Capital

smile, which meant that she probably had. He didn’t say anything else; there wasn’t any need to. His nan looked at him for a bit, then closed her eyes. Not long after that, her breathing changed, and Smitty saw that she’d fallen asleep.
    Smitty went back downstairs, wandered out into the garden, which was looking good, as far as he could tell, which wasn’t very far, since as he liked to joke, ‘I’m not competitive enough to be interested in gardening.’ He went back inside and turned the TV on, but everything was shite and his nan (of course) didn’t have Sky, so there wasn’t much choice, so he went back into the kitchen again and there on the table, along with some junk mail which his mother hadn’t yet chucked, he saw one of those cards saying ‘We Want What You Have’. It was another photo of the front door. Smitty picked it up and stared at it, and couldn’t tell whether what he was feeling was foreboding or sadness.

44
     
     
    At the Polish club in Balham, Zbigniew sat with a bison-grass vodka and a bottle of Żywiec beer, waiting for Piotr. Zbigniew did not repress things, he believed in letting complaints out to give them some air. So he was going to tell Piotr what was going on with Davina. Zbigniew felt that he was going to have to tell Piotr what was happening, because if he didn’t his head was going to explode, but the cost of doing that would be to suffer Piotr’s amusement. He knew that Piotr would think what had happened in his love life, or his sex life, was hilarious; he would think it was a punishment for his pragmatic and deliberately unromantic approach to women.
    This was made very much worse by the fact that a tiny part of Zbigniew thought there might be some truth in Piotr’s view. But knowing that you had gone wrong, and knowing how you had gone wrong, were not the same thing as knowing how to put it right.
    The bar was half-full. It was a popular spot with the older generation of London Poles, the ones who had come over during the war – there were even people here who remembered that time first-hand. Favourite fact: one-third of all the planes shot down during the Battle of Britain were shot down by Polish pilots. So it was a place for old men to play cards and watch the Polish TV and generally carry on as if they were still back in the old country. The younger generation hadn’t yet colonised the club, which was one of the things Zbigniew liked about it. Without really examining the feeling, Zbigniew was aware that the club reminded him of his parents, of the evenings when his father had his friends over for Zechcyk and his mother pottered about in the kitchen, pretending to complain about how late they would keep her awake.
    Piotr came in, looked over, saw what he was drinking, made a sign with two fingers pointing up in curls at the sides of his head – their private gesture for bison, therefore for bison-grass vodka – and came over from the bar with two more vodkas and two more Żywiecs. They touched glasses and downed the vodkas and then took a shot of beer.
    In Polish, Piotr said, ‘This Chelsea job stinks. It’s like that job we did in Notting Hill where Andrzej wanted to leave a dead rat in the cavity wall. Remember them, the fat music producer with the skinny blonde wife? These ones are the same. They’re the kind of rich people who fight you over every penny and because he’s a crook he thinks everyone else is too. She acts as if she has the authority to make decisions, then he comes the next day and reverses everything she said and claims that we shouldn’t have acted on her authority so we should carry the costs. It’s like watching a divorce in slow motion and being expected to pay for the privilege. I was a moron to take the job.’
    ‘Good money though.’
    Piotr gave a sharp shrug which indicated that while this was true it was also obtuse since it wasn’t the point at issue. Zbigniew found it important to have no feeling about his clients one way or another, and was about to say this to Piotr, with some smugness, and for about the hundredth time; but since he was also going to be spending a significant part of the evening complaining about his predicament with Davina, he didn’t feel this was a good moment to point out a philosophical error on Piotr’s part.
    There was a burst of noise from one of the card tables; two of the middle-aged men sitting at it had their arms above their heads, in victory or horror. The other two were looking