Chapter 12

Morning was heralded by a cacophony of platform announcements, the flutter of circling pigeons and the hiss of the python chatting to the struthiomimus. I looked across the tiled floor at Beta lying spread across her seat, head resting on her arm and eyes that were wide open and staring at me.

"I thought you were never going to wake up!" she said with a mocking smile. She swung her body round, ran her fingers through the long tangles of her green hair and rested her feet on the floor. "It's getting ever so much busier now!"

Although in the tedious hours of the night, I had longed for morning to arrive while listening to Beta's gentle breathing and the distant sound of unidentifiable machines, the seat now had never seemed more comfortable nor the prospect of continued sleep more welcoming. Nevertheless I prised open my eyes and tried to focus more clearly in the bright neon light that had never dimmed at all, although there was enough natural light streaming through the windows for it to be superfluous.

"What do we do now?"

"Let's see more of the City!" announced Beta jumping up and frowning at my recumbent figure.

My tongue tasted the sour rawness of my mouth and my fingers carefully detached small grains from the corner of my eyes, while just behind my forehead a persistent thud was commanding me back to sleep. However, I knew there was no prospect of that, regarding the commuters sitting around with their business suits and rolled umbrellas. I followed Beta as she pushed open the glass door to the waiting room and confronted a greater density of people running backwards and forwards than I had ever seen before. I was pressed against the wall by this whirl of activity, anxious of losing sight of Beta who strode fearlessly ahead.

The jostling flow of commuters, - many no doubt coming from the Suburbs, -marched forward in determined haste towards the signposted underground stations and bus stops. Watches were glanced at, newspapers tucked under arms, tickets stuffed back into wallets and eyes set dead ahead with contempt for all distraction. Beta preceded me through the tall portals of the railway station, past newspaper vendors yelling in staggered unison "Latest Election News!" and "Election Latest!" I dashed after her and caught up with her outside where she stood unabashed and unembarrassed staring around her.

The City was all that I'd imagined it being and more. All around and towering high above were the tallest buildings I could imagine. A narrow corridor of blue sky ran parallel to the road below. People bustled by in two streams of motion on the wide pavements, separated by a slow, nearly stationary, procession of buses, taxis, lorries and cars. Above and passing between and through the tall buildings were monorail tracks from which trains were hanging and standing commuters stared at the pavements below. At street level, shop windows were displaying clothes, electrical goods, robotics, leisure facilities, foreign holidays, luxury lets and anything else that someone with substantially more money than I could afford. Dotting the pavement were advertising boards, bus-stops, litter bins and traffic lights.

"I just can't believe it! I just can't believe it!" uttered Beta again and again as she surveyed the scenery. "And this is just a tiny corner of the City! How can there be so much? So many! So ... oops!" A pair of diatrymas jostled past her and caused her to fall forward slightly. I caught her by the arm before she was trampled underfoot.

"Let's get out of here," I suggested.

"Where to?"

"Anywhere. Somewhere not by the station. It's bound to be busy here." I looked at a signpost illuminated by a stick figure with a purposeful stride. "How about Her Maphrodite's Royal Palace?"

Beta agreed. We followed a stream of commuters, at the same rapid pace, dodging the feet of the odd beggar or other figure sprawled out in front of the shops, and constantly in danger of being knocked down and under the crowd ourselves. All we could see, smell or hear were the backs of commuters ahead of us and the fumes and noise of the impatient traffic.

Eventually, the push of the crowd lessened and we were in a much quieter area adorned by older but no less splendid buildings. The enormous skyscrapers and attendant monorails were supplanted by palaces and town houses circumscribed by high walls, towering railings and tall trees.

"Let's stop!" commanded Beta breathlessly, pausing by an elm tree and a pair of peacocks chatting to a couple of anacondas. She gazed through the railings of a majestic building guarded by soldiers in blue uniforms and bearskin hats, who were marching with eccentrically held rifles. As they approached each other from opposing directions they performed a pantomime with their rifles, spun around and marched back in the direction from which they had come.

Most of the people in this district were carrying cameras and wearing tee-shirts emblazoned with such words as I © The City. The building that was the object of their attention and the focus of their cameras was an architectural montage of styles from every period imaginable. Corinthian arches, Palladian pillars, round domes and grandiose glass windows framed by magnificent velvet curtains. All of this was beyond high golden railings, forbidding guards, several furlongs of concrete and ornate lawn, and a towering row of flag staffs with the blue, red and green standards of several nations waving slightly in the breeze.

"Doesn't this make you feel proud to belong to this country?" commented one of the pair of peacocks standing by us, a videocamera strapped around his neck. "Don't you just feel awed by it all?"

"It's very impressive!" admitted Beta. "Do you think Her Maphrodite might be in residence?"

"On the day of a General Election? Of course!" enthused the peacock. "Someone's got to be on hand to give the new Prime Minister constitutional authority. Where would we be without Her Maphrodite? It just makes my feathers preen!" He splayed out his orange-eyed feathers. "I just feel sorry for foreigners. They are so deprived. They don't have a monarch to look up to as we do. No wonder they envy us so much and clamour to immigrate in such vast numbers!"

"Is it possible to approach any closer?" wondered Beta, grasping the railings in her hands.

"For the likes of us, of course not! Royalty have to stay apart from the mass of ordinary people. It wouldn't do to mix their blue blood with the debased genes of commoners! They're over there. And we're over here. And that's the way it has to be!"

"I see," contemplated Beta. "Are they really so much better than us?"

"Someone has to be. And royalty have more entitlement than anyone else!"

The peacocks returned to their serpentine companions who were wrapping themselves around an ash tree and lifting themselves as high as they could to get a better view of the palace grounds and the stiffly marching soldiers. Beta and I stood against the cold iron bars with the crush of tourists behind us and the broad empty space ahead, in which the soldiers performed their unchanging rituals and the flags gently fluttered.

We left the palace and the tourists who, even this early in the morning, were amassing in increasing numbers to glimpse at this world of privilege. We drifted into a precinct of magnificent shops where people in fur coats, jewellery, pearls and gold watches strolled by in total indifference to the majority of the population who were admiring goods they could never afford through massively thick plate glass windows. I certainly couldn't afford the ten thousand guinea suits, the ten million guinea watches, the five hundred guinea silk ties, the four hundred guinea packages of caviar, chocolates or game fowl, the cars in excess of two million guineas and quite modest portraits at several hundreds of millions of guineas. These numbers, with their long string of zeroes, were shocking to me, but even more so to Beta.

"Even the newspapers cost more than five guineas!" she exclaimed. "In the Village, a newspaper costs less than a groat! How can people afford them?"

"I imagine they must earn more money in the City," I remarked, but still awed at the cost of a bar of chocolate at three guineas, a packet of cigarettes at thirty guineas and cassettes at nearly two hundred guineas.

"How much do you have to earn to be able to afford what some of these people have!" Beta exclaimed, indicating some rather fat men in opulent and ostentatious clothes. One man was smoking from a cigar nearly as long as his forearm and disdainfully flicked ash over a boa constrictor sitting by a cardboard sign which read in scrawling biro: Cold & Hungry! Please Help! The snake squirmed to avoid the ash. "Did you see how much one of those fur coats cost? It would feed the Village for hundreds of years! Where does all this wealth come from?"

The answer to Beta's question was perhaps provided after we had walked beyond the expensive shops; the hotels guarded by smart looking security guards in anachronistic uniforms; the Rolls-Royces, Bentleys and golden carriages parked outside lavish buildings; and the women sporting luxurious fur coats and snakeskin handbags. Tall buildings reappeared, but taller than ever: marble, concrete and glass towering higher and higher. At the top, eagles and condors circled on the up-draughts from the slow-moving traffic below. The buildings had large plaques outside, often set in small grass plots adorned by statues of both modern and antique origin. The names gave me no doubt that this was where in the City there was most wealth: the Country and City First Agricultural Bank, the National & Provincial Assurance Society and the Bank of the New Canine Republics. Each building housed a bank, an insurance company, an investment group or other financial institution. Although only the reflection of other buildings could be seen through the glass windows, I imagined rows upon rows of clerks and computer screens, frantically ringing telephones and stock brokers frenziedly shouting at each other as trillions of guineas were exchanged across international time zones and between other financial centres. Beta was very impressed by my suppositions.

"I've just never thought about money like that before!" she remarked, gawking up at the anonymous windows on the highest windows. "Are you saying that these buildings contain trillions of guineas of money? That must take up an awful amount of space unless they're stored in very large denominations. Perhaps they have billion guinea notes. That would be an awful lot of 0s! Would that be nine? Or twelve?"

"I don't think it's actually stored as money," I explained further. "It's nominal rather than actual money. I think it's really just stored as data on computers. The trading is in the form of digits shifting up and down as credit is moved from one account to another."

"What's the point of that? Why can't they just leave it where it is?"

"It's to make profit. If the money moves about a lot it somehow becomes more on the way. I don't know how that works. I think the money is invested into businesses and so on..."

"So, when my father borrowed ten shillings from the bank to buy a new donkey, and paid back a shilling a month for a year that makes the bank profit. I can see that. So they must loan out an awful amount of money. It's a wonder they have any left!"

"I don't think that's the only way that money accrues profit though," I remarked watching a couple of magpies in business suits trot up the steps into the Two Brothers Insurance Company building. "I think that some of it is made from buying things at one price and selling them again at another price. There's a lot of profit to be made if the volumes of the sale are particularly huge. If you buy a billion guineas of pig iron and sell it at a profit of 0.1 % you make a profit of a million guineas. Whereas if you bought only ten guineas of pig iron and sold it at the same profit then you'd only make 2¼d. Hardly worth the effort!"

"Do you mean they've got a billion guineas worth of pig iron in these buildings? No wonder they're so big! I can't begin to imagine how heavy all that would be."

"It's not that they've actually got all the pig iron they buy. It's just a transaction done by computer. The people who trade in pig iron probably never see any at all. They also trade in the anticipated values of things in the future, promises to pay by governments that no longer exist, the likelihood of things happening or not happening, the relative differences between the value of money in one part of the world and another, or anything that will part people from money."

"That sounds like nonsense to me!" sniffed Beta. "You say that all this wealth is made from things that may or may not exist now or in the future, which you probably wouldn't really want anyway, and is only stored as electrical or magnetic impulses on enormous computers. What's that got to do with the real world? How does all that give you food to eat or clothes to wear?" She gazed at the shadows of the buildings on each other, and the walkways hundreds of yards above where more besuited people were walking above our heads. "Then why do they need such enormous buildings?"

We strolled on through the streets, which were extremely busy, even now long after most people had arrived at work, with employees rushing in and out of tall buildings clutching files, brochures and documents under their arms or between their teeth. There were bowler hats, striped shirts, braces, dress-suits and stilettos jostling past us on all species of worker, all entirely intent on their destination. The eyes were always fixed ahead and regarded us only as obstacles to be sidestepped.

"How many banks are there?" Beta wondered as we paused to let two vultures dash by in urgent conversation, tiny bowler hats covering their bald heads and umbrellas tucked under their wings.

"Not that many really!" remarked a tall pigeon about our size who was standing nearby and pecking at a bag of seeds he supported in a wing. "I'm sorry to interrupt your conversation, but I just couldn't help overhearing you. All this ridiculous wealth: trillions and zillions of it in less than a cubic mile of the City. It's enough to make you spit! What do they want so much of it for? And what is it for but to build even more of these enormous buildings, push up the land rental to extremes you just can't comprehend, and push out all the honest hard-working Citizens like me who will never ever see the smallest iota of this wealth. And where are we to go? The East End slums? The distant Suburbs? Have you any idea how expensive rent is in the City?"

"None at all," I admitted, as we huddled against the Commercial & Lambdeth Union & Friendly Society to avoid being stampeded under a rush of shirt-sleeved young men led by a couple of hinnying hyenas in psychedelic braces. "More than in the Suburbs I imagine."

"You'll be lucky to get much more than a room the size of a toilet cubicle for less than five thousand guineas a week. That's a week! And how many people living in the City earn the sort of money they can afford that kind of expense? I consider myself fortunate to take home just enough to get by. There are plenty whose earnings are less than six digits."

"That's still an awful lot!" gasped Beta.

The pigeon glanced at Beta. "You would say that! I guess you must come from the Country. You have coins smaller than a crown there I believe. And you can even buy things with them! But to many working in this financial district, like those noisy louts who just passed by, anything less than nine digits is considered an admission of failure. For them it's just money, money, money. And what do they spend it on? Champagne. Gambling. Fast cars. What do you think of that?"

"I suppose if I had a lot of money like that there would be quite a few frivolous things I'd like to buy," mused Beta. "It'd be quite nice to have more money than I need."

"It certainly would be!" chirped the pigeon enviously. "I would just love to know that my salary cheque would see me through the month comfortably, with no risk of my bank balance going into the red! But what makes it so unfair - so terribly and utterly unfair - is that all that money which piles up as a result of all this financial wizardry and wheeling and dealing eventually goes to shareholders who haven't contributed anything to this activity but capital. Capital, moreover, that they have mostly just inherited. Only those who already have obscene quantities of wealth can invest money and make money."

"Is that how it works?" Beta wondered. "Rich people put in a lot of money and then get a lot more out."

"Essentially, yes. And there's a kind of sliding scale. The more you already have the more you're going to make."

"So..." Beta reflected, "the rich get richer and richer. What about people who're not rich? Don't they get richer too?"

"Oh, I wouldn't think so for one minute! These financial institutions aren't working in the interests of the poor. Why should they?"

"If there's only so much wealth in the world and more of it is going to richer people, then there must be a drain from somewhere else," I remarked.

"Only if there's only a fixed amount of wealth in the world," the pigeon replied. "All this prosperity is based on the belief that the world's wealth will just go on growing for ever and ever. And because of that, people say that it isn't just the rich who benefit. Everyone else does as well."

"That sounds silly!" Beta pointed out. "How can things just keep growing forever? Surely there must be a point at which it just can't grow any more. And then what happens? Do the rich continue to get richer and everyone else gets poorer to finance them? Do the things which used to make money stop making so much money in future? And can't it all go into reverse? Maybe all these buildings will just crumble into the ground and we've used up all the world's resources?"

"I don't know. I'm not an economist. I just live here."

The streets of the financial district eventually gave way to an area of shops, restaurants and cafés at the foot of buildings that still towered above us, but seemed less remote and threatening. The hustle and bustle eased, but there was still the ubiquitous roar of traffic. By now, like everyone else, we were no longer really seeing the people we passed by. Their very numbers had somehow robbed them of personality.

Even though it was still some time till midday, diners were greedily eating in the restaurants and cafés. We peered through the window of a restaurant to see two pigs facing each other over a table loaded with plates of the most exotic and rare foods which they shovelled into their mouths with a constant unbroken rhythm. A waiter approached and poured them each a glass of wine which they picked up in their trotters and drank immediately in one mouthful, so requiring a further refill. One of the pigs noticed us and made no attempt to avert his gaze. His jaws clumped again and again on a sinuous trail of meat which dangled out of his mouth while rich sauces dribbled down the dark pink folds of his chin and mixed in the kaleidoscope of stains on the cloth table napkin tucked into the collar of his striped shirt.

"There's enough food there to feed my Village for a month!" gasped Beta. "How can they eat so much? There must be much much more food than they could possibly need!"

The pig lost interest in us and returned to his food with relish, plunging his knife and fork deep into its entrails. His companion had not once paused his gorging, but the likelihood of him finishing before his companion was lessened by the waiter bringing in more plates of food. Looking at so much food awakened Beta's appetite, so we wandered past restaurants selling meals at thousands of guineas a head until we found a small, comparatively inexpensive café where a cup of coffee cost less than ten guineas. The décor of the café matched the relative cost of the coffee, with only a few very uncomfortable wooden stools lined along a small counter facing onto the street outside. I paid for two coffees with several grimy pound notes which the anaconda serving was initially reluctant to accept, while Beta reserved two seats for us just next to a pair of teenage boys and a couple of small minotaurs. I lifted myself up onto the stool and looked through the plate glass window, past writing in Cyrillic and Arabic, to the never-ceasing crush of pedestrians outside. It was somehow relaxing to watch this world go by, knowing that, temporarily at least, we were not a part of it. The coffee however didn't taste at all pleasant and was not especially warm. The addition of tasteless milk from the sachet or sugar cubes in paper covers did nothing to improve the taste nor the temperature.

"What do you think of the City?" I asked, putting down the cup and trying to ignore its taste. "Is it all that you expected?"

"There does seem to be an awful lot of it!" she remarked. "Much more than I thought. Anna was right. The City does make Lambdeth seem terribly provincial. And I thought that was big enough. Everyone seems to be terribly busy. Dashing around with some mysterious purpose."

"Not everybody!" I commented, pointing at a pair of ground sloths who were slumped over a table, idly peering at tabloid newspapers with the headlines Reds Do Better than Expected and Her Maphrodite's Aunt Eats Hamsters. Beta turned her head round, a curtain of hair flopping down to her knees.

"Those two don't look busy either," she said indicating a couple of crocodiles who were sitting impassively, barely even blinking, with full but probably cold cups of tea on the table in front of them. It was difficult to believe that they were in fact real living people, but it seemed implausible that anyone would bring in two stuffed models and set them there. "I suppose not everyone in the City has a lot to do."