Various Pets Alive and Dead (5 page)

Serge is often mysteriously unavailable for weeks, but this time he answers on the first ring.

‘Serge Free.’

‘I know it’s you, you little troll. Have you been avoiding me?’

‘Claz! Why would I do that?’

‘Has Doro talked to you about these proposed parental nuptials?’

‘Yeah, she came down to London today.’

Which is strange, since Serge is still at Cambridge finishing his PhD. He mumbles something about collaboration with a maths team at University College, then starts on about an argument concerning doggy-doo with some woman wearing pink leggings. Her mother seems to be getting more and more eccentric in her old age.

‘Poor you. Was it embarrassing? Did people stare?’

‘Just a bit.’

‘D’you remember that time you fell over in the park and came home covered in it? You even got it in your hair. Doro went ballistic.’

Serge was always uncannily accident-prone as a kid. Doro used to call him dyspraxic.

‘Yeah, I remember. Wasn’t it Freud who said shit is a dream-metaphor for money?’

‘How Doggy-Doo Can Make You Rich! Billionaire Secrets Revealed!’

‘There could be something in it.’

‘Get a grip, Soz.’ He’s almost as mad as Doro. ‘Anyway, she wants us to track down the kids from the commune. But I’ve got my hands full trying to organise a stall for the school’s Community Day. I can’t get hold of the recycling company.’

She talks about her problems with Syrec, and Doro’s strange letter. He makes occasional supporting grunts down the phone.

‘I’ve looked on Facebook, but none of the Solidarity Hall kids seem to be signed up,’ she says.

‘Tosser and Kollon aren’t really Facebook types. I last saw Tosser … ooh … two years ago?’

‘I last saw Star on TV. In a police raid on a climate camp. She was still wearing that rainbow crochet top and raggedy velvet skirt. I thought social networking was the big thing among that lot.’

‘Mm. Maybe.’

He sounds distant and distracted. She can feel her irritation rising. How did it happen that holding the family together became her job?

‘And it’s strange Otto isn’t on Facebook, given his obsession with all things technical.’

‘Otto? I dunno. Maybe he’s changed his online name. Isn’t this more your sort of scene, Claz?’ he mutters.

‘Why’s it always me that has to do everything?’

‘You’re good at it. You have the organiser’s touch.’

‘Like you have the touch of death.’

‘Sheesh! You’re not still going on about that icky hamster! Get over it!’

‘It’s not the hamster, Soz. It’s your total refusal to accept responsibility for … Oh!’

She jabs her phone off, and takes several deep calming breaths.

Whatever they start off talking about, it always seems to come back to Fizzy. Thinking of him (or her) makes her choke up with remorse, even after all these years, and she doesn’t know whether to feel more upset at Serge for killing him, or at her parents for letting it happen.

Fizzy was her class’s pet hamster when she was at primary school in Campsall. He (or possibly she) lived in a cage on the nature table. Fizzy was named after Bucks Fizz, then number one in the hit parade. He was unbelievably cute, like Hamlet, with ginger fur and a white tummy, pink paws, and a little black spot that looked like an ink splodge on the tip of his nose. On Fridays the kids took turns to take Fizzy home and look after him for the weekend. Clara was the lucky one who got to have him for a whole week at spring half term. Doro collected her from school, helped her carry the cage home, and set it in a corner of the sitting room.

Fizzy was a champion carrot-chomper; he whizzed round on his hamster wheel like a boy racer; and when she took him out of the cage, he sat in the palm of her hand twitching his whiskers and looking around with bright beady eyes. Serge, who hadn’t started school yet, was mad with envy.

‘I want a go!’ He made a grab.

‘Gerroff! He’s mine!’ Clara closed her hand around the hamster, feeling its little frame squirming between her fingers.

‘I just want to hold it!’

‘You can’t, so there!’

‘Don’t grab, Serge,’ said Marcus, who was sitting on the sofa trying to read a newspaper.

‘Darling, just let him hold it for a moment,’ said Doro.

‘No,’ said Clara.

‘Doro says I can.’

‘You can’t because you’re too little and you’ll kill it.’

‘I’m not little. I just want to hold it.’

‘Clara, don’t be selfish,’ said Doro.

‘You can’t make me,’ said Clara, squeezing him tight.

‘Yes, I can.’ Serge lunged and prised the little creature out of her hands. He held it up in the air like a plane and ran around the room yelling, ‘Ner-ner! Ner-ner!’

‘Give it back!’

Clara ran after him and grappled it out of his hand, pressing it against her chest. Then she noticed something odd. Actually, it wasn’t just odd, it was horrible. The hamster wasn’t squirming any more.

‘Aaaaw! He’s dead!’

She opened her hands and stared at the limp furry scrap. One of its eyeballs seemed to have popped out.

‘Put it back in its cage,’ said Doro. ‘It’s probably just frightened.’

They put Fizzy back in his cage, and Clara poked him every few minutes. But he didn’t move.

‘He killed ’im!’ she sobbed.

Marcus looked up from his newspaper. ‘That’s what happens when you fight over possessions. Now go and play outside! Scarper!’

‘What’ll I say, when I have to take ’im back to school?’ Clara wailed.

‘We’ll find another one,’ said Doro.

On Saturday, Nick Holliday drove them into Doncaster to scour the pet shops. There were only two, so it was a quick scour. The first shop had one hamster, an albino, fat and white with pink eyes. The other shop had four hamsters, very cute, with brown-grey stripes, but they obviously weren’t Fizzy. Clara started to sob again.

‘There might be a pet shop in Rotherham,’ said Nick.

But the Rotherham hamsters were only babies.

Undeterred, they set out for Sheffield, Clara and Serge squabbling on the back seat of the car, with the empty hamster cage between them. She wanted Serge to admit he’d killed Fizzy and apologise, but he wouldn’t even admit the hamster was dead. He kept reaching across and hitting her, so she had to hit him back.

At one point Nick, who was generally an even-tempered kind of guy, pulled over in a lay-by and screamed, ‘If you don’t stop this minute, you can both get out and walk home!’

In Sheffield, they eventually found a hamster which was the same gingery colour as Fizzy, even the same size, with the same white fur on its tummy. Only it didn’t have a black splodge on its nose.

‘It’s no good!’ she howled, stamping her feet.

Nick said, ‘Nobody’ll notice the difference. You’ll see.’

Fizzy was buried in a paper bag in the garden.

When no one was looking, Clara went and dug him up – to check whether he’d gone to heaven yet. She’d learned at school that you went to heaven if you’d been good. But he was still there.

This made her howl even more.

On the Monday after half term, she took the new hamster in its cage back to school, and handed it to the teacher, who put it on the nature table with barely a glance. None of the kids seemed interested. She breathed a sigh of relief. Then the girl who had preceded her on the hamster rota put her hand up.

‘Please, miss, it’s t’ wrong ’amster.’

She was a skinny freckled girl from an extended family of loudmouth aunties, tough uncles and mean-looking cousins who all lived in the Prospects, a warren of crumbling terraces not far from the school.

‘No it in’t!’ Clara retorted. ‘You can’t even tell the difference.’

‘Yes I can, cos t’other one were a bit black on’t nose,’ said the girl.

Next day, three of the girl’s cousins were lying in wait for Clara after school. They called her a murderer, thumped her about, pulled her hair, and stole her red star hairclips that Moira had made for her. Jen, who was late picking them up from school, didn’t see a thing. Next morning the girl turned up in class with her mousy hair pinned back in the red star hairclips, instead of her usual pink daisy hairclips. Clara spotted them immediately, but didn’t tell.

No one else noticed.

‘Who is old woman you meeting today, Sergei?’ asks Maroushka, sidling up to his desk.

‘What old woman?’

‘In Café Rouge. I have seen you!’

‘That was … just a friend … a friendly dentist.’ (Sorry, Mum!)

‘Hey, you know wired people.’

‘Yeah. What were
you
doing out there, anyway, babe? Let me guess – an assignation with your secret lover?’

‘You have very amusing idea, Sergei. Ssh! Here comes Chicken!’

She raises a scarlet-tipped finger and, turning to follow the direction of her eyes, he sees that their boss has just appeared in the entrance to the trading floor.

Despite his nickname, FATCA’s senior partner Ken Porter is a handsome, muscular man who looks more like a Dobermann than a chicken, a mature hunting dog with sharp white teeth, glossy black hair and quick shiny eyes. Although at fiftyish he must be past his prime, he still exudes a sort of testosterone-charged animal vigour which, according to the gossip, makes him irresistible to women. His office is a leather-and-mahogany shrine of golfing trophies, shag-pile rugs and investment art, in the style of a nineteenth-century gentlemen’s club, up on the top floor of the steel-and-glass FATCA tower, where the senior partners entertain clients so important they’re only referred to by their initials or an account number.

Serge has only been up there once, the day he was interviewed for his job. It was more a seduction than an interview: Chicken’s offer – ‘cutting-edge research; opportunity to apply your skills in a dynamic international environment; money, lots of it, more than you’ll know what to do with’ – against the lonely satisfaction of his still-unfinished PhD, the monk-like cell in a medieval college, the miserable £9k bursary.

While he hesitated, Chicken had jabbed his finger at the FATCA logo on a company report – a globe encircled with the words
AUDACES FORTUNA IUVAT
.

‘You’re a scholar, Free. Know what that means? Fortune favours the bold.’

Then he’d reached out, gripped Serge’s hand, and shaken it up and down like a killer dog trying to break the neck of some little creature it’s just caught.

Most days Chicken takes a stroll along the trading floor, walking with a slight wide-legged roll, like he’s got a permanent hard-on. Or he drops into the morning meetings, just to spread a bit more testosterone around. You can smell it on the air, or maybe it’s just his aftershave, a pungent musky smell that brings up in Serge’s mind a faint whiff of his childhood.

He pauses by Serge’s desk, leaning to examine his screens. ‘All right, Freebie?’

‘All good, Chief Ken.’

‘Freebie’ is Serge’s nickname at FATCA. Everyone here has a nickname (apart from Maroushka, which is already a nickname for something ordinary, like Mary). It’s meant to foster an informal and creative atmosphere. Ken Porter thinks his own nickname is Chief Ken, but it didn’t take long for some wag on the trading floor to abbreviate it to Chi-Ken, and from thence to Chicken. Despite his nickname, he’s undoubtedly the top dog in the pack, and you have to feel some admiration for a guy who’s made it so big-time, and wears the suits to prove it.

‘I see your ABS fund is coming in at just over two million, Freebie.’

The ABS is an algorithm-based investment strategy which Serge created in March to capitalise on the downward spiral in the US housing market, when the whole international banking system was thrown into turmoil by the uncertainty surrounding their multibillion investments in US sub-prime. But where there’s uncertainty, there’s risk: and risk is the godfather of serious money. And this year he’s been making it in shedloads for FATCA.

‘That’s what we want; the best and brightest of your generation working for us.’ Chicken grasps his hand and pumps up and down.

Serge glows, winces and tries to maintain eye contact, all at the same time. Out of the hundreds of employees at FATCA, it’s kind of cool that Chicken has noticed his contribution. Suddenly Chicken drops his hand. The smile freezes over, the teeth are still bared.

‘I need to know how you got your information, Freebie.’

‘I didn’t have information.’ A rush of alarm. ‘I … er … worked out a better way of hedging the risk so we could boost the yield. It’s … it’s an extension of Itoˉ’s Lemma.’ He is gratified to see a glimmer of respect light up in the bright doggy eyes.

‘The Lemma, eh?’

Chicken, he guesses, is somewhat out of his depth with the new maths. He belongs to the previous generation of bankers – the barrow boys, as they were called – hard, hungry men who were recruited in droves into City jobs in the late 1980s to replace the bowler-hatted toffs whose gentlemanly protocol was thought to be too fuzzy for the post-Big Bang trading conditions. What you needed to make money in that newly deregulated environment were aggression and cunning, and Chief Ken has bucketloads of those. But nowadays, the newest intake to the City tend to be geeky people, maths and physics nerds like himself, who were initially a tad uncomfortable in the purlieus of money, though it’s surprising how quickly you can get used to eighty plus k a year.

‘Risk-free risk. Limited downside. That’s what we pay you for, Freebie. Have you shared it with the team?’

He thinks there’s a whiz-bang numerical trick to take the risk out of investment, like a key-code à la Dan Brown that will unlock the steel-reinforced door leading to a glittering chamber of infinite wealth.

‘It’s complex, Chief Ken.’

‘Good. The more complex the better – harder for some other sneak-geek to steal or copy. ‘

Chicken smiles, and Serge feels the radiance light on him like sunshine. He could add that it also makes it much harder for anybody to keep track of what was in the original investment bundle, so in the end nobody knows what anyone is worth, apart from the quants like himself who put the packages together. And they’ve mostly forgotten, or got bored and moved on to something else.