A Week in December

by Sebastian Faulks

  Consulting her catalogue, Sophie saw that it contained something called Cash Cow, 2007. ‘Arguably the most daring piece undertaken by a contemporary artist, Cash Cow is a mixed-media piece made from sterling banknotes and lutetium, the rarest metal in the world (symbol Lu, atomic number 71). The materials alone cost in excess of £4 million. “I wanted to challenge people’s preconceptions about art,” says Liam Hogg.

  ‘Please note. Guests may spend no more than thirty seconds each in front of this exhibit.’

  Sophie Topping was determined not to miss Cash Cow. When she had queued for twenty minutes, Lance told her he was going home and she told him she’d catch a taxi later.

  Eventually it was her turn in the pink half-light, and she stood alone at last before the exhibition centrepiece. It was a life-size model of a cow in a glass case. It was coloured pink and had flaky silver-coloured horns and silver eyes, which gave it an odd, blinded look. This was the lutetium, presumably. Sophie peered through the glass and could make out the Queen’s face several times on the animal’s barrelled flanks. The cow itself, she recognised from a semi-rural childhood, was of a shorthorn dairy breed with painfully full udders.

  It didn’t seem to do anything, other than stare blindly out. Sophie wondered if she should press a button and get it to moo or poo or chew the cud or something. She turned to her catalogue for help: ‘The piece is made from papier mâché of which the paper element consists of 60,000 £50 notes and is coated with new notes of the same denomination.

  ‘The horns and eyes are coated with lutetium, the world’s most precious metal, the heaviest and hardest of the rare-earth metals. It is too expensive to obtain in any quantity and therefore has few, if any, commercial uses. Although non-toxic, its dust is a fire and explosion hazard.’

  ‘Time’s up, madam,’ said the attendant. ‘Move on now, please.’

  Back in the main gallery, Sophie finished the catalogue entry. ‘Cash Cow was sponsored by Allied Royal Bank, Salzar-Steinberg Securities and Park Vista Capital. It is for sale tonight at £8 million.’

  Sophie went to find Nasim. Perhaps she would be able to explain the point of Cash Cow. She understood why it was so expensive, because Liam Hogg had to cover his costs, but she wondered if she was missing something else about it. Unfortunately, Nasim had taken the limousine back to Havering-atte-Bower, leaving Sophie to go down alone into the cold of Dover Street.

  As she stepped out to hail a taxi, a bicyclist with no lights on came shooting in the wrong direction up the one-way street and swore at her as she leapt back on to the pavement, her heart thumping.

  At 7.45, John Veals had a chance meeting with his son on the stairs of their house in Holland Park. As each shifted from foot to foot, trying to think of something to say, one of Veals’s six mobile phones let out a message bleep, and he took it into his study to read. The identity of the sender, according to Veals’s personal encryption, was ‘Kayad’, which spelled ‘Dayak’ backwards – a reference to a tribe of East Indian headhunters. The number was therefore Stewart Thackeray’s and the message said: ‘Our Mutual Friend says yes, def.’ The question had referred to the debt covenant at ARB. By the time Veals had finished his small but intense celebration, Finn, to his relief, was no longer on the landing, and the awkward moment had passed.

  John Veals fired up the screens in his study and checked a variety of prices around the world. Everything was in order; everything was behaving in the way that it should, and he felt the satisfaction of an engineer who has carefully tested all the parts of a moving system. And yet, he thought, there was only one thing so mournful as a battle lost, and that was a battle won ... The planning, the precision, the sheer skill of his and Duffy’s trades seemed to be bringing Veals the overwhelming victory he had craved; but when he thought about Ryman’s part in it, the rumour that had been necessary to inflate the price of Allied Royal, he felt ... Not guilty, exactly; but, well ... It was, as a matter of simple fact, the first time since his days of front-running as a young futures trader that he had done anything that contravened the guidelines of the regulatory bodies. He had thought himself better than that; he had believed so much in his own superior ability that he had not deigned to do the kind of thing that others in the Bank did almost every day. It was a pity that this trade had needed a preliminary fluffing up before it could be placed; it was just a small manoeuvre necessitated by the complex nature of the quite legitimate trade he had envisaged; it was no big deal, but still when he thought about it, John Veals felt ... What was the word? he wondered. Wistful, perhaps. A little wistful.

  Upstairs, Finn was watching a football match on his flat-screen television, propped in his favourite position against the end of the bed. It was between his own team, whom he’d supported since he was seven years old, and the club which, like Finn himself in Dream Team, had just signed Spike Borowski.

  Open on his thighs with their skinny jeans was a laptop where the latest stats and news from Dream Team were unfolding. Three of Finn’s fantasy eleven were in real-life action, so it was a big night.

  ‘And I see the new signing Spike Borowski warming up, Frank,’ said the commentator about an hour later. ‘Do you think we might get a look at him in the last twenty minutes?’

  ‘Aye, it looks like it, John. I think he’ll take off the big Bulgarian. He’s run his socks off but he’s not had much change out of their defence. Borowski could be the man to break the deadlock.’

  ‘Yes-s-s-s,’ Finn heard himself hiss, and his fist made a piston movement in the air.

  Spike, now fully stripped off, was bending down and touching his toes, jogging on the spot and getting an earful of instructions from Mehmet Kundak. The manager was wearing an ankle-length sheepskin coat that made him look like an Anatolian shepherd, and his transitional lenses had turned to black under the floodlights. Spike nodded at intervals, though Finn wondered how much he really understood. Kundak made emphatic movements with his arm, then quick rotations of the wrist. Finally he tapped his temple with his finger. It looked a complicated way, Finn thought, of telling Spike to score a bloody goal. Then the official – the man who apparently did this job at every football match, seeming to pop up at places 200 miles apart within minutes – held up the illuminated board where the bulbs formed a number 9; and off trotted Vlad the Inhaler, head down, straight past Spike without a look or a handshake. Kundak gave Spike a good-luck slap on the rump, and his English career began.

  Finn was rattling between websites and television stations in order to keep abreast of the progress in the games that would affect his fantasy team’s progress. What he really needed, he thought, was a third resource: double-screening didn’t really give him all the information he required.

  During a temporary lull for treatment to Ali al-Asraf, Finn rolled a small joint with the Aurora/Super Skunk Two mixture. He had secreted Simon Tindle’s outsize stash in a suitcase deep within his fitted closets and transferred a manageable amount into a zipped sandwich bag for immediate use. There was no risk in lighting up. He’d checked his mother was watching a costume drama – Shropshire Towers by Alfred Huntley Edgerton, ‘adapted’ to include scenes of oral sex – on television in the sitting room, her hand clamped round a bottle of Léoville Barton 1990, and his father never came upstairs.

  He sucked deeply and settled back against the bed. The smoke made his throat constrict for a moment as it rasped its way down into his lungs; but, as Tindle has predicted, the effect was almost instantaneous. His eyes watered for a moment, and a tear ran out of the corner.

  There was a free kick that Danny Bective was lining up at the edge of the penalty area. Finn could see Spike being heavily marked on the far post by the centre half, who had a handful of shirt to keep his man from jumping too high.

  If Spike should score and lead his team to a victory, then the result would push Finn’s own club down into the relegation zone. On the other hand, given that the other three players from his fantasy team had all done well for their respective real-lif
e clubs that night (a goal and an assist from the forwards, a clean sheet from the full back), it was possible that his fantasy eleven would go top of the league-within-a-league that he and his school friends were running.

  Which meant more to him: his real team or his fantasy? The Aurora/Skunk Two made such a nice call hard to make. Then Danny Bective hit the free kick straight into the wall in any event, so the dilemma was unresolved.

  Finn sucked in the remainder of the joint and lay back. His eyes took in the poster of Evelina Belle, gazing down at him in an almost caring, almost maternal way.

  There were three minutes added for injuries, despite the protestations of both managers in the ‘technical’ area, the small white marked box in front of the dugout, so called, Ken had told him, ‘because, technically, inside it you can call the opposing manager an aunt.’ Ken always swore in predictive text.

  Finn’s mouth was dry from the skunk and he was finding reality hard to cling on to.

  Then Ali al-Asraf made a run down the left flank. He was quick, you had to hand it to him. He looked up, passed and – bloody hell, Borowski was clean through the offside trap: the centre halves who’d kept Finn’s team up in the Premiership for three seasons – he’d sprung them like a cheap padlock; and the assistant’s flag was pointing at the ground ...

  Finn stumbled to his feet. And now there was no doubt at all, no choices to be made between a lifelong loyalty and a momentary gain in an imagined world – no difficulty in choosing between the real and the fantastic ...

  ‘Go o-o-o-n-n-n,’ he yelled, as Borowski took al-Asraf’s pass in his stride, steadied for a moment and buried the ball in the lower right-hand corner.

  ‘Oh y-e-e-s-s-s-s.’ Finn fell back against the bed, more than one tear now running down his smooth cheeks.

  At midnight, Nasim al-Rashid knocked at her son’s bedroom door.

  ‘Come in.’

  ‘Can I sit on the bed?’

  ‘If you like.’

  Hassan was reading a book: Milestones by Sayyid Qutb.

  ‘You’ve read that before, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes. So?’

  ‘Hass, darling, we’re worried about you. Your father and me.’

  ‘Why?’ Hassan’s voice had the surly edge it had developed at the age of about fourteen – as though he was being persecuted.

  ‘You seem so ... Angry. And we’d like you to have a job. It’s not good for you to spend so much time at the mosque.’

  ‘I thought you wanted me to be a good Muslim.’

  ‘Of course we do. No one’s more devout than your father, as you know. But sometimes young men can get too wrapped up in religion. Not just Muslims. Others too. It’s not healthy to spend so much time in your room.’

  Hassan said nothing.

  Nasim looked down at the duvet and pinched the edge of it in her fingers. ‘Where were you today?’

  ‘I had to see some friends about a project.’

  ‘You left the house very early. You were away all day.’

  ‘I know. And what did you do?’

  ‘Me?’ said Nasim. ‘Oh, you know, the usual. Things in the house. Then I went to the West End to see an art show. A man called Liam Hogg. Have you heard of him?’

  ‘Everyone has.’

  When Hassan was a child, Nasim believed he would do the things that had been denied to her and Knocker, because their families had been immigrants. The education both of them received had been rudimentary, and the job prospects grim for people of their background in post-industrial Bradford. But Hassan ... Born speaking English, and born beautiful, too, with his long black lashes and his bowed upper lip: the only son of a family that cared for him so deeply and had somehow stumbled on the money to provide for him – surely with his natural intelligence he was destined for greatness, or, at the very least, great happiness. He was a curious and gentle little boy, not rumbustious and aggressive, as so many others were, but not weak or retiring, either – just interested in the world, in how it worked, in stories people told about it, all of which he approached with his head on one side, ready to listen, keen to know the answers. He had something else the other boys didn’t have: an ability to sympathise with others, even grown-ups. Sometimes he patted his mother’s hand in consolation when he saw she was upset, and Nasim thought he had inherited his father’s simple kindness.

  The mother’s love for her boy was intense; and if there was sometimes a trace of sentimentality in it, then that was necessary, she thought, as a kind of protection or socialising of the dangerously visceral passion that underlay it.

  Nasim had found it hard to accept the changes that came over Hassan as he grew older. When he hung out with the bad boys at school she could see how artificial was the veneer of disdain he’d applied to himself, how thin the self-defence. And then the ridiculous student politics. She knew little about these things herself, and some of what he said about what America had done in the Middle East seemed quite likely to be true; but what worried Nasim was not the detail of what he proposed or the old-fashioned Communist language, but the degree of self-dislike that it suggested.

  By giving Hassan all the advantages that she and Knocker hadn’t had, she believed she would remove him from friction, place him in a comfortable mainstream where he could use all his energies to flourish and waste none of them, as his parents had, on the attritional business of surviving.

  She was cut to the heart to see it wasn’t so. The boy didn’t seem to rejoice in the place that had been carved out for him by the sweat and love of his parents. He became distrustful, separated from them and from their beliefs and alienated too, in some way Nasim couldn’t start to understand, even from himself. She asked advice from friends and she consulted parenting manuals. They all stressed that children were their own creatures; that while genetically they were a half each of their parents, this input was of relatively little importance because what they chiefly were was something else: themselves. And there was almost nothing you could do to influence this hard, unknowable core. One of the self-help books compared the mother to a gardener who’d lost the labels on her seed packet. When the young plant grew up you didn’t know if it would turn out nasturtium or broad bean; all you could do was encourage it to be as good a flower or pulse as it could be.

  Whatever Hassan was, whatever the true nature that he was growing to fulfil, Nasim thought, he wasn’t happy. She had to nerve herself for these conversations because she found his abruptness so upsetting and because she feared that by interfering she would make things worse. She approached his bedroom door, therefore, only when she was certain that not to do so risked causing greater damage.

  ‘My love, if there’s anything wrong, you would tell me, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘What sort of thing?’

  ‘If you were unhappy? People get depressed. It’s not a weakness. And boys of your age. Everyone knows that puberty is hard, but in fact it was fine for you, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘I mean, it’s quite fun, growing up, going out and so on. But for young men I think your age is harder. The early twenties. I don’t know why. Anyway, all I want to say is, you’d always come to Mummy, wouldn’t you? If I could help.’

  ‘Aye. Thanks.’

  Nasim stood up. She felt saddened by her inability to reach the heart of Hassan’s problems and bruised by his coldness. Her offer of help if he needed it, to be ‘always there’ for him ... Pathetic, really, she thought, when once, when he was young, they had had this majestic intimacy ...

  But what more could you do?

  Five

  Thursday, December 20

  I

  The Pizza Palace Book of the Year prize, somewhat controversially, was awarded to either a children’s story, a travel book or a biography. Excluding all fiction was a bold thing to do, but it was felt that novelists already had enough prizes of their own not to need the £25,000 on offer from the restaurant chain that claimed to have put the pizza into pizzazz.

  None of
the board of PP was much of a reader (three out of eight voted against sponsoring the prize), but the finance director knew the man who ran the Zephyr public relations agency, which had some connections in the arts world. Trevor Dunn was his name, and his biggest arts client had been a theatre company that specialised in putting on musicals adapted from television programmes. Dunn asked Nadine and Tara, his two most recent trainees, to help him do a preliminary sift of all the entries and gave them lunch at a hotel in Covent Garden for their trouble.

  There wasn’t time to read the books, but by studying the jackets and the blurbs, Trevor, Nadine and Tara got the list down to about twenty in each category and sent them off to the preliminary judges: reviewers or trade insiders who were willing to look though twenty books for an ‘honorarium’ of £400. After the category winners had been chosen, Trevor earned his own larger fee from Pizza Palace by luring in some names for the final three-book judging. As early as June, he had been able to announce his panel for the December showdown. They were a junior transport minister from the second Major government who was said to be one of the few politicians who read books; a lively woman presenter on children’s television; the ‘esteemed literary critic’ Alexander Sedley; the ‘well-known reviewer and biographer’ Peggy Wilson; and – Trevor’s coup – the ‘former Girls From Behind singer and now TV personality in her own right’, Lisa Doyle. In its mixture of gravity and showbiz, Trevor thought it was the best panel he’d yet managed, and the board of Pizza Palace, counting the newspaper column inches his agency mailed to them, was inclined to agree.

  One person violently dissented, and that was R. Tranter. His biography of the Victorian novelist A. H. Edgerton had earned him £1,000 as category winner and he had reasonable hopes that it could see off a challenge from Bolivia: Land of Shadows by Antony Cazenove in Travel and Alfie the Humble Engine by Sally Higgs in Children. And then he had seen the list of judges one morning in the newspaper and his cereal had turned to cotton wool in his mouth. The transport man would be all right, the girl singer would be keen to show off and he’d been nice enough to old Peggy Wilson at the books-page party where Patrick Warrender had introduced him. But Sedley ... Christ.