The Mark and the Void (5 page)

To my surprise, Paul accepts the invitation. Now the issue becomes making it out of the office. It has been another bad day – a very, very bad day – for Ireland on the markets. The two ailing Spanish banks have caused a panic across the whole continent, with investors scrambling to pull their funds out of any bank felt to be vulnerable – which includes all the major Irish institutions. The worst hit, Royal Irish, lost a million for almost every minute of trading, and every time I put on my coat another frantic client calls, wanting to know if the government will step in to save it. But the Minister has yet to make a statement – in fact, no one seems to know where the Minister even is.

Just after six o’clock, I am summoned upstairs by the Chief Operating Officer; exiting the lift on the seventh floor I walk straight into an enormous Garda. My mind floods with a whole new order of panic. Have we been robbed? Is the building under siege?

The secretary appears in the doorway and motions me impatiently into the corner office.

‘Ah, Claude, there you are.’ Whatever turn of events has brought a policeman into her foyer doesn’t seem to have bothered Rachael. But then, Rachael is imperturbable. No matter the time of day or state of the market, she always looks immaculate – streamlined, frictionless, like a virtual avatar of herself. Her hair is perfectly blonde, her skin perfectly white, her very presence has been buffed to a sheen as smooth as a mirror. People say she slept her way to the top, but it is literally impossible to imagine her having sex with Sir Colin or anyone else; others like to say she has a USB port instead of a vagina, and that her
husband uses her to charge his phone, which seems marginally more plausible.

Four men are in her office, crowded uncomfortably on couch and chairs with cups and saucers balanced on their knees. ‘Gentlemen,’ Rachael says, ‘allow me to introduce Claude Martingale, one of our most talented analysts.’

I turn to the seated men and experience one of those cognitive shocks specific to meeting in real life someone long familiar from a screen. For the last two years, ever since the collapse of Lehman Brothers finally ignited the bonfire that was the Irish economy, the Minister for Finance has appeared almost nightly on the TV news, where he has always seemed measured, controlled, on top of the situation. In the couple of seconds it takes him to half-rise and greet me, it is frighteningly clear that this confidence is a veneer no thicker than the film of make-up applied backstage. Up close, unmediated, he seems actually to embody the country’s dire condition. Shadows devour his features, beads of moisture cling morbidly to the grey folds of his skin; his courtly, reasonable bearing is belied by great dark rings around his eyes. I had heard he was unwell: when I lean in to shake his hand I am hit by a stench so deathly I have to fight the instinct to recoil.

Rachael introduces the two men on either side of him as the Secretary General of the Department of Finance, and the Second Secretary at the Department in charge of banking policy. One is fat, one is thin; both wear glasses and the pursed, dismissive miens of civil-service lifers. Nearest the door is a fourth man, small with lugubrious eyes and a sallow complexion reminiscent of yellowing pages. He does not look Irish, but Continental – Portuguese, maybe, or Corsican. Rachael does not tell me his name, and he does not introduce himself; in fact he does not speak at all during the meeting, just remains in his corner, semi-translucent, staring at the Minister with those dolorous, unblinking eyes.

Rachael closes the door and turns to me brightly. ‘The Minister has dropped by to speak to us –’

‘Informally,’ the fat secretary interjects.

‘– to speak to us informally about the current, ah, uncertainty in the Irish banking sector.’ Rachael cannot hide her delight at this coup; she is positively glowing. ‘Minister, Claude has advised several major international investors in relation to Irish banks.’

The Minister opens his mouth into a strange gaping smile and wags it at me, like a grandfather who has had a stroke and is incapable of speaking. Then, as if this effort has caused some internal upset, he hastily brings a handkerchief to his mouth.

‘Claude, perhaps you could explain a little more what it is you do,’ Rachael prompts me.

‘Certainly,’ I reply, and begin to paint a broad picture of my role – namely, to dig through the loan books, deposit books and unexploded assets of distressed or defunct Irish banks, looking for anything ignored or undervalued that an external capital provider might take an interest in.

‘Picking off the good stuff for the vultures,’ the thin secretary translates.

I smile courteously. ‘Even the vultures have to be persuaded to invest in Ireland at the moment.’

He sniffs; it is the fatter secretary who speaks next.

‘Obviously the reason we’re here is Royal Irish,’ he says. ‘We’ve sunk a lot of money into it, quite apart from the guarantee, and at this stage we thought things would be turning around.’

‘They were turning around,’ the thin man corrects him. ‘Up until a couple of days ago. But now because of these bloody Spanish we’ve got investors pulling their money out again, and it’s starting to look like it’ll need another recapitalization.’

‘Obviously there are very good reasons for keeping the bank open,’ the fat man says, slinging a foot across his knee. ‘It’s of systemic importance, obviously. And we want to send the message to our international friends that Ireland’s financial sector is
in perfect health and ready to do business. At the same time, we can’t just keep paying and paying.’

‘So I suppose what we want,’ the thin man says airily, ‘is to get a fresh perspective on the situation vis-à-vis Royal Irish. Our advisers tell us core capital ratios have been returning to acceptable levels, and that once it gets over this, as it were, hump, it should be able to return to profitability without further government assistance. We’d like to know, beyond the current situation, where you might see the bank’s position in six months, a year.’

The Minister grins mechanically and works his jaws by way of endorsing this, a blast of fetid air issuing as he does so.

All eyes are now on me, but I am not sure how to proceed. Things have not been turning around at Royal Irish; Royal Irish has been haemorrhaging money for months, first investors’ money, then taxpayers’ money. The general rule in banking is to tell the client what he wants to hear – that way, if you’re wrong, he’s less likely to hold you to blame. But to claim that Royal Irish can keep going for another week, let alone six months, would be like saying Louis XVI is alive and well and will shortly be resuming his kingly duties. It is finished as a going concern; surely they know that?

The men are waiting. I glance over to Rachael. She draws a thoughtful breath: a weirdly synthetic gesture, like a doll opening and shutting its sightless eyes. ‘Maybe you could give us a broad idea of what a return to profitability might look like,’ she says, with a meaningful nod.

I think for a moment, then start talking in vague terms about the volatility of the market, how nobody knows what will happen, how some Irish brands are certainly undervalued. It all depends, I say, on the wider recovery in Europe. If things stabilize, and if Royal genuinely do have capital reserves, and if they pursue a particular strategy, and divest themselves of their toxic assets, then yes, in that scenario they could get back on their feet. Each of those ifs would require a miracle, but the secretaries
seem pleased with what they hear. They ask some follow-up questions, using financial jargon that makes no sense; the Minister, meanwhile, gazes down at his lap. He appears to be picking skin from his fingers; it comes away in loose white skeins, which flutter down to the floor. Then he leans over to the thin secretary and gurgles something in his ear.

‘Yes,’ the secretary says, and turns to Rachael. ‘There’s a new man in charge here? This fellow Blankly?’

‘Porter Blankly, that’s correct. He’s based in New York, of course.’ She addresses this to the Minister, who is gazing up at her with a kind of prayerful desperation. ‘But I speak to him almost every day. Porter is – well, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you he’s an inspirational figure. He believes that if you can get the market on your side, anything is possible.’

The secretaries seem pleased with this too. They whisper together a moment. The Minister grins at us, a crunching sound issuing from his mouth along with a fresh gust of fetor – he is eating raw garlic, I realize; he has been peeling skin from a clove he clutches in his left hand.

‘Thank you, Claude,’ Rachael says. Taking my cue, I stand up and shake hands with the visitors again. The Minister has his handkerchief pressed to his mouth again; above it his shell-blue eyes roll wetly at me, as if signalling desperately,
There is a man trapped in here!

‘I don’t get it. What did he want you to do?’

It’s Friday night; we are leaving the building at last.

‘Reassure him. Make him feel he has made the right decision to recapitalize Royal Irish. Tell him they can still get back on their feet.’

‘And they can’t?’

‘At this stage Royal Irish doesn’t even have feet.’

‘Just an arsehole,’ Ish grumbles.

‘You mean Miles?’ Paul says. If any one person can be held
responsible for Ireland’s current state, it is Royal Irish’s CEO, Miles O’Connor, who made some forty billion euros of loans to property developers that then went bust – although next on the list would be the Minister himself, who has committed the country to paying off all of the money that Royal and the other banks owe. It’s hard to understand. In France, where if someone misses a coffee break there is a national strike, a scandal like this would have shut down the streets. Yet the Irish seem able to absorb any amount of punishment without complaint – like the drunk at the bar you expect any moment to topple off his stool, who instead keeps throwing back shots, his massive inebriation having become a kind of self-perpetuating system, a kind of replacement gravity …

Just as I am thinking this, I hear Ish say, with a note of alarm, ‘Whoa! That guy looks a bit the worse for wear!’

That’s putting it mildly: the gentleman in question, wearing a dark wool suit, has a bloody red socket where his left eye ought to be and a withered claw instead of a hand. We stop and watch as he lurches over the plaza and across the bridge, where he is greeted by five or six other similarly cadaverous figures.

‘Zombies,’ Jurgen says.

The zombies have raised a tent on the riverbank opposite, around which they stagger, gesticulating at the traffic with authentically decomposing hands.

‘What’s this about?’ Paul says.

‘That building there was supposed to be Royal Irish’s new headquarters,’ I tell him, pointing to the concrete shell on the far side of the river. ‘They had just started construction when the crisis hit.’

‘Why the costumes, though?’

‘A zombie is what you call a bank that’s still trading even though it’s insolvent.’ The first revenant has produced a placard that reads
DO NOT FEED THE ZOMBIES
and is waving it about.

‘They’re saying that if the bank is finished, the government shouldn’t be giving it any more taxpayer money.’

‘But why would they give it more money?’ Paul asks. ‘If it’s dead in the water?’

‘They’re in denial. They still think it can be saved.’

‘Huh,’ Paul says, as one of the zombies’ arms falls off and under the wheels of a truck.

‘The Financial Services Centre brings in a lot of money,’ Ish says. ‘But the reason it does is that all of these international banks and funds and special purpose vehicles and God knows what else can come here and do whatever it is they want to do and they know they’ll be left alone. It’s a bit like a red-light zone, see?’

‘So …’ Paul is not quite making the connection.

‘So if a bank goes bust, it’s like if a hooker dropped dead. Suddenly there’s ambulances coming in, health authorities wanting to do blood tests, news crews demanding to know what’s happened. Even if you, Mr Sex Tourist, aren’t worried about catching whatever it is killed her, still, it’s not feeling so private any more. So you quietly pack your bag, and the next day you’re off to Luxembourg or Liechtenstein or the British Virgin Islands, or wherever it might be.’

‘You mean the Irish government want to cover it up because it’s bad for business.’

‘Who knows? Maybe they genuinely think Royal Irish is salvageable. Stick a few more billion in there, close your eyes and hope for the best.’

‘It is what in the bank we call “magical thinking”,’ I add. ‘It is more prevalent than you might expect.’

Paul gazes at the cavorting zombies, the great financial memento mori that is the unbuilt bank hanging over the grey river. ‘They’re going to need it,’ he says.

And here is Life, dark and full of strangers, yelling at each other from their private intoxications like monkeys screeching through the bars of their cage. Music booms all around, prohibiting conversation at anything less than a shout; battalions of drones, haircuts modelled after the heroes of the day, neck their fizzy lagers, their syrupy alcopops, and perform the minimal courting rituals required before they have sex with each other. The bar’s style is classic Celtic Tiger – white armchairs with zebra throws, ubiquitous mirrors, large unseated area, palpable air of incipient violence – like a cross between a hairdresser’s and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Nevertheless, Life is the closest thing the Financial Services Centre has to a local. This is where the real information is exchanged: who’s getting paid what, who’s hiring, who’s on the way up/down/out; tips for good schools, good builders, good mechanics, good tailors, good divorce lawyers.

The name is a pun –
Life
is Gaelic for Liffey, the river that splits the city into north and south (and, broadly, rich and poor) – and gives rise to many more puns (‘I hate Life’, ‘After a few drinks Life won’t seem so bad’, and so on), which we make instead of finding somewhere less repugnant. On Friday nights, patrons will typically skip dinner in order to start drinking sooner – unthinkable in Paris; get stuck beside Ish and you will first be treated to what seems an unending series of humorous cat videos, then, as the hysterical laughter dies away, find yourself attempting fruitlessly to comfort her as she rehearses yet again the break-up of her relationship, before lurching off into the night with whichever opportunist has bought her last drink.

Tonight the turbulence on the markets has lent an extra edge
of mania to the proceedings, as employees of the many banks not currently punching above their weights contemplate the idea that this time next week they may be out of a job, and reach desperately for a lifebelt.

‘Think the brunette there’s taken a shine to you, Kev,’ Gary McCrum, Utilities analyst, says.

Kevin turns to look. The dark-haired girl at the end of the adjoining table glances up and away again. She has delicate hands, eyes with a little too much white in them, a disorientating air of weightlessness, like a dress on a clothes line flapping in the wind.

‘Totally checking you out,’ Dave Davison, Commodities, confirms.

Kevin scrutinizes the brunette dubiously, like a diner in a restaurant examining the lobsters in the tank. ‘Is she hot?’

‘Is she hot? She’s right there in front of you!’

‘I’ve looked at so much porn I can’t tell any more if IRL women are good-looking or not,’ Kevin confesses. ‘I have to imagine if I saw her on a screen would I click on her.’

‘IRL?’ I ask Dave Davison. ‘This means Ireland? Irish women?’

‘
In real life
, Grandad – here, Kev, look at her through my phone. See? She’s an eight, easy.’

‘Well, a seven,’ Gary says.

‘Maybe she is more of a seven,’ Dave concedes.

‘Pff, I’m not wasting a drink on a seven,’ Kevin says, and turns his back on the brunette, who dips her eyes woundedly into her lap, then reaffixes herself to her friends’ conversation, throwing her toothy smile about the room betimes like a cracked whip.

‘I used to feel that way about sevens,’ Dave says sadly. ‘Then I got married.’

‘Those two are really hitting it off,’ Jurgen says to me, nodding over to where for the last half an hour Paul and Ish have been deep in conversation.

‘I hope she is not telling him anything too personal,’ I say.

‘Such as her theories about where it all went wrong with Tog?’ Jurgen says.

‘Yes.’

‘Or the time she got diarrhoea in China?’

My eyes widen. ‘You think she’s telling him the Yangtze riverboat story?’

Maybe I should go and check, I decide; but someone is blocking my path. It’s Howie, arriving with Tom Cremins, Brian O’Brien and a couple of other traders, all carrying glasses of single malt whiskey. They crowd in beside us; the girls at the next table swivel their heads towards ours once more, like lovely, money-tropic flowers.

‘Hear you had a little chat with the government today,’ Howie says to me. ‘What’d he tell you? Are they going to recap Royal?’

‘He didn’t say.’

‘He must have said something.’

‘He actually didn’t,’ I say, recalling with a twinge of horror the Minister’s grinning, terrorized aphasia. ‘Anyway, even if I knew, I couldn’t tell you – you
know
I couldn’t tell you,’ raising my voice as he starts swearing at me, ‘it’d be insider trading.’

‘Crazy Frog, if they locked up everyone in this town who’s insider trading, there’d be no one left on the fucking inside.’ Howie plonks his glass down on the table, making the ice cubes jingle. ‘
Someone
ought to be making money out of this eurozone shit-show. This whole fucking week has been a disaster on every conceivable level, like getting raped by a guy with a tiny cock.’ The eavesdropping girls flinch, but don’t stop staring; Howie’s attention, however, is already elsewhere. ‘Is that the writer?’ Pushing past me he taps on Paul’s shoulder and asks him the same question. Paul turns with a slightly confused smile. ‘What the fuck are you doing writing a book about this guy?’ Howie demands, gesturing at me.

‘Ah –’ Paul says, looking startled.

‘He’s not a player. He’s a research analyst. It’s like you’ve gone
to Silverstone and you’re watching the mechanics. I mean, do what you want,’ Howie sniffs. ‘It just sounds like a boring book, that’s all.’

‘Well, you see, in a way that’s the –’

‘There is crazy shit going down right now,’ Howie interrupts. ‘I mean world-historical craziness. You should be speaking to the traders. Or the hedge funds. If I had a hedge fund, I’d be shorting the shit out of the whole of Europe. And in six months I’d be a billionaire.’

‘You’re talking about the –?’

‘The whole continent’s fucked. The politicians don’t know what to do. All that can save it now is a war.’

‘A war?’ Kevin hiccups.

‘That’s the way it’s heading. France, Italy, Spain are all watching their economies go down the tube, Germany’s there with its arms folded, saying, “Don’t expect anything from us.” There’s all the ingredients for a war, right? And it would stop all the, you know, the bollocks.’

‘
War
,’ Paul repeats, scribbling in his red notebook.

‘War’s a good thing. What stopped the Great Depression? World War Two. Or look at the Baghdad Bounce. NASDAQ crashes, the economy’s assholed, till the US invades Iraq and the stock market goes up 80 per cent. Capitalism needs war. Besides, war’s what made Europe great. The whole reason their currency’s in the toilet is you’ve got a bunch of bureaucrats in charge, trying to pretend the last thousand years of history never happened. Acting like Europe’s all just one big happy family, singing and holding hands like a bunch of fucking Smurfs. And they wonder why everyone’s lining up to short them! Would you invest in a Smurf economy?’

‘
I
wouldn’t,’ Kevin says.

‘No way,’ Howie says, but his eyes are suddenly vacant and he peers back and forth as if he can’t remember what he’s doing here.

At that moment, Tom Cremins pulls his sleeve. ‘We’re going,’ he says.

‘Yeah,’ Howie says, and drains his glass. He turns to Paul once more. ‘When you get tired talking to this joker, come and see me,’ he says. ‘I’ll show you stuff that’ll have you haemorrhaging from every orifice.’

With that, he and the traders bounce off, their conversation a blizzard of acronyms and stomach-turning sexual references, like a Scrabble game at a gang bang.

‘Interesting guy,’ Paul says thoughtfully. I watch him watch Howie barge his way through the drunken, suited bodies, feeling the same pang I might have at a school dance, seeing the girl I adored bloom at the attentions of some handsome delinquent. Then, as if he senses my unhappiness, Paul turns to me, and with an enthusiasm that strikes me as false says, ‘But then, you’re all interesting! I just had a great conversation with your friend here. Did you know she studied anthropology? I thought you bankers were all rocket scientists.’

‘That’s just the traders,’ I say. ‘My background is philosophy – François Texier, do you know him?’

Paul shakes his head.

‘In fact he might be a useful person to think about for your book,’ I say. ‘He had many fascinating ideas about simulacra, and the derealization of modern life.’

‘Derealization?’ Paul repeats, with a half-smile.

‘Yes. He was interested in a Buddhist concept called
sunyata
, or voidness. According to this
sunyata
, reality as we perceive it is an illusion. We see the world as divided up into objects – this glass, this table, this person. But in fact, these are merely snapshots of processes that are in a constant state of change, all parts of a great intermingling flux.’

‘That does sound pretty derealizing,’ Paul admits.

‘Actually, the derealizing comes as an attempt to cover over this notion of flux,’ I say, excited to feel these thoughts coming to life
in my mind again. ‘To a culture centred on the individual, the idea that we are all just transitory surface effects on some great sea of emptiness has not been popular. Texier’s argument is that most of Western civilization has been an attempt to build over the void with huge, static systems of thought, religious, economic, scientific, that divide everything into facts, each with its own specific place. We call it analysis, but really it is escape. Or as he puts it, “We write the encyclopedia to explain the world, and then we leave the world to live in the encyclopedia.” The simulacrum is a kind of a derivative of these –’

‘Oi! What’s going on here?’ Ish arrives with a tray of drinks. ‘You know the rules, Claude. Friday night – no Frenchness!’

‘I’m just explaining that we have all come to banking from different disciplines,’ I say.

‘Kevin here was halfway through a medical degree,’ Ish says. ‘Imagine, he could actually have been useful to somebody.’

‘Doctors don’t make shit these days,’ Kevin says.

‘It used to be the smartest people didn’t always want to be the richest people,’ Paul says.

‘Maybe the smartest people got smarter,’ Kevin returns.

‘
I’m
not going to spend the rest of my life at it,’ Ish says. ‘I’ve still got a box of my old clothes at home. As soon as I get my next bonus, I’m going to chuck my whole wardrobe of daggy work shit straight into a skip and fuck off to the Pacific. It’ll be like Corporate Ish never existed.’

‘What about your apartment?’ I say.

‘Oh yeah.’ Her face falls. Turning to Kevin she says, ‘Here, want to buy an apartment? It’s got a bidet.’

‘Property’s finished,’ Kevin says. ‘I’m putting all my money into global pandemics.’

As midnight approaches, I see Paul put on his coat.

‘The end of your first week,’ I say. ‘It is all going well?’

‘Sure,’ he says – but I detect a hesitation.

‘Only … ?’

‘It’s nothing,’ he reassures me. ‘I’m just trying to figure out how it all hangs together.’

‘If you have questions, maybe I can help.’

At first he blusters nothings, then he pauses, looks at me, as if deciding whether to take me into his confidence: ‘I feel like I’m
missing
something,’ he says. ‘I’ve got the characters, what you do, the rhythm of the day. But I still – I feel like I’m not getting to the
heart
of things, you know?’ I must look very worried, because he claps me on the shoulder. ‘It’ll come. Maybe I just need to change my focus a little bit.’

‘We will see you on Monday?’ I say.

‘Of course.’ He grins. ‘Have a good weekend. You’re off-camera! Let your hair down.’

Not long after, the lights come up; Life begins to empty, its pinchbeck promises having slipped away, as always, through the cracks of the night.

We gather our things and make our way outside. I am deep in thought: what Paul said about missing something bothers me, and as if picking up on that, Jurgen says, ‘So he has told you what’s going to happen?’

‘Happen?’

‘In the book.’

‘We know what is going to happen in the book,’ I say. ‘It is about me, a modern Everyman, experiencing a typical day.’

‘Yes, but there will be some kind of story also?’

‘That is the story,’ I say.

‘That is the story?’

‘Yes.’

‘You, sitting at your computer, writing research notes about banks.’

‘That’s right.’

Jurgen says nothing to this.

‘It’s not supposed to be one of those books where things happen,’ I explain. ‘It’s about discovering the humanity in ordinary lives.’

‘Oh,’ Jurgen says.

There is another silence.

‘It’s not going to be boring,’ I say.

‘Of course not,’ he says.

Around us the Centre looms, darkened and empty like a Perspex necropolis. I think again of Paul’s parting words, and anxiety quickens in my sinews once more. ‘Did he say anything to you?’ I turn to Ish. ‘What were you talking to him about for so long?’

‘He was asking about the Torabundo archipelago. I travelled around there a bit with Tog back in the day. She pauses, then says, ‘
I
reckon he’s got something planned for you.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like … I don’t know … maybe you fall in love.’

‘I’m not going to fall in love,’ I say categorically.

‘In a book this is exactly the kind of thing the main character will say right before he falls in love,’ Jurgen says.

‘Yeah,’ says Ish. ‘Plus, you’re French. You lot practically invented love. French kissing. French letters. It’s the whole French thing.’

‘How would you feel if I said the “whole Australian thing” was kangaroos and tinnies and daytime soap operas?’

‘That
is
the whole Australian thing, Claude. Why do you think I left?’

‘Yes, well, then you will understand that not everyone fits into the national stereotype.’

‘I certainly do not think that when people speak of the “typical German”,’ Jurgen chuckles, ‘they are imagining a crazy man who loves reggae music, and writes articles about medieval economics while listening to reggae music on his computer!’