The garden is in reality a small patio a few paces square. Beyond its fences the world looks hazy, as if somehow further away than it could possibly be, the air falling out of definition like drizzle on hot tarmac. On one wall pink fairy lights fade in and out of operation to a random time pattern while on the wall opposite tiers of flowers and herbs cascade over each other like the gardening shelves outside a supermarket following the collapse of civilisation. Suki is making mental notes on this, impressed by the set up, with its suggestions of seedy glamour and the inevitable cannibalism that comes with breakdown of society.
By the back fence are two large structures resting on table tops, difficult to make out in the gloom and the clouds of smoke which regularly billow and fade across them. Moving like an astronaut atop a lunar gravity, a figure in a pin-striped beekeeper’s getup is dosing a hive with smoke.
‘Are there bees here?’ Suki asks.
The figure turns towards her, puts down the fuming bottle and removes a bowler hat with a trailing mesh.
‘Sorry, what?’ the man asks.
‘Is that a bee hive?’
‘Are you allergic to bees?’
‘I don’t know. I assume not. How would I know?’
He shrugs. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter anyway. There aren’t any bees here. I tried to establish a colony but they just weren’t interested. They’re not the diligent workers they’re made out to be. And we’re told they’re in crisis? Sod ‘em. If they’re not prepared to put the hours in they deserve everything they get.’
‘No bees then,’ Suki says, ‘in the hive. The beehive. No bees in it.’
‘Oh, of course,’ the man says, loosening his stripy beekeeper’s tie. ‘That isn’t a hive for bees.’
‘There are other hives?’
‘There are now. Yes.’
They both look at the ghostly smoking hive for a moment.
‘So –‘ Suki says.
‘You wouldn’t think, to look at me, that just a year ago I was in A and E following a heart attack. Would you?’
‘No, I probably wouldn’t. Is this your house?’
‘Twenty-seven years old. Over the hill, eh? No longer the youngest or the hungriest on the payroll. The world of investment banking isn’t big on sympathy or loyalty. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
‘I left school with three A levels. They were in Attitude, Doggedness and Balls. That’s literally what it says on my certificates. I can show you and everything. I shot off my CV to everyone I could think of – banks, financial institutions, investment companies, investment banks. Financial banks. My CV was just a moody photo of me and my mission statement: to be alpha piranha in a tank full of already angry and hungry piranhas who themselves were already showing high counts of attitude and strong leadership potential. I had interview after interview in which I laughed in their faces as they offered me the job because I despised their eagerness to please me.
‘After a good few weeks of this I eventually accepted a position at Bastard’s Bank, just because they had an impressive rate of burnout among their money wranglers. They worked hard and played hard. It wasn’t uncommon for people to sleep at their desks rather than go home. And only every other night. We worked two day shifts at the least, competing to see who could get by on the least sleep. You’re probably in awe of this, aren’t you?’
‘I’ve always thought banking stuff … must be important,’ Suki says.
He nods, violently. ‘Nothing more so. Nothing. Or so I thought.
‘I spent four years there. Promotions followed quickly, usually on the first Tuesday of the month. This was the day management brought round the bottle of champagne for the best financial bank person of the month and the customary dead stoat for the least impressive employee. No one wanted to be the one who had to wear that as a hat for the next four weeks. The whole time I was there I remained in the top three and never let anyone down, for as long as my heart kept working adequately.’
He lifts his gun thing and squirts another burst of smoke at the hive, tiredly.
‘To be honest I’ve never really got money,’ says Suki. ‘I mean I’ve never understood it. All that stuff with wires and plastic cards. Maybe I’m just too practical or something. Money isn’t an end, it’s not something you can ever own, like a shoe or a kebab.’
‘Let me tell you what money is. Money is everything and it is nothing. It is both those things, and neither at the same time. I’m going to let you into a secret.’
He pauses. For quite a while, so that Suki begins to feel a bit awkward.
He whispers. ‘There is no money.’
She blinks. ‘No money. I think you’re going to have to explain that, as I have coins in my pocket. Probably.’
She takes a 5 coin out of her pocket, and looks at it as if she can remember how it got there.
He shakes his head. ‘Five coins, ten coins, five notes, twenty notes. These are tricks. They’re designed to keep us believing in it. Because we can see these small denominations, can feel them in our hands, we think it all makes sense, it’s all working. I’m sitting under a bridge with some coppers and silvers in a plastic cup and I’m comforted by the thought that others have even more, factors of ten and such.’
‘If you were sitting under a bridge with coppers you’d probably feel angry that there were people with more than you, wouldn’t y-‘
‘It works at the micro level, it makes sense there, so we’re calmed by the knowledge this is scaled up time and again, through the comfortable to the well off to the tax-imaginative. Everyone is on a spectrum, you think, everyone has their part to play in the tapestry of finance. But you would be wrong, spectacularly wrong.’
He jumps up and peers at the hive, as something small and dark flops onto its pale walls and crawls in. He watches it for a moment, as if expecting more.
‘You think all these things, and you are very wrong,’ he says. ‘The main lesson to learn about money is that, for the most part, it doesn’t exist. You are not paid in money, you don’t pay for most things with money. It’s all electronic movements of code. That pocketful of shrapnel we have is designed to disguise this fact, to make us think that the small amount we personally possess relates to the economy at large. That when we pay a big coin for a can of something millionaires are also paying, I don’t know, a hundred pounds for a big can of something. They’re not. That’s not how it works.’
‘I see,’ Suki says, because there is a gap in which to say it.
‘Most money doesn’t even exist,’ he says. ‘Yes, you just take a moment to think about that. My apologies if I’ve just blown your mind. Ninety per cent of the money we spend each day is nothing more than numbers on a screen.’
‘And this is the secret you want the world to know?’
‘I’m perfectly okay with it. It’s just numbers, it’s not like it’s real. I would shuffle them around all day and by the time I went to sleep under my desk at five o’clock the day after next I would forget all about it. They were just numbers, and I was happy to accept that that’s all they were.’
‘So that’s what you were doing all day – shuffling numbers? Sorry, I have literally no idea what people do in the city. Do you sit at desks with those green visor things, or stand on the floor wearing hats and shouting ‘buy’ and ‘sell’, or what?’
He nods. ‘It is a whole world of its own. Like nothing you’ve ever experienced. It’s the sheer thrill of money in its rawest form. We’re not talking about notes and coins, nothing sanitised to that degree. We’re talking primal, earthy. Something ancient, powerful and yes, there is something erotic about it. The idea of money, the chaotic, snarling form of primal money. And in my time there I became an expert. Investing, brokering, doing shares and stock markets and suchlike. Typing things on a laptop so that there’s more money than before. Eating microwave lasagne out of a mug. Our mammoth banking sessions, where we outbanked our rivals and even sometimes outbanked ourselves, were amazing times. Hours of stand up banking fuelled by nothing but ambition, strong coffee and high grade cocaine. And because we were an ethical company it was always fair trade cocaine.’
He looks up, at nothing in particular. ‘Money,’ he whispers.
He shakes his head, until his eyes focus again. ‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking how did he get from there to where he is now?’
‘I wasn’t, but sure, you can answer that.’
‘So I’d been there three months. One week I pulled a three-nighter, doing some intense banking to Tokyo time, to Rio time and banking the fuck out of Eastern Europe while the people of Chisinau were dreaming of sausage or whatever they dream of. I banked myself into the ground and lost a Thursday. When I came back topside everyone had been replaced. And I mean everyone. The boss, all my colleagues, even the person whose job it was to sit crying and trembling in the furthest toilet cubicle until the paranoia wore off – all changed. I felt like I’d resurfaced in a different building. If it hadn’t been for certain familiar stains on the floors, the walls and the ceilings I might even have believed this. The new boss spoke half the time in what I thought was Chinese.
‘And the results were not so good. Everyone else there seemed to be pulling banking success out of the air. It helped that they were still young. I had somehow slipped into my mid-twenties by that point without realising it. You get tired at that age. Your reflexes are slow. You start to watch television instead of doing tequila and laughing gas. And it shows. The younger generation start to look at you more with contempt than amusement. Everyone is just waiting for you to slip.’
The door opens and the minotaur appears. He lights a cigarette, breathes deeply on it and on the exhale looks up at the stars.
‘Oh, wait,’ Suki says. ‘Are you not in banking any more?’
‘Do I look like a banker?’ the man asks, adjusting his cuffs and smoothing his hair back. ‘I thought it was clear by now this was the tale of a banker’s decline.’
‘I know. I just thought maybe you’d got through it. Had a bit of a holiday or something, then came back feeling better. That’s what I did once. And my colleague Petra –‘
‘You don’t get anywhere by staying still in that game. You have to keep moving, faster than ever, just to stay where you are. And with time your reactions slow, you want it less. And all of a sudden there you are, the wrong side of twenty-five. I found myself working harder, staying later and later, doing more of that typing numbers on a computer, doing it really quickly. It worked, as it happened. I clawed my way back up there to the top where I had been before. But when the apparently Chinese boss came round with that month’s spreadsheets – proving I was the best again – I couldn’t feel it. All I could feel was pains in my arm and chest. In the hospital they told me I’d had a cardiac arrest – or a heart attack as we call it in the business.’
It takes Suki a while to realise he has stopped talking. She is watching the minotaur coughing.
‘One thing I’ve always wondered,’ she says. ‘Do you still use calculators? You don’t see them around so much these days.’
‘A heart attack,’ he says, louder. ‘They told me I needed to rest, but they didn’t understand. If I took time off then that was it. Everything I’d worked so hard for would be written off. I might as well never go back.’
The minotaur is scrolling down his phone, pausing to laugh at something and shake his horns.
‘Did you go back?’ Suki asks.
He smiles. ‘Funnily enough, no. I spent a week in the hospital. And it was hard. I didn’t want to be there but they didn’t want to let me leave. They kept me sedated, they kept me handcuffed to the bed.’
‘Really?’
‘Practically. They would’ve if they could have got away with it. They probably had security waiting outside to stop me leaving. If I’d tried to leave they would probably have stopped me. As if wanting to go back to work was a crime.’
He takes a mesh handkerchief from the pocket of his double-breasted beekeeper’s jacket and dabs his forehead.
‘But after a few days of this something strange happened. I realised I no longer wanted to go back. I no longer wanted that stress, those high-pressure stakes. It had taken a heart attack to make me see the job was killing me. It was only once I understood I needed to recuperate that I began to recover.’
‘Hospitals are good for that kind of thing. I’ve a friend who hasn’t eaten cheese since she was last in a hospital. She’s switched to a much healthier lifestyle. To be honest I’ve never really been sure how cheese fitted into that story. I think it was involved at some point. She definitely took up walking, anyway.’
‘It was my last day in there and I was wondering what I would do when I returned home. I couldn’t even remember much about home, in fact, I spent so little time there. When I was there it was usually dark. I’d just go there to sleep and make sandwiches. I was thinking of this, about how I could narrow down the number of places it could be and how many doors I would have to try my key in when a bee flew through the open window. In that moment I knew.’
‘Bees,’ Suki says, weightily. ‘You knew. About bees.’
‘You’ve got it. Bees are useful, vital, even. And more importantly, in looking after them I could look after myself.’
‘But there are no bees in the hive.’
‘None. None at all. So I decided I was going to be an apiarist. I did lots of reading on the subject, everything I could find, attended lectures, wrote papers, passed all the exams with excellent grades. I consider myself an expert on bees. Go on, ask me anything. Anything at all.’
‘Okay. Whose house is this?’
‘About bees, I meant. That was kind of implied in the context.’
‘Ah. Of course. How would I know if I’m allergic to bees?’
He nods. ‘Anything at all. I’m the guy to ask. Me.’ He jabs a thumb towards himself to make it clearer. Then sighs. ‘On paper at least. But when it came to practical application, when it came to fieldwork, what happens? Nothing. Nothing at all.
‘There we were, the cream of this year’s beekeeping intake, the degree of pride you can only imagine if you’ve never been involved in the high stakes world of competitive hymenoptera wrangling, all assigned our own hive for the first time, all ready to make our mark on the bee world. So I go out to the hive, suited and armed with bee drugs, fingers itching inside my big gloves to pull out one of those sliding things and tap the honey off, and what do I find?’
‘Nothing at all? Is that right?’
‘Nothing. At all. Empty cells. No trace of pollen or honey. At the centre just a fat queen munching lazily on twigs. They were flying all day, buzzing among the flowers, but what were they actually doing? Nothing at all. I’d put in all the hours, I’d stayed up night after night doing research.
‘The other apiarists – what did they do on learning of my situation? They only laughed in my face. At least vaguely towards the mesh which covered my face, but they knew my actual face was behind it. I learnt two important lessons: bees are a total waste of time, and a significant proportion of beekeepers are complete arseholes.’
Suki saw another dark shape flying towards the hive in an ungainly manner, climbing I through the little front door.
‘So what do you keep in there?’
He smiles. ‘Earwigs.’
‘Earwigs?’
‘Yes.’
‘In a hive?’
‘Yes.’
‘Earwigs.’
‘Just think about it. For centuries we have cultivated bees. Not that they’ve shown any appreciation of it. We give them a home and flowers and who knows what else and in return they give us a kind of boring syrup. But who knows what earwigs might be capable of, if we only gave them the same chances? What could they come up with?’
He stands aside as an earwig flies past with something shiny in its mouth, leathery wings flapping erratically. It bounces off the hive, falls towards the ground and groggily flaps its wings again.
‘In the central chamber is the queen earwig, growing fat and productive on a diet of pollen and nectar. Every day she sends out her devoted workers to scout for food and materials. They appear to be on to something. This is an incredibly exciting time.’
He doses the entrance to the hive with a waft of smoke.
‘What’s the smoke for?’ Suki asks. The cloud by now is concealing the angles of the hive.
‘It keeps them placid,’ he says. ‘You don’t want them stinging you with their little pincers. That would probably hurt.’
Another two or three earwigs buzz lazily into view, one carrying a pencil in its mouth, another a dried up tadpole.
‘I’m going to see what’s going on inside the hive,’ he says, putting his net hat on again. ‘Do you want to have a look?’
She nods, cautiously drawing nearer.
He takes the lid off the hive, takes out a couple of the panels and looks in.
‘Oh. My. God,’ he says, looking in, but Suki can’t see anything through the smoke.
Impractical Entomography 