Remainder (4 page)

“Let me try,” Greg said.

I handed it to him, but he couldn’t do it either.

“You have to…” Catherine began, but just then the cork flew out with a bang. It only missed my head by half an inch. It hit a metal light clamped to the ceiling and then fell back to the floor.

“Woah!” said Greg. “You could have had your accident all over again. If that light had fallen on you, I mean.”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“Do the honours, then,” said Greg.

I poured the champagne and we drank. It wasn’t very cold, and it had a weird smell, like cordite. Catherine still had two glasses on the go, the champagne and the beer. She alternated, taking sips from each.

“You could do both,” said Greg.

“I’m sorry?” I said.

“Live like a rock star
and
give to these housing projects in Kenya. It’s enough money to do both.”

“Zimbabwe,” Catherine said. “Yeah but it’s not just housing. Housing is a vital aspect, but there’s education too. And health.”

“Hey,” Greg said, “did I tell you about the time I took coke with this rock band? I was with this…”

He stopped and looked up. Catherine and I looked up too. Greg had stopped because the weird guy who’d been on his own had shuffled over to beside our table and was glaring at us. We looked back at him. He shifted his gaze from one of us to the other, then on to the table and the champagne bottle, then to nowhere in particular. Eventually he spoke:

“Where does it all go?”

Catherine turned away from him. Greg asked him:

“Where does what all go?”

The weird guy gestured vaguely at the table and the bottle.

“That,” he said.

“We drink it,” Greg answered. “We have digestive systems.”

The weird guy pondered that, then
tssk
ed.

“No. I don’t mean just that,” he said. “I mean everything. You people don’t think about these things. Give me a glass of that stuff.”

“No,” said Greg.

The weird guy
tssk
ed again, turned round and walked away. Other people were trickling into the bar. Music started playing.

“Does this champagne smell of cordite to you?” I asked.

“What?” said Greg.

“Cordite,” I said, raising my voice above the music.

“Cordite?” Greg said, raising his voice too. “What does cordite smell like?”

“This,” I answered.

“I don’t think so,” Greg said. “But look: that time, I was with this friend—well, with this guy I knew—and he played in a band, and…”

“What time?” Catherine asked. She’d finished her first glass of champagne and had poured herself another.

“When I took coke with this band,” Greg told her. “We all went in a van, to an after-gig party. It was somewhere up in Kentish Town, Chalk Farm. There were—hang on…” He poured himself another glass as well. “There were…”

“Wait,” I said. “Say I were to give towards this reserve fund…”

“Resource,” Catherine corrected me.

“Yeah, right,” I said. “Well, could I…I mean, how would I fit in?”

“Fit in?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “How am I connected to it all? Do I need to go there? Even if I don’t, could I go anyway, and watch?”

“Maybe you could take the virgin with the firmest ass as collateral,” said Greg. “And then another with the firmest tits as interest on your investment. Then, each time you snort a line off her:
bingo!
instant connection.”

“Why do you need to see it?” Catherine said. “Isn’t just knowing it’s happening good enough?”

“No,” I said. “Well, maybe. But I’d need…” I felt a kind of vertigo. I knew what I meant but couldn’t say it right. I wanted to feel some connection with these Africans. I tried to picture them putting up houses from her housing kits, or sitting around in schools, or generally doing African things, like maybe riding bicycles or singing. I didn’t know: I’d never been to Africa, any more than I—or Greg—had ever taken cocaine. I tried to visualize a grid around the earth, a kind of ribbed wire cage like on the champagne bottle, with lines of latitude and longitude that ran all over, linking one place to another, weaving the whole terrain into one smooth, articulated network, but I lost this image among disjoined escalator parts, the ones I’d seen at Green Park earlier. I wanted to feel genuinely warm towards these Africans, but I couldn’t. Not that I felt cold or hostile. I just felt neutral.

“Well, anyhow,” said Catherine. “That’s what I’d do. But that’s just me. It all depends on what you feel will give you the greatest, you know…”

Her voice trailed off. Greg came back in with his cocaine story. Then they went on to talking about Africa, where Greg had been once, on some safari. This led them back after a while to arguing about what I should do with my new fortune; then they truced up and chatted about Africa again. We went on in this vein for quite some time. The whole damn evening, probably. It went round in cycles, over the same ground again and again. I zoned out after a while. I knew already that I had no desire either to build schools in some country I’d never been to or to live like a rock idol. The Dogstar filled up and the music got louder and louder, so that Catherine and Greg had to shout to make themselves heard. And shout they did. We had another bottle of champagne and three more beers. They ended up quite drunk. I felt stone-cold sober the whole night.

Catherine and I left Greg outside the bar and walked back to my flat. I had to pull the sofa in the living room out into a bed for her. It was fiddly, finicky: you had to hook this bit round that bit while keeping a third bit clear. I hadn’t done it before we went out—deliberately, in case the extra bed wouldn’t be needed. But it was needed. Catherine had already begun to annoy me. I preferred her absence, her spectre.

3

THE NEXT DAY
I went to see Marc Daubenay. His office was up at Angel, as I mentioned earlier. I rode the tube there, concentrating on the overhead terrain, keeping a grip on it.

Daubenay’s subordinates must have been told about the Settlement. The first one, the horsey young receptionist, buzzed me straight through, glancing at me nervously, as though I were contagious. The second, Daubenay’s secretary, rose from her desk and opened Daubenay’s door as soon as I came into her outer office, holding me all the while with her austere gaze. It really was chastising, that gaze—like the school secretary’s when you’ve been sent to the headmaster’s office for doing something bad.

Marc Daubenay rose to his feet and shook me warmly by the hand.

“Congratulations once more!” he said. “It’s a stupendous settlement!”

His face was beaming, wrinkling the skin around his eyes and on his forehead. He must have been in his late fifties, early sixties. He was tall and thin, with white hair swept over his thinning pate. He wore a waistcoat beneath his jacket and a thin-striped shirt and tie beneath that. Very proper. He remained behind his desk as he shook my hand. His desk was quite wide, so I had to kind of lean across it for my hand to reach his, and to concentrate on keeping my balance while the desk’s edge prodded my leg. Eventually he sat down and gestured for me to do the same.

“Well!” he said. “Well!” He leant back in his chair and drew his arms out wide. “We have a very pleasing resolution to our case.”

“Resolution?” I said.

“Resolution,” he repeated. “End, completion, finish. You sign these papers and it’s all done. The funds will be transferred as soon as they’re biked back.”

I thought about this for a while, then said:

“Yes, I suppose it is. For you.”

“What’s that?” he asked me.

“A resolution,” I said. “End.”

Daubenay was flicking through a mass of papers. He pulled several out, turned them around to face me and said:

“Sign this one.”

I signed it.

“And this one,” he said. “And this, and this. And that one too.”

I signed them all. After he’d gathered them back and straightened them into a stack I asked him:

“Where do all the funds go?”

“Yes, good question. I set up a bank account for them this morning. In your name, of course. It’s just to provide a landing pad for them. A holding tank, as it were. You can close it down and take them all out if you like, or you might choose to keep it open. I’ve also taken the liberty,” he continued, flicking through his documents again, “of booking you an appointment with a stockbroker.”

He handed me a dossier. It had gilded ornate writing on it, like the lettering on birthday cakes, spelling out the name Younger and Younger.

“They’re the best in the business,” said Daubenay. “Absolutely independent—yet well-connected at the same time. Ear to the ground, as it were. Matthew Younger will deal with you if you choose to go.”

“Which one is he?” I asked.

“He’s the son,” Daubenay answered. “Father’s Peter, but he’s semi-retired now. It’s been running for three generations.”

“Shouldn’t it be Younger and Younger and Younger then?” I asked.

Daubenay thought about this for a moment.

“I suppose it should,” he answered.

“Although when the youngest one comes up he can become the second one, and the father who was the second one can become the first one, and the first one can just drop off the end,” I said. “It’s all about what position they’re in. They rotate.”

Marc Daubenay looked at me intently for several seconds. Eventually he answered:

“Yes. I suppose you’re right.”

Younger and Younger’s office was close to Victoria Station. I took the tube there. As I came up to street level, out onto the concourse in front of the station, rush hour was getting underway. Commuters were streaming past me, heading back down the steps into the tube. I stood there for several minutes trying to work out which way Younger and Younger’s office was while hurrying men and women dressed in suits streamed past me. It felt strange. After a while I stopped wondering which way the office was and just stood there, feeling them hurrying, streaming. I remembered standing in the ex-siege zone between the perpendicular and parallel streets by my flat two days earlier. I closed my eyes and turned the palms of my hands outwards again and felt the same tingling, the same mixture of serene and intense. I opened my eyes again but kept my palms turned outwards. It struck me that my posture was like the posture of a beggar, holding his hands out, asking passers-by for change.

The feeling of intensity was growing. It felt very good. I stood there static with my hands out, palms turned upwards, while commuters streamed past me. After a while I decided that I
would
ask them for change. I started murmuring:

“Spare change…spare change…spare change…”

I continued this for several minutes. I didn’t follow anyone or make eye contact with them—just stood there gazing vaguely ahead murmuring
spare change
again and again and again. Nobody gave me any, which was fine. I didn’t need or want their change: I had eight and a half million pounds. I just wanted to be in that particular space, right then, doing that particular action. It made me feel so serene and intense that I felt almost real.

The office turned out to be slightly to the station’s north, facing the gardens of Buckingham Palace. The receptionist here made Olanger and Daubenay’s Sloanette look like a supermarket checkout girl. She wore a silk cravat tucked into a cream shirt and had perfectly held hair. It never once moved as she lowered her mouth towards the intercom to let Matthew Younger know that I was there or walked into a small kitchen area to make me coffee. Above her, also sculpted into frozen waves, mahogany panels rose up towards high, ornately corniced ceilings.

Matthew Younger came in before she’d finished making me the coffee. He was short, really quite short—but when he shook my hand and said hello his voice boomed and filled up the whole room, billowing out to the mahogany panels, up to the corniced ceiling. It struck me as strange that someone who physically filled so little space could project such a rich sense of presence. He shook my hand heartily—not as cheerfully as Daubenay had, but more assertively, with a firm grip, bringing his transverse carpal ligament into play. Most handshakes don’t involve the transverse carpal ligament: only the really firm ones. He gestured out of the reception room towards a hallway.

“Let’s go upstairs,” he said.

I made towards the hall, but hesitated in the doorway because the receptionist was still preparing the coffee for me.

“Oh, I’ll bring it up,” she said.

Matthew Younger and I walked up a wide, carpeted staircase above which hung portraits of men looking rich but slightly ill and into a large room that had one of those long, polished oval tables in it which you see in films, in scenes where they have boardroom meetings. He set a dossier on the table top, slipped off the elastic band keeping it closed, slid a piece of paper from it which I recognized from the heading as coming from Marc Daubenay’s office, and began:

“So. Marc Daubenay tells me you’ve come into rather a large sum of money.”

He looked at me, waiting for me to say something in response. I didn’t know what to say, so I just kind of pursed my lips. After a while Younger continued:

“Over the last century the stock market has outperformed cash in every decade apart from the thirties. Far outperformed. As a rule of thumb, you can expect your capital to double over five years. In the current market conditions, you can reduce that figure to three, perhaps even two.”

“How does it work?” I asked him. “I invest in companies and they let me share in their profits?”

“No,” he said. “Well, yes, that’s a small aspect of it. They give you a dividend. But what really propels your investment upwards is speculation.”

“Speculation?” I repeated. “What’s that?”

“Shares are constantly being bought and sold,” he said. “The prices aren’t fixed: they change depending on what people are prepared to pay for them. When people buy shares, they don’t value them by what they actually represent in terms of goods or services: they value them by what they
might
be worth, in an imaginary future.”

“But what if that future comes and they’re not worth what people thought they would be?” I asked.

“It never does,” said Matthew Younger. “By the time one future’s there, there’s another one being imagined. The collective imagination of all the investors keeps projecting futures, keeping the shares buoyant. Of course, sometimes a particular set of shares stop catching people’s imagination, so they fall. It’s our job to get you out of a particular one before it falls—and, conversely, to get you into another when it’s just about to shoot up.”

“What if everyone stops imagining futures for all of them at the same time?” I asked him.

“Ah!” Younger’s eyebrows dipped into a frown, and his voice became quieter, withdrawing from the room back to his small mouth and chest. “That throws the switch on the whole system, and the market crashes. That’s what happened in ’29. In theory it could happen again.” He looked sombre for a moment; then his hearty look came back—and, with it, his booming voice as he resumed: “But if no one thinks it will, it won’t.”

“And do they think it will?”

“No.”

“Cool,” I said. “Let’s buy some shares.”

Matthew Younger pulled a large catalogue from his dossier and flipped it open. It was full of charts and tables, like some kind of tidal almanac.

“With the kind of capital you’ve got earmarked for investment,” he said, “I think we can envisage cultivating quite a large portfolio.”

“What’s a portfolio?” I asked him.

“Oh, that’s what we call the spread of your investments,” he explained. “It’s a bit like playing a roulette table—with the important distinction that you win here, whereas in roulette you mostly lose. But with a roulette table, there are sectors, clusters of numbers you can bet on, then rows, then colours, odds/evens and so on. The wise roulette player covers the whole board strategically rather than staking all his chips on just one number. Similarly, when playing the stock market you should cover several fields. There’s banking, manufacturing, telecommunications, oil, pharmaceuticals, technology…”

“Technology,” I said. “I like technology.”

“Good,” Younger said. “That sector’s one we’re very well-disposed towards as well. We could…”

“What was the one you mentioned just before that?” I asked.

“Pharmaceuticals. The big drug companies are always an…”

“No: before that.”

“Oil?”

“No: signals, messages, connections.”

“Telecommunications?”

“Yes! Exactly.”

“That’s a very promising sector. Mobile telephone penetration is increasing at an almost exponential rate year after year. And then as more types of link-up between phones and internet and hi-fi systems and who knows what else become possible, more imaginary futures open up. You see the principle?”

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s go for those two: telecommunications and technology.”

“Well, we could certainly
weight
your portfolio in that direction,” Younger began—but paused when the perfectly-held-hair receptionist walked in. “Ah, here’s your coffee,” he said.

She was carrying it on a small tray, like the ones stewardesses use in aeroplanes. As she set it down on the polished table I noticed that it was a two-part construction: the cup itself, then, slotted into that, a plastic filter section where the coffee grains themselves were. It made me think of those moon landing modules from the Sixties, the way the segments slot together. There was a saucer too, of course: three parts. The receptionist lowered the whole assemblage gently down onto the table’s surface, set a small jar of cream, a bowl of rough-hewn blocks of sugar and a spoon beside it, and then blasted away again with the tray.

“We could certainly look at
weighting
it that way,” Younger continued. “But my point in putting forward the roulette analogy was that it’s best to cover several sectors of the…”

“Yes, I understand,” I told him. “But I want to know where I am. To occupy a particular sector, rather than be everywhere and nowhere, all confused. I want to have a…a…” I searched for the right word for a long time, and eventually found it: “position.”

“A position?” he repeated.

“Yes,” I said. “A position. Telecommunications and technology.”

Now Younger looked flustered.

“While I view both these sectors as most promising ones, I feel that this degree of localization, and especially given the great sum we’re proposing to invest, does represent an excessive level of exposure to contingencies. I’d much prefer…”

“If you won’t do it,” I said, “I’ll go to another stockbroker.”

Younger tensed up. He seemed to shrink even more; his voice shrank into silence while he took in what I’d said. Then he struck up that hearty look once more, took a deep breath and boomed out:

“We can do it. Absolutely. It’s your money. I merely advise. I’d advise a degree of diversification—but if you don’t want that, then that’s perfectly…”