Capital

a little more, eaten some cereal, set out for work, been let into the house by the crazy divorced lady, painted the hallway purple, had a break for lunch, checked his share portfolio, painted some more walls purple, talked a little bit with the crazy lady about how long the rest of the job would take and pretended to ignore her while she had a fifteen-minute conversation on the phone with someone about how much she hated her ex-husband and how she didn’t blame ‘that whore’, only him; then he had gone home to change out of his work clothes, ignored Piotr again, and gone out to the bar by the edge of the Common, the one where they’d met for the first time, to meet Davina, to dump her. All this time he had been possessed by the certainty that today was the day for the break-up, and had been working on how to say it. From experience, Zbigniew knew that the information needed to be conveyed clearly and at the start of the conversation; after that, he could say nice things, if she were amenable to being spoken to, and if she wasn’t, it wouldn’t matter, he would just run away. The worst would be over.
    ‘My grandmother is dying. I must go home to Poland. We can never see each other again.’
    ‘I am gay.’
    ‘I have Aids.’
    ‘I am gay and I have Aids.’
    ‘I am gay and I have Aids and my grandmother is dying in Poland, also of Aids, and I have to go back to Poland and my mobile contract is about to lapse so you can’t call me.’
    That might be too much.
    Zbigniew arrived in the bar fifteen minutes early. The choice of venue was the product of a great deal of thought about whether to have the talk in public or in private. This boiled down to whether she was more or less likely to explode if there were other people around. He had decided that a public place was better; and had then realised that this was probably a mistake, but it was too late to change his mind now, because if he did that would be a good reason to postpone the split-up, and he wouldn’t do that.
    He bought himself a glass of sparkling water. If he had alcohol it would increase the chance he would end the evening by having sex with Davina.
    The bar was crowded for a Tuesday night – but then it was always crowded, like everywhere else around this part of town. If Zbigniew had to sum up London in a single image, there would be a number of candidates: a group of young Poles sitting in a flat watching television in their socks; two dustbins outside a house, with a plank of wood balanced between them, to reserve a parking space for a builder’s van; the Common on a sunny weekend day, with exposed white skin stretching to the horizon. But the winner would be the high street on a busy evening, full of young people bent on getting drunk – the frenzy of it, the particular pitch of the noise, the sex and anger and hysteria. Zbigniew had once had a sense of the British as a moderate, restrained nation. It was funny to think of that now. It wasn’t true at all. They drank like mad people. They drank to make themselves happy, and because alcohol was an end in itself. It was a good thing and people want good things, want more and more of them. So, because alcohol was good, the British wanted more and more of it. With drink, they were like Buzz Lightyear: to infinity and beyond!
    It would be good to go home soon and see some Polish drinking, in its natural habitat. He should see his father and reassure his mother that he was eating properly and had not caught tuberculosis.
    Then Davina came in. She looked around, as always with an element of theatricality: standing slightly on tiptoe, turning her whole head, her expression seeking, expectant. She had a faint frown which was ready to turn into a smile when she saw him. It was like a one-woman performance called ‘searching for my boyfriend in a crowded bar’. In the few seconds between him seeing her and her seeing him, Zbigniew was struck yet again, yet again, by her prettiness, her blondeness, her faint but sexy dishevelment – she was wearing a patterned black and white scarf which had slipped on one shoulder, so it was trailing much lower on one side than on the other, indeed was on the point of slipping off. Zbigniew, for the billionth time, felt the uncomplicated wish to have sex with her and the complicated reservations and aversions that went with the wish, but told himself, firmly, that tonight was not for having sex with Davina but for dumping her. He phrased it like that to