The Twain Maxim by Clem Chambers

nodded, mute.
    “Hence my order of yogurt” said John. “Shortly the antidote will be on hand.”
    Much to Jim’s relief, after two small dishes of cucumber yogurt the sensation had all but gone.
    “Chillies are poison to birds,” said Smith, “which is why the bird-eating spider, usually called the tarantula, has venom made of the active ingredient in chilli. It’s the only poison common to plant and animal.”
    “That’s good to know,” said Jim, through a mouthful of his own curry. “I won’t eat tarantula curry and I won’t go to Belgrade.”
     
    Next morning Jim found himself watching the markets. He wanted to trade but it was pointless. Instead he surfed the Net and looked up the Black Hand. He found nothing that referred to any event later than the 1920s. He listened to music and started to buy hundreds of tracks from iTunes.
    He was becoming a little bored when Stafford came in with two gorgeous girls. Jim was immediately on his feet.
    “These are my two godchildren,” his butler informed him. “Lavender and Tulip. Lavender and Tulip, this is Mr James Evans.”
    “Jim,” he said, shifting from one foot to the other. “Nice to meet you.”
    “Come now, girls,” Stafford said, “we shouldn’t waste any more of Mr Evans’s precious time.”
    “Don’t worry, that’s fine,” said Jim.
    Tulip gave him a cheeky look as they left the room.
    Jim felt suddenly invigorated. Blimey, he thought. He sat down and closed his browser. He looked at the desktop wallpaper of Jane and her lovely muddy smile. It had to go.
     
    Later that day he was staring out at the river. He should buy himself a boat and park it outside his window, he mused. Maybe he should extend the basement and build a submarine pen so he could pull out in secret at full tide. How cool would that be? And maybe he’d buy a mansion and fill it with cool toys. He could afford anything and everything. How great was that? Even things that weren’t possible now, he could fund and make happen. But what would bring him the most happiness? He’d never really had much fun. Happiness and pleasure had been in short supply all his life. His training for happiness had been pretty much limited to an unexpected ice-cream, a hoped-for present on his birthday or at Christmas or a quick kiss in the corridor at school. And his adult life had been one of ever-increasing drama and stress. Happiness and pleasure were pretty much strangers to him. He needed some kind of guide, he realised.
    Tulip came into the room and headed for his screens. She picked up his phone and dialled a number into it. A phone somewhere on her person rang and she hung up. She smiled cheekily at him and walked out.
    Something was wriggling in his guts – and it probably wasn’t last night’s curry.

12
    The flotation paperwork was about ten feet thick and the whole process had cost Baz around seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds. It was all legal cut-and-paste work, put together by well-paid but clueless junior lawyers and accountants’ minions for the fat cats who ran firms that floated companies on the stock market. The firms he used specialised in mining explorers – or mining promotions, as they’d referred to them when they called a spade a spade rather than “environmentally friendly mineral extraction equipment”.
    The right fees ensured that his engineering reports were perfectly prepared. Very shortly he would be selling Barron’s story to the institutions. As Higgins had said, it was like shooting ducks in a barrel. The market wanted speculative mines and, by God, it got them. Did they ever turn into billion-dollar mines? It happened occasionally, just as a racing punter got the odd winner in the Grand National.
    Still, the City needed speculative mines because the audience loved them, and fund managers, who couldn’t outperform the index if their lives depended on it, relied on mining stocks to give them a shot at a freak win.
    There was no perfect market, no