Capital

a two-bedroom flat in Croydon. The flat was sublet from an Italian who in turn sublet it from a British man who rented it from the council, and the rent was £200 a week. They had to be careful about noise because if the other residents reported them they would be kicked out – but in fact the polite, well-built young men were popular tenants in the flats, whose other occupants were old and white and, as one of them once told Zbigniew in the hallway, ‘just grateful you aren’t Pakis’.
    ‘You’re seeing Dana,’ said Zbigniew – Dana being Piotr’s latest potential love interest, a Czech girl he’d met in the pub. ‘If you’re not back by ten, no kielbasa.’
    ‘If I’m not back by ten . . .’ said Piotr.
    ‘ Czekaj, tatka, latka ,’ said Zbigniew. You can wait until the cows come home. He laughed. He had known Piotr since they were both tiny children, and his friend was a chronic romantic who constantly made the mistake of falling in love with women before sleeping with them. Zbigniew prided himself on avoiding this error.
    Now there was the wait for the Tube. Five minutes, said the board, but that meant nothing. One thing about London which was like Warsaw was the difficult transport and the grumbling stoicism of the people who used it. The other guys at the flat were all out on the same job today and would be coming back in Piotr’s trashed Ford van, which he had bought for next to nothing and had sort-of fixed up; Zbigniew hated using the van because there was such a strong feeling there was no reliability about getting to where you wanted to go. Zbigniew liked to feel in control.
    A crowd of black kids arrived on the platform. Zbigniew had nothing against black people but after three years in England he had not yet got to the point where he did not even register their presence. He had a tendency to assess whether or not they looked likely to be trouble. These kids, seven or eight boys and girls, were loud – the girls more so than the boys, as if proving a point, which in this country often seemed to be the way. They were all simultaneously teasing each other about something.
    ‘You never—’
    ‘He never—’
    ‘Batty man—’
    But Zbigniew could see that these were good kids being noisy rather than bad ones on the verge of causing trouble. The old lady beside him, who had been waiting on the platform when he got there, wasn’t happy. She would be thinking about her journey in the company of these shouting children. She was probably also wondering about walking off down the platform to somewhere else and worrying about that looking too rude. She wouldn’t want to seem racist. Zbigniew knew that it was a big thing in this country not to seem racist. In his opinion people made too much fuss about it. People did not like people who were not like them, that was a plain fact of life. You had to get on with things anyway. Who cares if people don’t like each other because of the colour of their skin?
    The train came, heading for Morden. The rowdy children got on first, pushing past people who were trying to get off. There was nowhere to sit. The kids went to the other side of the compartment and a couple of them took seats. The others were standing around them and they were all still talking and yelling and showing everybody their high spirits. Most people in the train succeeded in ignoring them. Another of the ways in which London was like Warsaw was the way in which people occupied their own spaces, went inside themselves, on public transport.
    Zbigniew got off at Balham and crossed to the train station. Miracle – a train was on the platform and about to move off. He got on. There were no seats but so what? All the people on the train were heading home from work, wrapped up in newspapers or themselves. Zbigniew leaned against the partition and swayed and bounced as the train racketed along. It was hot and crowded and uncomfortable in the compartment, but again, so what? Zbigniew was well aware that people here complained about public transport a lot. In his view they should just shut up. Yes, the transport was shit, but lots of things about life were shit. None of them was improved by complaining. They should live in a place where life really was hard, for a while. Then they would begin to have an idea.
    These thoughts made Zbigniew turn to wondering about his father. He, Michal Tomascewski, was a mechanic. He had worked for thirty years repairing buses for the city of Warsaw: hard and