Audacity: Part 1 – Chapter 1

There is no cocktail of emotions quite like the one that assaults you when you wake suddenly, violently, to find yourself stark bollock naked in front of a woman who has categorically not chosen to share this experience with you.

Horror, humiliation, vulnerability, shame: they all come for me with the adrenaline delivery of an epi pen, while the twin shocks of full-wattage lights and female shrieking have me sitting up on the bed with the gasping drama of a seemingly dead TV villain suddenly come back to life.

She screams in a heavy Eastern European accent. ‘Oh no! I’m sorry, mister, I’m sorry. I think it was empty!’

‘Fuck,’ I mutter, cupping my junk on instinct with one hand as I use the other to shield my eyes against the sudden glare. Where the fuck are my trousers? I glance blindly around the area of floor beside the bed, my eyes landing not on my clothes, as I hoped, but on a used and knotted condom.

Excruciating.

‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,’ I mutter on repeat with a grating British obsequiousness more suited to pushing past people on a tube escalator than inadvertently flashing someone who is almost certainly not paid enough to deal with this shit.

My mouth is parched. I must have been snoring, because the dehydration is definitely not from alcohol. This sex club, Alchemy, has a two-drink limit to protect everyone who partakes in its delights. Clearly, the only parties not protected from unwanted advances are its poor cleaning staff.

‘I’ll be out of your hair in just a moment,’ I insist, wedging a pillow in front of my dick and using my free hand to bear my weight as I peer plaintively over the other side of the bed.

This is ridiculous.

I feel like I’m starring in an x-rated version of Mr Bean.

I’m a thirty-six-year-old man who is now responsible for hundreds of staff members and billions of pounds of assets. It’s about time I started acting like it.

‘I leave you,’ she insists even more forcefully, backing out of the doorway and shutting the door with a firm click.

Heavenly Father, what the hell am I doing?

I collapse on the bed, flinging my forearm over my face to keep the dratted overhead lights out of my eyes. She left them on—smart woman. Probably knew I’d pass straight back out if she turned them off again.

At least there’s no sign of the person I fucked earlier this evening. Waking up with her would have been arguably more horrifying than waking up to a traumatised cleaner—especially because I no longer recall her name.

(My fuck, that is.)

Wait—did I finish? I did, didn’t I?

The low-grade chafing of my dick confirms for me that no, I did not fall asleep on the job and I remember that yes, I did indeed acquit myself with honours before I passed out. She liked it when I got her on her hands and knees.

She really liked it.

I summon the energy to move my arm and drag my hand down over my face. If forsaking one’s vows and leaving the priesthood to assume the management of eight billion crisp British pounds of assets was a common enough occurrence to warrant being a cliché, I would indeed be a cliché.

As it is, I’m simply a laughingstock.

I’m also stiff—not in a good way—and fucking freezing. These beds have satin fitted sheets but no actual coverings—an attempt to prevent dipshits like me getting too comfortable, presumably.

I groan aloud and haul myself off the bed. A glance at my watch tells me it’s just after four in the morning.

I am a joke.

The winter sun is a small comfort, I suppose. It’s streaming through the windows of my office, hitting my monitor in exactly the wrong place, but I welcome it.

I ended up coming straight into the office when I left Alchemy this morning. God knows, I needed a shower, but I wasn’t about to use the room’s ensuite when the poor cleaners were waiting to purge the scene of my sins of the flesh. I have a large bathroom and shower here—it’s useful when I jog into work—so I washed myself and proceeded to lie wakefully on the sofa opposite my desk for a couple of hours before yielding to the inevitable.

I’d had my sleep for the night.

My Alchemy membership was supposed to be a stopgap for me. An interim measure. My mate Anton Wolff suggested it a few months ago, when I may as well have still been a priest. Casting aside my vow of poverty was inevitable for a man in my position. A necessary evil.

Casting aside my vow of celibacy sat far less well with me… until it didn’t. But, much like the money and the whisky and every other numbing technique I’ve abused since assuming this role, the blessed lustre of my orgasms has faded and now I simply feel grubby. Shame-filled.

It’s not exactly a surprise. One of Christianity’s foundational concepts is that base, fleeting pleasures will never bring the kind of everlasting peace and joy that spiritual pleasures do. Still, I find myself in some kind of joyless vicious circle where the overwhelm of this new version of my life necessitates constant, aggressive numbing. I’m drowning in this toxic whirlpool of materially-driven stress, and until I find my flippers, I need regular life-aids.

Which brings me to the move I know I need to make. The move that, of all the sins I’ve committed in the past twelve months, feels grubbier, more exploitative, more transgressive, than the rest.

I reach into my desk drawer and pull out a small rectangle of card, pressing my finger and thumb to diagonally opposing sides and spinning it. It’s pale pink and made from heavy card stock. On the front, a pair of intricate gold angel wings and a single debossed word.

Seraph.

Anton passed me this card last week at Alchemy when I was just as exhausted as I was last night. Even more convenient than sex on tap at a club, he argued, was having sex on tap at work. An MBA-qualified executive assistant from Seraph, an agency he founded, would apparently sort me out on every front. She’d service me whenever I needed it, particularly during office hours, and keep me sated enough that eight hours’ sleep might become a reality.

The level of fatalism with which I’ve been approaching many of life’s decisions these past few months is frankly terrifying. I’m on a rickety rollercoaster with very little, if any, sense of control over this path along which I’m hurtling. But nothing says abject moral decay like picking up the phone to employ a prostitute in my place of work.

I pick up the phone.

My conversation with Anton leaves me jittery. He’s promised to put in a call to Athena, his own former EA and the woman whose praises he and his successor, Max, sang that night at Alchemy. According to them, Athena is a walking epiphany: physically sensational and terrifyingly competent on every front.

If she can’t or won’t entertain the notion of jumping ship from her current employer, a guy Anton quotes as being “a total fucking waste of her body and her personality”, he will call the Seraph CEO and have her meet with me to find me the right candidate, a process so daunting that I’m already shitting myself.

It’s with fatigue and a growing sense of self-loathing that I drag myself from my desk and over to one of the small rooms adjoining my office. Dad used it as a store room when he ran this place, but a spontaneous and horrifyingly expensive trip to Sotheby’s auction house shortly after I took over the running of this financial behemoth had me anointing his store room with a new function.

There it is.

On a table in the dimly lit space sits an illuminated glass case, its contents more nourishing for my soul than any amount of sex or scotch.

Above it, a simple crucifix hangs on the wall.

Before it stands a Victorian leather-cushioned prie-dieu, or kneeler.

I shut the door behind me with a soft click and approach the table with reverence. I already feel the softening, the easing of friction and exhaustion and guilt. This is my baptism. It will purify me in the same way that immersing my naked body in the River Jordan would cleanse me of this grimy layer of sin I carry.

It will, in a small way, expunge the lingering memory of the past twelve hours and help to ground me in what is good and true and pure.

It’s close enough to nine o’clock. Hora Tertia. The hour when the Holy Spirit descended on the feast of Pentecost. The Office of Terce offers guidance and strength from the Holy Spirit for the remainder of the day that lies ahead.

Next to the glass case sits a metal pitcher and matching metal bowl. I filled the pitcher earlier this morning and now I pour the water into the bowl, admiring the shallow, gleaming arc of liquid the jug’s generous lip provides. As I prepare to wash my hands before handling the contents of the glass box, I muse at the irony of keeping Terce far more regularly in my new life as a billionaire CEO than I ever did when I was an anointed servant of God.

You join the priesthood for a sacred life, a life of service. And while the sacred remains, the service aspect takes front and centre. Of all the eight Hours I learnt at the seminary, the only ones I kept were the morning and evening ones of Lauds and Vespers respectively. At nine o’clock most weekday mornings, I was mucking in at our parish soup kitchen or wrangling donors for fundraisers.

I was categorically not in a position to keep the Hours in the company of a seven-million-pound Book of Hours from the Italian Renaissance.

But now, here I am, this surreally corporate world allowing me the space for structured contemplation that my actual role as a priest simply did not. While it’s by no means a daily habit—I’m a businessman, not a Trappist monk—I find myself nipping in here for the occasional Terce before board meetings, for noontime Sext prayers devoted to peace and strength (often needed after said board meetings) or for the perspective on sacrifice that the three o’clock None offers—often before stuffing my face non-ironically with afternoon tea and biscuits.

This ritualistic washing of hands that I insist on adopting may, at face value, be the smart thing to do before touching a priceless artefact, but it doesn’t escape my notice that it’s grounded in the muscle memory of the Lavabo ritual I undertook every day at Mass before I handled the Eucharist.

I may not be a priest anymore.

I may no longer have the right to perform sacraments.

But this silent, ceremonial handwashing tethers me to this moment. This moment where I’ve chosen to stay in stillness and humility and prayer. To seek out God’s grace, even as the poor, miserable sinner I am.

Hands washed and dried, I don my nitrile gloves and raise the lid of the display case. My previous role required the handling of precious items—none so precious as the Lord’s body and blood—but this is the most expensive and creatively impressive masterpiece I’ve ever owned.

An Italian Book of Hours.

A stunningly intricate book dedicated to the glory of God, its provenance almost as fascinating as its visual riches. It was originally commissioned by the Tornabuoni family, who were major patrons of the arts during the Italian Renaissance, and its still-vivid illumination is a celebration of Florentine flamboyance, with accents of richest vermillion and ultramarine and malachite overlaid with burnished gold leaf.

The conservationists at Sotheby’s held my hand throughout the entire process of my taking stewardship of this priceless piece. They arranged for its storage in my office and educated me thoroughly on how to care for and handle it. The expert who led the process told me I was the first buyer she’d ever met who actually intended to use it for the purpose for which it was originally created.

I can’t imagine many Sotheby’s clients keep the Hours.

The book lies open within this humidity-controlled display case, its spine supported at the requisite one-hundred-and-twenty degrees. I take a moment to marvel at the intricacy of the bianchi girari—the white vine scroll work—in the margins as I begin to intone the words that introduce all the Hours.

Deus, in adiutorium meum intende.

Domine, ad adiuvandum me festina.

O God, come to my assistance.

O Lord, make haste to help me.

How many people’s gazes have fallen upon these pages? How many people have beseeched God with these words to help them, to bring them strength, in times of distress and fear that we, with the blessings of modern medicine, can’t begin to fathom?

I pick up the fine bone handle with which I turn the pages of this ancient book. It’s only then that I note the page it’s currently open at.

Compline.

The bedtime prayer for protection and peaceful rest.

I pulled a late one at the office last night, trying to make a dent in the infinite void of Things About This Industry I Do Not Know, before ending my working day with Compline.

That was about an hour before my mate Adam Wright called me and dragged me out to Alchemy for drinks.

My prayers to God for a peaceful rest fell on deaf—and almost certainly disapproving—ears last night.