The Futures Market

Mind Games

Maybe Simone shouldn’t have called Lennon a twisted arsehole, but Andrew forced her to take extreme positions, and she began to enjoy firing these shots through his heart. Liverpool. No one in their right mind needed Liverpool. Hamburg and Abbey Road were enough. If Andy wanted to cream himself in front of George’s first Strat, let him go to Liverpool. Simone was done with time-travel. She needed to take in some natural beauty.

The Beatles were never the issue. Simone couldn’t have cared less whether Lennon was the true genius of his century or a snide misanthrope. For her, it was about coping with an otherwise intelligent man cursed with the need to take on his mother’s high-school obsessions. How could you possibly start a family with someone who’d want to analyse and discuss ‘Revolution Number 9’ in his retirement?

After months living in each other’s pockets, the break would do them good. Or so she argued. For Andrew, knocking back Liverpool was like a Muslim giving the finger to Mecca.

And no sooner had her train crossed the Welsh border than the guilts set in. She’d denied a pilgrim the chance to have his devotion validated. The poor bastard would have to beg strangers to take his photo in Penny Lane. Much as Simone adored the Beatles, she’d never embrace a world that proclaimed the currency and superiority of all things Fab. But as the landscapes she flashed through grew more spectacular, a desolation took hold.

Andrew was always map-man, and now she’d have to pretend she wasn’t at a loss, desperately hoping that the wetness slapping her window wasn’t the first sign of an unrelenting wet, nature’s desire to quash her new freedom. Rain is never just rain. This rain was punishment for sadistic disloyalty. Her craven refusal to offer the hand that a Beatle-boy wanted to hold. Now it was certain to rain flat-chat for days.

—

The Switch

Other than the old song about having a lovely day there, Simone only knew Bangor via the Beatles. The newly psychedelic ones were meditating in North Wales the weekend their manager overdosed. They were shocked and stunned. And Brian Epstein’s death would leave them to drift rudderless across the sea of unimaginable success. But none of this Bangor trivia was any help when a furious windgust put paid to Simone’s best umbrella.

The lone traveller found a cheap bed and breakfast five minutes from the station. Though the Welsh were slightly easier to understand than the French, Simone had no idea why she was in Wales beyond her desire not to hear again how Paul consoled young Jude with a song. Maybe when the rain stopped, she could take a trip on the mountain railway. Mrs Evans soon put paid to those hopes. The railway was closed for winter. And this mist was nothing compared to how bad it would get in the next few days. So the traitor spent an evening alone in her room writing letters home which told friends and family what a fantastic time she and Andrew were having.

At breakfast next morning, Simone pulled back the curtain to find the water-world Mrs Evans promised. She knew that her actions were responsible. The sun wouldn’t reappear until she’d fully undone her cruelties. She was searching timetables for the next train through to Liverpool when joined at the table by another guest, a stupendously large, middle-aged man who offered a nod and a shy smile before introducing himself as Ken.

Ken had the magician’s gift for making food vanish. Several plates of sausages, eggs, and bacon disappeared without Simone seeing the man place food in his mouth. Her breakfast companion had refined the process of food consumption to such a level of elegance that he could cut, insert, chew and swallow during the natural pause between sentences, never once losing eye contact.

Ken was a Shrewsbury man, but he spoke with the plummy, educated accent of someone who produced radio arts documentaries. Though he’d never travelled to Australia, he did know one of Simone’s English lecturers, Karen Williams, describing her as ‘related by marriage’ without detailing the exact nature of the relationship. No wedding ring. Simone saw Ken stacking on the charm, and she was sufficiently flattered by his interest to be curious how far that interest would extend. In the meantime, Mrs Evans delivered another plate of crisp bacon.

Questions. Simone was between degrees, unsure which direction to take. She’d spent three months visiting art galleries on the continent. Now she hoped to spend a few days here before reuniting with her friend in London. Her friend? An Australian she’d teamed up with when she arrived in London. A friend of a friend.

A kind of game, not using Andrew’s name, studiously managing not to mention that this friend of hers was a boyfriend, a lover. A tease. Simone enjoyed Ken’s melodic voice, and his quietly insistent gaze. The big man was smart enough to make his own surmises.

As she spoke about career hopes, Simone was reminded how little time she’d had to consider her future when travelling with Andrew. He’d taken up all the space she ordinarily gave to reflection and thought. Simone would tell her huge dining companion that she had no real sense of her future life, and needed to become much more focussed. She couldn’t decide if she wanted to be an academic, a writer, or a filmmaker, and wasn’t sure that she’d ever have the ability to fulfil those roles. Maybe she’d end up corralled by her inability to decide.

According to Ken, the important thing was not to let anxiety rule the show, or to make decisions for the sake of appearing decisive. Trust your most immediate passions and follow them wholeheartedly. The future was certain to crush imperfectly formed hopes, so you had to let your resolve build gradually.

Ken managed to pass on this advice while a fried tomato and three sausages vanished from his plate.

Though Ken’s tone was fatherly, and devoid of obvious sleaze, his gaze was unremitting. What would Simone the onlooker conclude if she saw her own father giving such close attention to a woman her age?

Not that Simone’s father ever travelled to Paris to interview Beckett, Bunuel, or her own great hero, Eugene Ionesco. This Ken needed to be larger than life. He’d seen everything, read everything, and he’d met almost everyone whose name mattered to Simone.

The giant only neglected his plate when launching into literary and cinematic enthusiasms, and these almost exactly coincided with hers. His big jowls shook when Simone mentioned Robert Musil. The young scholar’s declaration that Love in The Year of Cholera by Marquez was a favourite among all favourites brought a tear to the man’s eyes. Ken had once flown to New York to interview Marquez, but illness forced a cancellation.

‘Anyone who loves Marquez and Cortazar must read Worthless Lives by Manuel Primm. Primm does that great thing Marquez does. He tosses out as casual asides brilliant ideas that most writers would base three-hundred page novels on.’

Mrs Evans brought fresh toast while Simone searched her bag for a pen to record the book title and the name of an author she’d never encountered.

‘And Marginal Behaviour by Michael Fouks. You must know him, he’s an Australian.’

When Simone admitted that she’d never heard of her brilliant countryman Fouks, the man took her pen and paper and scrawled a list of a dozen authors and titles. None of the names were familiar. All, according to Ken, were crucial to any well-formed understanding of where literature was headed as it steered away from post-modernism. Simone heard her pen singing as Ken wrote.

‘Oh, and Helen Bain, a new writer from Wick in the north of Scotland. Unbelievable. A little like Alice Munro. Not quite so elegant, but playful in surprising ways.’

Ken’s list of must-reads would keep Simone busy for years. He made each of these books sound irresistible. Though she saw that the big man’s outpouring of enthusiasm was in large part delight at meeting an attractive woman who shared his principal interests, she couldn’t be certain that this was a tactic of seduction.

Simone couldn’t read Englishmen. Men of any nationality for that matter. Andrew was relatively simple. Always happy to be enthusiastic about Simone, provided she was enthusiastic about him. Otherwise, bets were off. Now Simone found herself with mixed feelings. Big Ken would disappoint her if he made a pass, yet she would be equally disappointed if his obvious attraction to her wasn’t charged with the man’s characteristic hunger.

As Ken shifted attention from plate to teapot, Simone took the opportunity to draw the man out. He didn’t strike her as the kind of person who came to North Wales for the walking or mountaineering.

She’d summed him up correctly. He wasn’t that kind of person. Ken’s ex-wife lived in Bangor. He came up every second weekend to visit his twin sons. The boys, young men of Simone’s age, were in palliative care. Their lives had been cursed by a rare genetic disorder.

Rain lashed the windows, and Mrs Evans was heard rattling plates in the kitchen.

Simone was speechless. How could a man with two sons near death eat several hearty breakfasts? How could a father in his situation enthuse about the unrivalled qualities of obscure novelists? The man continued to pour his tea as if his remark had been a banal comment on the weather.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Ken told her, ‘but we’ve had twenty years to come to terms with the hand we were dealt. In the long run, you have to make a choice; to despise life, or to relish it.’

Even this struck her as glib, untouched by real feeling. Maybe the big man needed to see others feel in order to connect with the emotional world. Or maybe it was something much more complicated than Simone would ever understand.

Finally, the Australian told Ken that she couldn’t imagine anything worse. The thing she feared most was the possibility of outliving a child. It was as if time was arse-about, running in the wrong direction.

The big man smiled gently and confirmed that’s exactly how it was. Life was arse-about. Someone given too much responsibility had hit the wrong switch.

—

Simone never mentioned Ken to Andrew. After failing to make sense of Ken herself, she could hardly expect the boy stranded in timeless melody to get a handle on him.

Though still angry, Andrew was keen to relate the intensity of his Merseyside experiences, but now Simone lost interest in provoking him. The couple seemed to know their relationship would end somewhere between San Francisco and Melbourne Airport. Accepting this allowed them to be more affectionate than they had been prior to their Liverpool dispute.

‘You realise the Beatles were staying in Bangor when Brian Epstein died?’

‘No, I didn’t know that,’ Simone told him.

At Foyles in London, she enquired about the books Ken recommended. The shop assistant took the list to a female superior who pressed horn-rimmed glasses hard against the bridge of her nose and gave the colon-stressed wince of a passer-by asked to disarm a live bomb. Mrs Delaney knew none of the books or authors. Simone asked the assistant to check the computer, but the young man politely declined. If books were listed on the computer, Mrs Delaney would certainly know about them.

Several days later, during a stopover in New York, Simone made the same enquiry, first at Barnes and Noble, then at several more specialised bookshops. The same result. Computer records found no reference to any of the authors, let alone exotic titles like The Abattoir at the Far End of the Futures Market.

When another helpful assistant at City Lights in San Francisco returned waving empty hands, Simone had to concede that the big man’s list looked dodgy. Amateur chimney sweeps were better known to the Internet than Manuel Primm, the remarkable author Ken situated somewhere between Marquez and Cortazar.

Perhaps the big man had greater need to hold Simone’s attention than she realised. She couldn’t pretend to have fathomed the depths of Ken’s behaviour that morning. Invention? Maybe those twins dying of a genetic disorder were no more tangible than the authors on the radio producer’s list. Honey-voiced Ken was one of a breed of giants who took pleasure in devouring gullible young women for breakfast.

—

Left-Field Investment Strategies

Simone never would have imagined marrying someone so opinionated as Mark. People who didn’t understand Mark often saw him as a deadshit whose self-confidence was unshakeable as it was ill-founded. She knew that many of her friends considered her husband to be a bad investment.

For the lawyer, the Beatles were cordial passing itself off as Coke. Overrated. A bunch of sharp-witted pretty boys who should have gone to Hollywood. According to Mark, punk and new wave failed music in one respect only. Not arriving fifteen years sooner.

Simone now felt guilty defending the Fab Four against critiques she’d once made herself. Particularly when she thought of Andrew, who’d returned to live with his mum after his father’s death. (This being the equivalent of choosing to camp in Strawberry Fields forever.) Yet Simone managed to see in Mark’s brash assertiveness all the characteristic signs of denial. Her man was a frightened puppy. His whole persona was a confidence trick.

Having cottoned on to the rules of the game, she took pleasure stringing Mark along, a puppet-mistress who allowed her charge the illusion of autonomy. Mark could be made to do absolutely anything if his wife convinced him that he was calling the shots, that all her ideas were his.

Where did his surprising idea to call their unborn child Rose come from? Mark didn’t know. How could his wife be certain he hadn’t fancied a Rose? He’d never known any, the name Rose just struck him as a good idea and now he couldn’t think of calling his daughter anything else. Simone would get used to it, eventually.

Yes, Mark was fragility itself, but Simone found his need to paper over vulnerabilities endearing.

Terrified of his wife’s prehistory, Mark refused to look at old travel photographs, not wishing to encounter Andrew – ‘that lanky dickhead.’ Simone knew that Mark couldn’t cope with the idea that she had known romantic excitement before meeting him, that she’d found other men to love, and that it might have been possible for her to live an equally happy life with someone else.

Unpacking after the shift from Elwood to Hampton, Simone found a box of papers she hadn’t seen since she’d posted it home from Europe seven years earlier. Maps and guides to obscure museums. Tickets. Postcards. Programs. The front door key to a bed and breakfast in Canterbury. Notes written on the back of beer coasters. Even a forgotten Polaroid of her and an equally pissed Danish girl sitting topless in a Heidelberg Youth Hostel. (How Andy must have searched for that photo!) Among a pile of aerograms she’d received from friends, Simone found the useless list of brilliant authors and books big Ken composed in the breakfast room of a double-story terrace in Bangor.

And she would have thought no more about this list if her eye hadn’t caught a name, that of the author Manuel Primm. What was it Ken had said about the South American’s unusual sensibility? She couldn’t remember. But Simone now recalled that this man Primm had just won a major literary prize. And two other authors on the list, Helen Bain and Miranda Murray, had attained sufficient prominence for their names to be known to her. Of course, Simone read nothing these days except books and articles pertaining to her doctoral thesis, an inspired attempt to relate the Myth of Sisyphus to the American film Groundhog Day.

So Ken hadn’t pulled her leg after all. The big man’s judgement was astute. She then recalled Ken’s strangeness about his dying twins, and figured the boys must have passed on by now. Ken might have too. It just wasn’t possible to sustain that sort of gusto at breakfast.

As Simone re-packed all the stuff into boxes that wouldn’t be re-opened for another ten years, she placed Ken’s reading list on a coffee table. Mark’s birthday was coming up, and maybe she’d give him a book. Tired of sending threatening legal letters to DJs and samplers, her man needed a new outlet for his vast reserves of disdain.

—

Grotesquely pregnant at twenty-six weeks, Simone enjoyed the attention of shoppers in her new suburb.

No, so far as her doctor knew, there was only one child, though it felt like two football teams scrambling for a loose ball near goal. Yes, she did know the child’s sex. Oh, but why spoil the surprise? Not her idea. A paranoid husband simply refused to let her keep anything secret from him.

Simone answered these same friendly questions when put to her by the woman who owned Kidna’s Bookshop. This on her way to asking whether Kidna’s had the latest novel by a South American author, Manuel Primm.

‘Yes, Worthless Lives,’Barbara answered, pointing to an expensive hardback on the shelf immediately behind Simone.

When Simone suggested that Worthless Lives couldn’t be the writer’s latest work, she was assured that Primm’s recent prize was for first-time novelists under the age of thirty.

Rather than try to make sense of this information, Simone gave Barbara Ken’s list of hot tips. Most of these names meant nothing to the book woman. Not long ago, she’d had multiple copies of Dream Life by Miranda Murray, but she’d sold out. The book was on re-order. Though she read Helen Bain avidly, Barbara had never heard of The Abattoir at the Far End of The Futures Market.

The name that most intrigued the book woman was Michael Fouks. Fouks was a Hampton local who frequently came into the shop. The previous year he’d won a competition with his story ‘Illusory Density’.

When Simone asked whether Barbara had a copy of Fouks’ book Marginal Behaviour, she looked perplexed. So far as Barbara knew, the writer hadn’t published a book. Just now, Fouks was writer in residence at Melbourne University, and she understood him to be using this time to finish a collection. She’d certainly ask him about Marginal Behaviour when he next came in.

Though Simone handed over thirty-five dollars for the hardback copy of Worthless Lives by Manuel Primm, she never gave the book to Mark, or read it herself.

In the past, impulses and sudden insights had taken Simone a long way. They’d once taken her to a bed and breakfast in North Wales. There she determined that life was much too short to get stuck in a vinyl groove half way through ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’.

Simone now felt certain that one of the worthless lives Manuel Primm wrote so brilliantly about would belong to Ken, a charming, obese radio producer whose days were shadowed by a half-baked genetic transfer. Another of those lives was very likely Simone’s own. Or a version of her life as she’d come to see it fifteen years hence. The South American’s magical control of tense would bounce sentences off the wall marking the end of time.

As a post-graduate student at the same university where Michael Fouks was currently in residence, Simone could have approached the young artist to ask about his work in progress. But she was ‘a woman with child’, a woman who remembered the curse that had already befallen the unnaturally far-sighted Ken and his twins. To praise Fouks for the quality of his unfinished book, Marginal Behaviour, would be the equivalent of kicking sand in the face of a sleeping dragon. Or discovering too late your responsibilities with regard to a crucial switch.