Page 67 - Raffles09_March2022

worst that could happen?
It was their time. This – he – was what she had been all her life moving towards. Andrew, almost twice her age, was, above all, solid. His strong body (she appreciated the idea, in this country, that you built your own body), his successful business, a consultancy in systems design. He had a red-brick apartment with a mezzanine, a car that smelled of money – its interior as stilled as a sound booth – and a grown child from a previous marriage whom he spoke about as he might a capstone asset: with modest pride, a little self-congratulation, a light auditorial bias. There was always the sense with Andrew that something was held in reserve. His friends liked to remark on this – mainly, she suspected, to gauge how much of that reserve she was tapping.
After the bankruptcy and eviction, she’d moved again, this time into a housing commission flat. She’d felt no humiliation, only impatience at failure. All day she analysed her algorithm and at night, head swimming with company P&Ls and D/Es and EBITDAs, she fell asleep to the TV. She only watched the fashion channel: slim, glossy models with huge eyes like aliens, willing to reconnoitre humanity only as far as the length of a runway before turning their backs. She would wake, and find herself touching her face, its raised, obscenely smooth spots, there, there. There was a kind of surgery. It was prohibitively expensive, an option only in rarefied circles and even then any mention was suppressed like samizdat. There was a world above this world. Above this children’s make-believe of constant strife, constant want – where bottom-dwellers like her toiled and painstakingly counted their coins at the till, carried home their groceries double bagged, plastic loops purpling their fingers. It must be possible to ascend.
And then it became clear to her. Money – the required lift force – wasn’t real. Her mistake had been to treat it as real. A banknote was a shared delusion. Assets, earnings, liabilities – bluffs of tangibility. The financial world was imposed by fiat, and its connection with the real world was fundamentally duressed. Mastering the market meant severing that connection – treating it as pure abstraction. She refocused her algorithm on derivatives.
Then she narrowed in further on futures, the field where all you bought and sold was the chance to buy and sell, where contention was stripped almost entirely of content and the game became one of sheer nerve and fear. These things she understood.
In short time, using maximum leveraging, she made, by any account, her fortune. The first thing she did with it was to fix her face. Next she started a hedge fund – geared solely to high net-worth individual investors – to quarantine her own risk. This was how she met Andrew. Her fortune went on to make its own fortunes, each firewalled from the next. But that was later. For now, she was twenty eight and she was safe.
***
They married in early spring, a small ceremony in an old shearing shed in the southern Grampians. Slanted light, decorative bales, battered milk cans bursting hopeful colours of hydrangeas, fuchsias, primulas. Andrew’s ancestors had once been graziers in the area, although he seemed indifferent to the connection. The heat went out in their deluxe shepherd’s hut that night – he’d had words with the manager later – but before that it was just the two of them, trussed and cocooned in sheets and throws and duvet, their noses cold and their eyes brilliantly alive.
They settled into a normalcy that felt, to her, in every particular, miraculous. She built her fund with such sure and equable decisiveness it was as though she’d done it all before. Every night before bed she went and checked each of the house’s locks. Like altars at a temple. Once she saw what looked like her birth village on TV – some documentary about yellow rain – and everything, everyone, looked fake. Andrew said they should go there together one day. They made love in the mornings, pale mineral light, when she was at her most self-conscious, then whiled their days in front of separate screens and at night poured considered wine into delicate glasses with their friends – his friends, really – and talked, and waited to talk, and pressed the side of fork tines into the tender seams of stargazers, which used to be called monkfish.
− EMOTION −
RAFFLES MAGAZINE 65