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year.
    ‘Risk-free risk. Limited downside. That’s what we pay you for, Freebie. Have you shared it with the team?’
    He thinks there’s a whiz-bang numerical trick to take the risk out of investment, like a key-code à la Dan Brown that will unlock the steel-reinforced door leading to a glittering chamber of infinite wealth.
    ‘It’s complex, Chief Ken.’
    ‘Good. The more complex the better – harder for some other sneak-geek to steal or copy. ‘
    Chicken smiles, and Serge feels the radiance light on him like sunshine. He could add that it also makes it much harder for anybody to keep track of what was in the original investment bundle, so in the end nobody knows what anyone is worth, apart from the quants like himself who put the packages together. And they’ve mostly forgotten, or got bored and moved on to something else.
    But that’s not what Chicken wants to hear, so he says, ‘I’ll bring it up in the quants’ meeting tomorrow, Ken.’
    ‘Good man. I’ll go and tell Maroushka.’
    He advances towards Maroushka’s desk, the gym-toned muscles flexing beneath the expensive cloth of his bespoke suit. One day, the thought slips into Serge’s head, I’ll wear a suit like that.

DORO: Groucho Marxist
     
    ‘I really shouldn’t have shouted at that pink-legged woman. It achieved nothing, embarrassed Serge and left me in a foul mood,’ thinks Doro, watching her reflection in the train window floating across the mile after mile of dispiriting countryside as she heads back north on Tuesday evening. London is less than an hour and a half away from Doncaster, yet it seems like a different country in a different era. She can’t understand how anyone can put up with it – such a crush of traffic, the streets filthy, the people ignorant. It was just the same when she and Marcus lived there, forty years ago. She’s glad to get away.
    Glad to get away from Serge too, who seemed not himself today – tense and manic, rattling on about incomprehensible things. Just listening to him is exhausting. If only he’d settle down and finish off his PhD, which has been hanging over him for aeons. Clara too seems preoccupied with the minutiae of her job. She wishes she could talk to her children in a friendly, open way; she wishes they wouldn’t always patronise her and humour her, treating her like some relic whose life is in the past. The bold, radical and outrageous values of her generation are regarded by her children as quaint lifestyle whims on a par with tie-dyes and loon pants, which make them keel over with laughter.
    She’s tried to explain about solidarity and class consciousness, but the words have no meaning for them. The language itself has changed. ‘Revolutionary’ is what you call the latest mobile phone technology. ‘Struggle’ is trying to get home on the bus with your bags of shopping. They think listening to indie music is what makes you a rebel. They think they invented sex. She was the same at their age, of course, and that’s the worst thing about it – they make her feel old.
    She remembers her own parents with a mixture of fondness and guilt: how she’d loved their non-judgemental Quaker kindness, and appreciated their cash bailouts when times were hard; how she’d mocked their bourgeois conformity and outdated sexual hang-ups as she’d plunged headlong into the student movement of 1968.
    ‘A young woman really should wear a brassiere,’ her mother had admonished (she pronounced it ‘brazeer’) when Doro had binned her bra, whose tight cotton straps (those were the pre-Lycra days) cut red welts into her shoulders.
    ‘It’s a symbol of patriarchy, Mother.’
    ‘I’m sure if the patriarchs had had bosoms, they wouldn’t have let them bounce around, Dorothy.’
    She has never quite forgiven her mother for christening her Dorothy.
    ‘Why should women constrict themselves in bras in order to please men?’ she’d sneered. ‘It’s false consciousness. Adopting the values and