At the trading desks it was a tempest of panicked activity, a maelstrom of despairing voices crying havoc, tossing imaginary life preservers to the howling shrieks of landlines and mobiles, beeping coloured graphs like faulty heart monitors, lines of credit just too short to save creditors, the banking horizon a swirl of economic brimstone and financial fire, phones bleating maydays, reams of paper exploding over head, suited men and their tottering secretaries battening down the hatches, tossing some clients to certain death and others to rack and ruin.

Yet for George amid the greatest financial meltdown in world history there was no correlation between the physical dynamic of his imagination and the reality that his body presented him. Years of neglect, finger tapping keyboards, observing banks of monitors, lounging around board rooms, making plays for the zillions, that one lunchtime drink too many, large breakfast followed by ample lunch boosted by a home cooked supper (often sandwiched between two plates in the oven) finished off with a swift night time snack and the ubiquitous bottle of red, invariably Spanish. All this had distributed about his body more than a few extra pounds. His organism was limber dissipated, his joints stiff, his youth sapped. And yet he could close his eyes and recall playing as a child, spinning, jumping, running, flying, twisting, pirouetting, somersaulting, sometimes like teasing sparrows head over tail through the air, at other times his body shoaled within an ensemble of tumbling weightless minnows. “If it is a memory within the mind then perhaps,” he told himself, “it is a physical memory too, the ability still stitched into his sinews”. Sure he might have been a bit clunky and sloppy in his movement, it had been years after-all. His focus has been on his job, revelling in a synthetic joy, built on the foundations of nothing. “Debt begets cash,” he had once explained, “rather like all that begetting in the Book of Exodus. Once there was just a man, now there are gazillions of them. And so it is with debt and it’s spawning revenues.” But the work had dulled his senses, dilapidated his motoneuron capabilities, robbed him of his natural desire to move, to make his body articulate instead of this indolent, supine and lymphatic morphon that remained. This was the crisis that had hit him that morning in the car. Before that as he woke it was the realisation that the hope and dreams of his youth had taken a powder and wandered off into the wings with whatever aspirations for goodness or the good man he may have once harboured. But when he stood beside his car naked and tried to fly, and when that failed, to simply hover, he was left with the grim discovery that he had no capacity for dance left. Yet there was still hope. There was a way that he could get it back. He just needed the courage to make the first move, to step out of the dressing room onto the dance floor and set about his boogie. “George,” screamed a voice, George had no idea who, “answer your fucking phone, it’s going down all sides of the Atlantic. George wake the fuck up.” It would be wrong to credit George with the economic meltdown of civilisation as it was known then, but his lack of obvious hysteria, his general disregard of the sheer scale of the collapse surrounding him, grown men crying, women wailing, not just in his immediate proximity but one or two floors up and numerous floors down, a cataclysmic wail replicated in offices the world over, yet one observer described him as “sitting at his desk rather like the captain of the Titanic, the ship going down with all hands on deck and all he did was stare with a look of flushed ecstasy across his face, as if he was listening to some cacophonous symphony underscoring the grand opera of historic events whilst ripping the pecuniary carpets from under our very feet.” There was nothing to be done and certainly nothing that George could do to stem it. Though he could have acted up more, giving some hearty bestial clamours of impending penury of his own, just to fit in, just to be one with the throng. Instead, after a long stillness, with eyes closed, he stood raised both his hands above his head, balanced on one leg. And then began to dance. Up and down the aisles of the open plan office, hopping into the air, kicking, sliding along desks, zinging on office chairs, standing his ground suddenly whilst whipping his arms in a flurry of waves, prancing up and down like a chicken, rotating his head at a ferocious speed, tipping on tiptoes, whooping with chest expressed, buttocks compressed, skipping across desktops, dropping onto his haunches like a Russian, whirling like a Dervish. It was a frenzy of improvised colour. It was like he had just come alive. It was like he understood somehow all that was really going on, everything that everybody missed, and I don’t mean it terms of the financial disaster, I mean it terms of life’s mysteries, something existential and important. The reality of George’s epiphany was a mixture of internal gyrations from which a kablooey of colours, splattered and sprayed slogans of movement that extolled the virtues of being. A medley of imagery such as holding his first born for the first time, which linked to his own recollections of birth, frantic and somewhat fuzzy, falling as a child, being mollycoddled, fighting in the playground, dashing the hundred metres, his first kiss, his first drink, his face day at the office, the crush of bodies on the train into work, the sweat, the battle of perfumes, the conductor squeezing his way through, the poor chap that lost his ticket or had forgotten to purchase it – he has no idea which, the taste of bitter coffee, the repetitive submariner blips of a train station full of iPhones, Blackberries, Qwerty thumbs a clicking, the rushing whirr of the train timetable, weaving the commute, hands up for a cab, dashing the traffic, crushed in on the lift, eyes shifting, the exit as one body, the sudden dispersal of individuals. Each movement he would later admit was clunky, at times extremely sloppy. He lacked the control he needed, he carried that extra weight, he couldn’t manipulate the wobble around his belly. He lacked too the precision of timing necessary to achieve absolute aesthetic transmorphication, which only got worse as his dance went on, his energy slopping out of him rather than shooting like light to the edges of his open plan office. Tears, wails, looks of disbelief, shock, awe, the world was in plight and George was dancing. Years later he would recall the moment he took flight as his first ever act of pure altruism. There was no undoing the meltdown it had been building towards for years. Secretly – not even secretly, quite openly in fact, they had all said that this moment would arrive, that there was no way the market could sustain the chords of debt crying out, crying out, crying out. Towards the end of his dance his body was possessed by a sorrow, a premonition of the future, an understanding that this day was a cataclysm that the world of men had put in place for themselves, an unavoidable nasty deplorable mess all of our own doing. George carried this sentiment in his hands and feet, in his belly. His lungs could no longer breathe, he was spent, and yet he still danced, his eyes half closed, looking like a reveller, a devotee of Dionysus, an impassioned votariant of mis-rule, jigging his jiggy, a Nero with a conscience- for it all to be re-born it must all be pulled down. George understood this and his organism embodied it. Weaving through bodies, kicking his leg, big French kicks and tiny toe flicks, a random jazz outfit of movement. Sweat soaking through his white shirt, his trousers soaked to his legs. And then finally exhaustion. George could move no more. He had no idea how long he had been dancing. He was depleted of energy and his movement reduced to the pulse of his heartbeat and the pant of his breath as he collapsed at his desk, a computer monitor in front of him, an open plan office in shock surrounding him. The financial markets discarded about him, all collapsed and depreciated, his despicable dance done.