Capital: A Novel

by John Lanchester

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Patrick. But for all that, Freddy seemed excited all week – he hadn’t slept properly or been able to sit still since he heard the news. He was bouncing around, terrified, thrilled, nervous. It was hard not to catch both his happiness and his nerves, and by Saturday morning at the hotel the team stayed in for home games, Patrick felt as ragged and stressed as he could remember. When Freddy went down for the post-breakfast team meeting, he lay on his double bed changing channels and playing with the minibar’s bottle opener. He made the electrically operated curtains close and then open again. He turned on the radio, which was tuned to a sports phone-in programme, and then turned it off again. He looked to see if the room had a Bible, but couldn’t find it. He hadn’t been able to eat.

  Freddy seemed calmer after the team meeting. Patrick noticed and resisted the temptation to ask him what had been said. They pottered around a bit, then headed downstairs to get in the coach. Because Freddy was the team’s only legal minor, Patrick was the only relative to travel to games with the team on match days; this often felt like a privilege, but today it was a form of torture. One or two of the older players made a point of coming over and saying hello, asking him if he was all right. The £20 million midfielder put his arm on Patrick’s back and said, ‘It’s a bit like having a baby. When my wife went into labour, you know what the midwife said? She said, “Don’t look so nervous, when it comes to husbands, we haven’t lost one yet.”’

  It was kindly meant, but Patrick had a sudden memory of Freddy’s mother, and of how she wasn’t here, or was here only through Freddy, since his gawky grace had been hers too; and all the things she had missed pressed on him for a moment. The midfielder squeezed his shoulder.

  ‘He’ll be all right, big fella,’ he said. He squeezed harder and then let go and moved on. Patrick felt a prick of tears, not from the shoulder-squeeze; he had to pull himself together. He couldn’t possibly be carried onto the coach crying his eyes out on the day of Freddy’s full-game debut. At just that moment, with perfect timing, the man in charge of the kitbags, who always made a tremendous fuss about everything, even on home games when the kit was already at the stadium, came past shouting, ‘Anyone seen the Adidas bags? Anyone seen the Adidas bags? I need the Adidas bags!’ – which was the perfect opportunity for everyone to look at each other, roll their eyes, and let go of some of their nervousness. Patrick saw Freddy nudging one of his teammates in the ribs, and his weepy moment passed. There was only the present to think about. Let the dead bury their dead. Even the dearest of them.

  The coach ride to home games was always strange. Coach travel in general is slow, not comfortable, anonymous, and takes place over distances which always feel too long. But the team coach felt more spacious than the Kamos’ home back in Linguère, and certainly had better facilities, with on-board entertainment, a lavishly stocked fridge, and personalised climate control. The engine felt muted and distant. And their travel was the opposite of anonymous. As soon as the coach left the hotel, people began to wave at it, honk their horns, brandish their team scarves, or – because this was a match day, which meant there were always plenty of opposing fans around – shout abuse, flick V-signs, call out player-specific insults (poof, black bastard, arse bandit, sheep-shagger, fat yid, paedo goatfucker, shit-eating towelhead, Catholic nonce, French poof, black French queer bastard, etc. etc.) and, once, take down their trousers and moon the coach. Patrick had heard stories of wilder days in the past, when angry fans would rush the coach and begin to rock it on its wheels, a genuinely frightening thing. But this wasn’t frightening. The hate was real, and disconcerting, but it was theatrical too. Patrick understood it without being able to explain it, even to himself. It was real but not-real.

  Mickey almost never came on the coach – on match days he had usually gone ahead to the ground, if there wasn’t some specific problem that needed his attention. Today, though, he came with them, sitting in the seat behind Patrick and Freddy, leaning into the gap between their seats, rubbing his hands with nerves and excitement.

  ‘Feeling all right?’ he asked Freddy for the tenth time, as they pulled into the road in front of a group of fans who were bowing in unison and doing a ‘we are not worthy’ thing. Freddy, for the tenth time, nodded. ‘Hope the traffic’s not too bad. All-time worst for this journey, barely a mile, guess what? An hour and a half. Last year that was. Burst water main, two roads closed, gridlock. Would have been quicker to crawl there blindfold. Bloody nearly late for kick-off, imagine that for a home game. Gets worse every year. Government needs to sort it out. Will they, though? Bollocks. No intention, too anti-car for that.’

  This, by Mickey’s standards, was nervous wittering. He was barely listening to himself, and anyway, as if in ironic counterpoint, the traffic today was moving with complete fluidity. The lights were green, other vehicles let them change lanes, pedestrians stood back from zebra crossings until there was a natural gap in the traffic. Patrick looked across the aisle. The team captain was chewing gum and staring straight in front of him; three seats in front the manager was talking to the coach and holding his hands apart in a cat’s-cradle shape and then moving them sideways. And then they were turning off the road, the club’s main iron gates were opening, and they were at the ground. Freddy’s first start! This was it!

  55

  They separated after getting off the coach. Patrick went upstairs to the directors’ box with Mickey. Freddy was pleased to see them go. On match day, in the last hour or two before games, he liked to get ready inside his own head, and that was harder with his two paternal figures in attendance. The manager was good about things like that. All the preparation was done in advance. Freddy had been briefed on what to do and there would be no last-minute surprises, no rousing speech in the changing room. Everyone was there to do a job, and everyone knew his job. Before they went out on the pitch for the pre-game warm-up and stretch there was a little time. Some liked to sit and think, some walked around, some listened to music. Freddy liked to change as soon as he could, and then just be quiet. Freddy had heard that at some clubs they had rituals, listened to loud music, had specific lucky songs they sang along to. It wasn’t like that here. This was man’s work.

  Freddy sat and thought about what he had to do today. Essentially, he had forced his way into the team. The manager liked to play a narrow formation up front, with one striker advanced and one lying behind him, making late runs, connecting with midfield, giving the central defenders a difficult choice between tracking him one-on-one, and therefore being pulled out of position all round the pitch, or leaving him to roam free with all the space and time he needed. It was a formation with which the manager had won national championships in three countries, as well as the European title. But Freddy was a born winger, a young man made to skin defenders on the outside; to suck them in to tackles and skip past them and then cross the ball; to cut inside and shoot; to lay the ball back for a midfielder coming forward at pace; and then do it all again and again, full of running and full of trouble, and gifted with the one thing which every defender in the world most hates to play against: startling, authentic speed. The speed meant that for an opponent there was no chance to recover from a mistake, and no forgiveness for a lapse of concentration. Blink, and Freddy was gone. His ungainliness, his deceptive air of being about to trip over his own feet, helped too. He would run towards a defender, looking as if the ball were about to get away from him at any moment, and simply kick the ball past. It would, to the defender, be completely obvious that the ball was now his: no way Freddy could get there first. He would turn and chase – and then Freddy would be beside him, past him, his leg would flick out, and he’d be gone. Once he was half a metre past, it was over.

  When Freddy first arrived it was clear he needed to put on a few kilos in his upper body, otherwise the bigger and older men would be able, if and when they caught him, to muscle him off the ball; and maybe the extra weight would mean he lost a yard of speed. That had happened before with many
other young footballers. But it didn’t with Freddy. Not that he put on the bulk; it turned out that he didn’t need it. His running style was so odd, so unpredictable and awkward and elusive, it was as if it short-circuited something in defenders’ brains. He was like an eel. They just couldn’t get a proper hold on him. The manager was very reluctant to believe this, but he finally accepted the evidence of his eyes, gathered over many fractions of games, leading up to entire second halves. OK, he eventually conceded. Freddy was ready. Or even if he wasn’t ready, he was still going to play.

  Freddy, in his match-day strip and tracksuit, sat on the bench by his locker and did up his boots. On Mickey’s advice, they hadn’t yet signed a contract for the boots, so he was wearing a pair of Predators with the logos blacked out. If today went well, and there were other days like today, his shoe contract would be worth many millions. Freddy couldn’t care less about that, because he already had all the money and all the stuff he would ever need, but it mattered to Mickey and to his father, so he did what he was told. The only thing that mattered for Freddy was football. Everything else was to some degree fake.

  A pair of shiny brown shoes appeared in front of him. Freddy looked up. It was the manager with the owner of the club behind him. The owner did not often come to the dressing room and this was, in nine months at the club, only the fourth time Freddy had met him: the others were when he’d first arrived, at an end-of-season club event, and once in the dressing room when Freddy had come on with fifteen minutes to go against Blackburn, and scored the winning goal. The owner smiled down at Freddy in his uneasy way, his eyes moving about as they always did, his air as always that of a man who wished to be somewhere else. Freddy caught a look in the manager’s eyes, and stood up. The owner waved him back down again but Freddy stayed standing.

  ‘Good luck today,’ the owner said in his slow, clear English. ‘Be fast!’

  ‘Yes sir. Thank you. I will try my best.’

  ‘More than try!’ said the owner. ‘Do!’ He was laughing; this was a great joke. He turned to the manager. ‘Do!’ The manager joined in his employer’s laughter. Still laughing and nodding, the owner moved on. Freddy sat back down. Across the room he caught the eye of the club’s longest-serving player, a central defender who had come up through the club’s youth system nearly twenty years ago, and never left. He winked at Freddy.

  Then they were into the pre-match ritual: the walk on the pitch, the stretch and warm-up, the last words from the manager, who said what he always said, a saying that was partly a good-luck charm, partly a mantra, and partly a piece of good advice: ‘We are better than they are. The only way they win is if they work harder than us. So if we work harder than them, we win. So that’s what we’ll do.’ And then they were in the tunnel, the noise level changing as the crowd sounds filtered back into the enclosed space, the other team there too, jogging on the spot, their shoes scratching loudly on the cement flooring, the mascots in front holding hands with the captains, the referee looking back to check that they were all there, and then they were running out onto the pitch, the adrenalin and the exertion and the noise and the sudden emergence into daylight blending into each other so that they were all one thing. Freddy felt as excited and nervous as he could ever remember. He was carrying a ball: as he came onto the pitch he kicked it ahead of him, hard, and put on a burst to get to it, and the crowd shouted and gave the chant they had started to give for him: Fredd-y, Fredd-y. He pretended not to notice, not to be pleased, but his heart was glowing. Then he and the striker passed the ball between them. He flicked it up onto his head and nodded it off the pitch. He was ready. Freddy knew that his father was there, in the directors’ box, and knew also that he wouldn’t be able to see him if he looked for him – which was perfect.

  He had his first touch within a minute of the kick-off. They knew he would be nervous so the holding midfielder, who was the player who made the team run – who covered and tackled, who got up and down the pitch, who broke up the opposition’s moves and did the short-passing to keep his own side in constant motion, who never seemed to do anything particularly noteworthy but never made a mistake and never had a bad game – knocked a short ball to him with his defender a couple of metres away. Freddy came to it, took it and turned in one move, and saw that the defender had dropped off him; he hadn’t tried to match Freddy’s speed to the ball. That meant he knew about him and was being careful. They were nervous of him: a good sign. He took two strides and knocked a pass at forty-five degrees to the striker, who tried to flick it back to him but was blocked by his close marker. The ball ricocheted back and went into touch off the striker.

  They were playing well today. They had most of the ball but no chances in the first ten minutes. There were days with this club, these players, when the momentum felt irresistible. The opponents were just there because they had to be there, but they were only there to provide a game so that Freddy’s team could turn out the winners. This felt like one of those days. The home team were quicker, more fluid; it was as the manager had said, they were just plain better. Ten minutes into the game, the central midfielder was carrying the ball forward, and Freddy decided to try something. His defender was going to hang off him if he could; he’d been warned not to get too close, where Freddy could turn-and-burn him. OK. Freddy had no theories about anything, as far as he was aware, but he had an instinctive understanding of one strategy in particular: do the thing your opponent doesn’t want. So Freddy, instead of looking for space away from the defender, drifted closer to him, forcing the man to back off even further – basically, he had to run away from him, back-pedalling, or he had to accept that he’d be caught in no man’s land, and step closer, exactly where he didn’t want to be. So the full-back stepped in to Freddy, just as the midfielder shaped his bandy right leg to pass him the ball. Perfect. Freddy took a half-pace towards the ball, then checked, and with the defender lunging towards him, switched his weight onto his left leg and as the pass got to him, dummied and pivoted his body in one movement, and that was it, he was gone. Just as he was thinking, I’ve beaten him, the big man, who had dived in late with his right leg fully extended and with all his mass behind his lunge, a slightly reckless tackle but without ill intent, connected with the place where the ball had been less than a tenth of a second before, a point that was now occupied by Freddy’s fully extended left leg. The defender’s leg hit Freddy’s ten inches above the ankle, and spectators sitting as far as fifteen rows back heard the bone crack. Even people who didn’t hear that could see Freddy screaming and rolling his upper body from side to side, and the fans right at the back who couldn’t hear could see that the lower part of his leg was bent back under his knee at an angle that was not possible.

  56

  On a warm morning in May, two weeks after his failed attempt to break up with Davina, Zbigniew went to the front door of 42 Pepys Road. He had heard on the street’s grapevine that the owner needed some redecoration work done, so had called to make an appointment and give a quote. Work, thank God for work. While he was at work he didn’t have to think about Davina and about the dead end, the impasse, the stuck-with-his-leg-in-a-bear-trap disaster he had made of his own life; he managed not to think about those things for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. They were a good ten or fifteen minutes, the best of his day.

  Zbigniew assessed the house professionally as he stood there: he knew these buildings well. Decent condition, ugly but sound. A kind of job he’d done many times: make it less unfashionable, less out of date, fix up the wiring, bit of plumbing. A decent-size job. Quote in the high single figures.

  The woman he’d spoken to over the phone opened the door; she looked tired and older than she had sounded. Mrs Mary Leatherby. She had the air of someone not giving the matter immediately in front of her her full attention. Zbigniew knew how that felt. It was fine with him. He had no interest in her either. She showed him round the downstairs. It was as he thought. Linoleum. Strip and repaint, take out the kitchen, put in a new one from a
kit. Check the wiring. Zbigniew guessed that it would be OK; it didn’t look as if the place was broken, just tired. The toilet under the stairs was horrible and she wanted to take it out. He’d have to get help with that, which wouldn’t be a problem. Quote in the low teens. He scribbled in his notebook.

  The sitting room was also straightforward. From the choices she was making it was obvious that Mrs Leatherby wanted to sell the house. Everything was going to be neutral, cream and white. Modern fittings. No problem; Zbigniew knew how to do that. More scribbling. Quote heading toward the middle teens. They continued going around the house. There was a bathroom upstairs, in more or less the same condition as the one downstairs, except this was for renovation rather than removal. More work for subcontractors, no problem. New bath and shower and basin and cupboards and fittings, good margin on all that, subs would be happy. Quote in the middle teens.

  ‘There’s another bedroom but we can’t go in there,’ said Mrs Leatherby. She showed him into a little study bedroom where she had been sleeping on a sofa bed. There was an opened, unpacked suitcase on the table and a photograph of a man and three children beside it. They went upstairs. The linoleum here would be going also, maybe to be replaced by carpet. That was a specialist job he could not do but he wouldn’t tell her that yet, he could put something in the figures and outsource it later, besides she had so little idea of what she wanted it would be premature to be too clear. The client not sure of what they want – every builder’s nightmare, every builder’s dream. Upstairs, two more bedrooms, both dark and poky, a small bathroom, ditto, a loft which had not been converted. He went up there and took a look: it was the usual – unlagged, warm and humid, with low exposed wooden beams and a centimetre-thick layer of dust. He could get in a crew to do this but it would be a step bigger than any job he had taken on for himself.