Capital

some mornings he went home with nothing, but his record was a thousand pounds. On this occasion, Roger slipped him two hundred quid as he and two others half-carried Mark out into the street. From the waiter’s point of view, it was a happy ending.

50
     
     
    Piotr was still not speaking to Zbigniew. So Zbigniew was no longer speaking to Piotr. But they still lived together. It was awkward sharing a room with someone and not talking to him. In the moments when he was not angry with Piotr, he thought it was going to be something they would one day find very funny. For now, most of the time, he was simply furious. Piotr’s Catholic moralising streak, which had always been the worst part of him, had for the moment ended their friendship.
    This was a problem, because if it weren’t for the fact that they temporarily hated each other and weren’t speaking, Zbigniew could have done with his old friend’s advice. He realised that he was going to have to break up with Davina and he needed to do it soon, because the longer he left it the more entangled he felt and the more difficult it would be. It was easy to make bold plans to tell her in her absence; after leaving her flat, going home and all the next day, Zbigniew would have no difficulty crafting messages which perfectly expressed the sentiment: you’re dumped, it’s over, it’s not you it’s me, we mustn’t see each other for a while, but we’ll always be friends, only let’s not call or see each other. He would possess a rocklike certainty about what he needed to do, and how to do it. At about the halfway point between the last time they met and the next time they were due to meet, the certainty would begin to fade, and then as the time to see Davina grew closer, he would get more and more nervous, and his sense of how things were likely to go would become darker and more realistic. He would mumble, he would say everything wrong, the message was stupidly mixed, it was impossible to dump someone and stay on good terms, besides Davina was hysterical, a madwoman, she would go crazy, she would scream, she would beg, she would shout and throw things, she would weep, she would clutch his leg, it would be impossible, a disaster.
    Then, when they met, the thing he always forgot to allow for would kick in. At her flat on the saggy sofa, in the pub, in the cinema bar, at the pizza place, he would sit opposite her, get a good look at her, and feel a surge of lust. He was thinking about ways of dumping her at the same time as he was wanting to have sex with her; and in these circumstances it was always possible to postpone the break-up, while the sex would seem increasingly urgent – after all, it would be the last time! The very last! Then things would take their course, and the sex would be over, and there Davina and Zbigniew would be, on the sofa, or the floor, or the bed, and Zbigniew would be filled with a tormenting mix of complete physical well-being and utter emotional misery. He felt weak, and a coward, and it was worse because in those moments Zbigniew also felt a warmth towards Davina, a sense of emotional closeness and gratitude, which made him feel even more of a shit and weakling. Zbigniew disliked disliking himself.
    Texting – there was always that. He could dump her by text. This was so unthinkable that Zbigniew enjoyed thinking about it.
    Sometimes, the only way of doing something is to do it. Zbigniew knew that. He was working on a house in Clapham which the wife was redecorating because the husband had run off with his secretary. She was painting the walls purple – an angry purple. People did break up with people. It was difficult but it happened all the time. People had final, definitive arguments, and said things which could not be unsaid; people woke up in the morning and realised that they could not go on with their lives, as they were currently constituted. People decided that they were no longer in love, so they left. And it was amicable, sometimes, too. The person being broken up with often turned out to be thinking about breaking up, too. It was often surprisingly easy. For the best – people agreed that breaking up would be for the best. It happened all the time!
    This was therefore, for all these reasons, the day. Zbigniew had decided the day before that today was the day, and his first thought when he had got up in the morning was that today was still the day. He had woken, ignored Piotr, gone to the loo, got dressed, ignored Piotr