by Bruno Noble
For me, the money was the least of it.
Sharon
Three years after Sebastian had left London for Tokyo, he returned.
The news trickled down the trading floor, from the derivatives desk, through to the traders and, last, to the sales team. On a day like any other he was just there, at the formerly empty desk next to his old one, and I was walking hesitantly up the central aisle in his direction, trading slips for him to sign in hand.
I stood by his desk perhaps a little closer than I did to other traders’ desks and asked how he was. My concern for him was genuine: I really did hope he was well.
He said that he was indeed well and asked after me in a way that, too, I felt, was sincere and affectionate. When he raised his eyes to mine they were bluer than I recalled them, shockingly so, and sparked an ache of desire that knotted my stomach. I longed to run my fingers through his hair and to snatch the pen from his hands.
He told me that he’d had a wonderful time in Japan, wonderful.
I told him of changes in personnel.
He told me about his job in Tokyo, his daily commute and the holidays he’d been on.
Our conversation was like an amateur tennis game of arcing, slow shots, let calls and double bounces.
I left him with a ‘Welcome back.’
He said he’d see me around.
I walked to the back office and back to my desk, my knees weak and my stomach hollow.
‘Who’s that you were talking to?’ asked Mie.
I told her. ‘He’s just come back from our office in Japan. I should introduce you.’
‘No,’ said Mie quite seriously. ‘That doesn’t follow at all. And, anyway, I’m quite capable of introducing myself.’
Monday came and went without my going to see Sebastian after work. The rest of the week passed with no hint that he had expected me to visit, no suggestion that he was unhappy I hadn’t. I assumed he had been relieved that I had stayed away rather than disappointed and too proud to say so. For all I knew, he was in a relationship. Maybe he was no longer living at the same address. Perhaps he felt that a renewed Monday after-work visit from me would have been a backward step.
Mie
To the outside observer, we 300 or more people in the dealing room must have resembled battery farm chickens, and yet I was never more certain of being uniquely me. My sense of self consumed me; it fed on itself and expanded within me, like the air in a balloon fitting the balloon’s shape exactly. Admittedly, I was a Japanese woman in an almost exclusively male and Caucasian environment but, perhaps augmented by this singularity, my sense of self made me giddy.
Knowing that a life will be shaped by the incidences one highlights and places emphasis on, leaving others to sink from the memory’s surface, I recalled every step that had got me to this point. It was odd to think that if I were the sum of those memory-building blocks I chose not to discard, among those rejected, abandoned memories – of experiences, thoughts, events witnessed – lay other, potential selves. Intellectually, I saw this; physiologically, I failed to.
One other person in the trading room stood out for me, in the sense that he too, I felt, possessed elements of the qualities I had previously considered exclusively mine.
I stood and watched Sharon weave her way to the derivatives desk and to Sebastian, who sat in front of his bank of screens, immobile in the tumult, the calm in the eye of a storm. My heartbeat quickened when I saw him, even though from a distance. Where others gesticulated, spoke or shouted, walked or ran, slumped forward or leant back in their desk chairs, he sat straight with his forearms on his desk’s edge and his hands clasped above his keyboard in a posture that communicated a state of relaxed attentiveness. It wasn’t his looks that alerted me to him but his poise, his aspect of self-assurance, of containment, of ironic detachment, his knowing quality that he was of the fray and yet somehow above it. He appeared neither proud nor smug but sure of himself, certain of his own existence, while willing to entertain that everything else around him was illusion.
For the first time in my life, I envied someone their self-possession.
*
I looked around a Soho cinema foyer decorated with black and white film posters on one wall and colour film posters on another, and thought of David and of Sebastian.
‘Do you know Sebastian?’ I asked David when he returned from the bar with a gin and tonic and a half of lager.
‘The film starts in ten minutes,’ he said, lifting his glass by way of explanation for the half. ‘No,’ he added simply.
It was David who had first proposed a film, and we had gone to the cinema about once a month after that. The one we were about to see had been my suggestion and David had only reluctantly accepted because, I guessed, my previous choice, about a girl and boy who get lost in the Australian outback, had shaken him. I had considered David demure rather than shy, private rather than quiet, but I was beginning to realise that his timidity – his seeming introversion – was something else altogether.
I entered the film, which stars James Fox, Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg in a blurring of identities, ideologies and genders, like a hand does a glove. David and I sat in the dark where, next to my elation, I couldn’t help but feel him seeping unhappiness, as though the film were challenging him to his core. When Fox’s character said, ‘I know who I am. I am a bullet,’ I reached for David’s hand and he grasped mine for different reasons, neither of them romantic or sentimental. When the naked Pallenberg sat astride the naked, lipstick- and wig-wearing Fox and held the yellow-bordered hand mirror to one breast so that we saw hers reflected in place of his, I felt the thrill of Fox’s identity crisis that David’s shudder, transmitted through his tightening grip, told me was his as well. We were, then, no longer a couple holding hands in a cinema, but life’s navigators, with me reaching overboard to hold the hand of a drowning man.
As the credits rolled and the cinema emptied, David and I sat still. He needed to compose himself and I needed to decide whether it was sympathy or contempt that I felt for him. We walked in silence to the tube and I pictured our black-lined silhouettes as children’s cut-outs from a folded piece of paper of two people joined at the fist, with my sense of certainty of purpose overflowing into the hollow man by my side at that juncture.
Isabella
It was Sharon who inadvertently had me question myself most profoundly. She was an ingénue, a guileless, pretty young girl with striking green eyes, naïve but not innocent, curious but not nosy, inquisitive but not prying; she was giving, loving and fun-loving. Pierre and Jemma had abandoned the appointment of a mentor for new girls, whether distracted by a more challenging economic climate and increased competition or by their deteriorating relationship, but Frederica and I had taken to Sharon and assumed the now formally neglected role, enjoying her candour and pleased to mother her. This, however, did not please her aunt, who I suspected of scheming to supplant Jemma in Pierre’s affections and business. Wanda pulled me to one side one evening and lectured me, warning me that I’d be out on my ear if I led Sharon astray. Dumbfounded, I had been momentarily unable to reply but, having regained my voice, chose not to use it, not to inform Wanda of her niece’s proclivities, as they would have provided no real defence of my own conduct and, besides, I liked Sharon. She appeared to carry no emotional baggage, unlike me, her aunt and most young people I had grown up around, and interested me for that reason. She had an attitude to sex I considered healthy, treating no liaison as illicit, greeting all mention of even the most fleeting and superficial of sexual encounters with a tender complicity, with raised shoulders, a grin and a twinkle in the eye that brought to my mind my guilt-free and pleasure-rich dips into Mama’s bowls of sweets.
I would leave the club with men I was happy to spend time and to breakfast with, men I fancied or who amused me. On the occasions when I returned home alone, I would stop to breakfast at Smithfield Market and would choose, as I wandered in the thicket of hanging sides of meat, through the
forest of carcasses hung from Achilles’ tendons and aitch bones, along the rows and columns of skinned, amputated and stamped bodies of quadrupeds, one among the bipeds – the bummarees, the cutters and the traders – one whose banter made me laugh and whose apron was not too bloody and who was neither so drunk nor so exhausted as to fall asleep on me. I took my recompense, when it was offered, however it was offered, whether in pounds of pence or of beef, pork or lamb, whatever the cut or its derivative. My reward lay not in financial gain but in the bodiless flight that came with sexual climax and, as I climbed the stairs to Frederica’s and my apartment with a man behind me, I looked forward to the disengagement I knew would come. At times, Frederica, either alone or with a punter, having jumped at the chance of negotiating a supplement, would join us on the sofas, carpets and armchairs in naked, hedonistic indulgence in a cubist still life of limbs, elbows and pubic triangles, rendered all the more lusciously exciting in bringing both the voyeur and the bisexual out in us all.
When I had started working at the club, and seeing Dr Dearman’s and Dr Faben’s expressions on other men’s faces, I had come to feel sullied and soiled; but then I had decided to embrace my sexual appetite, to accept what had happened to me and be positive in affirming who I was. I would be active as opposed to reactive or passive, I would make decisions and regain my power while acknowledging the paradox that I was using my body precisely to escape it. In part to obliterate certain memories and in part to gain vicarious revenge, I approached sex with gusto – aggressively, animalistically, insatiably, occasionally scaring men who expected women to be submissive and pliant with no sexual appetite of their own. I was called a lunatic, a nymphomaniac and a freak by men whom I labelled closet necrophiliacs, men who wished for no signs of life from their sexual partners and who might have been better satisfied by the meat market’s corpses. I was called wonderful, astonishing and fantastic by men I considered self-knowing, -confident and normal, who I believed sought a sexual encounter between equals and satisfaction between consenting adults. With such men, who betrayed no panic and no concern about the give and take, the push and shove, the equitable, unselfish exchange of small pleasures and of physical contentment, I could go into my head and cut myself off, allowing my body to respond to caresses and penetrations, to fingers, lips and tongues. I felt caught in a circle that, vicious in its conception, was virtuous in its completion. Unwilling to be consciously present while having sex, I wasn’t. I disappeared into my head and, from there, flew elsewhere. Consciously needing the drug of mental release, addicted to my mind and body split, I required sex frequently in order to attain it, to be the free, independent woman I wanted to be. The sexual partners with whom I achieved this responded with pride and no small degree of arrogance that I found endearing when they weren’t too demanding. Limp, drained and deflated and yet cocky, content and flattered, they would beg to see me again, and continued to press telephone numbers or money on me as I left their hotel rooms or showed them to my door. I didn’t want to know so much as their names.
Sharon
One Friday evening there was a commotion in the club that made its way into the girls’ changing room. Honey and Angelica tumbled in, holding onto each other in fits of nervous giggles, and announced the arrival of three Japanese men in the club. We all knew what that meant.
A story had been doing the rounds that a Japanese man had been frequenting the clubs and had been extremely liberal with his money, to the point that the girls had been very willing to indulge him in the most bizarre of fantastical requests. While our club had only semi-private, open booths at the other end of the room from the stages and poles, other clubs had cubicles that afforded complete privacy. One of this mythical Japanese man’s less grotesque requests was to ask a girl to scream, a request that would be met with little protest, given the very loud music typically played in the clubs and the money he would throw at her for every shriek that was louder than the one before. Girls would spill out of the booths, hoarse and breathless and giddy with fistfuls of notes while their colleagues would look on jealously. Or the Japanese man would step out of a cubicle first, leaving the exhausted girl on the floor gathering the paper money he had thrown at her. And then there’d been one evening when the lucky girl he had chosen had screamed louder and for longer than other girls at other times and he had stepped out first, bowed, gathered his coat and left. After a time, another girl had wondered what was keeping her colleague so long and had gone to look for her in the booth, only to find her body on the floor and her head in an ice bucket. At every iteration of this story another detail emerged. It hadn’t happened once but twice, once in Tokyo and once in London. It had happened not twice but three times – in Bangkok too. It was rumoured that one dead girl’s eyeballs had been gouged from her head. Another had had her cheeks bitten off. Yet another, her nipples bitten off.
And so, believing in safety in numbers, pleased with the distraction from a familiar routine performed to a succession of interchangeable customers, we tottered in our high heels and our two-piece swimsuits out of our changing room and onto the dance floor to catch a glimpse of the ogre.
That was when I saw Yuuto, and he saw me.
On noticing me, one amid half a dozen near-naked girls, Yuuto jumped, legs straight as though pulled by a stage wire from his back, black polished brogues clearing the shag carpet and one hand brought to meet the other to better grip the glass he was about to drop. His mouth and eyes formed three perfect Os and opened wider as he looked from my face to my breasts, my waist and my legs and back again. Within a matter of seconds, though, he had regained his usual, nonchalant, sardonic poise, patted his hair down and looked around for a place to sit next to two men I assumed to be his clients. We exchanged neither a word nor another look and I danced at the end of the cavernous room far from him for the rest of the evening, nonchalantly, distractedly and poorly.
I anticipated Monday morning with some apprehension, but I needn’t have: Yuuto gave me not so much as a wink. I would never have expected such a level of discretion from him. It made me think how little we can know others and wonder for what reason I had ever thought that we could.
Mie
I was impressed with the fact that Sharon had landed her job after having left school at 16. It was as clear to me that her team loved her as it was that she needed to be loved and, because her need was met, she was always happy, and happy to please. No matter how different she was from me – unintellectual, superficial insofar as she was always concerned to make a good impression and to be liked – I couldn’t help but like her. There was something amusing about being taken under the wing of this young girl who had stopped her formal education so much earlier than I had and, after she had shown me the West End’s bright lights and included me in her group of friends, I recognised in her a complete absence of artifice, a true generosity of spirit. There was one thing about her that surprised me: she had absolutely no interest in the job itself or, to be precise, in the nature of the financial markets we operated in. I had learnt that the bonds we bought and sold were IOUs, the values of which depended on inflation expectations, central bank rates, economic growth and the credit quality of the borrower. I grasped the nature of bonds’ derivatives – futures and options, especially the latter, as Yuuto had a client who traded in those practically daily – and sought to understand why a client would choose a derivative instead of the underlying instrument, why the client would choose to buy a call option on a bond instead of buying the bond or a put option on it instead of selling it.
Sharon, however, did not care, and yet she executed her duties to perfection. Where I bothered Yuuto by asking him about a client’s reason for a trade, she completed and processed her UK team’s trading slips faultlessly without having the slightest idea what she was doing and why, and without ever enquiring after the investor’s motivation. She had a system, she followed it and any extraneous information risked only impeding her. I sensed she was at her happiest as she sashayed up and down
the trading aisles, dodging chairs, waving arms and telephones, and replying sweetly to the frequently sexist endearments she received. Hello, darling.Hello, love.Got any biscuits?What are you doing this weekend?You’re young enough to be my daughter. The more pairs of eyes she had on her, the happier she was, and yet there was nothing cheap about her; she moved elegantly and dressed well. Next to her, I looked like a frump.
‘A frump? But that’s only because you want to!’ she laughed. ‘When you’re ready for a change of image, just say.’ She replaced a blouse on a hanging rail of the clothes shop we were browsing in one lunchtime.
I looked at its price and then considered the clothes she was wearing more critically. ‘Sharon, come to think of it, how can you afford to wear some of the beautiful clothes you have? On our salary? I mean, it can’t just be clever shopping. I don’t mean to pry,’ I added.
She led me out of the shop. ‘I’ll tell you,’ she said, and she did. ‘Only Yuuto knows. And he’s been very discreet. Though I don’t know if it’s out of courtesy to me or to protect himself – because, you know, he’d have to say he’d been there. Catching flies?’ She chucked me under the chin and I closed my mouth. ‘Come on, it’s not that bad. No touching allowed. All in the best possible taste!’ Laughing, she pulled me by the arm. ‘Come on!’
Sharon seemed unaware of her own indiscretion in having told me that Yuuto visited strip clubs. The fact that he did confounded me little compared with my astonishment that, not only did she work in one, but could disclose it with such facility. I had little time to dwell on either, because we returned to the office to find our end of the trading room in a state of excitement: unusually, Robert, our head of bond sales and trading, Yuuto, Jonathan and the rest of the sterling bond sales team, Adam and David were sitting or standing around a meeting room table on which were laid an assortment of sandwich trays, crisps and fruits, canned soft drinks and glasses and white porcelain plates and paper napkins. Adam, seeing us through the glass partition wall, raised his hand and beckoned us over. The air was close. With the exception of David’s, ties were pulled down and top buttons and shirt sleeves undone. Adam exuded an air of satisfaction. For good reason: he and David had acquired the bank co-lead manager status for a sterling-denominated Japanese government bond issue. It was a singular honour, the accompanying excitement of which was immediately contagious. The deal would be announced as soon as the eurobond markets opened the following morning.