Book 3, Chapter 4 : Burning Gold

BURNING GOLD

Smolder-bearded, blind with tears of laughter, Roman takes Dean’s hand and drags him from the crackling nursery, little streets on fire behind them. Out in fresh air, grabbing their still-sniggering kiss behind a rolling screen of acrid gray, Roman can smell all of the potential never-to-be-realized cash as it’s cremated, an expensive stench diluted and dispersed in the slum firmament, into the dead-end Saturday, the hard-up afternoon. He’s still got that big painting in his shrunken monkey head: the giants in nightshirts thundering the fuck out of each other with their blazing billiard sticks, a precious gore of ore sprayed molten from the point of bloody impact. For Rome Thompson, snogging with his lover-boy there in the choke and uproar of the moment, there at that specific junction of his self-inflicted and unlikely roughneck history, there in the Boroughs and its timeless holy fire of poverty, the violent and unearthly image does no more than hold a mirror to real life, life being an affair of rage and pool-cues and colossal brawlers bleeding wealth. Of stolen kisses by the pyre of art, a kind of currency gone up in smoke here where the mint once stood, here where they hammered out the coin more than a thousand years ago. Behind a drifting cordite curtain stands Thompson the Leveler, frenching his young man, a fissured, glued-together composite of all his misspent times and misspelled words and miscreant deeds: the sum of his mosaic moments.

While the other eight- and nine-year-olds are learning how to read and write he’s up there in the slate-creak and the starlight, learning burglary. A spidery cutout shape on a black paper 1950s skyline, it is in the slant and scrabble of the rooftop night that he receives an education in both politics and socio-economics, there at the blunt crowbar end of the economy, there in the fiscal infrared. Shinning the rusted drainpipes that are too frail to take anybody’s weight save his, slipping head-first through open window-cracks that would defeat those with an ounce of flesh upon their fuze-wire bones, he understands the structure of the world that he’s so recently been born into to be entirely based on criminality, expressed in different languages, at different magnitudes. A warehouse skylight jimmied open here, an interest rate adjusted or a neighboring state invaded there. The hostile takeover, or sticky brown tape on a pane of glass to stop the wind-chime pieces falling when you smash it. Little Roman Thompson and the boardroom blaggers, all in a great classless commonality of the adrenaline-habituated. Slide a sheet of newspaper beneath the door to drag the fallen key after you’ve poked it from the lock, or spread embezzled losses into the next quarter’s figures. Roman runs with bigger kids, semiprofessionals, divides the loot, hears all of the instructive sex-jokes several years before his classmates. Nobody can catch him. He’s the gingerbread boy.

Consequently he can’t write to save his life, thinks syntax is a levy raised on condoms, sometimes gets his phraseology caught in his zip. When the authorities he’s nettled try to get their own back by accusing his beloved obsessive-compulsive boyfriend of being a social nuisance, Roman reckons that they must see Dean as his “Hercules Heel”. He reads, though, chewing ravenously through all of the history and politics that he can get his bony hands on, trying to locate and orient himself in socio-economic spacetime. He can’t write, then, other than the odd historical research piece or the slyly vitriolic Defend Council Housing pamphlets that he sometimes pens, but he can read. He can mine information from an electronic or a paper coal-seam, he can organize it in his stealthy nightlight-robbery mind and understand all its essential lowlife intricacies. He can read and he can talk – talk like Hell’s auctioneer as tenants’ representative at Borough Council meetings, making all the most embarrassing inquiries, mentioning the most unmentionable things, calling a cunt a cunt. He’s lost count of the occasions when he’s been evicted from the Guildhall to trot chuckling down the wedding-photo steps and squint up at the angel on the roof, the one that his mate Alma thinks is working class because it’s got a billiard cue in its right hand. He knows his Woodward and his Bernstein, knows all about following the money, lurks in ambush on the cash trail.

In so far as Roman understands these things, the Ancient Britons who originally have their settlements around these parts work with a barter system. This makes simple robbery or livestock-rustling an option for the proto-criminals inhabiting the Neolithic period and the Bronze Age, where they’ve got more of a grasp of owning property, relative to the wandering Old Stone Age hunter-gatherers of earlier times, and where therefore there are more things to steal. This is all still comparatively petty larceny, however, and major financial crimes will have to wait for the concept of finance, wait for Roman’s namesake empire to turn up in the first century and introduce us to the endlessly manipulatable idea of money: gold and silver coins which represent the sheaf of grain, the snorting bullock, down to the last hair, the meanest scruple, but are much more easy to make off with and to hide. During the Roman occupation, then, when everyone’s conditioned to accept that this much gold is worth that many ducks in what seems on the surface a fair proposition, Iron Age Northampton has its introduction to both coins and serious crime: in Duston, using cheaper metals to adulterate the silver, Roman coins are forged, a crucifixion felony. Iron Age ironically, the hard-up Empire has adulterated its own coinage at least since the reign of Diocletian, the same fraud upon an international rather than local level, all made possible by money. You can’t forge a cow.

Straight from what should have been his school years he rolls up his sleeves and gets beneath the bonnet of the world to fathom out its mechanism, ends up as head engineer at British Timken, then providing half the town’s employment. From there it’s a short step to becoming the key union representative, his bristling terrier countenance at each dispute, on every picket line, the blue touch-paper eyes restlessly searching for a weasel argument to shake between his teeth. In either of these two capacities, whether oil-stained professional or deepest red political, Rome’s main advantage is in understanding how things work, from cogs to councils to communities, from obstinate machines to management. His other big plus is his reputation: diabolically logical, tenacious to the point of tetanus once he has locked his jaws, as unpredictable as cheese-dreams and completely fearless from his burglar boyhood, madder than a bottle full of windows. In the police-scrums and demonstrations of the 1960s it’s mostly his spittle that gets emptied from the megaphones, and in the Anti-Nazi 1970s it’s him who breaks the riot-squad cordon, managing to land one on the National Front minder next to leader Martin Webster before being dragged away and charged. An atmosphere of gunpowder surrounds him, a perfume of Civil War and regicide. Below a straggling brow the china eyes spark in their wrinkle-cobwebbed sockets, always informed, always on the money.

When the Roman legions are withdrawn they leave us with a money habit. From the kickoff of the seventh century, gold and silver coins are struck as local currencies by various small coining operations up and down the country. In Thompson’s opinion, the most famous such establishment is probably at Canterbury although there are gold coins made here in Hamtun dated 600 AD, which have to be among the very first produced in Britain. And when he says Hamtun, Roman means the Boroughs. Possibly due to this early aptitude we have an unofficial mint here from 650 onwards churning out a stream of gleam into the Dark Ages’ protracted night, a golden shower. Meanwhile, unobserved in the surrounding information-blackout, the benighted half-mile settlement mysteriously gathers substance and significance: King Offa’s market town supplying his retreat at Kingsthorpe, here in Mercia’s center at a time when Mercia is the most important of the Saxon kingdoms. To Rome Thompson’s way of thinking, it might even be that pilgrim bringing the stone cross here from Jerusalem around this period which helps cement Hamtun’s mystique as center-of-the-land, but for whatever reason it’s from this ground during the 880s that King Alfred the failed cake-minder divides the country into slices, adding ‘North’ to the town’s tag and naming ‘Norhan’ as foremost among the shires, legitimizing its two-hundred-year-old mint, acknowledging its status. Wax-sealing its fate.

He’s not obsessed with cash. He’s never had enough to get obsessed by, but you need to know how money works to understand its necessary complement, this being poverty. The two things are inseparable. John Ruskin claims that if resources were shared equally there’d be no poverty or wealth. Thus, to make someone rich depends on making someone else poor. Making someone very wealthy may depend upon impoverishing an entire population. Poverty is money’s obverse, the coin’s other side. Rome wants to scrutinize its dirty engine and to comprehend the micro-tolerances of hard times. He knows his own hard times have mostly happened not because of money, but because of how he used to drink before the heart attack and his sometimes deranged behavior. He’s culpable, responsible – he knows all that – and sometimes feels a black pang if he thinks of Sharon, their doomed marriage, his exploded family. He would simply observe that those from a chaotic background frequently tend to be predisposed to alcohol and chaos, and that chaos levels rise as funds go down. That isn’t an excuse; it’s an example of how life is likely to work out in a poor neighborhood, with more capacity for harm, for wheels to fall off struggling relationships, for nasty incidents. The squaddies eager for a scrap down in the cellar bar off vanished Wood Street. The slagheap collapsing on him in Paul Baker’s yard, crawling through dirt in search of a few bob on the Edwardian empties.

Growing up, Rome thinks the king he’s heard about is called Alfred the Grate because of where he scorched the scones, then later learns about dividing up the shires, effectively making Hamtun the capital, establishing the mint at London (one of a few dozen) as an institution in 886, and all the rest of it. The king is trying to regulate the many regional economies, or so it seems to Thompson, but no one will have much luck with that until Edgar the Peaceful turns up to reform the coinage in his last year as king, 973 AD, and standardizes it into a national currency stamped out at forty royal mints throughout the land, with Hamtun being one of them. This is the year you first get pennies turning up with “HAMT” on the reverse, the letters set in the four quarters of what’s known as a Long Cross, one where the arms reach right to the coin’s hammered edge. By Ethelred the Second’s reign, commencing 978, emergency mints are set up to cope with the privations caused by all the Viking raids the King was famously unready for, and by Harold the Second’s rule prior to the Norman conquest there’s at least seventy of them, with the biggest mint being the one in London. Following 1066, William the Bastard changes things. The mints are gradually reduced in number, centralizing monetary control and rationalizing an inherited and sprawling Saxon system. Disempowered, Northampton’s mint survives until the thirteenth century. Until Henry the Third arrives and really puts the chainmail boot in.

The subsiding fifty-year-old hill of ash and clinker falling in on him, the incident with the drunk soldiers: these are just part of the fire he’s dressed in, the insane debris of circumstance that makes him who he is; that ultimately tears apart his life with Sharon and the kids. He’s foraging for old stone bottles when some half-a-century of the town’s black, incinerated shit suddenly pounds its fist into his scrawny back and drives the precious wind out of his lungs. Dirt in his eyes, dirt in his mouth and enough time to form the thought, so this is how we all end up, before his mucker Ted Tripp grabs him by those matchstick ankles, drags him cursing from the sludge like an uprooted Tourette’s carrot out into the daylight of Paul Baker’s yard, just as the cop cars all come howling in. He owes Ted big time, and so when Ted’s lock-up full of hooky goods is raided some while afterwards and the arresting officers fail to lock up the premises behind them, Roman has the evidence away and leaves Ted to produce receipts so that the angry coppers have to reimburse him for the lock-up’s contents. Debt repaid, this means that Rome feels free to steal Ted’s car on that occasion with the pissed-up and abusive squaddies: Roman’s awesome and apocalyptic payback; his avenging angel-work. He feels that it’s important someone keeps the moral ledger straight, such as it is. The heart can’t keep double accounts, and its books must eventually be balanced.

Though Northampton has admittedly lost some of the illustrious burnish since its Alfred the Great heyday, it’s still an important central pivot of the country for two hundred years after the conquest, and still has its mint. A thriving, pretty little market town, by all accounts, since Dick the Lionheart grants it its charter in 1180-something. Cobblers and leather-workers all up Scarletwell Street and the old Gilhalda, the original town hall there on the Mayorhold, where they hold their Porthimoth di Norhan, although no one nowadays knows what that might have been. Something to do with boundaries. Henry the Third seems rather taken with the place at first and wants to give the town a university, before he’s had a chance to fully understand the fiery and unusual spirit of the ancient settlement. The Bacaleri di Norhan, the stroppy students, are protesting Henry’s imposition of a forty eight-strong council – the exact same number of the bastards that Rome Thompson currently contends with weekly – who are lining their own pockets with the profits of the town. Henry decides he doesn’t like the locale after all and sends his troops in through the wall of the old Cluniac priory where St. Andrew’s Road is now. They pillage, rape and burn until Northampton is an ugly, smoking wreck. And when he says Northampton, Roman means the Boroughs. Henry’s promised university ends up in Cambridge, and with Henry’s death in 1272 they take away the mint as well.

His reputation for exacting startling retribution, whether against individuals or institutions, means that anyone who’s heard of him knows that they’re better off not picking fights with Roman. Which leaves those who haven’t heard of him. He’s visiting the cellar bar outside the Grosvenor Center, near where Wood Street used to be, for a quick drink. There are these nineteen-, twenty-year-old soldiers from some camp outside Northampton, half-a-dozen getting rowdy in the lounge, shoving past regulars. When Rome asks one of these latter-day roundheads to watch where he’s going, he’s got the whole mob around him swilling their testosterone and vodka smoothies. “Yeah? What are you gunna do about it, Catweazle?” Six of the nation’s finest, being all they can be with a stick figure in his mid forties. Roman puts his palm up. “Sorry, lads. I’m evidently in the wrong pub. I’ll just finish up me pint and go.” He leaves them to their night out without answering them, without saying what he’s gunna do about it. Never cross someone with neither want nor fear of anything. Like he tells Alma while he’s lounging calmly in the middle of a blazing bonfire on that camping holiday in Wales, “It’s all about will, Alma, ain’t that right?” She pulls upon her reefer and considers while he starts to smolder. “Yeah. Well, will and flammability.” They have to drag him from the flames and beat him out, but Roman feels he’s made his point. He’s put his money where his mouth is.

As does England after 1272 when Henry’s dead. The number of mints are reduced to six – rebellious Northampton not included – with the main one at the Tower of London from 1279 onwards, housed there for the next five hundred years, the only game in town by 1500, a monopoly. Northampton, far from being King Alfred’s de facto capital, is on its way to being somewhere that’s unmentionable. Roman doesn’t think this is because the place is unimportant, more that it’s important in a way that’s toxic to authority’s best interests, churning out its Doddridges, its Herewards, its Charlie Bradlaughs, its Civil War agitators, Martin Marprelates, Gunpowder Plotters, Bacaleri di Norhan or its Diana Spencers. At best huge embarrassments and at worst riots or heads on poles. Perhaps Northampton has become the anti-matter capital, an insurrectionist parallel universe, not to be spoken of. While this is clearly just how everything was always going to work out, Roman blames Henry the Third, a spiteful little fucker at the best of times. And his son Edward’s even worse. In 1277 some three hundred of the Jewish population centered around Gold Street are all executed – stoned to death as Rome hears it: accused of clipping bits from the old hammered coins to melt down and make new ones. Actually, the royals owe the Jews a wad of cash. Survivors are first driven out of town and then all Jews are banished from the land, brutally welshing on the debt, putting the plan into Plantagenet.

All about will and flammability, so Alma says, and Roman thinks she’s right. Having the fire of will and spirit is a must, but useless if your fuel’s damp or goes up like tinder. What’s important is the way you burn. He can remember Alma telling him about how she has Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond from the KLF turn up one day at her house on East Park Parade to show the film of them torching a million quid up on the Isle of Jura, where George Orwell completes 1984. She says she likes a movie where you can see every penny of the budget up there on the screen but Roman’s not sure how he feels at first about all that potentially life-saving lucre going up the chimney. Still, as Alma points out, if the million had gone up their noses nobody would raise an eyebrow. In the end, Rome comes to the conclusion that it’s glorious, more than just a gesture. It’s the whole idea of money being burned, not just the actual loot. It’s saying that the golden dragon that enslaves us, that allows a tiny fraction of the global population to own nearly all the wealth, that ensures almost universal human poverty by its very existence, doesn’t actually exist at all, is made of worthless paper, can be taken care of with a half-box of Swan Vestas. Drummond is Northampton reared, a hulking Scot from Corby who goes to the art school here and works at the St. Crispin’s nuthouse for a while. Rome fancies you can see the town’s brand on the renegade rock-god: incendiary, justified and ancient.

This is money from a local point of view, a shell-game with evolving rules, a long con given centuries to hone its act; achieve a peak of predatory sophistication. Looking at the hundred or so years after the Norman occupation, with the number of mints dwindling as the manufacture of the coin is centralized and brought under control, Roman can see the obstacle that money-hungry kings are left with. Cash is still too real, too physical. Getting the planet to accept that discs of precious metal represent a crop or herd is an immense accomplishment, but coins with their smooth hammered edges are still vulnerable to clipping, and material gold and silver pieces are less easy to manipulate and conjure with than something that is hardly there at all. It’s in the twelfth or thirteenth century that the Knights Templar, hanging out at the round church in Sheep Street and collecting dues from local businesses as an ecclesiastical protection racket, come up with the idea of the internationally-valid promissory note or money order. They invent the check, have the idea of money as a piece of paper long before 1476 when William Caxton’s earliest English printing press makes banknotes possible, just in time for the Tower of London’s mint to assume its monopoly in 1500. Given all the harm caused by the Templar’s fiscal origami, Rome feels it’s an insult that they get wiped out because Pope Clement claims they’re gay, two men on one horse, all that Catholic bollix.

Roman’s own epiphany comes with the heart attack that marks his fiftieth birthday. It’s around the sleeping-in-a-campfire period of Rome’s existence, when the mania that drives him is at its most phosphorescent. His behavior at this point is already more than halfway to dismantling his family so he’s alone there in the house all night, on his own, when the left-arm lightning hits. He sprawls there, on his back in the dark living room, and can’t move. There’s no one to call for help and Roman knows that this is it. He’s going to die, and in a few days he’ll be back under the dirt like that time down Paul Baker’s yard except with no Ted Tripp to haul him out. Under the dirt forever, and with so much unresolved. During his long hours in the twilight between quick and dead, Roman reviews his life and is astonished to discover that his foremost fear is dropping off the twig before he gets the nerve up to tell anyone, himself included, that he’s homosexual. All those years he’s taken pride in never backing down to anyone or anything, not to police or management or to those drunken square-bashers or even to the element of fire, to find that he’s been bottling the biggest, pinkest challenge of them all. Roman resolves that if by some chance he survives this he’ll go out for some queer fun and then tell everyone about it. As it turns out that’s what happens, but he’s not expecting love. He’s not expecting Dean, the two of them together on the one horse from then on.

Gay or not, the Knights Templar clearly aren’t the first people to think of folding money – Roman reckons that he can remember something about paper notes in seventh century China – but they are the first to introduce the notion to the West. It still isn’t until the nineteenth century that you see proper printed English dosh, but back at the exclusive Tower of London mint in 1500 you can tell they’re warming up to the idea. The goldsmith-bankers of the sixteenth century issue these receipts called running cash notes, written out by hand and promising to pay the bearer on demand. Even with Caxton’s press, the near-impossibility of printing counterfeit-proof wealth means England’s paper currency will be at least partially scribbled for the next three hundred years or more. The paper concept only gains momentum when the Bank of England is established during 1694 and straight away is raising funds for William the Third’s war on France by circulating notes inscribed on specially-produced bank paper, signed by the cashier with the sum written down in pounds, shillings and pence. In the same year Charles Montague, later the Earl of Halifax, becomes the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Two years on, in need of a new warden of the mint, he offers the position – “ ’Tis worth five or six hundred pounds per annum, and has not too much business to require more attendance than you can spare” – to a fifty-five-year-old man previously passed over for high office: Isaac Newton.

Roman tells Bert Regan, Ted Tripp and the others that the most feared and respected of their formidable number is officially now traveling on the other bus. Endearingly, given the reputation of the working class for homophobia, they merely take the piss the way they would if he’d told them he was part Irish or developed comically deforming facial cancer, and then carry on as normal. They treat Dean respectfully despite the fact that his OCD impulses do tend to put him at the “Ooh, look at the muck in here” end of the homosexual spectrum. Ted Tripp asks Rome who’s the horse and who’s the jockey, and Rome patiently explains that it’s less about sex than you might think and more about the love. Ted may make ass-related jokes around the situation but he understands, has always been there when Rome needed him, will lend Rome anything, particularly if he doesn’t know he’s doing it. The night when Rome exits the cellar bar with military mockery still ringing in his ears he marches down to the Black Lion in St. Giles Street and there in the notoriously haunted hostelry he finds Ted Tripp in the front room, playing a hand of brag with rotund troubadour Tom Hall and junkyard-owner Curly Bell. Rome sits with Ted and idly chats for a few minutes while Ted’s mind is on the game, and then gets up and leaves. Ted barely registers Rome’s visit, much less that his car keys, which should be on the pub table next to his tobacco, are no longer there.

Still, that seventeenth century: a bastard from the outset and then it builds up to Isaac fucking Newton as its big finale. It kicks off with the gunpowder plot and Francis Tresham’s head impaled down at the end of Sheep Street, then it picks up pace with the Enclosures Act when all the toffs are given liberty to fence off areas of common land, legally sanctioned smash-and-grab with all the main protesters being local, all the doomed and dashing Captains, Swing and Slash and Pouch, this last one landing on a spike in Sheep Street within eighteen months of his posh adversary Francis Tresham. You can see what makes the land-reclaiming Diggers and the class-war Levelers so popular when they arrive in the mid-1640s to support Oliver Cromwell, alongside all of the other ranting, quaking dissidents that use Northampton as a millenarian theme-park in those years. The town backs Cromwell. He turns out to be like Stalin but without the sense of humor. Anyway, he’s dead by 1658, his son and heir fucks off to France and so by 1660 Charles the Second’s on the throne. Upset about Northampton’s role in getting his dad’s head lopped off he has its castle torn down as a punishment, but he’s concerned about the currency as well. Charles’s reign sees the introduction of milled edges to some of the previously hammered coins to prevent clipping, but the practice is still rife in ’96 when Isaac Newton comes to town, the Eliot Ness of English finance in the sixteen-hundreds.

If Roman’s in bed, his arms around his boyfriend, drifting off into the dark behind his corrugated eyelids, all the madness in his life makes perfect sense. When him and Dean first hook up in the early 1990s, that’s when his and Sharon’s young son Jesse starts to come unglued. Part of the Rave scene, Jesse necks assorted disco biscuits – ecstasy and ketamine and Christ knows what – halfway to a drug-aggravated breakdown, like Bert Regan’s stepson Adam, Jesse’s best mate at the bleary, blurry sunrise parties. Jesse takes Rome’s coming out hard, undeniably, but there’s a lot of other factors in the mix. Pal Adam goes spectacularly crazy and decides he’s gay as well; a gay male angel with his wings torn off by treacherous women – this meant literally. For Jesse it must seem reality has suddenly become untrustworthy so he stops going out, starts drinking to damp his by-now perpetual hallucinations, to blot out the cats with human faces, and then somewhere down the line he learns that in the blotting-out stakes heroin beats booze. His junkie new best mate is first to overdose, to fall off of the world in Jesse’s bedroom back at Sharon’s place, and then a few months later Jesse’s dead as well, bang, just like that. Ah, fuck. Sharon blames Rome for everything, won’t even have him at the funeral. It’s black, and doctors finally put a name to Roman’s driving fire, his contradictory soul: manic depression. Like police car sirens or economies, it seems Rome has his ups and downs.

This role as warden of the mint is meant as a seat-warming post, but Isaac takes it seriously, smells blood and money in the water. Coming to the job in 1696 when forgery and clipping still degrade the currency, Newton begins his Great Recoinage, where he recalls and replaces all the hammered silver coin in circulation. It takes two years and reveals that getting on a fifth of all the coins recalled are counterfeit. While forgery is classed as treason, punishable by evisceration, getting a conviction is a bugger, but the gravity man rises to the task. Disguised as a habitué of taverns Newton loiters, eavesdrops, gathers evidence. He then gets himself made a Justice of the Peace in all of the Home Counties so that he can cross-examine suspects, witnesses, informers, and by Christmas 1699 he has successfully sent twenty-eight rogue coiners to be drawn, hung, and then quartered, off down Tyburn way. In recognition of a job well done, in that same year he’s made the master of the mint, his wages bumped from Montague’s five or six hundred pounds to between twelve and fifteen hundred quid a year. Newton’s recoinage has reduced the need for low-denomination hand-scrawled bank notes so that anything under a fifty is withdrawn. Of course, it’s only those in Newton’s income bracket who will ever notice, given that for most people their yearly earnings in seventeenth century England are far less than twenty pounds and they will never see a bank note in their lives.

When Rome’s first diagnosed as a bit swings and roundabouts they stick him on the new anti-depressants, the SSRIs, Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors like Prozac, that in 1995 appear to be the British medical profession’s first response to anything from clinical depression to occasional ennui. The drugs, in Rome’s opinion, are born of the probably-American idea that those in the developed world have an inalienable right to be contented every hour of their existence. So what if these happy-pills haven’t been around long enough for any adverse side-effects to show up so far; are effectively untested? There’s a market eager for an end to all their troubles, there are pharmaceutics corporations eager to make money, and the blue sky ethos of that endless economic boom-time stipulates instant gratification. Anyone dissenting from this mandatory manic optimism is a Gloomy Gus, a scaremonger or pessimist, is out of step with all the laissez-faire euphoria and would most probably feel better on a course of Prozac. Rome gives it a go, not having been informed that one occasional byproduct of SSRIs is suicidal black depression. When Dean asks what’s wrong Rome drop-kicks him across the living room. He throws the pills away and in the dark troughs he goes for long walks and sorts it out himself. The manic peaks he saves for council meetings, for campaigns or organizing protests. Energy efficiency. It’s one of the first principles you learn in engineering.

Newton, who’s familiar with the principle, brings chemical and mathematic know-how to the mint. After his Great Recoinage he’s asked to repeat the trick in Scotland, 1707. This leads to a common currency and the new kingdom of Great Britain. Not content yet, in 1717 the seventy-six-year-old first proclaims his bi-metallic standard where twenty-one silver shillings equals one gold guinea. England’s policy of paying for imports with silver while receiving payment for exports in gold means there’s a silver shortage, so what Newton’s doing here is moving Britain’s standard from silver to gold without announcing it. Personally he’s doing nicely, coining it, well-minted. Trusting his ability with sums to double up his cash he invests in the sure-fire high-return world of the South Sea Bubble, dropping twenty grand – three million by the current reckoning – when in 1721 the whole thing goes tits up. The fiscal genius of the day loses his shirt. He lets greed override his risk-assessment faculties, displays an expert’s fatal overconfidence in his abilities, the way that it’s mostly mycologists who end up killing themselves with a death cap omelet. And what brings Sir Isaac down is dabbling where he should know better, in a market bloated by a form of bonds known as derivatives, partly responsible for the Dutch Tulip-bulb fiasco that occurs in 1637 five years before Newton’s birth, and probably about to sink the world economy nearly three hundred years after his death.

Roman and Dean get digs in St. Luke’s House, a block between St. Andrew’s Street and Lower Harding Street, where Bellbarn used to be. He’s known the Boroughs all his life but this is the first time he’s lived there. Roman finds himself in love with its crushed population, with its relic tower blocks braced against the rain. Blanched grass sprouts from the seams of maisonettes and in it Rome can read an English bottom line. This area is up in the top two per cent of UK deprivation. Simply living here takes ten years off your life. These people at the shitty end of economic theory are the product of all that creative number-crunching. Individuals betrayed by bankers, governments and, yes, Rome sticks his hand up, by the left wing. Dean’s mixed race and they’re both gay, but neither of them see much benefit from the left wing’s promotion of racial and sexual equality. How does it help that Peter Mandelson and Oona King are doing okay, when the inequality between the rich and poor that socialism was intended to put right remains conspicuously unaddressed? Rome turns in his red star in ’97 at the first whiff of New Labor and its rictus-grinning frontman, to become an anarchist and activist. The malcontents that he attracts are sometimes “Defend Council Housing”, sometimes “Save Our NHS”, depending what will look most swinish to oppose. Thompson the Leveler has found his sticking place: the leveled ground where he can stage his gunsmoke stand.

Dying 1727, in his eighties and still at the mint, Newton sees the beginning of the shift to paper money. In 1725 banks issue notes where the pound sign is printed, but the date, amount and other details are hand-written by the signatory, like a check. Cash gradually becomes more abstract, but a greater sleight of hand takes place hundreds of years before with the invention of derivatives, the concept that helps scupper Newton. A derivative – a bond deriving from the actual goods for sale – occurs when someone makes a deal to sell their goods for an agreed sum at some future date. Whether the market price rises or falls before that time determines who’s made the best bet, but what’s important is that the derivative bond now has a potential value and can be sold on, with its projected worth continually increasing. This uncoupling of money and real goods contributes to the Tulip Craze and South Sea Bubble, while the current value of the world’s derivatives, from what Rome hears, is up to ten times larger than the sixty or so trillion dollars that is the whole planet’s fiscal output. The divide between reality and economics is a hairline fissure widening across the centuries to a deep ocean vent from which unprecedented forms of life squirm up with dismal regularity: bubbles and crazes, Wall Street crashes and Black Wednesdays, Enron and whatever bigger fuck-up is inevitably coming next; the bad dreams of a rational age that good old William Blake calls “Newton’s sleep”.

Rome combs the Boroughs streets looking for trouble. In some of the last remaining council dwellings there’s asbestos that the council won’t own up to, much less take away. Attempts to entice people into private housing schemes by entering them in a draw for prizes that are never won; do not exist. There’s endless scams or deprivations to attend and Rome has mission-creep, as likely to campaign against the selling-off of eighteenth-century houses in Abington Park as to bellow abuse through a loudhailer when they bring in Yvette Cooper, housing minister, to launch the NEWLIFE towers flogged to a housing company by former councilor Jim Cockie just before he joins their board. And there’s always some new affront on the horizon. At the moment there’s moves to put Euro-dosh meant for the Boroughs into a big needle like the Express Lifts Tower, but on Black Lion Hill. Roman suspects that this is to facilitate backhanders from whichever company lands the deal. Rome plans to feign disinterest, let them think his eye is off the ball. They’ll set dates for a secret ballot, to vote the proposals through without constituents knowing that they’ve backed this clearly bad idea. Then, on the afternoon before, Rome will call in a favor from someone with council clout, get them to change it to an open ballot, lift the stone to shed light on the wriggling things beneath and make them vote against it if they want to keep their seats. It’s all a complicated business, but then he’s a complicated man.

Money continues to evolve – particularly after the remarkable events at a Northampton cornmill that Rome has related to a slack-jawed Alma not an hour ago. 1745 sees partly-printed notes from twenty to a thousand pounds. Fifty years later, after the Napoleonic Wars, the bank stops paying gold for notes in what’s called the Restriction Period. This is when Sheridan calls the bank “an elderly lady in the City”, which cartoonist Gilray artfully tarts up as “the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street”. In 1821 the gold standard’s reinstituted and endures in a robust condition up until the First World War. The part-handwritten papers are made legal tender for all sums over five pounds in 1833, becoming proper modern banknotes. Then in 1855 they go the whole hog with the notes completely printed. Britain finally leaves the gold standard in 1931, its currency now backed up by paper securities rather than bars of precious metal. By the middle of the twentieth century, as Roman sees it, we’ve a world economy relying more and more upon the logic of a huge casino, and we’re just about to see a wave of postwar innovation that will change the planet. When these new ideas impact on the money markets they create the preconditions for a scale of ruin never previously witnessed or imagined. Eddies in the cash flow deepen into whirlpools, maelstroms, and we have the makings of a catastrophic storm. As they say in the ’Sixties, it don’t take a weatherman.

Not all Rome’s tasks are so dramatic. There’s fundraisers like the poster Alma does, and slogging door to door to make sure everyone’s informed. Like yesterday: Rome spends it letting people know about Alma’s do at the nursery while walking off the tail-end of a downer, one of Rome’s bear markets of the soul. Fresh air makes him feel bullish, while attempting all those stairways in the flats should do some cardio-vascular good. Trudging the tower blocks he checks on some of the older residents. They won’t be interested in the exhibition, but it’s an excuse to see if they’re okay. Near Tower Street he spots Benedict Perrit setting out on a day’s drinking and then pretends not to notice minor local drug czar Kenny Nolan, an amoral little shit who’s running down the district when he’s not even a councilor; not even being paid to do it. Crossing Bath Street, Roman mounts the scabby ziggurat of front steps to look in on little Marla Stiles, who’s on the skids, the game and crack, respectively. Her hungry lemur eyes dart everywhere when she comes to the door. She isn’t listening as Rome gives her the spiel on Alma’s show, but at least he can see she’s still alive. How long for, well, that’s anybody’s guess. He goes on up the flat-blocks’ central walk to visit other causes for concern around St. Katherine’s House, and on his way back later has to veer around a fresh-laid dog turd distantly resembling a dollar sign. It’s funny, isn’t it, the little details that you notice?

Economics as art starts out figurative, goes abstract, although not until the twentieth century will it become surrealism. Britain starts to leave the gold standard in 1918 which, coincidentally, is when the fifty-year dismantling of the Boroughs kicks off. Nearly all its terraces are gone by the late ’Sixties, when that decade’s fiscal innovations are beginning to come into play. Rome hears about a paper published, early ’Seventies, with new equations to help calculate the value of derivatives based on that of the goods that they’re derived from. Theoretically, this makes such deals a safer bet, and to the money markets that’s a checkered flag. Mathematics-wonks are suddenly the saviors of the industry. There are now new ways to make money, if there weren’t these regulations in the way. At decade’s end Thatcher and Reagan come to power, two eighteenth century Free Market Liberals who share Adam Smith’s mystical conviction that the market somehow regulates itself and subsequently start removing its restraints, just as the 1980s’ big computer boom gets underway. Keeping an eye on stocks, computers can gain or lose fortunes in a millisecond, adding to the system’s volatility. Crashes and crunches come and go, ruining countless thousands, but the bigger players keep on making bigger profits. Then in 1989 the Berlin Wall comes down and it’s like a dam bursting. Scenting blood with its only major competitor’s sudden demise, capitalism slips its leash.

When Rome’s own crashes come, fiscal analogies break down. He always ends up in the black. Black doves, black ice cream, a black wedding, a black Christmas, simmering in a stock of his own fuck-ups and nothing to do but live through it, to take those long walks up the color gradient from deepest ebony to manageably neutral gray. Tom Hall calls it “the black dog”, after Winston Churchill’s name for the phenomenon. Back in the early days with his soon-to-be wife Diane, Tom goes for a lie-down on the Racecourse when he’s done something to test her patience, which is often. He can see the dark hound through his half-closed eyelids, sitting calmly on the summer-yellowed grass beside him. Roman misses Tom, but then, who doesn’t miss that planetary presence that kept half the town revolving with its gravity, its levity? That night in the Black Lion after Roman’s brush with the new model army, Tom is playing brag when Roman drops by to nick Ted Tripp’s motor; almost certainly sees Roman swipe the keys but only chuckles to himself and goes on with his game. Rome leaves them to it and, after he picks up something else he’s going to need from the back room, he takes the car from the pub car park. Furiously calm, he drives it round to Abington Street and pulls up beside the Grosvenor Center’s entrance with his lights off, waiting. Obviously, with the street now pedestrianized you couldn’t do that sort of thing today. It’s Health and Safety gone mad.

After the wall’s fall, financiers launch into an epic victory binge. Free to proliferate, capitalism mutates fast. Not even a free-market frenzy like the Thatcher-Reagan years, this is something entirely new, but with a few old faces. Alan Greenspan, guiding U.S. finance under Reagan, George Bush, Clinton and Bush Junior, is a big fan of libertarian Ayn Rand and it’s on his watch that some J.P. Morgan wizards invent Credit Default Swaps in 1994. What these are, briefly, is insurance. You lend somebody a lot of dosh at a good interest rate, but they’re all hillbillies with Cyclops babies and you’re worried they’ll default. So you pay a third party to insure the debt. Assuming that the hillbillies pay up, everyone wins. And if the babies one day need to go to Cyclops college and the loan goes bad, no problem. The insurer coughs up, and assuming you’ve not only loaned to Cyclopses it probably won’t bother them much either. This apparently removes the final obstacle to making serious money, which is risk. The banks and companies can now do pretty much exactly as they please, with someone else obliged to pay for their mistakes. Predictably, they go berserk; make record-breaking profits doing so. When the warmed-over Tories now known as New Labor come to power in 1997, which is when Rome leaves the party, they provide the Bank of England with control over the interest rate and thus the whole economy. Profits like that, they must know what they’re doing.

After lots of hassle, Dean and Roman trade their flat off Lower Harding Street for a whole council house in Delapré. The new place is much nicer, though they have a neighbor who complains when Dean pops out into the back yard for a smoke one night and unleashes a torrent of loud swearing after stepping in the garden pond. This is the business that the council try to talk up to an ASBO when they’re trying to get at Rome through Dean, through his Hercules Heel. Oddly enough, their old digs in St. Luke’s House end up being used by CASPAR, the shoestring community support group to whom all of the modest improvements in the area can be attributed. Rome only finds this out last night when he’s down at the nursery with Burt Reagan, setting up for Alma’s exhibition, and he meets Lucy, who’s arranging it and gets it in the neck if anything goes wrong. Turns out she works for CASPAR, laboring where him and Dean first make a go of it, make love, make breakfast. She and Rome chat while him and Burt hang the paintings and put the big sculpture or whatever it’s called on the pushed-together tables in the center of the room. They bond over his old flat’s inconveniently tiny toilet, there amid the stupefying images of river-monsters rearing over Spencer Bridge, of multiple-exposure charcoal children flickering in a wasteland and the raging giants in nightgowns with their arcing billiard cues, their spraying golden blood like fire.

The economic watchword is not caution now but innovation, new ways to make loot that are not tested or thought through. Enron borrows upon future derivatives from areas of technology not yet invented, such as shares in Daleks or Transporter Beams but evidently nowhere near as solid. Enron’s bubble bursts as Dubya Bush takes over in 2000, the worst monetary catastrophe in U.S. history, and when the facts emerge nobody can believe the catalog of madness, the horrific warning that this poses for economy in general. People call for tighter regulation, which would hinder making money, so the Enron business is dismissed as a statistical anomaly, some of its execs go to jail and then everyone carries on as normal. The big market in the U.K. and the U.S. now is housing, and those Credit Default Swaps mean banks can offer mortgages to almost anyone, a million Cyclops hillbillies, safe in the knowledge that insurers pay if it goes wrong. Unless, of course, all of the hillbillies default at once. If Rome’s correct, the world’s swollen financial markets are all resting on the least dependable and most impoverished section of society, on people almost guaranteed to fuck up. People like those in this very district. Schemes intended to reduce risk instead spread it through the whole system like woodworm, until from Beverly Hills to Bermondsey those folk who’d never dream of visiting an area like the Boroughs find instead that it has come to visit them.

Roman has a capacity for violence, never a propensity. It’s just been part of the equation, scuffling with coppers in an alley or outside the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square, just as it’s always been there in the money markets during their own troubled adolescence. When the Bacaleri di Norhan stage economic protests in 1263, Henry the Third sends in the troops to bash some heads together. When the Poll Tax riots kick off in the late 1980s – also economic protests – Thatcher sends in riot police to bash some heads together. Rome imagines that when the balloon goes up in our hi-tech twenty-first century, whoever’s running things will very probably send in Atari hunter-killer robots to – well, you get the idea. Violence, or at least the threat of it, is always there, hence Rome’s lifelong easy association between finances and criminality. There’s always hired goons somewhere in the mix, bruisers or bailiffs, or riot-samurais, or soldiers. Rome sits in the dark of Ted Tripp’s borrowed car and waits until the half-a-dozen squaddies stagger pissed and bellowing out of the cellar bar to fall into a minibus that’s evidently their ride back to base. It pulls away down Abington Street, most probably bound for Bridge Street, South Bridge and the motorway beyond. Rome gives it a few seconds and then starts Ted’s car up, following the soldiers out past the bright lights of town to where the darkness gathers round Northampton like an angry and protective mother.

Just last year in 2005, amid the tube-bombs and ongoing nightmare of Iraq, big Gordon Brown sells off the last of Britain’s gold reserves right when the going rate is at a temporary low. There’s nothing solid holding things up anymore, not even paper, only electronic impulses and mathematics swirling in the ether. Rome, as a manic depressive, entertains dark possibilities: when banks begin to crash, as any airborne vessels held aloft by bubbles surely will, how will governments deal with that? The money’s bound up in the banks, especially in Britain where they’ve run the show since 1997, and if they go down the whole economy goes with them. No one’s going to let that happen. In effect, the banks are now immune to government control or reprimand. They have, by stealth, become a monarchy. It’s not even capitalism anymore, not the brutal Darwinian free-for-all proposed by Adam Smith and Maynard Keynes and Margaret Thatcher. This is some refried early seventeenth century arrangement, with a coddled and capricious ruler dominating even parliament. Rome’s not sure what you’d call the set-up – it’s a moneylenderocracy or something like that – but it would seem that the banking sector sees itself as royalty. Roman agrees. He sees them, more precisely, as King Charles the First. And everybody round these parts knows how all that ends up: in fire and pikes, wet innards and dry powder. Worlds turned upside down. Screams in the night.

The B-roads outside town are submerged in a rural blackness. There’s nobody else about, no other cars. Roman accelerates, pulls alongside the mini-bus. They think he’s overtaking until he slams into them, BDANK! The bus squeals, trying to regain control, with everybody on board thinking it’s a dreadful accident, when Rome lurches across, deliberately ramming them again, BDANK! This time they swerve into a ditch, roll over and land upside down. Rome stops a few yards further on, retrieves the billiard cue from the Black Lion that he’s got stashed in the back, then slides out of the car. He takes his time walking back up the road, the pole over his scrawny shoulder. No one’s going anywhere. The nearside door of the crashed troop-transporter turns out to be open. Roman climbs aboard. The soldiers are all dangling in their safety belts, concussed and bleeding. Out of those who can focus their eyes, nobody’s what you might call pleased to see him. He walks down the aisle between the seats, well, actually he walks along the inside of the bus’s roof but it’s the same thing. He walks down the aisle and scrutinizes all the stunned, inverted faces, picking out the ones who’d given him the aggro. “You.” The thick end of the billiard cue jabs forward, into teeth. “And you.” Again the cue comes down, again. He pots a black eye, a pink throat, a cue-ball skull. Again. Again. Rome clears the table in a single visit and the crowd here at the Crucible goes wild.

The thing is, even if this century concocts a Cromwell who drags all the bankers to the chopping block, despite the fact that Rome finds it a lovely image, it won’t do a bit of good. The west is broke. There’s no nice way of putting it. Broke and in debt for generations, but still keeping up a front the way that Emperor Diocletian does when he begins to water down the empire’s coinage. Any revolutionary who succeeds in toppling the banks is going to inherit the same dismal situation, the appalling world they’ve left us with after their dizzy and intoxicated spree, fucked up beyond all recognition. No, just executing the executives is a nonstarter. What you need to execute is money, or perhaps just money as it is from Alfred the Great onwards. Rome sees some bloke from the London School of Economics on the telly while he’s flicking through the channels. This chap makes the point that governments don’t actually do anything for us. The only thing that makes them boss is that they control all the currency. Historically, anyone proposing an alternative to cash is brutally suppressed, but then historically they haven’t got the Internet, which makes such things much easier to set up; much harder to crack down on. Rome can see a battered future Britain where a cow’s still worth five magic beans or the equivalent, which has no standard currency and thus no standard government, no kings, no credit agencies. Only a thousand colorful and ragged flags.

The Leveler kisses his boyfriend through the smoke in Castle Street and there’s a siren closing from the distance, whooping oscillations swooping from the Mounts to Grafton Street, driver perhaps starting to realize that it’s difficult responding to alarm calls from the Boroughs, its streets closed with bollards in an unsuccessful effort to prevent curb-crawling which has nonetheless been quite successful in obstructing every other fucking thing. He gives Dean’s bum a quick squeeze and can feel the all-at-once of himself welling up around him. He knows he’s still somehow up there on the rooftops as a seven-year-old, nicking moonlight. He’s still at the barricades, still messing up his life with Sharon, still under the mudslide in Pete Baker’s yard, still shifting Ted Tripp’s dodgy merchandise from the unguarded lockup, still half dead in the dark living room on his fiftieth birthday, still broke and still furious, still sleeping in the fire, still stalking through the upturned mini-bus with his apocalyptic staring eyes, his bloody snooker cue. He’s who he is, exactly, perfectly, and if what Alma says about that endless circuit of Delft tiles up on the nursery’s north wall is true, he’s who he is forever. The forlorn and lovely little pauper streets with all the precious memories are burning down somewhere behind him. Roman Thompson stares the future in its hairy eye, and knows that he won’t be the first to look away. Screaming its panicked aria, that siren’s getting nearer.