by Bruno Noble
I could tell from Curtis’s face that someone behind my back was making faces or signs that were amusing him, so I replied, ‘Yes. What’s going on behind my back?’
He grinned impishly and said, ‘Good question,’ and then a gleam came to his eye and he said, ‘I tell you what, when I tell you to, turn around suddenly – now!’ And to his delight some of his red-faced colleagues whipped away sheets of paper they’d been holding up, but not before I had seen a large red 10 scrawled on one of them. Curtis hooted with delight and, getting up to leave, said, ‘Watch out for Kate. She’s got teeth!’
When Kate entered the interview room after the longest wait, during which I had kept my back to the trading room, I nearly laughed aloud, as she wore her tightly curled hair either side of her hair band in the fashion of a cocker spaniel’s ears and I fully expected her to bare a cocker spaniel’s set of teeth. I only then noticed her clothes, which were of an elegance and cut that screamed expense and taste, and I felt cheap and shabby in comparison.
Kate stared humourlessly at the activities behind my back, and turning her attention to me, smiled ever so artificially charmingly, and said, ‘Sharon… Sorry, that is your real name, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I replied, puzzled.
‘Oh good, good, how sweet,’ said Kate. ‘Tell me, Sharon, if I asked you to book me into a hotel in Edinburgh for two nights, which one would you choose? And which airline would you fly me there with? If I asked you to book dinner, in London, for an important client and me, which restaurant would you choose? Would you choose a different restaurant if my client’s wife were joining us? How much float do you think you’d have to keep in petty cash for a week for the team? On what occasions would you book a car service for me instead of have me hail a black cab? Would you object to running errands, for the greater good of the team and of our clients? Tell me, is that your old school uniform you’re wearing? Do you think you’d be capable of submitting my expenses the day I give them to you? It’s been a pleasure, Sharon, such a pleasure.’
Kate hadn’t stopped to listen to my hesitant replies. All of a sudden, I was exhausted, deflated, as though I had just put on the longest, toughest performance of my life.
I woke to Mr Self shaking me gently by the shoulder. ‘I’m sorry to have kept you waiting so long,’ he said, ignoring my embarrassment. ‘But I have good news! Congratulations!’
*
In celebration, Wanda opened a bottle of champagne, and then another, that we consumed either side of a Chinese takeaway, sitting at the ends of the settee in Wanda’s living room, our legs interlaced in the middle of it. Our mood passed from exuberant to contemplative, when Wanda took it upon herself to resume the mother’s role and advise me on good working practices: the importance of punctuality, of asking questions rather than pretending to have understood instructions, of honesty, integrity and of managing one’s managers. As much as I appreciated my aunt’s guidance, I wished I could have heard it from my mother.
‘Aunt Wanda,’ I said sitting up a little. ‘Tell me, what are the evening jobs you go to? Mum asked me to ask you ages ago, but I always forgot.’
Wanda held the stem of her champagne glass in both hands and replied, ‘Well, you know, I do the books for some restaurants and other businesses and they ask me to help out in the evenings. From time to time.’
‘Yes, I know that. But which restaurants and which businesses?’
‘Well, you know I’ve done the books at Lo Scoglio for some time now. Massimo and Laura would rather have me in if they’re short-staffed or need a holiday than a temp. Anyway, it’s easy – I go in once a week to take care of the finances and stay on for a couple of sittings.’
‘Yes, but that’s only one night a week, if that. What about the other nights?’
‘Hit a person when she’s down, why don’t you? You choose your moment!’ Wanda extended a leg to tickle me with a bare foot, head lolling to one side to exaggerate her inebriation.
‘What do you mean, hitting you?’ My curiosity was suddenly aroused. ‘Come on! Are you hiding something? Where are you on those Thursday and Friday nights?’
‘Oh God,’ said Wanda, placing her glass amid the empty foil containers and cardboard lids and bringing a hand to her head. ‘This you do not tell your mother. I do front of house for another company I do the books for.’
‘Another restaurant?’
‘Well…’
‘Come on, tell me. What’s it called?’ I clutched her foot.
‘You don’t want to know.’
‘I have means of making you tock,’ I said and raised a finger as though to tickle her sole.
‘You promise not to tell your mother?’
‘I promise.’
‘Argh!’ said Wanda, in feigned anguish. ‘It’s so unfair of you to ask me after I’ve had a bottle of champagne.’
She held her head in her hands.
‘So. What is it?’ I persisted.
She told me.
‘But. That’s a strip club!’ I gasped.
‘A gentlemen’s club or a lap-dancing club but not a strip club.’ She raised a finger. ‘There is a difference. Or so we like to think. Anyway, now you know.’
‘Aunt Wanda!’
She shrugged.
‘I don’t believe it!’
‘You might as well.’ She withdrew her foot and pulled her legs up under her. ‘To tell the truth, I didn’t either to begin with. But I’ll tell you what, it beats visiting all these so-called respectable companies to do their books for weeks at a time and being followed into dark, dingy offices by their in-house accountants on the pretext of delivering forgotten files so they can touch you up and leer over your shoulder with their bad breath and roving hands and go on about nice figures. And then beg you to sign off on their dodgy accounts, their crooked expenses, their trips to Paris with mistresses and their lavish dinners with their mates. You know, not once have I not been felt up by someone in those supposedly respectable companies I’ve audited – and not once have I not found occasions of corruption. And I’ll tell you something about the club: it’s whiter than white. No deviation from a hundred percent honesty is tolerated. Every penny is accounted for. It has to be; the police, the Inland Revenue and the council are all over it. But, more than that, Pierre wants to do this properly, cleanly.’ Wanda leant back. ‘He’s the owner. If the business is considered smutty then it has to be run cleanly.’ She leant forward again. ‘And, actually, the best thing about it is the girls. The girls who work there. They’re lovely! Like a big family for each other – they look out for one another. And nothing goes on besides chatting to customers and topless dancing. No touching allowed. You know…’ She shook her head. ‘It’s not what people think it is, what they assume.’
‘But what do you do there, Aunt Wanda?’
‘I do the finances. I meet with Pierre and talk cash flow, bank overdraft and interest rates. I sign off on the numbers he has for me once I’ve either counted the money or seen the bank receipts. Sometimes I accompany him to the bank. Sometimes I go without him. Then I have dinner. Then I’m front of house and welcoming customers at the door and taking their money and, sometimes, their coats if we have no one for the cloakroom, and then I might help the cashier if customers wish to withdraw money on their credit cards. Or I might just hang out in the dressing room with the girls, laughing with some, consoling others, mending costumes. You know how it is.’
‘I don’t, really.’
‘Sometimes, when customers get drunk or aggressive, it’s good to have a woman to defuse a situation. But fortunately that doesn’t happen very often.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d be short of women there.’
Wanda stretched her lips into a smile. ‘A woman not in a bikini, I mean.’
‘This Pierre, is he your boyfriend?’
‘No! He’s too old for me and I’m too old for him! You know, you should come there one evening and see for yourself. It really is not what people t
hink. I bet you would love it. Oh God, what am I saying?’ Wanda brought her hands to her forehead.
Isabella
The executors of Freddie’s father’s estate had secured her a grant for a music course and approved her rental of a London apartment that she and I had wandered about in amazement before falling into each other’s arms in fits of giggles, the thud of our suitcases hitting the bald board floor reverberating off the bare brick walls. We had the top floor of a former Victorian warehouse, a vast expanse of space immediately below the building’s serially vaulted, high-beamed roof that required the support of two iron pillars at a regular distance between the room’s side walls; each of these contained a door that led to a corridor off which were a bathroom and a bedroom. Freddie picked sides, choosing one bedroom and bathroom over the other, not because there was any difference between the two but, I suspected, in simple demonstration of her right to have first dibs. A kitchen, the only immediately visible concession to domestic occupation, had been fitted the entire length of the rear wall either side of the entrance door.
That evening, each sitting cross-legged on a suitcase immediately below one of three massive casement windows constructed from a multitude of panes of glass set in dirty leading, we ate our first Indian takeaway ever and listened, on Freddie’s transistor radio, to a discussion about whether the discoveries of four incendiary devices in London over the last three days were evidence of the IRA’s intention to step up their mainland bombing campaign. The Indian and the Irish brought elements of exoticism and excitement to our London move. Looking out over the roof of the Smithfield meat market and, in the middle distance, the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral half-lit by a setting sun, we listened to a programme on the impending first anniversary of Germany’s reunification, and the elation that accompanied the story of that country’s rebirth was ours, too, as we made plans for the work I would find and the furniture we would buy and the manner in which we would decorate the apartment and the life we would lead. ‘And I will pay rent, of course,’ I had said, to which Freddie had replied sweetly that there was no hurry before quickly suggesting a price, which, I thought, indicated that she had already given the matter some consideration.
Freddie and I trawled the second-hand furniture shops of Clerkenwell and further north and east to furnish the apartment, and headed to Covent Garden and further west to, as I put it lightly to Freddie, furnish our souls, dipping our toes and noses into museums, galleries and expensive shops like timid tourists. Freddie, complete and self-assured as she was, was unimpressed, so I kept to myself the thought that with every rug, armchair, trestle table and hanging rail we bought and with every decorative jug and vase we filled with flowers and placed on tables and window shelves, I furnished a little bit of my person, taking further steps towards self-definition and self-knowledge.
I took jobs where I could, in cafés, pubs and sandwich shops that served City workers at lunch, while Freddie studied and gave children piano and singing lessons. We took our pleasure where we could, by day with friends made in Freddie’s college and my odd jobs, and by night in Kings Cross’s and Hoxton’s burgeoning club scene, later breakfasting with club-goers and butchers and meatpackers who were finishing their shifts in the meat market. Exhausted and yet wide awake, sleepy and yet buzzing, we and our hangers-on would climb the endless flights of stairs to our apartment to sleep through the better part of weekend days, Freddie and I waking up in the afternoons to complete strangers in our beds and armchairs and on our sofas and floors.
Sharon
I recalled a summer holiday in Wales, staying with Nonna and Nonno in Cowbridge. My grandparents would drive us to Ogmore-by-Sea for fish and chips and we would stop en route to climb the ruins of Ogmore Castle and dare to cross the Ewenny River on a series of close-set stepping stones just before it joined the River Ogmore only a mile from the sea. A memory came to me of Nonno and me on the stepping stones and of Nonna and Seamus on the bank and her shouting, ‘Be careful!’
‘One stone at a time, bring your feet together on the one stone before you step to the next, regain your balance, that’s right, take it easy,’ instructed Nonno.
It was easy. I grew confident. I slipped. I fell between two stones and gasped with the grip of the ice-cold water on my chest and the grasp of Nonno’s fingers on my wrist and with the not knowing whether to laugh or cry. By the time we had returned home, with me stripped of my sopping clothes in the car park by the castle and swaddled in an assortment of clothes my grandparents had spared, I thought the discomfort and fright quite worth it for the attention I received; Nonno got the ticking-off from Mum.
There was something of the time of year, the quality of light that brought this back to me as I crossed St James’s Park lake; maybe it was the crossing of the footbridge with Whitehall’s buildings to my far right, a visual echo of Ogmore’s castle in its relation to the stepping stones. I was unaware I had stopped until a tourist bumped into me and excused herself. She was saying something else to me. Would I take a picture of her and her friend together?
They stood, their bags at their feet and their backs to Buckingham Palace in the middle distance and the low sun behind; their faces would appear dark in the picture, I knew.
I returned the camera and thought, this is what my life will be like, a series of memories like a series of photographs with nothing to connect them. A join-the-dots life in which the dots remain forever unconnected, as in the pages of Seamus’s join-the-dots books he never got around to completing. A sequence of stepping stones with no guarantee that anyone would be there to save me by the wrist when I slipped and fell.
*
The bank was a circus, its trading floor a tumultuous riot of voices raised in excitement and exuberance when not lowered in despair and frustration. I sat across from Curtis and Kate and between Jonathan and Guy, my designated mentor, who showed patience when he needed to and trusted me sufficiently to leave me to my own devices when I said I’d understood something. Behind me sat the Japanese team: a loud, arrogant man called Yuuto and a rotation of his timid, terrified team assistants who never managed to stay for long.
On my first day, Kate stood by my desk; she was shorter than I’d remembered her to be. She said, ‘You might as well hear it from me: I didn’t want you hired. But I was outvoted. Anyway, as you’re here now…’ She held out her hand and I shook it. ‘You’d better be good.’ She padded back to her desk. To my surprise, I saw that she was barefoot; she’d kicked her heels off. That detail made her seem more approachable, less aloof, and I vowed that I wouldn’t let her down.
As a matter of priority, I read the compliance manual’s entry on expenses and I learnt who her clients were, the cities they were located in and the names of the best hotels and restaurants. I learnt how to complete trading slips in triplicate and who to take them to. Gradually, I learnt the names of the traders and of the salespeople in the other teams. Over a period of months, I learnt the names of all our clients too, and how to keep them on the phone until one of my team was available so that they wouldn’t go to a competitor.
‘Sharon,’ asked Jonathan one day. ‘Did I hear you flirting with my client?’
I blushed.
‘Good. Let’s hear more of it, please!’
‘Kate, call for you on line five.’
‘Who is it, Sharon?’
‘Call for you. On line five.’ I waved the handpiece.
Kate stood, one hand over the mouthpiece of the phone she held in the other, and shouted, ‘Sharon, how many times do I have to tell you? You don’t just say, Call for you. You say who it is, where they’re calling from and what they want.’
‘Kate, just please pick it up,’ I begged.
‘No!’ shouted Kate. ‘Who is it? And what do they want?’
Resignedly, I said, ‘It’s the department store. The toilet roll holder you ordered has arrived. They want to know if you’ll pick it up or want it delivered.’
Kate’s face turned crimson as she jumped on li
ne five. ‘Laugh all you want, you bastards,’ she shouted to the trading room before relaying her instructions down the telephone line.
‘Nice one!’ said Jonathan, delighted with Kate’s discomfiture.
I learnt everything, everything but what the team and the bank actually did. The mechanics of it interested me. I was part of the execution process, one cog of many, albeit a small one. I knew that the money was made by buying bonds at one price and selling them on at a higher one, but why or when anyone wanted to buy or sell was beyond me. The eager, desperate talk about inflation, GDP, interest rates and unemployment left me nonplussed. They were the terms of an extraterrestrial language.
*
A year after starting with the bank, I had found a new home, a place where I was appreciated and valued. My team was supportive, even protective, of me. Kate had softened and accepted me. Even Yuuto, who I had considered brutish initially, had no bite to his very loud bark and would lean back in his chair to share jokes with me that I could rarely understand.
The aisles were my catwalks. I would walk them with trading slips, memos and various errands and would greet traders by name and stop to chat when they weren’t too busy. The traders were chauvinist, sexist, but, to me, more endearing than threatening, even when they howled like dogs if a woman they considered ugly was shown onto the trading floor. Pity the poor salesperson showing a female client around who got howled at – he had to think of a believable story to explain the canine noises away.
Sebastian traded options on bonds and he sat at the very limit of my universe, just before the equities desk. He kept his eyes on his screens and would extend a hand for the three slips I held. He would examine and sign them and hand two of them back. It was a year before he spoke to me at all and when he did, as I turned from him to begin my long walk to the back office, it was just, ‘Hey.’