After Everything Read online

  As he stood up, his knees creaked and there was a painful twinge in his lower back. Carolyn was fully asleep and he arranged the shawl over her shoulders. Pulling on his clothes, he stepped over to the window and trailed his fingers through beads of condensation. He drew a circle on the glass, surrounded by wriggly lines. It might have been a spider or the sun. He couldn’t decide.

  [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Forgot how fierce you can be and have been trying to work out who you inherited it from. Not from Mum – she’s too soft and sensitive. And Dad – you never know where he stands on anything. Remember how everyone at school envied us the cool life and the glamorous parents. That was a joke. Mum was always lemon lips and Dad just slept all the time, when he managed to find his way back home.

  No more memory lane for me. Got that courier job. I get to ride this scooter all around London. I nearly kill myself once a day, or someone nearly kills me, but it’s good money and I’m like this living street directory. I might just get to bathe in Buddha’s light after all. In case you’re wondering, I’ve been as clean as the proverbial.

  Chapter 14

  One day Tim would be able to afford his own cleaner and a plush Harley Street address. But not yet, so each week, in the back seat of his Jeep, he carried a small basket carefully packed by Angie with dishcloths, ecologically friendly toilet cleaner, and some kind of whizz-bang handheld vacuum cleaner. He arrived early, well before the clients. He was meant to be dusting their neuroses, not his office.

  This week, there was a new one, again from the City and no doubt again enraged by the unexpected removal of what he’d thought was a lifetime tenure to guzzle from a trough of never-ending cash. Tim had had a lot of these lately, referrals from a colleague he’d met at Goldsmiths. The last client, barely twenty-eight and pushed off his desk with three hours’ notice, complained about his redundancy payment. ‘I mean, my boss, when he was moved on three years ago, got enough to pay off his mortgage and buy a vineyard in Galicia. I got basically nothing.’

  Tim stowed his cleaning basket in a cupboard and quickly read the new client’s file: Dan Warburton, thirty-one, single and very angry, according to the colleague. The colleague was not wrong. Punctual to the minute, Dan arrived and flung his motorcycle helmet on the floor.

  ‘C-c-c-unt,’ he stuttered by way of introduction. ‘F-f-fucking cunt. I did nothing wrong. Nothing.’

  Tim arranged his face in what he knew, because he’d practised many times in his bathroom mirror, was an expression of calm acceptance that any amount of bile this angry young man disgorged would be absorbed and, in time, removed. He positioned himself in neutral stance, upright behind his desk, hands on his knees and waited in silence.

  He wanted to tell Dan that this time of shame and fury and fear would pass, that in six months’ time, or two years at most, it would metamorphose into a dinner party quip. He could refer Dan, by now stamping up and down the small office leaving dirty imprints of bike boots on the beige carpet, to the Cambridge study indicating insecure employed people were just as anxious and depressed as recently unemployed people. Or he could mention the Baseline of Happiness theory, which argued that after extreme events, people tended to return to their own level of happiness, whatever that might be.

  Instead he made a mental note to buy a bottle of carpet shampoo. Dan flung himself into the chair and began to cry, fat tears coursing down his cheeks.

  ‘Why not tell me what happened?’ asked Tim, inching the box of tissues towards him.

  Tim knew he was a wounded healer. Each time he heard what was essentially the same story – that of a man stripped bare of his job and therefore his self-esteem – his own fear returned, freshly bitter, appeased not one jot over the last decade. The impotence, the shame, the not being good enough, the past midnight feeling that he’d never be good again. And yes, he admitted to himself, he was jealous of the people who managed to keep it going – Jeremy most of all and then Peter. He even used to envy Sandy, who at least had done something that kept paying him a pittance.

  He’d tried so hard, worked his balls off. What did he end up with? Nothing except a bloody mountain range of debt, accusatory glances from bank managers and accountants, as if to say who’s been a silly chap then? And no sympathy from his father who looked up from Match of the Day and muttered he should have gone into the civil service instead. He’d survived because of Angie, but there was still a part of him that wanted to be strong and successful, to be an alpha male like Jeremy, and that part of him festered beneath the guise of the loving husband and the benign, enabling psychologist.

  Dan’s tirade cut through his meandering thoughts. ‘I know I st-st-stutter,’ he said. ‘I know I’m not good with clients. But I didn’t need to be. I’m a good quant.’

  For the first time he looked directly at Tim. Under his freckles his face was mottled, his eyes puffed and bleary. ‘You know what I mean, don’t you? By a quant? Arbitrage? Game theory?’

  Tim recognised the terms from occasional forays online, but his actual understanding was minimal. ‘Go on,’ he said, nodding and hoping he could remember the basic lingua franca.

  ‘I was writing a s-s-stock movement prediction programme and I was testing it at work. I was going to refine it and s-s-start my own business.’ Dan looked sheepish. ‘I know I s-s-shouldn’t be testing my own programme at work, but how else was I going to do it? I would have got s-s-sacked for that alone.’

  Tim kept quiet. Silence was always best. Dan gulped air like a goldfish and Tim passed him a glass of water.

  ‘And one evening, after the markets closed, I was running s-s-some tests from the accounts and I got into the boss’s files by accident. I opened one of his folders and there was all this s-s-stuff.’ His face turned puce. ‘I’d never s-s-seen anything like it. I mean, I’ve never got into porn myself, but I know loads of men are meant to get off on it. But this was s-s-something else. It was little girls, ten, eleven years old, doing these things. It was hideous. I didn’t want to know anything about it. I wanted to forget I’d ever s-s-seen it.

  ‘And then, I heard him come back into the office and the next thing he was right behind me. I’m pretty sure I’d closed everything down before he saw my s-s-screen, but s-s-somehow he knew I knew. I could just tell. He kept leaning over me, stinking like an old cigar and asking me what I was working on. I told him I was doing some predictive s-s-stuff, but he didn’t believe me. The next thing I was s-s-sacked. He said he couldn’t keep me on because of the recession, that I was uncooperative and not up to the mark. What an arsehole, with his private clubs and fancy lunches. Fat fucker with his posh accent. And the worst thing is my girlfriend tells me not to worry.’

  Dan looked at Tim as if he wanted to strike up some kind of male camaraderie. ‘Don’t you hate it when they do that? She’s a doctor, so no one is going to sack her. How do they know what it’s like?’

  Tim wanted to agree with him. He’d never been able to understand Angie’s implacable confidence that everything would be all right. She was like some twenty-first century Julian of Norwich, intoning that all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. He was jealous of her strength, her common sense and ability to adapt. If she was disappointed or upset, she attacked the garden for a morning, or went to bed for an afternoon. That appeared to solve everything from infertility to bankruptcy. It was harder for him, with his black depressions, his secret anger, his shrivelling impotence.

  Sometimes he hated needing Angie so much. It seemed unnatural for a grown man to want to cling onto a woman and never let go, even though he made jokes about it, how old men were the new girls with their moobs, their propensity to cry in public and their new-found dependency on the partners they’d kept at arms-length for so long. Was that why the four of them had clung together since university, although their careers, or lack of them in Sandy’s case, had diverged so sharply?

  It wasn’t as if they talked about anything new or dif
ferent, or even acknowledged the consequences of what they said to each other. When Peter said he was bored of football and giving up his box at Stamford Bridge, the others knew immediately that he wasn’t going to Hollywood after all. Everyone said it was a great idea when Sandy moved across the river. ‘I envy you, mate,’ said Jeremy without a pause. ‘You’ll be fit as a trout, running around that park every day.’ They must have known Sandy’s money was running out, that his days as a hit songwriter were over, just as they must have known that Jeremy was making great gobs of money from the stock market and that he, Tim, was making nothing at all.

  Although Tim had called Sandy after he came out of hospital and asked if he wanted the name of a good therapist, he was secretly relieved that a psychologist’s protocol prevented him from taking on clients he knew as friends. He didn’t want to talk openly to Sandy. Within their little group, he wanted nothing to change.

  Scraggy clouds scudded across the sky. What were they? Cirrus, cumulus, altostratus? Did it mean it was going to rain? He’d completely forgotten about Dan and his mottled face, his anger and rage. He had to concentrate, try harder.

  Dan was screwing up his eyes and trying not to weep. ‘I’d report him, but I know he’d have deleted everything by now, probably s-s-smashed his computer and replaced it. Or maybe no one would care. One of the guys got drunk a month or so ago and took a dump in a wastepaper bin. Everyone thought it was hysterically funny.

  ‘The thing that really pisses me off is that my life has been ruined and his goes on uninterrupted. I bet that he’s f-f-forgotten my name already. Lording it up in Knightsbridge or wherever he lives. I’ll never get out of Peckham.’

  Tim nodded, but he wasn’t listening. He was letting Dan’s rage wash through him. Other people’s anger always made him calmer. His Goldsmiths colleague said it was a normal response. Everyone walked away from the sight of a traffic accident relieved that they had survived. Psychologists were only human. They couldn’t contain all the mental angst heaped on them every day in fifty-minute increments. They had to have their coping mechanisms.

  Dan’s time was nearly over. Tim made all the right noises and said all the right things with the appropriate body language. He smoothly concluded the session and made an appointment for another at the same time next week. He saw three more clients. The first was summoning courage to ask a woman to dinner for the first time since his wife left him a year ago. The other two were trying to salvage marriages that were sinking along with their bank balances. He’d have to refer both to couples therapy, but he wanted to wait until they felt more secure. That might take some time as both wives had entered the jugular zone.

  ‘I told her,’ said the last client of the day, sweaty and pale, ‘that we couldn’t afford to move to Notting Hill. We’d have to wait until I’d got a better job. She just told me to work harder. I don’t think I can do all this much longer.’

  At that moment, as the still unidentified clouds disappeared and the afternoon sun skittered across the balding head of the man sitting opposite him, Tim felt a rush of gratitude for Angie and his own good fortune to be married to her. He forgot his darker moments, his occasional jealousy and resentment of her competence. He decided to cancel his regular booking at the B & B in Wandsworth and drive home in time for dinner with his wife, to tell her about his day, about Dan and his rage against the cruelty of the workplace, how he had to pretend to know about game theory, and what the harridan wife had said to her beleaguered husband. Therapists weren’t meant to discuss things, except with other therapists, but Angie was different.

  Chapter 15

  It was 3 am. A fierce headache lurking at the back of his head. A tight scalp, as if the brain beneath it was about to explode. That might be the best thing; for room service or the maid to walk into Suite 547 of the Nonamia hotel in Tverskaya Street, brush past the potted orchids and see Jeremy on the floor with his tortured brain spattered all over the red-flocked sofas.

  How ironic that he’d survived the sub-prime crisis, steered clear of the collateralised debt obligations, always been suspicious of Madoff for reasons he could never quite decide, only to be gouged senseless by his shareholding in a Russian coal mine that turned out to exist only in computer-generated images emblazoned over the glossy pages of the prospectus.

  He’d known it was a risk, but wasn’t everything? He thought he was safe. Now he was just like the rest of the failures he despised, a fool who tried to take a quick ill-considered profit. He hadn’t hedged his own bets and that was the whole point of a hedge fund. You covered yourself either way.

  The client accounts had been swept to cover the prospecting fees and the extra payments necessary in a town like Moscow. The money, plus a healthy increase, would be back in their accounts before the next quarterly statements were due. All he had to do was find a way to airbrush the figures until he traded his way clear. It was supposed to be a win–win. It had turned into a fucking bloodbath. Pretty much everything had gone and it would be a long time before he got it back. If ever.

  The family trusts and the big clients’ accounts were all but empty. London’s wealthiest divorcee, the former budget airline stewardess who’d been awarded thirty million from that gay German prince, was cleaned out. So was the couple from Inverness who’d sold their leaky lodge and twenty thousand acres of prime stalking for twenty million to some dry-cleaning magnate. And, of course, Sandy. How was he going to tell his closest friend that all his money, every last pitiful penny, was gone?

  There had to be a solution, but where? How? What had made him do something so stupid? He didn’t need to. He wasn’t strung on the wire like others he knew. His reputation, up to now at least, was solid. A steady pair of hands. Not the biggest, but all the more reliable for it.

  Then it came to him, sitting on the ridiculous flocked velvet sofa, the reason why. He’d wanted to prove to himself he hadn’t lost his nerve, that he was still a silverback to be reckoned with. All because that young American had taken his business elsewhere.

  He crossed the room to the window. Six lanes of traffic crawled underneath. A neon sign advertising Ferrari cars flickered uncertainly. Under the sulphurous streetlights, stick figures in voluminous down coats made their way between slagheaps of leftover snow. In seven hours lines of tourists would form an orderly queue to file through Lenin’s tomb in Red Square. The stallholders outside the Metro would be preparing for the day’s trading, the rich would continue to spend.

  He’d always taken the long view, unlike most of his peers whose memory lasted only as long as the average CEO tenure – about five and a half years. No wonder they kept making the same mistakes. They were too young to remember and too arrogant to learn that interest-only mortgages were popular before the 1929 Great Depression too.

  He used to distribute tidbits of economic history to clients and fund managers, most of whom could barely remember Nick Leeson’s name and had forgotten all about Jeffrey Skilling. He’d explain the Gaussian Probability Distribution and Keynesian theses to recent widows, newly minted divorcees and eager young market traders. It felt good to see them nodding attentively, imbibing his experience and wisdom. If only he’d taken his own advice.

  Not that he’d suffer. There was enough to see him through. The Jezebel was safe, the pictures, the cash in Zurich. Reinvention was also a possibility. Others had done it. He thought he’d never have to.

  It was his injured pride, the inevitable destruction of his reputation that stung. Hubris. Nemesis. Bloody Greeks. Id. Ego. Alter ego. Bloody Freud. Schadenfreude was all that was left. Jeremy knew that far too much of his natural self was tethered to plush material things that shouldn’t matter: the respectful glance of maître d’s, the impeccable tailoring from Huntsman, the knowledge that if he wanted something he could have it. That was the reason his wives had left him, because under the luxury enfolding them like cashmere, there was not much there.

  ‘I can’t be with you any longer,’ Isobel had said. ‘It’s like living with a m
irage.’ Sally had just removed herself with a series of eloquent shrugs. At the time, he didn’t understand. He thought he was real enough. He thought he knew himself well enough. Most of himself anyway. Other parts were less clear, deliberately so.

  If he managed to get out of this he’d be so clean and neat that he would be held up as a model of probity and financial caution. He would stop cigars for a year and give the money to school building projects in third world countries. He would call it a day with the young girls. He would find some respectable divorced woman about his own age. He would try to like her children, if there were any.

  A nerve in his shoulder went into spasm and he winced. Suddenly he wanted to speak to Rosie. He wanted to bask in the reflection of her adoring childhood gaze, the one that said he was the daddy who would do no wrong, who could fix everything. He wanted to hug her and inhale her fresh-skinned confidence in him. But Dubai was in the same time zone as Moscow. She’d still be asleep.

  He thought of Amy, forgetting how bored he had been when he’d last seen her. What time was it in London? He might catch her before she went to sleep. He scrolled down for her number and rang it. There was a message, spoken in breathy urgent tones as if she was either about to have an orgasm or rush off to some life-changing event. He couldn’t call Sandy. He couldn’t tell Sandy what had happened.

  He picked at the embroidery on the sofa. Bits of it came away in his hand. The whole country was like this hotel suite: a sumptuous stage set that, when you touched it, began to disintegrate. The taps didn’t work in the bathroom, so what good was the Philippe Starck bath? The toilet took an age to flush and, last night, tossing in the emperor-size bed with its mountain of pillows and cushions, he’d discovered toenail clippings in the sheets.

  Jeremy knew what he wanted. He knew it was wrong, that it would solve nothing, but at that moment, he needed oblivion. Not the bleary fog provided by more than one glass of alcohol, but something sharper, more savage.