A steady stream of people are taking their seats in the tent. Most people are over forty. No students or teenagers here. These are all grown-up people with money issues, thinks Tracey. She hopes very much that she won’t bump into anyone she knows. Or any of her cosmetics customers. God, that would be awful. She’d have to pretend she was there for professional reasons, make out that Alan had hired her or something. It would be so embarrassing.
She and Harriet take up their seats somewhere towards the back, and shiver out of their coats. Tracey starts to think the event might be quite amusing after all.
“This is great,” she whispers to Harriet. “A night out, watching a celebrity but also doing something virtuous.” It’s fun to be out of the house, and at an event. Even if it’s an event devoted to thinking about overdrafts. She notices that other people are quite brazen about being there, waving and shouting ‘Hi!’ to acquaintances on the other side of the marquee. Maybe, she thinks, that because there is a famous person in the room, they think they have become a little bit famous too.
At precisely 7pm, the lights dim, and Alan Makin springs onto the stage. He is a very fair man with aviator glasses. He is wearing one of his famous light-coloured linen suits. He waves at everyone.
Alan Makin’s Unique Selling Point is that he tries to make paying off debt seem thrilling.
“Good evening, all!”
Harriet turns round and pulls a face.
“He’s a lot smaller than he is on the TV, isn’t he? I hope I haven’t wasted your time, sweetie.”
“No,” says Tracey. She is transfixed by watching someone from the screen existing in real time just before her eyes.
“Tonight, I am going to educate, entertain and inspire! I am going to help you all become better investors and to learn how to deal with debt. Because debt must be dealt with. Do we not agree?” thunders Makin.
The audience murmurs sheepishly.
“Doesn’t it?” booms Makin.
“YES!” shouts the audience back at him.
“Tonight, we are going to understand THE WAY FORWARD.” He steps one pace forward on the stage. Harriet and Tracey exchange grimaces.
“I am going to leave you wanting to TAKE ACTION!”
“I believe this is what’s known as ecstatic economy talk,” whispers Harriet, laughing.
“Who feels their debts are impossible to deal with?” continues Alan Makin, stalking the stage. A few people raise their arms, but it is only to take photos of Alan Makin on their phones.
“Who is trying to bury their head, and their bank balance in the sand? Like an ostrich? Who thinks they cannot live without going shopping? Who has been fooled by promises of 0% interest rates, and then finds themselves shelling out interest to credit card companies which comes in at 35%?”
Various hands go up.
“Ostriches, you are going to change your ways. Earn it first, then spend it,” says Alan. “That’s what you are going to learn tonight. Earn it, then spend it. Not the other way round.”
He then dives into an anecdote. It is not a long and winding road. In Alan’s expert hands, it is a short, straight road.
“Once upon a time I had more debt than I was earning on an annual basis. Can you possibly imagine what my bank charges were?”
Knowing laughter ripples around the room. Tracey looks at the audience. Nobody looks obviously impoverished. They all look like people who would normally attend an annual Book Festival. She’s feeling happy, in the presence of Alan Makin. He seems to be exuding a sort of glow. She nudges Harriet.
“He’s rather adorable.”
“I gave myself eighteen months to pay it off,” continues Alan. “I was working at the Post Office. I took no trips. I bought no clothes. Whenever I travelled anywhere, I went on the bus. I sold my car. I worked every nightshift, holiday and extra hours that I could. I substituted for everyone on my team. Gradually, I shifted that debt. And do you know what it taught me? It taught me that nothing is worth having the stress of a huge debt. Earn it first! Then spend it! Not the other way round.”
After the anecdotes, Makin encourages people to come up on stage. They sit on a stool, Alan sits behind his desk, and gives them a four-minute Money Makeover, as honed on his eponymous TV Makeovers, as explained by him in his Daily Mail columns, and as written about in his numerous books, sold at airports around the world. Because debt, as Alan is fond of saying, is global. Tracey finds herself wondering whether he is married.
“Do you think he’s gay?” she whispers to Harriet.
Harriet tilts her head back, and surveys Alan.
“Could be. That suit. But no. I don’t know.” She looks at him through half-closed eyes, as if that will give something away.
“I don’t know,” she finally says.
Meanwhile, Alan, unaware of this scrutiny, is well into his stride. He deals with each person on stage in the same way.
First, he starts with praise:
“You should be proud of yourself. Your own business? Five children? A sculpture studio in the garden? Well done.”
Then it quickly transmutes to humiliation.
“What? You have an overdraft of £25,000, and an addiction to catalogue shopping and a beach hut worth £60,000, and you can’t make ends meet? Sell it! Sell it, unsubscribe, and don’t look back!”
A middle-aged man grins and stumbles away off the podium.
A serious-looking woman of fifty is next up.
“Am I hearing you correctly?” yells Makin. “You are earning an annual income of £55,000 and you can’t work out how to pay your tax bill? Don’t avoid those letters coming in. Tax evasion is dealt with so seriously!”
She nods furiously.
Then she leans over and gives Alan a huge kiss. Being publicly humiliated by Alan Makin has clearly delighted her.
“Thanks, sweetie. Next!”
His next victim is a younger man with glasses, who confesses he wishes to build up a property portfolio.
“You want to do buy to let? With debts of over £48,000? You are out of control with your desire to own property. Take control of yourself!”
The man shrugs his shoulders and looks at his shoes.
“What is your overdraft like?” demands Alan. “Well, I’ve got about £20,000 in unsecured debt,” he confesses.
“Talk me through your assets,” says Alan.
“Err, house. Flat in Courchevel. Er, Car. Sports car. Merc. Err, plasma screen telly,” says the man. He grins cheekily. “Although I don’t know that I could call that an asset, since what’s on is just rubbish.”
Alan glares. He is the gag master around here. Plus, he gets a lot of income from his daytime TV franchised shows.
“Well, you need to simplify your life,” he says. “Minimalism. That should be the life-changing mantra for you. Say it as you cut up those cards, as you sell the plasma TV, as you flog the ski flat. You need to be rational. You are way over-leveraged. Thank you.”
However, the man doesn’t want to leave the stage humbly.
He doesn’t seem to notice that his time is up with Alan Makin.
“But I thought it was good to be aspirational,” he retorts. “And keep money circulating in the market. Isn’t that Keynesian? Isn’t that capitalism?”
Everyone laughs.
Makin moves into aggressive mode with the speed of an accelerating BMW.
“You feel pretty good about yourself, don’t you?” he says to the man. “Like you’ve made it. But you haven’t. In fact, the little I know about you, and your money situation, I already would say you are way off making it.”
Gosh, that’s a bit below the belt, thinks Tracey.
“You come up here with your plasma screen, and your Merc, and you start to brag to us all about your ambitions to be a property mogul, and tell us how in debt you are. You are living in folly! And I will make you see it.”
The man goggles at Makin.
All at once, Tracey stands up. She doesn’t know how she is suddenly standi
ng up, but she is. She needs to prick this man’s balloon. She doesn’t care that he is from the TV. She’s had enough of it.
“What are you doing?” hisses Harriet.
“Mr Makin,” shouts Tracey, waving urgently. “I have a question for you. Is this the point?”
Alan Makin looks slightly irritated. He squints out into the body of the marquee to answer her. He also looks at his watch. Tracey blusters on, aware of Harriet staring at her from somewhere by her right elbow.
“What’s that?” shouts Alan across the hall.
“I mean, what is your definition of Making It? For you it might be wealth. Or fame. For other people it might be other things. Raising a family. Looking after an ageing parent. Being a great friend. Overdrafts aren’t the end of the world, are they? I mean, are they?”
Everyone applauds.
Alan Makin looks thunderously at her. After the first thrill of adrenalin, Tracey is beginning to wonder how she can end this confrontation, and sit down again.
“He probably didn’t mean to become overdrawn,” she continues in a faltering voice, pointing at the man on stage. The man nods vigorously at her.
“No, I didn’t,” he shouts back to Tracey.
Cheers from the audience. This inspires her.
“Nobody in this tent did.”
Alan gives him a withering look.
“None of us did,” continues Tracey. “Debt just happened. Crept up on us. Somehow owing hundreds of pounds became owing thousands of pounds, and then tens of thousands, and then the figures stopped relating to actual money, and just turned into little black marks on a piece of paper.”
Everyone has turned round and is now looking at her.
“All that happens from the credit card companies is that you get a bill.” She pauses. “With the interest rate written down in monthly figures, so it looks terrifically small, and a nice message saying all you have to do is pay the minimum fee, which is minuscule. And then it offers you Increased Credit.”
More nods, and a few claps.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with making it, or not making it, or whether you are a success in life or not. It really doesn’t. About whether you are a fantastic mother, or a fantastic wife.” She pauses. Should she confess? “Do you know I have an overdraft, even after winning the bloody Lottery a few years ago!”
This gets a laugh.
“Oh, God Tracey,” moans Harriet beside her. “Please shut up.”
“Oh, I remember now. The famous Lottery couple. Looks like you need a Makin Makeover,” says Alan, recovering his poise. “But not now. Next time!”
Tracey takes this as a signal to sit down, and does. She is shaking, slightly. Harriet looks at her, smiling tightly.
“That was weird.”
“Sorry, Harriet, do you think that was rude?”
“No,” says Harriet, whose face indicates otherwise.
“Really sorry, Harriet. I just felt… I felt for that man on stage.”
“No, it’s fine. It was funny. Not sure about the Lottery mention, but never mind.”
Middle class people are so uptight about the Lottery, thinks Tracey. She then wonders, as she always does, how what Larry did, winning a bit of money, well quite a lot of money, on the Lottery, is really any different from winning a bonus on the Stock Market.
Alan shakes hands with the man on stage, and claps him on the back.
The agent steps up to the microphone. “Alan will be signing books here for everyone. Please form an orderly queue.”
When they get back to the Square, Harriet drops her off and leans across the passenger seat.
“You were great,” she says, exuding the bitter stench of tobacco over Tracey.
“Not too weird?” Tracey says, still worried.
“No, no. It was fine. Why don’t you get in touch with Alan Makin, though. I dare you! You never know. He might have you on one of his shows. He could do a Makeover on you, and you could say all that stuff again, on TV. Apart from the Lottery bit, of course. But seriously, Tracey, he might help you out with your overdraft.”
She thinks about it at night, lying in bed, surrounded by the evidence of her lucky, lucky win; the perfect house, the immaculate kitchen, a wardrobe full of shoes, quietly existing in the soft darkness all around her.
Chapter Seven Roberta
She’s knows she is lucky to have an allotment. She got it under the Austerity Enterprise scheme from the local council. It used to belong to some woman who never used it. She did use it, actually, but not for vegetables. She just grew sunflowers on it. This was regarded as inessential. It was taken away from her. Now it belongs to the piano teacher who plants vegetables in it.
Roberta’s back aches. This has got to be the last row. Please let it be the last row. She looks back at the small pots. How many are there? Fifteen? Twenty? Surely she can put these all in the same row, can’t she?
Are leeks a less deserving enterprise than sunflowers? Is a beautiful flower, which manages to swivel round and look at the sun every day, less important than a leek? The council certainly judged so, and Roberta, whose name was first on the waiting list, was the beneficiary of that judgement. Food before art.
She bends down stiffly and quickly picks up a little pot, holding it by its plastic rim. The ribbons of bright green in the centre of the pot wave encouragingly. Carefully, she tips the dome of soft compost into her gloved hand. It falls easily into her palm, the sandcastle shape contained by a web of thick white latticed roots leading to the fleshy cylindrical core. She dusts crumbs of soil from the long ribbons. Leeks.
She pushes the raised line of soil askance with her toe, and puts the leek into it. Still crouching down, she picks up the next pot. Squatting now, she swiftly decants the baby leeks, pot after pot, into the open ground, each in its allotted place. After three, she stands up, stretches, walks along and squats down to plant three more in their places. Allotted, on the allotment. At last the job is completed.
She stands up and walks along the row, treading down the rich black compost with her boot, walking carefully so the flat long emerald leaves aren’t imprinted with its muddy sole. The light is nondescript, the sun absent. She hears children shouting on their way home from school.
They sprouted last year, tiny green hairs in miniature square containers made of card, their nursery the sunny, wind-free world of her kitchen table. A packet’s worth. Then, she pricked them out into larger pots. Now she’s planting them in the garden for the winter, a task as ancient as it is repetitive. She’ll have leeks all season long. Braised, stirred with olive oil over a gentle heat, simmered with melted cheese tempering the blackened edges.
Hanon is repetitive too, considers Roberta. Repetitive exercises designed to strengthen the fingers and improve fluency. She’d rather play the piano than plant leeks. But this means a winter’s free vegetables.
Eighteen months, for three rows of leeks. Does anyone ever think about this in Waitrose? Do they hell.
Later, back at home, washing the soil off her hands, stretching her aching back, she feels content with her morning. She considers the small leeks now securely wrapped underground. Completely free, bar the 30p for the packet of seeds. She got the compost from Patrick, who gave her a whole bag of it. Fifty litres. Why do they always measure compost in terms of liquid?
“Robs, old thing, we never use this, why don’t you take it?” he had said to her bluffly one day, after she had finished teaching and was bringing her cup into the kitchen before leaving. Patrick was dangling a bag from his hand.
“Bought by Jane in one of her mad gardening schemes. Lost interest after about a week, ha ha! But I know you have an allotment. Would you like it? I’ll give you a trowel too, if you like.”
She had slipped the trowel, its red unused blade and still shiny wooden handle, testifying that it had never been left out all night in a flower bed, into her coat pocket and awkwardly lugged the long, heavy plastic bag back home on the bus that night, slightly worried it might
mix with petrol fumes and explode. Wasn’t that how the IRA used to make its bombs? Fertiliser and petrol? She’s not sure.
Food before art.
But that’s not true, she thinks, sitting at her upright, playing Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in C Major, the first of the Forty-Eight Preludes and Fuges. Art is food.
She breaks off, notices her answerphone winking at her. She gets up from the stool, rewinds it. This machine is about to be as defunct as a typewriter, she notes. She’ll have to upgrade to something digital and seamless. She reaches the beginning of the tiny tape, presses Play.
“Hello, Roberta, it’s Tracey here,” says Tracey. “Listen, Roberta, I need to talk to you about Belle. I’ve been thinking, well, she’s been thinking about her piano playing, and it’s sort of made me start thinking, about next term’s lessons. Can you call me please? Any time.”
Roberta feels her stomach clench. She knows very well what that sort of message means. It means ‘my daughter is fed up with her lessons and wants to stop, and as I have done my parental duty to introduce her to the piano, I want to stop too.’ That’s the start.
It is a piece in four movements. First, comes the theme. I want my child to stop learning. Then there are usually two variations on it. “Well, I’m not going to stand in her way, because the effort has become too great.” That’s the first variation. “Of course (laughs) we all know she will regret it when she is thirty, but that’s teenagers for you.” This is the second variation. “As Oscar Wilde probably never said, education is wasted on the young, ha ha, now thank you so much for all your hard work, really. Thanks so much, Roberta.”
Finally, the coda. “Of course we will recommend you to all and sundry, you have been absolutely amaaazing, good night.” Exeunt, to rapturous applause and the scraping sound of a bank account, her own bank account, at rock bottom.
No more Bach tonight. She tucks her hair behind her ears. She stretches her aching back. She pulls down the file above her piano, opens it. On it is a list of names each written carefully in a column. At the top of the page, a large heading:
The Square Page 6