A Week in December Page 41

  Sophie Topping, born Sally Jackman in Epping forty-two years earlier, had never imagined as a diligent, contented child going to the local primary school that life would turn out so bizarre – in England of all places. Her father had been an RAF wireless operator and her mother a hairdresser; when the old fellow died and his debts were paid off, it turned out he had left his wife £28,000. Mrs Jackman had a small building society account, no mortgage, the state pension, few expenses, and it was enough. She did the occasional cut and blow-dry for pocket money, about £50 a week, visiting the houses of friends and neighbours. It all worked out fine. Sally had done well at school and left at seventeen to work as a secretary in the City, where five years later she’d changed her name to Sophie, after meeting Lance, who was struggling in the public relations department of a stuffy bank and trying to get on his party’s list of candidates.

  Looking down the table at her guests now, Sophie tried to calculate their worth. The Loadeds: countless; hundreds of millions of pounds. The Porterfields: said to be more than a billion. The al-Rashids: tens of millions. Dobbo McPherson: ‘north of a hundred million’, she’d heard Mark Loader say. Jimmy Samuel, the debt packager and seller-on: likewise, north of a hundred. The Margessons, the teenager-website couple: certainly tens of millions. John and Vanessa Veals: billions in the fund. But apart from Farooq al-Rashid, who’d shifted tons of limes from the groves of Mexico and Iran via the steaming vats of Renfrew down the gullets of the masses and thence into the sewers underground, none of them had engaged with anything that actually existed.

  Gabriel Northwood and Clare Darnley, on the other hand: zero. They didn’t do their sums in thousands, perhaps not even in hundreds. They were in negative-equity land; and the contrast with the others was this: a billion or bugger all.

  The other thing that perplexed Sophie was that, with the exception of the al-Rashids and Spike Borowski, she hadn’t deliberately sought out rich people as her guests. All the others, the mills, the multis, the bills and the trills, were people she had met – a simple cross-section – at the school gates over the last ten years in North Park.

  Sophie pushed her chair back with a squeal and clapped her hands. It was time to move people round.

  III

  Adam Northwood was standing alone in a dark corridor of Wakeley.

  Alone was not how he felt himself to be, however. Three voices spoke to him loudly: Axia, the Disaster-Maker and the Scissor Girl.

  His own voice was audible as he debated with them, though the only person there to hear it was Violet, who kept her vigil by the darkened window of the dining room, looking out over the lawns.

  More than six feet tall, handsome once, now run to fat round the belly, stooped and unkempt, Adam saw himself as the leader of Wakeley, its chosen and most senior inhabitant. With his beard and shaggy hair, he might have been a prophet.

  On him fell the responsibility of making sure the building did not burn. By touching every third tile in the hallway, he might placate Axia and spare the fire this time; but a failure to count precisely, or a failure to touch would most assuredly signal the end.

  With a heavy step, he began his task, the sound of the Scissor Girl so loud in his ears that it was hard to concentrate. And the names she called him ... The things she said ... She imputed to him desires so disgusting he barely understood what she meant ... Where did she get these things from? Not from him, that was for certain, because he’d never even heard of half the things she talked about, let alone told her about them ...

  Earlier that day he’d thought for a second about Gabriel, his younger brother. He wondered how he was doing at school and why he never came to visit. Perhaps he was busy on the farm.

  Axia’s voice was now louder than the Scissor Girl’s. ‘I destroyed the generations before them and I will destroy you in the same way,’ said Axia. ‘The fire is your home. Believe me and follow what I say or you will surely burn. I will cut off their heads, I will cut off the tips of their fingers.’

  Adam breathed in tightly as the volume rose. It was always hard to concentrate, and sometimes he thought his counting the tiles just infuriated Axia and made him shout more loudly.

  He was halfway down the passage, where it widened out into the dining room. The cacophony in his head made it hard to think a thought.

  Oh, if only he could go round himself, go round his brain and turn off the noises one by one, then he might concentrate long enough to hold a single thought, pure and soothing to his mind. Then he might stop the Scissor Girl from plucking out his thoughts and broadcasting them so all the people in the day room saw them on the television, even his worst thoughts about women.

  Seventy-nine, eighty ... He had almost reached the doorway of the dining room, almost done his duty for the night. But Axia was angry with him. ‘I have power over all things and if anyone denies it he is lying and I will make him burn for all time.’

  At one end of the corridor was the entrance hall, dark now except for a bar of light that came from under the night porter’s door. At the other end, in the bowels of Wakeley, was the closed door of the day room, emptied now for the night, the television having been switched off at 10.30.

  In between stood Adam, roaring to keep out the sound of Axia and the Disaster-Maker as they shouted their cataclysmic warnings in his ears; and beside him now, in the silence she had kept for twenty years, was Violet with her bent arm still raised in greeting or farewell as her eyes gazed over the dark and empty lawns.

  Moving people round the long table at the Toppings’ had been almost too successful, to judge by the liveliness of the conversations that ensued.

  Roger Malpasse was shifted so that he was no longer distracted by Olya and no longer within football-chat distance of Spike. The schools inspector had made a special friend of Roger, hovering at his elbow through the evening and diligently replenishing his glass. Roger had promised himself to drink no more than three glasses, but since the level had never dipped below halfway he could technically say he was still on his first. But whatever the exact volume of wine that sat on top of the double-zonker base and half a bottle of champagne before dinner, it filled him with exuberance and geniality.

  He now found himself opposite John Veals, whom he knew slightly through old corporate connections from his time in the law.

  ‘Well, John. How much more of these bank problems, do you think?’

  Veals looked up from his screen. ‘A lot. I think all the American banks are in trouble.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You have a pile of shit – these bundles of CDOs that are starting to default. Banks have sold them round the world, so everyone’s infected. They’ve also sold them to hedge funds they themselves manage. That’s what Bear Stearns has done. But Merrill Lynch is clearing Bear’s trades for those funds. Merrill doesn’t like what it sees. So it makes a margin call on Bear’s hedge funds. Bear hasn’t a clue what the thing’s worth anyway, because it seldom actually trades. Like your house. It’s worth what someone will pay and you only need one buyer. But they’re leveraged ten times over and Merrill’s telling them it’s worth only 75 cents on the dollar. So without their ten per cent equity Bear’s now at minus 15. They’re fucked. Mind you, so’s Merrill.’

  ‘So they’re all going to go broke? All those big shiny American investment banks?’

  ‘I shouldn’t wonder. There seems to be a trillion-dollar hole.’

  ‘At least a trillion,’ said Roger. ‘Thanks. Just a half-glass. Thanks.’

  ‘But, John,’ said Sophie, ‘where’s all the money gone?’

  ‘It’s gone into John Veals’s back pocket,’ said Roger.

  ‘The money doesn’t exist,’ said Veals.

  ‘It existed until you trousered it,’ said Roger genially.

  ‘Fuck off,’ said Veals. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  A spasm passed over Roger Malpasse’s face as he drained his glass of burgundy; it was like a very dark cloud, the only one in the sky, going
across a midsummer sun. ‘As a matter of fact,’ Roger said, ‘I do. You forget that I was a partner at Oswald Payne for twenty years. One of my colleagues – a guy in the capital markets or finance group, I forget which – he was responsible for helping you people design these absurd products, CDOs and so on, in a way that was at least nominally legal.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Veals.

  ‘What happened,’ said Roger, ‘is that investment banks and hedge funds created ever more arcane instruments which they could flog to one another in a completely false market. Because it was over the counter, in private, the regulator couldn’t see it. Then they could sell an inverted iceberg of bets on the likelihood of the original instruments defaulting. They were able to account a notional profit on the balance sheet on all this Alice-in-Wonderland crap and so pay themselves gargantuan bonuses.’

  Other conversations along the table were dying out as people began to sense drama or blood.

  Veals smiled thinly. ‘I’m afraid it’s rather more complicated than that.’

  ‘Do you know what?’ said Roger. ‘It really isn’t. It’s a fraud as old as markets themselves. The only difference is that it’s been done on a titanic scale. At the invitation of the politicians. Behind the backs of the regulators and with the dumb connivance of the auditors. And with the fatal misunderstanding of the ratings agencies.’

  ‘That’s a cute story,’ said Veals. ‘But financial life is more—’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ said Roger, his voice growing louder. ‘Do you know how high a million dollars in $100 bills would come up off the table, tightly packed? I’ll tell you. Four and a half inches. And do you know how far a trillion reaches?’

  ‘Yes. I can work it out.’ John Veals paused only for a moment. The whole table was now watching and listening as his fabled mental arithmetic went to work. ‘Seventy-one miles.’

  ‘Correct,’ said Roger. ‘That’s how much has been misappropriated or mislaid. And all of it will have to be paid back before the world can move on. Every inch of the tightly packed seventy-one miles. Over a period of – how long would you say? Five years? Ten? And it won’t be paid back by people like you, John, you or the bankers, because I don’t suppose you pay tax, do you?’

  ‘I pay what I’m legally required to pay.’

  ‘I think we can take that as a no,’ said Roger. ‘And the misdemeanours of the bankers will be paid for by millions of people in the real economy losing their jobs. And in paper money, the trillion will be repaid in higher tax on people who have no responsibility for its disappearance. And the little tossers in the investment banks who’ve put away their two and three and four million in bonuses each year over ten years ... They’ll hang on to it all. And they of course will be the only ones who won’t pay back a coin. Which is bloody odd when you come to think of it. Because really they ought to be in prison.’

  ‘That’s enough, Roger,’ said Amanda.

  ‘Why, darling?’ said Roger, sitting back in his chair, rather red in the face. ‘Is there something fundamentally wrong with that analysis?’

  Jenni Fortune was on the last circle of her evening shift. All day long she had thought of him and wondered why he hadn’t telephoned or texted her. Perhaps he went to dinner with all his clients, then invited them to his flat and took them to see his brother in hospital on their second date ... Perhaps he kissed them all on the doorstep, then came back shamelessly for more ...

  There had to be an explanation; she was not prepared to abandon trust in him. Not yet. People were busy, even on a Saturday. There was perhaps a football match he had promised to take some kid to ... There was tidying up his flat ... No, there wasn’t that, obviously. But there must have been a trip to the launderette at least.

  She would just have to concentrate on driving, going round and round. It seemed such a disappointment, the dirty black of the tunnels, the same old names of the stations, the circles of hell, when only a day ago everything had been lit with hope and possibility.

  Then, as she handed the keys to the next driver and went wearily upstairs to the canteen, lonely Jenni, back where she’d begun a week ago, her mobile phone was able to receive a signal and bleeped twice in her pocket. Her hand was shaking as she pulled it out.

  She flushed with pleasure as she read Gabriel’s text. But she should punish him. She ought to make him wait, play hard to get. She should ... Oh, what the hell, she thought. I love him.

  IV

  Once up on Waterloo Bridge, Hassan began to walk south. Halfway across the river, he came to a halt with a strange, panicky feeling: there was no sign of Waterloo station on the other side. He stopped and tried to regain his bearings. Behind him, he remembered a huge building with a courtyard. He thought it was Somerset House. Ahead, he could see a cluster of equally large buildings in a brutal modernist style, but he didn’t know what they were. Theatres, galleries? He looked, in vain, for the arched roof of a railway station. It wasn’t there.

  He didn’t know whether to go on or turn back; he had no way of orientating himself. Then he remembered how this had happened to him once before, when the GPO Tower appeared to be in the wrong place. His mother had told him it was because he had been too long without food and his blood-sugar levels had crashed; this led to mental confusion and could be dangerous, Nasim had read, because he might faint and his brain could be damaged by lack of oxygen. She insisted that he see a doctor, who told him it was called ‘hypoglycaemia’ and could be cured at once by a simple bar of chocolate. It was true he’d eaten nothing today since a piece of toast with his parents at about nine – more than twelve hours ago. But how could you lose an international mainline station, however low your blood sugar? How could it just disappear?

  Hassan found sweat on his upper lip despite the increasing cold of the night. His hands were both shaking now, though whether from fear or from hypoglycaemia he didn’t know. Then he had an idea. His rucksack had a compass sewn into the top flap; it was part of the kit. He knelt down on the pavement and fumblingly undid it. If it showed north behind him and south ahead, across the bridge, then surely all he needed to do was carry on.

  When he had finally obtained a reading, it told him he was heading south-east. Yet surely the Thames ran west–east, so he could only be going north or south across it. The compass had simply made things worse.

  Someone was coming towards him on the footpath of the bridge and Hassan decided to ask him the way. But as he came closer, it was clear that the man was plugged into loud music from his earpiece and couldn’t be distracted. A woman was crossing the other way, but she was talking into a mobile phone and didn’t see Hassan when he waved at her.

  Above the almost freezing Thames, Hassan stood, trying to persuade a passing Londoner – anyone – to engage with him.

  A strange memory came to him in his light-headedness. Waterloo station was not at the foot of Waterloo Bridge; perplexingly, it was at the foot of Westminster Bridge. No. That was irrational, impossible. And anyway, when he looked upstream there was a rattling railway bridge – Hungerford, was it – not the stately Westminster. Where now was Westminster Bridge? Had that gone too? Or maybe the Thames took a sudden turn and ran north–south at this point, in which case he should be going ... East?

  Oh God, he thought, oh God. I mustn’t lose it now. He muttered a prayer, then turned back for human help.

  Five people he tried to stop on the bridge; five times he moved forward and tried to intercept these passing strangers, and five times he found them wrapped up in private music or talking into hands-free microphones concealed in their coats.

  They were talking to the air. All were listening to voices, talking back, but there were no people. His was the only real voice on the bridge, but the only one to whom no one would listen.

  He couldn’t give up now. He couldn’t stop. What he had to do was somehow to make the world hear – not the profane nonsense of rap and rock, not the garbage of kafir phone calls, but the truth and beauty of another voice: the words
of the unseen God, spoken to the Prophet almost 1,400 years ago. Those were the words that must reverberate in the ears of the people on the bridge, and in the ears of all the world.

  At that moment a bicycle with no lights on shot past him along the pavement, making him leap to one side.

  Hassan stood back against the parapet of the bridge, with his heart hammering his ribs in a huge lumping rhythm. Shit. He had thought for a second he was going to die.

  His body wouldn’t return to normal; he couldn’t get a rhythm back. It was hard to breathe.

  Then he leaned forward on the stone parapet and put his head between his hands. Where was it? Where was the voice, the voice of God that the Prophet had heard in the desert? This was the voice of the truth, the world’s salvation. This was what he must die for. What he must kill for. For that disembodied voice only and not for any other, he must go to the station, go to the hospital and kill.

  It was all so fantastically, so risibly, improbable.

  Hassan hoisted himself onto the parapet so he could see down into the icy darkness of the river below, the oily surface sweating black.

  He thought of his mother Nasim’s earnest face, leaning over his bed and of his father’s dear worried eyes with those little specks of pigment under them.

  His heart was still pounding from where the unlit bicyclist had brought him face to face with reality.

  And as he moaned like a wolf in a trap, a strange thing began to happen in his mind. He found that his pumping heart began to slow, and as it brought him back from the edge of death, his moaning began to soften; and in the bellows of his chest it mutated slowly into something deep, and uncontrolled and wholly unexpected that felt like – that in fact turned out to be – laughter.