Meltdown (9 page)

If the people wanted to be governed
by
the people, then they should damn well expect to pay the people to do it. Henry wrote a note to accompany the claim form that he would submit to the accounts committee:

Henry almost tore out his perfectly arranged hair with frustration. This was simply ridiculous.

He earned a fraction, a
tiny
fraction, of what he could command were he to go and work in the City. A fraction even of what he could get hiring out his skills to local government. Yet despite that, he had chosen to be a servant of the people. Why should he not be paid an appropriate amount, an amount that was comparable to professionals in other fields? Why should he be forced to such ridiculous lengths to get what in any nation with a media that had the remotest sense of proportion would be his by right?

It was immoral, that was what it was. He deserved better.

Henry turned to the issue of secretarial assistance. Jane often helped him with his letters. She was at home writing anyway and it gave her a break from working on her novel. Surely she should be paid for that? It was only fair.

Money is the new Rock ’n’ Roll

It was astonishing. In quite a short time Jimmy had gone from being undeniably the poorest member of his little uni gang to being the richest. Richer even than Rupert. Which was, as Rupert himself pointed out,
seriously
insane.

David was still studying to be an architect. Lizzie (with Robson tagging along) was offering haircuts plus ‘American-style’ muffins from a stall on the Portobello Road, and Henry was going crazy reading unsolicited manuscripts for a publishing house while trying to get a local party to select him as a candidate at a forthcoming by-election.

And Jimmy,
Jimmy Corby
, the gang’s good-natured Jack the lad who had scrounged bacon and eggs off every one of them back in Sussex, had lapped them all.

‘Quite incredible,’ they said to each other in amazement. ‘Jimmy’s rich.’

He didn’t look very rich in those early years. He still slept among pizza boxes and empty beer cans. It was true that he now owned the pit in which he festered rather than passing out on other people’s floors, but apart from that nobody would have known that by ’95, after two years at Mason Jervis, at the age of twenty-three Jimmy was making a hundred and fifty K a year with half that again as a Christmas bonus.

His only real luxury was clothes. Not designer clothes, just new clothes. New clothes every single day. He was now working so hard at Mason Jervis that he had no time for laundry, no time even to make regular trips back to Sussex to get his mother to do it. Time spent worrying about your sweaty jocks was time spent away from the phones. Time spent away from all those hypnotic numbers on all those screens. Numbers that continued to climb and climb and he needed to
be there
to hitch a ride. While he was wasting real time doing a wash, a bundle of coffee beans years away in virtual time might have dipped and rallied. He needed to be there, otherwise how would he buy in the dip and sell in the rally? Fuck laundry. He needed to
trade
.

For a while, despite his wealth Jimmy had not been averse to turning yesterday’s pants inside out and calling them clean (even if he’d done the same trick the day before). Eventually, however, it was possible for Jimmy to do the sniff test at five metres and Piers took him gently aside and whispered a word or two about hygiene. After that Jim developed the habit of paying one of the girls to go out and grab him a new shirt, socks and underwear every day during her coffee break.

It became part of his morning routine, like his coffee and bar of chocolate. He would arrive at work in his previous day’s clothes, do three hours’ trading and then at about ten thirty pop into the toilet and bung on the new threads that the girl had brought him. He’d slip her a fiver for her trouble and bin the previous day’s clothes on his way back to his desk.

A quick chew on a bit of toothpaste chewing gum and he was fresh and ready to spend another long day in the future.

It was obvious to his friends that Jimmy had become addicted to his work. Lizzie and Robson were particularly worried and tried to interest him in other things, like the theatre, which Jimmy thought was complete shit.

‘Why go to the theatre when you can see a movie?’

‘Because the theatre is offering the latest David Hare and the cinema is offering
Batman Forever
.’

‘Exactly.’

But in fact Jimmy didn’t even go to the movies any more. Like many a gambler before him, he lived only to play the game. The difference between him and the traditional sad obsessive was that his was a game at which it was very difficult to lose and, unlike the poker players regularly testifying at the Canary Wharf branch of Gamblers Anonymous, Jimmy’s illness was making him richer.

Richer. But no less screwed up.

It was obvious to anyone who cared to think about it that there was a downside awaiting Jimmy and his highly overexcited colleagues. Physical and mental exhaustion or, as the Americans put it more succinctly, burnout.

The human nervous system was not built to spend fourteen hours a day in a state of high tension and the other ten drunk, wired, having sex or unconscious. The vast majority of the guys on Jimmy’s floor were destined to push it too far, lose their edge and be replaced by younger players.

Jimmy was heading that way faster than most.

‘You’ll be useless in five years and your firm will dump you,’ Rupert assured him cheerfully when the old gang met at Khan’s in Kensington for their regular curry and beer. ‘But
what
a five years, Jim boy! People go their whole lives without having a single
day
on the sort of roll you’re on. In the future people will look back and not be able to
believe
how much money you guys made.’

‘That’s right,’ Jimmy, hollow-eyed and pasty-faced, always agreed. ‘You know my motto. Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse, eh?’

Henry, who had spent all day searching for a decent typescript among the great mound of hopefuls that was his publishers’ slush pile (while trying to summon up the courage to recommend his own under a different name), was having none of this. He earned less in a week than Jimmy was about to spend on a bottle of vintage champagne and he found Jimmy’s attempts to pass off his sweaty-faced, coke-fuelled gluttony as boho chic deeply irritating.

‘James,’ he said sternly, flicking his blond locks aside, ‘the phrase “Live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse” was coined to describe life in the
real
fast lane. Not the bloody City of London but down on the mean streets and out on the edge. It describes true originals who tested the boundaries of the culture and rewrote the rule book of youth. Jimi Hendrix, Sid Vicious, Kurt Cobain. Not always pretty but always original, guys who really did take it all the way, not by getting rich and drunk but by rejecting society’s values in pursuit of the true punk ethic. Doing it, my pampered friend, for Rock ’n’ Roll.’

‘Henry,’ Jimmy replied equally sternly but still with that disarming twinkle in his bloodshot eyes, ‘Bowie just floated his back catalogue on the London Stock Exchange. Mick’s in a tax haven. These days City traders
are
Rock ’n’ Roll.’

In a way Jimmy was right. In some ways he was flying the flag for the Rock ’n’ Roll ideal. While an increasing number of musicians were turning vegan and going to the gym, while Sting was informing the world about the rainforests and tantric sex, Jimmy was
larging it
. In a different club every night, heading for self-destruction with the same relentless tunnel vision that had led the likes of Sid Vicious to their doom. Living on his nerves and his wits and feeding them only with booze, convenience food and endless columns of digits. When he added cocaine to the mix he was clearly setting himself up for a major car crash. A crash which, while it might not kill him, would certainly leave him with severe depression and therefore of no further use to Mason Jervis, a company that lived or died on reckless optimism, not drug-induced paranoid introspection.

This would almost certainly have been Jimmy’s fate had he not met Monica.

Monica saved Jimmy because in her he finally found something more fascinating than gambling on the fantasy future of foreign agricultural products.

To Jimmy she was
that
beautiful. That much fun. That much more Rock ’n’ Roll.

‘Christ in a bucket,’ Rupert observed when Jimmy explained this point to him, ‘she must be one cracking bit of totty.’

‘She is, Roop,’ Jimmy replied, the love light glinting in his suddenly once more bright and shining eyes, ‘she is one cracking bit of totty.’

Monica and Jimmy got together over sandwiches. Literally. Their eyes met over the big tray of them that hung from her neck, lodged beneath her bosom which she later admitted she had been shamelessly using as a visual sales pitch. She was trying to sell Jimmy avocado, alfalfa and beetroot on walnut, a combination which, when she got to know him (later that day), she would realize was not his thing at all. Jimmy was very much a peanut butter sort of bloke, or Kraft cheese slices. And, above all, on white. Sliced white. That was how you made a sandwich. Pretty much all of the guys on the floor agreed.

Monica and her friend Tip had founded their own catering firm. It was called Sand Witches and they both wore pointy black hats. Their idea had been that all those thousands of unbelievably busy people in the City would not have time to go out for lunch and were working too hard to think about it anyway. Tip’s brother was a trader and he’d told her that they all lived off Mars bars. The girls had therefore had the idea of bringing food,
seriously good food
, directly to the consumer. They were unbelievably excited about their idea, convinced it was a real winner.

Which it was. Unfortunately, three or four thousand other girls had had the same idea on pretty much the same day. In terms of female career options in the mid-nineties, catering companies were the new nursing and for a while it seemed as if every female graduate in Britain was setting one up. Unfortunately, this glut of bright sparky girls with their pesto and focaccia coincided with the arrival of Starbucks and Coffee Republic, who also sold sandwiches. It did not take long for almost all the sparky girls to go out of business and, apart from the two or three lucky ones who went on to cater for film premières and Gwyneth Paltrow’s dinner parties or design food for Marks and Spencer, they all gave up.

Lizzie was one of those who prospered. She and Robson had ditched haircuts by that time and moved into food. Somehow, as with everything she touched, Lizzie had made it work and by the turn of the millennium Lizzie’s Sarnies were being sold in Sainsbury’s.

Monica and Tip, on the other hand, had lasted less than a week. They had not even got as far as buying their third batch of bread. The work had been hard and horribly unrewarding. None of the men in shirtsleeves glancing up from their phones had wanted their sandwiches, although plenty of them had wanted Monica and Tip.

Jimmy wasn’t interested in Tip but he had wanted Monica right off the bat. He had elevated his gaze from her artfully exposed cleavage to encounter a fresh, open face with pale, porcelain skin, a splash of rosiness at the cheeks and large, almost startled-looking chestnut eyes. The fringe which hung above them and the long tresses which tumbled from beneath her witch’s hat were of that deep, rich brunette in which hints of crimson lie hiding, waiting only for sunlight to make them sparkle.

Even as Jimmy asked Monica if she had any peanut butter and jelly ones, he knew that it was love at first sight.

‘Jelly?’ Monica asked. ‘As in jelly-and-ice-cream jelly?’

‘No,’ Jimmy replied, ‘jelly as in the American word for jam.’

‘Oh,’ said Monica, ‘are you American then?’

‘Uhm . . . no,’ Jimmy replied, slightly thrown. He and his friends habitually used as many American words and expressions as they could, and nobody had ever thought it strange before. ‘What I meant was peanut butter and jam.’

‘Oh,’ said Monica. ‘Well no, I haven’t.’

Then Jimmy asked her out and it was Monica’s turn to be taken aback. It was, after all, very sudden, and not merely in the sense that he had hit on her within seconds of declining a radish, rocket and chickpea wrap.

They all did
that
.

‘How about you let
me
do the catering, babes?’ they’d drawl, with eyes flicking from her face to her cleavage. ‘I finish at midnight but Annabel’s does a serious all-night breakfast.’

Monica knew their game all right. They wanted
her
for breakfast and ta-ta in the morning. A line of coke and they’d be back to the future without a single thought for the immediate past and she’d be left doing the walk of shame with her dirty knickers stuffed in her handbag. Well, no thank you, there’d been enough horny boys at college and at least they had the decency to hang around in the morning in the hope of cadging a piece of toast and Marmite.

But Jimmy’s offer was different. He wanted to take her out immediately. Right there and then. He was actually offering to leave his phone and buy her a coffee.