Capital

on itself, and he also liked the smell of paint. As jobs to do on your own went, it was one of the best.
    After about half an hour he heard the divorced lady come in and go into the kitchen. About five minutes later she started coming slowly up the stairs. Zbigniew stopped painting and stood up to let her get past. She was wearing a saggy grey tracksuit, had a headband keeping her hair back, and was carrying a pink iPod nano.
    ‘That man is going to kill me one day,’ she said.
    ‘Maybe you should kill him first,’ said Zbigniew. She thought that was very funny.
    He went back to painting and as he did so began to make a plan about how to speak to Piotr again. It was clear from his experience with Davina that he was now a master of communicating with other people. Piotr was a Catholic bigot and a fool and a hypocrite, given his own history of failed and broken relationships, and a moralising know-all, but he was also his oldest friend and this had gone on long enough. So perhaps the simplest and best thing would be just to approach him and say ‘this has gone on long enough’, and then they could move on. He did not need a complex plan.
    To celebrate last night’s successful dumping – though now that it had happened Zbigniew in his mind was more gentle and named it ‘the break-up’ – he took himself to the café round the corner for lunch. It was what the British called a ‘greasy spoon’ but in fact the food was not greasy at all, since it served salads and pastas as well as the large plates of fried food that British labourers ate. Zbigniew had acquired this taste and ordered a full English number 2, consisting of bacon, a herbed sausage which was not as good as Polish sausage but was still not bad, blood sausage, chips, fried bread, fried egg, mushrooms, tomatoes, and baked beans, a British speciality which Zbigniew had initially disliked but through repetition – they were often included as a standard ingredient – had come to like. As with many foods the British liked their secret was that they were much sweeter than they pretended to be. There was also a large mug of not very good coffee. This meal cost £6 but on a special occasion was worth it. If Zbigniew finished the job today, as he fully intended to do, he would be half a day ahead of his work schedule (the real one, which he carried in his head, rather than the estimates he gave to customers) so he could move on to other work, which meant he could move on to earning more money, which was almost as good as money in the bank, so he was already up on the day.
    He got back to the house and to his brushes. He had two more hours of painting to do, then about three hours of filling, then he was done, unless the crazy divorced lady had more work for him. At about three o’clock, just as he was preparing to go round filling and touching up and finishing, the doorbell rang. A delivery, Zbigniew assumed, as the woman of the house went downstairs and stayed there for a few minutes; then Zbigniew heard her footsteps coming all the way back up to the top of the house.
    ‘It’s for you,’ she said, her expression tight with something he could not read. Zbigniew wiped his hands and went downstairs.
    His first thought when he saw Davina was that she had been caught in the rain. Her head drooped, her hair was lank, her expression sagged, her shoulders were sloped, her clothes seemed to hang off her. But it was not raining, had not rained all day. Davina’s skin had lost all its colour and with her blonde hair she looked like a ghost. Zbigniew felt a lurch, a physical sensation in his chest and stomach, rather than any emotion he could name.
    ‘Hello,’ said Davina. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’
    Zbigniew had seen her acting miserable before, theatrically miserable, but there was something truly frightening about the flatness with which she now spoke.
    ‘How did you know where I was?’ he asked. As he put the question, he found himself posing it to himself with much more energy: yeah, how exactly? He was sure he had never told her where he worked. So it was creepy and strange that she knew. This was wrong; felt deeply, lurchingly wrong, with the sensation of dangerous weightlessness and loss of control that came when a car went into a skid.
    ‘Piotr,’ she said.
    ‘We can’t talk here,’ he said; though the crazy lady had gone upstairs and so if he wanted to, he could. But it did not feel right. He came out and half-thought about taking her