Page 66 - Raffles09_March2022

space – pure potential, proving ground for light and – far beneath – the child’s drawing that delimited their world: plains, paddies, forests, mountains, waterways webbed like blood capillaries, and across everything the shallow scratchings of man. Was this what the American pilot had seen? Sitting on high, in safety, quickened with payload, beholding the larger pattern? Scanning the spread for alien lives?
Then the revelation of ocean: besieging, boundless. You couldn’t treat a vision like that as incidental. You had to change everything.
This is what she told Andrew when they first met. They were in a bar, at a corner table; it was early and empty, she was tipsy. Usually she didn’t drink at work meetings – he was a prospective client and she was pitching him – but he had asked her to choose the wine, which they never did. And he was drinking too.
So she had moved out of Springvale, enrolled in a diploma in finance. Worked in a Vietnamese restaurant by day and rented a room above it by night. (She didn’t mention how the owner, on seeing her deformed face, had taken pity on her.) She saved, started trading, lost her savings. She switched her diploma to computer science. While studying, shadowing others’ trades and extrapolating their strategies, she began to develop an algorithm. For months she refined it, iteratively cross-checking predictive models against market movements, testing and troubleshooting, until she was satisfied. By then, the restaurant owner, who also lived upstairs, had become so impressed with her singlemindedness that he demanded to invest a portion of his savings.
“You took it,” said Andrew.
He was so at ease, suffused with the sense of someone who knew that when he spoke others would listen. She chose not to respond. Without looking away from her, he beckoned for another bottle. Their third?
He continued the story for her: “What’s the worst that could happen?”
The worst was that she doubled her boss’s money in three weeks. The commission was more money than she’d ever had. All this was pitch boilerplate.
Smiling, she excused herself to the bathroom. She had to concentrate to walk. She’d very nearly told him what had happened next – how her boss had then invested not just the rest of his family’s savings but money drawn from the business mortgage. She’d taken it. Their bespoke fund climbed, and climbed – and then, of course, during a sector correction, it crashed. She’d upped the risk tolerance – chased the loss – and lost it all. The business went bankrupt.
On her way back, she noticed him looking at her, brazenly, following her every step through the entire empty span of the bar, and that was when she realised this was no longer a work meeting.
His front door: he picked her up around the waist with one arm, fished his keys out of his pocket with the other, bounced them in his palm a few times, then pincered the correct key and brought it directly, unerringly, to the keyhole. The realisation jolted through her that he wasn’t as drunk as she was, and certainly not as drunk as he’d pretended to be at the bar.
But what did it matter? Her feet weren’t even touching the ground. ***
64 RAFFLES MAGAZINE
− EMOTION −
He continued the story for her: Whats the