Capital

time they open their mouths.
    The City of London is one of the few places in which this tyranny of the mediocre, the mean, the average, the banal, the ordinary, the complacent, is challenged. The City is one of the few places in which you are allowed to be extraordinary. No – it was better than that. The City is one of the only places in which you are invited to demonstrate that you are extraordinary. It did not matter what you claimed; claiming to be this or that meant nothing. Claiming has no effect. You have to show it.
    This is what Roger’s deputy was thinking about as he rode the train, clunketa clunketa, out to his parents’ house in Godalming. The early spring sun was out and it was airless and warm inside the carriage. Mark sat in first class; he didn’t have a first-class ticket, but knew from experience that on this fifty-minute journey on a Sunday, no one would check. His BlackBerry was on the table in front of him; the heath landscape of Surrey, its deceptive wildness and bleakness, was passing the window. It was Sunday, and he was going home for that immersion in mediocrity, convention, and stifling bourgeois horror known as ‘Sunday lunch’. This was something he ‘had to’ do once a month. On these occasions Mark would either dress down or dress up. Last time he had worn ripped jeans and a T-shirt with what he was qualified to know was a semen stain on the lower left side. Today he wore a £1,500 suit with a very expensive shirt and even more expensive trainers. If he was very, very lucky, this might prompt his mother to say ‘You look nice, dear’ in her wavering, uncertain voice.
    There was a tumult in Mark; there always had been. There was a panic or emptiness inside him, a too-weak sense of who he actually was. His parents were mild people, not strong, and his father had gone broke in the Tory recession of the early nineties, just as Mark was hitting puberty. His mother had just had another child, a daughter, which did not help. He lost confidence in his parents just as they lost confidence in themselves; he became angry and grew full of the certainty that his mother and father were frauds, were pathetic, were imitating people they were not; were not fully alive, not authentic. So he saw through them just as he was starting to wonder who he was himself, and the net result was that he grew up a typical angry suburban teenager. But with Mark, the confusions and uncertainties of adolescence had never really gone away. He did not let go of his fury at his parents for being nothing-special, and his reaction to that was to cling very firmly on to the idea that he was a special being, cut off from other people. He was so frightened of being ordinary that he had convinced himself he was not the same as anyone else. Mark had never told anyone else this, but Mark knew that he was extraordinary; he felt this knowledge deep within himself.
    This for Mark was a certainty: his being had a quality in it which other people did not have in theirs. And he worked in one of the only places in modern Britain in which it was acceptable to demonstrate your superiority; one of the few areas in which doing better than other people was the whole point. Everything should be perfect. And yet – Mark prided himself on never lying to himself – everything was not perfect. He was stuck in a job in which his abilities were not acknowledged, working for a boss who, in Mark’s considered view, was a throwback or hangover from how things used to be, a pointlessly tall, contentlessly smooth public-school twat, a bluffer and chancer and lightweight, doing a job which Mark could do a thousand times better. Roger was good at managing upwards – he must be, because he was head of department, and he hadn’t been sacked, which had to mean that something was going on out of sight. The only aspect of this Mark saw directly was that Roger could kiss Lothar’s arse as if he had a genuine taste for it. Apart from that he was a waste of space, and it was clear to Mark that Roger had only the sketchiest understanding of how the detailed mathematics of their trading worked. He was technically blank in a job that was all about technical things. That was unforgivable.
    Mark should not lie to himself – a great man did not lie to himself. Roger was a dickhead and he, Mark, was a genius. He was rotting away as Roger’s deputy, because Roger would not give him full credit, and the reason Roger wouldn’t give him full credit was