Learning to Die

by Thomas Maloney

  Curiosity of the jealous kind — Dan acknowledges a trace of that hazardous element, uncharacteristic in him — is as unlikely to fade as desire.

  ‘I have a question.’ It’s the young woman: a rising star. Even her ambition is ambitious. Mike senses both danger and opportunity.

  ‘Sure — fire away.’

  ‘I’ve run a few numbers based on the data that you kindly sent over last week. I was surprised to find that your so-called supercomputer is eighty per cent correlated to a naive strategy of buying what went up over the past year, and going short what went down.’ So-called, she said. The atmosphere in the room is drawn taut. ‘I’m talking about the most basic trend-following. Any high school geek could code it up in half an hour. So my question is: why should we pay two-and-twenty for that, when we can get it in a more transparent product for half that fee?’

  The sales rep glances at him uneasily. The CIO’s smile has gone; he frowns and nods as if he’d been thinking that all along.

  ‘You’re absolutely right,’ says Mike, making full frontal eye contact. ‘Just about eighty per cent.’ Now the sales rep is frowning, too. Mike leaves a dramatic pause. ‘If only you could eat correlations,’ he says at last. ‘But what you and, more importantly, your beneficiaries get to eat is returns. Do you know which twenty per cent of naive trend-following the MRI strategy is not correlated to?’

  His challenger looks slightly sick. She can already guess that her little gambit is going to backfire. Nobody answers.

  ‘We’re not correlated to the twenty per cent that throws away most of your gains. The whipsaws. The bolts from the blue. The head-in-hands disasters. MRI can see those coming. Let’s throw a comparison up on the screen. Don’t worry — it won’t take me half an hour.’ He flashes her a smile and bangs away on the keyboard for about ten seconds. Two jagged lines appear — a black one relentlessly rising and a green one following similar contours but lagging far behind.

  ‘Now let’s adjust for different fees. One and ten, you said?’ He types again and the gap narrows infinitesimally: the black line is still streets ahead. ‘It was a great point,’ he says, magnanimously but using the past tense, ‘but I hope I’ve allayed that concern. Alpha is measured in returns, not correlations. This strategy delivers the real deal.’

  As they all shake hands at the end of the meeting, Mike saves his earnest ‘Thanks for taking the time’ for the CIO, who responds with glowing compliments. The young woman offers a curt and dismissive ‘thanks’ — she hasn’t forgiven him for making the naive, underperforming line on the graph green to match her outfit. Some things can’t be helped.

  In the lift, the sales rep grins and slaps him on the back. ‘God damn Rocket Jesus. Now I get why they call you that.’

  6. Empty space

  ‘The most manifest sign of wisdom is a constant happiness.’

  Montaigne

  Brenda Vickers is on a restocking team this week, which suits the sense of stubborn regeneration that often follows the passing of her darker episodes. The clear-felled swathe of mountain has lain fallow and unsightly for two years, and is now ready to nourish ten thousand new saplings — beams and rafters for the houses of 2050. A mild weather system has conveniently thawed the ground.

  What was it James called the saw-work? Dismembering the crap out of trees. Sometimes that’s all she’s good for. Taking revenge. Other times she’s almost normal, an outdoorsy girl in her element. Most of the estate boys like her, even the two or three she’s slept with. You might expect these Highlanders to bear grudges, but they don’t.

  Her rented house, a two-bed pebble-dashed semi in a modern outgrowth of the village of Invergarry, is one of many called The Shieling. From her bedroom window she can watch the copious waters of the Garry swirling towards Loch Ness. In the kitchen, a PG Tips magnet secures a Scotsman cutting to the fridge: ‘Mountain race abandoned after “mindless sabotage”.’ Brenda doesn’t take kindly to litter on the mountains, whatever its purpose — she kept the stack of fluorescent flags as a souvenir. A second clipping hangs from a Nessie magnet: ‘Paisley Nurse Smashes Highland Way Record.’ This article is a source of private amusement because Brenda ran the ninety-five-mile trail twenty minutes faster with a couple of lads from the Monarcan a’ Ghlinne, an elite climbers’ club whose membership criteria are ‘Drink hard, get up early and prove you’re neither feart nor bamstick.’ The Monarcan, who invited her to join, don’t know about the Inderal.

  Brenda’s violent aversion to social appearances covers parties, dates, family gatherings, job interviews, ceilidh night at the Lock, and even simple photographs: since the age of twelve she has been physically incapable of smiling on demand, though that’s the least of her problems. Mike’s hideous party did to her exactly what she told him it would, and the aftermath of self-loathing festered. James’ message was a jolt, an invasion both thrilling and unwelcome. She surprised herself by calling him back; she found she wasn’t afraid to — after all, he was even more of a mess than her. But it made no difference to her urgent, gathering need to be alone, which was only finally satisfied by making herself, for one night, the most isolated person in the country. Over the mountain she went, to see what she could see. And all that she could see, thank god, was empty space.

  She feels better now. She wouldn’t even mind if James called her again, but he hasn’t. These Sitka saplings must be planted densely, to slow down the juvenile growth and produce stronger timber. Too much space is bad for them. He’ll call again.

  A simile trips off James’ cursor: like a man left sitting in the bath after the water has run out. He smiles with satisfaction and then suddenly frowns. Did he read that somewhere? Lowry, or one of the American masters? He can’t be sure he didn’t. These bastards are still jostling him, crowding him out. He hammers the backspace furiously, then sits for a moment with fingers poised. It’s no good: he’s lost the flow. He’s the man sitting in that fucking bath.

  When did he last have a bath, anyway? It was last Christmas Eve, on his annual visit to the Old Enemy, his parents. His mother offered him one as though he were a vagabond they had received in an act of charity. He shaved out of consideration for her bourgeois feelings.

  His father is an accountant, now approaching retirement. His Portuguese mother was one too, but retrained as a teacher. They are conscientious people, who moved into the catchment of the right school and asked him gently challenging questions about his schoolwork. His father in particular, whose parents ‘came from nothing’ (it was writ large in Saunders lore that James’ grandmother wore clogs in the winter and went barefoot in the summer), values hard work and financial security and takes nothing for granted.

  Shortly after James told his father he wanted to be a writer and would not even complete his degree, a magazine was left prominently open on the kitchen table, showing grainy photographs of evicted tenant farmers in Ireland — Nanna’s ancestors. The intended message: spoilt brat.

  That was ten years ago.

  Mike Vickers is back in London, pounding the treadmill. The good news is that the prospective client has agreed to invest a cool two hundred million dollars in his system, subject to final board approval which is virtually assured. The bad news is that the very same system is down almost five per cent on the week. It could bounce back, of course — it has before — but as of now, both a chunk of his existing investors’ gains and a slab of his own end-of-year haul have gone up in smoke. He has effectively donated it to the dopey chumps on the other side of his trades — for every buyer there is a seller, for every loser a winner. This time their irrational phobias and foibles have paid off.

  A tall woman is interval training on the treadmill in front of his: she runs hard for a minute or two, leaps off, straddling the machine as the belt whips round beneath her for thirty seconds, then hits the belt running for another burst. During one of her rests, Mike studies the lycra-clad outline of her thighs. If there were s
uch thing as a perfect body, it would soon pall. But a woman’s beauty presents infinite variations: he has never seen these miraculous thighs before.

  The walls of the gym are covered in mirrors, and where two walls meet he sees his own labouring reflection: the aspect not head-on but oblique; the image not reversed but true. Who is this sweaty, lecherous man in the corner, no longer in the first flush of youth, and how did he get here?

  The careers questionnaire at school prophesied ‘marine biologist’ as his destiny, and ‘astrophysicist’ as Dan’s. Dan’s misdirection from galaxies to dizzy electrons was only a matter of scale, but Mike’s own path has gone more fundamentally astray. He won a place to study mathematics at Oxford — getting one over on Dan, whom Cambridge foolishly rejected — but his first term was a disaster. The simple, memorised recipes for A-level success were useless here, where maths was taught quite differently by real mathematicians who were baffled by his lack of ability. During the second term, though, he began to get the measure of his situation — not as a scholar but as a fraud and a bluffer. He spent four years polishing his act, his veneer of competence, so that even the supposedly fearsome scrutiny of Oxford’s Examination Schools merely bounced off it. After the last exam, he remembers quaffing champagne with the bewildered relief of a criminal who has just pulled off an outrageous heist and got clean away with it. Master of Mathematics. Master of anything. First Class.

  The little mathematics he did grasp is all forgotten now: he’d probably fail a GSCE paper. He has come to realise that at the very core of his mind, where the weightiest and most precious substance should be concealed, there is a void. At the same time, he has come to realise that it doesn’t seem to matter.

  It was from a rare satisfied client of his father’s that he first heard the words hedge and fund linked together. The man was a ferocious maths nerd who, learning of Mike’s academic triumph, mistook him for a kindred spirit. After a few cosy chats in his Vickers-built extension — triple-glazed, climate-controlled and mood-lit — the ferocious nerd offered him a job. ‘We’re one of the big fish, but you won’t have heard of us — and don’t bother looking for a website. We call ourselves traders, not portfolio managers. We don’t sit around managing. We make money by trading the right stuff at the right time: it’s a zero-sum game.’

  So, instead of becoming a marine biologist, Mike became a trader’s assistant at a large and secretive hedge fund that had figured out how to turn the zero-sum game into a dead cert. The genius, he discovered, was only partly in the timing of the trades: it was also in the marketing and the fee structure. There was nothing illegal or dishonest. ‘We’re just giving the investors what they want,’ one Ferrari-owning cynic told him with a shrug. ‘Heads we both win, tails they lose. We call it the money valve.’

  The traders weren’t all cynics. But Mike felt uneasy in those early days, and told himself the mystifying job was only temporary: a way to pay off a chunk of student debt while he thought about what he really wanted to do. What he really wanted to be.

  That was ten years ago.

  Glancing again at his reflection he dimly remembers fearing that he might become accustomed to a mean, material existence — fearing it, but never really believing it could happen. This is how it happens. The gentle reclassification of aspirations and ideals from noble to naive, the fading of frustrations as the heart accommodates. All will return later, he suddenly realises. He grasps at the thought and then hastily flings it away: all will return later in the terrible, terminal form of regrets.

  Natalie Mock is back at home. The doctor has signed her off work for a week, but the team meeting is tomorrow and she’s going to try to attend. Dan has been brilliant: the house looks eerily spick and span as though on the market, the laundry has been done and her clothes folded the way she likes them, and the fridge is full. The showerhead has been replaced with a comforting, plasticky one with big holes that delivers a gentle but drenching rain; the cradle is no more. She keeps telling him the accident wasn’t his fault.

  Natalie doesn’t like being off sick. Her salary is paid out of money that would otherwise be helping the most desperate people in the world, in countries where thirty-two thousand pounds goes a long way. ‘100% of your donation goes towards helping people like Mirembe,’ say the posters that she helps to design. It’s sort of true — some colluding donor has agreed to cover staff costs, to make it sort of true — but it’s sort of untrue. Unless you consider Natalie Mock to be a person like Mirembe.

  Which in some ways she is. Both of them grew up without a father (Natalie’s died of a brain tumour when she was twelve), both are intelligent and kind-hearted — if Mirembe’s photo is anything to go by — and both have been unable to follow their dreams: Natalie was supposed to be an architect.

  There the similarities end. She lives a comfortable life with a loving and reliable husband, a robust health that even a stab in the back can’t impair for long, free access to world-class healthcare, and the indescribable pleasure of catch-up TV.

  Natalie knows that SmartAid’s expensive national fundraising campaigns peddle a subtler untruth than merely disguising their own cost. They represent each problem with a photogenic individual, vulnerable, desperate and yet so easy to help. Text MIREMBE to give her three pounds right now. Who wouldn’t? The true magnitude of the world’s suffering, its harrowing, godless injustice, its sheer bewildering self-inflicted self-perpetuating incurable fucked-up-ness, is vaguely understood by all but a subject better avoided. Feelings of helplessness and resignation are evoked; a need to escape, not engage.

  Natalie knows this from personal experience: she prescribes herself the same deception every day. As she searches guiltily for the remote control, it occurs to her that Dan never feels helpless about anything. He doesn’t ignore difficulties, but simply works with what he’s got. This is both admirable and infuriating.

  In the early evening, James F. Saunders receives a text message on his ancient Nokia: ‘James. Good to meet u the other week. I believe u may have borrowed one of my books, and wanted to make sure u have the correct address to return it to. Take ur time tho. Mike.’ Then a postal address and an email address.

  James reads it again, and frowns. Brenda must have given the carrot-top 007 his number, which he considers a breach of trust. She’s not the only guilty one, though: on his desk, beside the creased paperback Montaigne, is another book. Not just a book — a thing of beauty: a 1759 edition of Charles Cotton’s translation in the original leather binding. Volume Two was all James could smuggle under his cardigan that night, but it contains three of his favourite essays. It turns out Mike doesn’t only spend his money on tasteless, pointless crap.

  He’ll have it out with Brenda. Or perhaps not — has she just given him two connections for the price of one? Could the smarmy salesman brother be a useful offshoot of Project Q?

  7. Mad things

  ‘I undervalue the things that I possess.’

  Montaigne

  ‘You worked a miracle on this cupboard,’ says Natalie on Saturday morning, as she bends stiffly and files away some hospital paperwork that she’ll never need again. Dan immediately recognises this as his moment.

  ‘All part of the service. By the way,’ he adds casually, ‘I found some letters of yours in there.’ She glances enquiringly; has no idea. ‘From before we met. In a bundle.’ Her face adjusts slowly: the sparkle fades out of it.

  ‘Oh, them.’

  ‘I didn’t read them, obviously. You never talk about that guy.’

  ‘Why would I?’

  ‘Well, it was two years of your life. I’m interested in any two years of your life.’

  ‘You’re saying you actually want to hear about my ex-boyfriend from ten years ago.’ Then she adds, with sarcastic brightness, ‘Which bits shall I tell you about?’

  Dan shoots her a reproving glance. ‘I just wondered. I’m always interested in how you became the
person you are.’ He crosses the room to her, remembers at the last moment not to put his hand on her bandaged back, kisses her hair. ‘The person I love.’

  She looks up at him and her face softens, then hardens again. ‘It was just a wrong turning, a dead end — it didn’t lead me here. It’s better forgotten about. I didn’t even know those letters still existed.’

  ‘I’ll throw them in the recycling, then.’

  ‘Sure.’ They both know he won’t.

  Dan survives lunch, but as he dries the soup pan he finds he can’t quite let the subject drop. There’s a fine line between dismissiveness and touchiness and he wants a positive ID.

  ‘The guy who wrote those letters — was he your first?’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘What?’ Dan spreads his hands in protest, pan in one, towel in the other. ‘It’s just a question.’

  ‘No, he wasn’t. As it happens.’ Dan’s mind quietly boggles: how much history doesn’t he know?

  ‘Who was, then?’ Nat is about to snap, but gives him a pitying smile instead.

  ‘Just some pimply boy. Not all of us went to repressed single-sex schools, you know.’

  ‘We had girls in the sixth form.’

  ‘The school did, but you didn’t, did you, my love?’ That hurts.

  James gets up too late for a coffee from his landlady, so heads to the tearoom. One of the proprietors gives a little smile of pride as he flips open his laptop, while the other looks suspicious — she’s heard all about the internet.

  He awoke with a sense of purpose. Mike’s text message has been niggling him for two days: the slimy, hand-shaking, wink-and-gun spiv is so rich, so superior, so infuriatingly charmant that he doesn’t give a damn about losing his book. If James had managed to snaffle all three volumes, he’d have sold them online and made enough to write for months uninterrupted by the need to earn his daily bread. Volume Two on its own isn’t worth selling.