Capital: A Novel

by John Lanchester

  ‘I find this extremely offensive,’ said the man, starting to get up from his seat.

  ‘Good. And you’ll fucking well sit still and listen to it unless you want to be reading all about your refusal to pay out in the Daily Mail tomorrow morning. You move from where you’re sitting and I’ll take this as a sign that these negotiations are no longer proceeding in good faith. And I have to tell you that my sense of your good faith is pretty fucking tenuous. Which part of “legally binding” don’t you understand?’ Mickey picked up one of the folders of doctors’ reports and waved it. ‘This says, translated into English, “his knee is fucked”. Which part of that don’t you understand? How plain do you want it to be? His knee is fucked, there’s a legally binding contract, and it’s time for you to FUCKING PAY UP.’

  Mickey felt better. He knew that the bluster would have no effect, but the threat to go public might. The negotiations were protected by a non-disclosure agreement, but if the insurance company could be shown to be behaving unreasonably he would be able to go public. What was happening behind the scenes, almost certainly, was that they were putting together the final details of the settlement they were prepared to make. This would involve Freddy not being allowed to play football ever again. His pay-out would be conditional on his retiring from football permanently – for the obvious reason that if they shelled out a huge amount of money to compensate him for not playing, he shouldn’t subsequently go on to be paid for playing. Mickey had mentioned this to Patrick, who seemed to have taken it in, but he wasn’t really sure: he didn’t want to labour the point. People who knew him might laugh at the idea of Mickey trying not to labour a point, but the truth was, he didn’t want to, because he didn’t want to seem to be patronising Patrick. Who after all was not stupid, and who would realise what this meant: no more football for Freddy. Ever. He would be being paid not for doing the thing he loved, but for never doing it again. It was a hell of a thing for the boy to have to face, and Mickey was morally certain Patrick wouldn’t have alerted his son to what might happen. The news itself would be hard enough to take: no point building up the badness too far in advance.

  ‘I suspect you are well aware the medical evidence is much more complex than you are giving us leave to understand,’ said the insurance man. ‘Expert opinion about the condition of Mr Kamo’s knees is not unanimous. As you know, these settlements often impose conditions on the subsequent career of a player and it would be cruel and reckless to see such conditions imposed on a man as young and talented as Mr Kamo without feeling certain that such constraints were warranted.’ In other words, the man had guessed what Mickey was thinking. He was a complete bastard but he wasn’t a stupid bastard.

  Mickey stopped listening. Nothing was going to be decided today. What all of them were really doing was nothing but waiting for the meeting to be over. It was grey and damp outside, not cold, a typical English non-autumn day. Mickey loved football, and football had been good to him, but as he got older there were moments when he felt the cruelty of the game, its emphasis on luck, the brevity of its careers, the long afterlife of its heroes outliving their fame; the way a single bad thing could happen, and then everything was over. As it had happened to Freddy. He wasn’t sure how much more of it he could take. Maybe something like property development was a cleaner racket after all.

  94

  Rain spattered against the window of the two-bedroom flat in Hackney where Parker French lived with his girlfriend Daisy, his perfect girlfriend. Where he lived with her for now, anyway. Parker didn’t know it, but he was right on the verge of being dumped. The reason he didn’t know it was the same reason he was on the verge of being dumped: because he was obsessed, oblivious, lost, locked-in, reckless, deaf. Daisy didn’t know how to get through to him. She was sitting listening to music with a cup of tea and a list divided into two columns, Yes and No. The Yes column was full of negative items and featured words like ‘blank’, ‘absent’, ‘down’ and ‘not here’. The No column had only one item in it: ‘He used to be lovely’.

  When Daisy went back over the chronology – which she often found herself doing, just to check and recheck her sense that she wasn’t imagining things – there had been three phases. That was excluding Normal Parker, the boy she had been going out with ever since they kissed at a sixth-form dance on a hot June night back at sixth-form college. Normal Parker was her boyfriend’s habitual sweet, boyish self; her boyfriend who needed more looking after than he realised, was more fragile in his confidence than he knew, was determined to make a mark but never quite clear how or when. He was a boyfriend but he was also at times a little like a younger brother; that wasn’t a complaint, she liked that, and it went with his looks, his narrow dark looks, and it somehow also went with the fact that he was the exact same height as her. She knew that Parker was completely sincere about his desire to Get Away – meaning Get Away from Norfolk, from the world of their childhoods. That she had always believed in, utterly.

  As for Parker’s art, well . . . the important thing was that Parker believed in it. Parker would do something with his life, she felt sure about that. Whether that thing would be art was less plain. It wasn’t clear to Daisy that Parker had any real feeling for the art world. This wasn’t so much an issue about his talent, but his ability to read how that world worked; it was a long way away from Norfolk and it wasn’t about being able to execute nice collages and your art teacher telling you you’re the most gifted pupil in the class. Daisy’s sense of the art world was that it was much more like a game, a deadly serious adult game, and that Parker hadn’t quite realised how that game worked. But none of that really mattered to Daisy, his naivety was all part of Parker’s Parkerness, and it was that about him that she loved and trusted. If he didn’t do art then he’d do something else. All that was Normal Parker, Parker who she hadn’t seen around for some months and whose existence took a conscious act of effort to recollect.

  That was because there had been three successive different versions of Parker since. The first of them was Speechless With Grief Parker, the one who had emerged after he had suddenly been sacked – suddenly in his version of things, anyway, though in Daisy’s experience there was no such thing as an entirely unforeshadowed dismissal, not unless you accidentally reversed your car over the boss’s dog. But his sacking was sudden to Parker, and that was the main thing. For weeks he had been lost, gone, buried under his sense of grief and grievance. That had been sad, of course, and she had felt for him, but it had been irritating too, not least because to Daisy, who was tougher than Parker, the final responsibility for not getting sacked lay with the person doing the job. If you did get sacked there was, finally, no one to blame but yourself, so the best thing to do was to suck it up and get on with it. The fact that she couldn’t say that made it all the more irritating, so she was pleased when, having taken Parker away for the Cotswold weekend in the spring to try and make him snap out of it, she found that he had, indeed, snapped out of it. Just like that: an idea or plan had hit him, and he had been like a different person. He was bouncy, he was full of vim and jokes, he was hopping up and down.

  That was the birth of Manic Parker. This was someone she didn’t recognise at all. He was fizzing with . . . with . . . Daisy didn’t know quite what it was, but he was fizzing with something. She would wake up in the morning to find Parker already awake beside her; which was strange enough in itself, since Parker was never awake before her, and certainly not awake like this, staring at the roof, sometimes smiling but not with his usual cheeky look, instead looking like a not very nice person relishing a private joke at somebody else’s expense. Once or twice she had even been woken by Parker tapping his feet or jiggling his legs in bed – which was so strange, so not-Parker, that she hardly knew what to think. She was confident that she knew him well enough to be able to read the signs if he was having an affair, or had run out of money gambling on the internet, or something specific like that; but this she couldn’t decode. When she asked, he was brisk about s
aying that there was nothing wrong; equally brisk the one time she had asked him about when he was going to start looking for work. More than brisk: he’d said, ‘I’ve still got savings left, but if you don’t feel I’m contributing enough, I can move out.’ That meant, don’t ask again. So she didn’t, but she wasn’t happy. Manic Parker kept about his business, visibly scheming and making plans and cooking things up and, it sometimes seemed, cackling to himself in entirely private, entirely secret glee. She once or twice had the thought that she preferred Speechless With Grief Parker.

  As if in answer to that thought, or in punishment for having had it, another version of Parker then turned up. This version was the one with whom Daisy was still living. This was the one who had Daisy making a Yes and No list while listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue on her iPod. He did not appear overnight, but Manic Parker first had moments, then hours, then days, when he transformed into what he was now, Dostoevsky Parker. This version of Parker first arrived in the form of nail-chewing, distraction, and an appearance of shifty preoccupation during times when he was supposed to be doing something else – paying attention to her, for instance, which had formerly been one of his strengths, but had for some months now seemed something he’d either forgotten to do or had lost interest in. She would go into the kitchen where he was supposed to be cooking the dinner, and find him just standing there gnawing the inside of his lip while the vegetables he was supposed to be stir-frying turned to charcoal. One of Dostoevsky Parker’s new pieces of body language was to sit at the table with his head in his hands. Instead of waking up early, Dostoevsky Parker couldn’t sleep: he had trouble falling asleep (which Daisy knew was a sign of anxiety), he woke up early and couldn’t go back to sleep (which Daisy knew was a sign of depression), and during the rare middle bits when he was asleep, he thrashed around like a breakdancing dervish. Dostoevsky Parker even looked different from Normal Parker: he was heavier and paler and more earthbound. He looked as if he subsisted exclusively on carbohydrates and ill feeling.

  So what was going on? Daisy had no idea. But one big difference between this Dostoevsky Parker and Grieving Parker was that this one didn’t seem to be mourning a specific loss so much as suffering a general and all-consuming sense of gloom and, unless Daisy was mistaken, guilt. He was fretting not about something which had been done to him, but something he’d done.

  ‘I wish you’d tell me what’s the matter, baby,’ Daisy said to him one evening in November, when she’d got home knackered from work and had wanted nothing more than to have supper cooked for her, maybe a back rub, and then to watch some junk TV with her boyfriend of long standing. Instead here she was sitting in silence over a ready meal she herself had microwaved, acting as the equivalent of an unpaid psychiatric nurse. She wanted to yell, but that didn’t work with Parker; he would just retreat further. So she did her best to gentle him out of himself. She also knew that there wasn’t much more of this she could take, and that she couldn’t face doing it for much longer. She couldn’t think of any more things to list under No.

  What she didn’t know was that Parker was longing to tell her, was desperate to tell her. He wanted nothing more than to confess. He wanted to break down all the barriers he had artificially built up, to knock down his jerry-built edifice of silence and secrecy and false self; to blurt and blub and let it all out. The need to confess rose in his throat like a nausea. And yet he couldn’t speak, and so the two young people who loved each other stayed stuck and miserable.

  95

  If Quentina had been asked what she expected from the detention centre, she might have got several things right straight away. She could for instance have guessed that there would be no privacy, that male guards would feel free to barge into women’s rooms and search their belongings whenever they felt like it, and that many of the women, some of them devout Muslims, would be outraged. No surprise there. She would have expected the food regime to be poor – not that they couldn’t get anything to eat after five o’clock, or that the children, of whom there were many, would sometimes be crying with hunger. She knew that the place was a prison and would feel like one. But what she hadn’t expected was the politics – the internal politics. When she arrived, she found that a large group of prisoners was on hunger strike to protest against conditions at the prison and they had a list of fifteen demands, including that the authorities give back the birth certificates that they’d taken away from children born in the UK, and also that they reinstate the daily allowance of 71 pence. And they wanted access to legal information, since the majority of them had no legal representation.

  Quentina agreed with all fifteen of the demands. But she had only just got there, was still dazed and bewildered from the immigration hearing, and just didn’t feel ready to pitch straight into a hunger strike. The causes were all right, all just, but they weren’t honestly her causes – she was a new girl and hadn’t even known about the existence of the 71p allowance. Quentina felt that she hadn’t been in the detention centre long enough to get really angry about the conditions. For the moment she was just trying to survive.

  That wasn’t the general feeling. The atmosphere at the Refuge in Tooting had been low, verging on depressed, with the emphasis on survival and endurance. Thrown in with that was an unspoken emphasis on the need to acknowledge the good intentions of their benefactors, who were keen to send the message that not all British people were as cruel as their government and their newspapers. That was not the mood at the detention centre. Here people were angry, fumingly angry, all the time. They hated the government, hated the press, hated the administrators of the detention centre. There had been riots the previous year, when warders had tried to prevent detainees from watching a documentary about conditions at the centre. It was easy to imagine that there could be riots again. In the mean time there was the hunger strike.

  Quentina’s guide to this was Makela, a Nigerian doctor who had run a clinic for victims of female circumcision. Her application for asylum had been rejected because the authorities believed, or claimed to believe, that her life was not really at risk back in Nigeria. She was angry, but not with Quentina; she agreed that Quentina as a new arrival couldn’t pitch headlong into the centre’s politics. She also made it clear that in her view, over time, the politically aware detainees had a responsibility to make trouble, especially if they didn’t have children.

  That would be in the future – perhaps a long time in the future. Quentina, for the first time since she had arrived in the UK, felt defeated. The air here was hard to breathe; it was thick with resentment and the lack of hope. That was why people were so angry: it gave an alternative to being completely beaten, broken, finished. All Quentina wanted to do was sit on her bed and look at the ceiling. Nothing seemed to have any point or purpose.

  The immigration tribunal hearing had been a disaster. In her first sighting of the red-faced judge presiding over it, she had felt a flicker of hope: he looked like a man whose natural state was to be reasonable. But as the first morning went on she saw that this was misleading. When he did ask questions they were pointed and implicitly sceptical. How exactly had she got into the UK? How exactly had she been supporting herself? When the government’s lawyers got on to the fact that she had been working illegally, she saw his manner harden. The pretence of friendly impartiality melted away. At that point, noon on the Monday morning, she realised that her application was going to be rejected.

  At the end of his day’s hearing, her lawyer, a mild-mannered woman in early middle age, turned to her and made a grimace.

  ‘That was terrible,’ said Quentina, to save her the trouble.

  ‘I didn’t want to say anything,’ said the lawyer. ‘But he’s one of the toughest ones. I’m sorry. Don’t worry, if we lose, which we haven’t done yet, there’s still every chance for an appeal.’

  They hadn’t lost yet – but they might as well have. Tuesday was just as bad as Monday, with the judge dwelling much more heavily on the subject of Quentina’s illegal employme
nt than on the prospect of what had happened to her in Zimbabwe before she left, and what would happen to her if she was sent back. He moved through all those details briskly. It was no surprise when his judgment, as they received it on the following Monday, was that she should be deported. In practice that meant being sent to an immigration removal centre to await the result of her appeal.

  She had been here now for two months. The drive down was in a minibus owned by the private security company that ran the detention centre, for a profit, on behalf of the government. Under other circumstances Quentina would have enjoyed the trip: a chance to admire the famous green fields of England, which she’d never actually seen before, unless you counted the Common. There were arable fields, cows, tractors. So England was not just London after all. Quite funny to find that out just before being forced to leave. Her first sight of the detention centre’s main building had given her a flash of optimism: a three-storey modern structure with a car park in front. To anyone familiar with the vernacular of contemporary British buildings, it looked like a motel or a conference centre, or maybe a sixth-form college. But as with the judge, first impressions turned out to be deceptive. The immigration centre was a prison, with the twist that when people were discharged from prison they went somewhere better, but when they were discharged from here they were sent back to the place they had risked everything to escape.