Capital

was a peacemaker, an accommodator, a finder of the common ground. It was a yin-and-yang thing. Balance was the key.
    His art was about extremes, his life was about balance. The ideal thing for Smitty would have been if he could get an assistant to sack his assistant. Get a new Nigel to get rid of the old Nigel. That would be perfect. No point dreaming about that, though. This had been going on for long enough, and Smitty had decided that today was the day. On his desk, to the right of the pile of stuff from his nan’s, was a Post-it note with ‘GET IT DONE’ written on it. That note had been there for a week; which was too long. In his head, he had given the assistant a second and then a third chance, both of which he had blown. Now it was over. The decisive factor was his assistant’s way of making it clear that in his judgement, he and not Smitty was the person who should be treated as the famous artist. The fact that he hadn’t actually made any art since leaving St Martin’s, the fact that all he did was chores for Smitty, seemed in his mind to be a minor, disregardable detail. It was only a question of time before the world realised its mistake in being interested in Smitty rather than in him, and it was tiresome of Smitty to insist on the current hierarchical order of their relationship, which was so soon and so inevitably to be reversed. That was how he acted. Well, thought Smitty, he can piss right off with that. He thinks it should be about him. Today is the day when he learns that right here, right now, it is all about me.
    That was how Smitty talked to himself to try and get into the right frame of mind.
    He had a plan. The first step was to begin with a small gesture that today was not an ordinary day. He had tried to prime things by saying to his assistant that the two of them needed to have a chat about some stuff in the morning. Since that was not the kind of thing Smitty ever said, and since having a chat about some stuff was also not the kind of thing Smitty ever did, that was warning sign number one. The second gesture – the second thing he never, ever did – was to buy himself and his assistant a cappuccino each at the Italian café on the corner, on his way in to the studio. He was late on purpose so that the assistant would already be there. Seeing the cappuccino bought for him by his employer, the assistant would know that something was wrong. That was the plan.
    It didn’t work. Parker French came in with his earphones on and his bag and jacket both swinging over his right arm. He made a little performance of hanging them up, all without turning off his iPod, which was in his jeans pocket, or taking off his earphones, which were in his ears. So when Smitty crossed the room to offer him the cappuccino, he took it while still listening to his music and still in his oblivious, entitled, irritating bubble. If Smitty was having second thoughts, the fact that the little shit couldn’t even be bothered to say ‘thank you’ would have dispelled them. He stood there waiting for Parker to sort himself out and put his stuff away. That took a while. Then he sacked him.
    It was pretty horrible – worse than he had expected. It occurred to Smitty about five minutes in that he had been an idiot not to do this at night, when the snotface was going home, rather than when he had just come in to work. But what really made it bad was the way his now-properly-ex-assistant had been so slow on the uptake.
    ‘We’re having a bit of a problem,’ Smitty had begun. ‘This is one of those it’s-not-you, it’s-me conversations.’ Every single person in the world knows that if someone uses those words a. it is you and b. you are being dumped. But Parker showed no sign of knowing this, this thing that every single person in the world knows. His face settled into a not quite sarcastic, but not sincerely deferential, pretending-to-listen-to-a-bollocking face. Authority figures had had words with him before, it was clear: parents, teachers, tutors. His manner implied that his charm and looks and brains (none of which in Smitty’s view was at all evident) had always got him through in the past, and would do so again. He would half-heartedly pretend to care for the duration of the bollocking, then he would go back to doing whatever he wanted – that was what his manner said.
    About halfway through, Parker’s demeanour suddenly changed. He realised that this was not a could-do-better, untapped - potential ,