Meltdown (3 page)

Jimmy was quite taken aback, not least because it was so unlike Monica to show an interest in that sort of thing. They always divided the Sunday paper with perfect equanimity. She took the review section and he took the business bit and they never swapped back.

‘God, Mon,’ Jimmy said, ‘what do you know about insider trading?’

‘I know that it’s against the law.’

Jimmy tried to shrug in a nonchalant manner, but in truth he was slightly thrown.

‘Well, I don’t
think
it’s insider trading,’ he said finally. ‘I mean, surely Rupert wouldn’t have suggested it if . . . I mean, it’s just like gossip, isn’t it? A tip at the races or something like that. A bloke gets wind of something, he tells a mate. You take your luck where you find it.’

‘That American friend of Lizzie’s went to prison, didn’t she? Martha Stewart. She just took a tip-off.’

‘Gossip, Mon. Not a tip-off as such.’

‘Jimmy, Rupert wasn’t passing on gossip so much as
facts
. He’s a government adviser. He’s actually in the loop.’

‘Well yes, but . . . I mean insider trading is like when you run a company and you know everything about it and then you make trades using information, privileged information that isn’t available to the public. That’s why it’s illegal.’

‘Exactly . . . and?’

‘Well, Rupert doesn’t own or run Caledonian Granite and nor do I. Neither of us has any association with it at all, so how can we be insiders? . . . It’s fine. I
know
it’s fine.’

‘It does sort of
seem
like insider trading.’

‘But inside what? I don’t know anyone who works for Granite and nor, I imagine, does Roop.’

Monica didn’t reply and Jimmy stared into his fruit salad for a moment. Insider trading? The thought had not even entered his head. Money just flowed towards him and he grabbed it, that was all. That was how it had always been for him. It wasn’t as if he’d mugged anyone or put his hand in a till.

‘Look,’ he continued, ‘I know it’s a
leeetle
bit Dodgy Brothers, babes. I’ll admit that, not saying it isn’t. But that’s the way things work. Knowledge, information. It’s the petrol in the engine. Everybody does it. Sometimes you get lucky and pick up a tip, sometimes you don’t. This morning we got lucky. Nobody died. The world’s still turning. Yee-ha! That’s Rock ’n’ Roll. Don’t knock it, dahhhhlin’.’

He could always make her laugh and she laughed now, but he could see that she wasn’t convinced.

‘I think you should give the money to charity,’ she said suddenly.

Jimmy stared at her.

‘Give it to charity?’ he repeated. ‘A hundred grand?’

‘Yes.’

‘We give loads to charity.’

‘Not that much, and anyway we should give more,’ Monica said. ‘After all, that hundred K isn’t really our money, is it?’

‘What do you mean it’s not our money? Of course it’s our bloody money. Whose else is it?’

‘If Rupert hadn’t tipped you off you’d never have sold those shares and they’d now be worth as little as everyone else’s. The money never would have existed.’

‘But he
did
tip me off, Mon, and the money
does
exist.’

‘Keep your initial investment then,’ Monica said, ‘and give away the profit. That’s fair, surely.’

‘Fair? Fair to who? We’d still be giving away over fifty grand.’

‘I know,’ Monica insisted, stroking her stomach, ‘but we have another baby coming.’

‘What, may I ask,’ Jimmy said firmly, ‘has that got to do with anything?’

‘I just think it would be good karma. That’s all.’

‘Good karma!’ Jimmy laughed. ‘Giving away fifty grand! I can’t do it.’

‘Jimmy, I want you to do it.’

Jimmy could see that it was pointless to argue. Monica had her superstitious side and it was clear to him that after making the connection between a charitable act and her unborn baby she was going to stick to her guns.

‘Give it away,’ she said firmly, ‘or I will.’

‘Oh all-bloody-right,’ Jimmy said. ‘But I’m not going to just
give
it. That’s too painful and boring. I’ve gotta make it interesting. You know, something fun.’

‘O-
kaaay.
’ Monica sounded suspicious. ‘And how will you do that?’

Jimmy thought for a moment while spooning a glob of neat Nutella into his mouth.

‘Tell you what, I’ll stick it on a horse!’

‘Tell you what back,’ Monica said, ‘
no
!’

But now Jimmy was off on one, his imagination fired up with exactly the sort of idea that appealed to the eternal adolescent in him.

‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘That’s what we’ll do. Some real long-shot bet. If it loses then nobody’s any worse off, but if it wins . . . Now
that
will be a contribution worth making.’

‘Fifty thousand pounds is a contribution worth making!’ Monica exclaimed. ‘I slave for months to raise that sort of money with my appeals.’

Monica worked very hard on her charity appeals. In fact people had no idea
how
hard she worked on them, something which Monica found just a little bit hurtful.

She always suspected that because she didn’t actually have a proper
job
, her career-minded friends thought that she did nothing at all. They thought that she was a ‘lady who lunched’. That really her ‘charity work’ was as much an excuse for social networking, meeting celebrities and having lovely meals in the restaurant at Harvey Nichols as it was for
making a difference.

But Monica felt that she
did
make a difference. And she knew what a difference fifty thousand pounds could make too. She was a fundraiser for Asylum Action, a charity that attempted to bring aid and support to the crowds of desperate refugees who, having fled the violence and misery of their war-ravaged homelands, found themselves caught up in the violence and misery of a massive transit camp on the French Channel coast. Those people needed medical care, legal advice and access to interpreters. Fifty grand could help a lot.

‘You can’t do it,’ she insisted. ‘You can’t bet that amount. It’s bloody stupid.’

‘Why is it stupid? We got the money speculating.’

‘You got the money cheating, Jim.’

‘Don’t be such a square, babe! Life is a speculation, let’s speculate a bit more. It’ll be fun. We’ll make a party out of it. Next year’s Grand National! Or maybe the Alabama Derby! I’ve always wanted to see that race and if we give the gang enough notice we could all go over together. I’ll put the money in gilts with my bookie and when the book opens he can put it on the longest shot on the slate.’

‘Jimmy!’ Monica tried once more to protest but Jimmy headed her off.

‘It’s a
brilliant
idea!’ He stuck his fist into a box of Toby’s Frosties and drew out a handful. ‘If we go in at, say, twenty to one we could be looking at over a million for Asylum Action. The committee will go crazy!’

‘Or nineteen chances of nothing at all.’

‘Can’t accumulate if you don’t speculate, babes. Gotta be in it to win it.’ Jimmy punched up the cappuccino machine. ‘It is after all well known,’ he added, ‘that charity is the new Rock ’n’ Roll.’

But what do you actually do?

It wasn’t as if Jimmy had ever expected to be insanely rich. He was the son of a bank manager. Provenance more solid and comfortable than a Sunday-night television drama serial. DNA-wise, Jimmy’s kids should have been called Pipe and Slippers, not Toby and Cressida and the recently added Lillie.

Of
course
he hadn’t expected it (the money, that is, not Lillie, who had been very much wanted), how could he have? As Jimmy was fond of saying about the size of his bonus, ‘You couldn’t make it up.’ The sums would have seemed like pure fantasy to any previous generation working in the City.

When Jimmy was a kid, nobody except rock stars had made the sort of money he had ended up making. Then suddenly Jimmy
was
a rock star. Well, he’d certainly bought his London house
from
a rock star and he’d paid an extra million for the kudos. He didn’t care what it cost. He wanted a big house in Notting Hill and he got one. ‘A house is worth what you pay for it,’ he used to say. Now he was discovering that in fact a house was worth what you could sell it for.

Of course, he hadn’t planned to be as rich as he had become. That would have been like planning on winning the lottery or being plucked from the dance troupe to marry Madonna. It had been fate, that was all. Right place, right time. Jimmy had just got lucky. The same thing as being in on the beginning of a gold rush. Yee-ha! California, 1848. First wagon over the Rockies. ‘There’s GOLD in them thar hills!’ You just grabbed a shovel and ran for it.

Nobody resented
them
. Nobody resented Klondike Pete and his best gal Sal the way people had suddenly come to resent Jimmy and his pals. Nobody called Klondike Pete a greedy, irresponsible bastard because he bent down and picked up lumps of gold when he found them lying around on the ground. As any fool would.

Despite what people might now claim.

No, Pete and Sal had been
pioneers
. Gritty chancers who created the wealth on which a great nation could be built. When their mines failed or the bottom dropped out of the price of gold, nobody said they deserved it. Nobody said, ‘Oh, they should have been more prudent, those pioneers. They should have asked themselves how long they could all keep digging up gold before the price went down. They should have put down their picks for a moment and considered
self-regulation
.’

And hadn’t Jimmy been a pioneer in his way? A gritty chancer? A wealth creator? And wasn’t that a good thing? Gold wasn’t anything in itself, was it? It was worth what people
believed
it was worth. Just like the pixelated numbers that had whirred across Jimmy’s computer screens for fifteen years. As long as people believed they meant something, everything had been fine.

‘Why are people being so mean now?’ Monica had wailed after a particularly unpleasant encounter with a window cleaner. He had turned up to do his regular job and Monica had been forced to tell him that sadly, due to the downturn, his contract was being terminated. ‘The man shouted at me,’ she cried. ‘He actually stood on the doorstep and
shouted
at me. He said that his trade was all buggered because of the likes of me. As if I’d created the bloody recession myself, deliberately, to spite him!’

Jimmy had got lucky, that was all. Unlike other men who had made many millions, he had not set out to do so. He had not been one of those guys who wrote little lists of goals while they were at university, saying things like ‘Millionaire by 25. Prime Minister by 40.’

If Jimmy had written one of those lists he probably would have put down things like ‘See Oasis live, date Kylie and try to avoid becoming an alcoholic.’

Jimmy didn’t really
understand
how he had got to be so rich, not in any detail. He certainly wasn’t very good at explaining it.

‘But what do you actually
do
?’ his parents were always asking.

It was a reasonable question and one which Jimmy had got used to dodging. He sort of got what he did when he was actually doing it, but when he
thought
about it, when he tried to put into words the abstract concept of spending one’s working days in a marketplace that would not actually materialize for years (if ever), of trading in products that might never be made or grown, his imaginative and descriptive powers deserted him.

‘Sounds like you’re Alice and you live in Wonderland,’ Jimmy’s father would say. ‘You’ve discovered a magic bottle that says “Drink me,” except it’s not you that’s getting bigger but your bank account.’

‘That sounds about right, Dad,’ Jimmy agreed.

But then he’d never really got
Alice in Wonderland
either, not even the Disney version.

Jimmy’s father was genuinely baffled by his son’s enormous success and also, if truth were told, slightly irritated by it. Derek Corby had dealt in the business of money all his life, he understood it, and yet here was his son, who clearly
didn’t
understand it, making sacks of the stuff every day.

‘You’re just jealous, Derek,’ his wife always teased when Jimmy and his dad locked horns. ‘I think you should be delighted. Imagine if he was still pinching money out of my purse like he used to when he was a student.’

There was some truth in what Nora said, but it wasn’t just jealousy. Jimmy’s wealth made his father uneasy. As a bank manager he knew about financial probity. It was the watchword on which his life had been built.

‘The rules of banking are very clear, Jimmy,’ Derek tried to explain when the Corbys were out together on one of their fishing Sundays, which Jimmy sometimes attended right up until the day he met Monica. ‘The amount of money I am able to lend is dependent on the amount of capital I have in my—’

‘Yeah, right, Dad, for sure,’ Jimmy interrupted. ‘Can we start the picnic yet, Mum?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Nora replied. ‘Not until we’ve caught at least one fish.’

‘What is more,’ Derek pressed on, ‘and you need to hear this, Jim, the security on which I lend that money must be sufficient to cover the debt, should the borrower default.’

‘Stop sniffing, Jimmy,’ Nora scolded, handing her son a loo roll from the basket. ‘You never stop sniffing these days. Are you looking after yourself? You seem to have a constant cold.’

‘I’m fine, Mum,’ Jimmy replied, rubbing his nose, a nose which his mother would have been shocked to hear was currently costing Jimmy almost as much a week to cater for as her husband earned at the bank.

‘And I always,
always
remember,’ Derek continued, so used to having his lectures ignored that he no longer seemed to notice, ‘that the money I lend is not mine. It’s not even the bank’s. It belongs to the
savers
.’

‘Got one!’ Nora exclaimed, pulling a minnow from the water.