white white T-shirt with paint stains, a pair of torn, ragged, saggy jeans, and trainers. He could look so smart and handsome when he bothered to make an effort, Mary thought it was a real shame that three-quarters of the time he went around looking like a tramp.
‘Hi, Mum,’ said Smitty. ‘Sorry, I’ve been sitting in the car for ten minutes waiting for it to be six o’clock so that the wardens didn’t get me. One of those African ones was eyeing me up. Walking past pretending not to have seen me. I swear, it’s like the nicer your car, the more likely you are to get a ticket. Is that capitalism?’
‘Your grandmother’s asleep. She might go straight through the night from here but she also might wake up. You know what to do, yes?’
Mary had gone over this, at length, twice. The instructions were simple, since all Graham had to do was go and help his grandmother if she called for him. They had now installed a baby monitor so that the person downstairs could hear Petunia if 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 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 Zywiec 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 Zywiecs. 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
