The Mark and the Void: A Novel Read online

  ‘Nevertheless, it takes us far away from the authentic picture of modern life you wanted to create originally,’ I point out. ‘In fact it turns the story into exactly the kind of cliché you told me you wanted to escape. I am not trying to be negative,’ I say, seeing his face darken, ‘only, I don’t understand what kind of motivation our Everyman can have to do something as non-universal as rob a bank.’

  ‘Well, he’ll have motivation,’ he says. ‘I’m going to give him motivation, if you’d just let me finish.’

  ‘I’m sorry, please continue.’

  Paul begins to speak and then stops, staring furiously into his coffee cup.

  ‘Because already the Everyman is paid very well for work that is quite legal,’ I clarify. ‘So it is difficult to imagine what will make him do something very risky like this.’

  ‘What if he wants something his money can’t buy,’ Paul says.

  ‘He wants to rob the bank to get something money can’t buy?’

  Paul swears under his breath. ‘Okay, how about – how about he falls in love.’

  ‘In love?’

  ‘Yeah, with a … with a waitress. That girl there, for instance.’

  We both turn to look. The dark-haired waitress is on the other side of the café, placing dirty crockery onto a tray; her long ebony tresses are tied up in a bun, from which a ballpoint pen pokes.

  ‘See, we need to be making better use of the resources we have. Fictionally speaking, someone like her is pure gold. She’s sultry, she’s exotic, she’s a struggling artist. A woman like that, as soon as she appears the story’s bumped up a couple of gears.’

  ‘She’s an artist?’

  ‘Well, yeah.’ He stares at me as if I am an imbecile, then points around the room at the various Simulacra.

  ‘Those are hers?’ I look over at the waitress again, then back at him. ‘She’s Ariadne Acheiropoietos? How do you know?’

  ‘Because I asked her.’

  ‘Oh.’ I sit back dizzily.

  ‘See? It’s a good twist, isn’t it?’

  I am thinking of the many uncomplimentary things my colleagues and I have said about her paintings while she was standing right beside us.

  ‘So our lonely, bored, overpaid banker runs up against this beautiful but impoverished painter,’ he goes on, warming to his new theme. ‘He finds they have something or other in common – it doesn’t matter what it is, French philosophy, say. Next thing he knows, he’s fallen head over heels in love with her. He’s breaking out of his sterile world of numbers, experiencing feelings he hasn’t had in years. But how’s he going to win her heart?’

  I find I am gripped in spite of myself. ‘How?’

  Paul spreads his hands summatively. ‘By robbing the bank.’

  The intrigue dies away again. ‘I am not sure I see the connection.’

  ‘You don’t think robbing a bank will get her attention?’

  ‘There must be easier ways to do it,’ I say. ‘What about their shared interest in French philosophy?’

  Paul rolls his eyes heavily. ‘Jesus, Claude, a woman like that, every dude who comes in here is going to be hitting on her. He needs to bring out the big guns. So how about this? He finds out her father – her father’s going to die unless he gets a vital operation. But it’s an extremely expensive operation, so expensive that even the banker doesn’t have enough money to pay for it. So he robs the bank. I know it sounds unrealistic on the face of it,’ he continues, before I can object. ‘But in terms of showing his inner life, it’s actually more realistic, do you see what I mean? She inspires him. She’s everything he’s not. She believes in things, in art, in love, in life! He looks at her, and he sees a chance to begin again!’ He’s gazing across the room at the waitress, his cheeks flushed, as if it is he, in fact, who’s being brought back to life. ‘From talking to her – because she’s Greek, so we can put in all the stuff about the financial crisis, what it’s done to her home and her family – the Everyman begins to become aware of all the injustice he’s part of. He’s not going to take it anymore! He’d rather rob the bank and risk going to prison than see the woman he loves suffer another minute. Suddenly we’ve got a hero we can get behind!’

  He falls silent, poring happily over the empty space of the café as if seeing the story enact itself in front of his eyes, until at last I clear my throat; he looks up, startled, then waves his hand. ‘Well, anyway, those are just the broad strokes,’ he says. ‘The real question,’ his voice lowers; resting his elbows on the table he clasps his hands tightly together, as if warding something away, ‘is how he robs the bank.’

  He looks at me expectantly.

  ‘How?’ I repeat.

  ‘If you were in that position, where you wanted to pay for an operation for Ariadne’s dying father, what would you do?’

  ‘Probably I would speak to the head of department about an advance on my bonus.’

  Paul exhales sharply. ‘No, if you were robbing the bank, Claude.’

  I give the question some thought. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘If I can be honest, since he decided to rob the bank, I have felt more and more estranged from our Everyman.’

  ‘Claude –’ With a murderous expression, Paul lifts his arms above his head, like an orchestra conductor at the thunderous apex of some violent symphony; then he lowers them again and slumps back in his chair, and he says, in a wan, tired voice, ‘I’m not going to lie to you. I need this. It’s been a long time since Clown. I need this book, and this book needs a story, and right now it doesn’t have one.’

  I blink back at him. I want to help him, but his story no longer makes sense to me.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be your character, even,’ Paul says with a touch of desperation. ‘Say there’s a very wicked banker in there. That guy, what’s his name, the arsehole from the bar, he wants to rob the bank. What does he do?’ He is pale now, and his voice has a dry, prickly quality, like a fabric charged with static electricity. ‘I suppose what I’m asking you is, where’s the safe in this place?’

  ‘The safe?’

  ‘The safe.’ His eyes are locked on mine; his fingertips bounce up and down on the tabletop.

  ‘Well, there is no safe,’ I say.

  ‘What?’ He puts his hand to his ear, as if he were a long way away.

  ‘There is no safe,’ I repeat, louder.

  ‘There’s no safe?’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  Paul stares at me for a long moment. Then he glances over his shoulder to the table by the window where Jurgen has just sat down with one of the senior managers. ‘I get it,’ he smiles, giving me a wink. ‘Classified information. Okay, put it this way, then: Where isn’t the safe?’

  This ontological riddle throws me. I contemplate it for a long time, before replying slowly, ‘Well, I suppose it isn’t everywhere.’

  Paul stops smiling and kneads his brow. ‘Look, when I ask where isn’t the safe, I mean where is the safe. When you say there is no safe, what is it exactly that you mean?’

  ‘I mean there is no safe,’ I say.

  He exhales a long, thin breath, his body at the same time seeming to drift a little to the side. ‘So where,’ he says softly, ‘do you keep the money?’

  ‘There is no money,’ I say.

  ‘There is no money,’ Paul repeats, nodding. And then, ‘What kind of bank has no money?’

  ‘A merchant or investment bank,’ I say.

  Paul goes very quiet. He lifts his coffee cup to his mouth, but his hand is trembling so hard that he lowers it again without it reaching his lips. ‘Oh,’ he says.

  ‘You must remember that unlike a high-street bank, an investment bank does not take deposits from customers. Instead we fund our operations primarily with short-term or even overnight borrowings.’

  ‘Right,’ Paul whispers.

  ‘Of course, we don’t like to talk about this, because it means that we’re a lot less secure than we pretend. I
n fact we are all just twenty-four hours away from a funding crisis! This is investment banking’s “dirty little secret”!’

  ‘Ha ha,’ Paul’s laughter is low and hoarse, as if he had a rope around his neck. ‘So now the question we have to ask ourselves is, given that it’s an investment bank, with no money on the premises, how is he going to rob it?’ He looks at me with eyes half-dazed and half-desperate. ‘That’s the question we have to ask, isn’t it?’

  I chew on my knuckles thoughtfully. ‘I fear it will be difficult for our Everyman,’ I say.

  ‘It will?’

  ‘Very difficult.’

  ‘Right,’ Paul says. For a long moment he doesn’t say anything else or even look at me; he merely sits in his chair, twitching.

  ‘But there are other ways for you to spice up the story,’ I say, realizing that I have made him even more discouraged than he was already. ‘For example, maybe there is a fire in Transaction House, and I am the Bank of Torabundo fire warden, so I must make sure everyone escapes.’

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ Paul agrees, rising unsteadily to his feet. ‘A very good idea.’

  ‘Or we could keep the love story with the waitress and the French philosophy, but leave out the robbery.’

  ‘Yes,’ Paul says. ‘That’s worth looking at.’

  ‘And meanwhile my character is dealing with the ongoing crisis in the eurozone – nobody knows how much the currency will depreciate, it is a very tense situation –’

  ‘Yes, there’s certainly a lot to think about,’ Paul interrupts in the oddly wispy voice into which he has lapsed. I have the strange impression there is less of him, as if over the course of the lunch little pieces of him have been stolen away, like twigs taken by birds as they build their nest, one by one by one … ‘Sounds like I’d better get back to the drawing board! Tell you what, I’m going to take the rest of the afternoon off to think about these suggestions of yours.’

  ‘Frankly, I think the book will be much better this way,’ I say. ‘The bank robbery idea was perhaps a little de trop, like we say in French.’

  ‘It probably was,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking. Well – see you tomorrow.’

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ I say.

  But Paul does not come in tomorrow; nor does he appear the next day. The weekend goes by without word from him; Monday morning turns into Monday afternoon and still there is no sign.

  ‘Maybe he has writer’s block,’ Kevin says.

  ‘Maybe his muse has deserted him,’ Jurgen says. ‘This is what happened to Gerhardt, the leader of my reggae band, Gerhardt and the Mergers. After his receptionist transferred to head office in Frankfurt he did not write a single song.’

  ‘I am his muse,’ I point out. ‘I have not deserted him. I am waiting for him right here.’

  ‘Yes, it is perhaps the less familiar situation of the artist deserting his muse,’ Jurgen says, frowning.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about it, Claude,’ Ish says. ‘Didn’t you say he was doing plot changes?’

  ‘He was trying to think up new directions for the book.’

  ‘There you go then,’ she says. ‘These things take their own time. You can’t push the river, that’s what my Uncle Nick always tells the people in the dole office.’

  In fact, Ish is almost as eager to see Paul herself, in order to share a discovery she has made about the island of Torabundo. ‘Today it’s basically the Financial Services Centre, only on a beach and with bigger spiders – but it used to be part of this really famous kula ring.’ She looks at our blank faces. ‘The gift economy? Malinowski, Marcel Mauss, all that?’

  ‘Are you having an acid flashback?’ Kevin says.

  ‘Gift economies are how everything worked before we had markets,’ she explains. ‘Instead of buying things from each other, people would just give each other what they needed. You give me a calabash of milk, I give you a shell adze, you pass the adze on to my cousin, I share the milk with your grandmother, and so on, and so on.’

  ‘You are talking about barter,’ Jurgen says. ‘The system that existed before money was invented and people no longer had to carry around adzes looking for someone to swap them with.’

  ‘Not barter. They didn’t exchange things. They gave things. Whenever anthropologists travelled to places where people still lived like that – without markets, I mean – instead of barter they found these gift circles. And one of the most famous examples was this island about a hundred miles from Torabundo, called Kokomoko. I actually went there with Tog a few years back, after we studied it in uni. A French anthropologist wrote a book about it. What she found was that people on Kokomoko didn’t hold on to anything. No one owned anything. Instead everything just cycled around constantly. Small things, like tools and food and clothes, but big things too. Kokomoko was famous for these beautiful necklaces, for instance, and they’d give them to the tribes on the neighbouring islands. Like, they’d sail over to Torabundo and there’d be a gifting ceremony with a big feast. But the Torabundans wouldn’t keep them, they’d sail on to the next island a few months later and pass the necklaces along to the tribe there. And that tribe would pass them on again, to the next island. And meanwhile there were other gifts from other tribes – cowries or arrowheads or whatever it might be – going from island to island in the opposite direction. That’s the kula ring. All of these islands, hundreds of miles apart, brought together by gifts.’

  ‘What was the point of that?’ Kevin says.

  ‘What was the point of what?’

  ‘Of just randomly giving each other things for no reason.’

  ‘Well, why do you buy a round of drinks in the pub?’ Ish says. ‘Why doesn’t everyone go up and buy their own drink?’

  ‘I have often wondered this very same thing,’ Jurgen says. ‘Financially speaking, the Irish mania for “rounds” makes no sense. Particularly if I am drinking a relatively inexpensive Pilsner lager, and I must be forking out for someone else’s costly whiskey and Coke. Even if they then buy me a beer, I still incur a net loss.’

  ‘Yeah, but that’s the point,’ Ish says.

  ‘That I incur a net loss?’

  ‘If I buy something from you, you hand it over and we both walk away and that’s the end of our relationship. That’s the market economy in a nutshell. But if I give you something, even if it’s just a drink that I know you’re going to get me back, then there’s a bond created between us that carries on into the future. Like, a social bond. So on these islands, gifts were a way of tying everybody together, like the different families, the different tribes, and so on. Not just them either, but the dead and the living too, because they believed that when you give a gift, a part of your soul goes with it, and joins with whoever else’s soul that gave it before. And at these feasts they’d recite the histories of the arm shells or the necklaces or the cowries or whatever it might be, and the stories of their ancestors who were still present in these magical objects. So instead of just walking out of the shop, they stayed connected, over generations.’

  ‘What if you didn’t want to stay connected?’ Kevin says.

  ‘Why wouldn’t you want to be connected?’

  ‘Because you don’t feel like handing over all your stuff.’

  ‘Look, say you’re living on an island in the Pacific, and your next-door neighbour needs an awl to tool some leather, and you’ve got an awl, you’re not going to keep it from him, are you? Because you know some time down the line you’ll need something from him, like food or a knife or a pair of shoes. Or just a friendly word, someone to look in on you if you’re sick. You know it’s important to preserve that relationship, in short.’

  ‘I’d just tell him to go to the awl shop and get his own,’ Kevin says.

  ‘Right, and for the rest of your life you wouldn’t talk to anyone around you and you’d just curl up every night alone with your awl, would you?’

  ‘I’d have a really good one,’ Kevin says.

  ‘I think what Kevin is sayi
ng,’ I interject, ‘is that we can see what they are trying to do with these networks of exchange. But they do seem to introduce a lot of unnecessary complication.’

  ‘Claude, we’re working in, like, the epicentre of unnecessary complication.’ She waves a hand at the glass towers, their thirty thousand inhabitants. ‘And what’s it all for?’

  ‘It is precisely to ensure that moneyed individuals can continue to stockpile wealth in peace,’ Jurgen says. ‘Without constantly being interrupted by neighbours and similar nuisances looking for awls and other goods.’

  ‘I wish you could see this place,’ Ish says wistfully. ‘Then it’d all make sense to you.’ She looks out the window, and for a moment her face takes on a radiance quite different from the cold grey early-morning light lifting in from the river. ‘Anyway the point is Torabundo dropped out of the kula ring to be an offshore tax haven, so now you’ve got the gift economy and its absolute diametrical opposite side by side. That’s bound to be something Paul can use, right? Like he could contrast the simple tribal island ways on Kokomoko with our miserable complex affluent ways. That sort of thing.’

  Is that the kind of spicing up he meant? I keep coming back to our conversation in the café. At the time it made me angry (he spends weeks poring over my life, then tells me there’s nothing there?) but I’m starting to see the problem from his point of view. He wants to give an honest account of life in the International Financial Services Centre; but he also has a duty to frame some sort of a narrative, to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end. In a way, we face a similar dilemma with our clients. On the one hand, we commit to giving them an accurate account of what’s happening in the market. On the other, we know that an accurate account is too complicated to be of any use to them. And so instead we tell stories: turn companies into characters, quarterly reports into events, the chaos of global business into a few simple fables ending with a buy or sell recommendation which, if followed, will hopefully result in a profit. The truth is fine in principle, but stories are what sell.

  The robbery is unfeasible on any number of levels (although he is not the first to suggest it: my father had often proposed a bank heist, though he also suggested I go in with a machine gun and ‘just shoot everyone’.) But the love story? On its own that would show the banker’s rich inner life, without requiring any major changes to the rest of the plot. Waiting for a client one morning, I watch Ariadne from behind a menu and weigh her up. Her limbs are long, her movements, as she glides down the narrow aisles of the restaurant, fluid and graceful; she carries herself with a sort of gladiatorial kindness, smiling implacably at all comers. And her eyes: from her complexion, I expect them to be brown, but instead they are a startlingly vivid green, like a stormlit sea, restive and electric. They continue to wrongfoot me every time I catch a glimpse of them – until she notices me staring, and smiles, and I blush and pretend I wanted to order another coffee.