Capital

would be cruel and reckless to see such conditions imposed on a man as young and talented as Mr Kamo without feeling certain that such constraints were warranted.’ In other words, the man had guessed what Mickey was thinking. He was a complete bastard but he wasn’t a stupid bastard.
    Mickey stopped listening. Nothing was going to be decided today. What all of them were really doing was nothing but waiting for the meeting to be over. It was grey and damp outside, not cold, a typical English non-autumn day. Mickey loved football, and football had been good to him, but as he got older there were moments when he felt the cruelty of the game, its emphasis on luck, the brevity of its careers, the long afterlife of its heroes outliving their fame; the way a single bad thing could happen, and then everything was over. As it had happened to Freddy. He wasn’t sure how much more of it he could take. Maybe something like property development was a cleaner racket after all.

94
     
     
    Rain spattered against the window of the two-bedroom flat in Hackney where Parker French lived with his girlfriend Daisy, his perfect girlfriend. Where he lived with her for now, anyway. Parker didn’t know it, but he was right on the verge of being dumped. The reason he didn’t know it was the same reason he was on the verge of being dumped: because he was obsessed, oblivious, lost, locked-in, reckless, deaf. Daisy didn’t know how to get through to him. She was sitting listening to music with a cup of tea and a list divided into two columns, Yes and No. The Yes column was full of negative items and featured words like ‘blank’, ‘absent’, ‘down’ and ‘not here’. The No column had only one item in it: ‘He used to be lovely’.
    When Daisy went back over the chronology – which she often found herself doing, just to check and recheck her sense that she wasn’t imagining things – there had been three phases. That was excluding Normal Parker, the boy she had been going out with ever since they kissed at a sixth-form dance on a hot June night back at sixth-form college. Normal Parker was her boyfriend’s habitual sweet, boyish self; her boyfriend who needed more looking after than he realised, was more fragile in his confidence than he knew, was determined to make a mark but never quite clear how or when. He was a boyfriend but he was also at times a little like a younger brother; that wasn’t a complaint, she liked that, and it went with his looks, his narrow dark looks, and it somehow also went with the fact that he was the exact same height as her. She knew that Parker was completely sincere about his desire to Get Away – meaning Get Away from Norfolk, from the world of their childhoods. That she had always believed in, utterly.
    As for Parker’s art, well . . . the important thing was that Parker believed in it. Parker would do something with his life, she felt sure about that. Whether that thing would be art was less plain. It wasn’t clear to Daisy that Parker had any real feeling for the art world. This wasn’t so much an issue about his talent, but his ability to read how that world worked; it was a long way away from Norfolk and it wasn’t about being able to execute nice collages and your art teacher telling you you’re the most gifted pupil in the class. Daisy’s sense of the art world was that it was much more like a game, a deadly serious adult game, and that Parker hadn’t quite realised how that game worked. But none of that really mattered to Daisy, his naivety was all part of Parker’s Parkerness , and it was that about him that she loved and trusted. If he didn’t do art then he’d do something else. All that was Normal Parker, Parker who she hadn’t seen around for some months and whose existence took a conscious act of effort to recollect.
    That was because there had been three successive different versions of Parker since. The first of them was Speechless With Grief Parker, the one who had emerged after he had suddenly been sacked – suddenly in his version of things, anyway, though in Daisy’s experience there was no such thing as an entirely unforeshadowed dismissal, not unless you accidentally reversed your car over the boss’s dog. But his sacking was sudden to Parker , and that was the main thing. For weeks he had been lost, gone, buried under his sense of grief and grievance. That had been sad, of course, and she had felt for him, but it had been irritating too, not least