Free Trading Futures by Jim Powell

myself. Surely I knew that I was out of work and would never work again,
didn’t I? I must have realized that I would have to tell Judy at some point, that the longer I left it the worse it would be, that those dread thoughts of a barren future would have to be
confronted. Hadn’t I? I ask, not rhetorically, but because I don’t know the answers. I fear that I had believed my own delusion. I don’t know how long one has to live a lie before
it starts to feel like the truth. Perhaps not for very long.
    I had no idea what I was going to say to Ahab about life in the City during la-la time. When I used to tell people I worked there, they assumed I must be a banker of some sort, as Ahab probably
did. I always bridled at the assumption. That had little to do with the present reputation of bankers; everything to do with how I imagined myself when I was growing up. Our generation was meant to
be different. We invented sex and music, and freedom and peace, and all sorts of things that turned out to be unpatentable. We invented ourselves, in fact. And we didn’t invent ourselves in
order to become bankers or accountants, to work in a nine-to-five job until we were sixty-five, collect a gold watch and a pension, and die shortly afterwards. We were not planning to die at all.
We would be immortal.
    I don’t think we considered who was to do the banking and the accounting that we were not proposing to do ourselves. I think we hoped that these careers would prove redundant in the future
we were about to create. They had to do with the movement of money, which was deeply boring. Money existed. That was the secret we knew and our parents didn’t. They thought that money was
illusory, that you had to slave all your life to make it real, and not spend it in case it became illusory again. We knew that it simply existed, and that its purpose in life was to be spent. That
was how it reproduced itself. That was why it existed in greater quantities every year.
    Our life’s work was not to shuffle this stuff around. Our life’s work was to change the world and to reinvent human nature: modest ambitions that we felt to be well within our
compass.
    I’ve now spent most of a lifetime sitting in an office off Leadenhall Street, shuffling the stuff around. I consider myself a failure and a hypocrite. I have always told people, and more
especially myself, that I work as a gambler, because that sounds more rakish, more subversive. Since it has been revealed that bankers are gamblers too, that the entire City is an offshore offshoot
of Ladbroke’s, it is thought neither rakish nor subversive, but greedy and seedy. I note that our corporate brochure, which once portrayed the art of buying futures as the epitome of
daredevilry and flair, now emphasizes prosaic research-based virtues.
    This is bad enough. In fact it’s utterly damning. But it now turns out that we were wrong about the very nature of money itself, and that our parents were right. Money is indeed illusory.
Sometimes it reproduces itself; at other times it wears a chastity belt. It doesn’t necessarily exist in greater quantities every year. At times it disappears altogether. So I’m not
only a failure and a hypocrite, but an idiot to boot.
    Most men like to feel proud of what they have achieved in their careers and are hurt when it is belittled by their wives. With Judy and me, it’s the reverse. I’m the one for
belittlement, to myself anyhow. Judy is proud of me. I have provided safety and security, a regular flow of income, two children, a dog and a cat, and a house in Barnet with a large garden. My
success is tangible – unlike fidelity, say, or love, which come with no written receipt. I can be lauded at social events in the neighbourhood, and as long as I attend some of them and fail
to mention that I vote Labour, my peccadilloes are overlooked. This is one reason it is so hard to tell her that I am now officially a failure.
    We seldom make love these