Meanwhile, above our heads, there is the sound of some commotion: shouting and a series of small thumps followed by a large, ragged one. More distant shouting. It is a warm day and the window of the doctor’s room is lying half open. Outside, I can hear birdsong and leaves rustling in the wind. That and the shouting coming from upstairs.
You are sure it was another person doing this? the doctor appears to be asking. I nod and say “Yes!” with some considerable emphasis. Above our heads, some sort of alarm is going off and I can hear running feet. The doctor appears oblivious.
You know not who it was? she asks.
“No!” I tell her. “I know not!”
You might have dreamed it, she suggests.
“I might have but I did not! It happened!”
“You know not who it was?”
“No! No! How many more times? No!”
“Or could have been?”
“Anyone. Any person it could have been.”
“Not nurse,” she begins, then I lose the rest. Possibly something about duties, which would make sense.
“Not nurse,” I tell her. (Upstairs, more thumping.)
The broad doctor looks down at the doll in my hands. I am holding it rather tightly, squeezing its chest as though trying to throttle it by the lungs. She reaches over and takes it gently from my hands, placing it beside the other one, which is still reclining in its handkerchief-box bed.
Upstairs, the rhythmic thumping ceases and a weak cheer sounds.
“There is (something something) of doll,” the doctor says.
“What?” I ask.
Above our heads, the sound of something scraping, probably chair legs on the wooden floor of the day room. Is that clapping?
The male doll I was holding earlier slides off the edge of the desk and flops to the floor. There is a scream from somewhere outside and a white-clad body falls from above, past the window, hitting the ground outside the window with a thump and a roar of pain. I seem to feel that pain. I shiver, half closing my eyes. The room around me starts to dim.
I watch the doctor recede in my gaze, seeming to fall slowly horizontally away from me as the office disappears hazily around me, starting with the outskirts, spreading to the wall behind the desk and the desk itself and ending with just the doctor, an indeterminate dot somewhere in the far distance, looking round in horror at the window and then starting to her feet and dashing towards it.
I see no more. It is as though I am falling down a great dark pipe away from everything and eventually I’m too far away to make out anything at all.
Upstairs: more shouting, again. It too sounds like it is being heard from one end of a long pipe, very distant and echoey and strange. It fades quickly away to nothing.
Finally, I think, I faint.
What? Kennedy? Man on the moon? The Wall comes down? Mandela walking? 9/11? 7/7? Notable dates for your diary, end-of-an-era stuff like that? I’ll tell you one:
“What, to each according to their greed, is that it, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I said, thinking about this. “Yeah, that’s a pretty fair what-do-you-call-it. Summation. Yeah, I should think.”
“Ho ho!” The girl just widened her eyes and shook her head and took a drink. “You are so fucked up.” She flashed a shit-eating smile and added, “Dude.”
We were in the Met bar, when it was still cool. I’d already seen one Gallagher brother. I was meeting some mates there; we were off to watch the F1 race the next day at Brands Hatch or Silverstone or wherever. The girl was there with a couple of old school friends, though the other two had gone off to the Ladies, one looking unhealthily pale and the other to hold her hair, I was guessing. Leaving this one. Called Chloë. Chloë with the diaresis, which is the two-little-dots thing, apparently.
The girl who was probably doing the hair-holding by now had volunteered their names earlier. In all the noise I didn’t think Chloë had caught my name and she hadn’t asked either. She was cute. Young enough to be a student, maybe: curly black hair, cheeky little face with big eyes. Nice top, great tits, designer jeans, red heels. Tasty, in other words. And a challenge. Patently.
“Greed gets a bad press,” I told her.
“Yeah. What, like fascism?”
I winked. “You’re an idealist, aren’t you?”
“I have ideals,” she agreed. Her voice was western Home Counties. Girls’ school. She was trying a bit too hard to sound bored. “Plus I’m human, so I’m a humanist.”
“And feminine,” I said. I’d got better at seeing how this sort of stuff worked.
“You’re catching on.”
I drank my lager, smiled. “Doing all right, am I?”
She raised her eyebrows. “I wouldn’t get too optimistic. I don’t fuck guys like you.”
“What sort of guys do you fuck?” I asked her, resting one elbow on the bar and leaning just a little closer to her, taking up more of her field of vision. I’d already got a semi. Just a girl using the f-word like that was usually enough. To be talking about fucking with a girl even when she was basically saying no, or at least was telling you she was saying no, was enough. Promising, know what I mean?
“Nice guys.”
“Nice,” I said, looking sceptical.
She winked at me. It looked like a what-do-you-call-it, a parody of the way I’d just winked at her. “They finish last.” She drank from her cocktail glass, looking pleased with herself.
I laughed. I put my glass down and held out my hand, looking tentative about it. “I’m Ade?” I said, quite quietly, head lowered slightly in that Let’s-start-again? kind of way. She looked at my hand like it might be contaminated. “ Adrian?” I said, and gave her the first-level cheeky smile, which has been known to melt many a girl’s heart and other parts and which I am not ashamed to admit I have practised in the mirror, to get the effect just right. Hey – it’s for them in the end. But then she took my hand, gripped it for about a nanosecond.
“Chloë,” she told me.
“Yeah, your mate said.”
“So, what, you’re in the music biz, Ade? Or films?” It was like she was trying to sound sarcastic when there was nothing to be sarcastic about.
“Nah, money.”
“Money?”
“Hedge fund.”
“What’s a hedge fund?” she asked, frowning. To be fair, not many people outside the industry had heard of them then – this was pre-LTCM folding, sort of in between the Asian crisis and the Russian crisis.
“Way of making money,” I told her.
“Hedging your financial bets?”
“Something like that.”
“Sounds… totally parasitic.” Another insincere smile.
“Nah, honest, we make a lot of money for a lot of people. We make money work. We make it work harder than anybody else. That’s not parasitic at all. Your banks are parasitic. They just sit there, absorbing stuff from the people actually making the money. We’re out there, we’re predators. We’re operators. We make the profits happen. We make money perform. We make money work.” I’d already said that, I knew, but I was getting enthusiastic. Plus I’d taken a toot in the Gents five minutes earlier and it was still hitting me.
She snorted. “You sound like a salesman.”
“What’s wrong with being a salesman?” I asked. She was starting to annoy me. “I mean, I’m not, but so what if I was? What do you do, Chloë? What’s your business?”
She rolled her eyes. “Graphic design,” she sighed.
“That any better than being a salesman?”
“Bit more creative, maybe?” she said in a bored voice. “Slightly more meaningful?”
I put both forearms on the bar. “Let me guess, Chloë. Your dad’s loaded. You-”