Knowledge Is Money

In my first life I sat over a screen for 6 days and let greed cost me everything I had. This time the whole of it took 6 minutes, and I did it on a sea wall with a bag of chips going cold on my knee.

The number falling down every screen in the world tonight is the same number that killed me once.

Not this me. The one before. The one these people would have me quietly put in a home for, if I ever said a word of it out loud.

I had it early, that time too. A few hundred pounds turned into a few thousand while I slept, and a few thousand into a number I had to count the noughts on twice to believe.

A sensible man takes that and goes to the pub. Buys his mates a round he can suddenly afford, puts the rest somewhere dull, and never thinks about it again.

I sat down at the screen instead, on a Tuesday. The next time I properly stood up it was the Monday after.

I stopped answering the phone. I ate standing at the sink, when I remembered to eat. I told the ceiling the same lie every morning. One more day. One more push. It’s still going up, and only a fool climbs off a thing that is still going up.

The curtains stayed shut until the days and the nights stopped taking turns at the window. Somebody knocked at the door, more than once, and gave up on me. I let them.

The number doubled. I did not feel rich. I felt hunted, by the version of me who would have to explain it later if I stopped now with anything less than the most there was.

Then it turned. I had known the day. I had it circled in biro on a calendar of a beach I never went to.

And on the morning I had circled, I watched the top come off it, and my hand would not close the lid.

Close the lid and the loss was real, and mine, and had my name on it. Leave it open and it might climb back and unhappen itself. It climbed back a little. I held. It went through the floor of everything I had held it at. I held.

By the end I had turned a fortune into a figure with a minus in front of it, and a flat into a bin bag in a mate’s hallway.

And I had turned a man into whatever was still sat at that desk at 4 in the morning, the screen light on his face, the night the memory came and took the whole thing back to the start.

The worst of it was never the money. I have made money since, out of the same daft gift. The worst of it was what the money was going to be, before the wanting ate it.

There was a thing I meant to build with it, that first time. It does not exist, in that life or this one, because I sat at a screen and let a future turn into a number, and then watched the number carry the future off with it when it fell.

The minus in the bank I cleared inside a year. The thing that never rose, I am still paying for.

I made myself one promise on the way back. I would always buy again. I would never again hold like that, sat over the glass with the wanting in the driving seat.

I could not shake it for weeks. The number I watched fall behind Danny’s shoulder that Friday came home with me, and sat in the house through September and into the wet back end of October, and would not let a man rest.

By a grey Sunday near the end of that month I knew I was going to do it, and that I could not do it alone in a quiet room. So I rang the one number I have never once had to explain myself to.

"Come and get me," I said. "Bring the cab. Bring nothing else."

"Chips?"

"Chips."

20 years, and we have the whole conversation down to the bone. Raj was outside in the Vauxhall inside 10 minutes, heater going, radio on low, and he pulled off towards the front without once asking me where.

He knows where I go when I cannot sit still. There has only ever been the one place.

He did not ask why a grown man wanted to sit on a freezing wall on a Sunday night. In 20 years Raj has never asked me why. He turns up, he drives, he talks about nothing at all, which is the most restful sound left in my life.

We sat on the sea wall with the estuary going out grey and flat in front of us, a bag of chips each, the salt and the vinegar coming up off the paper into the cold.

Down the wall a bloke in waders was packing a rod away and losing an argument with a folding chair. A pair of gulls worked him for the last of a cone.

"...so I says to him, mate, you cannot park a hearse on a red route, dead or not," Raj was saying. "And he goes, well, he’s not in a hurry, is he. Cheeky sod. I had to laugh."

"What did you do?"

"Moved him on. Gentle about it. It’s a funeral, you don’t make a scene." He ate a chip. "Lovely fella, once he stopped arguing. They usually are."

He is the only man alive who knew me before. Before the club, before the money, before the quiet came down over me that nobody in this town has ever worked out. He knew the lad who drove the van, and he has never once asked where that lad went.

"Do you remember," he said, out of nowhere, the way he does, "sitting on this exact wall when we were 16, skint, swearing blind we’d have a boat one day?"

"I remember you swearing it."

"I’d still have the boat. You went and bought a football club instead." He shook his head at the water. "Always did aim funny, you."

He is right, and he has no idea how right. In one life I aimed at a number, hit it, and it killed me.

In this one I aimed at a leaking football ground on the edge of a tired town, and it is the only thing I have ever hit that did not turn to ash in my hands.

Raj thinks I aim funny. He does not know I have had 2 goes at the same target.

The wall was cold through my jeans, the particular cold that sinks into a man in his 30s and stays put till spring. I took my phone out while he talked.

My hand knew the shape of this. My hand has done this before, and my hand remembers exactly where it ends.