Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (13 page)

All that was asked was that I keep my award from public notice. And I should pay 10 per cent of my winnings to an agent. (No change there.) An attached form made it a simple matter to pass on the relevant banking details.

Before I could trouser this first rattle of Spanish doubloons and plot my retirement to the coast, watching the horizon, doing a little painting, there was another download of Iberian largesse. This time the El Gordo sweepstake had drawn a ticket, which once again I had not been obliged to purchase. Here was a new form of gambling, every one a winner. A way, after the urban renewal of the Barcelona Olympics, to foster a climate of European goodwill, by offering funds to difficult authors, and disguising cultural awards as lottery triumphs. Over in Madrid, a favourite city of mine, last seen at the age of twenty, they recognized quality when they saw it. How discreet of them to avoid vulgar prize-giving ceremonies, for which, in any case, I had permanently disqualified myself by blundering into a form of writing that was neither fiction nor non-fiction.

This time it was
SIX HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN THOUSAND EIGHT HUNDRED AND TEN EUROS.
It was mounting up nicely. The conditions were the same, keep it buttoned, 10 per cent to the agent. I’d soon have enough to buy a flat in one of the new towers overlooking the site of Chobham Farm. Contracts were on the point of exchange when Lotería Primitiva came back to top up the pot – only three exclamation marks after the
CONGRATULATIONS!!!
– with another tidy lump:
EIGHT HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN THOUSAND EIGHT HUNDRED AND TEN POUNDS ONLY
.
Maybe they’d mistaken my failure to activate my claim for a prejudice against euros.

And this was far from the end of my winning streak. I began to think that I was personally responsible for the credit crunch, by mopping up all the global slush funds, the shiny trinkets hidden in hedges. I was operating at a Bishopsgate-bonus level. I should be out there, propping up the secondary economy of Shoreditch by sniffing, snorting, guzzling, shoving wads of readies into the vestigial underwear of lap dancers. Even the formerly staid
Reader’s Digest
– did you know they operated a Finance Department? – got in on the act. Noble of them, I thought, given our differences over style and content.

I’m still waiting for that orange envelope. But as the cheapskates were only offering five grand, who cares?

The really creepy stuff kicked in when total strangers started paying cheques into my apparently secure account. £4,500. £4,300. £9,500. £4,900. And £9,500 again. By the close of play on 5 January 2009, I was £32,700 to the good. A gesture, perhaps, from an unknown well-wisher in response to the difficulties surrounding the launch of my new book,
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire
? The bulk of my readership, so I understand, consists of Hackney-born sentimentalists exiled to the north and the far west. A pretty cover qualified this item as a suitable present, given by new London Fielders, so that old folk can write to let me know where I got it wrong.

Who was the mysterious Mr N. Lardja? A man who felt a compulsion, several times a day, to fill in a credit slip. Was he suffering from some form of dementia, memory-wipe? An unfortunate condition causing him to donate substantial amounts to a person he had never met, at regular intervals, as he went about his business. ‘Another coffee, sir?’ ‘Just a minute, while I find my chequebook. Time to give old Sinclair his dibs.’

And what of Mr C. Lai? With his blatantly coded name:
see lie
. Did they know each other? Had I been elected to a society so secret no member would ever learn the identity of any other? Was Mr Lai in the employ of Dr Fu Manchu?

The telephone, interrupting my soap-opera reverie, broke the spell. The HSBC bank security division wanted to query the rush of blood that had me spraying cheques out, as wildly as Messrs Lardja and Lai, to a gentleman whose name rang no bells. My security code meant nothing. My mother’s maiden name, my special place? Familiar knowledge to the fellowship of the Lai. I don’t use internet banking, but that was no protection. I was haemorrhaging money I didn’t have. By a curious coincidence, hinting at psychic powers on the part of the thieves, payment for the sale of my archive to an American university had just come in. And now, before I could access a penny, had gone out again like the tide. The large cheques could be blocked, but they’d started modestly with fifty. And then a few hundred. And a few hundred again. Those sums had gone and would have to be reclaimed. In one day, they’d cleared £37,000. Which was never there and which left me staring at a black hole as fantastic as the promises of the Spanish lottery.

My account was being used as a clearing house for intricate drug-connected deals. When I arrived at the bank and found an actual person to talk to, in one of those comfortable little partitioned areas, she was relaxed about the whole affair. It was, so the lady admitted, a commonplace. Happens all the time. But especially in the early part of the year, after Christmas. There is no such thing as money any more, as we once knew it. The metaphor has collapsed: anachronistic as a DeLorean car. Money has moved away from an Adam Smith or a Maynard Keynes cod-scientific rigour to a dopey, psychedelic soap bubble. We should think of the Wall Street jackals, the Lea Valley visionaries, as poets of a new unreality, where anything is everything. The virtual world has been carved up between accountants and curators, both of whom recognized right away that content is finished and contempt is the tool of the times. Contempt for truth. Contempt for place. Contempt for the human animal. The post-ironic explanation, the slick pitch, the masterly deployment of statistics, the belated apology: that’s what it’s about. Accountancy, I told myself, is what I’ve been doing all along; a form that is neither fiction nor fact. An unacknowledged hybrid medium. Collaboration between author and invigilator. Signed off when you pay that meaningless cheque (plus interest). Maintaining an in-credit account was fiscal innocence of the worst kind, an open invitation to online scavengers in rented Leytonstone rooms, the new invisibles who spend their days picking over the landfill dunes of cyberspace.

I interviewed a media-savvy architect in his riverside studio. He doodled as he spoke: towers, floating rings like a manifestation of the hoops of smoke he puffed as he whaled a French cigarette in three drags. I recorded his riff.

The Olympic Park will be a disaster. The press are so mealy-mouthed. Everyone knows when it’s all done we’ll have a bill of at least twentybillion. The starting figure means nothing at all. But the civil servants are right behind it. They announce budgets that are acceptable to the politicians, budgets that receive full political backing. They have no bearing on the
truth at all. They say, ‘We can always blame it on the architects and the planners.’ Which is what they always do.

It’s the same with all grand projects. I was invited into the competition for Tate Modern. At that time the budget was eight million. I did ask the question: ‘If you just make the thing watertight, clean up the brickwork, get rid of the crap inside, repair the windows, so you’ve got bare walls and a
big shell, how much would that be?’ They said, ‘Two to three million.’ I thought, ‘Christ, it’s got to be ten at least.’ No one knows the true budget, but I have it on reliable authority that it was in excess of 140 million.

The world of grand-project accountancy is completely unreal, figures are just floated. If you tell the truth you won’t get the job. Sadly, the public sector is the worst. Why did we make such a mess of Wembley? The Emirates Stadium is a much more intriguing structure. Much more lively. If we accept that we need a new athletics stadium, and Crystal Palace is difficult to get to and past its sell-by date, let’s do it properly.

Behind the Olympic Park, whatever anyone says, are the architects HOK. They were responsible for Sydney. They got the job by saying they would fund it themselves. They are a huge organization. They put in additional seats. They get revenue from the additional seats and they take it away. They make a lot of money. And they reduce the risk.

So what happens here? They are going to remove part of the structure of the Olympic Stadium. We’re not going to have a proper stadium as legacy. It’s got nothing to do with architectural quality. HOK specialize in stadia. They will do a deal with finance. No other architect would do that.

The closer you get to the Stratford construction site, the more money, as civilians understand it, loses its meaning. I think that what they are actually building, in those tunnels and bunkers, deep inside the dangerous, unexploded-ordnance-infested clay is a gigantic particle accelerator like the facility at CERN in Switzerland. Why else would they need to curtain the landscape in blue plywood? To employ regiments of Gurkhas? My Lea Valley string theory, attempting to reconcile quantum mechanics and relativity, blunders into previously unsuspected dimensions, which include multiverses of insecure investment, global terror websites and a wilderness of counterfactual theology. Cutting-edge physics cohabits with Mayan 2012 endgame prophecies to deliver a new economics. The more you owe the richer you are: we understand that perfectly well. But the more you owe, the more you fuck up, the more you will be given? They call this ‘anomaly cancellation’. In other words, if a flaw can be described, wipe it out. Sue the shit out of anybody who complains about radioactive dust drifting over their pristine estates. And, if the worst comes to the worst, establish a committee to elect another committee to draw up a report, to be evaluated by government-appointed experts, before being binned by the incoming administration, because it is nothing to do with them. Improving the image of construction. Public autopsies for Iron Age bogmen dug from the peat.

I was uneasy about a few thousand pounds coming and going from my bank account, the grand-project managers were made of sterner stuff. The HSBC associate who dealt with the fraud I had experienced as casually, more casually, than an overdraft exceeded by a fiver, explained that the Olympics had set off a deluge of cybercrime. A notion supported in an article by Mark Prigg in the
Standard.
Prigg alluded to a plethora of websites punting premature souvenirs, tickets for seats that would never exist. You could buy, if you were sufficiently deluded, a ‘virtual Olympic torch’. Graham Cluley, of the online security firm Sophos, is reported as saying: ‘The 2012 Games is going to attract a lot of criminal attention. There is going to be an explosion in junk mail and scams.’

Things are not as bad as they might be. Given the regularity of postal strikes and the mountainous backlog to be cleared, the junk mail won’t get through. And the scams will not come close to the sanctioned disappearances and escalating budgets of the Olympic Park developers. The LDA, with a generous allowance to buy up land from those about to be evicted from the Lower Lea Valley, managed to mislay £100 million. The managers responsible for closing down the allotments will now take an extended gardening leave. Forensic accountants expected an overspend of £32 million, but discovered that the figure had crept up by almost five times that amount. ‘There has been no evidence of fraud, just mismanagement.’ Another cancelled anomaly, they said, to be made good when land is flogged off after the Games.

Meanwhile, the survivalist economics I had practised from those days as a labourer at Chobham Farm in the early 1970s were drawing to a close. The old freelance life of the Lea fringe boroughs was over. Rubbing along on fees from talks or readings, up and down the country, was no longer practicable. When my wife took charge of chasing outstanding invoices, she discovered a stack of seventeen, going back over six months. One government-funded arts institution kept a promise of £100 in play from March to October: emails were ignored, calls vanished into answering machines and were never returned. The finance department has no contact with the creatives who commission work and who move on to another gig as soon as your piece is safely delivered. Eventually, it was admitted that the cheque had gone out: to the wrong person. No payment was possible, naturally, until the fee was returned. We learnt about new accounting systems with teething troubles, mislaid paperwork, files that couldn’t be downloaded. We shipped off passport photographs, sworn affidavits, photocopies of petrol receipts. Articles solicited in the most extravagant terms back in February were an embarrassment to all parties when they were submitted, as required, in December.

As the postal service imploded, the old ‘cheque’s in the post’ excuse became a fact of life. Nothing made it on to the mat other than junk mail, free council propaganda (funded from the rates), invitations to long-concluded art shows and gilt-edged stiffies from such as Debrett’s: who wanted my company at a wine tasting preceded by a talk on trust and estate planning. ‘The aim of this service is quite simple: to provide authoritative advice on matters of wealth protection and innovative ways to mitigate tax.’ After which, we would sit down for a performance of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto and Mussorgsky’s
Pictures at an Exhibition.

I was otherwise engaged. In the Hackney twilight I was taking my payment for council tax, along with the usual blustering red-letter bills and summonses, to the new multimillion-pound offices, around the back of the white-stone edifice on Mare Street. Land deals in Shoreditch, development packages in Dalston Lane: the bloated cash cow was milked straight into the civic bucket. Stylish new premises, like an upmarket betting shop, for the black-suits, the clipboard bureaucrats with the razor-cut hair. The high-heel smokers with badges. But nobody, it seemed, was authorized to deal with something as inconvenient as actual payment.