Thomas Maloney - Learning to Die

Lisa was in Laos, on that hike. Afterwards, she followed them around half of Asia, ignoring hints. When they finally shook her off, leaving her with some wacko Americans on Phuket, Natalie was struck by remorse. But annoying Lisa has done just fine.

Lisa kept in touch with the backpacker crowd, Natalie recalls, and always knew who was doing what with whom. She’ll put the crucial enquiry in a casual, gossipy postscript. She glances at Dan but he’s miles away, poring over a complicated diagram on his tablet. She and Dan don’t read each other’s emails: it’s a privacy thing, a respect thing, like not using the toilet while the other person’s in the shower. Or it’s a trust thing.

As she types, her heart flutters. But the involvement of that organ is incidental biology.

May God bless Brenda, who has the key to a friend’s empty flat, and who, without asking where James was planning to stay, positively encouraged their evening towards that destination. His booking at the youth hostel won’t be needed. In her friend’s grubby kitchen, which is miraculously provisioned with booze, fruit and ice, they make cocktails that would have cost him dear at a bar.

After a raid on the kitchen cupboards, he returns to the sofa to find her lying on the floor on her front, eyes closed. Surely she hasn’t passed out on him?

‘Brenda?’

‘When I was little,’ she says, wide awake, her eyes still closed, ‘if my dad was riding his luck, we’d go on holiday to Spain. The Costa Brava. I remember lying exactly like this on the beach, eyes closed, head on my arms, listening to the waves breaking — that slow, irregular rhythm, sometimes a big wave, sometimes a small one — and feeling the hot sand between my toes, the breeze coming and going, nothing to do but soak it all in, thinking, “This is now. You wanted this, you waited for months for this, and here it is. Soon it will be over and you’ll be home, with lessons and homework and people you hate, remembering this moment and wishing you were back here. But this is now, right now.” I was just thinking the same thing: “This is now.”’

Not much later, they’re in Brenda’s friend’s bed. James is in the stupor of any starved man presented with a feast, and content to follow Brenda’s lead. She won’t stay underneath him, but rolls him this way and that, laughing, until they lie side by side in an awkward tangle.

The laughing troubles him. To James, sex is about as funny as appendicitis or the Cuban Missile Crisis. He has a vivid memory of Becks once laughing in his face. There he was, desperate, defenceless — ethereal, you might say, flush’d and like a throbbing star — and she laughed. Couldn’t help it, she said. The look on his face. She apologised lovingly but he never quite forgave her. Anything but that. Brenda’s laughter isn’t so bad: she isn’t laughing at him. Is she?

Gradually, these thoughts fade as his mental field collapses into a point. He unthinkingly takes hold of her hip, tries to turn her to better direct his efforts. She disengages. Did he go too far? ‘If you want it that way,’ she says in a matter-of-fact voice, rising onto hands and widely-planted knees, ‘we might as well do it properly.’ Her eyes flash a friendly challenge. Christ, this woman means business, after all. How long will he last? He finds his gaze fixed on the knotted contours of her upper back, the deep valley between muscles drawn together over her spine. For a brief, weird instant he’s fucking a guy, not a girl. This distracting notion helps to delay his moment of crisis, which nevertheless rushes upon him all too soon.

The sheet splits loudly, right between his knees. A few stunned seconds follow — deep, slowing exhalations — before they both dissolve in laughter.

Brenda wakes before James. The flat is cold. She pees, brushes her teeth, and then lies back down to watch him for a while. Every morning after every social interaction, her impulsive habit is to pick over each mortifying episode — the wrong things she said, the people who laughed at her or ignored her, the witnesses to her freakish symptoms — and work herself into a delicious agony of shame. But this morning is different — she casts her mind back over the previous day and doesn’t feel any trace of her signature emotion.

James doesn’t snore. He’s dead to the world. These writers get up late. He probably has a cheap ticket only valid on one train.

‘Hey. Morning. When’s your train?’

‘Hmm.’ He sighs, moistens his mouth, opens his eyes. They wander down over the small breasts that for some reason she isn’t ashamed of, the washboard stomach, then back up to meet hers. ‘Love is pleasin’,’ he sings, in a soft, Irish lilt. ‘Love is teasin’. Ten fifteen.’

She wants him again. Didn’t expect to. She throws back the duvet, and when he reaches for it, pushes him down.

‘We have ten minutes,’ she says, then adds, ‘Invergarry and Merryman’s Bay — this isn’t really going to work, is it?’

Mike arrives at his desk early on Monday morning. He looks through the bar charts showing the Box’s new signals, and then opens the window where inflows and outflows are specified. He slowly punches out the zeroes of two hundred million dollars and hits enter to calculate the new target positions. The Box uses a ton of leverage, meaning he’ll have to do nearly a billion dollars of trades to regain his risk target. He opens all the trading platforms and arranges them across his screens. Markets are calm, and he’ll trickle the orders throughout the morning. The first trade sitting in the holding pen, waiting for him to authorize it, is to buy seventy-six million US dollars against Japanese yen. Here goes.

At two the next morning, Mike finds himself awake and can’t help checking his phone to see if anything is going on. He reads: ‘YEN DOWN 6% ON BOJ INTERVENTION STATEMENT’. What the. He’s short yen, right? He’s definitely short. The trend has been up, but Crispin’s eccentric bells and whistles are outweighing it. A gift from the gods.

But. These big shocks often reverse on a sixpence. Especially if they happen with Europe and America sleeping, on thin volumes. It could just be a flash-crash. His instincts scream that he should lock in the profits. He flips open his laptop to access his work computer remotely.

Crispin would tell him to let it be. Ad hoc interventions are a big no-no: let others be greedy and fearful, he’d say. But surely this is a special case. Mike opens the dashboard: the Box is up ten million dollars. He can’t update the signals from here, but they’d probably tell him to cut the position — the risk controls would see to that, wouldn’t they? Might as well do it now, secure the gains. It’s not supposed to be possible to trade remotely, but Mij once showed him a trick to get round the barrier, just in case he ever needed to make a one-off adjustment out of hours. His position is one hundred and sixty-seven million, so he could sell, say, a hundred — a little more than half. Make it one twenty. He opens the currency platform and punches it in: ‘SELL $120M JPY vs. USD’. Quote. Execute. Filled. He feels a surge of relief — he’s locked in the winnings — and goes to back to bed.

He has a dream in which he did the trade the wrong way round — sold yen instead of bought — but bluffers like him are used to such anxiety dreams and he rides it calmly. It’s okay, he reminds himself during moments of wakefulness. I’m up big, and I’m safe. It’s not until he’s sitting on the tube on the way to the office that realisation hits him in the stomach: he really did sell, not buy. He loaded the boat. He’s short about thirty billion yen. He’s probably blown his risk limits. Rogue trader. Fuck. Shitting fuck.

The crowded escalator, the pedestrian crossing, the lift — they all take an eternity. So. An ignominious end to ten wasted years. Sacked for unauthorised trading. Criminal investigation. Car-crash CV. Tabloid mockery. At last, with sinking heart but maintaining an appearance of calm, Mike walks to his desk and logs on. The screaming headline has changed — now it says, ‘YEN DOWN 10% ON BOJ INTERVENTION STATEMENT’. His eyes swivel across to the tracker. His accidental trade has sent the Box up another twelve million.