We All Fall Down (36 page)

Before settlement, Kate made a final visit to Stanwell Park to choose what she wanted from the house. She and Hugh spoke over the phone, their conversation very cool and civil, and they agreed that she should go round on a day when he was in the city. They both felt, with neither actually spelling it out, that it might be easier that way, that it might be less upsetting. She arranged for two men with a removal truck to meet her at the house, and she drove south through the Royal National Park. She hoped the peace of the park would still the turmoil within her, but it had no affect whatsoever.

She took everything they'd bought for Tim – his bed, chest of drawers and toys – a few large items of furniture, some of which had been hers from the days when she'd been single, a lot of bedding, china and kitchenware, and a few things which meant something personally to her, like the Buddha garden statue they'd bought on holiday in Bali. On the phone, Hugh had told her he didn't want much. There had been despair in his voice, as if hanging onto possessions was no longer one of his priorities, so she felt no compunction as she watched the van being filled up. Everything was stored – temporarily she told herself – in her parents' garage. She knew, now that returning to live in Stanwell Park was no longer an option, that she had to think seriously about moving somewhere with Tim, into a place of their own. They'd have to rent to start with, and it would have to be somewhere on the North Shore, maybe back in Crow's Nest, or perhaps Chatswood or Lane Cove.

She felt physically sick as she contemplated the future: living alone with Tim in a small apartment, with all the responsibilities she'd have to face without anyone to help her. She was frightened, she was lonely, and she had no idea how life
worked
– the practicalities of existence without a man. Putting the garbage out for collection once a week loomed large in her imagination, as did hanging a painting and changing a fuse. The thought that she'd done the wrong thing never left her.

15

2008 was not a good year for Hugh Drysdale. From a financial viewpoint, he kept very much in step with the rest of the Western world. It was a year of economic meltdown for everyone. As a result of the subprime mortgage fiasco, the Bear Stearns Bank in the United States got into such difficulties that it was acquired for a pittance by JP Morgan. Some strangely named mortgage lenders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, went belly up too. Because they lent more than half of the mortgages in America, the Government was obliged to help them with a handout of fifteen billion dollars. (Hugh was never able to adjust to everyone suddenly talking in billions, rather than millions, and wasn't even sure what they meant by a billion. Was it a thousand or a million millions?) In that same year, the IndyMac Bank failed, Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, Merrill Lynch was snapped up by the Bank of America, it took eighty-five billion dollars of taxpayer funds to rescue AIG, for the first time ever oil reached one hundred dollars a barrel, and stock markets around the world plunged. To round off the year in style, a former Chairman of NASDAQ and one of the top market maker businesses on Wall Street, Bernard Madoff, was accused of a fifty billion US dollar investment fraud. (Madoff
made off
with all that money went through Hugh's head, yet he never heard any broadcaster refer to the man in those terms, which struck him as odd. It rhymed perfectly.)

Hugh's own financial graph was on a considerably smaller scale, his dealings much more modest, and yet the correlation between his peaks and troughs and those of the global economy was striking. He kept only some essentials from their Stanwell Park home. After selling a few things on e-Bay, he held a garage sale. People haggled over items he only wanted one or two dollars for. ‘Two bucks is too much. I'll give you one.' He was too surprised to argue. He sold almost nothing. He stacked what he didn't sell in a pile on the pavement for the garbage people to collect the following day. Overnight, before the garbos arrived in the morning, almost everything was taken. He stood in his driveway, looking up and down the deserted street, wondering at this modern phenomenon – people who were happy enough to forage through the neighbours' rubbish in the dead of night in order to save themselves a few cents.

After selling the house, paying off the bank and his lawyer (both of whom simply took what they considered to be their due from the settlements without even bothering to submit an invoice –
How cold-bloodedly efficient is that!
Hugh thought), and after Kate had taken her share, he was left with no more than a few thousand dollars. What distressed him wasn't the amount of money he'd lost, but the fact that his seven year relationship with Kate, the only woman he'd ever loved, had been dragged down to the basest of levels, to an unseemly bickering over dollars and cents. Money's not that important, he thought; it's preserving the integrity of what we once shared that counts.

He moved back into the city, to Bronte. He wanted to avoid the North Shore, anywhere near Crows Nest, their old haunts. He settled on Bronte for no other reason than that he wanted to bury himself in anonymous apartment-land, and also be near the sea. He imagined solitary walks on the beach when he didn't have work. It struck him as a reassuringly sane thing to do. He no longer thought of running. He felt he couldn't summon up the energy to do anything that strenuous.

All he could afford was a rundown, one bedroom apartment. A threadbare, grey carpet that he would never be tempted to lie down on, covered the floor. Everything was in need of a lick of paint. The shower spluttered and dribbled, the gas fire didn't even spark, and the oven and cooker looked to be at least fifty years old. Every apartment in the area was inhabited by young people, singles in the main, those who were starting out in their lives and still full of optimism and hope. Living amongst them made Hugh feel old and disillusioned.

A few weeks after moving, despite his loathing for the banks and a desire to have nothing to do with them, he made an appointment to see if he could borrow money to set up a new business venture. It was as if he was determined to fuel his hatred for the financial institutions with an almost certain rejection. But it could simply have been naïveté. Although he would have liked to open his own agency, perhaps for no other reason than that he felt he owed it to Fiona, the fact that he could no longer sign up Bauer, and the difficulties in the present economic climate of persuading any client to move, made such a venture unfeasible. Instead, he considered a provincial post office, as he and Kate had once talked about a long time ago.

Half way through stating his case to the local bank manager, Hugh realised that the man was smiling at him as if he considered his customer to be both delusional and pathetic. He asked Hugh for some numbers – how much he was paying on rent, his living costs, how much he was earning, and did he have any assets – tapping them in a desultory fashion into his computer. He was then asked to supply the bank with three years of tax returns as a self-employed person. ‘I just told you. I haven't been a consultant for three years.' The manager turned away and stared at the office wall for a minute or two as if the answer might appear there, before turning back to Hugh, sighing and shaking his head. ‘No can do.'

‘You mean you won't give me a loan, even for a short period of time, until I'm set up?'

‘Too high a risk. Sorry, Hugh, but the figures don't add up.'

Having once greeted him with open arms, his bank now regarded him with arms folded and a look of cold disdain. He was dismissed and out of the door in less than five minutes. The loans officer shook his hand, ‘Nice to have met you, Hugh.' The fact the man didn't call him Mr. Drysdale also made him angry. Now that he was out of work, didn't own a property and had no assets, it was obvious no one respected him. He felt like throwing a brick through the bank's window. He hated them. Banks should be not-for-profit organisations; they should
serve
. He knew such a dream was unrealistic, especially in a world where the word ‘banker' means someone who runs a gambling house as well as someone who runs a bank. Certainly, the one thing almost everyone agreed on in the current economic climate was that the banks had been speculating. They'd been behaving like casinos – gamblers gambling with other people's money. And in the US and the UK many of them were now throwing in their chips: they were
bank-
rupt.

From resembling, in the distant past, a community service, a service industry, Hugh concluded that the banks had deteriorated to such an extent they were now little more than self-serving gold diggers. From being institutions that, over the past ten years, had thrown money around with the recklessness of philanthropists on speed, backing hair-brained schemes and investing in any building that could boast at least one brick and a plank of wood – from practically
begging
people to take on a mortgage – every bank in the Western world donned, overnight, the cloaks of conservatism, canniness and stinginess. They continued to charge excessively for their modest services, continued to invest – and risk – other people's money, and continued to only show interest in the welfare of their shareholders and their boards of directors. Hugh experienced a bittersweet moment when the CEOs of two of the UK's major banks publicly apologised for letting the country down, causing the current financial meltdown, and for being both greedy and irresponsible. For him, it was a rare, very Japanese sight.

On the surface at least, the world went on as usual. As he walked away from the bank, he looked around him. The people seemed to be unaware of any calamity. Surely they were worried too? Surely they, too, were caught up in this vortex? The financial world, the business world, the whole neo liberalism
system
, including its property based foundations, was going down the plughole. Hadn't they noticed? Surely he was not alone? He was tempted to stop someone in the street and ask if he or she was aware of what was going on.

He wondered if this was what Alison had always been referring to: the death throes of Capitalism presaging the beginning of a spiritual age. He despised the society he was a part of, the parasites who ran it, the rapaciousness of those who profited from it, the whole flimsy, unstructured, unregulated edifice built on greed. The people who were successful in this climate, the ones who managed to climb up onto the shoulders of everyone else, were those with an endless, insatiable appetite for short term profits, who speculated in real estate or shares or currencies. It didn't seem to matter what you invested – no,
speculated
– in so long as it was quick, even instant; this week rather than next week, this year – at the outside – rather than ten, twenty or thirty years down the track. It was despicable, but he wasn't too blinkered to appreciate that his view might arise from his lack of success in this new world.

As he slid out of the property market, so he slid off the edge of the advertising world. He was unaware of doing either. He had slid quite a distance before finally deciding he should register for unemployment. It was a big psychological step, an acknowledgement that he was going no further in the advertising world.

At Centrelink they said, ‘You have no formal qualifications, do you, Mr. Drysdale? That makes it difficult for us. Experience is fine, but it will only take you so far if you don't have qualifications.' The woman, spilling over the edge of her chair like some Rubenesque figure, perspiring heavily and with a hairy spot on her chin, managed to make it sound as if this was not only extremely unfortunate for Hugh, but also placed him at a severe disadvantage. ‘Still, we can but try. That's why we're here. Go and wait over there. Your number will be called.' She handed him a ticket, and he joined many others, sitting forlorn and worn, all with dead eyes. He waited for three hours.

The Centrelink people treated him as if it was his fault he didn't have work, as if he didn't wish to work. Their attitude amounted to, ‘We've got your measure, you lazy son of a bitch. You just want to lie on your couch all day, drinking beer and watching telly. Oh yes, we know your sort. You can't pull the wool over our eyes.' Although he'd have preferred a job rather than receive money from the government, and told the various bureaucrats who interviewed him that he didn't mind what kind of work he did, they insisted on treating him like a beggar, and behaving as if they were being generous, even charitable, in helping him out. For this he was expected to be grateful. Many times he was tempted to shout out that he'd paid his taxes, high taxes, but he fought against such impulses. He knew only too well that if you got on the wrong side of these petty tyrants, they could make your life unbearable.

They sent him for one or two job interviews. He was never sure what he should wear, whether to dress up or down. The premises he had to visit were often rundown, just off some major arterial road, with dust several millimetres thick on the windowsills, and graffiti on the outside walls. The people stared at him like he was a stranger who'd just walked into their small village from some distant land. They could smell his foreignness.

‘You're not really what we had in mind,' said a fat man in a shiny suit, the jacket of which barely contained his vast stomach, and with a curl on his top lip. Another said to him, ‘You're too highly qualified for a job like this.' ‘I don't mind,' Hugh replied. ‘Honestly, I don't really have any qualifications, not real ones.' The man stared at him. He appeared bored. ‘I'm happy to learn.' It turned out they weren't happy to teach him.

He knew he could do any of these jobs with his eyes closed, but they were never offered to him. He went for a job in a sandwich bar. It was in an industrial part of town, surrounded by factories and warehouses, so there was little risk of his being humiliated by an advertising colleague walking into the place. Once he wouldn't have, couldn't have contemplated eating in such a place. Food was spilling out of large wastebins at the back, and inside he could feel his feet sliding on the grease. The place had obviously never been visited by a government hygiene inspector. The owner, a slippery eastern European type with enough oil in his hair to fill a chip pan, asked Hugh if he had any experience.