Various Pets Alive and Dead (21 page)

Most of the transactions in Chicken’s account are with a couple of online brokerage firms, one in London and one in New York. Once Serge has got the hang of the patterns used in setting up the passwords, a trawl through variants quickly opens the sites and lets him in. Tomorrow, when trading starts again, he reckons he’ll quickly repair the black hole in his finances. Although the Nikkei and Hang Seng are already open, the Eastern markets are notoriously volatile, and he doesn’t trust himself in that unfamiliar environment. He can’t afford any more losses; he’ll say goodbye to spread betting, stick to companies whose form he knows, and wait for the London Stock Exchange to open.

From the windows of his penthouse (he still can’t quite believe he really owns this sleek abode – or at least, he owns the quarter of it that the bank doesn’t own) he looks out towards the City with its tall blocks of lights blazing in the night, quite eclipsing the humble little stars and the pale washed-out moon, money stamping its presence across the sky. He can’t pick out the FATCA tower, but he knows it’s there, his hamster wheel, waiting for him.

Next day, when he gets into work, he chooses his moment to lock himself in the disabled lavatory with his iPhone, and uses Otto’s remote desktop app quickly and carefully to place his trades. He was right about the Fibonacci retracement – he should have held his nerve. The markets are plunging again, but erratically. He holds SYC, which has recently acquired an interest in a chain of sheltered housing and residential care homes in the North of England, and opens another short position on Edenthorpe Engineering. The company reports show Edenthorpe was floated on the Stock Exchange in 2004 to raise capital for a new plant at Barnsley. Although it’s a well-run firm with a skilled workforce and a healthy balance sheet – not to mention Tiffany’s tits – heavy engineering in his opinion is doomed. Who needs all that old rusty machinery and its crumbling Gothic infrastructure when there’s so much profit to be made in the gleaming money-mills of the City? In the current economic climate, this is an ideal candidate for short selling. He can now trade with confidence because, if he wins, Dr Black is in the money, and every time he loses, Kenporter1601 picks up the bill.

The biggest gamble he takes of course is that he’ll get away with it. He knows that any police investigation would quickly reveal the real identity of Dr Black, but it would also reveal that Ken Porter has an unauthorised personal account, has been trading in breach of FATCA rules, and who knows what other illegal practices. The very existence of the 1601 account is suspicious. It’s like he and Chicken are locked together in a murderous embrace, each with a knife to the other’s throat. So long as Serge replaces what he borrows, he reckons Chicken will not push for a bank enquiry. He’ll find out that
someone
has accessed the account easily enough, but he won’t readily find out
who
– not without revealing his own game. And if the money is replaced, his incentive to find out will be so much less. After all, Serge isn’t actually stealing, but simply borrowing (strictly temporary) the proceeds of someone else’s crime.

Besides, Chicken has other things to worry about this week. After a lethargic summer, markets all over the world are in panic. The Footsie has dropped below 5,000; the Russian Stock Exchange is suspended; gold is at an all-time high; and governments everywhere are getting into a mega-flap. Dour Darling urges calm. Grumpy Gordon promises discipline. Lloyds takes over ailing HBOS and immediately £2 billion is wiped off its value. Rumours abound.

‘They’re going to blame short selling,’ clucks Chicken on his morning walkabout, though most of the traders must have already worked this out for themselves. ‘They’ll say we’re causing the crash by shorting equities, when any dickhead can see we’re shorting because equities are crashing. A rational response to market conditions. Now they’re talking about banning short selling.’

Serge can hear his voice from the next aisle, bubbling with suppressed rage.

‘You know what’s wrong with this country? Nanny-state noddies interfering with market freedom. Get your positions open, before they slam the door on us.’

Maybe because of all the stress, Tim the Finn is having a particularly troubled time with his prostate, and this is a problem, from Serge’s point of view, because while he is slowly emptying his bladder in the disabled loo, Serge is unable to get in there to place his trades. Nevertheless, he chooses his moments, and trades quickly and accurately, observing and predicting the turns of the market. Luck is with him. By the end of the week, when the Financial Services Authority puts a temporary ban on short selling the shares of twenty-nine key companies, he’s made up his losses, and is twenty k up. When he’s not trading, he now opens up furtive online property searches in Brazil.

On Friday, he decides he needs a bit of escapism, so he looks around on the net for a film to see and chooses
Iron Man
. Its blend of subtle comic-book irony and retro sci-fi heroism matches his mood, and the redemptive message about peace and good triumphing over evil is almost spiritual.

Clara regrets having wasted her Saturday night watching
Iron Man
at Meadowhall. The film was a childish male fantasy, and the guy she went with, a partner in Ida Blessingman’s firm of lawyers, had a thin black moustache and cold rubbery hands that kept on finding their way into her bra.

‘He’s just broken up with his girlfriend,’ Ida had said. ‘It’ll do him good to go on a blind date.’ She probably thought she was doing Clara a favour too.

He spent the evening trying to operate her nipples like a PlayStation, until she dug him sharply in the diaphragm with her elbow and heard a satisfying wheeze.

‘What’s the matter?’ he gasped.

‘Good luck keeping up,’ she said.

At the end of the film, he dropped her off in his Audi, they pecked each other on the cheeks, but she didn’t invite him to come in. It’s not as though
Iron Man
was even her choice. That’s the trouble with men – they confuse fantasy and reality. No wonder Ida prefers cheesecake.

She pours water over a chamomile tea bag and watches it expand, releasing its depressing pond-watery smell, and finds herself thinking about Josh, guessing that he would probably have chosen
Iron Man
too, though the groping might have been less desperate. It wasn’t exactly Oolie’s fault that they’d split up, but the fact that she told him, last time they met, ‘Clarie says you ent got no onions of your own,’ can’t have helped.

Before going to bed, she checks on her Facebook friends, mostly people from her student days who stayed on in Sheffield because, like her, they enjoy the Peak District – walking, cycling, rock climbing and other energetic pursuits. Recently they’ve started to pair up and post pictures of their bald indistinguishable babies. She posts enthusiastic greetings to each new member of the species, wondering how she’s ever going to be able to get to that stage herself. As Doro keeps reminding her none too subtly, her biological clock is ticking away.

‘So how d’it go?’

Ida invites herself in for a coffee on Sunday morning. She’s still in her dressing gown, a turquoise silk kimono with gold embroidered dragons that curve around her boobs. She must be at least a size eighteen, but the way she looks and moves makes Clara feel gauche and bony.

‘We didn’t hit it off.’ Clara stirs the cafetière. ‘I think it was his weird moustache. Like a serial killer.’

‘But rather special, no? And absolutely loaded, by the way.’

‘Ha! If I’d known, I wouldn’t have poked him in the ribs,’ she says, lying, because Ida seems annoyed.

‘Why did you do that?’

‘Wandering hands.’

‘You’d rather be groped by that boring headmaster? Hey, you’re blushing!’

Clara laughs.

What would it be like, going to see a film with Mr Gorst/Alan? She wonders, slipping some croissants under the grill. It wouldn’t be
Iron Man
, that’s for sure. It would be something deep and inspirational. Would they hold hands? Would they grope? Or would love creep up on them, twinkling like dawn in the east?

The way he had talked to Oolie the other day was so kind and easy.

On the way home Oolie had said, ‘’E were reyt nice. I bet you want to shag ’im, don’t you, Clarie?’

Oolie is sometimes startlingly perceptive.

Despite the ban on short selling, Royal Bank of Scotland shares have lost a fifth of their value. The Bradford and Bingley is in deep shit, and looks like it will soon follow in the footsteps of Northern Rock. LIBOR has gone through the roof. Although everyone around him is manic with panic, Serge feels immersed in calm, like a deep-sea diver who has descended below the turmoil of surface currents. With UK new mortgage approvals at a new low, the work pressure is temporarily off him, and he finds he has time on his hands. He starts arriving later in the mornings and leaving earlier in the evenings. No one appears to notice.

Day and night meld into one blue rectangle of online hours. When he’s not riffling Chicken’s bank account, he sometimes browses his emails (remembering to ‘mark as unread’ each letter after he closes it), enjoying the sense of intimacy from peeping through Windows into his boss’s soul. Like an apprentice Chicken studying the calling that will one day be his, he’s begun to acquire an arm’s-length expertise regarding expensive whisky, cut-price art and hand-crafted humidors from Chicken’s online shopping forays. (Unfortunately, clothes hardly feature – Chicken goes bespoke.) What would Doro and Marcus make of all this gear? Actually, he knows exactly what they’d make of it.

Marcus would say, ‘That useless humidor costs more than your average worker in Doncaster earns in a month.’

Doro would add, ‘And they had one just like it in Oxfam last week for £2.99.’

Sometimes he wonders whether they’re really his parents at all, or whether some trick of fate whisked him away at birth from his real (much wealthier) family, and deposited him in Solidarity Hall.

He smiles. Dear Marcus and Doro, despite their grey hair, have never quite entered the grown-up world, have they? They’re still in that innocent pre-consumer age, like when he kept that box of Fibonacci snail shells and pine cones under his bed – his childhood treasures, which opened up his eyes to the timeless beauty of mathematics. A lump rises in his throat.

Those hyped-up FATCA traders don’t give a frog’s fart about anything apart from their Profit and Loss statements and where to get a snort. You can hear them, in between bouts of trading, going on about what they’ll spend their bonus on, sprinkling brand names like holy water. What’s he doing here, caged up with them in this hamster wheel? He’s different. He won’t let himself get seduced into that life of aimless consumption, fetishisation of high-value objects, partying to oblivion, life ruled by P&L, body rhythms ruled by uppers and downers. He wants money not to acquire stuff, but to buy freedom – the escape to the modest beach house in Brazil. Philosophy. Maths. Poetry. Dusk-to-dawn sex. Maroushka. Okay, so he might also have a nice suit or two.

Apart from the online shopping sprees, Chicken’s inbox hosts a steamy correspondence with various women, which Serge felt bad about peeping into at first, but the intriguing subject lines soon overcame his scruples. Back in May there was Gabriella, a tall, regal babe on Fixed Incomes with heels that made her tower above most of the male staff at FATCA, who gave ‘my kuddly Kenny’ a fake leopard-skin posing pouch on his birthday. ‘I want to taste your kum’ was the subject line of her last email. (Babs never said anything like that!)

Before Gabriella there was someone called Chrissie in Treasury, whose subject line was ‘Spanky and spunky’. Serge can’t picture her at all, which isn’t surprising, because contact between front-office staff (traders, arbitrageurs, fund managers and the like) and back-office staff (the more lowly paid boys and girls who collate the trading data, manage accounts and service the money-making elite) is frowned upon. Collusion between front and back office is one of the main avenues of fraud in the City. So Chicken is a rule-breaking risk-taker, cheating on FATCA as well as on his wife. Still, top corporate guys like him are under a lot of pressure and, if this is how Chicken chooses to relax, Serge isn’t going to get judgemental.

Chrissie subjected Ken to a bit of mild chastisement, but nothing compared to Juliette – no apparent connection to FATCA – who beats Chicken up fortnightly on Friday afternoons in an apartment in Clerkenwell.

‘You naughty boy, you,’ she writes. ‘I will see you 6 p.m. Friday and do not forget to bring those special boots size 8 [size eight – rather large for a woman, isn’t it?] and if I find you of been up to any naughty tricks with other ladys I will Velcro you up and make you beg for it and whack you with my whip and you know what I will do next.’

He tries to picture Chicken, tied up and begging for it at Juliette’s size-eight feet, flinching under the crack of a Ben-Hur-style whip. The image has a certain appeal.

Reading about Chicken’s sexual exploits inflames Serge with a mixture of disapproval and envy that he finds oddly arousing. Or maybe not so odd, since he hasn’t slept with anyone since … crumbs, it’s more than a year since he split up with Babs, his girlfriend at Queens’. Though there’s a lot to be said for wanking: it’s cheap, it’s safe, and the courtship is more straightforward. Still, the memory of Babs pricks at his conscience. He must ask Otto how she’s getting on.

Babs was a postgrad botany student, a plump jolly girl with freckles, thick dark hair that swung across her face, and thick pale legs that swung beneath unflatteringly short skirts. She wasn’t exactly his type, but the girls he coveted were out of his league. The thing is, achieving the grades he needed to get to Cambridge from his comprehensive school in Doncaster was as nothing compared to the hurdle of mastering the social rules once he got there. Not the arcane dining rituals – the commune’s yellow table, with its bean-flicking, spoon-banging etiquette, had left him well prepared for the college dining hall (though the abundance of cutlery was puzzling at first). Not the exclusive college societies – he avoided them and hung out with the other fractals freaks. Not the tutors – they were generally kind and encouraging. No, it was the girls, the terrifyingly glossy self-possessed posh-school princesses. How the fuck did one get into their knickers?