Chapter 17 – The Beast Within
Summer lightning assaulted the sky with luciferous, arcing tendrils of blue-white light as Stan and Ambrosius made their way home through the night. All of a sudden rain came down in sheets, and within seconds the two were soaked through to the bone. The streets became reticulated with rivulets of rain, transmogrified into liquid gold by the meagre, other-worldly light of the few fish oil lamps that lined the streets. The sewers rose and boasted a stench that was suffocatingly foul, their contents floating out in feculant streams that lapped at the front steps of nearby houses and threatened to rise above and flood over the thresholds. But summer rain is as fickle as it is ferocious, and all of a sudden it stopped and gave way to a balmy, close night which just made the smell all the worse. The two wayfarers made it home soaked and tired, and went to bed with the last dregs of wine still in their somno lent stomachs and the stench of hearth-smoke and sewage in their nostrils.
Stan swore at the Smug, which woke Ambrosius up.
“It's still early,” said Ambrosius.
“Yes but I forgot to draw the damn curtains, and that cod-forsaken bauble is doing its best to shine right in my eyes.”
“We might as well get up now.”
Stan sighed. “I resent it, but yes. You need a new suit, one which speaks for your new found wealth. Then we shall see about getting you a job with the Company.”
The tailor had the suit fitted by the afternoon and Ambrosius and Stan collected it as soon as it was finished. It looked sharp as a nine-inch nail, with that certain deadly quality that accompanies something very expensive.
“You look murderous, sir,” said Stan as they walked towards the centre of the City. “Now Fish Stocks Limited has its headquarters about fifteen minutes walk from here, right in the middle of everything. They took over the king's old palace. It is said all roads lead there, from when people came from miles around to use his fish processing machine. Some say the old machine is still down there somewhere in the basement.”
They made quick progress across town, Ambrosius receiving a few resentful looks off people who had taken out loans with him. But they were looks that spoke equally of deference – the suit told them that they would do well not to get in its wearer's way, and they obeyed. Soon the towering headquarters of the Company loomed above the surrounding buildings. The headquarters were a peculiar bricolage of different styles with bits tacked on willy-nilly as the company had grown over the years. The effect was unspeakably ugly, an architectural obscenity that was thrust at the sky with questing pseudopodia of brick and mortar, wood and steel. Glass was used in a way that maximised the light inside to save on candles, which resulted in the whole structure having a quality which was not only naked but almost eviscerated, showing the human entrails trapped behind desks within.
“We're here. I have a contact on the fifth floor, by the name of Jacob. He'll get you a foot on the ladder, so to speak.”
They went in to reception and Stan spoke to a woman on the front desk. She scribbled a note and put it into a capsule in a pneumatic tube, which then was sucked upwards with a hiss and a rattle. After half an hour of waiting a man of about thirty with flushed cheeks and yellow sweat patches under the armpits of his white shirt came down the stairs into the reception area. He was fat and he smelt.
“Jacob, you big bass steward, how's it going?”
Jacob didn't smile. He eyed Amrbosius' tail with a kind of surprised disgust. “I'm busy, Stan. What do you want?”
“This man here is a very capable man. I want you to get him a job.”
Jacob groaned. “We're not taking on any new staff. Haven't you heard there's a pisconomic downturn on at the moment?”
“What's that mean?” asked Ambrosius.
“It means we're running out of fish,” said Stan. “You boys up in the trees might not have realised it quite yet.”
“Yes, we have,” said Ambrosius. “I was meant to try and stop it.”
Stan raised an eyebrow. “So it really is that bad.”
“Look, you guppies might be able to stand round and chat but I'm pretty rushed at the minute,” said Jacob. “Give me one good reason why I should give monkey-boy here a job.”
Ambrosius couldn't help look a little angry. “You say that you turn fish into numbers here?”
“You could say that,” said Jacob.
“Well, I have a way with numbers,” said Ambrosius.
“It's true, he does,” said Stan.
“Lots of people do,” said Jacob. “I'm afraid there's no way we can afford to take on rookies at the moment, no matter what their skills are.”
Stan ran his hand over the two day's stubble that foliated his chin. “We can prove to you that Ambrosius will make you money.”
“How?” asked Jacob.
“You let us loose on your trading floor for one hour with our own money, then we'll show you what we can do.”
“Your own money?”
“Yes.”
“You do realise you could lose everything?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I'll arrange it for tomorrow. Be here early, six o'clock in the morning, that way things will be quieter. If you mess up it's your loss.”
Stan and Ambrosius worked their way back through ant-like throngs, towards the residential quarter and Stan's own alcove of filth.
“You didn't say anything about having to put up our money,” said Ambrosius as they walked.
“Everything worth while in life requires some element of risk,” said Stan. “I have every confidence in you.”
“Say what you like, it'll be my first day on the job and I could lose everything.”
“But you won't. You have a plan.”
“No I don't.”
“You do, but you've just not realised it yet.” Stan opened the door of the shack and the two stepped into the gloomy closeness of the interior. “You've got a hidden skill that is going to make you win the day.”
“I have?”
“Yes. Think about it.”
Stan stoked up the fire and brought the never-ending infinity fish gumbo to the boil. They both took a steaming bowl and sat eating and cogitating.
“I really haven't got a plan,” said Ambrosius as he finished his gumbo.
“Yes you have. Something that you've always had a talent for, but that everyone's belittled.”
Ambrosius thought. “Well, there's my carving... hang on. Of course! The whole City works on numbers, all I need is a suitable abacus!”
“I told you,” said Stan, smiling that pedigree grin.
“Just a minute, how did you know that...”
“I read a lot of books,” said Stan. “Trashy novels, mainly. The hero always has a talent that is overlooked, then one day it saves his life or helps him get the girl or whatever.”
“Well, anyhow, you're right. All I need is the right abacus, then I can predict the movements of the stock market.”
“You've got until six o'clock,” said Stan. “Can you do it?”
“I need a knife and some hookwood,” said Ambrosius. “Yes, I can do it.”
To say Ambrosius whittled away the hours would be very acc urate. He cut his thumb early on in the evening and his blood dripped and mingled with the wood as he carved, lacquering the grain with smears of brownish-red. This thing that he was giving his soul to by the hour was beautiful; it needed that blood and drank it like wine. The frame took shape and the bars with their beads slotted perfectly into place. The Smug was just below the horizon, giving the sky its weird half-light as Ambrosius finished.
“What's that thing, kid?” asked Jacob, as, bleary eyed and half drunk with fatigue, Ambrosius and Stan entered the trading floor. It was a big room with a high vaulted ceiling. A large cube with a clock on each of its four lateral faces hung from the ceiling in the middle of the room, rudely shouting “five to six” at anyone who would care to listen. All around were desks, clerks sitting with pens at the ready, waiting for trading to start. In front of each desk was an array of pneumatic tubes.
“It's just a little tool I think might come in handy,” said Ambrosius.
“Whatever,” said Jacob. “Now I'm not going to be able to give you any training in the five minutes before be start, so I'm just going to have to sum up what's going to happen in as few words as possible. Those clerks get the latest gen on the markets from those tubes in front of them. They decide what to buy and what to sell, then write down their orders and put them back in the tube. Those tubes criss-cross the whole city, covering all the major fish dealers. Fish are bought and sold by those pieces of paper, and the fish dealer's signature is put on them to make sure he agrees on the price. That way we can buy and sell fish without ever have to get a sniff of them.”
“Okay,” said Ambrosius. “Where do I sit?”
Jacob motioned towards an empty desk. “Rupert's off sick, so I managed to get you his desk. You've got one hour. If you go into the red by more than a hundred grand I'm pulling you before your hour's up – I don't want you annoying the traders by not being able to pay up. You ready?”
“As ready as I'll ever be.”
“Good fishing, kid,” said Jacob. “You'll need a miracle to last ten minutes, though, the way the markets are moving.”
Ambrosius nodded. The hands on the clock ticked round to six o'clock and the floor was suddenly a bustle of noise, everyone shouting at each other and pneumatic tubes whooshing and zipping. Ambrosius was left out of the loop totally. Everyone else was shouting advice and forming alliances to push stock prices up or down. Nobody trusted Ambrosius so he had to operate on his own. He read the prices of the various stocks as they hissed onto his desk from the tubes. He flicked beads on his abacus and jotted sums down on scraps of spare paper. Theory, he realised, was very different than practice. He was slow and clumsy at unscrewing the caps ules containing the stock information and his hand quickly started to ache from writing. By the time he had done his calculations the markets had changed completely.
Ten minutes passed and, out of the £500,000 he and Stan had put in Ambrosius was down to just £250,000 already. He struggled on, forced into bad decisions by his cumbersome calculations. The nib of his pen scratched his signature again and again, putting his name to failure after failure. “Bad luck,” came back a note from one of the dealers. “J. J. Turbot and Son's just lost half its value. You lost £200,000.” Ambrosius felt the blood rush to his head. He had just £50,000 left. Quickly he consulted his abacus, trying to calculate the rate of change of a new stock, trying to predict when it was going to peak. He scratched sums down, his ink-smeared hands smudging them so that they were illegible as he did so. He lost another £50,000. Only half an hour had gone by and he had winnowed his money down to nothing. The clock seemed to laugh at him as he struggled to plan his next move. Whilst he was waiting another stock plummeted. £50,000 in the red. He reached for the abacus, sweat dripping from his forehead and his hands shaking. In his ears he could hear laughter, but when he looked around he could only see people sat hunched over their desk patently ignoring him. He tried to calm down. He only had quarter of an hour left. He moved the beads slowly, purposefully, meticulously. He chose his stock well, then... it crashed. He was £90,000 in debt - just £10,000 left to borrow.
“Cod-damned son of a fish!” shouted Ambrosius. Heads turned. Now people really were laughing. Every glance, every sly comment, every snigger, all just fed into Ambrosius' anger. He pushed the abacus off the front of his desk and it smashed to pieces on the floor, scattering beads everywhere. Recklessly he put the whole ten grand on an outside bet, signed it and posted it down the tube.
“You jammy codger,” came the reply. “Monkfish Associates just doubled. Maybe your luck's on the turn, kid.”
Ambrosius' expression didn't change, but in his brain lots of lovely chemicals seeped into all the right places. This was a rush better than any stupid fisherman could ever hope for. He made another punt on Hake & Hake PLC and came off on top again. From then on he couldn't lose. His abacus lay broken on the floor as he used his instinct to drive his deals. Hit after hit, he got his fix. He hardly noticed when the minute hand hit the vertical again.
“Wow, you sure pulled it back there,” said Jacob, stepping in and taking Ambroisus' pen off him. “You pulled it back from minus ninety grand to plus fifty. You still lost big time, though.”
“Give me another hour,” said Ambrosius, his face set like a mask. “I'll make it all back.”
“No dice, kid. You had your chance.”
“I'll personally give you ten grand if you give me one more hour.” It wasn't the loss of money that bothered Ambrosius. He just wanted another fix.
Jacob grunted. “Twenty and you got yourself a deal.”
Ambrosius nodded.
“One more hour,” said Jacob.
What can happen in an hour? Let us look at some examples.
A mistfly lives and dies.
A hooktree grows six point eight millimetres.
A fish is hooked and caught.
A hooktree is cut down.
A liver-spotted old man gets drunk.
A young woman called Sunbeam lies with her husband.
A hookflower looses a petal.
A young woman thinks of a man who is not her husband.
A cloud boils to nothing under the Smug.
A young woman thinks about how things could have been.
A shrieker bird puts the finishing touches to her nest.
A young woman's forehead wrinkles; her husband finds it charming.
A countless billion hydrogen atoms fuse in the Smug.
A young woman's husband asks “Why so full of care?”
A hookbeetle fights for its mate and loses.
“A passing thought, no more.”
A clock completes a revolution.
“A thought you want to share?”
A painwasp burrows into a hookfruit.
“A confusing memory, private to me.”
A hill falls in a landslide.
A man in a City is held for a second by a woman's face in his mind.
A piece of paper travels through a tube.
A man makes £50,000.
Another piece of paper shoots along.
A man makes £20,000.
Another piece of paper...
“A miracle!” announced Jacob. “Nothing short of a miracle!”
“I just got my eye in, that's all,” said Ambrosius. A fine sweat was evaporating off his forehead and he felt drained but happy. He wanted more.
“You made your £500,000 back and another £100,000 on top! Kid, I underestimated you. You can have your job. You're going to go far, I'm telling you.
Just make sure you sign over that twenty grand in stock over to me.”
Stan and Ambrosius left the Fish Stocks Limited building with a spring in their step. That devilish grin that was at first only Stan's was now Ambrosius' as well.
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