Various Pets Alive and Dead
Read Various Pets Alive and Dead Online
Authors: Marina Lewycka
Various Pets Alive and Dead
FIG TREE
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
DORO: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need
By the same author
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
Two Caravans
We Are All Made of Glue
To quietly flowing Don
We live in new times – the age of the hero is past – now is the time of the non-virtuous man.
Nikolai Gogol,
Dead Souls
, 1842
Various Pets
SERGE: The mill
The whole world is deranged, though most people haven’t noticed yet. Everything still looks normal, but when he breathes in Serge can detect it, a faint whiff of madness in the air. It’s 8 a.m. on Monday 1st September 2008, the London Stock Exchange has just opened and, all around him, the traders are already getting stuck in.
The trading floor at Finance and Trading Consolidated Alliance resembles a vast money-mill where profits are turned on an industrial scale. The cavernous hall, with its six long face-to-face rows of desks, seats some hundred people, and on each desk a bank of flickering monitors registers minute by minute the restless surge and fall of the markets. The windows are darkened, so that sunlight never bleaches out the monitors, and the ceiling is high enough to absorb the industrious hum of talking and keyboards clicking as trades are made. But in spite of this the air inside has a dead quality, a scorched sulphurous taint of hot plastic from hardware that has been running non-stop ever since it was installed, because to pause or switch off even for a moment would be a moment in which you weren’t making money.
Along two sides of the floor are several glass-walled offices for the team leaders. The corner office at the far end of the north side is used by the quants who service the Securitisation desk, reflecting their importance within the corporate hierarchy. The quantitative analysts are the six guys and one girl who are supposed to be able to take the riskiness out of risk with the wizardry of mathematics.
The one girl is Maroushka. From his desk, Serge can see her through the open door, swinging back in the swivel chair, feet up on the table, mobile phone pressed to her ear. No shoes. No tights. Her toenails bling-bling like rubies. She’s talking in that outlandish bubbly language of hers, and he finds himself listening when he should be concentrating on the data on his screens. He’s never composed poetry before, but then he’s never felt so inspired.
Princess Maroushka!
Hear the song of Serge!
Let our destinies converge
On this … something-something …
Green and sunny? Dark satanic … verge.
‘Hey, Sergei!’ She sees him watching and wiggles four fingers in his direction.
He leans in the doorway. ‘Hey, beautiful princess from Zh –’ Where did she say she comes from? ‘Did you enjoy your birthday on Friday?’
‘Very good, thank you. You okay? I think you have been very much drunk. You have fallen on floor.’
‘Yeah. I got a bit wasted. But it was worth it to see you dancing on the table.’
‘It was folk dance of my country. In Zhytomyr is normal behaviour on birthday.’ She blows a kiss and turns away to re-engage with her phone call.