It was late in the evening when, after many false turnings round the labyrinth of South Hampstead, the taxi finally delivered George Moonbat at his destination.
At the top of Revelation Drive, opposite Babylon Gardens, behind Cassandra Crescent, was Apocalypse Close, a loop of four-storey Victorian buildings backing onto Hampstead Heath. At the top end, on the bend of the loop, stood Number Four, belonging to Tom and Vanessa Huntingdon.
The ghosts of Hampstead past were recorded on a faded palimpsest listing former inhabitants, preserved in an enamel-framed plaque inside the front door beside the antique bell push. Obscure outliers of the Bloomsbury set; academic refugees from Central Europe; angry young men, drug-happy sixties art students; Trotskyist social workers; more Central Europeans (plumbers this time, rather than philosophers); all these and more had passed through Apocalypse Close. Now gentrification had finally overtaken this lost corner of North London, and the building had reverted to its original role as a town house for the comfortably off, which – these days, in the twenty-first century – means those with several hundred million in the bank … or somewhere.
It had been the fate of this corner of London to attract dreamers, romantics, builders of brave new worlds – and the present owners of Number Four, despite (or possibly because of) their immense wealth, were no exception. Others had dreamt and passed on, leaving little but memoirs donated to the local library, and occasionally a blue plaque announcing their brief presence. But the current occupants weren’t like that.
Tom Huntingdon was not one to let his pile of steaming lucre lie dormant. His millions flowed and gathered mass, like a snowball down a ski slope, like a melting glacier in springtime, sometimes forming unexpected picturesque lakes which glinted in the Alpine sun, beckoning invitingly to those who are fascinated by deep, inexhaustible pools of money.
Tom had amassed his millions indulging in an arcane activity known as hedge funding – a modern version of the enclosure movement – by which large quantities of wealth were fenced off from useful activity and reserved for the enrichment of those who understood the mysteries of modern economics.
Religions have always made it their business to guard jealously their central mysteries, and modern economics and its associated pseudosciences are no exception. To ensure that the mysteries remained intact and known only to a select few, those whose job it was to understand and explain them were enrolled in the Great Game. Newspapers were no longer bought and sold by ambitious tycoons like Monopoly cards. Politicians and editors could no longer be bent to the will of their masters by offers of weekends on yachts in the Med. But influence was still there to be bought, if discreetly and at arm’s length. Charitable trusts were founded to finance think tanks. Professorial chairs were funded in prestigious universities. And, by a thousand similar subtle indirect means, were courted, flattered and cajoled those who were in a position to influence the course of Tom Huntingdon’s quest – the unending search for ever more absurdly unimaginable quantities of loot.
* * *
“George! What ever have you been doing?” Vanessa exclaimed, staring at the bruised, dishevelled figure on the doorstep.
Moonbat responded to the motherly tones of concern and reproach with a wan smile. “It’s nothing. An unfortunate encounter with a rake this morning”.
“Oh really George, don’t tell me you were weeding the garden while waiting for the bus!”
“Not that kind of rake. Rake as in wastrel, philanderer … Hogarth.”
“Oh dear. You’ve been campaigning. It wasn’t Galloway again, was it?”
George waved his free hand in a dumb, pleading gesture to be allowed to come in, put down his rucksack in some warm welcoming guestroom, tend his wounds, and head for the drinks cabinet.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, his black eye salved and his spectacles straightened, George was led by the ever-motherly Vanessa onto the patio, where the other guests, having long finished their sumptuous (though organic and almost entirely vegetarian) meal, were lounging in a variety of handwoven ethical ethnic hammocks, sofas and armchairs, nursing their third or fourth after-dinner refresheners, and eagerly, if a little vaguely, discussing the future of the world. She furnished him with a plate of roquette and parsley pastries and a large whisky, and looked round for someone sober, alert and unoccupied to whom she could introduce him.
“George, have you met Stefan? Professor Lobachevsky’s from Austria”.
“Austrélia, Vanessa,” the Professor corrected her curtly, pronouncing the name of his adopted continent in the English fashion. He was wearing a turtleneck sweater – appropriately enough, since he had a head like a turtle – except that a turtle’s head is retractable, while Lobachevsky’s seemed to be glued onto his shoulders. He was clearly not capable of retracting his head – or anything else.
“So you’re a climate scientist? “ hazarded George, wondering how to tackle this somewhat inert, lithic figure.
“Ye-e-es. On the behévieural side,” replied the antipodean academic. And stopped, leaving George to puzzle out his meaning.
“A big ya pahdn?” said George. Lobachevsky’s mangled attempt to squeeze all Australianism out of his accent had the strange effect (or rather, stringe iffict) on George, of making him adopt a caricatural downunder twang himself, as if to compensate.
Lobachevsky stared at George with the look of hatred of one who has spent his life constructing a defensive outer shell to protect his inner feelings of inferiority, only to see it shattered by the first encounter with a being somewhat less inferior than himself. He turned his head as if George had just slapped him, causing the turtleneck sweater and the rest of him to rotate, leaving George facing the antipodean backside of the outback cognitive cognoscento.
Luckily, the awkward silence was broken by a squeaky “Hi George!” and a familiar gangling figure ambled over, a half empty glass in one hand and a homemade custard pie in the other.
It was Mark Lyingas – his alter ego, his doppelganger, his nemesis. They greeted each other coolly – a simple peck on both cheeks – like members of rival repertory companies. For years now they had been treating each other with icy politeness, each one gallantly conceding precedence to his rival, each eager to acknowledge the other as his John the Baptist.
A few years ago, they had published books simultaneously – one salted with sombre citations from Goethe’s Faust, the other peppered with equally miserable stanzas from Dante’s Inferno. Both had been fervent apostles of renewable energy until, sensing which way the wind was blowing, they had both espoused nuclear as the sole salvation from imminent doom. One had attempted to perform a citizen’s arrest on a war criminal; the other had thrown up over a Danish economist who had adamantly refused to fear the future. One lived in terror, the other in foreboding. Both felt perfectly at home at Apocalypse Close.
After exchanging a few conventional philosophical barbs of mutually assured deconstruction, they drifted apart, and George glid towards one of the few unfamiliar faces around the buffet table.
“Hi, I’m George. I write for the Guardian,” he began. He’d always found the direct approach the most effective.
“Hi, I’m Miranda.”
Her introduction came to an abrupt halt, leaving George wih nothing to say or do, but take in the appearance of his interlocutor.
Miranda was a tall, imposing woman with chiselled features, prominent Mongol cheekbones, and dyed orange hair swept back from a high forehead. What made her even more striking was her costume. She seemed to be covered in soft mauve scales.
She was an extraterrestrial Amazon from central casting. Her long bony fingers alone were enough to convince you that she wasn’t an elaborate hoax.
Unless of course central casting had a tridactyl giantess on their books.
George stared, fascinated, until the monster broke the silence. Don’t be embarrassed” she mumured in a soft baritone. “Everybody notices, and nobody dares to ask.” She waved the three digits of her right hand in an ambiguous gesture. “Skiing accident.”
Suddenly, George felt the evening was looking promising.
* * *
George awoke the next morning with a familiar whisky-induced hangover and an unfamiliar pain in the region of his left buttock. Slowly, consciousness returned, and he realised where he was, and why he was there. The aimless though animated alcoholic discussions of the previous evening had been but a warmup for the real work today and tomorrow. There would be seminars, presentations, debates and even a summary paper to be published and hyped in his weekly article. A thick black coffee or three from the handy machine next to the bed, and he would be in shape. But first, the strange sensation in his bum – at once numb and stabbing – was bothering him. He staggered over to the wardrobe mirror and twisted his head round to observe his antipodal adiposity.
Three long parallel scratches disfigured his otherwise smooth white skin.
“Bugger,” he thought. “What a waste.”
He remembered nothing at all.