Trading Futures (20 page)

I still didn’t mention it to Mum and Dad when it happened, or later. What was the point? It could have been an accident. I didn’t know that it wasn’t. I still don’t know.
There is no proven connection between the event and a conversation three years earlier.

I sometimes wonder if they had any inkling. I don’t think they did. And I wonder whether, if my own children felt like Alan did, I would have an inkling either. Probably not. I can tell if
they seem to be happy or sad. That’s about it. I’ve never talked to them much about their feelings. Judy does. At least, I imagine she does. I expect Judy would know if they were
feeling really low, or at least have some instinct about it. I worry that these things are hereditary.

This is the place. I’ll pull in here for a while. It hasn’t changed much. The tree is still standing. There are one or two flowers growing at the foot of the trunk. I wonder if they
could have seeded from the ones I left in 1970. I unscrew the cap of the whisky bottle and take a long, long drink.

I had an unremarkable career at school, running with the herd, pushing rebellion to the limit and not beyond it, fighting right up to the penultimate ditch. Just before my A-levels, I had a
crisis. It occurred to me that I was the meat in the grinder of a huge sausage machine, churning away into oblivion. There was a choice, and this was the moment to make it or it would be too late.
It was time to step off the conveyor belt.

I fudged the choice, as I always have. I told myself it was possible to be a hand-made sausage. I’m not sure now that it is. I have lived a life with my body on the conveyor belt, and my
head hanging off it. That is no place to be. Time to make the choice now, I think. Time to submit to the grinder, or step off the conveyor belt altogether. Time to make a choice between different
oblivions, different eternities.

The sandstorm conceals the desert. The smoke conceals the furnace. Nothing and no one are ever what they appear and the reality is always worse.

I think this is what I’ll do.

I will drive towards Barnet. If I pass a late-night chemist before I get there, I will stop. I will buy as many paracetamol tablets as I’m allowed. I will swallow them with the rest of the
loony pills I got in Bridgwater this afternoon, washed down with what remains of the whisky. If I don’t pass a chemist, I will return to a house in Barnet and to a woman who lives there.

Supermarkets don’t count. It has to be a chemist. There’s no fun in backing odds-on favourites. I want to give myself a sporting chance. More of a chance than Alan gave himself.

I adored Alan. I looked up to him. He was way ahead of me, a lot more than three years. At twenty-five, he’d already worked out that life was not all it was cracked up to be.

I don’t know why it has taken me so long.

TRADING FUTURES

Jim Powell was born in London in 1949. He is the author of one previous novel,
The Breaking of Eggs
, and was named by BBC2’s
The Culture Show
as being
amongst the ‘12 of the Best New Novelists’ in 2011. He divides his time between Northamptonshire, England, and the Tarn, France.

Also by Jim Powell

THE BREAKING OF EGGS

First published 2016 by Picador

This electronic edition published 2016 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
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ISBN 978-1-5098-0644-7

Copyright © Jim Powell 2016

Cover Design by Neil Lang, Pan Macmillan Art Department
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Author photograph © Brian Dunstone

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