The Last Cannibal of Lisbon

He woke with the restraints biting into his wrists.

His head had fallen against the window at an angle that would cost him later, and something wet was running down his chin. For a moment he had no idea where he was, only that he was high up and moving, and that when he tried to lift a hand to his face the hand would not come. Then the engines reached him, that long unbroken exhalation, and the rest arrived in order: the seat-back, the blind half drawn on a white glare, the two men in grey fleeces either side of him whose knees were careful not to touch his.

It was undignified, sleeping on a plane. He had always thought so, even in the years when flying had meant something else: a conference in Vienna, a paper on the vascular supply of the hand, a window seat and a gin and tonic he would never have ordered at home. Even then he had hated waking to find that strangers had been looking at his face while there was nobody inside it. Thirty-five thousand feet up, mouth open, head lolling. The body carrying on without you, the way it would at the end.

Or worse. He had been having the dream again, three nights running in the centre, and there was no reason the dream should respect an aeroplane. He listened back into the silence he had just come out of, trying to hear whether it held anything. A cry. A name. A plea for mercy, perhaps, in the old words, the ones he had not said aloud since he was a boy on his grandfather’s prayer mat. Ya Allah. Ya Rahman. He did not think he had. But the man on his right had taken his earphones out.

A stewardess came down the aisle with the trolley, and he watched her decide not to look at his hands. She did it well. She had been trained to do it, presumably, as he had once been trained to tell a mother her son was going to be fine. She offered the escorts coffee. She offered him nothing, and then, correcting herself with a small flutter, offered him water, and the man on his left took the cup and held it to his lips. Most of it went in. The rest found the same track down his chin, and dried there, and he felt it tighten on his cheek.

In the seat in front a little girl had turned round and hooked her chin over the headrest. Six, perhaps seven. She studied him with the total seriousness of the very young, taking in the grey stubble, the cuffs, the shine on his cheek, and he could not look away from her. Her eyes were dark. Then her mother’s hand came up over the seat and drew her down, and he heard a murmur in Farsi, don’t stare, my soul, it’s rude, and something in his chest that had been shut for a quarter of a century came open like a cupboard in an earthquake.

He closed his eyes.

There was a trick he had learned in his first year, from a man in Wandsworth who had killed his stepfather with a fire extinguisher: you could leave. Not with your body. Your body belonged to Her Majesty, and later to His Majesty, and today to a private contractor whose logo was stitched over the hearts of the two grey fleeces. But the rest of you could go. You lay still and let the mind rise out of the top of the skull, and you went somewhere. A beach on the Caspian. A lecture theatre. The inside of a hand you had once opened, and put right, and closed again.

He tried for the hand. He tried for the beach.

The mind goes where it likes. It went where it always went: to a flat above a launderette in Bayswater in the spring of the year 2000, to the smell of hot cotton rising through the floorboards, and to his sister standing in the doorway in a coat he had not bought her.

Anahita.

He had come to England with nothing but hope. He could say that now without embarrassment. A young doctor, top of his year at Tehran, with a letter from a consultant at St Mary’s who had trained under his professor in the seventies. The NHS had always had a taste for Iranian doctors, and Iranian doctors for it. He was going to be a surgeon. Hands. He had beautiful hands, everyone said so. His mother said so, the professor said so, and the nurses at St Mary’s said so in a way that made the other juniors laugh.

And then she had come, two years behind him, with a place at the London School of Economics, a suitcase full of books and their father’s instructions, the chief of which was him. Look after her. He met her at Heathrow and did not recognise her. Not for a second, a full and terrible second, because the girl he had left in Tehran had become, somewhere he had not been watching, a woman. She had looked at him across the arrivals hall with a calm, faintly sarcastic patience, as though she had been waiting years for him to catch up. So young. And somehow already knowing everything.

He opened his eyes. The little girl’s fingers were visible over the seat-back, opening and closing on the headrest, as if she were trying to hold the plane still.

How fast it had been, in the end. That was what he could never get past, not even now, with twenty-five years to get past it in. A winter. A single London winter, and the city had taken her down into its underneath and shown her things, and shown them to her for money. And then it had shown her. This was the part he still could not think about without the blood coming up into his face. It had shown her to other men. And through her, all of them. His father. His mother. The name.

He felt the heat in his cheeks now, at fifty-six, on a plane, in handcuffs. The rage came up, as fresh as it had ever been. It always did; it was the most reliable thing in his life. And, as always, after a moment it turned, the way milk turns, into the other thing, which was worse. The disgust. Not at her. Not any more. He was no longer sure, after all this time, when it had stopped being her.

He looked down at his hands in the steel. A surgeon’s hands, once. Now only an old man’s, the knuckles thickened, a white scar across the left thumb from a tin lid in the kitchens at Long Lartin. Nothing about them said that they had ever done anything at all.

On the screen in the back of the little girl’s seat, a small white aeroplane was crawling across a brown map, over the Aegean, towards a city he had never seen; and past it, off the edge of the little screen, towards a place he had not let himself call home since he was thirty.

Time to destination: 1 hr 55 min.

He shut his eyes again. Behind them, patient as ever, she was waiting.

The rain had come in the night and decided to stay. By half past seven it had found its way down the area steps of St Saviour’s and under the crypt door, where it lay across the lino in a long brown tongue, and Ruth was on her knees with a mop and a bucket and the radio on, listening to a man from the Treasury explain that the economy was fundamentally resilient.

“So are cockroaches,” she told him, and wrung out the mop.

It was a Wednesday. There had been a time when Wednesday was the day the other side’s comments came back, and you could sit in a glass room on the twenty-third floor with a plate of sushi nobody had ordered and push the commas around until midnight and feel, absurdly, that you were holding something up. Now Wednesday was the day the clinic nurse came, and the day the housing officer from the council didn’t, and the day before Thursday, which was hot dinner.

She got the worst of the water into the drain by the boiler room and propped the mop against the wall under the memorial to the parish dead of the Great War. Their Name Liveth For Evermore, it said, and beneath that, in Kemi’s careful marker on a laminated sheet, PLEASE DO NOT CHARGE PHONES IN THIS SOCKET IT IS FOR THE FRIDGE.

Then she put the urn on, and stood with her back against the warm metal of it while it ticked and grumbled, and allowed herself, as she did most mornings at about this time, four minutes of thinking about him.

Four minutes. Then the doors opened and there were sixty people who needed things, and the needing filled her up to the top. That was the point of the job. Her therapist, while she could still afford one, had called it displacement, and Ruth had called it Tuesday.

She had been hurting, back then, as she put it to herself now. Will: an architect, eight years, a kind, careful, slightly boring man who measured everything twice. And the shameful part was that she had not been mourning Will at all. She had been mourning the life she had built around him in her head, plank by plank: the two children, the cottage in the Cotswolds, a fire that Will would never in a hundred years have known how to lay. Traded in, at thirty-five, for a phone full of men.

It was not that she wasn’t popular. It was just that most of the men she met weren’t right. Too afraid to lead, to choose a restaurant, to have an opinion. Or else too interested in her body and not at all in the fact that her mind was, by some distance, her largest erogenous zone. She had said this once, three glasses in, to her friend Hattie, who traded options from her kitchen table in Fulham and was afraid of nothing, and Hattie had shrieked and stolen it for her own profile.

So it was with some trepidation that she had sat at the bar that night. A cocktail place off Bishopsgate, all brass and green leather. It had been a Wednesday, and raining, and the rain was the best argument for going out, because it made staying in feel like surrender. They had barely chatted on the app. Three or four messages, his short and slightly teasing, and it was only a drink.

She had seen him walk in.

Tall and dark, in a navy suit. A big man, the kind of size that ought to have been clumsy. But he crossed the room with a curious elegance, as if the furniture had been arranged around his route in advance. Two girls at a table by the window glanced up as he passed. He did not look at them. He was looking at her. He had twinkly eyes, like his profile pictures, and something in them knowing and slightly mocking, as though he already had a fair idea how the evening was going to go and was interested to see whether she did.

Finn, 42, his profile had said, and very little else.

Maybe, she had thought, uncrossing and recrossing her legs, maybe he’ll be a good one.

The urn clicked off, with two minutes left.

It had been a whirlwind. One cocktail, and then somehow a second, and then dinner at a place in Shoreditch where they were given a table that had not existed a moment before. A drink at his place: a flat high over the river, too clean, with one enormous painting and no books. She was a woman who read the reviews. But he had led her from place to place, his mocking eyes challenging her at every threshold to say no, his hand on the small of her back, and each time she had not said no it had felt less like a decision and more like a slope.

What happened in that flat she had never told anyone. It was not that it had been shameful, exactly, although some of it had been. It was that it had been total. He had taken charge of her in a way no one ever had, unhesitating, unembarrassed. And afterwards, when she had been expecting him to roll away and reach for his phone, he had held her, tightly, his chin on the top of her head, as though she were something he had been looking for. She had lain there in the city light from the window and thought: oh. Just that. Oh.

The doorbell went. Ten to eight. Ruth pushed herself off the urn.

Dougie was first, as always, his beard beaded with rain and his dog, Mrs Thatcher, a small, furious terrier, zipped into his anorak with only her head showing. Then Precious with her wheeled suitcase and her two hats. Then Stan, who was eighty-one and had been sleeping out since the miners’ strike and called Ruth “Miss” in a way she had stopped trying to correct. Then a dozen more, steaming gently in the warmth.

“You look knackered, Miss,” said Stan, taking his tea.

“I’m thirty-eight, Stan. This is just my face now.”

“I’d have married you,” said Stan, “in nineteen sixty-five.”

“I’d have let you.”

She did the sign-in book and the post, the clinic list, the naloxone kits and the shower rota, and she talked a young lad called Reece down off the ceiling about something at the night shelter that might or might not have involved a knife.

It had involved a knife. She knew that before he did, from the way he kept his right hand in his pocket and let the left do all the talking, and she let him come at it the long way round, nodding, until he arrived there by himself and looked up at her, astonished, sure that she had guessed. She wrote it up in four lines. It was the best part of her morning, better than the other four minutes, and she did not write that down.

She found herself, at intervals, looking at the door. Jack was late, and in six months he had never once been late, which in this place made him close to a miracle. He came in at eight on the dot in his long, ruined greatcoat, patched at both elbows with gaffer tape, and he said good morning in a voice from another life, and he took his tea black to the end table by the radiator. He was fifty-eight. He had been clean since the spring. He was, she thought, getting better, though she had learned in this job to hold that word at arm’s length.

He was a City refugee, like her. Not from the accent, which was plain Home Counties gone slightly to seed. It was the vocabulary. He described the night shelter’s bed allocation as “a fundamentally mispriced market”. And then there were his teeth: perfect, white and absurd, veneers so flawless that they looked, in his ruined face, like a joke someone else had made at his expense. Nobody in the crypt had teeth like that.

She had never told him where she came from. In here she was just Ruth from Lanterns, who did the post and found you socks, and nobody knew what she had done; and she had done it, and did not let herself forget that she had.

The morning after Finn she had showered in the basement at six and changed into the spare suit in her locker, and sat at her desk on the twenty-third floor in front of the Project EPIC data room and done, in three hours, almost nothing, the same three or four frames from the night before running over and over. The deal was Candour plc, a FTSE 100 software business worth about fifteen billion pounds, about to be bought by an American private equity house. It was still months away, she had thought, and there would be time to catch up.

He had been like a drug, and she had been an amateur. She gave up being Ruth Ashdown, senior associate, eight years in, with her name on the cover of documents that moved billions. He texted at eleven at night and she went, and wrote the date in her diary afterwards, as she wrote down everything. He cancelled at an hour’s notice and she cried in the disabled loo on twenty-three and then went again when he texted at eleven the next night.

He talked to her. Nobody had ever been interested in her work the way Finn was. Not the confidential parts, never that. He would put his finger on her lips and laugh and say I don’t want to know, I’d only short it. But the shape of her days. Which partner was a bully, and what it felt like to sit in a room at three in the morning with twelve men from New York and know that you were the only one who had actually read the documents. She would lie on his enormous bed and talk at the ceiling for an hour, and then he would turn her over and wipe her mind clean, and she would go home in a cab at dawn feeling, for the first time in her adult life, completely and exactly seen.

It was the three in the morning she talked about most, though she did not notice that until long afterwards. The room going quiet when she found the clause. The partners turning to her. She had loved that part of the job before she ever met him, and had never said so to anyone, because it was not the kind of thing you said. He had heard it inside ten minutes, in a bar off Bishopsgate, and had asked her about it, and had listened to the answer.

He had a name for her, in those hours. She would not have let any other man say it out loud, and she would not say it now, not even in her head with the urn ticking. The worst of it was not that he had called her that. It was how true it had felt.

“Ruth? Ruthie?” Kemi was leaning through the hatch with a slice of toast in each hand. “Graham wants everyone at eleven. Staff room. Says he’s got news.”

“Good news or Graham news?”

“He’s wearing his cardigan with the buttons.”

“Christ,” said Ruth. “Good news, then.”

When the deal leaked, she did not let it cross her mind that it might have had anything to do with her.

The Financial Times had it on a Thursday morning, ten days before signing, and the story was wrong, wildly wrong: it said the American buyer was walking away, that due diligence had found something rotten in Candour’s business. Nobody outside the deal had known there was a buyer at all; the Takeover Panel was on the phone to Candour’s advisers before the market opened, and by eight Candour had been made to announce that it was in talks with a possible offeror, which only made the rest of the story look true. The share price fell by a third before lunch. The real buyer, rattled, did walk away. And the fund that did best out of the collapse, something in the region of sixty million pounds, had never hidden at all. Its name had sat on the regulator’s public list of short positions since June, at a little over one per cent, and its letters to investors had been saying for months that Candour’s revenue recognition did not bear looking at. A known bear. When the price fell, it looked like conviction.

There was an inquiry, inside the firm and then by the Financial Conduct Authority. Ruth was asked whether she had discussed the transaction with anyone outside the team, and she said no. She answered every question but one honestly, and she was believed. They never found where the leak had come from. The file was closed, and the bear was congratulated in the trade press for its nerve.

Finn, meanwhile, had gone quiet.

Not all at once; he was too good for that. The texts at eleven became texts at one, then an apologetic mad week, will call, and then, at some point she could not afterwards locate, they stopped. Men like Finn did not end things; they let them starve. And then one night, half a bottle in, in her flat in Stockwell, she had googled him. She had his first name and a photograph and the knowledge that he worked “in finance, God help me”, and it took her nine minutes.

Finn Corrigan. Partner and Chief Investment Officer, Europe. Saturn Capital.

She had looked at it for a long time. Then she had gone back to the FT’s coverage of the collapse, and found, in the third paragraph of a piece about the short-sellers who had called it right, the name she had read a dozen times that September without once thinking about it.

Saturn Capital.

She had not needed the rest explained. She had told him the timetable, week by week. She had told him about Leeds, the one site in the data room that did not bear looking at, and laughed about it. He had known exactly when a story about the buyer walking would do the most damage.

Bastard, she had said, out loud, to her empty flat. She said it again now, quietly, to the urn, and Dougie looked up from his porridge and said, “Language, hen,” and Mrs Thatcher growled.

She had resigned a month later. Just another burnt-out corporate lawyer, the woman from HR had said, kindly, with a box of tissues, as if nobody had done anything. What was she going to say? I think I sold my client to a man who was very good in bed? Fifteen years of being the cleverest girl in every room, and she had handed it all over in exchange for being held.

So she had travelled, for a few months. And then, two years ago, she had come back to London and answered an advert in the Guardian for a caseworker at a homeless charity in a church crypt in Southwark, on a salary roughly equal to what she used to bill in a week, and left what the City had paid her in an account she never looked at. Cleanse her conscience, if a conscience was a thing that could be cleansed.

She looked at the door again, and at twenty to ten it opened.

He came down the steps slowly, like a man going into cold water, grey in the face, the rain running off the shoulders of his coat. But his eyes, when they found her across the room, were clear, and when he smiled the teeth came out like headlights.

“Ruth,” he said. “I do apologise. The 43 has developed a philosophy of non-attachment.” He began unbuttoning the greatcoat, his fingers stiff. “Also I slept in Threadneedle Street, and I woke up late because for once I was warm. I’m told that’s the cold, actually. The warm feeling. It’s the last thing that happens.”

She looked at him. He looked back. It was the kind of joke he made, and it was not a joke.

“I thought you had a bed at Mile End this week.”

“I did. Then somebody’s boyfriend arrived with views on the allocation process.” He hung the coat on the hook by the radiator, where it steamed and smelt of wet dog and old money. “Is there tea, or has the economy collapsed?”

“The economy,” said Ruth, “is fundamentally resilient.”

“Christ. Pass me a sugar, then.”

She made it herself, black, three sugars, and took it to him at the end table, and sat opposite him for a minute, which she was not supposed to do. He held the cup in both hands, under his chin. His fingers were white at the tips. She wanted, absurdly, to take them in hers and rub them. She did not. There were rules, and she had written some of them.

“Threadneedle Street,” she said.

“There’s a pleasing irony in it, sleeping on the steps of the lender of last resort.”

“Jack.”

“I know.”

“The winter shelter opens in seven weeks. If you can hold on—”

“I can hold on.” He set the cup down and looked at her, really looked, in the way he did sometimes that she found both flattering and faintly unsettling, as though he were reading a document she didn’t know she had written. “You’re tired. Is it a man?”

“It’s the urn,” said Ruth. “It’s temperamental.”

He smiled, and let it go, which was one of the things she liked about him.

At eleven, Graham gathered them all in the staff room, a former vestry with a kettle, a crucifix nobody had had the heart to take down and a poster about bed bugs. Graham Pell had been a vicar for twenty years in Lewisham before deciding that God was more reliably to be found in a soup ladle than a pulpit: tall, stooped, bald, with a grey cardigan done up on the wrong buttons, and almost vibrating.

“Right,” he said. “Right. I’m not going to make a speech.”

“Thank God,” said Kemi.

“Quite. Well. Thank Him anyway.” He beamed at them. “As you know, we’ve been looking for a headline sponsor for the Winter Gala. The foundation that used to give us the forty thousand for the clinic has had what they described to me as a strategic refocus, which I think means they’ve discovered climate. I had begun to think we might have to do the gala in the church hall with a raffle and Mags’s rum cake.”

“Nothing wrong with my rum cake,” said Mags.

“Nothing at all, Mags. But we won’t need it. We have a sponsor.” He looked down at the paper in his hand. “Seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Over three years. Plus the full cost of the gala itself, at Vintners’ Hall, on the eleventh of December.”

There was a silence, and then Kemi screamed, and Tony from outreach said fuck me, Graham, and Graham did not tell him off. One of the Quaker volunteers began, quietly, to cry.

Ruth sat still, watching the room from a few feet above it, the way she had at the end of long nights on a deal, when everyone else was cheering a signing and she was already thinking about the conditions precedent.

“Who?” she said. “Who’s giving us three-quarters of a million pounds?”

“Oh, it’s a hedge fund, actually, I know, I know.” Graham held up a hand to forestall objections nobody had made. “The man who came down last month, the one who got Stan into the Standard. They announced they’d be backing a homeless charity, but I didn’t want to say a word until the figure was signed. And he couldn’t have been more decent. Irish. Warm.” He riffled the papers. “Saturn Capital. They’ve asked whether he might host the evening. Finn Corrigan, his name is. Lovely man.”

Ruth did not hear the next minute clearly. Graham was talking about table plans and a jazz band and the Bishop of Southwark. She was aware of the poster about bed bugs, which said THEY ARE NOT A SIGN OF DIRT. She was aware that he had been here. Here, in the crypt, last month, on one of her days off; that the others had all been talking about a man from the City with a photographer, and she had not asked his name. That he had walked down the area steps she mopped every morning and stood under the memorial to the parish dead and looked round the room.

He knew she worked here. He must know. It was on the website. Her name, her photograph. Ruth Ashdown, Senior Caseworker.

“And one more thing,” Graham was saying, “and this one’s for you, Ruth. They’d love to have someone speak. Someone with lived experience. A story of hope. I immediately thought of your Jack.”

Everyone turned to look at her.

“My Jack,” said Ruth.

“He’s so articulate. And he’s got that—” Graham waved a hand. “That bearing. People would listen to him. Would you ask him? Only if you think it’d be good for him.”

She went to the toilets afterwards and sat on the closed lid of the end cubicle with her forehead against the partition for twelve minutes, which was eight more than she was allowed. Somebody had written on the back of the door, in biro, GOD IS LOVE and underneath it, in a different hand, AND RENT IS DUE. Her heart was going like a bird against a window.

She could go to Graham now and tell him. Tell him what, though? That the lovely Irishman had made sixty million pounds by sleeping with her? She could see Graham’s face trying to be kind about it, and behind the kindness, the arithmetic. Seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds. The clinic for three years. The outreach van. The women’s night. Against a caseworker’s bitterness about an old affair.

She could resign again.

Or she could stay. She could stand in Vintners’ Hall on the eleventh of December in the one good dress she had kept from before, and she could look Finn Corrigan in his lovely, laughing eyes, and she could watch him see her.

She found, with a sort of horror, that her pulse had changed. That the bird had stopped flinging itself at the glass and had begun to do something else, something slower, that she recognised. She had felt it in a cocktail bar off Bishopsgate on a rainy Wednesday three years ago.

She washed her face with cold water and went back out into the crypt.

Jack was still at the end table by the radiator, the newspaper folded into a neat rectangle, doing the crossword with a betting-shop biro. He looked up as she sat.

“You’ve been crying,” he said.

“I’ve been in the loo.”

“In my experience those aren’t mutually exclusive.” He put the biro down. “What is it?”

She told him about the gala, and that they wanted someone to speak, and Graham had thought of him.

Something went across Jack’s face that she could not read: pride, perhaps, or fear, or the memory of a time when people had asked him to speak and had listened.

“Vintners’ Hall,” he said slowly. “Christ. I used to go to dinners there. I sat next to the Governor once. Of the Bank. We talked about pheasants.”

“You don’t have to. There’ll be drink on every table.”

“There’s drink on every table in London, Ruth.” He looked at the folded newspaper. “The ones who pour it down the sink are the ones you find in the offie by teatime. Only bottle worth trusting yourself with is the one you can see from where you sit.” Then he smiled. “No. I’d like to. It would be good for me. Isn’t that what we say? It would be good for you, Jack.” He turned the biro over in his fingers. “Who’s paying for the canapés?”

“Some hedge fund,” said Ruth.

“Ha. Of course it is. They all are.” He shook his head, amused, and went back to his crossword. “Seven across,” he said. “Ring-bearer who devoured his children (6). That’s not even cryptic. That’s an insult.” He wrote it in, in neat capitals, and turned the paper so she could see. “My old shop was named after him, would you believe. The founder thought it was terribly witty. Something to do with compounding.”

Ruth looked at the six letters in the little white squares.

“Your old shop,” she said.

“Long time ago.” He laid the biro across the folded paper, square to the edge. “Another life. Different teeth.”

She should have told him then. Jack, the sponsor is. Four words. She looked at his hands, which had stopped shaking, and at the gaffer tape on the elbows of the coat steaming on its hook, and she thought about Vintners’ Hall, and about a man in a navy suit turning at the sound of an old colleague’s voice. And she found that the slow pulse under the bird had not gone away at all. It had simply sat down to wait.

She did not tell him which hedge fund. She told herself she would tell him tomorrow. Afterwards, of all the things she would have to forgive herself for, that was the one she kept coming back to.