Capital (21 page)

He had done so the way he did everything else, awkwardly. It was as if he was remembering to try not to be brusque but not quite managing it. The brain tumour he had said needed ‘eliminating’ as a possible illness turned out to be what she actually had. The business about ‘elimination’ was, she now realised, doctor-speak for ‘this is probably what you’ve got’. She had a large tumour, one which had, he said, grown surprisingly quickly for someone her age.

‘I’ve got cancer,’ Petunia had said, with a sensation that she had bumped into something. People talked about the floor opening up beneath you, or the ground falling from beneath your feet, and things like that, but that wasn’t how Petunia felt; she felt as if she had walked into something invisible. Something which had always been there but which she hadn’t been able, and still wasn’t able, to see.

‘Not strictly,’ the doctor said, having visibly had a small struggle over whether or not he should factually correct a dying woman over a point of terminology, before giving in to the impulse to do so. ‘Brain tumour is not a form of cancer. But you do have a tumour and I am sorry to say there is evidence that it is growing.’

Evidence – a heavy word.

The doctor said that the tumour was too big to operate on but that they could treat it with chemotherapy. Or rather that they could ‘perhaps’ treat it with chemotherapy. Many years ago, after watching her friend Margerie Talbot – who had lived at 51, where the Younts now lived – suffer horribly with the treatment for cancer and then die anyway, Petunia had resolved never to have chemotherapy. Now, sitting in the doctor’s consulting office on the eighteenth floor of the hospital tower block, she was interested to notice that the practice was no different from the theory: she felt no temptation to accept the offer of treatment. Not that it was an especially tempting offer. It was something like six weeks’ treatment for six extra months of life – Petunia couldn’t now remember the exact details of the calculation but she could remember at the time thinking how strangely similar it was to the extended warranty offers, £5.99 a month for three years’ extra coverage, which had used to make Albert so reliably furious.

‘No,’ said Petunia. ‘Thank you, but no.’

‘You don’t have to decide here and now,’ the doctor had said.

‘Well, I have decided, and it’s no,’ said Petunia. The consultant looked, for the first and only time, a little taken aback. And that was the last time she had seen him.

The doctor’s verdict was a shock. But at some level it was not a surprise. Things had suddenly got much worse in February. At the core of it was a feeling that this illness was different from any other she had ever had. Every other time she had been ill, there had always been a distance between her and what was wrong with her; she was over here, her illness was over there, and even when she had been deeply ill, delirious with flu and fever, say, she had known that the illness was not her. Her being and its being were separate. That was different this time. The symptoms were not spectacular, but Petunia knew that the sickness was very intimate, it was entwined with her thoughts and perceptions and deepest self. The shadow on her sight spread and grew darker, and then Petunia was dizzy and weak and at times couldn’t do anything much: walk, or even get out of bed. She was taken into hospital. At times she could barely see. For a short period there she had uncontrollable hiccups, so much so that the other patients on the ward complained.

After two weeks things stabilised slightly and she was sent home to die. Her daughter Mary moved down from Maldon to look after her. The alternative would have been moving to Essex to stay with Mary and her family while she died, but there was something creepy about Mary’s house (though of course Petunia didn’t admit that this was the reason), something cold and sterile and unwelcoming and not-right. Mary spent most of her time cleaning and putting things away – she always had – and this habit was harder to bear on foreign territory. At Pepys Road, Mary spent most of the day doing things somewhere else in the house, but came when Petunia called her. That was shamefully often. She sometimes could manage to get to the loo in the night, but sometimes could not, and when that happened she had to call for Mary, who was sleeping in the single bed in an adjacent room which had once been Albert’s den and now was nothing much, except the room which had once been Albert’s den. But Mary was a deep sleeper
and even though mother and daughter both left their doors open she often didn’t hear her mother call until Petunia was almost losing her voice with shouting for her. And then they had the trip to the bathroom to negotiate. Petunia hated this, and Mary hated it too.

There was palliative care available, either at home or in a hospice, when Petunia was actually dying. But she wasn’t quite there yet. The rate at which she was dying seemed to have slowed down sharply since her daughter had come home.

Petunia could hear a rattling from the kitchen downstairs. Mary had a very low tolerance for mess but a high one for noise, or at least a high one for the noise she generated herself. She banged and crashed, she left the radio on turned up loud wherever she went; even the Hoover seemed to make more noise when she was using it. Now she was, Petunia knew because it was eleven o’clock, slamming cupboard doors, rattling saucers, banging a tray down on the table, and thumping the kettle down on the worktop, all by way of making herself and her mother a cup of tea. So she would be coming upstairs in about five minutes. Petunia was glad of it. She and Mary didn’t have much to say to each other but the way in which her daughter’s routines broke up the day was welcome.

The specific manner in which the tumour had affected her brain meant that Petunia could not read. She did not want to watch television and she only intermittently wanted to talk; and when she did, Mary tended not to be there. So she spent the day in a state of pure being, a state closer to infancy than any she had experienced since. There were moments when she was afraid, and moments when she felt actual panic, terror, at the thought of dying. At other times when she thought of her death she felt a generalised sense of loss, strangely nonspecific: not about the things she would no longer experience, because so many of these things had already faded. Her sense of taste and smell had gone funny, so coffee and tea and bacon and flowers were no longer themselves; or if they were themselves, the sense-impressions were no longer accurately recorded by her brain; they were lost in synaptic translation. But it wasn’t anything specific she felt she was losing: it wasn’t that she was losing this day, this light, this breeze, this spring. It
was a general sense of loss connected to nothing and everything. She was simply losing, losing it all. She was on a boat drifting away from the dock. There were moments when it wasn’t even an unpleasant sensation, when she felt safe with herself. At other moments she felt suffocated with a sadness that made her feel choked up and short of breath and so came to seem another symptom of her final illness.

S
hit flows downhill. This basic principle of institutional life had landed a fat folder labelled ‘Investigation: We Want What You Have’ on the desk of Detective Inspector Mill of the Metropolitan Police. It had gone like this: half a dozen residents of Pepys Road had first complained to the local council and, to no one’s surprise, had come up blank, so then they had written to their MP; the MP wrote to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police; the Commissioner sent a note to the divisional commander; the divisional commander had forwarded it to the nearest station commander, based at Clapham South; and the station commander had dumped the issue onto Mill. That was why he was now sitting looking at this folder. A cup of revolting percolated coffee was cooling on the desk next to the file, with a stack of report forms on the other side next to his charging mobile and a copy of yesterday’s
Metro
.

A person who wasn’t used to it would have found it impossible to work in that room. Not a single other body in it was in a state of silence and rest. Two dozen Met officers were in constant motion, most of them also talking, joshing, making off-colour jokes, often while simultaneously keying data into computers, or flicking through files, or dialling phone numbers, or eating muffins, or lobbing crumpled paper into the bin, or carrying piles of forms from one end of the office to the other. It was mayhem. Mill liked that about it.

He found himself asking the first thing he always asked about any piece of work: why me? It wasn’t an idle question. Mill was not, demo-graphically or psychologically, a typical policeman. He was a Classics graduate from Oxford, both the town and the university, the son of two teachers, who had joined the police as an experiment on himself, for reasons which he often speculated about – observing himself as from a distance – but still didn’t understand. He wanted to scratch an itch to do with authority, his need for it, his desire to have it, his liking of hierarchy and order. It was that thing the centurion says to Jesus: ‘For I also am a man set under authority, having under me soldiers, and I say unto one, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it.’ Yes. That felt right to him. Five years out of university, on the graduate fast track up through the ranks, he was very aware of the ways in which his colleagues thought he might be a wanker; not that he was a wanker all the time, but that, through the cocktail of class and education, he had the kind of perspectives and opportunities which meant that he might at any moment say or do something wanky. As if being in the police was for him a lifestyle choice, rather than a fundamental expression of who he was. He resented that they saw him like that, while admitting, deep down, that it was also fair enough. So he learned to be careful.

Mill wanted to make a difference, whatever that meant – it was a phrase he thought about a lot. He was a Christian – had never stopped being one, had been one since childhood – and wanted to lead a good life. But you had to think about what that meant. To make a difference presumably meant either to do something that other people couldn’t or wouldn’t do, or to do their jobs in a way which was better than the way they did it. So it was a marginal difference. It was the difference between the kind of policeman he was and the kind someone else would have been. If he was, say, 15 per cent better than the other person who would have been Detective Inspector at his station, then that was the difference he was making, that 15 per cent. That was his marginal utility. Was it enough? There were days when he felt it was and days when he felt it wasn’t. His girlfriend Janie thought he was mad to have wanted to go into the police, and was only now,
four years in, beginning to accept the idea that it might in some bizarre way suit him.

That didn’t mean he didn’t think about giving it up and doing something else. He did, almost every day. The thought was a safety valve; the idea that he could quit whenever he liked was one of the things which kept him in the job. The exit was always in his line of sight. The idea of it helped him to stay put and to cope with the rough parts of his job and his day.

One of those rough parts, in the form of Constable Dawks, was heading towards his desk at that precise moment. Dawks was a decade older than Mill and would never be anything other than a constable. Mill had spent two years on the beat and then been promoted to inspector as part of the accelerated-promotion scheme, invented in the eighties as a way of attracting more graduates into the force. It worked, but not without attracting resentment at the gilded generation who slid effortlessly into jobs which ordinary coppers would never have a chance of getting. Added to this was the fact that Mill – as a slightly built, well-groomed 26-year-old non-smoking teetotaller can sometimes do – looked roughly half his age. As a detective there were times when that was an asset. In the station house, not so much. One of the reasons that was true was because of men like Dawks, a physically imposing, not very bright 35-year-old whose attitudes were less about law and much more about enforcement. Dawks was a natural bully, who over the nine months they had known each other had made a number of attempts at picking on Mill, like a shark circling potential prey; Mill had fended him off, but it was clear that Dawks would return for another go whenever he felt like it. The idea was to look for a weak spot, something he could find that Mill minded, and that he could then exploit to turning the Inspector into a figure of ridicule. Once that was done it was hard to undo. People liked Mill well enough but he was sufficiently different to make a good target, once the beachhead had been established.

Today, though, there was a reprieve. Just as Dawks was about five feet from his desk and opening his mouth to say something, he was called to the other end of the room by one of the custody sergeants.
The constable stopped and turned away, not without giving a last look at Mill. So that was unfinished business. Back to work. Mill picked up the folder and began flicking through it again and returned again to the question, Why me? Mill’s boss, Superintendent Wilson, was a dark-haired, trim, smooth-mannered woman in her middle forties, another product of the accelerated-promotion scheme. She was the most talented natural politician he had ever seen, especially when it came to sniffing out trouble in advance, spotting pitfalls, and knowing what things would look bad if they went wrong. It made her a cautious police officer but not necessarily a bad one. Her use of Mill, he noticed, implied that he was cut from a similar mould. She often sicked him onto problems with a political angle, real or potential. That was half a compliment, because it implied that she trusted him, and half an insult, because it implied that he resembled her.

In this case, her brief has been explicit. ‘Find out what’s happening, then make it go away.’

So the first question was, what was happening? The material on his desk had been accumulated by aggrieved householders in a local street called Pepys Road. They had been subjected to what they called ‘a campaign of sustained harassment’. They had written a classic middle-class complaint letter, carefully phrased to press the maximum number of official buttons. According to them, the campaign had begun with postcards of their own front doors, then with videos of their street, and there was also an anonymous blog with photos of the houses, shot at a variety of hours and over a period of time. All of this material, without exception, bore the slogan or motto or injunction or threat ‘We Want What You Have’.