Meltdown (10 page)

Even though she’d only been wandering the trading floors for three days, Monica knew that this was highly unusual behaviour. These guys were
obsessed
. They
never
left their phones while the trade was on. They wanted sex, of course, but sex, like everything else, had to be on their terms and Monica and Tip had soon realized that if these blokes could have shagged you while continuing to shout into their phones those would be the best terms of all.

And now one of them, a particularly cute one with his boyish face and lovely mop of sandy hair, his brand-new shirt clearly worn straight from the shop, the heavy folds of its packaged state firmly subdividing his chest, this nice-looking, eager, youthful chap had actually hung up both the phones he had been working and offered to take her for a coffee.
There and then
.

‘Don’t you have to keep working?’ Monica asked. ‘I thought that was the rule.’

Jimmy was aware that one or two of the other guys had already noted that he was engaged with a sandwich chick for more than the usual brief moment.

‘Babes,’ he said, flicking his cuff to reveal the gold Rolex beneath (actually a Hong Kong fake), ‘the Jimster makes his own rules.’

The flicker of disappointment and distaste that passed across Monica’s sweet features was for Jimmy that thing which his American colleagues had started to refer to as a ‘wake-up call’. Something stirred deep in his memory, back before the nearly two years of phones and computer digits had numbed his personality, destroyed his good taste, ruined his sense of decorum and buried his self-awareness. He could remember what a complete wanker sounded like.

It sounded like him. Jimmy ‘the Jimster’ Corby.

‘Did I say that?’ he asked.

Monica nodded glumly. ‘Yes. You called me “Babes” and you called yourself “The Jimster”.’

‘I didn’t! It’s a lie. You’re a crazy woman. I should call Security.’

Monica couldn’t help smiling at the speed with which he was recovering, but she stood firm.

‘Also you thought I’d be impressed because you’re wearing a Rolex.’

‘It’s a fake! I swear! Two hundred Hong Kong dollars! I may still have the receipt to prove it!’

Monica smiled again, but that did not mean she was letting him off the hook.

‘That’s even worse. Trying to impress a girl on the cheap. But it doesn’t matter anyway because I have a rule that I never go for coffee with boys who refer to themselves in the third person. Or people who prefix their names with a definite article.’

‘Pardon?’ Jimmy said, his head swimming a bit. People did not normally bother with full sentences where he hung out.

‘In plain English, babe. Bye bye, the Jimster.’

She turned and Jimmy cried out.

‘Stop!’ he said. Loudly and firmly.

He didn’t know why he did it; he’d known her less than a minute. Heads turned. Piers, who still headed up Jimmy’s group, looked up from his computer. Tip, who’d been working the derivatives desk next door, turned round too.

Jimmy didn’t care. It was a scene from a movie. He’d called out in a crowded room to a girl whose name he didn’t even know and now she was turning back towards him and giving him the cutest ‘yeah, what?’ expression he had ever seen.

‘My name’s Jimmy. I’ve been here for nearly two years,’ he said, ‘and I’ve never taken a break. I think I’ve earned one. Please, let me buy you a coffee.’

Jimmy didn’t care about the laddish ‘woohs’ that followed him and Monica as they left the floor together. Nor did he mind that Piers would certainly want to know what the
fuck
was going on when he got back. What he cared about was the beautiful, funny girl whose name he would shortly discover was Monica.

Perhaps it was an instinct for self-preservation that led him to fall hopelessly in love that day. It certainly saved him. Saved him from career burnout and saved him from turning permanently into the appalling idiot he had been rapidly becoming. Saved him from becoming a man who called women he’d never met before ‘babes’ and who referred to himself as the Jimster.

Strangely enough, it also made him a much more useful operative for Mason Jervis. A potential group leader who would rapidly overtake Piers and be given charge of a national desk.

Loving Monica gave Jimmy a sense of perspective. Reminded him of outside interests. Reintroduced him to the importance of social communication. Brought to his attention the half-forgotten notion that you could do more interesting things with your earnings than count them. In another American term that had recently crossed the Atlantic, she ‘grounded’ him.

They were married just four months after they had first met. Lizzie catered the wedding, did the flowers and designed the invitations. David designed and supervised the erection of the marquees. Henry read the bit from Shakespeare about ‘the marriage of true minds’. Rupert sourced, ordered and paid for the wine (‘so I’ll be sure there’s something decent to drink’) and Robson was best man.

Effortlessly, easily and
so
satisfyingly, Monica was absorbed into Jimmy’s little gang.

‘Thank
God
for Mon,’ Lizzie said. ‘She saved Jimmy.’ And they all agreed that she had.

The phone rings

Despite their elation over Lizzie’s spectacularly generous offer of financial help, Jimmy and Monica still had the immediate problem of a screaming toddler and a screaming baby to deal with.

‘You’re rich, you’re poor, you’re rich again,’ Monica laughed, ‘but some things don’t change, eh? Keeps things in perspective, doesn’t it?’

‘That’s one way of putting it,’ Jimmy replied.

She drained her glass. ‘I’ll take Lillie up to bed. You try and get Cressie to sleep down here.’

And so Jimmy began his long and weary perambulation of the basement of their Notting Hill house. Pushing the buggy round the huge glass coffee table, past the vast flat-screen towards the kitchen area, along the breakfast bar, around the polished granite water feature (no longer working), past the aquarium which was set in the wall to mirror the position of the equally indented flat-screen TV opposite, around the central fireplace with its stainless-steel hood and flue (as big as the roof of a shed) and back to the coffee table. It was a circuitous journey, particularly since Cressida’s buggy was of the large, chunky-wheeled variety, built more for mountain walks than kitchen perambulations. Also the number of toys scattered about the floor further impeded a smooth passage. Jodie used to pick those up, she and the three day staff.

The walk was fraught with tension for Jimmy as he desperately wanted to keep Cressida quiet so that Monica could grab an hour of sleep before Lillie’s first night feed. Just as he knew she would be upstairs willing Lillie to go down so that when Jimmy did finally get to bed he might manage a bit of rest and hence not be feeling dead when he faced his mountain of problems in the morning.

After a while Jimmy dispensed with the buggy, which wasn’t doing the trick at all, and picked Cressida up. He knew that the only way to keep her quiet was to carry on walking, holding her to him so that her head lay on his shoulder. If he did that and sang ‘Morningtown Ride’ to her over and over and over again, then all would be well. Cressida would not scream and eventually she would fall asleep.

If Jimmy should deviate from those rules in any way whatsoever, the child would scream. Jimmy knew that as certainly as night follows day. He was not allowed to change arm. He was not allowed to stand still, scratch his arse or stop singing, and above all,
above all
, he was not allowed to sit down.

No matter how gently he tried to do it and no matter how meticulously he maintained Cressida’s position relative to his chest, Cressie always knew when he was trying to sit down. Cressie knew if Jimmy was even thinking about sitting down. It was as if she had her own in-built altimeter that was programmed to go off if ever her distance from the floor fell below three feet.

Jimmy looked down at the little sleeping face. How beautiful she looked, that tiny person who exhausted him so. She was smiling now and reminding him so much of Monica (even though some people said Cressie looked like him, which Jimmy thought was just mad). He smiled back as he walked and whispered his song, now with a tiny spring in his step. One moment like that, one moment contemplating that perfect little face, was worth a thousand sleepless nights.

It helped of course that he could occasionally grab a swig of wine too, dipping in his stride as he passed the kitchen bench where he had opened another bottle, sweeping his glass up with the hand he used to steady Cressida’s head and chugging a swig between verse and chorus. Unconditional love and undying devotion were all very well in keeping a man walking and singing through the still watches of the night, but a drink or two didn’t do any harm either.

Jimmy would not be marking these extra units of booze on the list stuck to the fridge. It was his little secret, the only one he kept from his wife. She was breastfeeding, she had to watch her intake for fear of damaging Lillie’s brain cells, but Jimmy wasn’t. He could bash his liver for six and drink himself into a coma and Lillie’s little brain would remain unaffected, and so, while maintaining the fiction of solidarity with his wife’s enforced semi-discipline, he allowed himself many a sneaky swig when she wasn’t looking.

Besides, he was celebrating. Drinking to the first glimmer of hope that had appeared on his horizon in a long time. True, it was not exactly a triumph to go two million pounds into debt to a couple of your oldest friends. Not something to be proud of or something he would ever have dreamed of considering even six months earlier. But these were unique times, capitalism’s uncharted waters, and the rules were changing day by day. Jimmy knew, he absolutely
knew
, that if he could just get through this period without the whole thing imploding, his assets would regain their value and all would be well. Like millions of other guys across the world in early 2009, all he needed was a bridging loan, something which the banks were no longer prepared to offer. But Jimmy had friends, he had contacts. Why not use them? That was how it worked. It was how life had worked since the dawn of time. Family, friends, tribe, loyalty. That was what counted. A girl he knew from Sussex was going to help him out, that was all. He would have done the same for her, unquestionably.

Jimmy had always been generous with his cash. He had once given an entire day’s personal profit to Comic Relief. A whole
day
. That was serious money.

Cressida was beginning to purr gently . . . Was she going down? Jimmy could scarcely dare to hope. It was only just past one. Gently he drew to a halt, and still Cressida remained unmoved. He had to try the ultimate test: could he sit down? Hovering over a chair, he slowly bent his knees. No good! He’d tried to rush it, she’d only been half gone, her altimeter was still taking readings. Instantly the bomb went off, but before she could ramp up the volume Jimmy was moving again. Slickly, smoothly, without a pause or a jolt, he straightened his back and was off again, moving, singing, patting and cooing.

She might not be asleep yet but he had at least prevented her from screaming blue murder and waking Monica. That was what mattered.

Then disaster struck. A huge, terrible, jarring noise ripped through the peace of the kitchen, so that the very fish in the wall looked up and took notice. Jimmy almost dropped Cressida as the high-pitched voice tore at his eardrums and ripped into his brain:

It was that stuffed Pokémon toy. It had caught him many times in the past but not for several weeks. Now, however, consumed in thoughts about how best to distribute Lizzie and Robson’s millions to avoid the money getting sucked into paying off non-essential debts, Jimmy had strayed from his path a fraction and fallen victim to one of the numerous electronic noise traps that littered their basement floor.

Since being forced to take a hand in the raising of his children Jimmy had learned that in the modern age no toy is silent, every single one emits endlessly repeated, mind-numbingly unforgettable, ball-crunchingly irritating tunes and jingles. And the big furry yellow Pokémon was the worst because its song was so loud, so high and so stupidly speeded up.

Cressida started crying instantly, and moments later Jimmy could hear her baby sister reciprocating upstairs. Monica and Lillie were two floors up, but when the Japanese created an irritating Pokémon toy they wanted the world to know. Inevitably, the next thing Jimmy heard was Monica. She had pushed the intercom button on their fiendishly complex internal phone system and her voice, metallic and desperate, emanated from the conference speaker.

‘I had just half closed my eyes,’ she said.

‘Sorry,’ Jimmy replied to the wall-mounted unit.

‘I was dreaming that everything was going to be all right.’

‘Everything
is
going to be all right.’

‘Good. ’Night.’

‘’Night.’

Cressida finally fell asleep at 2.40am, after which (having sat with her for five minutes to make absolutely sure) Jimmy gently took her upstairs and began the infinitely slow process of lowering her into her cot. Fading out his song and gently disengaging first one hand and then the other before straightening up and slowly retreating as the last whispered chorus disappeared into silence. No
Danger UXB
technician in the Second World War ever approached an unexploded bomb with more care than Jimmy did the process of detaching himself from his sleeping daughter.

Lillie for once wasn’t feeding but was sleeping peacefully in her Moses basket while Monica snored gently under the duvet. Toby was asleep next door. Incredibly, four out of five members of his family were asleep at the same moment. Jimmy wondered whether this could be the first time that had happened since Jodie. He almost felt like getting out the video camera.