Capital

listening, he sat completely immobile. He had done the initial remedial surgery and therefore was the only person actually to have looked not just at Freddy’s knee, but inside it. He was, they were told, the leading specialist in this kind of surgery not just in London or Britain but in Europe; there were, arguably, men his equal or superior in America, but only arguably. He was Mr Anterior Cruciate. His judgement was that Freddy would never play football again; he would never again run or kick a ball with intent. The very best he could hope for was that he might, if he were lucky, walk without a discernible limp.
    The second doctor, visited at the insistence of the insurance company, was much nicer. He was a younger, more casual man, handsome and confident and not more than forty, and they saw him on a warm day when he’d taken off his jacket and tie. When they came into his office, he’d been listening to a Bob Dylan CD that he turned off by remote control. He took care to put Freddy at his ease, to smile and say how sorry he was for his trouble. Even his hands, touching and very very carefully manipulating the knee, were gentle. He told them that he had looked extensively at X-rays and at the surgical notes of his distinguished colleague – for whom he had the highest regard – and that in his opinion, Freddy had a 50 per cent chance of being able to play professional sport again. At that point, he gestured to a photograph on the wall behind him of a professional cricket player, a bowler in mid-delivery stride, jumping half a metre in the air, his whole weight – and to Freddy’s eye, he looked a bit fat – about to land on his left, front, leg. The doctor said that he had used a new technique to operate on the cricketer’s left anterior cruciate ligament, which had been in the same condition as Freddy’s after he broke his leg, and that photo, taken over a year ago, was the result. The cricketer was still playing cricket, and bowling quicker than ever. He did not say that the other doctor was wrong but he made it very clear that he believed he himself was right.
    So they had to go and talk to a third doctor, one agreed on by both of the other two – a third opinion which both of them could see as an acceptable second opinion. This involved a train trip to Manchester, Freddy playing Championship Manager on his PSP, Mickey driving everyone within earshot crazy by making calls on his iPhone until the battery ran out, and Patrick looking out the window at this country he knew so little about. The countryside looked so empty, the city- and townscapes so old, so crowded, so thick with history and long habitation, and so impossible to know.
    This third surgeon was amiable, crisp, and made it evident that in his own judgement he was the clear first choice to provide the opinion and when time came to do the surgery. He had light-coloured hair and fair skin and seemed to have been freshly scrubbed; he radiated cleanness. He listened briskly, asked questions briskly, and examined Freddy’s knee with a brisk air too, as if he thought Freddy might be malingering. Then after all this briskness he would not give them a verdict then and there, not even a provisional one, not even a hint. He would think about it and write to them in a day or two’s time.
    The letter, when it came, agreed with the first surgeon. Freddy in his judgement would never play football again. He said that he was very sorry.
    All that was the positive, practical, forward-moving part of the experience. It got worse from there, because it was at this point that the insurance company and the lawyers took over. Mickey couldn’t believe it. He knew perfectly well that if you left the taps running in the bath, and water came through the ceiling of the downstairs flat and trashed it, the insurance company would niggle and carp and look for exclusions and exemptions and generally seek every way they could to weasel out of paying. Everyone knew that, it was a fact of life. Or they would screw you so hard by raising the premiums that you would have been better off not claiming in the first place. No-claims bonuses, no-fault car insurance: all these were giant conspiracies against the public. Everybody knew that. But seeing that this was a young man’s whole life – not just his livelihood (though that as well) but his whole life, the thing which was at the centre of his seventeen-year-old existence – Mickey thought they might have shown a bit of