Capital

first time anyone had spoken to him since Mickey had stopped ringing him. He blinked to clear his sight, looked through the viewfinder, and took a photograph of the two middle-aged women in anoraks with their arms linked together, and the Houses of Parliament out of focus in the background behind them. Then he walked home.
    The effect of his long solo foot trips through the city wasn’t to make him suddenly love London, but he began to feel that he understood it a little better – understood where things were, understood the rhythm of the city. Patrick realised that what was disconcerting for him was the impression of everybody being busy all the time. People always seemed to be doing things. Even when they weren’t doing anything, they were walking dogs, or going to betting shops, or reading newspapers at bus stops, or listening to music through headphones, or skateboarding along the pavement, or eating fast food as they walked along the street – so even when they weren’t doing things, they were doing things.
    On the third morning Patrick woke late; the building noises which were never absent on a Pepys Road morning had for some reason not broken through into his sleep. He ate toast and an entirely flavourless banana and instead of struggling with the coffee-maker – which had a French-language instruction manual but was still impossible to work out – brewed strong stewed coffee in a jug. He shuffled around the house a little bit, dressed, and left when the housekeeper arrived at about half past ten.
    Patrick’s third walk took him north, towards the river. He went down a local street which he’d never visited even though it was just around the corner: it had, it turned out, a delicatessen, a shoe shop, and a gym where an outstandingly fat man was fighting his own shortness of breath as he tried to chain up a bicycle. A minicab office, a pub, a pizza restaurant which might not yet be open for the day, or which might have gone out of business, it was hard to tell. Down the hill, past a greengrocer’s shop with a sign in the window saying ‘African Vegetables’. Under a railway bridge, past a huge poster with a close-up photo of a man’s crotch dressed in Y-fronts. Past a bus stop with the usual cast of Londoners smoking, playing electronic games, listening to music, staring into space, all as if those activities were jobs in themselves. Past the gasholder, through the park, past joggers and cyclists, down to the river, along the riverside walk. The Thames was different colours depending on its different moods and today, with a rare glimpse of blue in the sky, it was lighter, happier, blue-reflecting. Unlike an African river, it seemed to have no smell. Patrick walked over the pretty, delicate, white-painted ironwork bridge. Again he was overtaking stationary cars, in which people posed and fumed as if they too were working at it. A couple in a low-slung car, a Mini, the girl also wearing a miniskirt, were using the time stuck in traffic to kiss and fondle each other. They were going hard at it. Patrick felt a pang of something, loneliness or lust or both. Maybe he should have taken this week to go home after all.
    Over the bridge there was a pub, with a sign saying ‘Cat and Racket’. The pub had tinted, mottled-glass windows, and electric lights designed to look like old gas lamps. Patrick looked at it and wished that he could go in. He had heard about pubs and had a fantasy image of what they were like: warm, brown, convivial. Not everything in London was people on their own, and pubs were proof of that. But Patrick had never been in one. He was too concerned about not embarrassing himself to go on his own, and too proud to ask Mickey to take him. That didn’t stop him dreaming, and he briefly dreamed now, about how he might cross the road, and find men inside watching football on television, or arguing about some aspect of the game, and they would ask his opinion, ask him if he knew anything, and he would say, quietly, ‘I am Freddy Kamo’s father,’ and they would be astonished, amazed, and they would be thrilled to meet him, and they would compete to buy him a beer, and to put an arm round him and tell him how great they thought Freddy was and how much they hoped things would work out. That is what he dreamed it would be like.
    Patrick cut across the King’s Road, which was a place Freddy had liked to come to and walk along, before he got so famous that it had become difficult. Freddy’s