… I picked up the stack of mail from the coffee-table and dealt myself one off the bottom: the envelope that contains my monthly bank statement, with its familiar brown matt and the wax seal like a blob of blood. It’s not my bank account any more, of course. It’s a joint bank account. Selina has half of it now — to shore up her dignity and self-respect, remember? I broke the seal with my blunt thumb. And the statement, I swear, was three pages long. Among the usual laconic entries on the debit side — US Approach, Liquor Locker, Dr Martha McGilchrist, Gas Board, Kreutzer’s, the Mahatma, Trans-American, Liquor Locker—there now thronged a host of Selina’s new playmates from the days of yore. Christ, what is this crew? It seems that the chick hangs out in Troy or Carthage when she’s got a bit of cash to burn: Chez Zeus, Goliath’s, Amaryllis, Aphrodite, Romeo & Juliet, Romulus & Remus, Eloise & Abelard … I always suspected that Selina spent all her money on massages, rug-rethinks and underwear — but that was when she hardly had any. The telltale entry was the lone item on the credit side: £2,000, from deposit account. I can’t complain, I suppose. Such is our deal. Such is our gentleman’s agreement. But that’s the whole trouble with dignity and self-respect: they cost you so much fucking money.
——————
And now I am one of the unemployed. What do we do all day? We sit on stoops and pause in loose knots on the stained pavements. The pavements are like threadless carpets after some atrocious route of flesh-frazzled food and emetic drink: last night the weather gods all drowned their sorrows, and then threw up from thirty thousand feet. We sit flummoxed in the parks, among low-caste flowers. Whew (we think), this life is slow. I came of age in the Sixties, when there were chances, when it was all there waiting. Now they seep out of school —to what? To nothing, to fuck-all. The young (you can see it in their faces), the stegosaurus-rugged no-hopers, the parrot-crested blankies — they’ve come up with an appropriate response to this, which is: nothing. Which is nothing, which is fuck-all. The dole-queue starts at the exit to the playground. Riots are their rumpus-room, sombre London their jungle-gym. Life is hoarded elsewhere by others. Money is so near you can almost touch it, but it is all on the other side — you can only press your face up against the glass. In my day, if you wanted, you could just drop out. You can’t drop out any more. Money has seen to that. There’s nowhere to go. You cannot hide out from money. You just cannot hide out from money any more. And so sometimes, when the nights are hot, they smash and grab.
Meanwhile, there are some pretty primitive creatures driving around with money in their Torpedoes and Boomerangs, or sitting down with money at the Mahatma or the Assisi, or just standing there with money, in the shops, in the pubs, in the streets. They are all shapes and colours, innocent beneficiaries of the global joke which money keeps cracking. They don’t do anything: it’s their currencies that do things. Last year the pubs were full of incredulously spendthrift Irishmen: they didn’t have money in their pockets any longer— they had Euromoney, which is much more powerful stuff. There’s some bundle in the Middle East, and a new squad of fiscal space invaders starts plundering the West. Every time the quid gets gang-banged on the international exchange, all the Arab chicks get a new fur coat. There are white moneymen, too, English, native. They must be criminals, with their wads, the crap they talk, their cruel, roasted faces. I am one. I am one of them, white or at least sky-grey, with pub rug, and ashen arm on the Fiasco doorjamb, unsmiling at the traffic light, fat-brained with abuse—but holding money. I have money but I can’t control it: Fielding keeps supplying me with more. Money, I think, is uncontrollable. Even those of us who have it, we can’t control it. Life gets poor-mouthed all the time, yet you seldom hear an unkind word about money. Money, now this has to be some good shit.