Meltdown (4 page)

‘Great!’ Jimmy replied, digging into the hamper and going straight for the cherry Bakewells.

Derek sighed. There was no common ground between the financial world in which he operated and that of his son.

‘I think the point is, Dad,’ Jimmy suggested, his mouth full of cake, ‘that money used to be a trade, and now it’s an art.’

Derek Corby harrumphed. He didn’t think money had any business being an art.

‘You were always terrible at art,’ Mr Corby senior pointed out testily. ‘Your soldiers never had necks.’

The new occupant

Jimmy’s position was pretty desperate but it could have been worse. People didn’t cross the street to avoid him as he shuffled up the street. He didn’t stink of piss and his hair wasn’t horrendously knotted and matted with filth. He didn’t have a beard that was alive with vermin or running sores all over his dirt-blackened skin. Not like the wretched wreck of a man who was shuffling up Webb Street, past all the houses that Jimmy had briefly believed he owned.

The man’s name was Bob, not that it mattered. He didn’t need a name because nobody spoke to him now. Sometimes he nearly forgot it himself. Except it was hanging round his neck on the ID that the people who ran the
Big Issue
had sorted out for him a year or two before. That had been during a brief period when some charity worker had tried to get him together; they tried occasionally, those charity workers, although Bob doubted that they ever would again. He was too far gone now, even for the freshest and most evangelical of do-gooders. He still wore the ID, even though it was at least a year since he’d been together enough to sell a magazine. It was useful when trying to get a bed for the night. The hostels always needed a name and ID. For their forms. But he didn’t stay in hostels now either: they were too crowded, crowded with people better able to argue their way into a bed than he. A whole different breed from what he was used to. IT consultants and estate agents. Estate agents becoming homeless? That was funny.

Bob had seen them all. He was first-generation street. A pioneer. A survivor from that time in the eighties when suddenly towns had become flooded by young people sitting in doorways. Some people didn’t remember now, but if you were over forty-five or fifty you might recall that there had been a time when there were virtually no homeless people on the streets of Britain and begging was almost unknown.

Begging? Unknown in Britain? The thought actually made Bob laugh. But it was true, when he was a kid that was how it had been. It had all changed when Mrs Thatcher made it so young people could no longer claim housing benefit if they’d left home voluntarily. Overnight, it seemed, every abused kid in the country was on the street.

Getting abused.

Bob had been one of them and he’d been on the street ever since. He’d seen the doorway population change from almost exclusively young runaways in the eighties to the poverty-trapped underclass that emerged in the nineties through the boom years of the squeegie merchants to the shawled, shuffling Eastern European women of the early noughties with their drugged babies and sad little notes on bits of torn-up cardboard saying, ‘Hungre. Plese help.’

Now it seemed to Bob that things were coming a weird full circle as the very yuppies who had tossed him coins when he first hit the streets more than twenty years before were joining him in the doorways. ‘What was all that about?’ he asked himself through a methylated, petrol-scented haze.

No, Bob didn’t apply for hostels now. He was just too screwed up. Mentally and physically. His sores festered, his mind raged with whatever drug, drink or solvent he could push at it and nobody went within ten feet of him. He was literally dying as he walked. But it was taking a while. He marvelled at how his body kept on keeping on. And wondered why it bothered.

That night Bob found himself in Hackney. In Webb Street. A semi-derelict and entirely abandoned property development that had run out of cash. At one end of the street some of the properties had been nearly renovated. These desirable billets had been squatted by smart, savvy class-war warriors with dreadlocks and posh accents who changed locks and sorted out the leccy.

The other end of the street had not been touched, and the houses were almost as rotten and forlorn as Bob himself. It was into one of these that Bob managed to creep with his shot of meth and the remains of a hamburger that he’d found in a bin. The door had been boarded up but kids had long since kicked that in. He decided not to trust the stairs. His bones were brittle and thin and Bob knew that if he were to put his foot through a rotten floorboard he would probably leave it there. Turning into the first room he found, a room which had once been an elegant reception area and more recently home to a whole family of Somalis, Bob lay down on the boards and went to sleep.

Bob was not quite the new occupant that Jimmy Corby, the nominal owner and developer of Webb Street, had had in mind when he began his development project. But then, as Bob often muttered to himself, it was a funny old world.

The price of love

Jimmy had never thought of his lovely Notting Hill home as a
big
house. And certainly not absurdly big, as he now knew it to be. Now that winter was pretty much upon them and he had to find a way to heat it while he tried to find a way to sell it.

How could he have not noticed how big it was? But the thought had never even occurred to him. It was just a decent-sized town house, that was all. In fact, it hadn’t really been big
enough
. Not with a live-in nanny who expected her own kitchenette. Not with three day staff cluttering up the place. Not if you wanted to put in a gym and spa. A fully equipped Nautilus gym plus steam room, solarium and massive whirlpool plunger that you could almost swim in. The weight of the water had meant putting in new joists to support the floor. An entire health club at home! It seemed crazy now but it hadn’t seemed that way a year before, when all he was thinking about was Monica getting her figure back. Then it had seemed . . . well, essential.

‘We’ve got to have a gym,’ he’d said. ‘We’re far too busy to get it together to visit the local sweaty jock strap.’ And he’d sort of
believed
it.

Jimmy went down to the basement, a vast knock-through space encompassing a fabulous kitchen and family play area. Monica was there, of course. She was always there when one of the kids was going off because the beautiful polished slate floor afforded the most room in which to push a buggy in a figure of eight while trying to rock a child to sleep. Monica was doing just that with Cressida and trying to suckle Lillie on the hoof. She was wearing a nightie that Jimmy had put in her Christmas stocking the year before. It was pure silk and had cost three hundred pounds. A gorgeous little filler along with some sweet Cartier ear studs, some piccolos of Laurent Perrier and a brace of tickets for the Orient Express (while Jodie took the kids to Euro Disney). Now one strap of that lovely delicate silk was hanging down off her shoulder, exposing one breast, while the other side was dark and sodden with copious let-downs. The nightie was a short one, more of a slip really, designed to show a maximum amount of leg, legs that Monica had always been rather proud of but which were currently encased in varicose-vein-suppression stockings that had fallen down around her ankles.

‘I was trying to go to the loo!’ was the first thing she said. ‘But Cressida was making such a row I thought she was dying. Take this one, I’m desperate!’

‘Love you,’ Jimmy said as he took hold of the buggy.

‘Love you,’ Monica replied as she hopped and shuffled towards the open toilet door with Lillie still at her breast.

Jimmy sighed a deep sigh. Ever since Jodie and the chef had left, Monica had been in a constant state of trying to get to the loo. Before that, neither of them had had any idea that fitting in one’s own bodily functions with the needs of a baby and toddler would present such a never-ending series of challenges.

‘The moment you want to go,’ Monica observed, ‘the toddler falls down the stairs and the baby’s sick.’ She was convinced that before they invented
Thomas the Tank Engine
to hypnotize children, mothers without nannies must have crapped on the carpet.

Jimmy picked Cressida up out of the buggy and the child began to calm down a little. Usually the buggy would have been enough to shut her up in the first place but tonight, probably sensing that Monica was alone and hence extra-vulnerable to persecution, Cressida had refused to be mollified.

A few moments later Monica re-emerged.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘Hi,’ Monica replied. ‘I have to get a clean nightie, this one’s soaked up half a boob’s worth and now I feel guilty because Lillie won’t get the milk. If you’d been here I could have expressed it. Cressida just wouldn’t let me do a thing.’

‘I had to go to Webb Street. I was meeting David.’

Tired though she was, Monica knew how difficult that must have been. David, like everyone involved in Jimmy’s failed property development, had not been paid. And David was a mate.

‘Oh, right,’ she said. ‘God, to have Jodie back. Just for a day.’

Jimmy carried on comforting Cressida. There was nothing to say on that score because there was no chance whatsoever of getting Jodie back, not unless she agreed to work for nothing and bring her own food.

For a moment they were silent, each holding a child, tiny bombs, either of which, if put down even for an instant, would immediately explode. Jimmy felt himself swaying slightly, fatigue enveloping him. For a moment he thought he was falling over, then he managed to blink himself back into focus.

‘How’s Toby?’ he asked.

‘Asleep. He misses Jodie.’

‘Well, I suppose that’s to be expected. She was with him all his life.’

Suddenly Monica’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I really do think . . .’ she started, ‘I mean, she might have found a way to . . . I thought she loved him. He feels so deserted.’

‘Mon, of course she loved him. In a way. Like a nanny. But what do you expect her to do? We can’t pay her.’

‘I know, but . . .’

But there
were
no buts. Jodie was as much a victim of the downturn as they were. She had been lucky to be offered a job at half the money (and no board) at a Shepherds Bush backpacker pub and she’d grabbed it.

‘If she hadn’t taken that job,’ Jimmy said, ‘she’d have been as stuck as we are.’

‘Perhaps not
quite
as stuck,’ Monica said, and for a moment she couldn’t help smiling.

Jimmy smiled too.

After all, Jodie might be poor and having to pull pints for pissed-up surfer dudes doing a year in London plus all the Aussie nannies who hadn’t lost their jobs. But at least she had managed to avoid the added burden of an enormous property portfolio negatively mortgaged to the tune of whatever horror story the
Evening Standard
was publishing that day.

Jodie had done her best to soften the blow, ignoring the painful and sudden reduction in her own circumstances and trying to be kind and positive about Jimmy and Monica’s. She had dropped back to see them twice in the first week of separation but it had all been too awkward. What was her position? Should she leap up and sort out the children’s laundry as she had been doing for years? Should she sit on the rug and engage Toby in some brilliant game before settling down on a bean bag to read him something fun but improving while the adults ignored them both and sipped wine? Or should she sit on the couch and drink her coffee with Monica like some newly discovered friend, politely but firmly declining all Toby’s demands to do all the stuff with him that she used to do? On her second visit Jodie had given in and done some painting with Toby, partly out of habit and partly out of sympathy. After half an hour she had realized that Monica had fallen back into old habits too and gone off to catch up on phone calls and emails. Jodie had had to disengage herself from a bewildered Toby and call to Monica that she needed to be getting back for her bar shift.

After that, Jodie didn’t visit again. She and Jimmy and Monica all understood that the situation was mutually upsetting and unworkable. The only person who didn’t understand was Toby, who simply found that somebody who’d always told him she loved him and who had seemed genuinely committed to his education in the finer points of Australian hard rock was now rejecting him, leaving not so much as a Cold Chisel album in the glove compartment of the Discovery.

‘How was it with David?’ Monica asked.

‘Pretty tense, as you’d expect,’ Jimmy replied. ‘His firm want paying, of course. Why wouldn’t they? They blame David for the bad debt, which is understandable as it was him who brought in our commission. Poor old Dave’s pretty stressed out in general now that his precious Rainbow Project has gone tits up too.’

‘Yes, that’s gone pretty sour, hasn’t it?’ Monica seemed to seize on the opportunity to talk about other people’s troubles. ‘It was even on the news. It looked so pathetic, two ridiculous-looking concrete spikes pointing at each other.’

‘Yeah, it was in the
Standard
too. It’s being used as a symbol of corporate excess. Hubris gone berserk. The headline was
Two Fingers to Caution
, which didn’t really work because they don’t look remotely like fingers. Of course, as originating architect David’s name’s all over it, so he’s
seriously
shagged.’

Together they walked their two younger children around the kitchen for a while, Cressida back in the buggy, Lillie in Monica’s arms.

‘It’s like some Greek tragedy, isn’t it?’ Monica said, breaking the silence.

‘It’s certainly some sort of bloody tragedy,’ Jimmy replied, once more finding it in himself to smile.

‘No, it’s Greek,’ Monica insisted, smiling too. ‘Greek tragedies aren’t just any tragedies. They need a fall.’

Monica had taken Theatre Studies as a subsidiary to her English degree and therefore knew her stuff. She had even been slated to play the king’s mother in a third-year production of
Oedipus
until the student director had informed her that in his vision of the play she would be expected to allow the actor playing Oedipus to suckle her breasts.