On the Floor

by Aifric Campbell

  Zanna’s voice is tinny in my ear. I kill the sound, let the receiver fall and hunker down on the floor. The truth pools and surges and bursts through my fuzzy thinking with all the force of a blow to the head. Stephen would have guessed my special mission as soon as I name-checked Kapoor. He is smart enough to be suspicious of coincidence and alert to the opacity of simple questions and answers. Geri got the simple answer to the simple question – so Stephen needed to find out exactly what Felix had told me. And he didn’t even have to ask me directly, he just had to fuck me and I spilled the beans with no prompting.

  All I have to do is tell Kapoor to tell his client he can have what he goddam well wants if he pays up 30%. I was sleeping with the enemy and taken for a sucker.

  I’m sorry. Stephen’s last words come rolling back at me. But sorry for what? For Venice or the fuckover repeat that had just happened in my hotel bed?

  I can see it all in replay, hear my own voice like the soundtrack of a disaster movie, the trail of hints snaking through the Mandarin lobby, the boozy late lunch, the glittering sea, the elevator doors, the familiar touch of his skin, the whole sorry tale of the seduction. And I know without doubt that this is the truth, no two ways about it: Stephen fucked me to find out exactly what I knew. It was not a remembrance of things past, not a nostalgia trip, it was an opportunistic premeditated fuck and I have only myself and my big fat mouth to blame.

  ‘You’re crying.’ I spin round to what I had forgotten. Pie Man’s blurry shape beside me.

  ‘You got something to drink?’

  ‘Some water? A cup of tea?’

  ‘I mean a proper fucking DRINK.’

  ‘Oh, right – erm – wait.’ He backs away and it’s true I’m crying real tears, snivelling on my shirt sleeve. Rex jumps up off the couch and comes over to snuggle on my feet.

  ‘I don’t know how much you want.’ Pie Man holds up a bottle of Smirnoff and a glass.

  ‘A lot.’

  He pours and I say more and he pours some more and I take the iceless glass and a huge burning slug. I hold out the glass again. He watches closely while I take another giant slug as if he expects some immediate effect. I snatch the bottle from him and sink down to the floor.

  ‘Very early for that,’ he says with a nervous laugh but I can’t blink the tears away fast enough. He disappears and then returns, holding a loo roll. ‘I don’t have any tissues.’ He hunkers down and pats my shoulder, tentatively, nervously, like I might lash out. Rex yawns, opens his mouth wide as a crocodile, rolls over and sprawls on his back.

  ‘Look at him.’ Pie Man scratches Rex’s tummy. I take another swig and lean back against the radiator.

  ‘If you’re in some kind of trouble, maybe I could help?’

  ‘I just got fucked big time.’

  ‘You can tell me about it if you want. But you don’t have to.’

  Rex stretches front and back paws so he looks like a golden carcass. His ears flop either side and his tongue lolls happily. Pie Man carries on scratching and I tell him my story.

  11:24

  ‘ARE YOU GOING INTO THE OFFICE?’ Pie Man has been fiddling with the shoelace on his trainer while he listens to my sorry tale of betrayal, shifting restlessly as if his great red bulk cannot be comfortably distributed on the floor.

  ‘You kidding? So I can get ritually executed by the Grope as he takes revenge for making him look an idiot?’

  ‘So what will you do?’

  ‘Carrying on drinking seems like a good option at the moment.’

  ‘Maybe they won’t realise. Maybe they don’t know you told Stephen anything, maybe—’

  I shake the bottle neck at him. ‘There is no such thing as a coincidence. Kapoor is smart, nothing gets past him.’

  He will piece it together and the stinking trail will lead to me. Kapoor would have filled in the gaps, heard the cantering hooves of the white knight. And he will be rueing the day that he ever even gave air time to the Grope’s idea that Geri Molloy should be roped into the proceedings. The stench of rotten egg on his face, in the down draft of Max-a-Billion’s white-knuckled fury and the deal that got away. Outmanoeuvred by Stephen Graves, the young buck he tried to hire, Kapoor finds himself staring into the rancid jaws of a rare defeat.

  ‘Maybe Stephen already knew about the price. Maybe Felix actually told him.’

  ‘Maybe, schmaybe. Doesn’t matter anymore.’

  ‘What do you think they’ll do?’

  ‘Fire my fucking Irish ass.’

  Because I was asleep at the wheel and I failed on all fronts. Because I didn’t sound the alarm straight away, because I didn’t tell the Grope the crucial bit of info that Stephen Graves had been to see Felix Mann just before me. Because I cost them nearly twelve hours of dead time before I even made the call, because I was too busy bragging and drinking in Repulse Bay. And I wonder where the beginning is in all of this, when I first dropped the ball, how far I have slipped and how long this has been coming. Something unarticulated about loss here, something that I cannot process. But maybe this is not such an untimely death: maybe I would’ve only lasted another five years, an earnings loss of $7,908,024.37 – assuming a conservative 30% annual growth.

  ‘What will you do?’ says Pie Man.

  ‘Maybe I’ll just stay right here on the floor forever.’

  ‘Well you probably shouldn’t go anywhere when you’ve had so much—’ Pie Man nods at the bottle.

  ‘Maybe I’ll just hide out here, be your flatmate, drink shots and watch movies.’

  He giggles excitedly, his boobs quivering like animals under the sweatshirt.

  So what’s the difference? The Grope can fire me in absentia. He can even use the fact that I went awol off the plane as further evidence of my instability. Yes, they could hang me out to dry for this since I’ve probably violated any number of compliance rules.

  I could try telling the Grope that I would NEVER let Steiner’s down like that, that I would never do anything to jeopardise a deal, NEVER put my career on the line by letting some information fall out of my mouth no matter what the reason, time, place or person I’m speaking to. I could say that Felix himself must have told Stephen, I could swear on my mother’s life and fling myself to the floor right there in his office. I could beg for mercy, blame it on some lapse of concentration or a crippling six-month insomnia, homesickness for my dog; I could offer to check myself into rehab or something, but whatever I say will be hollow and unconvincing.

  So I could just tell the Grope what he’s already guessed. That my ex-boyfriend fucked me so I would tell him what I knew and then he fucked me again.

  And I didn’t I see it coming.

  ‘You want to know the funny thing in all this?’ I say to Pie Man. ‘That’s twice Stephen has dumped me in a hotel room.’

  ‘Wanker,’ he spits and glances, incredibly, to see my reaction. ‘Excuse me, but under the circumstances.’ And he is on his knees on the floor and for a moment I think he is going to start crawling but he is hauling himself upright.

  ‘Go ahead, call the fucker anything you want.’

  ‘Bastard.’ Pie Man stands now towering red over me, mashing an empty crisp bag in his hand.

  ‘Nearly done.’ I take a swig from the bottle and shake it, place it beside me.

  ‘You should steady on there.’

  ‘Ha, that’s a good one.’ The bottle sits on the floor like an omen and his eyes shift from it to me.

  ‘You could get alcohol poisoning.’

  ‘Do you have any fucking IDEA how much I can drink?’

  ‘You don’t have to swear so much.’

  ‘You are so fucking bastard right, Pie Man.’

  He stands working his lips like he’s chewing on actual words or struggling to keep them in.

  ‘“Subscribers here by the thousands float,”’ I begin. ‘“And jostle one another down / Each paddling in his leaky boat / And here they fish for gold and drown.” In a big bottle of Smirnoff.’

  ‘W
hat’s that?’

  ‘Jonathan Swift on the South Sea Bubble.’ I take a long slug and salute him. ‘Stephen always had a quote for every occasion. It’s a prepschool thing.’

  And I slam my hand full force against the radiator, my knuckles scream and so do I. Rex barks, slinks away to the couch.

  ‘Geri, what?’ says Pie Man but I am gripping my hand under my arm.

  ‘Ice,’ he says and thumps away, comes back with a frozen bag which he lays over my throbbing knuckles. The bag is freezer slimy and smells of potato.

  ‘Tesco’s Crinkle Cut Chips. I fucking hate crinkle cut.’ Rex slinks over and sniffs the bag.

  ‘Is it sore?’ Pie Man breathes like a caveman beside me.

  ‘Course it’s sore.’

  ‘Do you think it’s broken?’

  ‘Don’t know. Don’t care.’

  He peeks beneath the freezer bag and we look at the healthy swelling rising between the knuckle dips. ‘Can you straighten your hand?’

  I wiggle my fingers. ‘So what does that mean?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I laugh and he laughs too, nervously at first but then he sees I am still laughing and he laughs some more.

  ‘Let’s do something.’

  ‘Bit busy,’ I wiggle the bottle at him.

  ‘Just wait, just wait—’ He is scrabbling round on the couch, pulling at papers. ‘You’ll like this.’ He plonks his big butt down on the edge of the coffee table. ‘It’s a problem I’ve been working on that—’

  ‘Music!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let’s have some MUSIC.’

  Pie Man goes over and roots in a cardboard box and then leaves the room and returns carrying a dusty little ghetto blaster that he puts down on the floor in front of me and plugs into the wall. He pops in a tape, gathers up the stack of papers from the shelf. ‘I was just doing a little bit of work on this when you—’

  ‘TAKE A LOOK AT MY GIRLFRIEND, SHE’S THE ONLY ONE I’VE GOT.’

  Pie Man lunges for the volume button, there’s a snap and the music stops. Rex leaps up and makes for the exit but I am rolling on the floor. ‘Fucking SUPERTRAMP!’

  Pie Man’s fat face stares down at me flat on my back, my arms stretched so far either side.

  ‘SUPERTRAMP.’ I flap my arms on the carpet. I am laughing so hard I might puke and I roll over to my side and hoist myself up against the radiator again. ‘Seriously, though, I mean who the fuck listens to that?’

  Pie Man’s fingers are scratching furiously at the underside of the cassette. He grabs and rips and tears a loop of the brown tape, drops it to the floor and stamps on the plastic casing with the heel of his big snowshoe, then picks up the mangled pieces and dumps them in the corner bin.

  ‘Fucking hell, Pie Man, that was a bit strong.’

  ‘My name is Colin, remember?’ he bends over me, jowls unpleasantly red.

  ‘Sorry.’

  He sits back down on the coffee table and picks up his papers. ‘Now listen.’ I have to bite hard on the inside of my cheek to stop from laughing or throwing up. ‘In 45 BC Julius Caesar wanted to change the inconstant lunar year into constant.’

  ‘Control freak.’ I hiccough so violently the bottle slides from my grip. ‘Wahey.’ I catch it just at tipping point. ‘Check it out!’

  He gives me a stern look. ‘OK, so Caesar wants to change time. The astronomical year was 365 days and 6 hours and he wanted to fix the equinox at the same day.’

  ‘What you have to do is—’

  ‘Which is what he did. But they had to ease into it. And that year of transition was called the year of confusion.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that.’

  ‘Maybe you shouldn’t.’

  ‘What the fuck else is there to do?’ I am staggering to my feet but the carpet swarms up to meet me and I lurch back and Pie Man is droning on, ‘So what I’m thinking is if we—’

  ‘Could give a shit.’

  He stops talking, lets a cool silence settle while he tilts his big head back and stares up as if some crucial piece of the Caesar puzzle might be written on the ceiling. The radiator is cold against the back of my head.

  ‘It’s such a waste, Geri. You have such a gift and you just don’t want to use it.’

  ‘I’m busy.’

  ‘You could do so much. I don’t understand, I mean, I just don’t get it. You’re totally wasted on sales.’

  ‘Absolutely wasted.’

  ‘The cutting edge in finance is quant. And I know what you are capable of, what you could do. I can see how far you could take it. But instead you just—’

  ‘Future is quant. Drink to that.’

  ‘We could even work on lots of things together.’ Pie Man’s voice is rising and closing in. He leans forwards, balanced on the edge of the coffee table like a massive red troll.

  ‘The two of us.’

  ‘We could move to somewhere else as a – like a package, you know. You could use this – eh – crisis to change direction.’

  ‘Two of us in a package.’

  ‘The future is all about people like us, Geri. In a few years’ time the big money will be chasing quants and everyone else will be old hat. Even people like the Grope – they haven’t got a clue just how big prop trading is going to be.’

  ‘Fucking HUGE.’

  ‘Just think how much fun it would be, how much we could do together—’

  ‘Sitting around playing with models all day long.’

  ‘That’s the future,’ he beams delightedly. Wipes his palms on his tracksuit. Does not register my piss-taking tone, for he is tuned out and into some horror vision where I throw in my mathematical lot with him and we break new ground in value extraction, use our mega brains and my sales expertise to roll out the models that will transform the business and end up pasted all over the front page of the Wall Street Journal as Beauty and the Beast, the ex-Steiner’s combo who changed the landscape for ever. And I will be so boggle-eyed I will become blind to Pie Man’s grossness that I’ll agree to marry him so we can pool our superior genetic material to start a little baby farm of maths geniuses. Pie Man has a vision of possession, where the two of us work on maths puzzles for all eternity.

  ‘How can you not want that kind of future?’ His hands flop by his side, deflating, the dream receding. ‘Don’t you even care?’

  ‘Everyone wants a piece of me. Seems like nobody wants the whole.’

  ‘Frege’s principle of compositionality,’ he sighs. ‘The meaning of the whole is the sum of the constituent parts.’ I lean my head back but the universe wobbles and it flops forward again. ‘You need to sort yourself out, Geri,’ he says, with a chilly tightening of the lips. ‘You need to take a good, long, hard look at your life.’

  And I do. Here on the floor, dog hair all over my suit, unwashed and unloved, wearing the same clothes, the same fucking underwear for forty-eight hours. And still drinking. My tights are sagging at my ankles, a toenail poking through, the pink varnish chipped and tired since when was the last time? When were all the last times that anything was OK?

  ‘I need a shower.’

  ‘What, here?’

  ‘You’ve got a bathroom, haven’t you?’

  He looks doubtful.

  ‘It’s OK, I’m not fussy,’ I grip the radiator and try to haul myself up but my knees fold under the strain. ‘Gimme a hand here, fucksake,’ and his big fleshy paw tugs me upright.

  ‘TAKE A LOOK AT MY GIRLFRIEND,’ I sing. Rex slinks away to hop on the couch. ‘All right, Rexy wexy, all right.’

  ‘Steady there, Geri.’

  ‘Having made my fortune Col-IN. I shall – mark you – become a highly original person.’ Up close his neck fat is white like something on a butcher’s slab. ‘That’s a quote from Dos-toy-evskeee actually. The Idiot. Very topical.’ He steadies me upright, one big hand tucked under my arm. ‘Uh – oh, don’t forget the bottle. Coming with me to the shower.’

  ‘You sure you want it?’ He leads me into a shadowy roo
m with curtains closed and a rumple of duvet rising like an iceberg out of the crumpled bed.

  ‘Wahey,’ I swing on his arm. ‘What’s all this? You’re not trying it on, are you?’

  ‘I only have an ensuite,’ he mutters and I grab the bottle from him.

  ‘No sharp objects,’ I laugh, prod him in the stomach. He stands waiting while I lurch against the bathroom door. ‘So what, are you going to help me undress too?’

  I am a room spin expert; the trick is not to try to balance, but to find support and claw your way on hands and knees to a safe space.

  ‘If you’re sure—’ he backs away.

  ‘I’ll scream if I need you.’ And I tumble into the bathroom.

  9

  dark matter

  17:31

  THERE ARE SPIKES DRILLING against my skull, my temple throbs on one side and all the way down my shoulder into my right arm, which I cannot move, since it is lost somewhere over the side. My eyes open onto darkness. A bed, unfamiliar, feels all wrong. I lift my head, let it fall. I may be sick, something in my overheated chest. A laboured kind of breathiness and then a sickly smell, sweet, warm; maybe I have already been sick. I use my left arm to explore, discover I am wearing some kind of towelling robe.

  ‘You’re awake.’ The voice strong and very close. Pie Man’s stale vanilla scent. ‘You know you passed out in the shower.’

  I tug on my right arm but it is still stuck down the side of the bed.

  ‘Where’s my arm?’

  ‘By your side. You cut your hand on the bottle when you fell.’

  ‘It’s numb. Can’t move it.’

  ‘I’ve looked after it, bandaged it up. And put TCP on it.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘That’s because you passed out, Geri.’ Disapproval snipping the vowels.