Thomas Maloney - Learning to Die

He parks the bike, swipes his pass at several sets of sliding doors and descends into his windowless lab just as dawn begins to break. Natalie is coming home today. He’ll have to wait a while, until she’s feeling better — just as he’ll have to wait before tentatively trying to initiate some sort of sexual contact, which in further evidence of his uncaring nature he has been missing — but when the time is right, he’s going to ask Natalie to tell him more about her life before they met.

Curiosity of the jealous kind — Dan acknowledges a trace of that hazardous element, uncharacteristic in him — is as unlikely to fade as desire.

‘I have a question.’ It’s the young woman: a rising star. Even her ambition is ambitious. Mike senses both danger and opportunity.

‘Sure — fire away.’

‘I’ve run a few numbers based on the data that you kindly sent over last week. I was surprised to find that your so-called supercomputer is eighty per cent correlated to a naive strategy of buying what went up over the past year, and going short what went down.’ So-called , she said. The atmosphere in the room is drawn taut. ‘I’m talking about the most basic trend-following. Any high school geek could code it up in half an hour. So my question is: why should we pay two-and-twenty for that, when we can get it in a more transparent product for half that fee?’

The sales rep glances at him uneasily. The CIO’s smile has gone; he frowns and nods as if he’d been thinking that all along.

‘You’re absolutely right,’ says Mike, making full frontal eye contact. ‘Just about eighty per cent.’ Now the sales rep is frowning, too. Mike leaves a dramatic pause. ‘If only you could eat correlations,’ he says at last. ‘But what you and, more importantly, your beneficiaries get to eat is returns. Do you know which twenty per cent of naive trend-following the MRI strategy is not correlated to?’

His challenger looks slightly sick. She can already guess that her little gambit is going to backfire. Nobody answers.

‘We’re not correlated to the twenty per cent that throws away most of your gains. The whipsaws. The bolts from the blue. The head-in-hands disasters. MRI can see those coming. Let’s throw a comparison up on the screen. Don’t worry — it won’t take me half an hour.’ He flashes her a smile and bangs away on the keyboard for about ten seconds. Two jagged lines appear — a black one relentlessly rising and a green one following similar contours but lagging far behind.

‘Now let’s adjust for different fees. One and ten, you said?’ He types again and the gap narrows infinitesimally: the black line is still streets ahead. ‘It was a great point,’ he says, magnanimously but using the past tense, ‘but I hope I’ve allayed that concern. Alpha is measured in returns, not correlations. This strategy delivers the real deal.’

As they all shake hands at the end of the meeting, Mike saves his earnest ‘Thanks for taking the time’ for the CIO, who responds with glowing compliments. The young woman offers a curt and dismissive ‘thanks’ — she hasn’t forgiven him for making the naive, underperforming line on the graph green to match her outfit. Some things can’t be helped.

In the lift, the sales rep grins and slaps him on the back. ‘God damn Rocket Jesus. Now I get why they call you that.’

Brenda Vickers is on a restocking team this week, which suits the sense of stubborn regeneration that often follows the passing of her darker episodes. The clear-felled swathe of mountain has lain fallow and unsightly for two years, and is now ready to nourish ten thousand new saplings — beams and rafters for the houses of 2050. A mild weather system has conveniently thawed the ground.

What was it James called the saw-work? Dismembering the crap out of trees. Sometimes that’s all she’s good for. Taking revenge. Other times she’s almost normal, an outdoorsy girl in her element. Most of the estate boys like her, even the two or three she’s slept with. You might expect these Highlanders to bear grudges, but they don’t.

Her rented house, a two-bed pebble-dashed semi in a modern outgrowth of the village of Invergarry, is one of many called The Shieling. From her bedroom window she can watch the copious waters of the Garry swirling towards Loch Ness. In the kitchen, a PG Tips magnet secures a Scotsman cutting to the fridge: ‘Mountain race abandoned after “mindless sabotage”.’ Brenda doesn’t take kindly to litter on the mountains, whatever its purpose — she kept the stack of fluorescent flags as a souvenir. A second clipping hangs from a Nessie magnet: ‘Paisley Nurse Smashes Highland Way Record.’ This article is a source of private amusement because Brenda ran the ninety-five-mile trail twenty minutes faster with a couple of lads from the Monarcan a’ Ghlinne , an elite climbers’ club whose membership criteria are ‘Drink hard, get up early and prove you’re neither feart nor bamstick.’ The Monarcan , who invited her to join, don’t know about the Inderal.

Brenda’s violent aversion to social appearances covers parties, dates, family gatherings, job interviews, ceilidh night at the Lock, and even simple photographs: since the age of twelve she has been physically incapable of smiling on demand, though that’s the least of her problems. Mike’s hideous party did to her exactly what she told him it would, and the aftermath of self-loathing festered. James’ message was a jolt, an invasion both thrilling and unwelcome. She surprised herself by calling him back; she found she wasn’t afraid to — after all, he was even more of a mess than her. But it made no difference to her urgent, gathering need to be alone, which was only finally satisfied by making herself, for one night, the most isolated person in the country. Over the mountain she went, to see what she could see. And all that she could see, thank god, was empty space.

She feels better now. She wouldn’t even mind if James called her again, but he hasn’t. These Sitka saplings must be planted densely, to slow down the juvenile growth and produce stronger timber. Too much space is bad for them. He’ll call again.

A simile trips off James’ cursor: like a man left sitting in the bath after the water has run out . He smiles with satisfaction and then suddenly frowns. Did he read that somewhere? Lowry, or one of the American masters? He can’t be sure he didn’t. These bastards are still jostling him, crowding him out. He hammers the backspace furiously, then sits for a moment with fingers poised. It’s no good: he’s lost the flow. He’s the man sitting in that fucking bath.

When did he last have a bath, anyway? It was last Christmas Eve, on his annual visit to the Old Enemy, his parents. His mother offered him one as though he were a vagabond they had received in an act of charity. He shaved out of consideration for her bourgeois feelings.

His father is an accountant, now approaching retirement. His Portuguese mother was one too, but retrained as a teacher. They are conscientious people, who moved into the catchment of the right school and asked him gently challenging questions about his schoolwork. His father in particular, whose parents ‘came from nothing’ (it was writ large in Saunders lore that James’ grandmother wore clogs in the winter and went barefoot in the summer), values hard work and financial security and takes nothing for granted.

Shortly after James told his father he wanted to be a writer and would not even complete his degree, a magazine was left prominently open on the kitchen table, showing grainy photographs of evicted tenant farmers in Ireland — Nanna’s ancestors. The intended message: spoilt brat.