Capital

she called out.
    ‘Sure I do, Mum. Chuck in a grenade and shoot the first one who comes running out. Off you go, off off. Dad said to tell you to take a black cab from the rank.’
    ‘Right,’ said Mary, who had no intention of doing any such thing. And then, since she couldn’t stop herself, since she was the one who did the family’s caring and worrying and asking and noticing and minding, and since Graham was looking so rough and so ragged – was looking a lot like someone who had lost their job, or didn’t have a job, and was in no hurry to get another one, she said:
    ‘Work . . . everything, everything OK at work?’
    ‘Never better, Mum. Off you go. Have a good time. I’ll keep away from the drinks cabinet.’ He held up his car keys and waved them as he said that. ‘Shoo. Hoick it. Scram. Vamoose. It’s your Big Night Out.’ So Mary had no choice except to pick up her clutch bag and go out into the evening.
    When the door closed behind her, Smitty clenched his fist and made an arm-pumping gesture. Yes! Ker-ching! He had bet himself ten million pounds that however short their interaction on the doorstep, his mother wouldn’t be able to stop herself asking about his work, or how things were going, or something. He actually said it aloud, ‘I bet myself ten million quid.’ It was nice to be proved right. That was something you never got tired of. Making a joke of his mum’s way of carrying on made it less of a mind-fuck. From his dealings with his mother, Smitty had learned the following truth: the person doing the worrying experiences it as a form of love; the person being worried about experiences it as a form of control.
    Smitty took a wander round the ground floor to see that everything was in order. It was – of course it was. If anything his mum was even tidier than his nan – though having said that, now that he was looking around the kitchen, there was clear evidence that she had taken up smoking again: a washed-up ashtray on the draining board, and the sort of tobacco smell you get when someone is trying to be careful about smoking near the window but doesn’t realise non-smokers will pick up odour anyway. Ha! Well, sort of ha. His mum taking up smoking would have been funny if the circumstances had been different. Her taking up smoking because she was sad and stressed about Nan dying wasn’t something to laugh about. He withdrew his mental ha.
    The kitchen was the same as always. It had been funny to see it as a form of time travel to 1955 when his nan was just being his nan, as permanent and unchangeable as a piece of sculpture. From a certain perspective, his nan’s kitchen was a genius piece of camp. But it looked a little different now that she was dying and would probably, no, certainly, never use it again: never open the world’s oldest fridge, never stand by the stove waiting for the ultra-retro kettle to sing. The objects had Nan in them, her care and attention and her wanting them to be this way. She had chosen them (or more likely her husband had chosen them and then she had chosen to put up with them). While she was dying, it was as if they were dying too, the care and the wanting-them-this-way draining out of them. Now she’d never be in this room again.
    Never was a hard word. Smitty’s art didn’t take much interest in never, and he found that it wasn’t something he wanted to spend much time thinking about.
    From the sitting room, he could hear a faint echoing noise which he took a moment to figure out; it was the baby monitor. You could set it to go both ways, presumably so people could talk back to their babies – yes darling, ga-ga-goo-goo, or whatever it was people said to babies – but Mary had disabled the feature so she didn’t have to worry about making noise downstairs. He’d best go check on his nan. Taking the stairs two at a time, Smitty went up to her bedroom. She was lying on her back, propped up against the pillows, and her eyes were open.
    ‘Graham,’ she said. ‘Your mother said you’d be here. I didn’t mean to bring you up.’ Her speech, Smitty noticed, had a faint slur, like that of someone who’s had a few drinks and doesn’t yet realise they’re becoming pissed.
    ‘Yeah, Mum’s gone out. She’s on a large one,’ said Smitty, sitting down on the chair beside the bed. ‘You all right?’ And then he realised as soon as he’d said it how stupid that was. His nan just smiled at him, as if she hadn’t heard, but it was a sad