Money: A Suicide Note (12 page)

'You know what forms. I've got to have some independence.'

'Yeah yeah.'

'I'm twenty-eight.'

'Twenty-eight? Well you don't look it.'

'Thank you, darling. I don't think I'm being unreasonable. Gregory gives Debby an allowance. Why are you so frightened of it? You're quite generous over little things, I'll give you that. But as soon as it comes to —'

'Yeah yeah.'

The trouble is, the whole trouble is, Selina's too clever for me. I tried to change the subject. In my experience, with Selina, the only way to change the subject is to go down the Butcher's Arms. How can you change the subject when there's only one subject? Oh yeah — violence. That'll change it. That'll do the trick, for a while. But of course violence is no longer an option. I didn't even consider it for more than a few seconds. I'm serious about this new self-improvement course I've put myself on—very serious. Self-discipline. A more civilized existence.

So I just got out of bed, told her to shut up, and went down the Butcher's Arms.

Tonguing my tooth and twisting my neck for taxis, I now stroll the length of the dental belt, through the stucco of the plaqued streets and carious squares, past railings, embossed porches, pricey clinics, tranquillized Arabs, groggy mouth-sufferers in their Sunday best, their women wearing fur coats and Harlem lacquer, their spruced kids either pained or happy — across the bus-torn slum of Oxford Street into Soho, the huddled land of sex and food and film, down narrowing alleys until I reached the glass preserve of Carburton, Linex & Self.

For me, now, Carburton, Linex & Self is another kind of waiting room. But what a place! You should see how much money we pay each other, how little work we do, and how thick and talentless many of us are. You should see the expenses claims, the air-tickets that lie around in here, and the girls. C. L. & S. was a breakthrough when we established the company five years ago. It still is. A lot of outfits tried to do what we did. None of them made it. C. L. & S. is an advertising agency which produces its own television commercials. Sounds easy. You try it. I myself was the key figure in all this, with my controversial TV ads for smoking, drinking, junk food and nude magazines. Remember the stir in the flaming summer of '76? My nihilistic commercials attracted prizes and writs. The one on nude mags was never shown, except in court. The publicity and its attendant heft empowered us to make our breakthrough, our breakaway, and we never looked back. Our moneyman Nigel Trotts, down in the basement with a chick, a xerox and a bushel of instant coffee, is the only guy here who works a full whack. And Nigel is a moneyman who does it all for love.

'Nigel has gimmicked a bag-carrier for the Dutch Antilles,' people will say to me at my desk.

'Beautiful,' I'll whisper back, as you're bound to do.

We all seem to make lots of money. Man, do we seem to be coining it here. Even the chicks live like kings. The car is free. The car is on the house. The house is on the mortgage. The mortgage is on the firm — without interest. The interesting thing is: how long can this last? For me, that question carries an awful lot of anxiety — compound interest. It can't be legal, surely. You can't legally treat money in such a way. But we do. Are we greedy! Are we shameless! I once saw Terry Linex, that fat madman, take a grand out of petty cash for a weekend in Dieppe, He got his wife's hysterectomy on X's — and his daughter's orthodontic work. He even gets the family poodle shampooed against tax: security expenses, with Fifi doubling as a guard-dog. We estimate that Keith Carburton spent £17,000 on lunch in fiscal '80, service and VAT non compris. You should see their freehold townhouses and bijou Cotswold cottages. You should see their cars—the Tomahawks, the Farragos, and Boomerangs. I've been ripping off the firm and the government too, for five years now, and what have I got? A hired sock, a Fiasco, and the prohibitive Selina. What did I ever do with it, the money? Pissed it away, I just pissed it away. And somehow I still have lots of money.

'I told my wife,' said Terry Linex, parking half his heavy can on my desk,' "you can have any domestic appliance you want. But when it goes wrong, don't come running to me. Do we understand each other?" I come home Friday night. I go into the kitchen — I said, "What's this, a horror film?" There's a brand-new washing-up machine and all this fucking black gunge all over the floor. "Get on the fucking phone," she says. "Fix it!" So what did I do.'

'What did you do.'

'I sued them. I rang Curtis & Curtis, got Mr Benson at home. Ten minutes later I walk into the kitchen — there's a Pakki on his back with his tongue up the funnel. No charge. No grief. It's brilliant. I do it all the time now. Took the motor in for a service. Four hundred quid. So what did I do.'

'You sued them.'

'I sued them. Fucking right. "How would you like to pay, sir?" he asked me. "Cash or cheque or credit card?" I said, "I'm not paying. You are. I'm fucking suing you, mate." They go all pale. Thirty-six quid I ended up paying. I sued the tax-inspector last week.'

'Beautiful,' I said.

'Don't you love it?'

I said I did, and returned to the sorry-looking chaos of my desk. I'm supposed to be tying things up here, sorting things out. The antique desk-drawers are buckled stiff with ripped paperwork: five years without paying any tax — that's why I've got all this money. . . The feeling in the office is that I am moving on to better things. Sometimes I wish they had consulted me about this. But they just roll their eyes and whistle and rub their hands encouragingly. I have been interviewed in Box Office, featured in Turnover, profiled in Market Forces. My thirty-five-minute short, Dean Street, won the guest critics' special-mention award at the Siena Film Festival last year. I am a headliner, a highroller. Peter Sennet did it. Freddie Giles and Ronnie Templeton did it. Jack Conn — he did it. They all live in California now. They have all bled out of the ordinary world. They all have new houses, new wives, new tans, new rugs. In V8 Hyenas and haunchy drophead Acapulcos they cruise the road-margined seas, gunning to the medical zone for their daily DNA boosters and plasma rethinks. Twice or three times a month they wing out for a long weekend on Thousand Island, a world that time forgot, down in the sea of joy. Everyone thinks that this will soon happen to me. Me, I don't see it somehow. I have a sharp sense of my life being in the balance. I may never look back, or I may never recover. I tell you, I am terrified, I am fucking terrified. 'Just give me the fucking money okay!' I want to shout this all the time. And if you fail they don't take you back ... I was in Cal myself this January — Los Angeles. I did cool deals there and it all looked possible. On the leisure side, though, things didn't go so well, and I got into some seriously bad business. Let me tell you about it sometime. It's a good one... I met Fielding on the flight back to New York. We both happened to be travelling first class.

'Where d'you fancy, John? The Breadline? Assisi's? The Mahatma?'

Terry Linex and the boys want to take me out to lunch. Keith Carburton has just walked in, razzing his hands. There has been quite a bit of this sort of thing recently. It feels to me like a new way of superannuating people. But I'm keen. After my morning, I need the , . fuel, I'm almost out of gas. I go, of course I go — as I will go when the time is right, when I get my big break. I hope it doesn't break me, my big break.. . So we come bobbing out of cabs in our high-shouldered cashmere overcoats. The girl in dike suit and streaming salmon tie (I think I could go to bed with her, if I liked, but it might be just her professional style to put this idea about) shows us fondly to our table. But it is the wrong table! Before Terry Linex can sue the restaurant, Keith Carburton takes the girl aside. I can hear him dully reminding her how much money we all spend here. The chick is impressed. So am I. Very soon we have another table (an old man is backing away with a napkin still frilling his throat), a better table, circular, nearer the door, and bearing a bottle of free champagne.

'We're sorry about that, sir,' said the girl, and Keith slipped her his pained nod.

'Now this is a bit more bloody like it," said Terry to himself.

'Right,' said Keith. 'Right:

We drink the champagne. We call for another. One by one the girls finish in the bog or the powder parlour and are redirected to the improved table. Mitzi, Keith's assistant. Little Bella, the telephonist. And the predatory Trudi, an all-purpose vamp and PR strategist. (As for the hiring of girls, we have a looks-alone policy over at C. L. & S.) They will have to do a lot of laughing and listening. They can talk a bit, but only so long as we are the heroes of the tales they tell. The quenched light of this joke June, in the shape of a sail or a breast, swells its camber across the room. For a moment we all look terribly overlit in here: we look like monsters. For a moment, the whole restaurant is a pickle-jar of rug glue and dental work. But now the real fun starts. Terry is throwing bread at me, and Nigel is on the floor doing his dog imitation and snuffling at Trudi's stockings. I notice that the middle-aged pair at the next table retract slightly and lower their heads over their food. As they huddle up, I give Terry a squirt from the shaken champagne bottle and join Keith Carburton in a few choruses of 'We are the Champions'. No, the rest of the meal isn't going to be much fun for those two, I'm afraid. I suppose it must have been cool for people like them in places like this before people like us started coming here also. But we're here to stay. You try getting us out. . . Now the menus come, dispensed like examination scripts, and we hesitate and fall silent for a little while, frowning and murmuring over the strange print.

Four o'clock. In heavy, motionless, back-breaking light, Linex and Self stood swaying in front of the basement urinal. I heard the slow rasp of Terry's three-foot zip, then the drilling of his leak against the ivory stall. There goes the day again, like so many others, just pissed away.

'Whoar,' said Terry with a wince.

'How's your dick?'

He glanced downwards. 'Still green,' he said in his piping, disembodied, fatman's voice.

'Still that thing you caught in Bali? What was it? Clap?'

'Clap?' he said. 'Clap? No, mate. I caught the bloody plague.'

Then his shot face grew serious. 'John. Have you fucked anyone's wife recently? Run over anyone's kids?'

'Uh?' I said, and pushed out a hand to steady myself against the cold wall.

'I mean — is there anyone out to do you a bit of harm?'

'Well yeah.' I shifted my weight. Some days it seemed that everyone was out to do me harm.

''Real harm?' he specified. 'Something a little bit serious?'

'No. What is this?'

'I was down the Fancy Rat the other night,' said Terry Linex. 'We think we drink. They're nutters down there. It's a scotch contest. I was with this crew of villains, one of them says, "Oy. You've got a business associate, John Self, right?" I says, "What of it?" He says, "There's some work out on him. Not sure what. But there's some work out on him." Now it's true, as you know, that an awful lot of ballocks gets talked down the Fancy Rat. But there's usually something in it... Want me to ask around?'

I looked into Terry's fiery face — cheap churned hair, half an ear bitten off, penny-farthing nostrils. His teeth are as randomly angled as shards of glass on a Backstreet wall. Terry is one of the new princes, an improviser of fierce genius. His current dream is to hire a handicapped chauffeur: the Disabled sticker would give Linex unlimited parking anywhere he pleased.

'Yeah, do that.'

'Glad to,' he said. 'Better safe than sorry. Know what I mean?'

So now as I plod home through the crumpled afternoon, veering this way and that among my brothers and sisters, with eyes meeting and not meeting, it's sort of nice to know that it's all official.

—————— 'Check,' I said.

Selina looked up at me indignantly. Her lancing eyes returned to the board. She exhaled, and made an irrelevant move with her black-square bishop.

'Check,' I said.

'So what?'

'It means your king's threatened. I can take your king.'

'You can have it. It's more bloody trouble than it's worth.'

'You don't understand. The whole —'

'I'm going to have a bath. I hate chess. Where are we going to go? I'm not having Indian or Chinese. Or Greek. Kreutzer's.'

'If you like.' I reset the heavy pieces.

'Your hair looks terrible. You should let me cut it.'

'I know.'

I'd had a twenty-quid rug-rethink that very afternoon. The little faggot sorted through my locks for a while, curled his lip and said, 'How old are you?' Roger Frift asked me the same question. It's the heart, the heart. My heart's wrong, my ticker's wrong. My clock's not right.

I went into the bedroom and browsed through Selina's knicker drawer, intending to spring a selection on her when she emerged from the tub. Hello, these are new. And so are these .. As I experimentally fingered a disused bodice I felt something solid in the tuck of the lining. What's this? Whalebone? No: a roll of used tenners — two hundred pounds! Now Selina's knicker drawer is a dumb place for Selina to hide things in, because I am always rootling about in there, as Selina well knows.

She came out of the bathroom with a handtowel belted round her waist. I pointed. She barely blinked when she saw the money — negligently scattered on her side of the sack.

'Where d'you get it?'

'I won it!'

'How?'

'At roulette!'

'What's all this about you being penniless?'

'It was my last fiver! I put it on a number on my way out of the door!'

'They only pay thirty to one — what about the other fifty?'

'It was a tip!'

'You said you were working there, right?'

'Right!'

'What as?'

'A croupier!'

I scowled, and paused. Selina had worked as a croupier before. This is true. The Cymbeline hires little cockteasers to police the tables. This is true also. They doll them up in mini-skirts and see-through blouses. The chicks look as though they'd come across for a cigarette but they're all strict business-heads and are forbidden to tangle with the punters — as I myself established, one night after my girl had gone to bed.