by Jim Powell
Jim Powell
TRADING FUTURES
PICADOR
For Kay
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
1
What I have decided to do is simple. It is cowardly. It is pathetic. But it is simple. I shall pull off the road and call home. If my wife has returned, and if she answers, I will say that my journey has been delayed, that I will be home at about eight p.m. If she has not returned, if she does not answer, I will turn the car round, go back to Somerset and stay there. Then I’ll commence the divorce proceedings.
God, the A303 is a boring road. Is there any more boring road in England?
If the fifth car that passes me is white, I will stop and make the call. No, I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Because if it isn’t white, I’ll have to start all over again and there’s a limit to how many times I can count five cars without forgetting what number I’ve reached, and then I might find myself making the call when the fourth car is white, which wouldn’t do at all. Let’s just say I’ll make the call quite soon.
Perhaps there are some more pills in the glove compartment. I could do with a few right now. There don’t seem to be. Why do they still call it the glove compartment? Nobody wears gloves any more. Perhaps the people who design cars do. If it were up to me, I would call it the gunk compartment. Everybody has gunk.
I’m pretty pleased with the decision to make this call. Several things about it appeal to me, most of all its clarity. It is a binary decision. Either this will happen or that will happen. No third dish appears on the menu. The vegetarian option is off. Each alternative comes with its own assembly instructions, and helpful diagrams showing A, B and Z, and something that may be an Allen key. Or a screwdriver perhaps.
Each alternative will later come with its own consequences. I’m not interested in the consequences at this point. I couldn’t care less about the consequences. I want a decision. I want to know what will happen now. Since I haven’t the faintest idea what I ought to do, it was a brilliant idea to delegate the decision to an inanimate object. A telephone, in this case. Got to have confidence in the staff, and inanimate objects are a lot more reliable than human beings, in my opinion. If you want to get anywhere in life, the A303 for example, you have to know how to delegate.
If I asked you which was prettier, a cobweb or the Taj Mahal, how would you answer? Exactly. You couldn’t. You’d say it was a ridiculous question. I could delegate the question to God, and let God get on with it, but I don’t really believe in God. In fact, I’m not sure I should be giving him a capital letter. I’ll withdraw it at once. Words don’t have capital letters when they’re just thoughts, you may object: thoughts are all in lower case, like websites. That may be true of other people’s thoughts. Mine do have capital letters, where appropriate, along with various other formatting.
Where was I? No, I don’t believe in god, at least not today, but I do believe in Fate. I probably believe in some combination of the two. Let’s call it Gate for convenience. And I like where Gate seems to be leading me. Not that I have the first idea where it is leading me. It could be anywhere. That’s all right. Anywhere will do.
I think the car behind may be following me.
There may be another reason why my decision appeals to me. It’s a gamble. That’s fashionable these days. You can’t turn on the TV without seeing adverts for gambling. I think it must be compulsory now. It’s the next stage in the ascent of capitalism. First phase, the manufacturing economy. Second phase, the service economy. Third phase, the gambling economy. I expect we could all earn a decent living by cashing in each other’s chips.
I have always gambled.
I’ve earned my living by gambling, by betting on whether the price of a commodity will rise or fall. I have traded futures. We don’t call it gambling, of course, especially not now. At least, I don’t imagine we do. I wouldn’t know since I’m not employed in futures any more. I expect we call it, oh I don’t know, predictive commodity analytics, or something. Only with capital letters. It would have to have capital letters. And initials. ‘We use our own PCA model here,’ I expect Rupert Loxley says to his clients, not that he probably has many clients these days. Serve him fucking right.
It’s not a large step from betting on whether coffee will rise or fall to betting on whether Matthew Oxenhay will rise or fall, so I’m pretty cool about it. The only rule of gambling is a calm acceptance of whatever happens. I have dwelt in this small niche where the financial markets embrace Buddhism. Om I god.
Not only have I gambled, I’ve been superstitious with it too. I would trade some commodities on a Thursday, but not on a Tuesday. I would sign important deals with my left hand, even though I’m right-handed. My colleagues thought I was a genius. Perhaps best of all was that I would buy coffee futures only when it was raining. That started as a joke. One day in the ’80s, it occurred to me that my last few trades in coffee had been on days when it had rained. After that I started to do it deliberately. I kept a notebook which compared my record in buying coffee with my record in buying other commodities. My record on coffee was above average.
I’m oversimplifying here. I didn’t buy coffee every time it rained, or my firm would have owned the world’s supply several times over. What I mean is that, when I was wondering whether it might be a good moment to buy coffee, when I was mulling it over on the Northern Line on the way to work, I let the weather that day make the decision for me.
For some reason, I got fired. What had constituted genius for forty years now constituted being a prat. Takes one to know one, as I said to Rupert Loxley. I may not have said that to him. I have called him a great many things in my head, all of them abusive, and I now get confused as to which of them I’ve actually said to him in person. Let’s just say that he wouldn’t be in the least surprised to know that I consider him a prat.
The car behind is still following me. Of course it is. It wouldn’t be behind me otherwise.
Anyway, I got fired. When was that? It was on a Friday. That’s when it was. A Friday about five months ago, if my memory serves me right, which it doesn’t often these days.
There have been times since, I must admit, when I’ve thought I might be going a bit off the rails. No one else has noticed, or not much. You’d have to know me pretty well to tell anything was wrong. I’ve managed to keep a lid on it. But I haven’t deceived myself. The fact is that I seem to have depended on the job rather more than I thought I did. So, when it wasn’t there any more, it drew attention to various other failings.
The point is, and this is the important point, that it’s never too late to change. That’s why I’m so pleased with my decision. It will bring change. Don’t ask me what sort of change. That’s the type of question old farts used to ask when I was at university. ‘It’s all very well knocking things down, but what are you going to replace them with, blah-blah-blah?’ Something better, you old fart. Change is good. Whatever comes out of this change will be good. All being well, I’ll even start liking myself again. I found myself quite liking myself this afternoon, as a matter of fact. That came as a surprise. It’s been years since I last liked myself. Things must be getting better.
That car has turned off. It can’t have been following me. Well, it was following me, because it was behind me for ten miles. But it wasn’t intending to follow me. Now I come to think of it, there may be some pills in the glove compartment.
I really ought to make the call.
It’s getting late and it’s not far to the M3 now. What’s the time? 6:35 and
30 seconds. Peep. Peep. Peep. There was a sign to somewhere back there. London, possibly.
What did I say the time was? 5:35. That’s right. No, I said it was 6:35. But it’s 5:35. The clocks have gone back an hour. They do that at this time of year.
When I was younger and some mates and I had spent several hours in rambling conversation, sorting out the world’s miseries, sometimes we would stop and examine how we had reached that particular point. We would retrace the straight lines, the arcs and the tangents, the logic and the non sequiturs that had led from this topic to that topic, and thence to here.
Driving up this pissing awful road, I am trying to work out how this all started. How I’ve reached the point of being about to make this call. To answer the question, there are about twenty-seven different explanations and the mix ’n’ match option is available. You can take the liquorice thingies and the pear drops, but pass on the gobstoppers and the toffee crunch. There has been no one single cause. There has been a cauldron of toxic ingredients, simmering for years and suddenly coming to the boil. Like if you put sodium cyanide, strychnine and batrachotoxin into a pot, gave it a good stir and chucked in a stick of dynamite. OK, I’m showing off. I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. I was looking at Angela Jones’s legs when we did Chemistry.
Where was I? Well, why don’t we go back to my sixtieth birthday party.
2
When I was small, my mother showed me how to grow a carrot from a carrot. She filled a jam jar with water, cut the top off a carrot, ran a cocktail stick horizontally through the stub and suspended it over the jar, just touching the water. In time, roots sprouted, and when they were long enough and strong enough, the plant was translated to the garden and new carrots grew. This was one of the many exciting ways in which I was prepared for adult life.
It was on my sixtieth birthday, five months ago, May 2008, that I remembered this. We were having a party at home. I say ‘we’, but what I mean is that Judy was having a party and I was a guest, which is not surprising since I am Judy’s husband and the party was being held in my honour. It was a small affair. I insisted on that when Judy proposed the idea, hoping my instruction would be ignored in favour of no party at all. I think about twenty people were there: our close friends and family. I say ‘our’, but what I mean is Judy’s close friends and, though they are our children, what feels like Judy’s family.
I wasn’t remotely sober when the evening started. That was the first mistake. After forty minutes or so, I made my excuses, left the lawn and withdrew to the house. I was intending to visit the cocktail cabinet and down a large Scotch for additional fortification. Which I did. Having done so, instead of returning to the lawn, I poured a larger one and went upstairs.
I spent a few minutes in front of the bedroom mirror, taking an inventory of myself at sixty. Several things had gone missing since a previous inventory ten years earlier. Two teeth. A thousand strands of hair. Vaguely contemporary clothes. A reliable erection. There had been some gains, though. Let’s not forget those. An interesting pot belly in the making. Plenty of lines going in various directions. Not of W. H. Auden proportions, but impressive. A pair of bi-focals. Summing it up, I felt that I looked spectacularly normal. Exactly what you’d expect of a well-fed Englishman at sixty. A perfect makeweight in an identity parade.
I then walked to the bedroom window and looked out over the lawn on a perfect May evening. One advantage of this perspective was that I couldn’t see the house. The garden is all right, as long as you like gardens where stray leaves get court-martialled and birds can’t crap without written permission. The house dates from the time between the wars when the country had temporarily mislaid its architects. It sprawls in all directions at once, like a jellyfish on a beach, devoid of structure. It has three bedrooms and the same number of utility rooms. We could never think what to do with them, so we bought things we didn’t need to fill them. The only advantage of this house is that Judy likes it so much she has stopped demanding a move every five years.
The scene from the window was a distillation of life present, of life cumulative to date. I was in the house that several decades of meaningless endeavour had procured, looking down on the wife that several months of conventional courtship had procured, on the friends that the procured wife had deemed suitable for such a house and such a marriage, on the children that several episodes of drunken sex had procured, and on the partners that said children’s market value had procured. None of it seemed to have a great deal to do with me. And nothing whatsoever to do with how I had imagined my life forty years earlier.
It was this that made me think of the carrots. Because what Judy had done, it seemed to me, was to cut me off in my prime, suspend me in water for a while, then transplant me to other soil, her soil, to produce a different carrot. I felt a pang of nostalgia for the original carrot that had been sacrificed to this endeavour. Thinking of that metaphor now, it seems to have lost the epic quality of a Biblical vision that it had when it occurred to me, but still to represent a truth. All I would change is to extend the accusation levelled at Judy, and include myself on the charge sheet for letting it happen. I would also indict Life, which has less capacity to wriggle out of that charge, or any other. Life is the ideal defendant when one is looking for a conviction.
What I thought most was how little all this was, how very little.
I’ve never envied my parents’ generation. I’ve never envied my grandparents’ generation. Nor do I envy my children’s generation, nor their children’s. As a matter of fact, there is no future generation that I envy, and precious few in the past.
But everybody envies us. Everybody thinks that our bums landed in the butter, that we have danced the last tango. The first third of our lives was funded by our parents and the State; the last third is supposedly being funded by our children and the State. Possibly we were self-supporting in the middle third. We are allegedly the one generation to be universally envied, and to envy no one. Except it’s not true. In reality, we envy more than any of our enviers, and what we envy is our own youth and how it amounted to so little. What we mistook for the promised land turned out to be a grazing pasture en route to a land of promises. Our generation made the great mistake of peaking too soon, in fact barely after we’d arrived.
Judy had bought a new dress for this occasion, or at least I thought she had. I may have been mistaken. I don’t notice her dresses. They come from the smartest boutique in Barnet, which is not saying a great deal. She dyes her hair these days, or at least I think she does. I don’t like to ask, but it seems more black than it did a few years ago. She certainly has it styled at the smartest salon in Barnet, which is saying even less. In short, Judy has succeeded in turning into her mother, and I have failed to prevent myself turning into my father.
She was talking to the chief executive of my company, the long and grinding toad called Rupert Loxley. He had not fired me at this point; for him, that pleasure lay ahead. Judy was talking to him because she still believed she was living in the era in which it was thought that if a man had a charming wife it would help his career. I’ve tried explaining to her that I might as well be bumming a Lithuanian rent boy for all the difference it would make, but she doesn’t believe me. She was talking to him because she knew that he had got the job, three years earlier, that I had expected to get and thought I deserved to get. And because she suspected that I might not have accepted that rejection with the requisite good grace, and hoped that her charm might repair whatever harm I had done to my prospects.
Judy’s children, who I’m obliged to admit are also my children, were talking to each other’s partners. Whether this was an active choice, or out of indifference towards the other guests, was debatable. Sarah, our daughter, was talking to Zoë, partner of Adam, our son. Adam was talking to Rufus, Sarah’s partner. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I didn’t need to. Adam and Rufus would be discussing which computer games they had downloaded, and how many thousands of virtual people
they could kill with them. At their age, I was going on peace demos to save the lives of real people, but what the hell.
Sarah and Zoë would be engaged in a wide-ranging conversation comprising, but by no means limited to, the noise levels in various clubbing establishments, the record amount each had spent in a day on designer clothes, the best Taylor Swift song ever, the relative merits of Tristan da Cunha and the Nicobar islands as holiday destinations, and twenty original ways of styling your pubic hair. As far as I could see, Sarah was not wearing a bra. She seldom did. It was her only known act of rebellion against her mother. I think she thought that it made her a feminist.
I could go on, but what’s the point? I expect you think I’m exaggerating, that I have a jaundiced view of the young. I am not so limited in my prejudices. I have a jaundiced view of everyone, myself most of all. People a few years older than Sarah and Adam are now running the country, which is terrifying. Their idea of the long term is something that will look good in next Sunday’s papers. Tony Blair apparently told Roy Jenkins that he wished he’d studied history at university. I think we all wish that, don’t we?
As for the friends who were there that evening, all I can say is that they weren’t. Friends, I mean, although they might as well not have been there either. They were acquaintances who now needed to be called friends because of the countless times we had seen them.
So I was spending my sixtieth birthday, supposedly the celebration of a notable achievement, looking out of my bedroom window, drinking whisky, thinking that my adult life had been pretty pathetic. At some point, rather later than I had expected, Judy must have noticed my absence and she came indoors to find me.
‘There you are, Matthew. What on earth are you doing up here?’ Her eyes travelled to my whisky glass, which has become their default point of focus, and she supplied her own answer. ‘How many have you had?’