Various Pets Alive and Dead (24 page)

What will happen to Oolie when Marcus and Doro can’t look after her any more? Will Clara ‘inherit’ her, along with their collection of 1968 protest posters, slogan T-shirts and Marcus’s unfinished manuscript? She needs to discuss this with her brother.

In the car on the way back to Sheffield, she breathes in the smell of the freshly baked rolls Doro and Oolie gave her, and wonders why Serge never answers his phone.

Serge blinks his eyes open. He’s still in the trading hall, and the clock in the corner of Bloomberg is showing the same date – 29th September 2008.

That’s good. The time is 18.40.

He closes his eyes carefully, then opens them again: 19.02.

‘What happen?’ Maroushka is standing over him with a glass of water in her hand.

Or at least, it looks like water. When she holds it to his lips, he realises it’s vodka.

‘Nothing. I’m fine.’ He tries to demonstrate his fineness by sitting up to take a sip, but his head spins and he slumps forward on to his desk again. ‘I just had a weird turn, that’s all.’

‘Wired? Not normal?’

‘What happened to Timo?’

‘Police arrested.’

‘Why? What did he do?’

His heart has started up again. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! How long before they realise they arrested the wrong person? She places a red-tipped finger to the side of her nose and winks. For a moment, the City-woman mask slips and she looks like a mischievous twelve-year-old.

‘I find out.’

Once the Fraud Squad are involved, he stands no chance. As soon as Timo starts to blab, they’ll realise they got the wrong man and they’ll soon track him down from that stupid Dr Black account.

What if there’s some perfectly simple explanation for Chicken’s 1601 account?

What if he’s registered it with Compliance after all?

What if …?

Most people have gone from the trading floor, apart from the Indians in the Currencies corner, who are working feverishly on some late exchange deal. The rest of the quants are at Franco’s, says Maroushka, celebrating Lucian’s birthday.

‘We go, Sergei?’

‘Soon.’

He takes her hand and pulls her towards him. She doesn’t resist. Her body rests lightly against his, her thigh pressing against his knee. Her perfume fills his nostrils.

‘Life stands before me like an eternal spring with new and brilliant clothes.’

‘You talking like crazy, Sergei.’

‘Carl Friedrich Gauss. Not crazy. Sublime.’

She pours a bit more vodka into his open mouth. ‘Drink.’

He coughs and splutters. ‘Bloody hell. Do you always keep a bottle of that in your handbag?’

‘I keep for emergentzee.’

‘I love you.’

There, it’s out. If he’d thought about it, he might not have said it. And she isn’t recoiling in disgust, she’s smiling her twelve-year-old smile again and taking a gulp of vodka.

‘I still think you wired, Sergei.’

She pulls away, but lets her hand linger on his shoulder.

‘Run away with me, Maroushka.’

Though he’s said her name over in his head many times, it’s the first time he’s spoken it out loud. The consonants fuse in his mouth. She laughs. She doesn’t realise he’s being deadly serious.

‘Why run away?’

‘I have …’

The vodka has made him feel detached and vaguely optimistic.

Princess Maroushka!

Hear the song of Serge!

When you’re facing an emerge-

Entzee,
you can count on me.

If he can find the right words, if he can formulate the killer proposal, he’ll make her see that despite his small size and ironic manner he’s not only serious but capable, the man she’s been looking for all her life without even realising it, the man who will love her and protect her and make her smile.

‘I am …’ He puts her hand to his mouth and kisses the small hard knuckles. ‘… I am Serge.’

For a moment, love swells like a heart-shaped helium balloon and rides the air, and bluebirds flutter beneath the ceiling of the trading hall. Then she laughs and pulls her hand away.

‘You too much wired today, Sergei.’

‘We can be wired together. We can have lots of wired babies.’

She rolls her eyes in that way he finds irresistibly sexy.

‘Something abnormal happens in world market, Sergei. Timo has no importance but this has importance. Congress voted down Bush plan. Very interesting situation. Dow Jones will collapse. From this position some are winning and some are losing everything. This we must find out. We go?’

In the noisy fug of Franco’s, several parties are going on at the same time. A pack of traders laid off from big-name banks in the post-Lehman bloodbath are drowning their sorrows, while others are blowing their comp, and the FATCA crowd are pouring champagne down their throats in celebration of Lucian’s birthday, while listening to some suit on TV explaining that the world’s tide of credit has run dry, and now, unable to borrow from each other, the big banks have stopped lending and started to collapse. Everyone seems to have forgotten about Tim the Finn, transfixed by the crisis being played out on the giant screen. Serge pushes his way through to join them as an ironic cheer goes up. The House of Representatives has just thrown out the Bush plan and voted that banks must stand on their own two feet, like everybody else. Assets they all thought were secure, assets backed by mortgages in the booming property market, assets rated triple A by the likes of Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, are now as flaky as dandruff. A dam of loans, secured (apparently) on ever-rising house prices, has been breached, toxic debt is oozing into the vaults of financial institutions all around the globe. Where will it end?

‘Happy birthday, dear Lucie!’ somebody roars.

‘Thank you, dear punters!’ yells someone else, to another volley of popping corks.

Toby O’Toole shoves a glass of something into Serge’s hand, and he glugs it down. Wow! What was that? Intoxicated with their own profligacy, the quants have started mixing wine and beer and spirits into the bubbly, in increasingly bizarre and disgusting cocktails, like synthetic CDOs.

‘… Sub-prime mortgages extended home-ownership to people previously excluded … low-waged and unemployed … US interest rates shot up from 1 per cent to 5.3 per cent … unprecedented rate of default … property prices collapsed … blah, blah, blah …’ the tight-jawed TV pundit drones on.

‘Dear God, just give us one more year before it all folds up!’ someone prays.

‘Or the regulators slam us down!’

Toby raises his glass, and Serge finds himself joining in, drinking to all the no-hopers scraping to buy their dream homes, the losers and wasters who should never have been given mortgages in the first place and now find they can’t keep up with their payments (surprise, surprise!), whose many-times-multiplied losses have fuelled their bonanza.

‘Another year, another million!’ screams one of the traders, and everybody cheers.

Serge looks around for Maroushka, wanting to share this transcendental moment with her, but she’s standing on her own at the back of the crowd, not drinking, watching the TV screen with dark intense eyes.

Doro clicks off the TV at eleven o’clock and makes her way up to the bedroom, where Marcus has already been asleep for half an hour. What does he dream of, lying beneath the heaped duvet that rises and falls with his breathing, filling the small closed room with fustiness? He’s been penned in his study all day, grazing in the pastures of the past. She’s been out on the allotment, and her limbs ache with that pleasant well-stretched tiredness of the outdoors – and a few extra twinges in the knees and spine that remind her she isn’t as young as she used to be. Missing Oolie’s company, she’d found herself wondering again why Megan had run away and left her behind all those years ago.

Maybe Megan resented the newcomers, or maybe they just rubbed her up the wrong way, but she never got on with the Chrises Watt and Howe, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that they tried really hard to re-educate her. Chris Watt, who had once trained as a nurse, helped her to control her eczema, and encouraged her to give up smoking and to breastfeed Oolie, which neither she nor Oolie found easy. Chris Howe undertook to instruct her in the basics of Marxism and free love.

Doro overheard them one day when she was washing up in the kitchen while he and Megan were finishing breakfast at the table. Crunchy Carl was under the table, tormenting a ladybird that had blown in from the garden. Chris’s long grey hair was tied back in a ponytail, and he was wearing (thank heavens) pyjama bottoms and a T-shirt with the almost washed-out slogan ‘
Never trust anyone over thirty
’, below which protruded a wedge of belly, pink and hairy. Megan was wearing Moira’s blue and mauve crochet top, showing off the lacy black bra she had on underneath.

‘A socialist society will liberate women from repressive monogamy, and permit them to achieve sexual fulfilment,’ Chris Howe was saying, his eyes fixed on the outline of her breasts under the crochet top.

Megan said nothing.

Taking this as encouragement, he continued, ‘Like, for example, under socialism, there would be nothing to stop you and me having sex together.’

‘You and me?’

Megan keeled back sharply on her chair, and had to clutch on to the edge of the table to stop herself from falling over.

‘Mam, what’s slosherism?’ Carl whined from under the table.

‘Summat filthy!’ Megan snapped.

As Doro sneaked out, quietly pulling the door closed behind her, she heard the sound of a slap, and Megan’s voice shouting, ‘Stop that, Carl!’ followed by a thin whimper.

She came upon them another time, sitting at the kitchen table.

Megan was smoking, and staring out of the window. Chris, bottomless this time, had spread out a sheaf of papers on the table, and was explaining, ‘You see, under capitalism the means of production are owned by rich parasites, and the working class have nothing to sell but their labour.’

‘I want to be rich,’ Megan said, pushing back a strand of heavy black hair that had slipped down over her face.

‘You want to be a parasite?’

‘Yeah, Paris, London, New York, anywhere’s better than around here.’

It was a few days before anyone in the commune realised Megan had disappeared. Doro was vaguely aware that she wasn’t around much but assumed she was with her mum and Crunchy Carl in Harworth and would come back, as she always had in the past.

If anyone noticed that Megan’s absence seemed longer than usual, it was probably with a feeling of relief more than worry, like when a disturbing background noise goes silent – though in Megan’s case it was the silence itself that was disturbing. The kids were relieved not to have Carl foisted on them in the name of brotherhood. Even Oolie seemed more relaxed without Megan constantly on at her to keep her tongue inside her mouth, and stop drooling. It wasn’t until about the fifth day that they started to ask each other whether she’d said anything to anyone about going away. Doro checked her room and found that all her and Carl’s clothing was missing, along with the collection of cuddly toys she kept by her bed. The clothes she’d borrowed were left neatly folded on a chair, including Moira’s blue and mauve crochet top.

On the sixth day, Marcus drove the commune’s ancient brown Lada up to Harworth, and cruised the streets, stopping people at random.

‘Do you know someone called Megan Cromer? She’s got a little boy called Carl?’

It must have been giro day, because there was a queue at the Post Office stretching right out on to the pavement, but no one knew of Megan or Carl.

‘’Appen she’s been sold into slavery,’ said an elderly woman with curlers under a headscarf. ‘Like in them boowks.’ The thought made her chuckle.

‘Tied up and ravaged,’ added her wrinkled companion.

‘’Appen they’ll know about t’ lad up at t’ school,’ said the woman behind the counter.

Marcus waited outside the school as the kids were coming out, but Carl was not among them. A teacher asked him what he was doing.

‘I’m looking for a boy called Carl Cromer. He lives with his grandmother in Harworth, I think.’

‘You’d better clear off now, before I call t’ police.’

‘’Appen she went off wi’ Silver Birch’s lot,’ said a man with multiple piercings standing outside the newsagent. ‘Scab ’erders is always loaded. Women flock after ’em.’ He snorted. ‘Dutch Elm, we used to call ’im.’

A man standing at a bus stop told him, ‘Never ’eard of ’em, pal, but I’ll gi’ you ten bob for your car.’

‘So where d’you think she could have gone?’ Doro had asked.

‘Megan is Megan,’ Marcus had said, which struck her at the time as an odd reply.

Weeks later, somebody found an uninformative little note that had slipped down the side of her bed.

Megan’s departure spurred them to rethink the balance of power between the men and the women in the commune.

‘The men always get to decide who they’re going to sleep with. We think we’re being liberated, but really it’s just the same old crap,’ said Moira, in their weekly women’s meeting.

‘Mm,’ said Doro, who had always believed that Moira was the one who decided.

‘They play us off against each other.’ Moira twirled a copper strand around her finger. ‘And we go along with it, because we want to be wanted.’

‘Mm,’ Doro agreed, thinking, it’s taken Megan to bring this home to her.

‘We should take matters into our own hands, and draw up a sex rota,’ said Chris Watt, who had never even met Bruno. ‘That way
we
could decide.’

‘Mm,’ said Doro, wondering how she could avoid encountering Chris Howe’s pink sausage dick, should it come up for her on the rota.

After his failure with Megan’s education, Chris Howe’s politics had taken a move to the left, or maybe a leap into the stratosphere.

‘You know where socialism will eventually come from, sister?’ he asked Doro, cornering her on the bend in the stairs one day.