Shadow Banking

by C. M. Albright

  'Why the City instead of Wall Street?' The question sounded too prying for small talk in a lift and Al felt awkward as Miles gave it some thought.

  'I guess I just like London.' And then he smiled and Al was split between appreciating his beauty and envying it. This guy would never struggle for women and with the arrival of the smile, all trace of Miles’s taciturn coldness was gone. After less than a minute in his presence, Al found himself intrigued by his new colleague.

  The lift doors opened and Al and Miles stepped out into an oak-panelled corridor that smelt of polish and after shave. Standing next to the lift was a tall ungainly figure in an ill-fitting suit that lacked both fashion sense and style but provided a compensatory comedy value with its double-breasted, wide-shouldered extravagance. The head that sat upon the too-tight mauve collar was red and pink and grinning with an ill-kempt curly mass of ginger hair on the top of it.

  'Please God tell me you’re graduate trainees.'

  Before Al or Miles could respond – their body language must have been enough to confirm that they were indeed graduate trainees – hands were being shaken. 'Fergal Quinn, bloody glad to see you, I’ve been here for over an hour, got the bloody times mixed up. Had a bit of a nightmare on account of some confusion with the security guard fella downstairs and he sent me to the post room. Apparently there’s someone starting there this morning and they thought that was me so I’ve been sorting mail for the past half hour. Must be something to do with the suit, I suppose. Bloody funny really although I could have done with another hour in bed.' He became suddenly conspiratorial and whispered – even though there was no one in their vicinity who might have overheard – 'I got arse-holed last night with my brother. You know what it’s like. It’s a Sunday night and you go out for a quiet couple and then before you know it, you’re all over the place with your face buried in a kebab at 2am. Could shit through the eye of a needle this morning.'

  By the end of this unprompted monologue, Al couldn’t help the big smile on his face. 'I’m Al Denham. Nice to meet you, Fergal.'

  'Hi Fergal, I’m Miles Ratner.'

  'Great to meet you both. Oh thank God. Felt like I was going to be locked in limbo by this here lift for the rest of my natural born and you know what it’s like when you’ve got a hangover …' And he was off again analysing in detail which of the seven pints of Guinness that he had had the night before was the one that might have been 'off'. They walked along the corridor to a reception area where they were directed down another corridor to a meeting room. Al didn’t ask Fergal why he hadn’t taken a seat in the reception area and waited for others to arrive instead of loitering by the lifts. He didn’t get the chance. By the time they arrived at the meeting room a couple of minutes later, Al and Miles had been given a brief Fergal Quinn biography: he was the second of seven children – he had four brothers and two sisters – and came from Dublin where his father ran a fishmonger’s: 'Used to work there on a Saturday when I was a kid. Took a bit of scrubbing to get rid of the odour I can tell you and it’s not a great smell to carry around with you as a teenage boy.'

  They were the first three to arrive and chose desks in the middle of the room. The other four members of the graduate training group arrived one by one during the next few minutes. Eve Saunders was shy and bookish with a nervous yet cheeky laugh that was infectious; Rhys Griffiths was a small Welshman with a keen expression and an enormous golfing umbrella despite the clear blue skies; and Charlie Warwick had floppy hair and a military demeanour – officer class – with an accent to match. The last of the graduate trainees to arrive in the office was Imogen Green and as soon as she walked through the door, Al knew that she would make concentration on the ensuing course all the more difficult. People talk of 'types' with regards to their ideal objects of affection and Imogen was definitely Al’s type. She was slim, petite and possessed of a smile that hinted at an irreverent playfulness. When she sat down next to Al, he couldn’t help but enjoy her fresh, clean, expensively perfumed aroma. Al was thinking hard about the sort of question that he could ask her to initiate a conversation – something more imaginative and original than 'What university did you go to?' – when the seven of them were joined by a tall avuncular man wearing a blazer and what smelt like half a pint of aftershave that bludgeoned to death any olfactory enjoyment Al might have derived from his close proximity to Imogen. Aramis vs Miss Dior. No contest. The man closed the door behind him and addressed the group with a beneficent smile.

  'Welcome, welcome, welcome. There should be seven of you I believe?' He nodded at each of them in turn as he counted under his breath and then said: 'Great! The magnificent seven,' and beamed as though this were a particularly witty and erudite remark to make. Nobody even smiled. 'Good, well, first things first – on behalf of your future colleagues and the bank’s senior management, I’d like to welcome you all to Trenchart Colville. My name is Timothy Marchant and I’m head of Human Resources. Embarking on a new career can be a daunting experience …' And he was off. This was a speech that Timothy Marchant had clearly made countless times over the years and one that he had edited and embellished and enhanced to the point where it had become a finely tuned machine which spouted forth his own peculiarly unfunny little ‘witticisms’ alongside the general information he needed to convey. Five minutes into the speech and Al couldn’t help himself, he had already zoned out as he contemplated his fellow graduate trainees. While Aramis Man slipped his hand into his pocket and let the loose change tumble through his fingers – which looked at first glance as though he was fondling his testicles – Al mused that already he had identified a drinking buddy (Fergal); a competitor (Miles); and a woman who he knew – even after spending only five minutes in her company – would occupy his thoughts and hopefully his time. Even if he hated his choice of career – and he knew that it was a definite possibility – working at Trenchart Colville was going to be interesting if nothing else. Al was easily bored; Timothy Marchant had bored him before he had even opened his mouth, but his fellow trainees looked anything but dull.

  An elbow was nudged into Al’s side and he turned to Fergal who nodded at the pad of paper on the desk in front of him. On it was a simple but brilliantly drawn cartoon of a man in a blazer – Timothy Marchant – who was juggling a huge pair of hairy testicles each one as big as his head. Al couldn’t suppress a giggle but any worries that it might cause offence proved unfounded because Timothy had just let rip with one of his old favourites regarding life in the city not being all 'pinstripes and braces' and clearly thought that Al’s giggle was a sign of appreciation which spurred him on to further wholly unsuccessful attempts at humour. Al picked up the pen and as though taking notes, he wrote: 'Why did you spend half an hour in the mail room when you knew you shouldn’t be working there?' Al surreptitiously slid the pad back towards Fergal who looked down and read the message. He took the pen and wrote: 'I thought it was some sort of cunning aptitude test. Watching old feckwit here, I wish I’d stayed there.'

  GBP/USD: 1.5815

  The graduate trainees were taken through for lunch in the boardroom with the senior management of the bank. Miles Ratner was seated next to Daniel van der Weithuisen. It was the luck of the draw. He might just as easily have been seated next to John Cavendish, the chairman of the bank or Ian Guthrie, the head of banking, but no, it was Daniel, the South African chief executive, a man who, Miles guessed, would be described as ‘dashing’ by those who lacked the insight to realise that his demeanour was little more than a carefully cultivated front. But what a front. On his tanned wrist was a Patek Philippe; his Savile Row suit was micro-tailored around his athletic physique, and his hair and manicured hands – even the way that he smelt – was right on the money. If there was anything that Miles could fault him on it was his tie clip – not because of any aesthetic judgement on the tie clip itself – it was perfectly acceptable – but just the fact that he wore one at all. It reminded him of his father with his tie clips and extravagant cuff links that he insisted
on wearing that made him look like he was trying just that little bit too hard. People picked up on things like that. Understatement was everything when it came to appearance in business. Only losers dressed to impress. But then, his father was nothing if not a loser.

  It could have been so very different. The ability to succeed was so often a genetic pre-disposition. That’s how it was with so many of his friends and colleagues at Monkton College and more recently at Harvard. Clearly his father was an aberration, a man who had cast off the genetic programming of his own father – Miles’s beloved grandfather – in order to get it all so wrong. Miles despised his father. Funny that the guy he had met in the lift, Al Denham, had asked that question: ‘Why the City instead of Wall Street?’ He had not been in his new place of work for more than a minute and already he had been asked the one question that he knew he would not be able to answer. It felt like neither the time nor the place to tell Al that he had decided to choose London over Wall Street because he refused to start his career with a cloud hanging over him. His mother said there was no cloud, he was his own man, no one would care but he knew otherwise. She was doing what mothers are supposed to do, reassure, cosset, nurture. But that still didn’t make it the truth. People would know what had happened. People would think – as he did – that success or failure is so often predicated on genes. He would be starting from a point of disadvantage and whereas in other aspects of his life he might enjoy the challenge of proving people wrong, this was too important. All his life had led up to this. There was no way that he was going to allow his father’s vanity, blind optimism and parochial small-mindedness to screw up the opportunities that he had worked so hard to create for himself.

  When he had landed in Heathrow three days before and made his way into town on the tube to his one bedroom apartment on the Abbey Road – less than a hundred yards from the iconic pedestrian crossing – where his few possessions were waiting for him in boxes, he had felt it; he had felt it this morning coming to work for his first day on the tube. It was something he found liberating. It was the anonymity. No one knew his father here. No one knew what he had done. There were three and a half thousand miles between London and New York, a distance that could be covered in the blink of an eye by words down a telephone line. But distance was still distance. Someone might have seen news stories about his father in New York but no one knew or cared about his father here. He was no longer Lawrence Ratner’s boy. Here, he was no one’s boy. And that’s how he needed it to be. It gave him confidence. Not that he lacked it. He doubted that anyone else in the room had as good a degree as he did. Harvard economics summa cum laude. All the late nights and the early mornings, all those hours of study, all of it had been worth it. Trenchart Colville wasn’t his first choice of London bank but it would do. And besides, graduate roles were scarce and Miles didn’t want to work for an American investment bank. All that mattered was that he was in the game. It was a springboard. It would serve its purpose well enough.

  Miles looked around the table at his fellow graduate trainees. They were an impressive bunch, no doubt about that but there was no one he needed to fear. Al Denham was a good guy but he was a people-pleaser through and through. Nothing wrong with that in a social context and nothing wrong with it in certain areas of the world of banking. Al might make a great salesman. People would trust him but Miles suspected that he probably lacked the instinct to go all the way. The Irish guy looked like he had hidden talents; he was hard to read. Eager to play the fool on one hand but Trenchart Colville was not the sort of place to employ fools. There was something endearing about him. Perhaps he would provide some competition. Miles knew that competition would help him hone his instincts and focus his vision but he also knew that it wasn’t something that he would need in order to succeed. He was his own worst rival in that respect, perpetually goading and cajoling himself into ever greater feats of strategic thought and logic. The fact of the matter was that he had been born to trade. It was something that his grandfather had seen in him and nurtured and it was something that he knew in his heart to be true. All he wanted to do was trade, to take and manage risk. Talking to clients was one thing, important of course, but Miles knew that his destiny was not to present a public face, it was to make the big decisions, come up with ideas and see them through.

  As their dessert of summer fruits was served, Daniel van der Weithuisen turned to him and asked: ‘So Miles, tell me, with your Harvard degree, why did you decide to come to London instead of Wall Street?’

  UK Gilt 5Y yields: 8.65%

  Fergal needed to go. It felt like his lower gut was trying to cling to the matter within it like a man gripping a rope beneath a hot air balloon. The balloon was getting higher and Fergal didn’t know how much longer he could hold onto the rope. That was all he needed, to soil himself on his first day on the job. The problem wasn’t that he felt he couldn’t ask to be excused, rather, it was the worry that having asked to be excused and having stood up to leave the room, he would lose control. If that happened then things could go one of two ways and neither of them was pretty. If he lost control silently then he could hurry to the toilet, make whatever preliminary cleaning activities could sustain a journey home on the tube whereupon he could cleanse himself more industrially. If he lost control audibly however, then he would do exactly the same thing but he would have to deal with the shame of people knowing that he had soiled himself. Either way, he could never come back. During his school days, he had done things, been involved in incidents that were embarrassing, shameful even, but to be known as the graduate trainee who lost control of his bowels at a boardroom lunch on his first day on the job would be too much to bear. He would have to phone up the HR department, speak to old Laughing Bollocks, Tim what’s-his-face and tell him that due to a family problem, he had to return to Dublin. Then he would have to set about getting himself another job. It was as simple as that. He might not even be able to stay on in the City. It wasn’t exactly a big place. They didn’t call it the Square Mile for nothing. People would see him. There were seven other people in this room alone. It would only take one of them to see him on the streets and it would spread quickly. There he goes. That’s Fergal Quinn; he’s the one who shat himself on his first day at Trenchart Colville. It would spread like wildfire.

  If only he could release some of the gas around the obstruction. It felt as though the pressure was building and if he moved the slightest amount, altered his position in any way, it would go off like a champagne cork, only bigger and much more socially unacceptable. But any attempt at flatulence was a huge gamble. Even if he did manage to reduce some of the pressure in his lower gut, the resultant gas would be foul-smelling at best and downright vomit-inducing at worst, brewed as it was on a diet of Guinness and doner kebab. All it would succeed in doing was to provide an entrée to the main event, le grand embarras.

  Fergal was sweating with exertion. There was only one option. He would have to take his chances, ask to be excused and make a run for it. Daniel van der Weithuisen had already left and his place had been taken by a young twenty-eight year old hot shot called Rob Douglas – a tall good looking Scot – who explained to the group that he was going to be a mentor to the graduate trainees. Rob was talking about the nature of the business, about risk reward and all of a sudden his words had a certain poignancy for Fergal. Risk reward was what this was all about. The risk was all too obvious. But his reward, a clean pair of underpants and no public shame would be oh so sweet.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Fergal, trying to assume a tone of nonchalance, ‘I shan’t be a sec.’ Rob Douglas nodded at Fergal. It was now or never. As stood up, he clenched his buttocks and strained and squeezed with every muscle in his abdomen. Straightening up as far as he could dare, he took his first step towards the door. If it was going to come, it was going to come now when he moved his legs apart. One step, he was fine; two steps, he was still clean, but by the third, the weight that hung in his lower guts felt as though it was on the move and its only
possible direction was downwards.

  Maintaining a running crouch, Fergal hurried towards the door. He couldn’t help a small emission but it was faint and he thought he had got away with it. Once out of the room and into the corridor, his running crouch began to resemble a perpetual stumble as he made for the gents with his knees bent, one hand grasping his mid-riff and the other pressed against his arse as though anything that might emerge from within could be pushed back in if needs be. It was going to be a close run thing, but how close he couldn’t dare to imagine.

  To get to the toilets, Fergal had to go through the reception area. Attempting to disguise his abdominal discomfort, he attempted to plaster a reassuring smile on his face for the benefit of the two women on the reception desk. This was a misguided effort at good cheer and came out as a pantomime grimace. But before he had time to worry about his facial appearance, he realised that he was within the line of sight of the little man painted on the door of the gents. It was like a shining beacon of hope in the darkness and he moved towards it sideways like a crab, any overtly forward momentum seeming to cause further potentially disastrous slippage in the birthing canal.

  Fergal shoulder-barged the door and he was in. But his prayers that the toilets might be empty were not to be answered, for bending over the basins washing his hands was Daniel van der Weithuisen, the fragrant, tanned chief executive of the bank. His and Fergal’s eyes met in the reflection in the mirror above the sink but the CEO knew that friendly communication with a new recruit to the bank would be inappropriate at a time like this. Fergal wore the expression of a man on death row only seconds away from the execution chamber who is praying for a last minute reprieve. There was a cubicle only six feet away. The door was open. He couldn’t help himself; it was as though his mouth had developed autonomy from his brain. He wasn’t sure what he was trying to say. There was no conscious thought process behind this impulse to speak. Perhaps he was going to try and offer some explanation for his actions. Perhaps not. But what came out was a tortured gasp that shrivelled into a gurgling whimper as he entered the cubicle, still sideways. There, he wrestled with the horrendous realisation that he having made it to his goal – arrived at nirvana – he now had to face up to the very harsh knowledge that having done so he was still going to soil himself, stymied as he was by the buckle on his suit trousers that refused to release the clasp from the hole in the leather.