Capital by John Lanchester Page B

that Smitty had an entrepreneurial streak and would turn out fine. ‘He’s a natural barrow boy, like me,’ was what he always said to Smitty’s mother, often in Smitty’s hearing. That too was a description Smitty didn’t mind at all. His mum, though – he instinctively didn’t want her knowing what he was up to. As for his nan, saying to her ‘I am a conceptual artist who specialises in provocative temporary site-specific works’ would have been like telling her he was the world heavyweight boxing champion. She would have nodded and said ‘That’s nice, dear’ and felt genuinely proud of him without needing to go into any further details. She was good at accepting things; a bit too good, maybe, in Smitty’s view.
    Anyway, here he was. Pepys Road. Smitty had taken the Tube, because although he could easily have driven, and deeply loved his Beemer, he found he got more ideas when he took the Tube and spent the trip looking at people and wondering about how to get into their heads. That was a big part of what art was about – getting into people’s heads.
    Before Smitty rang the doorbell, he could hear his nan pottering about inside. One of her signature moves was to put the kettle on before coming to the door, so it would be boiling within seconds of the guest sitting down. Then the door opened and there she was.
    ‘Nan!’ said Smitty.
    ‘Graham!’ said his nan, because that was Smitty’s real name. Hehanded over a box of chocolates – a fantastically expensive box of chocolates that his soon-to-be-ex-assistant had ‘sourced’ (the soon-to-be-ex-assistant’s word) from a poncy shop in West London. His nan would not notice that the chocolates were incredibly fancy, which is why Smitty felt free to give them to her. If he’d given them to his mum, she would have subjected him to Abu Ghraib–style interrogation about how much they had cost and whether he could afford it.
    ‘I’ve put the kettle on,’ said his nan. They went through to the kitchen, Smitty’s favourite room in the house and possibly in the whole world, because it was exactly like time travel to 1958. Linoleum – Smitty loved lino. A Coronation biscuit tin. A proper kettle, one you put on the stove, none of that electric rubbish. The world’s most knackered fridge. No dishwasher. His granddad had been too tight to buy one, and then after he’d died and his nan was living on her own there wasn’t enough washing-up to justify the expense.
    His nan wasn’t moving quite as well as she might have been. She was what, eighty-three next year? Nan had never taken up much space, but she had always seemed pretty robust, physically. That ran on both sides of the family. But she seemed thinner, frailer, and now that he was looking closely, slightly less steady on her pins. Probably just age, pure and simple. You heard people say forty was the new thirty and fifty was the new forty and sixty was the new forty-five, but you never heard anybody say eighty was the new anything. Eighty was just eighty.
    Smitty was tempted to put out an arm to help her down the single step into the kitchen but resisted the impulse. Nan was talking about how she got most of her shopping done over the internet now, how his mother had set it up for her, and what a blessing it was, though she didn’t like the fact that they used up so many plastic bags, sometimes a whole plastic bag for a single item, but his mother had told her that they took away the bags too and she had asked and it was true and that was a blessing. Smitty semi-listened to all this.
    ‘You can get anything over the internet now, Nan. Friend of mine moved to Los Angeles. In America, six thousand miles away. Before he goes he sells his flat, sells his car, and dumps his girlfriend. Then he goes online and rents a flat, rents a car, and gets a new girlfriend, all over the internet and all before he’s set a foot in the place. True story.’
    ‘It’s a different world,’ said his nan. She was