by Bruno Noble
*
For a while, Yuuto Kawaguchi became the most important person in my life. He, I realised, was a bully whose bark was worse than his bite and whose skill lay in knowing his clients and telling them what they wanted to hear. I listened attentively as he took the good news out of the latest economic report for the market ‘bull’ and the bad news for the market ‘bear’, as he discussed one client’s children with him and, with another, the client’s girlfriends and his nights out and, with some, kept the conversation purely formal and focused on markets and economic developments. Know your clients, commanded the compliance manual, but Yuuto knew them better than any compliance officer could have envisioned. ‘Everyone is unique and everyone is the same,’ he told me on one occasion. ‘Everyone wants to be loved and admired and everyone wants to write a ticket; you just have to find their hot button.’ I wondered whether that were true of me and what my hot button was, and bridled at the thought of Yuuto presuming to ask himself and answer that question of me.
Yuuto seemed to measure my performance by whether or not I succeeded in keeping his clients on the phone and in gleaning information about their trading intentions while he assessed whether or not to end the call he was on. If a client was calling to boast of his hangover and just wanted to chat, I’d open and close my hand repeatedly and Yuuto would draw his finger across his throat in instruction to kill the call, or would twirl his index finger in the air meaning that he would call him back. If the client wanted to deal, I would repeat his intentions loudly enough for Yuuto to hear while assuring the client that Yuuto was coming.
I wasn’t authorised to deal but, if the trade were either large or beneficial in helping the bank get out of a position, I would call the trader on the squawk box and set the trade up for Yuuto. If Yuuto failed to get off the phone in time, so that either the client went elsewhere or the price had moved against him or the bank, Yuuto would scream at me in, fortunately, Japanese. How different to Mr Omochi’s tantrums that would fill Yumimoto’s library-like offices! Here, Yuuto was just one more salesman or trader shouting and no one batted an eyelid. Everyone, even Yuuto himself, knew that the display was to prevent his loss of face and that my role was that of the sacrificial calf, and he performed these admonitions with gusto, waving his telephone handsets above his head and mine with passion.
‘What was all that about?’ Sharon asked me, turning her chair to look at me after a particularly long rant by Yuuto that had only stopped when his phone had rung. ‘What was he repeating his name for?’
I swivelled around in my chair to face her. ‘He was reminding me that Yuuto means ‘superior’ in Japanese and that it’s also the name of a constellation and that I must follow his star. Generally, he was reminding me that I am his slave and he is the master, that kind of thing.’ I had my hand across my mouth in the hope of keeping my voice down, and I gave a shrug as if to say, It’s no big deal, but Jonathan overheard me and burst out laughing.
Jonathan was taller than Mr Omochi and nearly as large. He resembled Oliver Hardy when he laughed, when he played with his tie and picked his fingernails in echo of Hardy’s forever bringing his fingertips together in supplication. ‘Priceless! And what does Kawaguchi mean? Big head?’
‘Oh, no.’ I was keen to dispel any such misapprehension. ‘Kawa means river and guchi means mouth so –’
‘Big mouth! Kawaguchi means big mouth!’ Jonathan stood and announced this to the thirty or so people within hearing.
No one cared except for Yuuto who, squaring up to Jonathan across the aisle and behaving as though he had temporarily forgotten the difference in their weight and height, shouted, ‘Kuso kurae, debu!’ But he saved the worst for me, accusing me of being a traitor, reminding me that we, the Japanese team, had to stick together, asking me whether my father butchered people as well as animals and, slipping into English, requesting I either eat less sushi or shower more frequently.
‘Steady on!’ said Jonathan, who had sat back down and had the telephone wires from his two handsets trailing over his shoulders and his braces. He looked up at Yuuto, who still stood, spent but satisfied. Jonathan suddenly leaned towards him, conspiratorially. ‘Tell you what,’ he said, seemingly appeasingly. ‘Do you have any naked pictures of your wife?’
Yuuto recoiled. ‘No!’
‘Do you want to buy some?’
‘Saitei!’ Yuuto stepped forward quickly and plucked Jonathan’s trouser braces so they snapped back hard on his chest, and was halfway to the trading room door before Jonathan had moved.
‘Ouch! That hurt my nipples! I’ll get you back for that!’ was said half-heartedly, the delight at having provoked so much anger outweighing the sharp sting of pain. He sat forward to examine his screens, absent-mindedly massaging his chest.
Sharon and I looked at each other and confined our laughs to our eyes. ‘Have one,’ she offered, and handed me a plate of biscuits she had made.
Sharon
I saw my family increasingly less frequently in what was a gentle separation of ways rather than a falling out. Work took over from family, friends and colleagues from parents and siblings. Wanda celebrated this – my forging, as she called it, of an adult life: she considered it confirmation that I had grown up, that I had found myself and created an identity of my own. It didn’t feel that way to me; it felt more that the strings that had held me in place were being cut before new ones could finish being tied.
Mie’s arrival on the scene shook things up for me. Her complete freedom and autonomy showed me the life I could be leading. Instead, I lived the independent life through her as I accompanied her to department stores and helped her furnish her apartment, but not altogether satisfactorily: she and I had different tastes and I often wondered why my recommendations, which were good enough for my other friends and family, weren’t good enough for her. I found her conservative and old fashioned, not chintzy but austere: her finished furnished apartment seemed anything but to me. She made me feel frivolous.
My college friends welcomed Mie unquestioningly into our little group. She had an earnestness that they found amusing at times and perplexing at others. Over a drink or dinner Mie would quiz us on English authors we had more often than not never heard of or, if we were lucky, had encountered only because of a set text in our English O level curriculum. She’d ask about art-house films we might have caught on a rainy Saturday afternoon on BBC2, or about music and bands that we only knew from our parents’ record collections. She would take guidebooks from the shabby handbag she insisted on keeping and ask our advice on whether to visit Bath or Cambridge on a coming bank holiday weekend. It wasn’t that she showed us to be ignorant – more that she made us see how much everything we knew was contemporary, mainstream or local. Whenever we did happen to have a recommendation, she would write it down studiously, which had the effect of discouraging further contributions in case they turned out to be wrong in some way, or not as good as we’d thought. Without her meaning to, I was sure, she had the effect of making me feel less secure, as though the level of meness that had been slowly filling up the form that was me had reversed its rise and was slowly declining as a consequence of my incomplete knowledge. Departing from us after the restaurant or pub, declining our appeals and invitations to join us in the nightclubs and scuttling off to the nearest tube, her back turned on fun and the opposite sex, she would leave me with a sense of inadequacy, of social and intellectual deficiency.
*
‘You should try a Japanese restaurant. We could go one evening,’ said Mie casually as she, Gavina, Monica and I were settling a restaurant bill. ‘Next time.’
‘Are there any in London?’ asked Monica.
‘There’s one in Swiss Cottage,’ said Mie.
‘Swiss Cottage? But that’s North London!’ Gavina reminded me of Dad in her fixation on the South and North London divide.
On the rare occasion of our forays north of the river, Dad used to say, as we climbed into the family car, ‘Right. Have we got our pa
ssports? I’ve checked the oil, the tyres and the petrol. Seamus, are the blankets and spade in the boot?’
Despite myself and in spite of Monica’s and Sarah’s liking North London for its cool music clubs and markets, some of Dad’s prejudice must have rubbed off on me, as I heard myself saying, ‘Surely, there must be a closer one.’
‘I must warn you, it is expensive,’ said Mie.
Monica expressed the most enthusiasm. ‘What a great idea!’
A month later, the four of us sat down to a distinctly unfamiliar menu in a restaurant that appeared both functional and formal and yet warm and welcoming.
‘How nice to be able to clean your hands on this fresh little towel after the tube ride,’ I said, placing it on a wooden tray held by a waitress in a kimono.
‘I might need some help here,’ said Monica, staring wide-eyed at the Japanese menu.
‘You can ask me anything you like,’ said Mie, ‘even though everything has been translated into English.’
A Japanese waiter bowed and stood to attention by our table.
Gavina closed her menu and said, ‘I’ll have a lasagne.’
The startled waiter repeated the word. ‘Lasagne? We don’t have lasagne.’
‘Very well then, I’ll have spaghetti bolognese.’
The bewildered waiter looked around for help.
Monica and I couldn’t help but laugh and then I said, ‘Come on, Gavina, make it easy for him.’
Gavina waved her menu about. ‘I don’t understand a word of this!’ She opened it. ‘Okay, what’s this? I’ll have this.’
The perspiring waiter leant over to read the item Gavina was pointing at. ‘The sashimi?’
‘Yes. What is it exactly?’
The appeased waiter straightened. ‘It’s little pieces of fish, madam, raw fish.’
‘Raw fish! I want mine cooked.’ Gavina handed the menu to him.
‘Cooked? Cooked!’ The now extremely disconcerted waiter hopped from one foot to the other, refusing the proffered menu. ‘Perhaps madam can choose another dish?’
Gavina huffed and puffed and rolled her eyes. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘What’s this?’ – pointing at another menu item.
‘Yakitori?’
‘Yes, yakitori. What is it?’
‘It’s chicken on a stick with soy sauce, madam.’
‘Is the chicken cooked?’
‘Oh, yes, madam, very cooked!’
‘Good! I’ll have some cooked chicken on a stick,’ decided Gavina, thrusting the menu at the relieved waiter.
That evening and the few subsequent ones when the five of us met were never quite the same after that. Mie, who had remained impassive throughout the exchange, had clearly taken offence, and despite Gavina’s best efforts to make up for her interventions, what little warmth there had been between them cooled. Certainly, their relationship wasn’t helped by the accounts of our adventures that percolated from Monica’s lips over coffee at the end of our restaurant meals, during which she would have consumed a bottle of wine or two in addition to the Babychams and Cinzanos she’d knocked back in the pub. Monica had found herself a boyfriend and succeeded in airbrushing herself from our history of sexual conquest as she told stories in which Gavina was depicted as a floozy, single-mindedly in pursuit of men, and I not much better. I saw Gavina and myself through Mie’s disapproving eyes, to my double discomfort: not only discomfited for being considered loose by her, I was unhappy with my ongoing inability to anchor myself in a value system of my own.
Isabella
After four years, Frederica and I had made more money than we knew what to do with. We hoarded it in shoe boxes, beneath floor boards and had even opened more than one bank account each to appease Frederica’s concern about our attracting the attention of the Inland Revenue. We lived well and well within our means, unable to forget our care home parsimony and unwilling to forego the flush of unearthing a good deal in an antique shop and the camaraderie of lazy afternoons in North London’s charity shops. Competing with our customers’ wives and girlfriends in West End stores for overpriced luxury items held no attraction for us. We furnished our apartment with, we liked to think, choice pieces of glassware, porcelain and ceramics, all the sweeter for having been bought cheaply, and framed posters of films and art exhibitions. I longed to trace Mama’s pictures and belongings, and passed that burdensome task on to Cosmo in a letter, suggesting that it would be easier for him to undertake the necessary detective work as he remained in Oxford. Besides, he was becoming an artist and I assumed he would be interested to learn about his mother’s tastes and preferences in art and artists. Frederica believed that I was looking to replicate my mother’s parlour; I suggested that she wished to recreate her father’s study. She accused me of modernism, of being avant-garde, of eclecticism, all of which I was secretly rather proud, and I her of being Victorian, chintzy and old fashioned; we met at Art Deco and Art Nouveau. Our large living space was eventually finished with a mix of ill-assorted, heterogeneous furnishings that we had both liked or, at least, compromised on, and came itself to resemble a second-hand shop, while our bedrooms became the repositories for the things we had failed to reach agreement on and that I considered the purest expressions of our intrinsic selves. On our return from one of Camden, Notting Hill and Petticoat Lane markets, having spun around our extensive living space and debated where to place our latest acquisition, we would sit cross-legged over tea and biscuits and ill-assorted china cups and saucers and revisit one of Frederica’s favourite topics of conversation.
‘Do you still think that our clothes and our accessories, that our homes express who we are?’ she would begin grandiosely. ‘That we chose them, and not them us?’
‘Aha! That is a very interesting question.’ I would buy time, for our positions on this were not the same from one debate to the next.
‘What are we if not material selves? And what is a material self if not the sum of its possessions?’ Frederica would speak ironically, self-importantly, humorously and yet, I understood, sought my validation and approval.
I knew what she meant. The objets trouvés on the low tables, the sofas, benches and armchairs covered with throws and cushions, spoke of a shared aesthetic and language. The light from the virtually floor-to-ceiling window playing with the coloured, glowing glass on the wide window sill, the vases and jugs of dried flowers, the bric-a-brac and the knick-knacks, were evocative of a time and a place and of companionship, all together the summation of two selves, two lives to date, imparting comfort and familiarity. I loved our apartment. I loved it most when the rain fell, a sound like a wire brush on a snare drum washing over our south-facing window, the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral visible in relief only as though seen through a butterfly cage mesh, occasional helicopters and planes on their descent to distant Heathrow remote, silent insects.
‘We’re not like the punters, are we? With their big, heavy watches and their long, thin, patterned ties –’
‘And their fancy cufflinks.’
‘– and their fancy cufflinks, who do they think they are?’
‘And those huge phones.’
‘Yes, and those bricks with aerials. They look at themselves and think – I don’t know – that they’re cool, sophisticated, attractive. But I look at them and think they’re saps, fools.’
‘They try to create an image, a particular image out of their accessories –’
‘– while we have our possessions reflect who we are.’
‘They base their choices, their likes and dislikes on the approval of others –’
‘– while we know who we are and what we like.’
‘Something like that.’
We looked around our room, at our possessions.
‘Who are we, then?’ I asked Frederica. ‘Who do the punters see when we bring them home?’
‘The punters see our arses and follow them to the bedroom and then, after, when it’s all over, they just want to get out as quick as they can. They
don’t see anything!’
Frederica and I rarely discussed the men we brought home. We had a different approach to it, and despite our friendship, the topic was the one subject we did not broach directly but, on good days, did risk skirting around. I suspected that Frederica considered sex a commodity and was concerned that she was not as discerning as she should be for her own safety and mine about who she brought home, or whose hotel room she visited. I imagined her recumbent with one eye on her mental bank balance and the other on her wristwatch. The men I crossed in the sitting room or on the stairs to our apartment were rarely ones I would have chosen to spend any time with. On one occasion she had breakfasted with me with a black eye. On another I had heard her scream and had gone running to her room to find a man hurriedly pulling his trousers up and Frederica crying and holding a bleeding breast in one hand and the wads of notes he had thrust at her with the other. I had dabbed her breast and nipple as tenderly as I could with TCP-soaked wads of cotton wool and registered not only the weight of her breast but that, despite her pain and the risk of permanent scarring – highlighted by the antiseptic’s yellow stain on the indentations made by the man’s teeth – she was gauging whether the excessive amount of money he had left her had made it all worth it.