Capital (26 page)

Smitty had been sent an invitation via his dealer – his dealer in the
old sense, as it happened, who was now his dealer in the new sense – and he felt like coming, so he did. He wanted to have a look around, not just to see the brothers’ work, which he already knew about, but to get the feeling of the room, of the vibe, of what was happening and what might be about to happen. Art was a business, which might not be your favourite fact about it but was a fact you were unwise to ignore. It was good to sniff around, to look at the players. Because of that, going to art parties was something Smitty loved to do. There wasn’t too much chance he would be recognised, even among an art-world crowd, because among that crowd there was a rumour – a rumour started by Smitty, as it happened, via a hint he’d got his dealer to drop – that Smitty was black. The existence of that rumour was Smitty’s single favourite thing in the whole entire world.

So his identity was protected here. At the same time, he was careful not to do the party thing too often, because if he did do it too often, people might start to wonder who he was; might start to wonder properly, not just to be faintly, briefly, idly curious. Smitty liked to play games with his anonymity, but he preferred to be the person who was playing the game; liked it to be a private game with one player, Smitty himself. So he always dressed up in a suit and tie, a not-too-smart formal suit, not a wide-boy-at-play suit, and if anyone asked him what he did, he said he was an accountant who worked for the artists’ insurers. That shut people up and made them go away pretty fast. If they didn’t, well, Smitty had an economics GCSE and was confident he could bluff his way through. Plus he always took an assistant as hanger-on and as cover. Even a useless Nigel like this one could be good cover, because Smitty looked as if he was standing talking to him while in fact he was checking out the talent in the room – the talent in all senses.

Smitty recognised about a third of the people in the room; that was about average. There were some dealers who were mainly drinking champagne, a few artists who were mainly drinking Special Brew (nice touch) and a few civilians who were either on champagne or London tap water that was being served out of magnums with ‘London Tap’ printed on the side (another nice touch). The dealers were for the most part wearing expensive versions of smart casual, the artists were carefully
superscruffy, and the civilians wore suits. Hence his disguise. There were more foreigners than usual, which was interesting; mainly Germans, Smitty thought. The word about these guys had got out quite far quite fast. Germany was a good market, as Smitty well knew. About a third of his book’s earnings had been in Germany. That was really all there was to see here. Another glass of bubbles and Smitty would be off.

All this made Parker very unhappy. Smitty was right to think that his assistant wasn’t exactly convulsed with respect for him. In Parker’s opinion, Smitty’s entire oeuvre was based on a mistake. Once you ignored the particulars of what Smitty did – which, in Parker’s view, you could easily do, without missing too much – what Smitty’s work was really about was anonymity. He was all about being anonymous, about the idea of, and consequences of, being anonymous. Warhol only had one idea, about the commodification of the art image; and he got that idea in all its implications, from every possible angle. Smitty too only had one idea, about the possibilities and consequences of anonymity. But his idea was, in Parker’s opinion, a load of bollocks. People did not want to be anonymous. More: anonymity was one of the things that they liked least about life in the modern world. They wanted to be known, they wanted to be named, they wanted their fifteen minutes.

‘It’s not about being invisible,’ Parker would say to his girlfriend Daisy when he talked about what was wrong with Smitty; which was fairly often. ‘He’s got it backwards. Art should be about making people visible. Making things visible. It’s about attention.’

She knew well enough not to say anything, just to stroke the nearest available body part.

Parker knew just how being unknown, unacknowledged, unseen, presses on people; he knew because he felt the pressure inside himself. He felt it as an aspect of the city, of the crowds and the blankness and the attention always going elsewhere, up and out towards dreams of celebrity and fame, down and into the reveries of the self; and never where it belonged, some small but loud and passionate part of him secretly felt: towards him, Parker French.

‘Yeah, we’ve done this,’ said Smitty, draining his glass and handing
it to one of the dwarfs. Parker knew what that meant: we are leaving immediately. Smitty’s absolute indifference to most other people could seem a form of geniality, the affability of an older man, but Parker knew that Smitty wasn’t at all genial, not even a little bit. Parker put his half-full glass on the same tray and the two men headed unnoticed for the warehouse exit.

P
atrick Kamo had a secret. It was a secret he kept from everyone, but especially from his son, and the secret was this: Patrick hated London. He hated England, he hated the life he was living while he kept Freddy company. He hated the weather, he hated the English language, he hated the year-round cold and rain and the way it made him feel old, he hated the extra layers of clothing he had to wear to fight the weather, and he hated the way central heating made him feel sweaty and cold and dried out all at the same time. He had looked forward to the spring, to the time when, he was told, everything would start getting warmer, but the English spring was ridiculous, grey and not just cold but damply cold. He hated people’s unfriendliness, and he hated the way he had gone from being a respected and important man in his own right to being an accessory of his son’s life. He hated the way he was invisible in the streets. He hated the fact that nobody knew who he was; he had never been a man with many close friends, he was too guarded for that, but he had many acquaintances, people who looked at him with regard; in London, he had none, except the people who were paid to be polite to him because he was Freddy’s father. He hated the house in Pepys Road, its horrible narrowness, its unexpansive tallness, the expensive toys which he found he couldn’t operate properly. He was a man who had always worked, but here his job was Being Freddy’s Father, which wasn’t a job at all. A man should be a father, but a man
should be a worker too. Here, because his job was nothing but to be with Freddy, he felt as if both things were being taken away from him. More than he would have thought possible, he hated being away from his wife and daughters. He expected to miss them in a way he could manage, a small pain, like a muscle ache. Instead he thought about them all the time. The agreement was that they wouldn’t be coming to visit until the autumn, but Patrick had no idea how he was going to wait that long for the smell of Adede’s hair, for the feel of his youngest daughters Malé and Tina crushed and squealing with laughter in his arms. In London, of course, all they would want to do was shop – but that would be good to see. It would sink in with his daughters what their half-brother had done, what he now was. And maybe Patrick would even get some pleasure from showing them this horrible city, this place he hated so much. Whenever the cursed postcards and DVDs arrived, the ones talking about how people wanted what he had, he wanted to scream and shout and swear and hit somebody. There was nothing in his new life that he liked.

He kept all these feelings to himself. It was a point of honour and principle for Patrick not to complain about things, that was one reason; the other was because it would be unfair to Freddy. To fulfil his dream, to live his talent to the full, to be paid more than anyone could imagine, to be a hero, to do the thing he loved and wanted more than any other – and to be greeted by his father with all this whining negativity: that would be crushing. Freddy was a good boy whose strongest motivation in life, apart from his love of football, was his wish to please his father. He should not have to deal with the fact that his happiness was bringing his father misery. So Patrick kept his misery to himself. Perhaps he could have talked to Mickey, who had become so fond of Freddy that Patrick had started to trust him; but there again, Patrick felt that telling him about his unhappiness would have been unmanly. He liked Mickey but he did not want to show him any weakness.

This week was particularly difficult because Freddy had gone to the Azores for a training break with the club. Patrick had talked things over with Mickey – when the matter touched on Freddy’s interests, Mickey was a good person to talk to – and had decided not to go to
the training camp with him. For one thing, they had been in London for five months now, and it would be good for Freddy to travel on his own for the first time – given that ‘on his own’ meant that he would be going in a party of fifty people, all of whom he already knew. For another, there was nothing at all to do at the camp except train, watch the training, then eat and take baths and watch training films and maybe a DVD in the evening. There were no temptations for Freddy to give in to (not that he was that kind of boy) and there was by the same token nothing for Patrick to do. So he chose to stay in London. He could be miserable on his own for a change. They were so rich now that he could have flown home to see his wife and daughters for a week, but that, again, felt unmanly to Patrick. It would be too like a child running to its mother to seek comfort.

So Patrick had the best part of a week on his own. The housekeeper prepared meals and left instructions on how to reheat them; the meals were in plastic containers in the fridge, the instructions, in printed handwriting, were on a notepad next to the cooker. Patrick followed the instructions, then added extra chilli sauce to make the food palatable. For the first two days, Mickey called him up to ask how he was doing. Patrick was grateful for his concern, but hid his gratitude behind a gruff manner because he didn’t want to seem gushing. He did that so effectively that Mickey thought he was annoying Patrick by fussing over him, and so stopped ringing. Freddy rang in the evenings, usually with music playing or someone laughing in the background. Freddy was happy. He liked having lots of people around him. Patrick Kamo, on his own in the London house in the rainy non-existent English summer, was as lonely and as bored and as underemployed as he had ever been in his life.

He took to going for walks. Up to now, most of the city he had seen had been out of a car window, and usually while travelling to or from somewhere with Freddy and Mickey. He had occasionally taken walks around the block, to the shops or just to get out of the house for a few minutes, but since it was hard for Freddy to go out in public now without being recognised, his time was mainly spent in cars or buildings. Patrick, left to his own devices, decided to change that. On
Tuesday he went across the Common to the south, down past Balham and Tooting, and understood for the first time the alternation between the clusters of shops in old high streets followed by long stretches, block after block after street after street, of identical houses, all tightly squeezed in, and then the open stretches of the various commons. On that walk, he began to head eastwards towards Streatham, then tired and looped back and found his own way home after hitting the South Circular and following it around. The traffic had come to a complete halt, and he must have overtaken hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cars at his easy strolling pace. When he got to King’s Avenue he discovered the reason: a helicopter was parked in the middle of the road, with two police cars to either side of it, lights flashing. He had heard of this but never seen it, the Air Ambulance. An Asian police officer stood behind a cordon and allowed pedestrians past. There was a white van, askew across two lanes of the road, and a glimpse of something wedged under its front wheels; from the stoops and frowns of the men around it, something was caught up in something else. A bicycle. Its rider could not have survived. Patrick felt pity but also incomprehension: this was a rich country, why would anyone choose to ride a bicycle?

The next day he went north-east, towards Stockwell, past people speaking a language he took time to realise was Portuguese, past busy roads and housing estates which looked like places he would not want to live, all the way to the river and a sudden, unexpected view of the Houses of Parliament. He stopped to look at the broad grey river and the handsome old buildings, and as he did so a woman came up to ask him to take a photograph of her and her friend. It was the 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.