The Meerkats’ Book on Money

By Ilinda Markov

A marriage made in heaven between The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari and Who Moved My Cheese? - this book is about a flat broke girl called Elizabeth and her virtual guru Master meerkat Liam who teaches her how to forage for money.

Everyone needs a teacher, a visionary and a healer in life and Master meerkat Liam is all a broke girl with a broken heart could wish for. Elizabeth leaves her native West End and her only true friend Malita and sets out on a journey during which she learns about the Midas touch.

Is money all there is or it's the attitude to money that defines comfort and happiness? These and more questions are answered during Elizabeth's encounters with people into money as she travels around the world. Some of them give her a secret message and a token symbolizing the significance of money in their lives.

What is Elizabeth's own secret message?

In West End Malita waits for her return singing a magic Ethiopian song, "Coffee pot, bring wealth..."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Mar 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781925880977

Book preview

You can’t dig out all the money in the world but you can try

                                      Master Meerkat Liam 

It helps to know the difference between Hippocrates and hypocrites…

                                 Master Meerkat Liam      

PREFACE

We know, we know, you are flat broke, desperate, in between anxiety crises, your last excitement dates from the day when you took your auntie shopping for clothes pegs, so you need us, a gang of bonkers meerkats straight out from the Kalahari desert where Cape burrowing scorpions are the friendly creatures.

It will get your knickers in a knot over the crazy things people do over money. Big money, fast money, heaps of money! You don’t need to be academic to figure out that rich people have always had it good: good life, good food, envious love affairs, expensive youthfulness.

From the old movie scenes with Mr Fat Purse lighting a cigar with a burning dollar bill, to the hipster rave: drinking vodka from an ice sculpture, it’s all about a show-off of money. Even if you are a non-smoker and vodka gives you a headache, you still need money to pay the bills breeding like mice in a kitchen drawer. Money might not always buy love and happiness but buys things that make one happy. Like paying those bills and paving the road to financial freedom. The literary legend Charles Bukowski labelled once as slavery a life like …leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight the traffic…just to make ends meet. Financial independence is beneficial for the health, the self-esteem, and last but not least to one’s posture; given our trademark role of watch guards, we, the meerkats, are particular about postures. Have you seen Rembrandt’s painting The Night Watch? Full of purpose and protection. That’s what we are telling you that money worries can give you ulcer, back pain, heart palpitations, depression, anxiety and what not.

The privileges for the rich date well back in the obscurity of history. If you were rich and lived at the time of ancient Egypt for example you were entitled to be mummified, plus given a copy of the Book of the Dead, which was more than forty feet long, so you knew your way in the afterlife. If you were a pharaoh, you’d order a pyramid to be built with chambers full of gold and goods that would keep you fed and happy during your time as dead. Some ancient tribes, though, like the Chinchorro people who lived in what is now northern Chile around seven thousand years ago were more democratic: mummification was for everyone, rich or poor.

If an average person thinks of sex every eight seconds, (sex is banned in our gang, it’s only the alpha couple’s business) it’s also believed that people think of money every two seconds. Thoughts last more than two seconds, so one is thinking continuously of money. That doesn’t help much making it. There are no free lunches or other nano wishes that circle in the head along with fantasies of Gatsby parties, overnight bitcoin hits, mammoth gold nuggets finds or windfalls of cash, that classic and infallible lubricant of people’s relationships. The reality is that money is a feral thing, that’s why we know its nature better while you never stop wondering how it is so that many are doing better in life, and with all the wealth to grab out there your purse is parched with continuous draughts. You ask yourself what kind of an app you might need to spruce up your life and find the river of money.

All you need is us, devious Kalahari gangsters in possession of good knowledge of foraging the desert where the sky is full of birds of prey, we are talking here hawks and eagles and from behind the bushes hyenas strike and Cape cobras are lurking in the sand.

Perhaps you are arrogant enough to still ask what meerkats have to do with money, after all among ancient coins there’s none with my snout on it. A lot of bulls and lions and other brutes but not meerkats. Meerkats appear though in modern South African and Rwanda gold coins: 24 karat gold is used for showing our gang in our trademark watchful stance, stretched high on our back legs to observe all and sundry on the desert’s horizon. 24 karat gold! That tells you something, dude. Who will put your portrait in 24 karat gold? No offence meant. Besides we are not cats as you might think reading that meerkat is the Afrikaans version of Marsh Cat. Marshes in the Kalahari? Ridiculously ignorant! Suricats as sometimes we are called sounds better.

So let’s start!

To prepare for our money foraging you have to BYO three, long discarded, memories.

The first goes back to the moment when you got your first pocket money. Remember the joy, the thrill of that special event when somebody put ceremonially a couple of coins in your little hand entrusting them to you, making a statement that you were big enough to have money, big enough to buy things, treasures like a soggy strawberry cream doughnut, Superman books with ripped pages and smudges of dirty fingers, or perhaps your dream was to stock up on chewing gum enough to master the art of blowing the best and biggest bubble gum balloons. Is important to bring that moment with you not because you have changed over the years and learnt to buy wiser but because I want you to relive the feeling that ripped through your juvenile heart and there are no emoticons for the thrill of the first bite into cold greasy chips bought by you alone lifting yourself on your toes in front of a market stall. The euphoria of receiving that first money and making use of it became a symbol of abundance that kept growing bigger than your best bubble gum balloon.

There’s a chance you have put that money into your first Piggy bank bought for you by the same old auntie who didn’t believe in giving money away but in passing on money attitude. So your second memory should be of the joy you felt when you rattle that Piggy bank and the music the coins produced: the music of money! Rattling that ceramic curly-tailed porker you feel important, you feel the bud of power and you wonder whether it’s always so easy to have a bank, your own bank full of money, the association between money and bacon in the back of your mind for life without knowing that pigg is the name of orange coloured clay used in the Middle Ages for pots to store money from where the name piggy bank originated. You don’t care! You love your little pig with a slit on its back or on one of its robust sides and you think that one of the purposes in your infant life is to feed it and make it happy gobbling coins in wait of the big moment when the piglet is so full that you have to break it. That’s how you start your career of a bank breaker.

Next, bring along another precious memory.

It’s about the first thing you bought for someone special with your own money earned by frothing cappuccinos in McDonald’s. It was for your always tired and moody mum. A shiny, long and purple scarf. She didn’t know what to do with until proudly tying it around a shade lamp in the lounge for everyone to see.

Bring that memory with you because it was the first sign and proof of your benevolent, romantic affair with money. You were young but cast money for an Oscar-winning support role in the movie of your life; you cast money for the back vocal to your own ode to joy. It was another triumphant moment of abundance and celebration of life.

These milestone moments of your money initiation charged with excitement and exuberant feelings will be a promising lay-out for your money digging.

First let’s complete the introduction. Only one of us comes with you to be your guide and that’s Liam, a young meerkat in his prime known to have a good nose for a free tucker. He is so clever, he can outsmart that cheating bird the drongo. For the record he chose to call you, Elizabeth and you come with so much luggage that you can’t fly commercial. Just kidding.

Or maybe not.

LIAM

Unless you are Francis Assisi and live in a cave, or a Buddhist monk with a bowl in hands waiting for the villagers to ladle out rice, you have to live your life regulated by outer forces and pay for your necessities. You pay for electricity, water, food, warmth or cold, for clothes and cars, you pay for entertainment, education and culture and sometimes for sex. Every time you get out of the house it costs you an arm, if you sit in the house it also costs you and nothing comes cheap.

Expenses are the very proof that we exist.

Everybody knows this, Elizabeth, but you! Everybody loves money, Elizabeth, but you. What a shame! Even the ancient Roman loved money or shall I say especially, how especially the ancient Romans loved their gold and silver coins, the sound of it, the smell of it, oh sorry, not the smell because they used to say that money has no smell that was because one smart dude of an emperor by the name of Vespasian introduced tax on urine collected from the public urinals and then widely used in bleaching clothes or treating leather. The story goes that the emperor’s son objected the tax and Vespasian brought some gold coins to his nose and asked what they smell like. No smell, answered the youngster and his triumphant father said, Yet it comes from urine. You can substitute urine with anything like drugs, weapons, prostitution, bribe, curruption, it still will be Pecunia non olet, money has no smell or even better money doesn’t stink. That’s what you think when we talk money, Elizabeth, and you want to puke, and you are full of despise because you are young, rebellious and like every young person you want to change this world for better and for a start you think that money is evil, money is behind every injustice. You side with the poor, the abused, the mothers with dried breast milk, the homeless, the ones not ready to compromise in the name of getting somewhere, the ones who refuse the modern slavery of nine to five, the ones who doesn’t sign contracts for the privilege to be sucked dry for life by banks, credit institutions and the likes so they can have a roof over their heads and a car to drive from home to work and back. What you dream of is freedom and a simple and healthy life in nature, you want to travel and you want to love but most of all you want your time for yourself and you don’t want to worry about bills. You want to spend your days synchronized to your moods and you want to make a point that your life belongs to you.

To be honest, Elizabeth, you look like something that even the cat wouldn’t drag home. With all my respect I can understand this. You have been through so much lately with everything that happened and couldn’t be undone in your young life. But it’s time you pulled up your socks up and made a life for yourself if you don’t want to finish with a severe depression in a suicide-prone protocol.

Watching you, always keeping my watch guard pose, I hoped you could scrape the leftover of energy that’s still in you and make some decisions concerning your health, love life and financial situation. Mainly your financial situation which could resonate beneficially on everything else that now looks stagnated and hopeless. But it’s not happening. So I am here to help. Remember me, Liam, your little friend who once you wanted to snitch from the Dubbo zoo? The little scruffy meerkat you fell in love with some twenty years ago when you were a little girl and your mum and dad were together, happily married. A happy family tavelling all the way down from Brisbane to the Western Plains, paying crazy money to sleep in a lodge with a panic button in case a cranky lion decided to pay you a visit. Your dad loved the loins and your mum loved the zebras because they reminded her of piano keys but all you wanted was to stay in the meerkats’ enclosure and feed me under the watchful eyes of my important family. Each one of them standing straight and alert as if we were not in Dubbo but in the Kalahari desert where we came from with the knowledge how to deal with predators. Unintentionally we have swapped the wild life of freedom and insecurity, life full of danger and thrill with a life in a zoo where I was fed regularly, looked after and even immunized, the only thing required from me to perform my little act standing tall on my hinder legs and entertain dudes like you and your parents paying money to see me. See I was earning my secure living but have lost my freedom and the thrill of fights and foraging that comes with it. Sorry to say but your parents were already showing the first cracks of incompatibility and it was you like a little fairy dancing between them, the only link left, but not enough to keep them together.

Don’t look around, Elizabeth, you are not going to see me perching on your desk or foraging for snakes outside in the garden once blooming, now covered in weeds. Why don’t you pluck the weeds by the way? The only place we meet is the virtual world of your child’s memory. You introduced me during one of those long and boring sessions with the beautiful Indian-born psychiatrist of yours, Amruta. She asked you what that only thing that you would love to hold and never let go was. Your answer rattled her and she talked about girls’ crushes on sexy late personalities like Elvis bringing her own experience by telling you how as a teen she was sleeping with his portrait under her pillow. A looker, wasn’t he? You said no, Liam is an animal, which cooled her