Capital

honest work. At the age of fifty he was too young to have much sense that the future would bring any pleasant surprises and nowhere near old enough or rich enough to retire – but there was, thanks to Zbigniew, the glimpse of a plan. Michal had for most of those thirty years had what amounted to a second job, looking after the lifts in their block of flats. Not quite every day, but never less than once a week, he would do some work on one or other of the three small metal boxes which were the lifeline and support mechanism of everyone in the block, especially the families who lived on the upper floors and especially especially the ones who had very old or very young members. News of his expertise in this area – and just as important, but perhaps even rarer, of his willingness to take responsibility – had got around and friends in other blocks had sometimes asked him to help them too. But there were only a finite number of hours in the day and Michal was now in his sixth decade and although he was willing to help people he was no sucker, so he did what he could comfortably do and no more.
    Zbigniew’s plan was as follows: to make enough money in London to go into the lift-maintenance business with his father. Warsaw was going to grow rapidly, anyone could see that, and modern cities grew upwards, and that meant lifts, which were – he could hear his father saying the words – ‘the most reliable form of mechanical transportation in the world’. With capital they could set up together: his father would work less, earn ten times as much money, and within a few years he would retire or semi-retire in comfort. He could buy a cottage somewhere and shuffle around doing things in the garden and wearing slippers and on warm days he could have lunch outside with Zbigniew’s mother. His father did not complain – Zbigniew had never heard him complain about anything, not one time – but he knew that his father loved the countryside, loved getting out of Warsaw to his brother’s house in Brochow, loved the country air and the space and looking at farm animals instead of cars and trucks and buses. So he was going to earn his father the chance to enjoy that. Instead of sending the extra money he was earning home, Zbigniew was saving it, about half his sterling income, against the great happy day when he could turn up unannounced at his parents’ apartment and tell them his news and his plan. That was a scene he often played in his head.
    The train came to a stop at South Croydon and Zbigniew got off. The next leg of his journey was the M bus for about two kilometres, then the walk home. Kielbasa to cook and then he would play a few games of cards with whoever was hanging around the flat. Or if everyone was out he might get to use the PlayStation 2 and do a couple of missions of San Andreas . Some of them would go out to the pub but that was so horribly expensive that Zbigniew only allowed himself to do it one night a week and then went to one of the bars which had a ‘happy hour’ offering two drinks for the price of one. ‘Happy hour’: that made him laugh. There would be girls there; he had met his last girlfriend in a place called Shooters during happy hour. She eventually broke up with him after complaining that he never wanted to go anywhere and never wanted to do anything. That, Zbigniew still felt, was not fair. He had never wanted to go anywhere and never wanted to do anything that cost money – an important difference.
    Today the stars were in alignment or his patron saint was smiling down on him or something, because the bus came immediately. He got on and found a seat about halfway back beside a girl who was listening to her iPod, smiling and nodding with her eyes closed. This was Zbigniew’s least favourite part of the journey: although the trains could be frustrating they did at least tend to move, once they came, but the bus could take any amount of time at all. They could be home in two minutes or he could still be right here half an hour later. On some days, it was quicker to walk. This close to home, he started to think about sitting down and stretching his legs, having a shower, and all that. Today he should have bought a lottery ticket because the bus shot through the traffic like a fish heading downstream, and before Little Miss iPod had opened her eyes he was pressing the button for his stop.
    The last part of the journey, on foot, was about ten minutes. Many of the houses had Christmas