‘So what’s your secret, Geri Molloy?’ He lets my hand fall and walks over to a big white couch behind which stands a posse of obvious Texans grinning like apes.
‘C’mere,’ he flops down and smacks the space beside him.
Max is well known as a giant playboy round town, is great pals with Charlton Heston and so evangelical about the right to bear arms that he has launched a nationwide series of Babes ’n’ Bullets weekends where women can fondle magnums and take turns shooting cardboard rapists in the balls. The Grope urges me forward with a hideous smile. Kapoor stands over to the side with a princely aloofness.
‘You got all the hotshots on your trail. Must be quite a little charmer.’ He guffaws, his wattle redneck puffing in and out. The atmosphere is part locker room, the only thing missing is that he doesn’t pull me onto his lap.
‘Geri Molloy,’ Max-a-Billion repeats, nodding his Stetson as if he is testing the name for size. Stares steadily up at me with black eyes that he believes can burn through to the true core. I have seen it before, these men who place all trust in their own judgements.
‘Siddown here,’ he belts the cushion beside him. I sit at the furthest reach. Everyone else in the room remains standing, apart from a few of Kapoor’s boys who are huddled over some paperwork at the far end of a roomful of guys who are all, of course, convinced that I am only here because I am shagging my biggest client.
‘Let’s cosy,’ he says and for a moment I think he might grab me and mash my face in his groin.
‘So ole Kappor here told you the story? Told you what I need?’
‘Yes.’
‘Got the key to Felix Mann’s heart? You gonna work your special magic on this fella?’ The Grope stands over at a diagonal like a henchman, arms folded across his chest. ‘You gonna find out what Felix wants to do with his 13%?’
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘She’ll do her best, you boys hear that?’ he bellows and the grinning circle chuckles on cue like quiet hyenas. Kapoor is inspecting his shoes as if he has just trodden in dogshit. ‘And tell me, Miss Molloy, just how good is your best?’
‘It’s real good,’ I say and Max-a-Billion slaps his thigh.
‘It’s real good,’ he honks, ‘it’s real good,’ and the Grope is grinning wildly and the whole room is an orchestra of merriment. ‘You hear that, Ae-Neel?’ He throws a glance over at Kapoor who is locked in a rigor mortis on the far side of the room. ‘Nah, he’s got no sense a humour.’
Max-a-Billion leans back, rests his arm along the back of the couch, his fingers almost touching my hair like we were in a cinema. I have cheek strain from holding this polite smile. ‘So where you from, Geri Molloy?’
‘Ireland.’
‘Figures. Smart and hungry.’ He nods, looking me up and down and then whips his Stetson round. ‘What’s the matter with you boys, whyn’t you offer the lady a drink?’
A flurry as two lackeys step forward, one pulls back. ‘Whadya say? Let’s have us a cocktail right here.’ One of them sneaks a glance at the wall clock. ‘I’ve been up for two days straight and I don’t give a goddam what time of day it is. Wild turkey for me. And for Miss Molloy?’
And I think, fuck the Perrier. The client is always right. ‘Vodka. On the rocks.’
Max-a-Billion taps my shoulder pad with a finger. ‘’Cos it is Miss Molloy, am I right?’
I nod. I see there is a clear tendency towards roughness in the yellow tint of his pale iris. I can easily imagine Max with his trousers round his ankles and some plump young blonde, a little too much pressure on the trachea. Or perhaps I am wrong, perhaps Max likes to receive, to be anointed with pain. A masked Amazon spilling out of a rubber corset with gashed red lips and a coiled whip by her side. She makes Max undress in front of her, strip down to his vest and boxer shorts and steps closer in her stilettos. She meets his watery gaze. His lips tremble pinkly and she jabs his chest with the whip handle. Leans closer, spits in his face and he mouths a mottle of webbed saliva. He moans and she slides his shorts down with the whip, prods him hard in the mid point of his belly and then barks BEND OVER, pointing to the bed behind her. Max-a-Billion spreads his hands wide, she lashes his wobbling buttocks with the whip and he jerks forward with a muffled scream as a pink welt blooms on the pale flesh.
‘You got yourself a good man, Geri Molloy?’ My lips quiver. If Stephen could see me now, he would consider all this to be in extremely poor taste. Like Kapoor, who has managed to slink away to the farthest desk now where he is in quiet communion with a spreadsheet.
‘Or are you savin’ yourself up till the right one comes along?’ He winks, he actually winks beneath the Stetson.
I take the tumbler, heavy, sparkling, two inches of solid glass at the base. Max-a-Billion leans in so that the brim practically touches my forehead. I wonder if he has thought about Pissed On as a nickname.
‘Bottoms up,’ he clinks and knocks it back. I follow suit.
‘Atta girl.’ And I imagine this as the opening round of a drinking competition that will have us slugging it out until Max starts chasing me round the room. But he waves away the man with the tray and stands up. I rise on cue. He ushers me forwards and I’m half-expecting him to slap my bottom as I walk ahead. Instead he drapes a heavy arm around my shoulders and walks me to the exit.
‘You an’ me might just get together sometime after this is all done,’ he says. His eyes are little slits of light beneath the Stetson and he stands stroking my arm on the threshold. ‘You do real good now, Geri Molloy. You do real good.’ He doffs his hat, turns back into the room and an invisible hand closes the door behind him.
The spotlit corridor stretches out in front of me like an empty runway. It is the flight instinct I feel tugging at my gut, the need to escape somewhere safe and dark and quiet and far away from men who would weave me into the webs of their own design. I could just tip over and sprawl here on the carpet, let my lids shutter down, will my heart to sleep on the velvet and wake in a white room with kindly nurses patting my hand and telling me I am lovely and I should not worry about a single thing, that this life of mine has been put in suspended animation while I catch up with it and decide whether or not I want it back.
I hurry away before the door opens again and the Grope comes to hunt me down. I am now the centrepiece of his bid for stardom so he will want to keep me close. Doubt snaps at my heels and I am feeling the chill. The Grope, Felix and Stephen like the three fucking fates, my life story scripted by three men, and me the willing pawn.
‘A simple answer to a simple question.’ The very phrase makes me want to howl with despair, for this is just the kind of cat-and-mouse that Felix enjoys. A trade for a trade. All the cards dealt to him and me sitting there empty-handed with nothing to offer apart from myself.
5
the smile curve
08:57
ZANNA STANDS BY THE WINDOW of her 12th floor office, talking into the phone in her reassuring client voice. She makes a little gap sign between index finger and thumb so I slink into a chair and survey her shelves, the tombstone display of deals that she has worked on and above them the framed photo gallery CV: Zanna marlin fishing in khaki shorts and a green visor cap with Daddy and the toothy CFO of AIG, Zanna in a white visor teeing-off at Gleneagles with the Finance Director of News Corp looking on admiringly, Zanna in last year’s favourite Chanel sunglasses, hugging her IVF nieces in twin sailor suits on a yacht off Cape Cod Bay.
She sits down at her desk and runs a hand over the glass peak of a fist-sized sun-trapping iceberg that her mother commissioned from a reclusive Swedish designer who turns down 99 per cent of the offers he gets. She replaces the receiver and makes a note in an open file, holding up a silencing palm.
‘Come out for a coffee,’ I say.
‘Hello?’ She points to the clock. ‘I can’t believe you’re not snowed under down there. Anyway, I’ve got a conference call in five minutes,’ and she starts yakking on about how the looming war is inconveniencing the Eur
opean road show she’s doing with some big-wheel CEOs.
‘I’m going to Hong Kong.’
‘So you said yes!’ She pushes back her chair and leaps up. ‘Oh Geri, congratulations!’
‘No, what I meant is the Grope’s sending me out to see Felix about a piece of business.’
‘So what about the relocate? You haven’t said yes?’
‘I thought the Grope had called me in to talk about it but it turned out he wants me to go see Felix about this other thing.’
‘So you didn’t discuss it at all?’
‘No.’
‘What did Felix say this morning?’
‘There wasn’t really time to talk about it.’
‘So when are you going?’
‘This afternoon. Julie’s trying to book me on the 14:05 flight.’
She sighs, casts off the celebratory mode and folds her arms tightly. ‘Don’t you think that this proves just how much you need to be in Hong Kong, seeing as you’ve only just come back?’ Zanna is at her exasperated best now, tucking her hair impatiently behind her ear. ‘And when you’ve met with Felix and done your business he’s going to ask you if you’re saying yes to the relocate? So what are you going to say?’
I shrug and this immediately infuriates her. ‘You want to risk losing all his business? You got another life plan I don’t know about?’ She is warming up to a lecture I do not care to hear, the one where she tells me I need to pull myself together and step into the adult world. Of course, Zanna herself couldn’t wait to get out of the playground and start taking charge. She has told me how she learnt to read the time at nursery so that she could check her mother’s erratic pick-up after long lunches with her girlfriends against the big clock on the nursery wall. She interviewed teachers and parents, did her own research and compiled a shortlist of target colleges before she even started second grade. She timetabled her teen years, methodically ticking off a list of essential skills to master – tennis, sailing, skiing (although not boarding), snorkelling, waterskiing, riding (but not show-jumping, there wasn’t time), conversational French, flawless make-up, effortless teriyaki.
‘Geri, you’re a wreck,’ she sighs, pats my cheek. ‘You can’t keep drifting like this. I mean, look around you.’ She gestures wide. ‘We all know where we’re headed. Even bone-headed traders like Rob have got their sights locked on a personal destiny. You need to get a future. This is not playtime, this is your life. I mean, you don’t even care about the money like you should. You don’t even enjoy spending it.’
‘You know Kierkegaard once wrote a piece called “The Unhappiest”?’
‘Ever met a happy philosopher?’
‘I’m agreeing with you. I mean that was his advice. The happiest were those who lived in the present. Kierkegaard said—’
‘Stop! Don’t turn this into an existential crisis. That would be too dull. Remember what I told you last night. You’ve got to face up to the real reason why you don’t want to go to Hong Kong.’
A bird wheels wildly in the window behind her. She rubs my upper arm briskly and then squeezes it, pinching the bone. ‘And go eat something, will you?’
‘I’m out of here.’ I turn away from her, wave in the air and head off down the corridor.
‘Ring me when you get back,’ she calls out. ‘And good luck. Do the right thing.’ By which she means let go. Stop waiting for Stephen. But Zanna does not know how bad things are. She does not know the extent of my shame. How I can lie on the bed in the darkness and trace a finger along my collarbone, let my hand slip down, imagining it is his touch, soft, warm, barely slipping down to my breast and already an urgent pulse between my legs as I press my thighs hard together and apart, and thrust upwards, my fingers sliding easily into my own hot wet grip but Stephen flees at this point and my fingers are a poor imitation, bringing only an empty coming that leaves me hollowed out. And I have reached the ultimate humiliation in my own bed, jerking off to the remembered touch of a man who has chosen the most unequivocal departure.
Jesus Christ, am I ever going to cut loose?
‘Sorry for shouting at you earlier,’ I stop by Pie Man’s desk. ‘But you caught me at a bad time.’
‘No problem.’ He nods, the flesh wobbling around his chin. ‘I just thought you’d find that article interesting.’
‘I know, I will read it.’
‘I didn’t mean to badger you. Just, it’s very relevant to your – eh – your talent.’
‘I’ve just been really tired. All the travelling.’ He bobs his big pale head and smoothes his hands unseeing across the desk, knocking a pack of Marlboro to the floor.
‘Didn’t know you smoked,’ I bend to pick them up.
‘Oh, no, I don’t. Someone left them here and—’ Pie Man watches me open the pack and fish out the lighter inside. ‘They’ll do,’ I exhale.
One of his geek mates across the way looks up, staring straight through me at some calculations on his inner eye. The desks here on SPUD look curiously naked because they don’t have Reuters or Bloomberg and they don’t have phone boards, instead they have the yellow plastic phones that mark you out as a non-producer. Rob will make a big play out of the fact that the geeks don’t have equipment and he occasionally wanders down and picks up a handset and bangs it hard against the desk then holds it to his ear and goes Hello, hello, is that you, Mum? while Dr Who makes a great show of pretending not to notice.
Pie Man twiddles with a stubby little pencil. His own desk is littered with pages of his even and beautiful script, almost calligraphic, as if the calculations are an aesthetic homage, the numbers flowing left to right, horizontal, vertical, in perfect alignment.
‘It’s like artwork,’ I pick up a page.
‘Oh, that’s just an algorithm for—’
‘Yeah, I know, I meant your handwriting. It’s beautiful.’
‘Oh,’ he blushes, looks down and sticks his little stub in the sharpener.
‘How come you always write in pencil when you never rub out?’
‘I like to leave the full trail, to see how I got to a point. If I have all the steps then I can trace it back.’
And he raises his head, glances at me briefly full face. I think of Piggy in Lord of the Flies, or Billy Bunter, but there is a razor edge to Pie Man. Beneath the blubbery lids, his eyes are a sharp blue. Youthfully clear, though his age is hard to decipher since the swollen flesh disguises all clues. He looks away, brushes at some crumbs on his sleeve. Soon he will be off to the canteen, shoulders hunched beneath the monstrous craving that propels him forwards up the stairs. Sometimes he returns with three pre-packaged sandwiches that he eats methodically, large slashing bites with his head angled sideways. I have seen him masticate even when his mouth is empty as if in involuntary reflex response to the thought of food. And I wonder how these habits developed unchecked into adulthood, if Pie Man’s mum and dad are like him, the three of them weighed down by the burden of a ravenous hunger, slumped at a kitchen table groaning with food. Perhaps the impulse that tells you are replete can malfunction, smothered by an avalanche of food that keeps slipping down your gullet.
‘Oh Jesus, I am such a fucking idiot.’
‘What’s the matter?’ Pie Man looks up alarmed.
‘I completely forgot about Rex.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve just remembered my dog walker won’t be able to take him tonight because she does these stupid Shih Tzus in Chiswick on Mondays. And I have to catch a plane.’ I turn away towards my desk. ‘Fuck.’
‘Wait, wait, maybe I could help.’
‘You know a dog sitter?’
‘No, but—’
‘’Cos Rex hates kennels.’
‘No, I mean, what about me?’
‘What about you?’
‘I mean I could look after Rex for you.’
‘Thanks anyway, that’s kind, but—’
‘He knows me.’
‘No he doesn’t.’
‘Yes he does. Remember that
time I bumped into you in the park? I even threw his ball.’
And I do recall a dingy Sunday morning, not long after Stephen, and Venice, when Pie Man suddenly appeared by the Round Pound. He stood there inside a massive green anorak like a parachute had collapsed around him, hurling the tennis ball over arm with a surprisingly long bowl, Rex barrelling after it.
‘Remember I told you I used to have a dog when I was growing up?’
‘Denis. The black and tan mongrel who ate worms.’
‘That’s right,’ he nods happily.
I park my butt back on the edge of his desk and Pie Man scrabbles to move a jumble of papers to one side. ‘You only met Rex for a few minutes once.’
‘You said he liked me.’ And it’s true, Rex did like him but of course Rex likes everyone who tickles his tummy and scratches his head although I don’t say that; I look at Pie Man’s earnest face while I’m formulating a no, then I think well it’s not as if I have many options – and it’s not as though he’ll go out clubbing and leave Rex locked up indoors. In fact, Rex would love Pie Man, plus they have interests in common like eating and lying on couches.
‘I wouldn’t be back till Wednesday morning.’ I am still scrambling for another last minute non-kennel option but there are none because there are no other single women in the City stupid enough to own a dog.
‘That’s OK. No problem. Really.’
‘I guess I could get Lisa to drop him over to your place later only you’d have to leave work early.’
‘I can work at home. I sometimes do, so it wouldn’t be—’
‘Are you really sure about all this?’
‘Yes, yes. It would be great to have him.’
‘I don’t know. Maybe I should do the kennel. Maybe he’d be OK this time.’
‘No, don’t, he’d hate it. I’ll look after him really well. I won’t go out or anything.’
‘Well, OK then. Thanks a lot. You’re a lifesaver.’ And Pie Man beams like he’s won a prize. He pushes back the chair and stands up as if this adds extra weight to his commitment. Smoothes his hands over his stomach, hitches his trousers. He is all business now.
On the Floor Page 10
