Capital: A Novel

by John Lanchester

  ‘There’s nothing else for it,’ said Roger. Joshua twisted his upper body round and tried to bite Roger on the arm. ‘Would you rather I let you fall in?’ asked Roger. The answer to that seemed to be in the affirmative. Joshua now began wriggling from side to side as hard as he could, with the full unrestrained strength of a three-year-old. He had the concentrated force of pure will and was also stocky, muscular, a tube of force and determination. He suddenly changed direction and bucked upwards, catching Roger right on the point of the chin with a ferocious upward head-butt.

  ‘Fuck!’ shouted Roger, his eyes stinging with tears. As his grip weakened, he felt Joshua slip. The little boy fell forward off the loo seat, seeming to be in tears before he landed on the floor. At that point, with no warning, he began to shit. A spray of excrement, not entirely liquid in texture but not solid either, came out of Joshua’s bum and as if it were a form of propellant he began crawling at amazing speed out of the loo, heading for the landing. Roger, head ringing, one hand on his mouth and jaw, lunged after him but he was too slow and Joshua made it onto the cream carpet before his father could catch him. Excrement was still coming out of Josh’s bottom and he was still crying. Roger was crying too thanks to the head-butt, which had made his eyes fill with tears. He lunged again and grabbed Josh with his right arm before he could make it down the stairs. Roger, wrestling with his son, noticed something that it was not helpful to notice: that the colour of the fresh shit-swirls on the carpet was exactly the shade of a perfectly made cappuccino. Then Joshua shat again, this time down the arm of Roger’s dressing gown. The shit was liquid and hot. It smelt very bad. Then the front door rang.

  ‘Fuck!’ said Roger, under his breath, but not sufficiently under his breath, because Joshua, smiling now that he had relieved himself, also said ‘Fuck!’ Roger decided that whoever it was at the door could sod off. He took Joshua back into the loo and put him standing up in the sink. Then he shrugged his dressing gown off, thinking: that’s for the bin. Then he ran the taps and washed Joshua, who was clean from the waist up but below that was about 70 per cent covered in shit. While he was doing this the doorbell rang twice more, each time for longer. Roger put Joshua down and looked in the cupboard under the sink, where there were about seven or eight different kinds of cleaner, none of them self-evidently the one to use to get shit off a carpet. There was something called carpet shampoo, Roger knew that. That would be the stuff. But none of these things admitted to being carpet shampoo. While Roger was looking at the various aerosol sprays, Joshua picked up the bleach and tried to get the top off, then when his father took it away from him made a lunge for the air-freshener, knocked the top off before Roger could react, sprayed himself in the face at a range of three inches, and burst into tears again. Then the doorbell rang for about the fifth time. Who rang the bell like that on Christmas Day, for God’s sake? Roger put his dressing gown back on, trying to avoid handling the stripes of shit on the left arm, picked up his naked son and went downstairs to open the door.

  Three large men, all of them at least Roger’s height, stood there with a huge package, wrapped in cardboard.

  ‘Happy Christmas,’ the largest of the large men said in a South African accent. ‘We have a delivery for Mrs Yount.’ He lowered his voice to a loud whisper. ‘It’s the sofa.’

  ‘Fuck!’ said Joshua.

  28

  If asked, Arabella would have told anyone that she had a fabulous time over Christmas, never better; that she’d never enjoyed a Christmas more. That was what Saskia and Arabella told each other, as they met in the relaxation room between treatments, or had their goes side by side on the treadmill, or ate their special luxury light lunch (maguro tuna sushi, carpaccio of monkfish and prosciutto, Earl Grey sorbet, Krug to wash it down). That was what Arabella told herself, many times, when she woke in the morning on Christmas Day, when she took her first sip of champagne at breakfast, and when she and Saskia unwrapped the presents they had bought each other (a MacBook for Saskia, who was at last definitely going to get to grips with that screenplay; a lovely Indian necklace for Arabella), and at the other times she felt a wave of something she could not exactly name. It was not a doubt that she was doing the right thing, because she knew that she was: her rationalisations were in perfect order. This experience was sure to make Roger a better, more attentive parent and spouse, and that would be a good thing for every member of the Yount family.

  Despite that, there were momentary wobbles. It was as if the ground was slightly unfirm under her feet; not for long, and only when she thought about Joshua and Conrad and whether or not they were missing her – how, exactly, they were missing her. She sat tight and waited for the uncertainties to pass, and so they did.

  At dinner, she and Saskia got chatting to a couple at the next table, a South African lawyer and his wife whose twin daughters were gap-yearing around Latin America. Saskia was a little tiddly by this point and kept giggling and making goo-goo eyes at the husband, who had done that madly unfair thing of keeping his looks while the wife had aged much faster. Under other circumstances it would have been funny but Saskia was so blatant, there was something a little sad about it . . .

  Saskia and her new friends – the wife looking like she was making the best of an evening she knew would be over soon – went through to the drawing room for liqueurs. Arabella knew that if she drank any more she would have a hangover and part of the point of being in this luxury spa was to go home looking and feeling fabulous, so she went to her room and read a novel set in Afghanistan until she realised she had fallen asleep twice already, and so she put the book down and turned out the light.

  29

  Boxing Day was Freddy Kamo’s first day on the bench at his new club. He knew he had been doing well in training but he was still surprised to be picked. The game was against the team who were bottom of the Premiership. The manager’s explanation had been very clear.

  ‘You won’t get on for long if you get on at all,’ he said through the interpreter. ‘But it will help you to get a feel of things here. This is our easiest game over the holiday and I’ll be rotating the squad. And also,’ smiling, ‘don’t forget to enjoy it.’

  That was advice Freddy intended to take – but it wasn’t easy. The warm-up was OK, but when he came out of the tunnel and ran to the dugout before kick-off, everything felt completely different. The noise and drama of the ground couldn’t be prepared for: this was the real thing. He had been to the stadium many times before, but it was not the same from the bench. The sensation of being in front of the crowd, the sheer volume of it, the emotional intensity, was a physical thing, almost an assault. Freddy could feel his heart rate was up; he tried to resist the temptation to look around for his father, who he knew would be sitting in the stands beside Mickey Lipton-Miller. Then he did look round and saw Patrick, who looked back at him, not smiling, completely serious. That helped to settle Freddy. Seeing his father on edge gave him permission to relax. The translator came and sat beside Freddy, squeezing in on the bench. Freddy could smell that he had had a glass of wine with his lunch.

  The referee blew for the kick-off and Freddy’s team were two goals up within twenty minutes. There wasn’t much pattern to the match that Freddy could see, but his side were generating chances more or less at will, and the striker took two of them with ease. It didn’t seem likely to stay 2–0 for long, but they relaxed a little and stopped pressing so hard. Half-time seemed to come very quickly. The manager didn’t say much, just told them to keep playing as they had been. As they were going out at the end of half-time, he tapped Freddy on the shoulder.

  ‘I may give you a run at the end of the half,’ he said, through the translator. ‘Just a couple of minutes.’

  Freddy nodded. He wished the manager hadn’t told him; now he’d be nervous all half. It didn’t occur to him that that was part of the point, to give him a taste of expectation and pressure. Back on the bench, Freddy began to concentrate on the left-back, who would be marking him. He seemed
on the slow side; Freddy was confident, and more confident still when the £20 million midfielder scored from a free kick to put them three goals ahead.

  With five minutes to go, the manager told him to warm up. With two minutes to go, the manager summoned him, and waved to the linesman, who checked his studs, then waved to the referee, and then he was on. Freddy ran to the far wing. His instructions were simple: be available for the ball, and get a cross in if possible or hold it up for the midfield if not.

  In the stands, Patrick had a rush of sensations he couldn’t explain to himself: frantic, scared, suddenly full of conflicting memories and emotions to do with his son’s youth, the first moment he’d held him, the day Freddy’s mother died, kicking a ball about in the dirt outside their house, watching Freddy play in his school team and score his first goals for them, holding his forehead when he was sick, taking him to games and picking him up after them and standing and watching him play hundreds, maybe even thousands of times, putting mercurochrome on his cuts, calming him when he had night terrors, his first-born child, his only son. Patrick felt his stomach turn over as he watched Freddy trot out onto the field, his awkward too-long legs looking skinnier and more elongated than ever in the huge crowded stadium, on the field with men fifteen years older than him. Patrick felt something wrong with his face. He reached up; his cheeks were soaked with tears.

  The crowd roared. Most of them knew who Freddy was, though they’d never seen him play. The ball was down at the other team’s end as the opposition passed sideways and backwards looking for an opening that wasn’t there. Then the central defender and captain won a 50-50 and knocked it to the £20 million midfielder near the centre circle. He looked around and played a short ball to the holding midfielder, who hit a first-touch pass to Freddy. It was all happening very quickly, but Freddy expected that. He’d experienced this before. When a player in any sport goes up a level, the first, overwhelming impression he gets is that of increased speed. It’s not that they’re doing things he’s never seen before, it’s just that they’re doing them faster and better and more often.

  The opposition left-back, whose name Freddy didn’t know, was about two metres away. At home, there was a move Freddy had done so often that, playing a kick-about game in front of his house in Linguère, it no longer worked, because all his friends, everyone in Linguère, had seen it a million times. Nobody here had seen it though, and it was a closer thing to Freddy than his own reflection in the mirror, as easy as getting out of bed. He lunged towards the ball with his left foot, but then, dummying, let it roll past and took it on his right foot instead. His weight was transferred, his direction switched, all in a second, and he was off. It was a dummy, a jink, and a burst out of the starting blocks, all in the same movement.

  There had been rain that morning. The pitch was not completely dry; that probably had an effect. The left-back had no real idea who Freddy was. It was the ninetieth minute and his concentration was wavering. The result of Freddy’s move was that the defender sold himself to Freddy’s leftward jink and when he tried to adjust his balance to follow him, he lost his footing and slipped over on his backside, but slowly, windmilling his arms to try and keep himself upright as he went inexorably over. By the time he was actually on his behind, Freddy was ten metres away. One centre-back came over to close him down, Freddy hit a cross to the far post, the striker got above the other centre-back and headed it against the crossbar with a noise Freddy never forgot, a smack like an axe hitting wood. The goalie collected the rebound and booted it upfield, and then the referee blew for full time.

  By midnight that night, a clip called ‘Freddy’s first touch’ was one of the ten most-viewed items on YouTube.

  30

  People sometimes said that stressful or dramatic or unusual circumstances caused time to ‘pass in a blur’. Roger wished that he had found that to be true. The forty-eight hours over Christmas were the most exhausting of his life. After the sofa was wrestled into position and signed for – he couldn’t face having it unwrapped, so it spent the day in its assigned corner of the larger drawing room, still reproachfully in its cardboard container – he made the mistake of turning on the television and letting the boys sit in front of it while they played with their new presents. They both had made spectacular hauls. Conrad had his robot, as well as huge boxes of Transformers, Bionicles, Lego, Action Men, and two lightsabers. Joshua did not understand Christmas yet so the sight of his colossal new Brio train set did not seem to exert much grip; it was as if he did not realise that it now belonged to him. Arabella had also bought him a giant bright orange teddy bear, almost five feet tall – too tall to drag around after him, though he might be able to sit on it. Joshua looked at it carefully, thoughtfully, for about thirty seconds, then burst into tears, and wouldn’t stop crying until the bear had been taken out of the room and hidden and Roger had promised that he would never ever ever see it again ever, not once.

  ‘Nevertobeseenagain,’ said Josh, when he had calmed down, repeating a phrase he liked from a story Pilar had read him.

  ‘Never to be seen again,’ agreed Roger. They were now sitting in front of the television watching a children’s programme with shouting presenters. Roger knew that there were scandals involving children’s TV presenters taking cocaine. To be that lively that early in the morning, it would in Roger’s view have been much more shocking if they hadn’t been taking cocaine. In fact, thinking about it, maybe coke could be the secret of a whole new parenting strategy . . .

  But the television was a terrible mistake. He used it up too soon. Roger didn’t know that his boys eventually tired of television, especially when they were allowed to watch it first thing in the morning; they became febrile and listless. In that condition it was as if they’d had too much sugar, and became unbiddable, unmalleable, prone to tantrums, both manic and exhausted at the same time. Roger should have used TV as a strategy of last resort. After no more than a couple of hours, he was knackered (also panicking, and full of rage, and self-pity); Joshua and Conrad were tired too, and bored, and bouncing on the old sofa, with each boy desperate for their father to play a strenuous game with him alone. With two sons and one father that was impossible, which made it all the more necessary, until Joshua trumped his older brother by flinging himself off the sofa-side table while Roger was distracted, and bumping his head, so Conrad retaliated by smashing his biggest new Transformer – Optimus Prime, his favourite – against a table leg, so hard that it didn’t just break-for-effect (he knew they came apart into pieces and could be reassembled, and this was the outcome he was looking for) but broke-for-real, at which point his tears and tantrum became real too: genuine, inconsolable grief.

  At that point, with both his sons screaming and crying, Roger, feeling as tired as he could ever remember feeling – feeling weepy with tiredness, gritty-eyed, furious, heavy, as if lying down on the bed would make him sleep for a month – looked at his watch. As he did so, he framed a wish about what the time might be; half past eleven, perhaps, with Joshua’s nap, which he knew took place at some point in the afternoon, now in sight? Then he could stick Conrad in front of the telly, again, or lock him in his room, or something, and go back to bed himself for a little precious sleep. Sleep – he had never really valued it before. He had taken it for granted. That was not right, because you should not take sleep for granted, because sleep was the best thing in the world. By far. Much, much better than sex. Much. And he could be having some, soon, oh so very soon, if only the outcome when he looked at his watch was that the time was say eleven, which was likely, or eleven thirty, which was possible, or twelve, or, who knew? time could fly past – or even twelve fifteen?

  It was ten. Roger felt his eyes fill with tears. His eyes lit on the card on the mantelpiece, the one which said somebody wanted what he had. Well, what he wanted at that moment, more than anything else, was a cyanide pill.

  That established a pattern. A stretch of time would go past, and Roger would know that it was going past, while h
e, say, lay on the floor pretending to be a baddy Power Ranger, or pushed a train round the Brio track making chuffing noises, or ran very slowly away from the advancing Roboraptor pretending to be a plant-eating dinosaur in the grip of fear. He would do this for some time then expect that time had fulfilled its part of the bargain, and had, somehow, passed: that having been twenty past eleven the last time he looked at his watch it would now be significantly later. Instead it would be twenty-five past eleven.

  Lunch was interesting. It was demanding to prepare – Conrad couldn’t remember which kind of eggs he liked, so Roger had to fry an egg and throw it away and boil an egg and throw it away and poach an egg and throw it away, before it was found by trial and error that scrambled eggs were the ones Conrad would eat. The confusion came about because he had said he liked the one which was eggy. Even allowing for that, Conrad was much less tricky than Joshua. He angrily refused everything Roger suggested before eventually deigning to eat a single narrow slice of crustless white bread with a thin smear of smooth peanut butter, and that was at the fourth attempt: the first slice was too thick, the second was defiled by the use of crunchy peanut butter, and the third by the use of too much peanut butter. Scraping the spread off and re-serving the slice with a thinner smear was by no means acceptable. There was something about the texture of Joshua’s tantrum, the way he thumped the table with his plastic plate while shouting ‘no! no Daddy no!’: the impersonal severity of his rage made it clear that this was a question of standards. A smear of peanut butter with some peanut butter taken off the top was not the same thing as a fresh smear of peanut butter.