Various Pets Alive and Dead

by Lewycka, Marina

  ‘I am …’ He puts her hand to his mouth and kisses the small hard knuckles. ‘… I am Serge.’

  For a moment, love swells like a heart-shaped helium balloon and rides the air, and bluebirds flutter beneath the ceiling of the trading hall. Then she laughs and pulls her hand away.

  ‘You too much wired today, Sergei.’

  ‘We can be wired together. We can have lots of wired babies.’

  She rolls her eyes in that way he finds irresistibly sexy.

  ‘Something abnormal happens in world market, Sergei. Timo has no importance but this has importance. Congress voted down Bush plan. Very interesting situation. Dow Jones will collapse. From this position some are winning and some are losing everything. This we must find out. We go?’

  In the noisy fug of Franco’s, several parties are going on at the same time. A pack of traders laid off from big-name banks in the post-Lehman bloodbath are drowning their sorrows, while others are blowing their comp, and the FATCA crowd are pouring champagne down their throats in celebration of Lucian’s birthday, while listening to some suit on TV explaining that the world’s tide of credit has run dry, and now, unable to borrow from each other, the big banks have stopped lending and started to collapse. Everyone seems to have forgotten about Tim the Finn, transfixed by the crisis being played out on the giant screen. Serge pushes his way through to join them as an ironic cheer goes up. The House of Representatives has just thrown out the Bush plan and voted that banks must stand on their own two feet, like everybody else. Assets they all thought were secure, assets backed by mortgages in the booming property market, assets rated triple A by the likes of Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, are now as flaky as dandruff. A dam of loans, secured (apparently) on ever-rising house prices, has been breached, toxic debt is oozing into the vaults of financial institutions all around the globe. Where will it end?

  ‘Happy birthday, dear Lucie!’ somebody roars.

  ‘Thank you, dear punters!’ yells someone else, to another volley of popping corks.

  Toby O’Toole shoves a glass of something into Serge’s hand, and he glugs it down. Wow! What was that? Intoxicated with their own profligacy, the quants have started mixing wine and beer and spirits into the bubbly, in increasingly bizarre and disgusting cocktails, like synthetic CDOs.

  ‘… Sub-prime mortgages extended home-ownership to people previously excluded … low-waged and unemployed … US interest rates shot up from 1 per cent to 5.3 per cent … unprecedented rate of default … property prices collapsed … blah, blah, blah …’ the tight-jawed TV pundit drones on.

  ‘Dear God, just give us one more year before it all folds up!’ someone prays.

  ‘Or the regulators slam us down!’

  Toby raises his glass, and Serge finds himself joining in, drinking to all the no-hopers scraping to buy their dream homes, the losers and wasters who should never have been given mortgages in the first place and now find they can’t keep up with their payments (surprise, surprise!), whose many-times-multiplied losses have fuelled their bonanza.

  ‘Another year, another million!’ screams one of the traders, and everybody cheers.

  Serge looks around for Maroushka, wanting to share this transcendental moment with her, but she’s standing on her own at the back of the crowd, not drinking, watching the TV screen with dark intense eyes.

  DORO: The sex rota

  Doro clicks off the TV at eleven o’clock and makes her way up to the bedroom, where Marcus has already been asleep for half an hour. What does he dream of, lying beneath the heaped duvet that rises and falls with his breathing, filling the small closed room with fustiness? He’s been penned in his study all day, grazing in the pastures of the past. She’s been out on the allotment, and her limbs ache with that pleasant well-stretched tiredness of the outdoors – and a few extra twinges in the knees and spine that remind her she isn’t as young as she used to be. Missing Oolie’s company, she’d found herself wondering again why Megan had run away and left her behind all those years ago.

  Maybe Megan resented the newcomers, or maybe they just rubbed her up the wrong way, but she never got on with the Chrises Watt and Howe, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that they tried really hard to re-educate her. Chris Watt, who had once trained as a nurse, helped her to control her eczema, and encouraged her to give up smoking and to breastfeed Oolie, which neither she nor Oolie found easy. Chris Howe undertook to instruct her in the basics of Marxism and free love.

  Doro overheard them one day when she was washing up in the kitchen while he and Megan were finishing breakfast at the table. Crunchy Carl was under the table, tormenting a ladybird that had blown in from the garden. Chris’s long grey hair was tied back in a ponytail, and he was wearing (thank heavens) pyjama bottoms and a T-shirt with the almost washed-out slogan ‘Never trust anyone over thirty’, below which protruded a wedge of belly, pink and hairy. Megan was wearing Moira’s blue and mauve crochet top, showing off the lacy black bra she had on underneath.

  ‘A socialist society will liberate women from repressive monogamy, and permit them to achieve sexual fulfilment,’ Chris Howe was saying, his eyes fixed on the outline of her breasts under the crochet top.

  Megan said nothing.

  Taking this as encouragement, he continued, ‘Like, for example, under socialism, there would be nothing to stop you and me having sex together.’

  ‘You and me?’

  Megan keeled back sharply on her chair, and had to clutch on to the edge of the table to stop herself from falling over.

  ‘Mam, what’s slosherism?’ Carl whined from under the table.

  ‘Summat filthy!’ Megan snapped.

  As Doro sneaked out, quietly pulling the door closed behind her, she heard the sound of a slap, and Megan’s voice shouting, ‘Stop that, Carl!’ followed by a thin whimper.

  She came upon them another time, sitting at the kitchen table.

  Megan was smoking, and staring out of the window. Chris, bottomless this time, had spread out a sheaf of papers on the table, and was explaining, ‘You see, under capitalism the means of production are owned by rich parasites, and the working class have nothing to sell but their labour.’

  ‘I want to be rich,’ Megan said, pushing back a strand of heavy black hair that had slipped down over her face.

  ‘You want to be a parasite?’

  ‘Yeah, Paris, London, New York, anywhere’s better than around here.’

  It was a few days before anyone in the commune realised Megan had disappeared. Doro was vaguely aware that she wasn’t around much but assumed she was with her mum and Crunchy Carl in Harworth and would come back, as she always had in the past.

  If anyone noticed that Megan’s absence seemed longer than usual, it was probably with a feeling of relief more than worry, like when a disturbing background noise goes silent – though in Megan’s case it was the silence itself that was disturbing. The kids were relieved not to have Carl foisted on them in the name of brotherhood. Even Oolie seemed more relaxed without Megan constantly on at her to keep her tongue inside her mouth, and stop drooling. It wasn’t until about the fifth day that they started to ask each other whether she’d said anything to anyone about going away. Doro checked her room and found that all her and Carl’s clothing was missing, along with the collection of cuddly toys she kept by her bed. The clothes she’d borrowed were left neatly folded on a chair, including Moira’s blue and mauve crochet top.

  On the sixth day, Marcus drove the commune’s ancient brown Lada up to Harworth, and cruised the streets, stopping people at random.

  ‘Do you know someone called Megan Cromer? She’s got a little boy called Carl?’

  It must have been giro day, because there was a queue at the Post Office stretching right out on to the pavement, but no one knew of Megan or Carl.

  ‘’Appen she’s been sold into slavery,’ said an elderly woman with curlers under a headscarf. ‘Like in them boowks.’ The thought made her chuckle.

  ‘Tied
up and ravaged,’ added her wrinkled companion.

  ‘’Appen they’ll know about t’ lad up at t’ school,’ said the woman behind the counter.

  Marcus waited outside the school as the kids were coming out, but Carl was not among them. A teacher asked him what he was doing.

  ‘I’m looking for a boy called Carl Cromer. He lives with his grandmother in Harworth, I think.’

  ‘You’d better clear off now, before I call t’ police.’

  ‘’Appen she went off wi’ Silver Birch’s lot,’ said a man with multiple piercings standing outside the newsagent. ‘Scab ’erders is always loaded. Women flock after ’em.’ He snorted. ‘Dutch Elm, we used to call ’im.’

  A man standing at a bus stop told him, ‘Never ’eard of ’em, pal, but I’ll gi’ you ten bob for your car.’

  ‘So where d’you think she could have gone?’ Doro had asked.

  ‘Megan is Megan,’ Marcus had said, which struck her at the time as an odd reply.

  Weeks later, somebody found an uninformative little note that had slipped down the side of her bed.

  Megan’s departure spurred them to rethink the balance of power between the men and the women in the commune.

  ‘The men always get to decide who they’re going to sleep with. We think we’re being liberated, but really it’s just the same old crap,’ said Moira, in their weekly women’s meeting.

  ‘Mm,’ said Doro, who had always believed that Moira was the one who decided.

  ‘They play us off against each other.’ Moira twirled a copper strand around her finger. ‘And we go along with it, because we want to be wanted.’

  ‘Mm,’ Doro agreed, thinking, it’s taken Megan to bring this home to her.

  ‘We should take matters into our own hands, and draw up a sex rota,’ said Chris Watt, who had never even met Bruno. ‘That way we could decide.’

  ‘Mm,’ said Doro, wondering how she could avoid encountering Chris Howe’s pink sausage dick, should it come up for her on the rota.

  After his failure with Megan’s education, Chris Howe’s politics had taken a move to the left, or maybe a leap into the stratosphere.

  ‘You know where socialism will eventually come from, sister?’ he asked Doro, cornering her on the bend in the stairs one day.

  She shook her head, looking around for escape routes, trying not to stare at the limp manhood dangling before her.

  ‘It’ll be brought to us from outer space.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Yeah. According to Posadas, any creatures intelligent enough to have devised space travel will already have created a socialist society. It stands to reason.’

  Remembering, Doro smiles to herself in the darkness as she curls herself around Marcus’s sleeping form, and feels quietly thankful that the sex rota was short-lived.

  The main beneficiary was Chris Watt who, heaven knows, deserved a break.

  SERGE: Lady Luck

  Serge clutches his arms across his chest and hopes he won’t puke in the back of the cab as it speeds and swerves through the night. It was stupid of him to get so lashed, but forgivable in the circumstances. The vodka Maroushka had given him was a necessary lifeline. A few glasses of champagne on top did no harm. The idiot thing was joining the race with the other quants to knock back those toxic combinations of champagne with whisky, brandy, beer, red wine, Pernod, Campari, fruit juice, Worcester sauce and some orange stuff that tasted like paint stripper.

  At one point the barman, a small dark-skinned guy with an earring and not much hair, had tried to suggest that they ease off a bit, and Lucian, the birthday boy, had turned on him wild-eyed and screamed, ‘Pour, you sad little prole! Do your fucking job!’ His arms flung wide, he staggered against the table, knocking a couple of glasses on to the floor.

  Another guy who worked at Cazenove, an old school friend of Lucian’s, who was already well juiced, threw his arms around his pal and gave him a soggy kiss.

  ‘Yay! If you’re not getting it, you’re not worth it!’

  The guy was blond and tall – so tall that Serge’s head would fit neatly under his chin. Serge glanced across at Maroushka to check whether she’d clocked him, but she was chatting to the Hamburger.

  ‘All this fucking wealth in this beautiful fucking city, we made it, we earned it, and we’re going to fucking drink it!’ shrilled Lucian, like a mulletted prophet.

  ‘Cos it could all dry up tomorrow!’ added Toby. ‘Happy birthday, ginger-boy!’

  He poured the contents of his glass over Lucian’s head. The sticky liquid trickled down his face and he stuck out his tongue to catch it as it dripped down. A couple of people clapped, but most said nothing, vaguely aware even through the miasma of booze that their colleagues had gone over the top.

  Serge leaned over the counter and said, ‘Sorry, mate. They’re not always like this.’

  The barman silently lowered his head and popped another cork. It was at this point that Serge realised he had to get out. He looked around for Maroushka, but she’d disappeared.

  ‘Thanks! Keep the change!’

  Serge hands the driver a tenner, and manages to tumble out of the cab just in time to throw up acidly, yellowly, abundantly on to the pavement outside his block.

  But luck is with him – he manages to keep it off his clothes.

  Luck: you have to stay on the right side of this unreliable lady, you have to flatter her, study her habits, know her vicissitudes, woo her with promises and gifts. You must never, ever take her for granted. He knows Luck, and he knows her two flighty sisters, Risk and Chance. This naughty threesome hang out together on the up-and-down ladders of stock exchanges; he’s met them often in examination halls; they haunt the poky corners of history, like those crones who used to knit beside the guillotine, always on the lookout for a big-head.

  Before turning in to bed, out of habit, he takes a quick peep at Chicken’s bank and email accounts. No action there at all today. Kenporter1601 is still empty. So far, so good. But fixed in his mind is the sickly grimace on Tim the Finn’s face as he was led away from the trading floor. He must have talked to those cops by now.

  What has he been telling them?

  Will Chicken ask them to investigate the rogue transactions in the 1601 account?

  Or does he want to keep his own trading activities in the dark?

  Serge knows luck has been with him so far, but how long can it last? To keep on the right side of Lady Luck, to encourage her to see things his way, he decides to make her a small gift. He logs in and transfers £5,000 from Dr Black to Kenporter1601 – a generous interest payment for the money he has borrowed. He attaches a one-word tag to the payment: THANKS.

  CLARA: Mr Gorst/Alan has a moustache

  When Clara arrives at school on Tuesday morning, Mr Gorst/Alan is in the staffroom trying to organise a meeting to discuss the school’s SATS results.

  ‘We could do better.’ He waves the thick printout of doom.

  But she can’t take her eyes off the growth of dark stubble around the lower half of his face, which could have aspirations to become a moustache or, worse, beard.

  No, no! Don’t go there! You’re lovely as you are, Alan!

  In her opinion, facial hair seldom suits anybody.

  After he’s gone, Mr Tyldesley whispers in her ear, ‘It’s like being lectured by a badly plucked chicken.’

  ‘Or Che Gue-Bloody-Vara,’ mutters Mr Kenny, loud enough for everyone to hear.

  Only Heidi Postlethwaite springs to his defence.

  ‘The Ancient Greeks regarded the beard as a symbol of virility.’ (Bitch!)

  Clara tries her phone once more. She still hasn’t had any luck contacting the guy from Syrec, who was supposed to pick up the bags of paper and plastic for recycling. Maybe Mr Kenny was right about the regional development grant.

  At lunchtime, she puts her head round the door of the boiler room, where Mr Philpott is dozing with a book open on his knee: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He sits up
with a start, and two pairs of glasses tumble off his nose on to his lap.

  ‘Thanks for keeping the bags for me, Mr Philpott. I’ll take a few more home for recycling.’

  The tied black bin bags are waiting in the lobby outside the boiler room. A gust of wind through the open door catches them, and sets them flapping like a flock of outsize rooks come home to roost. Mr Philpott helps her heave a couple more bags to her car and shove them into the boot. She slams the hatch and heads off back to her classroom. Bloody Syrec.

  When she gets there, she tries the Syrec mobile number once more and, to her surprise, someone answers. It’s the same teen-on-speed voice as before.

  ‘Yeah. Yeah. Oh, shit, I completely forgot. Sorry. Yeah. Two weeks ago. Three? Where are you? Right, I’ll be round. Yeah, right. Four o’clock this afternoon. Twenty quid.’

  The afternoon lesson is history, Miss Postlethwaite’s subject, and she’s decided in her wiggly-bum wisdom that the kids of Greenhills should learn about Ancient Egypt. Maybe the old slag heaps around South Yorkshire remind her of the pyramids.

  ‘Who can remember which river runs through Egypt?’ Clara asks, keeping one eye on the clock on the wall, which is inching slowly, slowly towards 3.15.

  There’s a bit of shuffling and sniggering. Nobody likes to be the first to put their hand up, apart from Dana Kuciak from Poland, who doesn’t mind being thought a swot.

  ‘Please, miss, the Nail.’

  ‘Nearly right, Dana! Well done! Now, who can get it exactly right?’

  ‘I know, miss! T’ Nob!’ shouts Robbie Lewis, his hands furtively at work behind the desk. The convention is that any word beginning with ‘n’ can be substituted with ‘nob’ which is an instant cue for anarchy. There’s a chorus of shrieks, groans and giggles.