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Capital

Capital

Titel: Capital Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: John Lanchester
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younger brothers behind, Shahid laughing and Usman scowling, through the crowd and the professional drivers holding signs and the tearfully hugging silent couples, the tour party gathering around a raised umbrella, the family group all crouched by a wheelchair, rushing into position by the arrivals area, the oddly free-form Heathrow arrivals area where it’s hard to tell arrivals from arrived, exit from concourse, and just as they arrived, just as they started to compose themselves, there was Mrs Kamal, frowning and pushing a trolley with three suitcases on it, her expression not changing as she caught sight of them and steered the heavy luggage towards them, all six of her family, three sons and two grandchildren and daughter-in-law, all with their greeting faces on. Mrs Kamal pulled the baggage trolley to a halt and said:
    ‘So who is minding our shop?’

66
     
     
    In a café in Brixton, holding himself as still as he could in front of his plate of bacon, eggs, sausages, beans, chips and toast, sat Smitty.
    Smitty had a fabricator whom he employed to make the things he used in his pieces. He gave the man the designs, they had a conversation, the man knocked up some 3D images on the computer, then made a prototype, then he made the object for real. His factory was in Brixton, so when they had a piece on the go, Smitty would regularly be schlepping backwards and forwards on the Victoria line, if he was in a hurry, or in his Beemer, if he wasn’t. At the moment the man was working on perfecting a nine-foot-high dildo in concrete treated to look as if it was plastic, or silicone, or whatever it was dildos were made out of. Smitty wasn’t yet entirely sure what this was for. He just liked the idea of this thing which looked as if it had to be made out of one thing which was by definition lightweight and pleasant to the touch, which turned out to be this other thing which was immovably heavy and nastily abrasive. Dildos were private, statues were public. It would be a piece about, about, about . . . about something. The tricky thing would be moving the nine-foot concrete dildo into place, but that was a problem for another day. Smitty had two more immediate concerns.
    The first was that he’d come to the factory and his man wasn’t there. The building, a former warehouse a bit like Smitty’s own studio, was chained and locked. No reply on the entryphone. There had been a cock-up. He’d have liked to blame the fabricator, but he couldn’t, because this just wasn’t the sort of thing his guy got wrong. So the cock-up was almost certainly at his end. Probably it was his new knob-head assistant, the replacement for his old knob-head assistant. To be fair, as knob-heads went, this new Nigel was much less of one than the last Nigel. Humanly, he wasn’t a knob-head at all, and had the great virtue of showing a proper respect to his betters, i.e. to Smitty. But he did make knob-head-type mistakes, and the timing of this meeting looked like being one of them. So Smitty was going to give it another half-hour and then piss off back to Shoreditch.
    The result was that Smitty was sitting in a café a hundred metres down the road from the warehouse, having a cup of tea and putting himself outside a Full English. That wasn’t a typical breakfast for Smitty, he was more a slow-carb, bowl-of-microwaved-porridge person, but he was having this monster fry-up because of the second thing which was wrong with his day: his colossal, reeking, throbbing, ear-ringing, cloth-mouthed hangover. A mate had had a do the night before, there was an eighties theme, and it had been good fun. There were people dressed as New Romantic pirates and dandies, there was Duran Duran and Wham!, and as a further concession to the theme, there were tequila slammers. At some point early on in the evening, that had seemed like a good idea. Smitty was, as a rule – it really was a rule – as careful with drink as he was with drugs, but a tequila slammer and an eighties theme night was just something you had to go with. The result was the way he felt now.
    Smitty made a point of never taking a day off when he’d overdone it. Part of the reason he was so careful about not overdoing it was because of this rule, so it was a win-win: he got off his face less often, and he got more work done. Because you could have lie-ins and free time whenever you wanted as an artist, the temptation was there to go it slightly too large, slightly too often. Smitty had

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