Another Justified Sinner

by Sophie Hopesmith

  I went at him, instinct, lashing out like an animal. But he tossed me back without effort and my head hit the wall. Tears flew into my eyes, and I hated myself then, I really honestly did. I vowed to change everything, to muddle it all: to get fitter and leaner and the hell out of that hellhole. Of course he got Kitty, made sure of it, afterwards, although he said it just happened, no hard feelings, whatever. But I kept my word, didn’t I?

  That’s why that night with Jackson was such a success. I was in it for the long game. I played the role of charmer; I wanted Jackson to think I’d changed. So I had one monologue that was particularly tender and poignant. And I could feel the charge between me and Lisa. She was tossing her hair back, her hand slipped between her thighs. When Jackson went to the toilet, I sat very close to her and asked a million questions: probing her, poking her. Making her feel like she was the most fascinating woman in the world, like I could hardly believe the sheer fact of her.

  When we all parted, Jackson had a doubt in his eyes, like he might want us to resurrect our brotherhood. As Lisa stepped out, I held him back and said: ‘It’s for the best, Jackson. I agree that it would upset Mum and this is between me and her, it’s got nothing to do with you. Let’s just be glad we had tonight. And maybe we can get together at some point in the future, maybe when you are married.’

  He smiled, and looked the most sincere I had ever seen him. ‘I’d like that, Marc.’

  Three weeks later, Lisa left him.

  She was so easy to drag away. It was odd: you wouldn’t think they’d been dating for almost two years. All it took were a few smitten texts for us to meet up in a bar and have a smashed-up kiss, full of guts and guilt. She tried to stay away after that, feeling all shameful and vexed, but I got her back with some hushed, sweaty phone calls where we said things like, ‘We shouldn’t’, ‘We can’t’; which only made it hotter. Then a few dirty photos, and we were meeting up once again, for dinner. She told me about her life, herself. I gave very little away but I was always topping up the glass, nodding with gusto, making sure our hands kept touching. Whatever her interests, I said I enjoyed them, too. Whatever opinion she held, I said it was brilliant. I told her how wonderful she was in so many wonderful ways, and I said of course I didn’t want to do anything to hurt my brother, of course – but who could deny this, who could earth this charge?

  Maybe it was because she knew I was richer. Maybe it was because I was younger and (now) better looking. Maybe it was because their relationship had reached that over-familiar, turgid stage, which even the distractions of wedding planning could not save.

  Not long after that, she moved in with me. I persuaded her to. I seduced her completely. From the things she told me, even in those brief conversations, I knew her self-esteem was slight, that she was easy to manipulate. So I said that her family were a bad influence, that she needed only me. Told her to quit her job as a cashier, that I would look after her, keep her safe, secure. I had enough money, she didn’t have to work. She could figure stuff out.

  Sure, there were a few early obstacles. Like when Jackson called round and punched me straight in the face. I’d never been hit by a sobbing man before. I replied very calmly that if he did it again, I would call the police to lock him up – and that would break our mother’s heart. This was undoubtedly bullshit, but it gave him the fear; and he backed away with his eyeballs all shot through with blood.

  It turned out that Lisa wasn’t a bit like Nancy. After we fucked a few times, she actually grew pretty tiresome. The novelty of the situation was ebbing away. For we had nothing to talk about, nothing to laugh about. I stopped asking her questions. I treated her like a slave. I started to punish her – because she wasn’t Nancy, because she’d been so easy to flatter, just because I could. I would shout at her, hit her, leave her hanging until the early hours, not knowing where I was. Yet the most maddening thing was she never shouted back, never retaliated, never told me I was a bastard. She was completely obsessed. She told me she loved me in less than two months. And she said it like she meant it: the colour drained from her face, that golden hair now straw-like and matted. She would do anything for me: anything. I don’t think a man had ever driven her so crazy. Something chemical had gone off like a bomb.

  As I withdrew from her, she withdrew from food. At first, it was the odd skipped meal. Then it became starvation. I don’t know if this had always been inside her, although she said it had, and from an early age. All I know is that her face got hollows and craters and lines and looked like the pockmarked howl of the moon. Her upper arms were thinner than her lower arms. There was no colour to her lips. She would sit there and not even speak to me. All I could hear were the rumblings and gurglings in her stomach. When they were noisiest, she would involuntarily smile.

  Well, I wasn’t going to throw her out. I liked having her around, in the background, wanting me. We somehow co-existed like this for a year. But one time she wrapped her arms around my neck and begged me to kiss her, to touch her. She hadn’t done that for a while. So I said to her I couldn’t, not with the way she looked.

  She gasped and the tears sprang to her eyes and her face contorted. She ran to the bathroom and locked herself in.

  ‘You disgust me,’ I shouted. ‘I can’t stand the sight of you.’ Of course, I meant skeletal – but it was only later that I realised she might think I meant fat. Well, it was what she wanted to hear, wasn’t it? That was her make believe. She was stuck in her own little world, and I knew what that felt like. Sometimes it’s easier if people play along, rather than try to wake you up.

  Her health deteriorated further after that. She refused to eat anything. It got so bad that she wouldn’t even touch liquids, and after a day or so of that, she finally went for an ambulance. I was at work, and her parents called me, the fury and agony shredding their throats. Her heart was very weak. They had forced her on a drip. I said I would visit, but I didn’t, of course I didn’t, the situation had me in hives. I dropped off her things at the hospital, in neatly packed suitcases, and legged it out of there. I changed my phone number, so her parents would stop calling. I changed the locks, so they couldn’t get into the building. It was over.

  At night, I would think about Lisa, and how I should feel something. I’m capable of emotions. Look at Nancy. I loved her like crazy. And this time, I did feel something abstract, but it wasn’t really pity or guilt, more a burning, surging innerness. An energy, with the lens zooming in. It took an hour of staring up at the ceiling to figure out that it was anger. I didn’t even know why I was angry. I tried for an hour to understand the reasons, but I got overwhelmed in the generals and, pretty soon, I gave up.

  Well, none of that mattered; a distraction soon came. Credit got crunchy and harder to swallow. Not that it seemed to mean much, at first. The system is set up so it should hurt us the least. So we continued to binge on expensive food and burn it away at expensive gyms. We ranted about reality TV, rather than act out our storylines. We lived for the weekend but then recalled nothing at all from the blowout of boozing and drugs. We hid from the headlines and buckled down in our habits. We did what we always did. We were invulnerable – weren’t we?

  Chapter

  Five

  One day, we watched the big financial institutions just topple down, like a new 9/11. We saw pale people stumble from the Lehman Brothers’ building, a laptop in one hand and office mug in the other. The world was all shaken up. Like a believer on the deathbed who suddenly blinks at oblivion and wonders ‘What if?’ Housing bubbles popped. Outputs popped. Eyeballs popped right out of people’s heads.

  The recession swept over the UK like a pyroclastic flow. We got burned by the heat. In early 2009, the UK was officially in the slump, although it had looked that way for months. The banks were begging for their life. House prices got shot. People lost jobs. We suddenly went on ‘staycations’ and grabbed at Groupon codes. Everything was depressed.

  Shops lurched into administration: MFI, Dolcis, our Woolworths who a
rt in heaven. Cue the pictures in papers of pitiful people stockpiling a final Pick ‘n’ Mix like they were scooping the hem of the Turin Shroud. Nobody believed this was happening. There had been nearly two decades of continuous growth. It felt like growth would just go on forever. But when cells grow out of control and invade other tissues, that’s when you get cancer.

  And yet, just before the recession, there was a global peak in food price. I read in The Economist that the spot price of food was at its highest since 1845, when the records began. Business was booming at Fishman & Sons.

  A few years earlier, Goldman Sachs had created a food index. It meant that all the commodities could be grouped and measured together, like stocks. This made the assets so much easier to grasp for your average non-specialist. It widened the client pool, basically. On top of that, other rules and regulations were loosened too, which made it more desirable for other banks and bodies. Private investors were just clamouring to add commodities to their portfolio: the icing on the cake, the pièce de résistance. Our clients gobbled up cheap land around the world: millions of square miles at a time.

  Food and farmland are fantastic things to invest in; even better when times are bad. Although the global food price dipped a bit at the start of the recession, it soon hiked up again.

  The greater the investment, the higher the prices – and the more clients feel a need to invest. The price generates its own demand. Since agriculturals were a big part of our skillset, the firm simply flourished at the time. Finnegan was ecstatic. I got promoted. Finally: a trader.

  I didn’t feel bad about it. It was just supply and demand. Anyway, we needed the speculators. High prices drive innovation. But let’s not mince our words: there was obviously a tricky in-between period. A few million extra went hungry. There were food riots in North Africa, Asia, the Middle East. All of this is true and unfortunate. But I knew the money would – in the end – go into food production and help drive the cost down. It was all in the system. And who knew what was behind the rising cost of food? It could be down to oil, weather, biofuels, diet. We’d never know. And until we did, here was a fantastic situation to exploit and invest in. It was, we told our clients, one of those rare and precious things: a win-win business deal.

  I mean, the situation was farcical. The UK was at its lowest ebb in years: on its knees and crawling through razorsharp debt. But here I was, making more money than I had ever seen in my life. Every time a grain contract reached its expiry date, I rubbed my hands in anticipation of an absolute mint.

  I celebrated with a final Pick ‘n’ Mix. I’ll admit it: the tears sprung into my eyes. A scene from childhood: shoving a gelatine ring over some scowling girl’s finger. Her biting it off and chewing it in her mouth, her eyes burning with hatred and her lips all dyed pink from the food colouring. Then another: me dropping candy cola bottles into Mum’s Bacardi – pure sheepish glee on my face. Yes, every bite was a saccharine hit of nostalgia. For – despite the world food price – the UK was now leering at superfoods and antioxidants, blueberries and smoothies. We were trying to live forever, trying to outlast all this shit. That bright shovel of sugar was a hangover from some other time.

  Well, I allowed myself a final flourish, after the saccharine feast. It was a birthday present, you see. So I moved out of rental and bought my own digs: somewhere even closer to the centre, can you believe. Oh, it was a no-brainer: I was always worrying about retribution from Lisa’s family. There had been the odd hour of angry intercom buzzing. Some hate mail in the post. Some threats from a half-brother I didn’t even know she had. In every possible way, the move made sense. It was wonderful.

  I sat in the living room, surrounded by boxes. I said: ‘Well done, Marcus. You did good.’ My voice had a bit of an echo, some reverb in it. A bit baggy and loud. I liked it. I opened a bottle of Salon champagne and drank it all. I went round the luxury flat and clinked my glass with the cooker, the bath, the windows, the bedframe… ‘Cheers.’ ‘Cheers.’ ‘Cheers.’ ‘Cheers.’ I sat on the floor with my head against some half-emptied box, fell asleep as the drink roared in my head, sloshed about in my stomach. My dreams were fitful.

  I was happy to wake up, as life was good. Ridiculously good. The sort of good you see in the movies, that you think couldn’t possibly happen that way: it’s too unlikely, too contrived. Everything gleamed with the sheen of high-definition TV. My time was now. The timing was great. I felt like punching the air every time I stepped into the office. Everything was good until my brother found me.

  Apparently, I had been tricky to find. He’d looked online, but my email and work number weren’t there. He couldn’t get past the security at reception. I never really found out why. Then he tried me at the old place, but of course I’d moved on, not stupid enough to leave a forwarding address. He tried my mobile, but I had long changed numbers. He looked on Facebook, but a short while earlier, I had decided to leave it. He even tried those websites where you pay to see people’s registered addresses, even the famous ones – but I wasn’t there, either. Just when he was close to giving up, he had a quick search on Twitter and found me.

  I don’t even know why I was on Twitter. I was just dabbling, I suppose; following other grain traders, keeping an eye on my clients, fishing out others. Its take-up had been pretty slow to build, but now people were starting to talk about it. There were a few celebrities on there who regularly filled out the news columns just through these tweets. It looked like you could bypass the old press and now file your media release in 140 characters. It looked like it was getting to the point where it was actually bad business not to be on there and managing your reputation and brand and contriving an image. I made sure I followed The Financial Times, The Economist, journalists and businesspeople who thought like I did and would give me retweets. I enjoyed living in this world. Other views did not exist. If they did, I blocked them. It was nice like that.

  I was happiest when crafting a carefully cultivated image: an avatar. I traded in virtual food, food I would never actually see or touch or till, future food that didn’t even exist yet. So it sort of made sense to trade with virtual personalities, most of whom I would never meet or know, personas that were all somebody’s fiction. It was a game.

  But like a fool, I was easy to find. Jackson set up an account and started to tweet me messages, over and over. How can I call u? Its urgent. And How can I contact u? We got to speak. Finally, Its about mum. We got to speak. Its urgent. I mean it.

  I was about to block him when I saw that final message and something churned up inside me, like my insides were shoved in a food processor. Everything fell into itself. There was something thick in the air, something that slowed me down. I could not move my hands to type. I breathed in treacle.

  I followed Jackson and DMed him my email. Within minutes, a message was bold in the inbox. Hi Marcus. First off this isn’t about Lisa or anything like that. You dont need to worry about that. But this is something id like to talk to you on the phone about. Not email. Ring me. Jackson. He left a number underneath (although I still had it in my phone, I confess) and I stared at it for a while, trying to absorb every digit, trying to drum up the confidence. Since leaving school, I had never lacked confidence. I always seized a moment without any self-analysis or doubt. But now I felt brittle and monstrously weak. My hands were shaking. I picked up the phone and put it down. Several times. I went to make a cup of coffee. I watched the kettle rumble. I watched the steam billow up to the sky. Back at the sofa, with the cup in my hand, I punched in a few numbers. Then cancelled. A couple of times I was only two digits from a dialling tone. Then I did it, and the phone was ringing, and I was too startled to hang up. I clasped the phone to my ear, tenterhooked.

  When Jackson answered, the words fell out of his mouth much the way I imagined them. Our mother had died. She had died in one of the ways Jackson had foreseen – but deep thanks, it had not been suicide. Her heart gave out. She must have been washing up, or cleaning, since she was discovered by Jackson
still wearing the marigolds. The place was spotless. He gave that detail: ‘The place was spotless.’

  Unfortunately, it was an unseasonably warm March. Daffodils had long broken free from the mud. So her place was already stunk through. Well – she’d been dead for two full days, you see. Jackson hadn’t heard from her. He was worried. So he turned up at the house; the two cats mewing outside, all wild and teeth. He had to break down the side door to get at her, her body was there straightaway. Apparently she wasn’t smiling or frowning or looking at peace or anything at all. She was just expressionless. Like she’d been caught totally unawares, in the midst of a daydream. Her flame blown out: just like that. Except he didn’t say it like that, did he? He said: ‘One second you’re living, and the next you’re dead.’ I started to cry.

  ‘Marc?’

  ‘Oh fuck,’ I sobbed. My face contorted. I smeared the snot with my hand. ‘Oh fuck. Fucking hell. Fuck, fuck.’

  ‘Marc?’ Now he sounded paranoid. Like I was toying with him; an elaborate game.

  ‘Jackson, she was young. She was too fucking young.’

  ‘Look, I know. Her heart–’

  ‘But wasn’t she on medication? Weren’t they fucking sorting that out?’

  ‘They were still testing the medication, trying to find the right dose. They hadn’t quite sorted it. They thought she might need an op. She was trying to back out of it. And then there was her seroxipram…’

  ‘Her what?’

  ‘Her anti-depressants. For depression and anxiety and stuff like that, basically.’

  ‘Right. I see.’

  ‘They always said there was a risk with the heart: irregularity or something. They said it was a very small risk, but… she should never have been on it. I think she was addicted. I think she might have gone over the dose…’

  ‘Oh fuck.’ I tried to stop the sobs but my whole body was shaking. I was shaking like it was twenty degrees below freezing.