Learning to Die

by Thomas Maloney

  Lisa was in Laos, on that hike. Afterwards, she followed them around half of Asia, ignoring hints. When they finally shook her off, leaving her with some wacko Americans on Phuket, Natalie was struck by remorse. But annoying Lisa has done just fine.

  Lisa kept in touch with the backpacker crowd, Natalie recalls, and always knew who was doing what with whom. She’ll put the crucial enquiry in a casual, gossipy postscript. She glances at Dan but he’s miles away, poring over a complicated diagram on his tablet. She and Dan don’t read each other’s emails: it’s a privacy thing, a respect thing, like not using the toilet while the other person’s in the shower. Or it’s a trust thing.

  As she types, her heart flutters. But the involvement of that organ is incidental biology.

  May God bless Brenda, who has the key to a friend’s empty flat, and who, without asking where James was planning to stay, positively encouraged their evening towards that destination. His booking at the youth hostel won’t be needed. In her friend’s grubby kitchen, which is miraculously provisioned with booze, fruit and ice, they make cocktails that would have cost him dear at a bar.

  After a raid on the kitchen cupboards, he returns to the sofa to find her lying on the floor on her front, eyes closed. Surely she hasn’t passed out on him?

  ‘Brenda?’

  ‘When I was little,’ she says, wide awake, her eyes still closed, ‘if my dad was riding his luck, we’d go on holiday to Spain. The Costa Brava. I remember lying exactly like this on the beach, eyes closed, head on my arms, listening to the waves breaking — that slow, irregular rhythm, sometimes a big wave, sometimes a small one — and feeling the hot sand between my toes, the breeze coming and going, nothing to do but soak it all in, thinking, “This is now. You wanted this, you waited for months for this, and here it is. Soon it will be over and you’ll be home, with lessons and homework and people you hate, remembering this moment and wishing you were back here. But this is now, right now.” I was just thinking the same thing: “This is now.”’

  Not much later, they’re in Brenda’s friend’s bed. James is in the stupor of any starved man presented with a feast, and content to follow Brenda’s lead. She won’t stay underneath him, but rolls him this way and that, laughing, until they lie side by side in an awkward tangle.

  The laughing troubles him. To James, sex is about as funny as appendicitis or the Cuban Missile Crisis. He has a vivid memory of Becks once laughing in his face. There he was, desperate, defenceless — ethereal, you might say, flush’d and like a throbbing star — and she laughed. Couldn’t help it, she said. The look on his face. She apologised lovingly but he never quite forgave her. Anything but that. Brenda’s laughter isn’t so bad: she isn’t laughing at him. Is she?

  Gradually, these thoughts fade as his mental field collapses into a point. He unthinkingly takes hold of her hip, tries to turn her to better direct his efforts. She disengages. Did he go too far? ‘If you want it that way,’ she says in a matter-of-fact voice, rising onto hands and widely-planted knees, ‘we might as well do it properly.’ Her eyes flash a friendly challenge. Christ, this woman means business, after all. How long will he last? He finds his gaze fixed on the knotted contours of her upper back, the deep valley between muscles drawn together over her spine. For a brief, weird instant he’s fucking a guy, not a girl. This distracting notion helps to delay his moment of crisis, which nevertheless rushes upon him all too soon.

  The sheet splits loudly, right between his knees. A few stunned seconds follow — deep, slowing exhalations — before they both dissolve in laughter.

  Brenda wakes before James. The flat is cold. She pees, brushes her teeth, and then lies back down to watch him for a while. Every morning after every social interaction, her impulsive habit is to pick over each mortifying episode — the wrong things she said, the people who laughed at her or ignored her, the witnesses to her freakish symptoms — and work herself into a delicious agony of shame. But this morning is different — she casts her mind back over the previous day and doesn’t feel any trace of her signature emotion.

  James doesn’t snore. He’s dead to the world. These writers get up late. He probably has a cheap ticket only valid on one train.

  ‘Hey. Morning. When’s your train?’

  ‘Hmm.’ He sighs, moistens his mouth, opens his eyes. They wander down over the small breasts that for some reason she isn’t ashamed of, the washboard stomach, then back up to meet hers. ‘Love is pleasin’,’ he sings, in a soft, Irish lilt. ‘Love is teasin’. Ten fifteen.’

  She wants him again. Didn’t expect to. She throws back the duvet, and when he reaches for it, pushes him down.

  ‘We have ten minutes,’ she says, then adds, ‘Invergarry and Merryman’s Bay — this isn’t really going to work, is it?’

  Mike arrives at his desk early on Monday morning. He looks through the bar charts showing the Box’s new signals, and then opens the window where inflows and outflows are specified. He slowly punches out the zeroes of two hundred million dollars and hits enter to calculate the new target positions. The Box uses a ton of leverage, meaning he’ll have to do nearly a billion dollars of trades to regain his risk target. He opens all the trading platforms and arranges them across his screens. Markets are calm, and he’ll trickle the orders throughout the morning. The first trade sitting in the holding pen, waiting for him to authorize it, is to buy seventy-six million US dollars against Japanese yen. Here goes.

  At two the next morning, Mike finds himself awake and can’t help checking his phone to see if anything is going on. He reads: ‘YEN DOWN 6% ON BOJ INTERVENTION STATEMENT’. What the. He’s short yen, right? He’s definitely short. The trend has been up, but Crispin’s eccentric bells and whistles are outweighing it. A gift from the gods.

  But. These big shocks often reverse on a sixpence. Especially if they happen with Europe and America sleeping, on thin volumes. It could just be a flash-crash. His instincts scream that he should lock in the profits. He flips open his laptop to access his work computer remotely.

  Crispin would tell him to let it be. Ad hoc interventions are a big no-no: let others be greedy and fearful, he’d say. But surely this is a special case. Mike opens the dashboard: the Box is up ten million dollars. He can’t update the signals from here, but they’d probably tell him to cut the position — the risk controls would see to that, wouldn’t they? Might as well do it now, secure the gains. It’s not supposed to be possible to trade remotely, but Mij once showed him a trick to get round the barrier, just in case he ever needed to make a one-off adjustment out of hours. His position is one hundred and sixty-seven million, so he could sell, say, a hundred — a little more than half. Make it one twenty. He opens the currency platform and punches it in: ‘SELL $120M JPY vs. USD’. Quote. Execute. Filled. He feels a surge of relief — he’s locked in the winnings — and goes to back to bed.

  He has a dream in which he did the trade the wrong way round — sold yen instead of bought — but bluffers like him are used to such anxiety dreams and he rides it calmly. It’s okay, he reminds himself during moments of wakefulness. I’m up big, and I’m safe. It’s not until he’s sitting on the tube on the way to the office that realisation hits him in the stomach: he really did sell, not buy. He loaded the boat. He’s short about thirty billion yen. He’s probably blown his risk limits. Rogue trader. Fuck. Shitting fuck.

  The crowded escalator, the pedestrian crossing, the lift — they all take an eternity. So. An ignominious end to ten wasted years. Sacked for unauthorised trading. Criminal investigation. Car-crash CV. Tabloid mockery. At last, with sinking heart but maintaining an appearance of calm, Mike walks to his desk and logs on. The screaming headline has changed — now it says, ‘YEN DOWN 10% ON BOJ INTERVENTION STATEMENT’. His eyes swivel across to the tracker. His accidental trade has sent the Box up another twelve million.

  Breathe. Get it right this time. ‘BUY $200 MILLION JPY vs. USD’. Buy. Not sell. A
ctually, let’s make it a hundred and ninety-one point five. Looks more like a real MRI trade. The bid-ask is wide but who cares. Quote. Execute. Filled. Confirmed. Done.

  As soon as the new trade feeds into his spreadsheet, the yo-yoing numbers settle down. He freezes the live data-feed for a moment, to savour their fat blackness. For reasons unknown, copper has moved in his favour too. Month-to-date profit: +$27,744,550. Year-to-date profit: +$33,030,898. Not bad for a night’s work.

  ‘Who’s got a yen position?’ snaps the big boss, the Generalissimo, as the trading floor begins to fill. Some traders look smug, some vaguely disappointed to have missed the action, a few pale and staring at their screens. ‘Rocket?’

  ‘The MRI was short,’ says Mike, brightly but without betraying any of the post-traumatic elation he feels. ‘It’s decently up.’

  ‘Good. Now you’re going to tell me it wants to double up. Underreaction effect, right? You seriously think this market’s underreacted? Underreacted, my arse.’

  ‘No — it’s cutting the position. I’ve already worked over a hundred bucks at seventy-eight fifty. It’s the risk model kicking in.’

  The Generalissimo, whose largest positions are measured not in millions of dollars but billions, looks momentarily impressed. ‘For once your Crispin-o-matic contraption is actually thinking like a trader.’ Then the spotlight of his attention swings off elsewhere.

  Mike slowly, stealthily opens the MRI’s virtual bonnet, tweaks a few well-buried risk parameters and hits a re-calc. Fancy that: the black-box supercomputer wants to trim positions across the board. Very sensible, this system of his. His contract entitles him to a twelve per cent cut of profits, which, as even he can calculate, currently amounts to more than two million pounds for the year.

  A ray of autumn sunshine, having entered the atrium’s pinball machine of architectural glass somewhere high above, lays its hand miraculously on his arm. He’s the Rocket Jesus: the chosen one.

  10. Explicit response

  ‘Strong diseases require strong remedies.’

  Montaigne

  By eleven, the Japanese dust has begun to settle and Mike takes a break, dodging the cabs to cross Park Lane. His daily constitutional is mocked by market-obsessed colleagues, but contributes to the semblance of self-assurance, of trusting the Box, on which his act depends. He shields his phone from the low sun and checks for personal emails. There is one.

  Dear Mike,

  At least I have hope. What hope do you have? You’ll always be a parasite. A gambler who doesn’t even have the guts to gamble with his own money. You invent nothing, you produce nothing, you inspire nothing, you facilitate sweet nothing. Your industry is specifically designed to contribute nothing positive to the world. You already know this.

  Sincerely,

  James

  Mike frowns, then smiles blandly. He wouldn’t expect a waster like James to understand concepts like price discovery, liquidity provision and market efficiency. Should he try to explain? Could he? Something about peaceful civilisations being built on systems of fair exchange? The challenge does not appeal. He pockets his phone and walks on.

  Dan Mock is getting cold hands on his morning ride. His heavy gloves have seen him comfortably through the last few winters, but maybe the insulation has become compressed, or air is leaking through the stitching. Or maybe the vibration is doing something to his circulation. Working the throttle and brake has become hard work, and when he gets to work his hands feel weak for the next hour or two. One morning, he tries to help his technician disassemble a shielding rig but the nuts won’t budge. ‘Which gorilla tightened these?’ he asks, straining on the spanner. ‘You did,’ is the amused reply. Dan sighs and returns to the beam-modeller on his computer. He’s not employed for his spanner skills, after all.

  The next morning, on the bike, he becomes aware that not only his hands but his toes are playing up. Definitely a circulation problem. The cold, posture and vibration might all be playing a part. He decides to make a few changes, as an experiment: extra liner gloves and socks; no coffee or alcohol and keep hydrated; stretch before and after each ride and at a halfway rest. If this basket of changes does the trick, he’ll withdraw them one by one to identify the true remedy.

  But the changes don’t seem to help. After a week, Dan reinstates the much-missed glass of rosso and puts up with the uncomfortable ride. He lets the technicians deal with nuts and bolts, and works instead on some calculations in six-dimensional phase space, and his strategy for changing Nat’s mind about having a baby.

  She described Chris as a dead end. She won’t settle for another dead end in her life — she’ll come round.

  At the age of thirty, James F. Saunders has discovered the art of sexting. Brenda is less enthusiastic and often sends dismissive replies like, Glad to hear it, thinking of u too, sleep well xxx, but once in a while she humours him with a single explicit response (his persistent follow-ups are patiently ignored). One favourite, which he saved in his phone’s tiny memory, was: wetter than a scottish summer right now, got all 4 fingers in there but its not the same. ps. ur a writer, dont get rsi xx

  When he’s not risking RSI — so much for the sublimation of desire — James is making progress on the novel. He thinks constantly of the great writers who have trodden this love-path before him. Sappho, by all accounts. Catullus, Ovid, Chaucer. The fair youth and dark lady. The Metaphysicals, Emily B., Tolstoy. La Moustache had a few fine moments in his fleuveroo but got hung up on jealousy — universality lost. The Exile, faithful married man branded a perv the world over, made heroic attempts culminating in Molly’s heavenly rant. Colonial love-merchants like E. M., Larry Durrell and the bondage queen. And of course, the Americans: Miller, Mailer (those two sound the same here in the north-east), the Bellower, the Upstart. A parade of masters, but they all missed the mark. Thank god.

  Yes, James shares Montaigne’s tendency to write — or at least think — like a dictionary of quotations. Adrift in a sea of these prophets’ words. The essayist notes wistfully that Epicurus did not introduce a single quotation into any of the three hundred volumes he left behind him. Bully for the old glutton. In 300 B.C. you could read everything there was in a couple of weeks — Homer and whatnot — and then forget about it. Twenty-three centuries later, the human race is drowning in its written excreta. But this time, somehow, James must build an outcrop of words he can claim as his own.

  If he sexts Brenda on her lunchbreak, will she respond?

  Unlikely. Brenda is running. While her brother hits the Mayfair treadmill, and again ogles, and again contemplates his oblique reflection, Brenda jogs up to the unmarked deer path that does a lap of Ben Tee, just below the snowline. Four hilly miles is just right to sharpen the dinner appetite, and with Brenda’s job no shower is required — a quick vest-and-sock change in the van will suffice.

  She jogs lightly over the rough, wet ground. Above her, a dozen deer hinds race a cloud-shadow across the mountainside. The low sun lights up a puddled morass in dazzling monochrome, and later, as she ducks and blinks in a gloomy stand of spruce, a single, soft beam drapes itself over a bough.

  Brenda was six years old when she challenged her grandfather, Old Vickers, to chase her round the bandstand in the local park. He was a big, red-faced man, like her father, and he worshipped her. ‘Alright, Brennie,’ he gasped after a token lap. ‘That’s enough for Grandad.’

  ‘But I’m only a little girl,’ she complained, ‘and you’re a man. You have to run faster than that.’ She pulled him by the hand, broke away with a mocking laugh, and when she next looked back he was staggering, his mouth gaping in a kind of yawn and his arm flopping about. Then he fell over.

  She ran to him, asked him what the matter was. But he just stared up at her, looking sad and strange. She shouted for help but nobody was near enough. She didn’t want to leave him, but when she sat on the ground and said she’d look after him, he pushed
her away and seemed to be angry with her. She kept begging him to say something, but he didn’t. Not a word. It was a long time until a passer-by saw them and called an ambulance, and Old Vickers died a few hours later.

  In a shocked stupor of guilt, Brenda told the paramedic, ‘We were walking and he just fell over. We were walking really slowly. He just yawned and fell over.’ This was the version of events that the Vickers family first heard, and Brenda has never corrected it.

  She feels her ankle begin to turn on a loose rock, and catches it just in time. The deer, traumatised survivors of a recent cull, have completed a lap of the mountain too.

  James F. Saunders does not write to a weekly schedule or observe weekends; all days begin alike. Some few turn into good writing days, the others bad. Saturday opens promisingly: the indignant sea tosses spray against his window, dawn hardly bothers to break, and James, having taken nothing stronger than an instant coffee, is having visions. Creative visions. More specifically, he’s losing the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction. Was Gaddafi really real? With those sunglasses, that curling lip? Or was he just another fictional bad guy like Sauron, the Kaiser and Darth Vader? Was James’ aborted English degree a very disappointing novel? His keyboard rattles.

  ‘Oi, James!’

  The deus ex machina. Is that you, Samuel Beckett? Or is it Dmitri Karamazov? Not Mephisto, surely — that would be hackneyed.

  ‘James, are you up there? Is he up there, Mrs Peacock? James, want to earn a few more quid?’

  At the mention of money, reality and fiction begin to disengage. Earn a few quid. Yes. Need to do that. James opens the creaking casement and a gust of salty air rolls in, banishing Muammar and Mephisto from the room.

  ‘Hello! Rob? Sure. How long for?’