Capital

that instead it had the effect of making him shut down, switch off, and turn away; which was what it did. Depressed people bored and annoyed Zbigniew; back home he knew too many of them, and their charms had long since worn off. Or she might have been genuinely, but briefly, depressed – except that to be as depressed as she seemed, she would have to be clinically depressed, in which case what she needed was a doctor and some pills, not a Polish boyfriend to sit across the table and be unhappy at.
    Last night, for instance. They had gone to see a film. The time before, she chose, so this time, he did. Iron Man . It was OK – not great but OK. Afterwards, in the pub, she did not speak. He made small talk for a while then gave up. After a couple of minutes, with Davina sitting there looking at the table, she looked up and said,
    ‘You’re very quiet.’
    ‘You are quieter than I am.’
    Pause.
    ‘Am I?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Pause.
    ‘Well . . . I just don’t feel there’s much to say.’
    At which point Zbigniew might have taken the opportunity to say, I agree, it’s over. But instead he fell into the trap.
    ‘Why not?’
    She shrugged – expressively, tragically, as if being forced to give a preference between death by hanging or shooting.
    ‘Is there?’
    ‘Isn’t there?’
    Another shrug.
    ‘You like films like that . . . Violent films.’
    So that was it.
    ‘It wasn’t that violent.’
    She shuddered.
    ‘By your standards, maybe not.’
    ‘What does that mean?’
    ‘You’re a man, you’re entertained by violence.’
    ‘No I’m not. I like action films. That’s not the same thing.’
    ‘When you have seen violence, though . . .’
    So that would be the way it would go. Davina sometimes implied that she was a victim of violence in some private way linked to her childhood (maybe) or to past boyfriends (maybe) or both. She never said anything explicit but would often drop hints and then fight off Zbigniew’s attempts to follow up and find out more. She preferred it when he made an effort to ask, so he said, while wondering just how he had been manoeuvred into asking a question when he didn’t want to hear the answer and wouldn’t necessarily believe it when it came,
    ‘What do you mean?’
    That was when she went into her black dog mode. And guess what? – it ended up with them having sex: after he had walked her home, she had burst into tears and invited him in, and about thirty seconds later they were, to use an expression Zbigniew had picked up from an Irish electrician, ‘banging away like armed policemen’. The sex was great, of course. It was epic. It was the best it could be. Sex wasn’t the problem. Or rather, sex was exactly the problem, because it was so great.
    Zbigniew got out of bed as carefully as he could manage. The ideal thing would be to get out of Davina’s flat without waking her, leaving behind a note expressing . . . expressing something. In his underpants, he made it to the en suite bathroom, where he splashed water on his face and brushed his teeth using the toothbrush she had bought for him. He pissed and – this was risky from the noise-making point of view but he was fastidious – flushed.
    Back in the bedroom, he had a moment of not much liking himself. The room was bright pink – a stylish bright pink, Zbigniew had to admit – and had a large Ikea bed. Davina had a collection of teddy bears which, in the haste to have sex last night, had been thrown off onto the floor. They were in a variety of positions, legs akimbo, upside down, piled on top of each other, and the way they were strewn around, combined with what Zbigniew and Davina had done last night, made, for a jarring moment, Zbigniew think there was something sexual about their air of abandon. The bears looked forgotten and unloved, and also as if they were in the middle of a bear orgy. It looked wrong.
    His clothes, also removed in a hurry, were on the heavy, ornate, very non-Ikea chair opposite the foot of the bed. He slipped on his T-shirt and sweatshirt, but one of his jeans legs was trapped under the leg of the chair. He lifted the chair with one hand and pulled out the jeans with the other, and heard from behind him,
    ‘Oooh, muscles.’
    He grimaced, then turned and smiled.
    ‘I was hoping I wouldn’t wake you.’
    ‘I like being woken by you,’ she said in a sleepy-sexy voice, which he couldn’t help finding, despite himself, made him feel a twinge in his cock.
    ‘Last night was