree), a valid driving licence, could cook, didn’t mind doing her share of the housework, got on famously with Maria the cleaner, which was good because otherwise it could be a bit embarrassing on the two days they were both in the house, and, most importantly – it went without saying that it was by far the most important – was just heavenly with her two boys. Conrad and Joshua positively doted on Pilar. They loved the games she made up for them, the Spanish nursery rhymes she taught them, and her willingness to submit to local custom and cook them two different meals three times a day, since they were inflexibly committed to never liking the same food. At the moment, Conrad would eat nothing that wasn’t doused in soy sauce, and Joshua would eat no vegetables, and Pilar was an absolute genius at dealing with all that.

  There was only one problem with Pilar, which was that she was going to be leaving them to go back to Spain. That was scheduled to happen just before Christmas. Pilar had told Arabella weeks before, very decently giving a full three months’ notice. She was going back to a job at a nursery school in Spain. A new nanny would begin work in the new year, but the Younts would be without any childcare over the holidays. When she had realised that and begun to think about it, Arabella had the initial flickering of an idea.

  For some time now, almost everything about her husband had made Arabella cross. It had begun with the birth of Conrad, eased off a bit after he got to his second birthday, then got much worse when she was pregnant with Joshua, and worse still after he was born. Joshua was now three years old and Arabella was as cross with her husband as she had ever been. The shorthand term for what she felt was ‘competitive tiredness’. She felt she was so tired that she could not think or see straight; she felt that she began the day tired, thanks to the broken and shallow sleep she had been having now for, literally, years, and got more tired as the day wore on, and that there were times when she was running on, as she put it, ‘sheer adrenalin’; but that when her husband came home from work he had the temerity to act as if he was the one making all the effort, as if he was the one who had, by the time he got home, the right to sigh and put his feet up and talk about what a tiring day he had had! Blind! Oblivious! He didn’t have a clue! As for weekends, in some ways they were even worse. Sheila the Australian weekend nanny was very helpful (though she was no Pilar – for one thing she couldn’t drive) but there was still masses to do, and her husband did very little of it. He didn’t cook, except show-off barbecues on the occasional summer weekend at his silly boy-toy gas grill, and he didn’t wash clothes or iron them or sweep the floor or, hardly at all, play with the children. Arabella did not do those things either, not much, but that did not mean she went through life acting as if they did not exist, and it was this obliviousness which drove her so nuts.

  The idea Arabella had had was quite simply to vamoose and leave Roger to it for a few days, with no warning. He could learn about looking after the children and the house by doing it for a few days, solo. While he was doing it, Arabella would be at x. x was nowhere specific, not yet, and yet Arabella had very specific ideas about x. It was going to be a luxury hotel, somewhere not exhaustingly far from London, with a spa.

  Arabella was not contemplating running away for ever. She couldn’t possibly leave Conrad and Joshua. The point was to give her husband a nasty shock. Ideally, the shock of his life. He had no idea, no idea, of the burden actually involved in looking after the children and running the house. No idea. Well, this would bloody well give him an idea. Arabella was going to go away, without warning, for three days and during that time she was going to be completely out of contact with home. Her husband would have no idea where she was – she could be in Reykjavik, she could be on Mars.

  Beside Arabella on the floor was a pile of perhaps twenty hotel brochures. If her husband had noticed them – which assumed that he ever noticed anything – he would have thought she was planning to nag him about holidays. This would teach him. In addition the web browser on her computer had six different screens open. The current most promising candidate was a hotel in the New Forest which offered a residential package starting at £4,000 for the two of them, though the nicer-looking package, which included a daily massage and pampering, was £5,300, not unreasonable, Arabella felt, for what it was. The idea of luxury, even the word ‘luxury’, was important to Arabella. Luxury meant something that was by definition overpriced, but was so nice, so lovely, in itself that you did not mind, in fact was so lovely that the expensiveness became part of the point, part of the distinction between the people who could not afford a thing and the select few who not only could, but also understood the desirability of paying so much for it. Arabella knew that there were thoughtlessly rich people who could afford everything; she didn’t see herself as one of them but instead as one of an elite who both knew what money meant and could afford the things they wanted; and the knowledge of what money meant gave the drama of high prices a special piquancy. She loved expensive things because she knew what their expensiveness meant. She had a complete understanding of the signifiers.

  The tricky thing could be friends: you needed friends who felt the same way. And who had the money to act on the feeling. Luckily, Saskia was one of them. She had been dumped by her shit of a husband eighteen months before but had cleaned him out in the divorce so she was more than good for her share of it. For this sort of adventure she was perfect. Clicking around the website, Arabella thought this New Forest package looked by far the strongest candidate yet. They had availability. S
he picked up her mobile phone, flipped it open, and said ‘Saskia’. The phone rang four times.

  ‘Babes!’ said Saskia, who was thirty-seven.

  ‘Darling!’ said Arabella, who was also thirty-seven. ‘I think I’ve found somewhere down south. Shall I read you all the porn or just book?’

  ‘Darling, you know I trust you.’

  ‘Cool,’ said Arabella, who without thinking about it had stood up and moved across to the mirror in what she called her dressing room. She often went to look at herself when she was speaking on the phone; when she was in the street and took or made a phone call she would stop in front of a shop window and consult her reflection. Although Arabella was conscious of her appearance, careful with her clothes and her blonde highlights and tentatively interested in cosmetic surgery, her skin always the same very faint golden colour to set off her hair, this habit was not vanity but an occasional, sudden, vertiginous loss of self, brought on by the experience of talking to a voice over the airwaves, and not a person in the flesh. When talking on the mobile she needed these occasional reminders that she was still actually there, and it was this unconscious need which underlay this habit of needing to look at her reflection. ‘I’ll go ahead and book,’ she said, turning her face from side to side and keeping eye contact in the mirror. ‘I’ll send you the deets. Big kiss.’

  ‘Love you lots,’ said Saskia, who then broke the connection. Arabella moved back to her computer and started to fill out the hotel booking form. From downstairs she could just hear the sound of three voices, in three familiar tones: Conrad was making an accusation, Joshua was raising his voice to drown him out, and Pilar was interceding between them. But it was not a ‘go to’ noise and Arabella had no difficulty in ignoring it. Then Arabella heard something which got her full attention: the flap of the letter box opening and closing, and a thump of mail landing on the doormat. It sounded as if there were some catalogues there; and Arabella loved her catalogues. She opened the door of her dressing room and came down the stairs as quietly as she could, making a mental note to have Bogdan look and see if there was a way to make it less creaky. Catalogues! Arabella bent and picked up brochures from two different travel companies – that was in case she finally got her husband to agree to go to Kenya for February half-term. There were a couple of uninteresting-looking letters for him, a credit-card bill for her, and a postcard with no addressee other than their house number. Her first thought was that this was an unsolicited offer from an estate agent: these came through at the rate of two a week and she enjoyed being irritated by them and the compliment they paid to the desirability of her house. Arabella noticed the postcard carried a second-class stamp; no one she knew used second-class stamps. The printed text on the card said ‘We Want What You Have’. The postcard was a photograph of their front door. It must be a viral ad thing. There would be a follow-up and then another card finally revealing the point of the exercise as some semi-criminal estate agent finally confessed to a wish to sell her home for her. Arabella took the catalogues and the card upstairs, the catalogues to read and the card to keep for the rainy day when they decided to sell up and get somewhere bigger.