Free Meltdown by Ben Elton Page B

of chocolate. He would arrive at work in his previous day’s clothes, do three hours’ trading and then at about ten thirty pop into the toilet and bung on the new threads that the girl had brought him. He’d slip her a fiver for her trouble and bin the previous day’s clothes on his way back to his desk.
    A quick chew on a bit of toothpaste chewing gum and he was fresh and ready to spend another long day in the future.
    It was obvious to his friends that Jimmy had become addicted to his work. Lizzie and Robson were particularly worried and tried to interest him in other things, like the theatre, which Jimmy thought was complete shit.
    ‘Why go to the theatre when you can see a movie?’
    ‘Because the theatre is offering the latest David Hare and the cinema is offering Batman Forever .’
    ‘Exactly.’
    But in fact Jimmy didn’t even go to the movies any more. Like many a gambler before him, he lived only to play the game. The difference between him and the traditional sad obsessive was that his was a game at which it was very difficult to lose and, unlike the poker players regularly testifying at the Canary Wharf branch of Gamblers Anonymous, Jimmy’s illness was making him richer.
    Richer. But no less screwed up.
    It was obvious to anyone who cared to think about it that there was a downside awaiting Jimmy and his highly overexcited colleagues. Physical and mental exhaustion or, as the Americans put it more succinctly, burnout.
    The human nervous system was not built to spend fourteen hours a day in a state of high tension and the other ten drunk, wired, having sex or unconscious. The vast majority of the guys on Jimmy’s floor were destined to push it too far, lose their edge and be replaced by younger players.
    Jimmy was heading that way faster than most.
    ‘You’ll be useless in five years and your firm will dump you,’ Rupert assured him cheerfully when the old gang met at Khan’s in Kensington for their regular curry and beer. ‘But what a five years, Jim boy! People go their whole lives without having a single day on the sort of roll you’re on. In the future people will look back and not be able to believe how much money you guys made.’
    ‘That’s right,’ Jimmy, hollow-eyed and pasty-faced, always agreed. ‘You know my motto. Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse, eh?’
    Henry, who had spent all day searching for a decent typescript among the great mound of hopefuls that was his publishers’ slush pile (while trying to summon up the courage to recommend his own under a different name), was having none of this. He earned less in a week than Jimmy was about to spend on a bottle of vintage champagne and he found Jimmy’s attempts to pass off his sweaty-faced, coke-fuelled gluttony as boho chic deeply irritating.
    ‘James,’ he said sternly, flicking his blond locks aside, ‘the phrase “Live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse” was coined to describe life in the real fast lane. Not the bloody City of London but down on the mean streets and out on the edge. It describes true originals who tested the boundaries of the culture and rewrote the rule book of youth. Jimi Hendrix, Sid Vicious, Kurt Cobain. Not always pretty but always original, guys who really did take it all the way, not by getting rich and drunk but by rejecting society’s values in pursuit of the true punk ethic. Doing it, my pampered friend, for Rock ’n’ Roll.’
    ‘Henry,’ Jimmy replied equally sternly but still with that disarming twinkle in his bloodshot eyes, ‘Bowie just floated his back catalogue on the London Stock Exchange. Mick’s in a tax haven. These days City traders are Rock ’n’ Roll.’
    In a way Jimmy was right. In some ways he was flying the flag for the Rock ’n’ Roll ideal. While an increasing number of musicians were turning vegan and going to the gym, while Sting was informing the world about the rainforests and tantric sex, Jimmy was larging it . In a different club