My Idea of Fun (32 page)

Ian dressed swiftly. He left the twill trousers and sweat-stained shirt lying where they fell. He kicked off his own fucked footwear and put on Bob Pinner's shirt, tie, stylish suit and shoes. All of them were an excellent fit but more than size, style was the factor that had brought them together.

Ian circumnavigated the foundation pit a few times, trying his new suit out in a variety of postures. He put his hands on his hips and adopted a serious, thoughtful expression. Then, coming over all casual, he slipped them into Pinner's trouser pockets and propped his foot up on a huge chin of cornice, still bearded with flower-patterned wallpaper after fifty years. The more Ian moved about in the clothes, the more he felt at home in them – he thought that their slightly flashy and unorthodox qualities were exactly what he needed to create the right sort of impression in business – and Barries’ had been his favourite designer emporium since he was at university.

A long, white, naked foot intruding into his visual field cancelled out Ian's reverie. Bobby was still swaying in shock, still lodged mercifully in the living past. Ian went up to him, his horrid anaconda arm extended, his fingers forked so as to ward off the evil eye.

One finger drove hard into each of Bob Pinner's eyes, breaking the balls so that fluid spurted out. Then drove on, carrying the tattered retinal pads along with them, following the squiggly
calimari
path of the optic nerves, straight into Pinner's brain. He was dead in under a second, although during the last quarter of it he suffered more pain than you can possibly imagine; and during the penultimate quarter-second more fear and apprehension than you can possibly summon up, even if you lie alone in a darkened room and contemplate, coolly and rationally, all the awful possibilities that may very well lie in store for you – and you alone.

‘So, that's how I got the suit,’ said Ian, and the strange thing was that he had no feeling at all for the man who had once worn it. ‘I suppose it beats shopping around.’ He gently shook his head and slapped his thighs to get the circulation going again; retroscendence could be a numbing experience.

‘Yes, that's how you got it, my dear boy,’ replied The Fat Controller.’ And now, if you're quite recovered, I think the three of us ought to get going. We have an appointment at the Barbican.’

‘Oh yes.’ Ian was curious. ‘Who with exactly?’

‘Why, with the Money Critic, of course, I want his opinion on “Yum-Yum”. You'll come with us, Hieronymus?’

‘Naturally,’ said Gyggle, ‘wouldn't miss it for the world.’ He stood and disentangled the beard from his pullover and shirtfront, to which it had become closely attached.

They stacked their tiny chairs with others the same behind a waist-high partition covered with finger paintings that divided the crèche off from the rest of the reception area. Then they walked to the glass doors and exited.

Outside it was daylight and the three Illuminati were instantiated in the Roman Road. ‘Hmm,’ Ian mused. ‘I see we're in the Roman Road.’

‘Yes, well.’ The Fat Controller was fussing around in the pockets of his suit, probably looking for a cigar. ‘While the baths are closed for renovation they're a convenient sort of a place to access the noumenal world, doncha’ know. I have an arrangement with a corrupt local councillor. Another bonus is that it's just around the corner from Vallance Road and I like to pop in on Mumsie from time to time. Not that she's good company or anything but I feel I ought to keep up with her if only for old time's sake.’

A balding overweight Greek Cypriot pulled up at the kerb in an estate car. ‘Sorry I'm late,’ he gasped as he reeled down the window.

‘Sorry isn't good enough, Souvanis,’ said The Fat Controller, ‘never is.’

The three of them got in, The Fat Controller in the front and Ian and Gyggle in the back, and Souvanis pulled back out into the stream of traffic.

For a while no one spoke. Souvanis drove well, breaking with the gears and accelerating smoothly. They crossed the Bethnal Green Road and headed towards Old Street. The Fat Controller smoked, Gyggle seemed to be examining split ends in the further reaches of the beard. Ian was thinking to himself how easy everything was once you began to see the world the way The Fat Controller saw it. ‘It is easier, isn't it?’ observed his mage.

‘Yes, so much less harrowing now that their flesh is as undifferentiated as that of fruit.’

‘Quite, quite – ’

‘But tell me, why didn't you let me realise my full potential earlier? It would have saved me an awful lot of agonising.’

‘My dear Ian, there are different degrees of initiation into these things, you can't simply leapfrog your way over them. And anyway you must remember, I am the very Gandalf of Galimatias conjuring grace out of gammon, how could I allow any aspect of your coming of age to be remotely straightforward?’

‘I see.’

‘But anyway, none of that matters now that you're happy. It amuses you, doesn't it?’

‘I love the utter pointlessness of my outrages, that's what I find so droll. The man killed for his suit; the old woman for her large-print book; the young student eviscerated because I didn't like the fraying of her cuticles – ’

‘Yes, very amusin’, very amusin’, and not forgetting the woman at the Theatre Royal – ’

‘You did set that one up for me, I was just a lad.’

‘I know, but what a lad, you took to the work like a duck to water. I hate to say it but really you're a chip off the old block.’ The Fat Controller struggled round as far as he could in his seat and placed an avuncular hand on Ian's knee. ‘Don't worry if you feel a trifle confused for a while,’ he went on, staring sympathetically into Ian's bloodshot eyes. ‘There are an awful lot of suppressed memories there for you to catch up on, a lot of little outrages for you to retroscend your way through, but in a couple of months you'll feel absolutely tip-top, yes?’

‘I'm sure I will.’

‘Capital, capital!’

No one other than Souvanis had been paying any attention to where they were. Now The Fat Controller noticed that they were hopelessly snarled in a jam that had lodged them in Finsbury Square for the past five minutes. A lot of the cars were honking and the street was overflowing with pedestrian commuters hurrying home, as well as the traffic. ‘What's all this, Souvanis? What's going on?’

‘I'm sorry, Master, there's nothing I can do, it's the sheer weight of traffic.’

‘Mere weight of traffic? Mere weight of traffic? What the hell are you talking about, man, there's nothin’ “mere” about this – we're completely hemmed in and’ – he checked his Rolex – ‘running late.’

‘I don't think you heard me correctly, Master, I said “sheer weight of traffic”.’

There was silence for two or three beats until The Fat Controller managed to take this on board and then, of course, he began to laugh. ‘Ahahaha! Hahahaha! “Mere” for “sheer”, ahahaha! That's very good – very fine, doncha’ think so, Hieronymus?’

‘It is extraordinarily diverting,’ Gyggle effused, ‘and it reminds me that we've yet to introduce our young friend to Mr Souvanis – ’

‘Oh, I know who he is,’ Ian broke in. ‘He does point-of-sale leaflet dispensers for D.F. & L., runs a little outfit in Clacton called Dyeline.’

‘That's right,’ said The Fat Controller. ‘And we're giving him the contract for the “Yum-Yum” standing booths. I do hope he'll be able to fulfil it – he's getting so chubby that I fear for his engorged heart; it may just pack up one of these days, or else he'll get some terrible cancer of the fat, disappear in a great greasy white truffle of sarcoma, yech!’

‘What he really needs,’ said Ian, choosing his words and placing them carefully in the car's close and hilarious atmosphere, ‘is an oinkologist.’

‘Ha-ha-ha-ha!’ The Fat Controller went critical with laughter, his great neck swelling up redly, like Dizzy Gillespie's when he used to hit a high note. ‘Oh my God, don't! Hahahahahaha! It is too, too funny, “an oinkologist”. D'ye like that, Souvanis? You're a porky little bugger, aren't you?’ He grabbed a fold of the dewlap beneath the Greek's chin and started to tug at it, syncopating his tugs with his rap: ‘Piggy, piggy, piggy, oink, oink, oink – oinkology!’ After a while Ian joined in, grabbing a fold of Souvanis's neck, then Gyggle did as well; and that's how the three of them spent the rest of the journey, teasing and hurting the poor man.

The Money Critic squinted down from his window at the three men as they crossed the central courtyard of the Barbican in the late-afternoon sunlight. He knew the fat man who waddled in front as Samuel Northcliffe, banker and financier. The tall thin man with the preposterous ginger beard he knew as Hieronymus Gyggle, a psychiatrist with pretensions to understanding the psychology of the markets. The third man, who was much younger and whose face was rather unpleasantly soft and eroded at the edges, he didn't recognise.

The Money Critic turned from the window and picked his way across the main room of the flat to where the entryphone was clipped on the wall. He waited for it to buzz, his face drawn into a desperate predatory mien. He had made it very clear to Northcliffe on the phone, when he called to make the appointment: ‘Please be sure to give the buzzer the lightest of presses, don't push it right in – there's no need, one very light touch is all that's required. You must understand that the least sound is exquisite torture to me, I insist on silence, reverent silence.’ But despite this he was convinced that Northcliffe would forget his injunction – he wasn't mistaken.

In the nanosecond that had elapsed while he ran through this speech in his mind, the buzzer started to sound and to the Money Critic's ears it was horribly loud and insistent. (Although in actual fact he had had the mechanism adjusted so that the noise it made was no louder than an insect's agitated wing.) He fumbled in agony for the handset and, pressing it to his large, cartilaginous, sensitive ear, breathed, ‘Yes?’

‘It's Northcliffe here,’ bellowed The Fat Controller down the entryphone. ‘I've got Dr Hieronymus Gyggle and Ian Wharton from D.F. & L. Associates with me. May we come up?’

‘Oh yes, I suppose so but please, please remember – ’

‘I know, “the least sound is exquisite torture” to you, we know, don't rupture yourself over it.’

The Money Critic pressed the button to admit them to the block and retreated to the sanctity of his armchair.

There was barely room in the aluminium box for the three of them. As it accelerated upwards The Fat Controller expostulated, ‘Pah!’ and sprayed Gyggle and Ian with musty saliva. ‘Pah!’ he reiterated. ‘The man's an utter poove, “The least sound is exquisite torture to me”.’ He parodied the Money Critic's breathy tones. ‘I think the man's a complete fraud.’

‘Yes, yes, maybe – ’ Gyggle was staring at the ceiling as he spoke. ‘But fraud or not he is a successful one and people listen to him.’

‘Oh I know it,’ said The Fat Controller, ‘don't I just.’ The trio relapsed into silence. Alighting from the lift they proceeded to the door of the flat. The Fat Controller was just about to beat it down, his frozen turkey of a hand raised up for the task like a sledge hammer, when it swung open.

The Money Critic was wearing a floor-length djellaba of unparalleled richness, patterned with interlocking geometrical shapes and financial symbols. The robe was iridescent even in the muted light of the flat. As soon as he had opened the door he worked his way back to his high-backed Queen Anne armchair, where he picked up his bone-china cup and took a sip of a rarefied tisane. He didn't invite the trio to sit and indeed they couldn't have even if they had wanted to, for there were no other chairs.

Instead, the whole floor of the room which the front door opened into was covered with irregular piles and heaps of money. Money of all kinds: neat stocks of freshly printed bank notes as slick as stationery; plastic rolls of new coinage broken into elbows; used notes of all denominations and currencies, stacked in loose bundles; necklaces of cowrie shells; criss-crossed stacks of lead and iron plugs; notched bones; the filed teeth of narwhals; totemic spirit boards; myriads of different kinds of share-issue certificates, government bills, gilts, bonds (junk and otherwise) from all the two hundred and fifty-two countries of the world; dry-cleaning tokens; Indian State Railway chitties; Luncheon Vouchers; pemmican; piltjurri; balls of crude opium; pots of cocaine basta; gold (in HM Government ingots, also US issue from Fort Knox and Reichsbundesbank wartime loot still stamped with the Nazis’ bonnet mascot eagle); other ingots of precious metals; diamonds, pearls, emeralds and dustbin bags full of semi-precious stones; and all kinds of plastic – there was a great slick drift, made up solely of service-till cards, which flooded into the kitchenette.

Here and there, there was an item of what might of been furniture, faintly visible beneath the riot of dosh, but overall the impression the Money Critic's room gave was of a relief map of currencies, in which the lumpings and moundings of diverse kinds indicated their relative liquidity and value.

The Money Critic's room was the room of a man who criticised money with a vengeance; for into these expensive spits and promontories of pelf there was written clear evidence of careful lapidary arrangement. There was nothing in the least vulgar about this, rather, the same mind that had conceived of the collection as an opportunity to demonstrate the raw mechanics of money – its great gearing, both into itself and into the subsidiary world of things – had also chosen to regard the things-that-were-money as aesthetic objects in their own right. A lacy bridal veil pinned with high-denomination drachma notes was draped over the lampshade; the sunlight from the window fell through – and was filtered by – a collection of abacuses that were ranged along the sill, each one like a miniature Venetian blind.

‘Well, this is cosy,’ exclaimed The Fat Controller. He shouldered his way to the centre of the room and stood there breathing noisily through his shofar nose.

‘Please,’ said the Money Critic quaveringly, ‘I cannot work if there is any aural pollution –’ He broke off, a discreet chattering of metal on paper was coming from an adjoining room.

Ian looked towards the sound. At the end of the ‘l’ formed by the flat's balcony there was another smaller room, this was choked with softly chattering telex machines, gently grinding fax machines and a bank of VDUs, across the faces of which green and yellow figures played chicken with one another. An enormous tangled knot of printout jerked, waggled and then came towards them; underneath it was a ratty little man wearing an old-fashioned sharkskin suit. He rid himself of the bunch and then emerged from the telecommunications room clutching a fragment of this paper. Making his way to the side of the Money Critic's chair, he made a respectful obeisance before handing the fragment over.