Bonding, page 14
‘It is,’ she said. ‘On paper.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘That I can’t afford to slow down. I’ve got to keep it growing as fast as possible.’
‘And if it doesn’t grow?’
‘It will.’
‘But what if it doesn’t?’
‘It will.’
She said it as if she hadn’t heard me. We were on our own now, ponytail had gone to the kitchen.
‘What do you want me to say?’ she said. ‘That I’ll have nothing?’
‘You’ll never have nothing,’ I scoffed.
‘You think I’m bulletproof?’
‘No, but I think we have different definitions of nothing.’
‘Why do I offend you so much?’
She looked hurt, as if I’d touched a nerve. Maybe I’d been laying it on too thick. She could never have offended me. If anything, that was the problem.
‘Help me,’ she said. ‘I can’t do this on my own. You’re the only person I can trust.’
‘What do you want me to do, exactly? No amount of “content” is going to change things.’
‘That’s not true. With Openr, it all comes down to engagement. Our customers want to be a part of something. They’re looking for a way to engage with the world – a way that makes them feel seen, that makes them feel involved. They’re interested in politics, justice, freedom. All we need to do is keep them talking. Keep them stimulated. Push their buttons. We’ve got to break new ground to stay ahead. We’re as much a content creator as we are a dating site. In the end, it all brings people to the app and that’s the one thing we’ve got to push for.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said doubtfully. ‘It’s not really what I do.’
‘I could put some equity on the table.’
This time she’d really managed to shock me.
‘You must be desperate.’
‘Not yet, but we haven’t been growing as fast this year. I need someone I can trust.’
I wasn’t sure how to take this.
‘VR and sex, though?’ I said, turning back to the screen. ‘Wouldn’t this have happened by now, if it was going to?’
‘She’s not a porn experience,’ she said. ‘She’s a customer service bot. She’s there to talk to people. Especially the men, the straight ones, the ones that no one wants to match with. So she’ll give them someone to confide in, gather data, help us understand them. She’s a customer service enhancement tool. I think she’s pretty cool, don’t you?’
‘Can you afford all this?’
‘That’s what the funding’s there for. And anyway, it’s not about what we spend. There are only two metrics in this game: customer acquisition and retention.’
‘You think you’ll get more customers with this bot, then?’
‘That’s the theory. People need someone to talk to.’
‘I mean …’ I trailed off.
I glanced around the studio.
As we left, Unity’s words rippled gently through the speakers:
‘I’ve been thinking of you,’ she murmured, her voice golden and depthless. ‘I was hoping to see you again. Tell me what you want,’ she breathed. ‘I’d like to get to know you.’
19
That weekend, Lara’s friend Natasha had a party. Tom was working late and I had nothing better to do, so I agreed to go with her. I’d met Natasha before. In fact, I’d met her so many times that I would have classed her as someone I knew, except every time I saw her she made a point of forgetting my name. She always did it in the most apologetic way, which only made the whole thing even more insulting. She lived in Battersea in one of those white stucco houses. When we arrived, she led us to the kitchen where she was ironically heating a cheese fondue. She introduced me, for the fourth time, to her boyfriend Nico, who was sitting at the table with his friends. I recognized a handful of these people. They were boys that Lara knew from school.
I was never sure what Natasha did for a living. She seemed to get photographed a lot at events. She was peripherally involved with Vogue magazine, she produced fashion videos or something. Nico ran an incubator that funded and nurtured start-ups. They both had voluminous, shiny hair and were always lightly tanned, which was because they’d either just been skiing or on holiday to St Kitts, where Nico’s parents owned one of those palm-shaded villas. Their dreamy friend Spence was leaning on the table, telling a story I’d heard before. It was about that time his brother Damo had dropped the E-bomb in Courchevel to get the Old Etonian hotelier to helicopter them out after a snowstorm. Almost every anecdote they told had something to do with where they’d been to school – a subject they rarely mentioned in public; it was reserved for times like this when they were all together. They’d all boarded at different institutions – Nico at Harrow, Natasha at Marlborough with Lara and Spence – but although these places were scattered around the country, they all seemed to know each other through some bizarre osmosis. There were fine distinctions between these schools, which provided them with endless hilarity: Millfield was basically for plebs and people who wanted to be footballers, Stowe was no longer second-rate and Dulwich was not as rapey as it used to be. Eton and Marlborough had ‘changed’, meaning their recruiting strategies now resulted in a majority of overseas students. Eton – which was always referred to as ‘School’, hence the E-bomb amusement – no longer specialized in the sorts of hereditary Etonians on which its reputation had been built. They were now not only outnumbered but practically on the verge of extinction, which explained why Damo’s kid had been rejected last year. Lara had been one of these ‘overseas students’, although she never drew attention to it. And she wasn’t the only one in the room; there was also Jay – whose parents were Indian – and Gabe, who had grown up in Egypt. Obviously, no one asked about my school. In the past, I’d made the mistake of mentioning that I’d grown up on the outskirts of London and had realized, too late, that this was in itself a faux pas. Although Jay had been gentle enough to tell me that he’d been there once for a warehouse party. They were curious about my existence but not in an attentive way. They just weren’t sure what I was doing there. The school talk went on for a while.
‘I tell people I’d never send my own kids private,’ Natasha said, as she stirred the cheese, ‘but then it’s convenient for me to say that because, nowadays, I doubt we could afford it.’
Jay wasn’t so fatalistic. ‘I don’t know, your hands are sort of tied if you live in London.’
He was an environmentalist who managed a water charity in Mali. His humanitarianism obviously didn’t extend to the rigours of the mind.
‘You do your best for your own kids,’ Nico said, as if that was the end of it. There was no way his parents wouldn’t pay for his future kids to go to his old school. ‘Although these days, you never know what you’re going to get. Look at Lara,’ he joked.
‘More bread?’ she replied, flicking a Gruyere-dipped piece of baguette onto his plate.
‘All the greatest radicals were privately educated, babe,’ Natasha said.
‘Marx, Sartre,’ Spence agreed. ‘Kanye West, Virgil Abloh.’
Natasha smacked him affectionately with a fondue fork.
‘So you and Lara work together?’ she said to me.
‘She’s a writer,’ Lara decided, apparently on the spur of the moment.
In fact, although I was grateful for the gesture – I had no desire to spend the rest of my life in spreadsheet hell – I still hadn’t decided if I was going to take her up on her offer. Besides, I’d hardly describe the job as ‘writing’, although I knew she was trying to protect me. Now I had to lie to these people. Inevitably, Nico took it further.
‘An actual starving artist?’ he said. ‘You don’t meet many of those these days.’
I’d forgotten what a prick he was.
‘You know, Natasha’s mother works in publishing?’ Jay decided to inform me. ‘You should send her some of your work, she’s lovely.’
I wondered if Lara was going to dig me out of this.
‘No, really, you should try her,’ he repeated unhelpfully. ‘I mean, I’m sure she’s inundated, but she’d read it.’
I saved Natasha from having to put me down.
‘I’m more on the journalistic side,’ I said.
‘Reporting?’
‘Confessional stuff, mostly.’
This wasn’t that much of a lie. The editorial style at Openr was not averse to a confessional essay, preferably one that involved some sort of intimate personal trauma. These posts were always wrapped up in a wholesome lesson about beating hardship, shining a light on issues, etc. The cost to the writer was often high – no one was getting paid enough to bare their soul – but as long as the clicks kept coming, people did it.
To my relief, Natasha was already losing interest. I spent the rest of the night on the balcony, getting drunk with Spence. I gazed into his slightly coke-addled eyes and watched him rake his hands through his silky hair. He did something at Goldman Sachs and was on the verge of setting up a software company to automate the process of equities and derivatives clearing. Later, in the bathroom, I overheard him and Nico in the garden.
‘Where’s that little slice of suburban bliss gone?’
‘You’re relentless,’ Nico said.
‘She’s fun.’
‘I’d describe her as monosyllabic.’
‘You don’t know how to juice them up like I do.’
‘I’d rather dip my dick in a blender.’
‘Give the girl some credit,’ Spence drawled, ‘she’s bagged herself a handsome Old Etonian.’
‘She’s always so tight-lipped with me. Is she shy? Or is this how people speak in Zone 6?’
‘You know what they say.’ Spence lit a cigarette. ‘Tight lips, tight cunt.’
•
I left with Lara not long afterwards.
‘So, you and Spence?’ she enquired.
She said it as if she’d been hoping something would happen.
‘He’s DMed me already.’
‘Man of action. Do you like him?’
‘Not particularly. You?’
‘He’s just someone I grew up with.’
‘You’re a bit contemptuous of them, aren’t you? Is that what I’m here for, to share your disapproval?’
‘They’re friends,’ she said, as if it was a fact of life.
‘But you don’t buy into all of that?’
‘Not really. It’s too much of a bubble, that scene. I don’t believe in it.’
I understood what she was saying but I think she also romanticized the alternative. To their credit, they were very clear about who they were and they were loyal towards each other. It wasn’t about actively liking each other, it went deeper than that. Some of them had families that had known each other for generations, and they went to great lengths to keep it that way. Obviously, the point was exclusion. They wanted to protect their way of life – but that didn’t make them insular. In fact, slumming it was part of the game. They weren’t above fucking the odd outsider. They even married one occasionally, but it was always at their own discretion. They could come to you but you couldn’t go to them. What they had was some semblance of society. There were plenty of things they lacked, but solidarity wasn’t one of them. Even Lara had imbibed that credo. Whatever she said about ‘that scene’, it was there, regardless – part of the architecture of her life. She didn’t seem to feel any requirement to actually like them.
I didn’t say that, though. I said, ‘Is it really that much of a bubble these days?’
I knew it was, but I also had the sense that things were changing. Even the Spences of this world were not completely insulated any more. Money now spoke louder than they did. It certainly spoke louder than nationality or race. Their own children would probably lead slightly different lives to theirs. They’d live in less salubrious postcodes. Their inheritances wouldn’t stretch as far. There was more competition and not all of them would keep up. In a thousand tiny ways, even for them, the wind was coming in.
‘They act like it is,’ Lara said. ‘It’s so boring.’
‘It’s safe.’
‘I don’t want to be safe.’
‘What do you want, then?’
I knew what she was going to say.
‘I want to be free.’
•
Throughout the following week, we started texting more often. Even the power-dossing made a comeback in the form of a spontaneous walk around the city. We met in Regent’s Park and walked to Notting Hill, then circled down to the Serpentine, where we sat in the cafe and drank lattes. In the gallery, there was an exhibition by the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat. Lara bought a copy of the catalogue, a heavy hardback filled with monochrome self-portraits. It described the artist’s parents urging their daughter ‘to take risks, to learn, to see the world’. She spent a long time leafing through it, staring at its thick, glossy pages.
•
The time I spent with Lara felt private whereas the time I spent with Tom was somehow porous and shot through with Lara’s presence. Everything was coloured by her thoughts, feelings, casual updates. We’d fallen unthinkingly back into a shared stream of consciousness. It was something I realized I’d missed and found difficult to resist. I went to the French House for dinner with Tom that Friday but I messaged Lara in the bathroom. She sent back a photo of herself at a party – she was in a black velvet dress. She was at the Institute of Directors, I recognized the brocade wallpaper. She said:
This place is full of Tories
There’s a lot of bad dancing going on
What are you doing?
Work party
Some VC thing
Come
I’d been to these events before, Ed had occasionally forced me to chaperone him.
I’ve met some guy from the Department for Business
I asked him what it felt like to have fucked the country, I mean really fucked the country
What did he say?
That he found my naivety adorable and did I want some coke
I think he thinks I’m some sort of call girl, he keeps asking if we do girl-on-girl
It’s going well, then?
I hate everybody here
The next day, she messaged me from home.
What are you doing?
You’re not with Bateman are you?
I didn’t answer, so she sent me the view from where she was sitting.
She was watching Sex and the City 2.
Why?
Hungover
I haven’t seen it
Carrie’s marriage is in trouble because Mr Big ate takeaway on the sofa, so the girls have gone to Abu Dhabi to talk about feminism
We discussed the high camp of the Middle East and she sent me a photo of Samantha on a camel.
That’s why you don’t see this kind of camp in Iran. It’s because the British never colonized it. It’s easy to laugh at the trashiness of the Emiratis but it’s all British, we exported it
Not so much actual homosexuality, though
I’m sure we tried.
She said that camp was a national sport in Britain because the whole country had cognitive dissonance, that we had to talk in doublespeak because we couldn’t make sense of who we were.
When I first arrived here for school I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. The place looked like a military barracks but they all spoke like saucy vicars. All that stuff about spotted dick and crumpet
The sound of willow on leather
And pantomimes, what are those about? We went to Cinderella, it was terrifying
She paused for a photo of Carrie’s turban.
It was relentless
People called it irony but it wasn’t really, it went deeper than that. I think it’s what allows our politicians to be so ruthless, and the rest of us to go along with it. We’re not capable of taking anything seriously
When it came to talking about ‘the British’, sometimes she said ‘they’ and sometimes ‘we’. She did it unconsciously, I think, swapping according to who she was talking to.
So back to Bateman. Why are you being so cagey?
You know why, I thought.
20
It was a Wednesday, which was drinks night at Openr. I had no desire to spend my own time at what was basically a team-building exercise but there was an unspoken rule that everyone in the office had to go. Cultivating community was one of the company’s three Core Behaviours, the others being Do work you believe in and Break boundaries.
Georgia Marchant, Openr’s creative director, was the instigator of this activity. Georgia was small, bouncy and ambitious. Her accent suggested an expensive education. In another world, she might have been a barrister, or maybe an upmarket estate agent. She would have looked like a quintessential English rose if it hadn’t been for her ‘style’, which changed every few months as if she’d transformed into a different person. She seemed to drift randomly through looks according to what she’d come across online, as if she’d connected briefly with some new tribe, immersed herself completely and then lost interest. Today her hair was bleached white blonde and she was wearing some sort of raw-edged tracksuit. Despite her slightly manic appearance, Georgia had a demon-like focus on her job. Her daily life was guided by efficiency, her calves chiselled from the gym. She talked fast, her sentences filled with peppy quotes like a Peloton machine. She liked to send group messages that said things like ‘Let’s have fun with this!’ and ‘Let’s break boundaries!’ She also had a tendency to cc the entire team into any exchange that had annoyed her, a habit she tried to pass off as transparency but that we all knew was just a way of warning people off. In a sense, I understood why she was like this: she was just trying to get things done. On the other hand, it was hard not to wonder who she might have been without the incentives of the job. That night, even in the darkness of the bar, she looked a little exhausted by it all.
‘To levelling up,’ she said, raising her glass.
‘To levelling up,’ echoed Marie, a tall, cheerful woman from accounts. Marie had just come out of an open relationship, as she told me every time I saw her.
