Iain Banks - Transition

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-”

“Fuck off,” she said angrily. “What’s he got to do with me?”

“Chloë,” I said in mock horror. “That’s your dad you’re talking about there.” I snapped my fingers. “Trust fund,” I said. “You’re a Trusty.”

“No, I’m fucking not! You don’t know anything about me!”

“I know I don’t!” I protested, pretending to match her in general upsettedness or whatever. “And you’re not making it easy for me, quite frankly!” You never want to overdo that kind of thing, though. I made a sort of deflating motion, dropping my shoulders and my voice. “What have you got against me, Chloë?” I asked, trying to sound just a little hurt but also being careful not to overdo the plaintiveness.

“The thing about money, maybe?” she suggested, like it ought to be obvious. “The whole greed thing, yeah?”

“Look,” I said, sighing. I was already thinking this wasn’t a chat-up situation any longer. I just wanted to say stuff that I’d been thinking about, stuff that I’d sort of wanted to say to people like her before but never got round to. Plus, of course, there are some women that when you stop trying to chat them up and start treating them like a bloke you’re arguing with, they really like that and that can get them into bed where trying to chat them up normally never would. So, definitely worth trying.

“The greed thing,” I say to her. “Everybody’s greedy, Chloë. You’re greedy. You might not think so but I bet you are. We’re all out for number one. It’s just that some of us don’t kid ourselves about it, know what I mean? We all want everybody to think the same as we do and we think they’re stupid if they think any different. And when it comes to love and relationships, we’re all looking for the right person to worship us, because that’ll make us happy, aren’t we? Wanting to be happy – that’s selfish, isn’t it? Even wanting there to be no more poverty or violence – I mean, it’s all bollocks cos there always will be: both. But that’s us being selfish cos we want the world to be the way we personally think it ought to be, know what I mean? You can dress it up as wanting other people to be happy, but in the end it comes down to you and your own selfishness, your own greed.”

Chloë held a hand up, almost touching my mouth. “Greed and selfishness aren’t the same thing,” she said. “Close, but not the same. And they’re both different from self-preservation and general self-interest.”

“Still, close, like you say.”

She sighed, drank. “Yeah, close.” She looked like she was studying something behind the bar.

“There’s nothing wrong with a bit of greed, Chloë. It’s what makes the world go round. Wanting to get on, wanting to better yourself, being ambitious, know what I mean? Wanting the best for yourself – what’s wrong with that? Wanting the best for your family – what’s wrong with that, either? Eh? It’s great having the luxury of thinking about other people, the poor and the starving and all that, but you only have that luxury cos somebody’s been thinking for themselves and their family.”

She turned to me, big eyes wide and bright. “You know what? You remind me of somebody, Ade,” she said.

“Somebody nice?” I asked. Sarcastically, if I’m honest about it.

She shook her head. I liked the way her hair moved, though I was resigning myself to never running my fingers through it or breathing in its perfume or using it to pull her head back towards me while I fucked her from behind. “No,” she said. “He’s one of those men who was packed off to public school when he was just a little kid-”

“Yeah, well, I wasn’t.”

“Ssh.” She looked stern. “I heard you out. The point is, because of that or not, he decided that everybody’s out for themselves and nobody really cares for anybody else, though some people pretend to. He’s looked after ‘Number One’” – she did that finger-waggly inverted-commas thing – “exclusively ever since and he can’t see there might be something wrong with that. In fact, he can’t even see that what he’s got there is just a single point of view, and a pretty perverse one at that; as far as he’s concerned it’s some great truth about people and life that only he and a few other realists have worked out. Thing is, he’s got a problem. Maybe he’s still infected with some tiny remnant of human decency or something, but he can only really be content with himself and his despicable egotism if he’s satisfied that his self-centred attitude doesn’t make him a freak. For his own peace of mind he needs to believe that it’s not just him, that anybody who claims to care for others is lying; maybe because they’re frightened to admit they only think of themselves too, or maybe because they actively want to make people like him feel bad about themselves.”

I was starting to think that Chloë had been on the marching powder too, though somehow it didn’t look like she had, know what I mean? She wasn’t speaking the way you do when you’re coked up. But, fuck me, she was still speaking:

“Socialists, charity workers, carers, people who volunteer to help others; they’re all – and he’s quite convinced about this – they’re all in reality mean-spirited bastards, either self-deceiving bastards or – for their own filthy left-wing reasons – deliberately trying to destroy the self-esteem of normal, healthily ambitious people like him. Because if only everybody looked after their own interests everything would be fine, see? Level playing field, with everybody nakedly ambitious and selfish; everybody knows where they are. If some people aren’t totally selfish, or, even worse, pretend not to be selfish, then it messes up the whole system. It makes it more unfair, not fairer, the way they’d claim. He calls people like that do-gooders, and they make him angry. I think he would actually prefer do-badders, which is a pretty fucked-up attitude when you think about it. He feels quite strongly that these charlatans needed to be unmasked. Always on about them. Never misses an opportunity to complain that they’re liars and frauds. Frankly, Ade, altogether, it makes him sound like – and I firmly believe he actually is – a complete cunt.”