Meltdown (5 page)

‘You mean
actually get my tits out
?’ Monica had exclaimed in a voice that turned heads in the union canteen.

‘Yes,’ the earnest (and clearly very horny) young director had replied.

‘And let a post-grad engineering student
suck them
?’

‘He’s mother-fixated. That’s the point of the play.’

And that had been the end of Monica’s acting career. Now she was playing a suckling mother for real.

‘No, it really is a Greek tragedy,’ Monica went on. ‘All power, wealth and glory. Then the fall. You. David. You were both doing so
well
, weren’t you?’

Over the Rainbow

Having had to study for a proper job, Jimmy’s old uni mate David had taken rather longer than Jimmy, Rupert or Lizzie (and Robbo) to join London’s financial elite. In fact until around ’97 he had had even less money than Henry, which was astonishing because at the time Henry was a local Labour Party activist with a part-time job copy-editing other people’s novels while he worked on his own, a ‘literary’ spy novel called
Security Blanket
.

David was the arty member of the gang. In the great Brit Pop battle of ’94 he had been the only firm Blur man. Jimmy, Rupert and Robbo had all been 100 per cent Oasis and Henry had sat on the fence.

‘Just like a fucking politician,’ Rupert had sneered.

Lizzie liked Enya and Clannad.

Right from the start David had walked the walk. He wore thick Jarvis Cocker glasses and desert boots, drank absinthe, briefly had an Italian girlfriend (an au pair) and had grabbed the attic room in the house that the five boys shared, where he slept on a mattress with a book about Jackson Pollock on the floor beside it. Nearby stood a number of big volumes full of black and white photographs which he got from his parents for Christmas and a stack of
Arena
magazines. However, he owned (as far as Jimmy could ascertain when he searched the room) no pornography at all. Which Jimmy found truly astonishing, particularly for someone who claimed to be a lover of beauty.

‘What’s the point of surrounding yourself with books of photographs if they’re not of naked women?’ Jimmy enquired and it was generally agreed that there was something in what he said.

During his first year, David had briefly had ambitions to be an artist and had even contributed an exhibit to a university art show, a used condom lying on a blow-up sex doll. The exhibit was picketed by both the Catholic Soc and the Fem Soc, the only occasion on which the two societies ever found common cause.

In the end, though, David switched his allegiance from Pollock to Corbusier and soon after qualifying as an architect had been taken on by a trendy practice. He had overtaken Henry in terms of annual income with his very first commission.

A decade after that, when Jimmy met him for beer and curry in order to approach him about taking on his Webb Street development, David was a wealthy man (and although Henry had by this time become an MP he still hadn’t finished his spy novel). In fact, so successful was David by 2005 that, university mate or not, the prospect of heading up a street’s worth of house conversions no longer tickled his fancy in the least.

‘I’ll recommend the job to my board as a favour, Jim,’ David said patronizingly while stealing Jimmy’s last poppadom, ‘but there’s no way I’ll be able to take any interest in it myself. Things are looking a bit too exciting these days for me to worry about how to squeeze eleven en suites into a ten-bedroom house.’

‘No problem, mate,’ Jimmy assured him as he reached over and shattered the stolen poppadom with the flat of his hand. ‘I don’t need you ballsing things up with a load of pretentious asymmetrical cock wank anyway. Call me mad but I’m not into houses that look like a pile of glass cubes stacked up by an educationally challenged two-year-old. I need houses that look
posh.
Not hip. Which is why I want your firm’s
name
, Dave. That I need, because that
is
posh. That’s stylish, that adds zeros to the price. But as to your firm’s mega-crappy signature style, which makes everything look like it was designed by half a dozen blokes working independently of each other in sealed rooms, you can stuff it.’

David rubbed his eyes behind his glasses. Glasses with the same thick, black, plastic frames he had worn at university, except of course that being Dolce and Gabbana instead of National Health Service they had cost four hundred pounds (which did not include the price of the light-sensitive lenses).

‘You were a philistine arse at uni, Jim, and you’re still a philistine arse,’ David said, managing to capture the remains of the lamb massala on his nan bread with a single superbly executed sweep that left the little metal dish looking as if it had just been washed. ‘And I’m afraid you always will be a philistine arse.’

‘If preferring buildings where it’s possible to work out which is the roof and which is the floor is being an arse then I’m guilty as charged. Anyway, bollocks to that, do you think your firm will take on Webb Street or not?’

David smiled and ordered two more pints of Kingfisher.

‘Jim lad, they’ll do anything I ask them to. Because I’ve got my NFM, mate. I is da MAN! You hear dat, bro? You is looking at da man innit, aiee!’

Jimmy flinched. He could be as naff as they came but David’s recently adopted habit of falling into a sort of half-black ‘yoof’ accent that he’d clearly picked up off a comedy sketch show turned even Jimmy’s stomach. Apart from anything else, he was so
bad
at it.

‘Dave, please,’ Jimmy said, ‘you’re thirty-three and you went to Winchester.’

‘Das rye!’ David replied, flicking his fingers to make them click but failing. ‘I is da youngest geezah wiv an NFM
in da ’hood
!’

David had long ago explained to Jimmy what an NFM was. It was the holy grail of every architecture firm on the planet.

The Norman Foster Moment.

The architectural commission that would garner real-world attention and catapult its designers into the upper echelons of superstar architects. Those architects whose firms emerging democracies commissioned to design their new parliament buildings, and multinationals used when they wanted to build an art gallery to burn up a bucket of tax avoidance.

‘You’re not telling me they’ve actually commissioned your Rainbow?’ Jim asked.

‘Jim lad, they ate it up,’ David purred.

‘Fucking hell, that’s incredible.’

‘What do you mean? You always said it was a brilliant idea,’ David protested.

‘Yeah, I
said
that,’ Jimmy replied, ‘because you’re a mate, but to be honest I thought it was just more Dave wank.’

Jimmy had heard the Rainbow pitch many times. David had rehearsed it at numerous gatherings and now, out of the blue, it seemed he had pitched it for real.

‘Hooked ’em this afternoon as a matter of fact,’ said David with a huge grin.

‘Buildings in the shape of rainbows?’ Jimmy asked. ‘You seriously pitched it?’

‘Of course!’ David waved his nan about as he relived the moment. ‘Vast arches with two sets of foundations! The skyscraper as a bridge! It’s brilliant! I mean, that concept alone would probably have been enough; everybody knows that to be really successful a building needs a nickname and I had loads – Rainbow, Bridge, Arch, Speed Bump. The board loved them all. They would have commissioned me there and then but my pitch hadn’t even
started
, mate.’

‘There’s more?’ Jimmy feigned excitement. ‘More than a bent building?’

‘You’re forgetting my coup de grâce.
Any
shitty old architect can offer up a building in a challenging and original shape!’

‘Challenging and original?’ Jimmy said. ‘That’s architect-speak for “stupid”, is it?’

‘No, it’s architect-speak for “idiots like you wouldn’t get it in a million years”. But just being challenging and original won’t get you the Shell headquarters in Nigeria, mate. And it won’t get you the upper legislature of some pastel-coloured parliament in the outer reaches of the ex-Soviet Union either. No! You’ve got to have more than just a challenging and original shape.’

‘The coup de grâce?’

‘Exactly! The coup de grâce. I told them. The whole point about a rainbow is it has two ends. This is a building that can
cross national borders
!’

Jimmy took a swig of beer. Despite himself, he was impressed.

‘Wow. I don’t remember that bit of the idea.’

‘That’s because I only recently thought of it.’

‘It’s a big concept.’

‘Damn right it’s a big concept!’

‘But . . . uhm. Why?’

‘Why?’ David gasped. ‘
Why?
’

‘Yeah. Why cross borders?’

‘Because it’s
conceptually fabulous
, that’s why! A building as a symbol of peace! A global handshake fashioned in glass and concrete! A multinational community in the sky! Quite literally a
bridge between nations
!’

‘And your board loved it?’

‘Crazy for it.’

‘Well, that’s brilliant, Dave. Seriously, congratu—’

‘I haven’t finished,’ David said impatiently. ‘I haven’t told you my coup de grâce.’

‘I thought that was the coup de grâce, building your Rainbow across national boundaries.’

‘That’s half of it.’

‘What’s the other half?’

‘We build them across borders between countries with
unequal tax legislation
.’

A slow smile spread across Jimmy’s face.

‘I like it,’ he said finally.

‘What,’ David asked, ‘is not to like? You have one set of foundations in a major economy and the other across the border in a tax haven. France and Liechtenstein, for instance. That way your building not only symbolizes peace and international cooperation but also makes it possible to generate corporate profits and evade the tax on them
without leaving the office
.’

‘Now that,’ Jimmy conceded, ‘is good.
That
is clever.’

‘They went crazy for it, Jim, just crazy. They’re going to float the concept at every major potential commission that comes up. I is on my way, geezer!’ David said, waving his empty glass at the waiter. ‘I is about
explain big time
. Ya nah wah ahm sayin’, blood.’

‘Yeah, well, bollocks to it anyway,’ Jimmy replied. ‘Are you going to recommend my housing-development project to your board or not?’

David agreed to do it for the price of the last onion bhaji and went on to describe his new concept for a building that worked like a Rubik’s Cube.

‘Never the same building two days in a row. The challenge will be finding your office in the morning,’ he said.

‘And that’s a good thing?’

‘If you have any sense of style it is,’ said David.

A drink and a lifeline

Two years after that conversation had taken place, David was no longer ‘da MAN’ and David’s firm would have been happy to take any commission that came their way, always assuming that it was a solvent one. Architectural practices were having a particularly hard time during the crunch, the assumption that the world could never have enough office space having proved to be an illusion. Jimmy and Monica were therefore faced with the fact that their old friend could no longer shield them from the debt they owed his bosses.

‘I’m afraid David’s Rainbow is screwed for the same reason Webb Street’s screwed,’ Jimmy said mournfully. ‘Nobody can sell the property they have. They just don’t need any more buildings, particularly bent ones that cross national borders. David ain’t the golden boy any more. The truth is he doesn’t know how long he can keep his boss from taking action against us.’

A flicker of fear passed across Monica’s features.

‘Taking action? What does that mean?’

‘Well, suing us, I suppose.’

‘
Suing us?
But . . . he’s our friend, a founder member of the Radish Club. You were at Sussex together.’

‘Yes, and I imagine Laura is saying exactly the same thing to him about us. We are their friends, I was at Sussex with him, we shoved the radish together on graduation night. And now I owe his firm a lot of money. Money they hold him responsible for.’

‘They were happy to take the job at the time,’ Monica snapped, tears welling up in her exhausted eyes, ‘whatever David might have pretended about being too grand for it. Money’s money after all and you were doing them a favour. You could have taken the work anywhere. They sent us round a magnum of Dom Perignon ’89.’

‘Yeah, Mon, I know. But they wouldn’t have wanted the job if they’d known I wouldn’t be able to pay for it, would they?’

Monica shrugged. There was nothing else to say. Perhaps it was the thought of Dom Perignon that led her mind to the bottles in the huge American fridge. Not Dom P of course, five-pound deal, three-for-two Pinot Grigs from Sainsbury’s, but very tempting just the same. This was one habit that had not changed since disaster struck. Monica always loved to point out that being rich did not mean being stupid and that Sainsbury’s cheapos were perfectly bloody OK if all you wanted was a good glug.

‘How many did I have last night?’ Monica asked.

Monica and Jimmy had always loved drink, much more than the obligatory cocaine and Es that they’d done in their early days together. Booze was their drug of choice and they appreciated it even more now that their lives had been torn to shreds. But with Monica breastfeeding they were trying, despite everything, to watch it.

‘A large double G and T at six and a large single after your last evening feed.’

‘So that’s three units then.’

‘Well . . . let’s say three.’

According to the rules they had both drawn up, that was Monica’s entire daily allowance.

‘But we also had a large glass of wine each before we went to bed,’ Jimmy reminded her. ‘It was our little treat, remember? To prove we were still human beings.’

‘So that’s one more unit then?’