On the Floor

by Aifric Campbell

  2

  present value

  monday 14 january 1991

  06:38

  london

  THE LIFT DOORS GLIDE APART, I step out onto 15 and already I can feel the market pulse. On busy days you can hear the roar of the trading floor right here, a blurred wall of sound that hits you like a stun gun. Time decelerates to slow motion and I cover the twenty paces to the double doors like a drifting astronaut. There are guys who bless themselves on this spot each morning and once I saw Rob kneel down to kiss the carpet. For there is no place in the world quite like this and I pause for a moment at the gateway to heaven and hell, listening to the call of the wild, the stadium pre-match rumble, the sound of money being kicked around.

  There are four parallel rows of screen-laden docking stations with a walkway loosely dividing Cash from Derivatives, thirty battery-hen slots in each row. A bank of wall-mounted clocks tells the time in every place that matters and right now we are between worlds: the Asian markets are closing, New York is fast asleep and Europe is waking up for business as risk is passed like a baton from one continent to the other in this twenty-four-hour relay. High up on the overhead TVs a muted Stealth bomber bisects one screen and, on another, a troupe of soldiers in berets and Ray-Bans trudge across a sandy plain. To my right the ticker tape runs last night’s closing stock prices above US Equities, a graveyard this time of day. The Grope’s glass office spans a half-width of the floor and, suspended from a coat hook, is the only visible sign that he is in: the green umbrella that doubles as a golf club in his rare frivolous moments.

  In the dead centre of the floor Joe Palmer sits tipped back in his swivel with his feet up on the desk, studying the football pages of the Sun. Behind him on the Japanese warrant desk, fifteen traders maintain an uneasy silence while studying his body language for some clue to the day ahead. Twenty-eight years old and five foot six in his brogues, Joe has a tight, wiry body and the cadaverous complexion of the shift worker, his skin a dirty grey, his eyes always red-rimmed as if he is battling an allergy. He wears his trademark blue shirt and a West Ham tie in a lurid claret and blue. His nose is a little misaligned, the legacy of a punch up on the Metals Exchange when he was a new boy. This is apparently not noticeable when you look at him full face, which I have never had the opportunity to do, because Joe does not speak to anyone who is not involved in the Jap warrant business and Felix gives all his Jap orders to Nomura since they bring in all the hot new deals.

  Joe and his army of traders are the most profitable on the Street and his own trading book is the most profitable on the floor by far – maybe 50 or 60 million bucks last year – and who knows how much squirrelled away in his personal trading account. The Grope treats Joe with the indulgence you would lavish on a favourite grandchild, tormented by the fear that he will be lured away by Nomura. But Joe seems to like it here, though according to Rob, all of this is second best because football is Joe’s real passion. He was signed by West Ham when he was a kid but a knee injury at seventeen cost him his future. Rob says one day Joe will buy a football club, that this is his dream, now that the first and real dream is forever denied him.

  As I head towards my own window row, Joe chucks the paper in the bin, and stands up to begin a series of neck rolls. He has been here since 4 a.m. and already done his pre-market thinking. He has spoken to Tokyo and he will not speak to anyone on the floor until precisely 6:55. His traders shuffle and stretch and fidget with their keyboards, prowling back and forth to the water cooler, circling their positions like a pack of hungry hyenas. A heavy pall of smoke hangs over their Quick machines which I covet, mainly because the screens are so cute and compact and all the text, everything, is in Japanese. We are making millions out of this market without even one person on the floor being able to speak the language but, luckily for us, all the Japanese stocks have numerical codes so you know what’s going on even when you haven’t got a clue. The past five years has seen the Nikkei index more than triple and Joe and his team have been riding the wave of this bull market driven up by whispers of land banks, reclaimed marshlands out near Narita, minidisks, semiconductors and tiny mobile phones that the analysts predict will soon make our clunky Motorolas a thing of the past. I picture their warrants as little scraps of torch paper, magical promises that can evaporate like those fortune cookie wrappers that ignite and dissolve on the tongues of fire, the incantation of holy words like Sony and Canon and Toshiba and Kawasaki, those monoliths that emerged from the post-war carnage to raise billions of cheap dollars with low coupon debt in the financial nirvana of Japan and an expansion that seems unstoppable. Lately there is a whiff of things going bad out there with the banks teetering under their own weight, but whatever happens we still all believe that Joe will be the last one standing. He has traded the Nikkei all the way up and then last year he made a killing even as it screamed down 39%. And incredibly, despite being the biggest player in the warrant market, Joe has never set foot on Japanese soil. In fact, he’s never even been on a plane due to his pathological aversion to flying. This Christmas he treated his girlfriend to a Concorde trip to New York for a week’s shopping with her mum and her sister, put them all up in the Astor suite at the Plaza.

  Of course it’s hard to sneer at someone’s phobias when they make so much money.

  ‘Nice of you to pop in,’ says Rob as I approach. He sits hunched over a printout of his trading positions, his foot tapping as he calculates the risk of the dawning day. He does not raise his head.

  ‘Nice to see you too,’ I park myself on the edge of his desk. Tapered strands of brown hair rest on his shirt collar in a slight kink and I lean in to check the label of his tie. Rob won last week’s tie king competition when he arrived with what looked like a vertical pattern of dollar signs made out of rope but was actually a column of naked girls snaking all the way up to his half-Windsor.

  ‘Grope’s looking for you big time,’ he says.

  ‘Any idea what he wanted?’

  ‘Not as such. Could just have been the fact that he expected you to be here already. Of course we’re only on the brink of a major war here, no pressing reason to come in at all.’ He lifts his head, smiles. ‘So how was Honkers? Bring me back any juicy orders from the Cat?’

  ‘Where’s the Grope now?’

  ‘Big war chat upstairs somewhere. He’ll be down for the morning meeting. But I wouldn’t be in a hurry to find him, he’s been a fucking animal.’

  ‘What’s all this?’ I point to the mini TV perched on top of the Reuters screen, wires trailing over his desk.

  ‘Got IT to set me up with a front row seat for all the action. Just look at this shit,’ he jerks a thumb at a shot of last night’s candlelight vigil in Trafalgar Square and a close up of a woman wearing a placard around her neck that reads:

  HOW MANY BODIES TO THE GALLON MR BUSH?

  ‘Give peace a chance, my arse,’ he grunts. The screen shifts to a still of John Major and Rob turns up the volume. Teenage boys murdered in sight of their mothers and sisters, their bodies left on the street as garbage. Those who caution delay because they hate war must ask themselves: how much longer should the world stand by and risk these atrocities continuing?

  ‘So what’s the word from the Grope?’

  ‘The usual: Keep your head down, no fancy stuff, but stay in the flow. T + three days and counting. Neeeeoooooommmmpugggggghhhhhhhh,’ and his right-hand span cuts a descending dash through the airspace.

  ‘You making money?’

  ‘Kerfuckingching.’ He taps his printout, for Rob is our lucky charm, the trader whose stock only rises and all the juniors stay close as if his pixie dust could coat them. When he first arrived the Grope had figured him for the Jap Warrant desk so he shipped him out to Tokyo to take the pulse. Rob spent a night at a club in Roppongi where the girls put minicameras in their vaginas that projected up on a big screen, and which he said was about as sexy as watching open-heart surgery. But he didn’t plan on playing second fiddle to Joe; he wanted t
o stake out his own financial territory.

  Rob is crisp in a way the other English guys aren’t – snappy button-down shirts, shoes gleaming, a pristine shave. And he knows all about studying form and reading cues because his dad was a bookie so Rob used to spend Saturday nights at Harlow, crouched below the dog track with a bag of crisps, fiddling with the stopwatch, listening to the hum of the hare on the vibrating rail. One of the big trainers offered to take him on at fifteen but it was back at the bookie pitch that Rob felt at home. It was the chalked numbers on the blackboards, his dad yelling the prices and the punters scanning the odds, the men who blew their social on the first race, who’d trade their daughters for a tenner to stick on the next one, the late surge as the bell rang and they scurried over waving their desperate fivers, the crowd scrambling up the steps just as the traps sprung and the winning ticket and all of it over in thirty seconds. But Rob’s dad wanted something better for him and so did Rob. On his sixteenth birthday he went on a school trip to the Stock Exchange floor and he knew immediately that he was home and dry. He cut his teeth in Futures where he wore a candyfloss jacket and roared his order execution up from the pit. Rob still mourns the end of open outcry, the migration away from an exchange floor and onto the screen. And he still goes to the dogs; took a bunch of us to Walthamstow one night where men in anoraks sidled up to mutter in his ear and he moved easily amongst them, a prince amongst thieves in his sharp suit.

  Rob’s got feel, his ear is finely tuned to the pitch of the markets and we have been comrades in arms since the very beginning six years ago when we met on rotation through the UK desk, sitting there wedged in between him and Jim Bain’s overflowing ashtray. See that chair you are sitting on? Know how much it costs to keep your arse in that seat? Bain showed his stained teeth. 250,000 dollars. That’s right, a quarter of a million bucks of allocated costs is what each trading position on this floor costs. So you two bozos are nothing more than overhead and don’t you forget it. Bain jabbed my shoulder. And you’re a Paddy, so you’ve got to work twice as hard.

  He wandered off, hitching his trousers and Rob leant in close, his eyes clear blue with tiny creases in the corner of the lids. Top of the morning, he grinned and I felt the smile spread across my face: we were the rookies but we were also the future and already we could sense that Bain was history. I am hot to trot, sitting here with these old fucks. I am itching to get my hands on a trading book. Just you wait, G, you and me, the dream team.

  ‘So how was your trip anyway?’ he offers me one of my own cigarettes. ‘Another dodgy dinner date with your number-one client? What did Felix make you eat this time?’

  I lean into the cupped flame and am overwhelmed by a wave of nostalgia. I long to rest my head in the shell of Rob’s hands, to lay my cheek against his starched shirt, inhale his moneyed cleanness and tell him that Felix is forcing me out to Hong Kong and away from all this and I don’t want to go, that there will be all this distance and a parallel life that carries on without me while I am outside the walled city of my comrades in-arms. For it was Rob who held me 152 days ago when I was ambushed by someone’s sudden enquiry after Stephen and fled the heaving Jam Pot, holding my breath and the tears, elbowing through the Friday night crowd, rushing down the alleyway. ‘What’s all this then, G,’ his arms encircled me on Lombard Street and he stroked my head while I cried into his shoulder, closing my eyes on the night around us. Rob held me for a long time with a surprising gentleness. I could almost imagine that it was Stephen, my hand inside his jacket felt the warm steady beat of his heart and I might even have drifted off for a moment into the sleep that had previously deserted me, there by the steps of the Royal Exchange with the comforting rumble of cabs, the tyres squealing on the damp street, the closing-time hurry of passing heels.

  ‘I can’t have you hanging on to me all bloody night,’ Rob raised my chin. ‘I’m only flesh and blood after all.’ He touched my cheek with his knuckles and kissed me on the forehead. ‘You can do much better than him, y’know,’ he whispered and waved me off in a cab.

  ‘You all right, G?’ Rob looks up at my pricking eyes. A squawk box blares unanswered over on the Jap desk where the boys are huddled round Joe now for the countdown to their OTC market open.

  ‘The smoke,’ I blink, already walking round to my window seat on the opposite side.

  ‘Actually I was giving odds on you getting stuck in Hong Kong for the whole war,’ he calls out behind me. ‘What d’you say we all go and get blasted tonight. Or shag, your choice.’

  ‘Remind me how much I didn’t miss him over the holidays,’ says Al as I sit down at my desk.

  ‘We call it Christmas in this country, mate,’ says Rob but Al ignores the bait and twirls a little Stars and Stripes between thumb and forefinger, the phone crooked underneath his chin.

  ‘Nice flag, Al. Very patriotic.’

  ‘We’re going in real soon, Geri,’ he clicks the mute button. ‘Thursday is my guess, soon as the UN deadline expires.’

  ‘Al’s got it all figured out,’ says Rob from across monitors. ‘Got a hot line to the Pentagon.’

  ‘Under cover of darkness,’ Al continues. ‘These Iraqis won’t know what hit ’em. The TV’s gonna be awesome.’ He clicks his receiver to live and plants the flag in a blob of Blu-tack on top of his Reuters.

  I prop my feet on the rubbish bin that sits between our desks and doubles as a footstool. Al is the perfect desk mate to have on a trading floor because he is very neat and does not mind my untidiness or object to my smoke. He always has a supply of pens and chewing gum and he does not floss his teeth in public which is a habit that seems to be gaining ground on the floor recently. And Al also keeps a huge pile of research reports by his desk, neatly filed by date order and sector, that comes in handy for the clients I have who are not Felix and are actually interested in what Steiner’s strategists and analysts have to say. Before Al was dispatched to London from our mother ship in New York, I used to sit beside Matty, who was fired for lying about an army career he never had. According to our mole in Human Resources, Matty admitted in his termination interview that he had lied about pretty much everything on his CV: he was not a county tennis champion, he never climbed Kilimanjaro and he did not have a pet cobra called Hector. None of this surprised me or Rob, since Matty had lied all the time to the few clients who would take his call, but also because Rob had been round to Matty’s place in Fulham after a night’s drinking and, when he asked to see the cobra, Matty said Hector was probably hiding in the chimney because snakes like the dark. But he wouldn’t let Rob use a torch to look and there were no signs of any reptile paraphernalia anywhere. When we asked Matty about it the following morning he just said Oh yeah, shame, Rob, ’cos Hector came out shortly after you left.

  ‘BANDAI, YOU FUCKING MORON,’ roars Joe Palmer with a phone clamped on either side of his head. He whacks one receiver on the desk and yells ‘ONE TWO’, then he rams it back in his ear. ‘You hear that, you shithead? TWO HUNDRED at nine and a quarter. I am buying two hundred fucking warrants of Bandai from you at 29 and a quarter.

  ‘BANDAI’ he shouts to his traders, ‘hit the decks, pay up to 31,’ and the boys hurl themselves on the direct lines to the competition and in a 90-second run-around they take out all the available supply of Bandai from the Street. Joe’s fingers fly over the Quick keys like a stenographer, then he leans back, pats the single cigarette in his shirt pocket and watches his assistant add up the blue buy tickets. Rob reverses his swivel across the walkway and gives him a high-five. No one else would dare touch Joe, not since we once saw him punch an Ops guy flat out on the floor over some trade input error. In five hours’ time he will be quietly planting the victory flag on the hill and he will take out his only cigarette of the day, which he will sit and smoke in absolute silence while his assistant tallies up the numbers. At 14:25 he will take his jacket from the back of his chair and walk over to the glass office where the Grope will leap up all toothy smiles and fuss over him like a grandma. So
metimes I wonder what they talk about, what the Grope’s declarations of love are. How the big Yankee Wasp does manto-man with this Essex boy whose girlfriend fills his thermos and packs his snack box every morning. They can’t shoot the breeze about skirt because Joe is known for his disapproval of indiscriminate shagging. Joe is a family values guy who still has Sunday lunch with Mum and Dad. At exactly 14:50 he will stand up and the Grope will open the glass door and walk him out to the elevator and Joe will go home for a kick-about and a sleep and return refreshed the following morning at 4 a.m. This ritual is never broken.

  ‘Word on the street is Bandai is going to start making edible underwear,’ Rob returns to tell us. ‘All those sex-crazed comic readers are in for a real treat.’