Various Pets Alive and Dead (28 page)

His searches for property in Brazil have become more purposeful. He has identified a location, a stretch of coast, a minimum number of bedrooms (two) and a maximum price ($500,000). He adds in air conditioning and a pool as requirements. But will that be enough to tempt her? One night, out of curiosity, he tries Googling that town she says she comes from. He has to experiment a bit to get the right spelling – Zhytomyr. It definitely looks like a place to avoid. No wonder she wants to hop over to the West. No busy brightly lit streets with bars and boutiques, but big shabby concrete buildings, grim squares with sad people in shapeless clothes, and dreary statues of guys no one has heard of – some geek who claims to have invented space travel (ha ha) and some bloke with a bad suit and a goatee beard, who looks vaguely familiar. He enlarges the view, and an image straight out of his childhood hits him in the eye. Hey! It’s Lennie the Leader! What’s he doing there?

Meanwhile, the heat in the quants’ glass-walled office is intense, not from the sun, which seems to have said goodbye for the year, but because of the competition to become the next incumbent of the swivel chair. Chief Ken is taking his time naming the successor to Tim the Finn, almost as if he’s playing with them, like so many juggling balls tossed up in the air.

Maroushka tries to stake her claim by twirling in the Finn’s swivel chair, showing off her legs. If it were a matter of legs, or even of maths, she might possibly stand a chance. But she’s relatively new, her visa situation is still irregular. And besides, look, she’s a girl. And it’s not just that – there’s a general feeling, not vocalised but expressed in smirks and sighs, that to be managed by Maroushka would resemble being indentured simultaneously to Kristin Davis and Attila the Hun.

Toby O’Toole clearly wants the job because he’s been sucking up blatantly during Chicken’s more frequent visits to their area, asking advice about new investments which are beyond Ken’s ken, chatting about golf and generally brown-nosing. Toby is efficient and clever, but there’s that ugly angry streak in his personality which scares people off.

From what Serge can make out, most people favour the Hamburger to succeed Timo Jääskeläinen (except Maroushka, who favours herself), because he’s the longest-serving member of the desk, a sound mathematician and a calm, good-natured guy. However, after the a cappella debacle there’s a mood emanating from New York Head Office that continentals are not to be trusted. This affects the Frenchies, too, especially since they usually head off home to Paris on the late Eurostar on Fridays, rather than joining the others at Franco’s.

Lucian is too wet behind the ears, so that leaves him. He’s as good a mathematician as Maroushka, but he’s not been there long enough, and he hasn’t been capitalising on his advantage, because he doesn’t want to attract the extra scrutiny. He needs to hedge his position, to have some insurance in place should his personal situation start to unravel, and to quietly plan his escape. In fact, he needs a little protection portfolio, like the portfolios he assembles for the markets, to offset the risk and save his skin in the worst eventuality. A portfolio of emails, for example.

I want to taste your kum.

I will walk all over your naughty willy, it will hurt.

What if …?

Up to now, he’s been covering his traces by marking the emails he reads as unread. But what if Chicken opened his inbox and found new messages that had already been opened by someone else? Not to actually blackmail him of course – that would be low, as well as risky – but just to nudge him to an awareness that whoever was accessing the Kenporter1601 account was accessing his emails too. Take today’s early morning classic from Juliette.

I waiting for you, you naughty boy, come Friday 6 p.m. and you will have to do every dirty thing I say else I will punish you.

 

Serge reads it and, for the first time, he closes it without restoring it to ‘unread’.

Later, sitting on the tube, avoiding the dawn-red eyes of his fellow travellers, he ponders the implications of what he’s done, and breaks into a cold sweat.

In Timo’s absence, Chicken has taken to attending their morning meetings in the glass-walled office once or twice a week. He doesn’t contribute to the discussion of algorithms, much of which is above his head, but he likes to share the benefit of his wisdom with the young ones.

‘You know what the real threat is to this country?’ Serge hears him asking Lucie, who says nothing, but raises his eyes, waiting for enlightenment.

Chicken snaps his teeth. ‘Too many women in burkas. Think about it.’

Lucie bows his head like an acolyte at communion.

‘You’ve got a point, Chief Ken,’ smarms Toby.

Burkas? thinks Serge. Could Chicken be very slightly mad?

‘You know what’s wrong with this country, Freebie?’

Chicken pulls up a chair beside him, and Serge feels the rabbit-kick of panic in his guts. Has he checked his email yet?

‘Er … the weather …? Crime …? Drugs …? The Government …? Poor performance in sporting events …? Burkas …? I dunno.’ He puts on his disarming smile.

A range of expressions flickers over Chicken’s face like a pinball machine as the ball of thought bounces around.

‘The public sector. There’s too bloody much of it, Freebie.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Civil servants. Bureaucrats. Planners. Social workers. Town hall busybodies. Pen-pushers. Clip-counters. Thumb-twiddlers …’ His face glows and quivers as the score mounts.

‘What about schoolteachers, dinner ladies, professors …?’

‘They’re not productive. They don’t produce wealth, like you and me.’

‘Me?’

‘Exactly. We pay for it all. And their bloody pensions.’

‘I learned maths –’

‘Exactly. Why should I pay for somebody else’s kids to go to university? Let them pay for it themselves.’

‘Doctors and nurses …?’

‘Don’t knock nurses, Freebie. I won’t have anything said against nurses. Angels.’ His voice thickens. His eyes have gone misty. ‘When our son Willy was in hospital …’

‘Angels. Well said, Chief Ken!’ Toby’s voice quivers with phoney empathy. Shameless.

‘I think biggest problem in this country is too much taxes,’ says Maroushka, twirling round in her chair. ‘In my country nobody pay tax. Is voluntary. Only pay pensioners and persons too unintelligent to avoid.’

She looks so lovely in a tight tailored sea-grey dress, Serge wonders whether it’s worth trying to convert her to a more enlightened view, in anticipation of a possible meeting with his parents, but she has that don’t-argue-with-me look about her. Anyway, who in their right mind argues for higher taxes?

Chicken turns, eating her up with his eyes.

‘Too right, Mary. Disincentive. If it goes up any more, I’ll just give up working altogether. Be a layabout. Sign on the dole.’ He chuckles. ‘Trouble is, there’s a lot of ignorant bureaucrats who don’t understand City bonuses, think they can be regulated. Like that prick Adair Turner from the FSA saying most of what we do is socially useless. I’d like to give his bollocks a nip! Grrr!’ He twists his head sideways and snaps his white pointy teeth. ‘We’re the main growth industry in this country. We create wealth. We give employment to thousands. Our employees pay taxes. What’s not socially useful?’

Serge keeps quiet, for something similar has occasionally crossed his mind. Wasn’t Doro recently ranting in the same vein? Something to do with dog shit. Though, when you think about it, lots of quite nice things are socially useless – banoffee pie, perfume, shoulder pads, mooching, to name but a few.

‘Talking about contributing to society,’ Chicken glances at his Rolex and rises to his feet, ‘I’ve got another meeting to attend. At Number Eleven.’

At lunchtime Maroushka grabs her matching sea-grey jacket and vanishes before he can follow her. He can’t face the cafeteria, so he walks down to Franco’s, half hoping Jonas will be there, but only the sulky bar girl is on duty. The food at Franco’s is Italian, classy, served in small pretentious arrangements on outsize square plates. Running his eye down the menu he feels a massive hankering for a Barnsley chop served with chips and Daddies sauce. But he settles for agnolotti alla zucca, seats himself in a corner, takes his phone out of his pocket and calls his broker.

He still has open positions on several holdings, and the market’s dipped below 4,000. It dropped 315 points yesterday, its biggest tumble in five years. He buys back half of his Endon holding, which he reckons has probably fallen about as far as it’s going to, but extends Edenthorpe Engineering, in anticipation of further falls. Then he orders a double espresso.

While he’s waiting, his phone rings in his hand. It’s Clara. He jabs the red Off button, but it rings again, and he surrenders to the inevitable.

‘Hi, Claz. Good to hear from you. How’s things?’

‘At last. Listen, you little ferret-fucker, I’ve been talking to Babs. She says you’re not in Cambridge at all.’

‘I … I’ve been working with a team at Imperial College –’

‘Don’t dig yourself in deeper, Soz. Just listen. Out of the goodness of my heart, I’m going to give you till the end of next week to tell Doro and Marcus yourself. You’ve been conning them all along, haven’t you?’

The worst thing is the undisguised glee in her voice.

‘It’s not how it seems, Claz. Sheesh!’

‘Don’t you sheesh me, hamster-killer. What are you?’

‘Okay! Okay. I’ll tell them myself.’

He fumbles for the Off button, but before he can switch off it rings again. It’s Doro.

‘Hi, Mum. Good to hear from you. How’s the frozen North?’ He plays for time.

‘Everything’s fine up here. It’s nice to talk to you at last, darling. You’ve been so elusive. How are things?’

‘Good. I’m good. Mum –’

‘Have you heard from Clara?’

‘Yes, she just rang. The thing is, Mum –’

‘I’m so glad. She was worried that she couldn’t get in touch with you.’

‘Mm. We had a good chat.’

‘Lovely. And how’s the PhD going?’

‘Fine. Good. The thing is, I’ve got something –’

‘I’m so proud of you, darling. Doing all that cutting-edge research. For the advancement of human knowledge. It’s sad that so many young people nowadays only think about making money. You know, when we were young in the sixties, we thought that if you had ability and education you should see it as an opportunity to help others less able than yourself. Believe it or not, people wanted to use their skills for the betterment of humanity. I suppose it seems old-fashioned to your generation. Nowadays, people who have brains just see it as a licence to fleece others. Look at Marcus, he’s so brainy, but he never for one moment …’

She prattles on like that. At the end of ten minutes, Serge feels emotionally drained.

‘Are you still working down in London on that project?’ she asks abruptly.

‘Er … yes … no … not exactly.’

‘So you’re back in Cambridge?’

‘Yes. I mean … not completely. The thing is, Mum –’

‘That’s wonderful, because Oolie and I are planning a little outing. We thought we’d come and spend a day with you in Cambridge. What about next weekend?’

Oolie is excited about their trip to Cambridge at the weekend, but Doro is more excited about her trip to the allotment this afternoon.

It’s been raining all morning, but now the sun is out, beaming gold between clumpy cloud towers massed overhead. The rain has chased the other gardeners away, and it looks like they have the place to themselves. The insects have gone too, but the birds are back, tapping and pecking impatiently at the fruit, knocking it to the ground, rustling droplets off leaves, beaking at the moist earth, gorging on worms that have wriggled to the surface, poking and pulling, scarcely bothering to flap away as Doro and Malcolm Loxley thread their way once more between the vegetable beds and fruit trees that are already bowed with ripening apples, plums and pears.

He’s wearing a white shirt and grey trousers, and carrying a briefcase. She’s wearing a flared skirt and a silky top, cut low to reveal the deep V between her breasts created by the wired and padded up-push of the black lacy bra she bought at Marks & Spencer. She looks down and sees the tops of her breasts wobbling as she walks. Has he noticed too? He shows no sign.

At the seats by the communal water tap, he sits down and opens his briefcase. ‘I thought you might be interested to see these.’

He passes Doro a bunch of papers which she studies attentively to conceal her embarrassment at having misread his intentions. They are the minutes of a council sub-committee meeting about the allotments, in which Councillor Loxley is on record as urging a moratorium on the development and a full review. Looks like he really did want to discuss the development, after all.

‘So you’re supporting us? Was it the beans that did the trick, or the rhubarb?’

He smiles. ‘I’m open to all possibilities.’

‘What possibilities?’

‘We could reach an agreement with the developers to use part of the site for a retail park –’

‘What do we need a retail park for? Half the shops in the city centre are empty as it is.’

‘It’d give the city a boost. Create jobs. And there’re grants available for environmentally sensitive development –’

‘You think pouring cement over this would be environmentally sensitive?’ She knows she should stop interrupting him, but the words just keep tumbling out.

‘Depends how it’s done. Part of the site could be dedicated to a socially valuable utility such as a nursery school, a doctors’ surgery or – and this would be my favoured option, Mrs Marchmont –’ he smirks at her like a card player who’s just about to pull a trump ‘– a sheltered housing facility for the learning disabled.’

She winces, and covers it with a smile. If only some of the other GAGAs were around to back her up. Ah, here comes someone! It’s Winston Robinson walking up the path with two bulging carrier bags in his hands.