Capital

decorations on display in the windows, and wreaths on the front doors. They looked good to Zbigniew, comfortable and, in the way that so much of London did, rich, polished, shiny, finished. Then he was at their house. The tenants downstairs were still at work. He ran up the stairs and let himself in to find Tomas and Gregor, two new members of Piotr’s crew, sitting on the sofa playing God of War .
    One thing to do before he could relax. Zbigniew went into the bedroom he shared with Piotr and took his laptop computer out from under his bed, where it had been charging. He flipped it open and booted it up. This flat was not perfect, and sharing with five others was not perfect, and sharing a bedroom with one metre ninety of old friend who snored was particularly not perfect, but one great thing about it was that two neighbours had unencrypted wireless connections. Zbigniew logged on and went to check his portfolio. He was not day trading at the moment – he couldn’t, he wasn’t working at a house with broadband – but he still had £8,000, his entire savings, invested in stocks. At the moment he was mainly in tech, with half of his portfolio in Google, Apple and Nintendo, all of which had more than doubled in the past year. Today GOOG, AAPL and NTDOY had mainly gone sideways and his net position was £12.75 ahead of where it had been the day before. This was not significant and it seemed to Zbigniew that no action needed to be taken, so he put the computer to sleep and went to have a shower and cook the sausages.

12
     
     
    Smitty, the performance and installation artist and all-round art-world legend, stood looking out the window of his studio in Shoreditch, waiting for his new assistant to come back with a triple-shot cappuccino and the daily papers. He had a black suit and white shirt on for visiting his nan, and could just see in the reflection that he looked, though he said so himself, pretty sharp: if his mum could have seen him, she would have been pleased. So that was good. Other things were not so good. He wasn’t impressed by the performance of his new assistant, who had gone out twenty minutes ago, and who only needed about a quarter of that amount of time to get out and back, and who would therefore be returning with a cup of frothy coffee which was odds-on to be cold.
    Looking out the window, Smitty surveyed the London scene: oldsters struggling with carrier bags on their way back from the supermarket, a crack whore topping up with Tennent’s, pramfaces from the estate and their grub-white babies, immigrants from who knew where, Kosovo probably or wherever it was the latest lot came from. The street was noisy with distant traffic and drilling and people had put their orange recycling bags out, piled and spilling, but they hadn’t been collected yet, so the pavement was a military-grade obstacle course. Smitty loved and approved of all he saw. London, life, London life. He felt an idea coming on. At the other end of the road, a group of workmen in bright orange safety jackets were standing around a hole they had dug about a week before. Two of them were smoking, the third was laughing, the fourth was drinking something from a thermos, and to one side of them their mechanical digger stood with its scoop pointing downwards. The way they were all grouped around the hole made it look as if the hole were their focus of attention, as if they were admiring it. That was what gave Smitty the idea: make a work of art about holes. Or, make holes the work of art. Yes, that was better. Dig some holes and make the hole the artwork, or rather the confusion and chaos the hole caused – people’s reaction, not the thing itself. Yeah – bloody great hole, for no reason. Let the tossers argue about who fills it in. That’s part of the artwork too.
    This was how Smitty had made his name: through anonymous artworks in the form of provocations, graffiti, only-just-non-criminal vandalism, and stunts. He was famous for being unknown, a celebrity without identity, and it was agreed that his anonymity was his most interesting artefact – though the stunts made people laugh, too. He had a crew who he had known since for ever, and who helped him when he needed helping. Last year, the sale of signed works and his own book about himself had taken his earnings over £1,000,000 for the first time.
    Smitty disliked writing things down – a dislike which meant he had struggled at school and been directed to what were