Various Pets Alive and Dead (8 page)

People like Doro think that making wealth is just a matter of buying shares and waiting for the value to go up, powered by the noble sweat of workers’ brows. They don’t realise that banks can make money when the market falls, by borrowing and selling shares they don’t actually own, then buying them back when their price has dropped. The problem is when the price rises instead, and you have to buy them back at a loss.

Doro nearly had a hissy fit when he mentioned this once. ‘It’s utterly immoral to make a lottery of people’s livelihoods!’ she shrieked, rather missing the point.

It’s not going to be easy getting her to accept his new career, but that’s not what’s on his mind right now.

He goes back to the disabled toilet, locks himself in and phones a brokerage firm that advertises in the Sunday papers. He places his trades, two k each for a short position on the three different Small Cap shares, using up almost half his kitty, and as an afterthought takes a long punt on SYC on the AIM with the rest. It all takes less than ten minutes, but his tension has built up to such a pitch that it feels like an hour. He breaks out into a sweat as the broker confirms his details. There’s that smell again – aniseed and benzene – cloying in the close atmosphere. Yes, Tim the Finn must have been in here nursing his troubled prostate, poor guy.

When all the transactions are confirmed, he lets himself out into the corridor carefully and returns to his desk. The retracement is still there, shimmering through the skein of graphs on the monitor like a mermaid tangled in a fisherman’s net against an ebbing tide – there for the taking. If the markets are really set to fall, this could be the big one, the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to scoop in his thousands as they plunge. He watches the shimmering pattern of numbers resolve and fade and remake themselves, and whispers under his breath: ‘Bring it on!’

It’s quite odd, thinks Doro, dibbing holes in the vegetable bed, that neither Serge nor Clara expressed any great enthusiasm for their parents getting married. Odd too that Marcus suggested it, in the context of adopting Oolie. She hasn’t discussed it with Oolie yet. It would mean explaining that she and Marcus aren’t her real parents, and she’s not ready to start digging up heartaches which go back to the commune days.

This morning, on the way back from the nursery where she’d bought the seedlings, she drove past the lane that led to Solidarity Hall, and was struck with a pang of nostalgia so intense it was hard to tell whether it was sweet or bitter. In those days, she never seemed to worry about anything. Everything was more vivid, the days longer, the colours brighter, the music better, the people more amusing. She smiles, remembering – and knowing this is a sign she’s getting old, but indulging herself anyway.

The dry soil crumbles under her hands as she prepares the rows and wonders whether it’s too early for planting out the spring cabbage. She sticks the seedlings in the holes, pressing them in with her fingers. In a way, her children are
her
cabbage seedlings, sown in the friable soil of the seventies, nourished by a rich compost of well-rotted ideas through which they’d all tunnelled like curious worms in search of adventure and a freer, fairer society – whatever that might mean. Like so much else, it seemed clearer, brighter in those days. Now her seedlings have been planted out in a much harsher world. She worries. Will they survive and thrive?

She thought it was the garden she missed more than anything – that near-wild quarter-acre she’d tamed and cultivated – the sunflowers, the tomatoes, even the bloody rabbits. After the fire in 1994, when they moved to their house in Doncaster, with its handkerchief square of lawn, she put her name down for an allotment. It took her seven years to reach the top of the queue, but now here she is, in this sunny forgotten corner on the edge of the city, planting out her spring cabbage. And realising that what she really misses is not the garden after all, but her own prime of life, and the childhood of her children.

They had arrived at Askern in November 1969, through one of those leaps of imagination typical of the post-68 ferment. At that time it was deeply uncool to admit to having been to public school, or being upper class or having money. So it came as a surprise when they discovered that Fred the Red, despite his woolly hat and cockney drawl, had access to a family fund. Fired with enthusiasm by their conversations, he went out one day and bought the former coal owner’s mansion at Askern for £1,300 at an auction of Coal Board property, without actually ever having seen it. He announced the news as they were sitting around the table in the Hampstead kitchen.

‘We will move from theoretical practice to practice in itself,’ he declared.

She had no idea what he meant, but it sounded inspirational.

‘We’ll use our education to enrich society, not just ourselves,’ added Marcus, in his thoughtful rumbly voice that sent tingles through her, ‘bearing in mind that the economy is determinant, but only in the last instance.’

‘We’ll build a society where everyone has a chance to fulfil their human potential?’ she said hesitantly, afraid they might laugh at her naivety.

‘Because the personal is political,’ simpered Moira, in that breathless way she had of stating the totally obvious.

When the five of them – Fred and a friend called Nick Holliday, and Marcus and Doro and Moira – made the journey up to South Yorkshire in Nick’s orange VW Beetle, they could barely conceal their disappointment that it wasn’t right beside the coal mine, but set apart on a country lane towards Campsall village half a mile from Askern colliery, whose gaunt twin winding wheels dominated the flat landscape of square fields stitched together by ragged hedges, as far as the eye could see.

Solidarity Hall, as they named their new home, was a huge draughty red-brick Gothic mansion, a sort of scaled-down St Pancras Station, halfway between Pontefract and Doncaster. It had been built for a pit owner in 1890, close to the small pretty town of Askern, once famous only for its spa, and it reflected the grandiose ambitions of its age – when Britannia ruled the waves, and the great Yorkshire coalfield fuelled the nation’s manufacturing boom and powered the trains and ships that carried trade to every corner of the empire. In 1946, in the fervour of post-war nationalisation, it had been taken over by the National Coal Board for offices, and an annexe built for the manager to live in. But then functional new offices had been built near the colliery, and the latest pit manager had long since decamped to a cosy modern bungalow in Askern, so the building had been empty for several years before the commune moved in.

It smelled of damp, the narrow Gothic windows let in little light, and the puke-green decor had last been renewed in the 1950s; but it was in better condition than the house in Hampstead, with six chilly bedrooms, plus four in the attic eaves where the kids would one day have their domain. They removed the plywood office partitions to reveal two cold cavernous reception rooms and a vast draughty kitchen full of crusty Formica and chipped enamel. And there was the pit manager’s annexe, which Moira said would be a perfect art studio, while Marcus and Fred immediately earmarked it as a Marxism Study Centre for the local community. Doro was entranced by the half-acre of straggly garden with its lilac and apple trees, overgrown vegetable plot and runaway vines leaping through the hedges.

The Althusserian girl was furious at the proposed move and, accusing Fred of dilettantism and interpellation of function by ideology, stormed off, slamming the door of the Hampstead house so hard that a shower of glass from the window above tinkled down on to the footpath. And so Nick, a small, intense maths postgrad, not part of the original collective but owner of the orange VW, was invited to move in. When Doro admitted to Moira that she found him quite attractive in a geeky kind of way, with his big brown eyes and thick curly eyelashes blinking behind black-framed spectacles, Moira made a point of bedding him at once. She was like that.

Nick also had an occasional girlfriend called Jen with noisy high-drama ways, who claimed that feminism was descended from witchcraft and tried to persuade the women to dance naked around a bonfire in the garden on midsummer’s night (they were saved by the Yorkshire weather). It was hard to imagine what Nick saw in her, apart from the attraction of opposites. She went off to live with a guy in a Reichian therapy commune where they practised rebirth and primal screaming, and Doro felt a guilty twinge of relief when she departed.

Askern was on the edge of the Yorkshire coalfield, and Marcus applied for work at the coalface to be alongside the proletariat, but was deemed overqualified and offered a job in the new Coal Board offices instead. He was their first ever PhD. Fred, whose PhD was still unfinished, got a job underground at South Kirby, but only lasted a month before he decided to devote his energies to setting up the Marxism Study Centre in a bedroom of the annexe. Nick taught maths at a Doncaster comprehensive, and was possibly the most highly qualified teacher they’d ever had. Moira worked two days a week as an art therapist at a centre for people with head injuries in Rotherham, and later got a stall on the Saturday market in Pontefract where she sold paintings, lampshades, coloured-paper mobiles and glass-bead jewellery, which she made at the kitchen table in the annexe. ‘To beautify the lives of the masses,’ she said. Doro worked part-time at the Tech, teaching liberal studies to Coal Board apprentice electricians and fitters, which left her with enough time to start taming the garden.

In the evenings, they sat around the long yellow-painted table in the kitchen, smoking pot under the watchful eye of the Che Guevara poster on the wall and discussing the progress they’d made in advancing the revolution.

She still has the poster somewhere, rolled up in the back of a cupboard.

Roll on, three thirty! The kids have been playing Clara up all afternoon. They’re at their worst when the weather’s warm and humid, like today. She’s been explaining about the tree seedlings on the window sill. The thing about plants is their slowness – they take time to settle into their environment; they adapt to its demands. Some trees take thirteen thousand years to grow to their full size; these seedlings have hardly started, she tells the kids. They groan and yawn.

Before leaving for home, she checks on Hamlet. He’s got entangled in his bedding. With a flutter of panic, she untangles him, tops up his water bottle and tickles his tummy.
Please don’t die on me, Hamlet!
He throws her a grumpy look and retreats under a duvet of peed-on straw.

Mr Gorst/Alan’s car is still there as she makes her way out with her bag full of marking slung over her shoulder. And here he comes, striding hunkily across the car park. She smiles; he smiles back. The door opens again and here comes someone else wiggling towards them, wearing a busty Regency frock with Roman centurion sandals and a Gladstone-style handbag. She climbs into the passenger seat of his car. Where’s the prehistoric Fiat? Written off? Could Mr Gorst/Alan be attracted to Miss Historical Postlethwaite, her bad driving, her breathless enthusiasm and her history-themed wardrobe? They give Clara a friendly wave and drive off.

Yes, she knows her reaction is irrational, unkind and unwarranted, and for this reason she always makes sure to treat Miss Postlethwaite with absolute politeness. But she is one of those people who make Clara appreciate the company of plants.

It’s almost six when she gets back to her flat. On the landing by the door, Ida Blessingman, who has the flat opposite, has spread the contents of her several shopping bags as she rummages for her keys, cursing softly and filthily under her breath. This is a fairly regular occurrence.

‘So how was it?’ Ida asks, finding the key at last and turning the lock, ‘or should I say how was
he
?’

Clara has already told her about Mr Gorst/Alan. She sighs, describing his departure with Miss Hippo.

‘Darling, there are men who wallow in banality,’ says Ida, heaving her shopping bags into the flat. ‘And they choose their women accordingly.’

‘Trouble is, she’s really quite nice.’

‘Doesn’t matter. Try thinking of her as a bitch.’

Ida is four years older than Clara and at least twenty pounds heavier, but wears the sort of expensive well-cut clothes that make her look shapely and stylish, and has thick black sheepy curls that always look interestingly unbrushed. She works as a lawyer in Paradise Square, has two divorces behind her and claims to prefer cheesecake to men.

‘She lists her interests on Facebook as history and dressmaking,’ says Clara.

‘A killer combination,’ says Ida. ‘You need a stiff gin.’

The Poire d’Or restaurant, when Serge finally got through to them on Wednesday, didn’t know anything about his bill, but promised to look into it. Since then, they’ve not returned his call, but he’s not too worried because the shares he took a short on have been sliding steadily, and the Footsie closed on Thursday evening seventy points down. He calculates that if he was to buy them back now, he’d be nearly 20 per cent up on his initial outlay. Not bad for an hour’s work. All he needs is steady nerves to hang on and maximise his return.

By Friday afternoon, to his amazement, he’s made enough to pay off most of his credit card bill, if he chooses to, and still lend Otto another month’s mortgage payment. It was ridiculously easy. Another run like this and he’ll be back where he was. In fact, he’ll be slightly up. He’s pulled in his haul, and the Fibonacci retracements are still surging his way. Next time, he’ll play with higher limits. His head is still spinning, and he needs to steady himself. He texts Otto to invite him for a celebratory drink, but gets no reply, so instead he approaches Princess Maroushka at her desk.

‘Are you doing anything tonight, Venus?’

Leaning over her chair he breathes in her weird perfume.

‘Yes,’ she says. On her monitor there’s a quick blink of a screen minimising.