On the Floor

by Aifric Campbell

  A shout goes up behind me, I turn my head as the Warrant desk erupts into frenzy, all the traders are on their feet and yelling down the phones. Already these glass walls, the whole floor, is bathed in soft focus, now that I may be forcibly removed from the place where life first took shape. Something in an inaccessible place that feels like my gut is telling me that I just don’t want to leave. That I just don’t want to take the next logical step in the career ladder that began with a chance encounter in my final year at UCD, when all I longed for was flight. But isn’t this everything I came looking for and more? Isn’t this the most spectacular success?

  For ten years since he emerged from the mists of Cambridge, Felix Mann has carefully constructed his own legend. But I imagine a beginning, some moment where he raised a sudden head from his books and stared into a future of petty squabbling over journal articles, frantic whispering over professorships, the breathtaking irrelevance of a life’s research that would only ever amount to a soundless drop in an indifferent lake. I see him standing up abruptly, the scrape of his chair reverberating down the corridors as he flings open the college doors and disappears into a bright light. Felix walked away in search of a real-world blood sport where he could beat others at their own game, the Philosophy post-grad with no formal business training who jacked in a brilliant academic career and unearthed a treasure trove of assets that would give him the opportunity to flex his outperforming muscle.

  Ten years is a lifetime in this business, the stuff of folk memory.

  The view from Felix’s Hong Kong fortress on the 31st floor of Exchange Square Two is littered with the sprawling bodies of enthusiastic bankers who crash and burn at his door, offering third-hand information and a menu of redundant services. Felix has never needed any hand-holding or breathless sales patter, he doesn’t believe that the hungry beaks can tell him anything he needs to know in order for his fund to make a rumoured and consistent in-excess-of 40% return. Before me, he never spoke to a single sales person; execution only was always his policy, a non-partisan and strict division of non-Jap orders between the golden triangle of Morgan Stanley, Goldman’s and Merrill’s, with the occasional crumb dropped at the feet of the squawking competition whenever some deal inadvertently fell into their incompetent laps. Felix routed his orders straight through to the head trader of the relevant desk. He positioned himself as a reliable cornerstone in new issues, ruthlessly exploiting his barometer position in the pricing. You get Felix to commit to taking down 15% of a deal and you’re home and dry.

  So five years ago when I first announced to the rest of the desk that I was going to cold call the largest private fund in Asia, everyone sniggered at the idea of a rookie sales person thinking she might succeed where countless legendary big-hitters had rammed their heads on an unrelenting stone.

  And when it worked, when I first had incoming from Felix Mann, they stood there gobsmacked, only to dismiss it later as the natural advantage of pussy. No offence, Geri, but a bit of skirt will get you there every time.

  But I knew it was something else that had caught his attention.

  It was 22 February 1986, some months after Cargo and Ed’s demise and I was sucking wind on a virtually non-existent client base, when a blow-in from the New York office who was my temporary boss threw me a phone list one morning and said, ‘Go fish for clients in Asia, it’s virgin territory.’ So I flew out to Hong Kong to meet a bunch of smalltime institutions who liked free lunches but had little business to give. But my real target was Tom Castigliano, Steiner’s dealmaker who had been based in Hong Kong for a couple of years, and had just succeeded in engineering a rare audience with Felix to discuss a complex restructuring for some Australian mining company. It took twenty-four hours of persistent pleading and ego-massaging flirtation over margaritas in the Captain’s Bar but Tom finally relented and agreed I could tag along to the meeting with Felix Mann – on the strict proviso that I would be a bag-carrier with no speaking role. Eleven minutes into the torturous permutations of the deal, when Felix told Tom to change a few parameters and rework the pricing, I forgot my promise and reflex second-guessed an answer before Tom had even started working it out on his bond calculator. Felix’s eyes registered my presence for the first time. He leaned back in his chair, tapping his pen on a notepad and ran a few scenario analyses by me as a test, instructing Tom to check my numbers on his calculator. Then he stood up and said, ‘My, my. Quite the little performer.’ Showing his yellow teeth. ‘Sadly, an obsolete talent these days,’ he added and pointed at the HP10 before ushering us out of the room.

  ‘So what is it, like a photographic memory thing with numbers or what?’ Tom asked later in the sinking lift.

  ‘It’s just seeing connections. Order. Sequence,’ I replied.

  I wondered if he was pissed off that I’d stolen the show. But I have since understood that Tom is a visionary pragmatist who adapts to the prevailing landscape, knows there are always other thunders to steal and had already realised how useful I could be. So when the doors shuddered open onto the foyer, he turned the full glow of his fuck-me eyes onto my face and smiled, ‘You could make a killing card-counting in Vegas with a trick like that.’

  But our unarticulated plans for sex were scuppered when I arrived back at the Mandarin to a message from Felix’s secretary that he was expecting me for dinner that evening. I turned back to the street for a forty-five minute Dress Emergency, whipping through boutique rails of backless-strapless nothingness until I decided on the 500-dollar ambivalence of a forest-green silk suit. The faint flame and mandarin collar would tell Felix I hadn’t gotten the wrong signal, hadn’t confused him with the kind of client who spends his evening in a champagne drool down the front of your dress.

  Felix’s uniformed driver bowed and led me from the hotel lobby at 7 p.m. ‘Where are we going?’ I asked the back of his shaved head but his peak cap didn’t respond. I smoothed the careful folds of my skirt as the car glided away from Central, away from the elegant hotels and the clustered nightlife I knew, speeding down into the tenemented harbour hell of Wan chai. The car stopped in a side street and I looked through the darkened window down an alley where a dog nosed through a jumble of rotting garbage.

  ‘There must be some mistake,’ I said when he opened the car door, my sandals hovering delicately just above ground.

  ‘Please, Miss Mowoy,’ said the driver and pointed to an opening in the wall where shredded blue and red plastic strips dangled in the evening breeze.

  Two men sat cross-legged and smoking on a low step, squinting impassively at my legs. On the opposite side of the street, a thin-limbed boy crouched on the ground, poking a gecko with his finger. A chicken came hurtling through an open door and stopped to shit by the boy. The car moved off and I pushed through the entrance, colliding with an elbow-height old woman who pinched my upper arm and pushed me towards the threshold of a room packed with smoking locals. There was a sudden lull in the chatter as they watched me make my way towards an empty table in the middle of the room and I sat down to a mutter and a sharp burst of laughter.

  ‘Geraldine. Delighted you could make it.’ Felix materialised at the table, in full evening dress, a naked bulb casting orbs of shadow below the sockets of his cold tea eyes, his thinning black hair swept smooth and sparse over a pallid skull. ‘I thought you might find it interesting to see where the natives go.’ He turned to the old crone and issued a rapid-fire sequence of Cantonese while she sucked loudly on her gums.

  Felix sat down and took a pen from his jacket pocket, scribbled on a notepad and slid the page towards me.

  ‘1.08,’ I said. ‘That’s if two decimal places is close enough for you.’

  Felix stroked a thumb tip along the inside of his watchless wrist.

  ‘And the sum of the series?’

  I picked up his pen and wrote: .

  The old woman shuffled to the table and set down a chipped bowl in front of me. ‘Aren’t you eating?’ I asked Felix, sweat seeping though the forest of si
lk as she returned with a platter piled high with the smell of fetid decay.

  ‘Thank you, Geraldine, but I prefer to eat alone.’ He laid one bony hand on the other and leaned forward. My trembling palms slid on the impossible chopsticks while Felix smiled and watched me eat and gag and eat and gag my way through a stinking procession of dishes, describing each arrival with painstaking detail: ‘chicken hearts on sticks, a rather vulgar snack popular with cinema crowds; deer tendon, requires the precision of a scalpel to cleanly sever it from the bone. Ah yes, bear paw, a northern delicacy with a host of medicinal properties. Did you know that the Romans used to eat flamingo tongue?’

  A pale lizard picked its way along the edge of the table and Felix grabbed its tail. ‘Transubstantiation, Geraldine. A rather troubling concept for an Irish Catholic child I would have thought – eating the flesh and blood of the grown-up baby Jesus?’ The light bulb flickered above our heads. ‘I don’t remember ever thinking about it,’ I said, looking away from the spasming body that dangled in the eye-level space between us.

  Felix clicked his fingers and the muttering crone appeared with a small stemless glass of what looked like red wine that I immediately drained, choking mid-swallow on the viscous metallic swill.

  ‘Turtle blood,’ Felix smiled. ‘Strictly speaking, a Taiwanese speciality.’

  I lurched away from the table in a blurred stagger, the old woman pursuing me with a stream of high-pitched squawking, the sound of laughter and clapping from the other tables. She shoved me out the back door into a shed where I bent double in the near-darkness and spattered my dinner into a black hole in the ground. She handed me a stained grey towel and I wiped the vomit off my sandals. ‘Water,’ I said holding up my hands, and followed her back inside to a sink full of dirty dishes. A fly buzzed just beyond my nose, the tepid tap water trickling over my hands. She handed me a plastic cup with a flood of encouraging sounds and gestures and I drank the clear liquid that smelt reassuringly of chemical oblivion, holding out the cup for a refill. When I returned to the table Felix stood up and bowed, thanked me for a delightful evening and led me out into the alley where his driver stood by the open car door. I got in and we sped off, a wordless drive back to the hotel where I stumbled out of the lift and onto my bed, to lie in the darkness under maximum air con, breathing a slow struggle against the churn in my stomach.

  At 7:30 the following morning I got a discretionary order for five million bucks worth of S&P futures contracts, phoned in by Felix’s assistant while I was still puking my guts out all over the hotel bathroom.

  A week passed back in London and Felix didn’t return my calls. And then one morning a shout came through on the squawk box that he was on the line. My hand hesitated over the receiver, Al and Rob staring at me in slack-jawed disbelief.

  ‘Geraldine.’ Felix’s voice like a light wave. ‘What’s your bedside reading these days?’ I turned to the wall and told him I was looking for recommendations.

  ‘Principia Mathematica. Call me tomorrow at 8:15.’

  I spent all night poring over the musty hardback that I had tracked down in the Kensington library, a 1963 second edition, last borrowed on December 1972, thinking, where shall I start, what kind of test is this, what does Felix want to hear? I flicked to the appendix: Truth Functions and Others. According to Frege, there are three elements in judgment: recognition of truth, the Gedänke, and the truth-value…

  At 8:16 the following morning Felix asked my opinion of Whitehead and when I put down the phone thirteen minutes later, I knew that I had bagged the elephant. My sales numbers rocketed and within four months I was the biggest hitter on the floor, generating eighty million dollars of orders and fuck knows how much trading p&l. Every head-hunter in town was leaving cryptic messages on my answerphone, wanting to buy me a drink on behalf of Goldman’s, Merrill’s, whoever, but I never returned the calls. Steiner’s was right up there in the bulge bracket and I’d found my place in the sun, so why would I ever want to leave?

  So now I cover Felix on everything that moves – stocks, derivatives, bonds, commodities – wherever he wants to go. He told the Grope I would be the only point of contact, the only voice at Steiner’s that he wanted to hear. ‘One-stop-shopping’, I believe you call it, Felix’s faint message like an old recording on the answerphone that the Grope played back to me in his office. Every morning for the past five years, Felix has taken my daily call at precisely 8:15. He never asks what Steiner’s strategists are thinking about the markets and he hasn’t the slightest interest in anything our research analysts have to say. Instead he begins each call by asking me what I have read from the list of philosophical and mathematical texts he has prescribed. Sometimes he wants me to quote entire passages or formulae, more often he will ask a question only to cut me dead mid-flow. Sometimes he just listens without remark. And these are the toughest calls, hunched over my desk amid the flickering screens and the purring phones and the roar of business, holding forth to a silent long-distance audience of one. When Felix has heard enough he says, ‘Thank you, Geraldine.’ As a reward for this service, I receive a party bag of two or three substantial ‘No Limit’ orders, one of which is guaranteed to inflict some pain on the traders.

  Out of all the bobbing heads in the sea of banking, all the barking seals voice-trained to perfect sales pitch, Felix has chosen me as the interesting diversion in his day, the research experiment that he might have undertaken if he hadn’t found academia so lacking in thrill and excitement. I am the engaging lab rat with the curious facility with numbers, and it seems Felix finds it amusing to test my outer limits, to explore the line between what I can absorb and what I can understand. Investment banks are usually so unimaginative in their hiring policy. How refreshing that Steiner’s should have found such a gem hidden away in a third-rate university in Dublin. I am a favourite pet, a beacon of entertainment in his outperforming day, an antidote to some bone-crushing monotony, the taste other people leave in his mouth, a dry and bitter acidity, an undisguised contempt. There is no one who keeps me amused like you do, my dear. I know that Felix sees my circus trick as a delightful affliction, a genetic fault, a deformity that fascinates. He is conducting pressure tests on a rare specimen to get a clearer view of what lies behind. Felix wants to know if my maths talent has real potential, if I can apply myself to original thought. Science is what you know, my dear, philosophy is what you don’t. Did you know that the great Mr Russell did most of his thinking as a teenager? In fact he’d already stumbled on Descartes’ ideas long before he actually read them. Felix has told me he is delighted that I paid so little attention during my undergraduate days in Dublin since too much study of old philosophers creates the illusion that everything has been already thought of. The young Mr Russell spent most of his time thinking about maths and God, concealing his theological doubts in secret code lest it cause his family pain. Your intellectual laziness intrigues me, Geraldine. It is as if something has dulled your appetite for all that you could become.

  He is right, of course, although he doesn’t know why. Felix is inching closer, can smell my reluctance, maybe even suspects that which only I know: how the numbers can cloud and swim in my line of vision, how they threaten to obscure everything, their horror seduction pursuing me through the night hours. The curve of a three, the suggestion of a seven, the swimming fluidity of an eight, the compulsion to connect, their screaming demands, the drain on my attention. The slow reveal of a sequence, the fear that I may somehow lose myself in the numbers, that they may one day suck me dry.

  But as long as I have Felix Mann’s account I am untouchable. And if the Grope could just figure out the key to Felix’s twisted heart then he could sleep easy. Every night Felix is with me as my head hits the pillow, and I know without ever having to be told, that if I didn’t do my reading, there would be no forgiveness, there could never be an excuse.

  It feels like phone sex, I said to Stephen once. So your client gets off on philosophy? So what? He turned the pages of his we
ekend FT. Just go with it, Geri, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

  But every morning at 8:15 it feels like I’m sitting naked from the waist down, feet pressed up against a glass wall, my quivering thighs splayed wide so that Felix can inspect the bits he’s paying for, the thing he owns.

  06:58

  ‘HE WON’T BE BACK NOW till after the morning meeting, Geri,’ Julie appears in front of me. ‘Are you OK?’ she bends down, peering at me with a frown. ‘You look—’

  I lean forward but the effort of rising from the chair is beyond me, there’s a rush of fluid to my head like I’ve driven over a bump. Julie shoots out a hand. ‘Steady,’ she grabs my arm. ‘You look like you’re going to faint. Lean over and put your head between your legs.’

  ‘No chance.’

  ‘Well, sit still then, don’t move and I’ll get a glass of water.’

  I close my eyes. Breathe. Think of a number, any number, say 167. Which is how many days it’s been since I last saw Stephen in the flesh. He’d left it two weeks since the Venice dumping to collect the last of his possessions from my place. There was less than might have accumulated during the four years of our coupledom – some shirts, books, a pole that had been separated from its ski. At least you weren’t living together, said Al. As if there is an arbitrary scale of collateral damage associated with a break-up where the maintenance of separate homes is taken as an indicator of a lack of commitment, rather than the by-product of an excess of income and a shortage of time, so that when everything falls apart it is supposed to be less upsetting, less painful than if you had been cohabiting. As if wealth is a fire blanket that insulates you from pain.

  Stephen was not red-rimmed or dark-eyed when he called round. He showed me how polite evisceration could be done with panache while I stood affecting nonchalance in my own hallway, hands wedged in the back pockets of my jeans, trying to short-circuit a trembling sensation that was creeping down into my fingers. He was sporting a pink check shirt I’d never seen and wearing deck shoes without socks, the pale instep showing as he balanced his leg on the chair to sort through some CDs. And I was staring at his instep while he chatted on in the manner of a friend who had popped round on their way elsewhere. Perhaps an impeccable prep schooling includes lessons on how to handle awkward aftermaths with aplomb. Stephen always exuded the charm and good manners of a Foreign Office diplomat. First they offer you a sherry and then they stab you through the heart. He could talk his way out of a bandit emergency on the Khyber Pass.