Capital

to start, he said, ‘Next week.’
    ‘Oh, fantastic,’ said Arabella, adjusting her hair behind her ear. ‘Fabulous! That’s so great!’
    Arabella had a habit of overstating things, one that she had so much internalised that it was not always easy for she herself to tell when she was mildly pleased about something and when she was genuinely delighted. Gresham’s Law was at work: the cheap money of overstatement was gradually driving out the good money of true feeling. But she was in this case genuinely pleased. She wanted the changes made to her room and she wanted them soon and was pleased that Bogdan would be able to do them, because, beneath the hyperbole, she liked and trusted him.
    ‘I think I should go now,’ said Zbigniew/Bogdan. He took up his pad and pencil and put them in his bag. ‘Next week?’
    ‘Thank you so much. Next week it is. Crack of dawn. Lovely! Thanks, Bogdan.’
    He slung his bag over his shoulder and went out into the street. It was raining but not cold in a serious Polish way. Some of the houses had Christmas decorations up; a couple of them were places where Zbigniew had done some work over the past year. He liked walking past places where he had done things. He never forgot a work project, the bathroom conversion over there and the loft conversion where they’d put a shower in against all advice and then had to run cables up to the top floor to power the immersion heater. The memory of the work on these places was a muscle memory, a physical sensation: he could feel it in his bones, the effort, the exertion, the tired fingers and aching back at the end of the day. But it wasn’t an unpleasant feeling. Real work never left you feeling worse.
    His first job in London had been on a crew in the next street, Mackell Road, and someone had recommended them to number 54 in this street; the job was for one man and his old friend Piotr had let him take it, for which Zbigniew was and always would be grateful. That was when he had acquired his London nickname, too, because there was a Bogdan on the crew and the man in Pepys Road had got the names mixed up, and Zbigniew had never corrected him. He quite liked being called Bogdan because it left no doubt in his mind that he did not really live in London, that his life here was a temporary interlude: he was there to work and make money before going home to his real life in Poland. Zbigniew did not know whether that would be in a year’s time or five years or ten, but he knew it was going to happen. He was Polish and his real life would be in Poland.
    Arabella would have been disappointed if she had known what her Bogdan thought of her, because the truth was, he thought very little. He didn’t have a negative impression of her, or a positive one; he neither fancied her, disliked her, was interested in her, or had any other feeling about her at all. She was a client and that was it. Zbigniew thought of all his clients the same way: they were people who paid him to do work and had certain expectations which he set out to fulfil. There was no more to it than that.
    As for their wealth – Arabella’s wealth, the wealth of all his clients – he did not dwell on it but he did notice it. A boy who grew up in a tower block on the outskirts of Warsaw could not fail to notice marble worktops, teak furniture, carpets and clothes and adult toys and the routine daily extravagances that were everywhere in this city. You also couldn’t fail to notice the expense, the grotesque costliness of more or less everything, from accommodation to transport to food to clothes; and as for going out to have some fun, that was almost impossible. The feeling of this cash leaking away just in ordinary life depressed Zbigniew. But in another sense it was the reason he was here: everything was so expensive because the British had lots of money. He was there to earn it from them. There was in Zbigniew’s opinion something fundamentally wrong with a culture that had all this work and all this money going spare, just waiting for someone to come in and pick it up, almost as if the money were just left lying around in the street – but that was not his concern. If the British wanted to give work and money away that was fine with him.
    His mobile rang. It was Piotr.
    ‘Your turn to cook tonight,’ Piotr said in Polish. ‘I got some kielbasa from the shop, they’re in the fridge. Don’t eat them all before I get back, OK?’
    Zbigniew, Piotr, and four friends lived in