Capital

like Uncle Kama,’ he said to his father, about a cloud which did indeed look like a short fat man with very well-developed buttocks.
    ‘Wrong colour,’ said Patrick. Freddy reached across and very softly punched him on the upper arm.
    Patrick was rigid with tension, ready to bristle and flare up, in the immigration hall, but although the queue had moved very slowly, the middle-aged woman looking at their passports and visas had let them through with no questions, indeed without speaking at all. Now they were in the arrivals hall.
    ‘Are you ready?’ Patrick asked Freddy as they stood beside the trolley on which they had put their suitcases. They were both wearing their best suits. Patrick had refused to employ an agent for Freddy, but he had taken legal and business advice. From this day, the club were paying Freddy £20,000 a week, with a complex series of escalators and option clauses taking account of what would happen when his career took off. In other words, from this moment on, they were rich. It was a hard thought to keep hold of; mainly Patrick was worrying about what would happen if they came through the arrivals door and Mickey Lipton-Miller and the others weren’t there to meet them. Mickey had offered to fly someone to Dakar just to fly back with them, but Patrick was a proud man and that seemed too much; he was not a child who needed his hand held. But the chaos and rushing and sheer indifference of Heathrow – the sense that every single person there was familiar with what they were doing and where they were going, and none of them would spare a thought for the Kamos – were close to overwhelming.
    ‘I am fine,’ said Freddy.
    ‘ D’accord ,’ said Patrick. ‘Let’s go and start this new life. Do you want to drive?’
    Freddy nodded and took charge of the luggage trolley. They went through the deserted customs hall and out before a wall of faces, two of whom, Patrick was pleased to see, were Mickey Lipton-Miller and the club translator.

17
     
     
    Zbigniew and Piotr leaned against the wall of Uprising, their favourite bar, and watched the midweek crowd jostling and flirting and drinking and shouting. Piotr was going home early for Christmas, so they wouldn’t see each other until the new year; Zbigniew was going to stay in London. He was on standby for any small plumbing or electrical jobs that came up at any of Piotr’s sites. It was a good time to get work because British builders were all on holiday. For that very reason Zbigniew had a couple of jobs which he had promised to finish over the holidays, while the owners of 33 Pepys Road and 17 Grove Crescent were in Mauritius and Dubai, respectively. They would be staying in expensive hotels and doing whatever it was people did when they went to expensive places – sit by the pool with expensive drinks, eat expensive food, talk about other expensive holidays they might go on and how nice it was to have so much money.
    Zbigniew was planning to go home in early January and had already booked a Ryanair flight for 99p plus tax. His mother would make a fuss over him and his father would take a day or two off work. It would be good to be home; Zbigniew hadn’t been to Warsaw since the previous spring. He would see some friends and dandle some babies on his knees and dream about the time he would be able to come back as a wealthy man.
    ‘That one,’ said Piotr. The pub had no Polish beers so both men were drinking Budvar, in their view the only good thing to come out of the former Czechoslovakia.
    ‘The blonde? Too short. Almost a dwarf.’
    ‘No, not the blonde, the one next to her. With dark hair. I am in love.’
    ‘You are always in love.’
    ‘Love is what makes the earth go around the sun.’
    ‘No, that’s gravity,’ said Zbigniew. This was an old debate between them and they barely listened to each other. Piotr fell in lust very easily and made no distinction between that and falling in love. He would conceive a crush on a girl, go and talk to her, fall madly in love, undergo a passionate and violently see-sawing affair, experience extremes of elation undreamt of by most mortals, have his heart broken, go through bitter depression, and recover to await the next encounter, all in about forty-five minutes. When he did actually go out with a girl it was the same cycle, but spread out over a longer time. At the moment Piotr was between love affairs and so coming to the pub with him was, Zbigniew felt, an act of conscious