Money_ A Suicide Note - Martin Amis [40]
'Nigel has gimmicked a bag-carrier for the Dutch Antilles,' people will say to me at my desk.
'Beautiful,' I'll whisper back, as you're bound to do.
We all seem to make lots of money. Man, do we seem to be coining it here. Even the chicks live like kings. The car is free. The car is on the house. The house is on the mortgage. The mortgage is on the firm — without interest. The interesting thing is: how long can this last? For me, that question carries an awful lot of anxiety — compound interest. It can't be legal, surely. You can't legally treat money in such a way. But we do. Are we greedy! Are we shameless! I once saw Terry Linex, that fat madman, take a grand out of petty cash for a weekend in Dieppe, He got his wife's hysterectomy on X's — and his daughter's orthodontic work. He even gets the family poodle shampooed against tax: security expenses, with Fifi doubling as a guard-dog. We estimate that Keith Carburton spent £17,000 on lunch in fiscal '80, service and VAT non compris. You should see their freehold townhouses and bijou Cotswold cottages. You should see their cars—the Tomahawks, the Farragos, and Boomerangs. I've been ripping off the firm and the government too, for five years now, and what have I got? A hired sock, a Fiasco, and the prohibitive Selina. What did I ever do with it, the money? Pissed it away, I just pissed it away. And somehow I still have lots of money.
'I told my wife,' said Terry Linex, parking half his heavy can on my desk,' "you can have any domestic appliance you want. But when it goes wrong, don't come running to me. Do we understand each other?" I come home Friday night. I go into the kitchen — I said, "What's this, a horror film?" There's a brand-new washing-up machine and all this fucking black gunge all over the floor. "Get on the fucking phone," she says. "Fix it!" So what did I do.'
'What did you do.'
'I sued them. I rang Curtis & Curtis, got Mr Benson at home. Ten minutes later I walk into the kitchen — there's a Pakki on his back with his tongue up the funnel. No charge. No grief. It's brilliant. I do it all the time now. Took the motor in for a service. Four hundred quid. So what did I do.'
'You sued them.'
'I sued them. Fucking right. "How would you like to pay, sir?" he asked me. "Cash or cheque or credit card?" I said, "I'm not paying. You are. I'm fucking suing you, mate." They go all pale. Thirty-six quid I ended up paying. I sued the tax-inspector last week.'
'Beautiful,' I said.
'Don't you love it?'
I said I did, and returned to the sorry-looking chaos of my desk. I'm supposed to be tying things up here, sorting things out. The antique desk-drawers are buckled stiff with ripped paperwork: five years without paying any tax — that's why I've got all this money. . . The feeling in the office is that I am moving on to better things. Sometimes I wish they had consulted me about this. But they just roll their eyes and whistle and rub their hands encouragingly. I have been interviewed in Box Office, featured in Turnover, profiled in Market Forces. My thirty-five-minute short, Dean Street, won the guest critics' special-mention award at the Siena Film Festival last year. I am a headliner, a highroller. Peter Sennet did it. Freddie Giles and Ronnie Templeton did it. Jack Conn — he did it. They all live in California now. They have all bled out of the ordinary world. They all have new houses, new wives, new tans, new rugs. In V8 Hyenas and haunchy drophead Acapulcos they cruise the road-margined seas, gunning to the medical zone for their daily DNA boosters and plasma rethinks. Twice or three times a month they wing out for a long