“I don’t care what you’re paying me,” he shouted. “It will destroy me professionally if this gets out. It’s just so ugly!”
We had to fire him. He sued us. Marc Daubenay came in and dealt with him. I don’t know how it turned out. Perhaps the case is still running today, who knows.
So in the end we found a set designer. It was Naz’s idea: a brilliant one. Frank, his name was. He’d designed sets for movies, so he understood the concept of partial décor. Film sets have loads of neutral space-after all, you only have to make the bit the camera sees look real; the rest you leave unpainted, without detail, blank. Frank brought a props woman called Annie with him. She turned out to be vital in the later stages.
Matthew Younger came once to the building during the setting-up period. I’d had him sell four million pounds worth of stocks when I’d first bought the building. It had cost just over four in alclass="underline" the three and a half price tag, plus conveyancing fees, stamp duty and all that stuff, plus the bribes of two grand each we’d given some of the long-standing tenants to get them to waive their rights and move straight out. Only two had refused, and they’d both changed their minds within a week. I didn’t enquire how they’d been persuaded.
The amazing thing, though, is that by the time Matthew Younger visited me on the site a few weeks later, my portfolio’s value had risen back almost to the level it had been at before he’d sold the shares.
“It’s like yoghurt,” I said, “or a lizard’s tail, that grows back if you yank it off.”
“Speculation!” he said, smiling from ear to ear. His voice boomed up the stairwell, zinging off the loose iron banisters that were being ripped out one by one. They’d looked right in the catalogue, but didn’t any more once we’d installed them, so they were being ripped out and replaced. “The technology and telecommunications sectors are experiencing a boom just now,” he went on. “They’re going stratospheric. This is great, but you must understand that your level of exposure is enormous.”
“Exposure,” I repeated. “I like exposure.” I turned the palms of my hands outwards and raised them both-almost imperceptibly, but still enough to feel a muffled tingling in my right side.
“I’ve prepared you a chart,” said Matthew Younger, taking a large piece of paper from his dossier, “that takes the mean performance of these aggregated sectors over eight years. If you look…”
I felt another type of tingling on my upturned palms-not one coming from inside me but an exterior one, a sensation of lots of little particles falling on it. I looked up: granite crumbs were tumbling from the stairs above us.
“Let’s go outside,” I said.
I led Matthew Younger out into the courtyard. Swings were being installed that day. I hadn’t seen swings in my original vision of the courtyard-but they’d grown there later, as I thought about it further: a concrete patch with swings on and a wooden podium a few feet to its right. Workmen had laid down the cement and were now planting the swings’ bases in it while it was still wet. Matthew Younger held his map up against the sky.
“Look,” he said. “In this first four-year period this chart covers…just here, see?-they rose pretty sharply. But then here, over the next two years, they drop again-and just as sharply, even dipping lower than they were back here. From here they rise again, and from the time when we bought into them their upward thrust has been phenomenal. But if they choose to plummet again…”
“Is there any reason they should?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “All the signs suggest they’ll rise still more. But one can never completely second-guess the market.”
“Isn’t that your job?” I said.
“Well, of course,” he said. “To a large extent. But there is a small degree of randomness-a capricious element that likes occasionally to buck expectations, throw a spanner in the works.”
“A shard,” I said.
“I’m sorry?” he said.
“Go on,” I told him.
“Oh. Right. Welclass="underline" caution-and above all diversification-can largely neutralize this element. Which brings us back to the question of exposure. Now if…”
“Shh!” I said, holding my hand up. I was looking at the jagged line that ran across his chart: how it jutted and meandered. As his lecture had moved off the figures and onto the randomness stuff he’d let the left side of his chart drop, so the value line was running vertically, like my bathroom’s crack. I let my eyes run up and down it, following its edges and directions.
Matthew Younger saw that I was looking at it and straightened it up.
“No!” I said.
“I’m sorry?” said Matthew Younger.
“It was better when you…Can I keep this chart?”
“Of course!” he boomed back. “Yes, have a proper look at it in your own time. I’ll leave you some stock profiles I’ve prepared here should you wish to diversif…”
His booming was drowned out by drilling coming through an open window on the second floor. Matthew Younger handed me the chart and then a wad of papers, then I showed him out.
“Could you have the word ‘speculation’ looked up?” I asked Naz as we were driven to a glazier’s that afternoon.
“Of course.” He took his mobile out and tapped in a text message.
The reply came ten minutes later:
“The faculty of seeing,” Naz read; “observation of the heavens, stars, etc.; contemplation or profound study of a subject; a conjectural consideration; the practice of buying and selling goods. From the Latin speculari: spy out, watch, and specula: watch tower. First citation…”
“Watch tower,” I said; “heavens: I like that. You could see the heavens better from a watch tower. But you’d be exposed.”
“Yes, I suppose you would,” Naz answered.
On the way back to my building from the glazier’s we detoured via my flat. I was still sleeping there while waiting for my building to be ready, but I was hardly ever there: I’d leave early each morning and return late at night, sleep for a few hours and then take off again. That morning I’d left a tiling catalogue behind; I told the driver to pass by there so that I could pick it up.
When we arrived there, Greg was ringing at my front door. I’d already got out of the car when I saw him-otherwise I might have made the driver drive me round the block and loop back a few minutes later. Greg turned round and saw me: I was trapped.
“My God!” Greg shouted. “Nice car dude!”
I didn’t say anything. It was a nice car, I suppose. It was quite long and had these doors that opened in the middle of the back. It wasn’t ostentatious, though-and anyway I only had it because my Fiesta wouldn’t have taken a desk and fax machine. As soon as everything was up and running I’d get rid of this car and go back to the Fiesta.
Greg stood on my steps, a few feet from me.
“So,” he said. “What’s new? You haven’t called me in six weeks.”
“I’ve been…” I told him, “you know…busy.”
“Doing what?” asked Greg.
“Getting ready to move into a new place.”
“Where?” he asked.
“The other side of Brixton,” I said.
“Other…side…of Brixton,” he repeated.
“Yes,” I said.
We stood there facing one another. After a while I said:
“I’ve got to pick up this tile catalogue, and then go off to a meeting.”
Greg looked past me into the car where Naz was sitting.