On the Floor

by Aifric Campbell

  I felt a lurch somewhere below my ribs and a dizzying drop in temperature as if warm fluids were being drained from my body and replaced by a formaldehyde chill. Stephen would have noticed the telltale signs of personal carnage: overflowing ashtray, dirty glasses on the floor, my unmadeness like a scripted response.

  When it was time for him to leave Rex tried to shove past through the open door so I had to grab his collar. Then he lunged and I banged my head on the wall, ricocheting into Stephen who dropped the shoebox of CDs and it descended into pantomime slapstick with him making solicitous enquiries about my forehead and me trying to shovel the CDs back into the box and Rex dropping his tennis ball in between us. I kept my head bowed so my hair would hide the tears that must have been unleashed by the blow to my head, because I could not believe that I had any left for us. Ice maybe? said Stephen. Just leave, I said and grabbed Rex, held his wriggling body tight while Stephen closed the door behind him and Rex sloped off to his bed in the corner, looking reproachfully at me as if to say, it’s your fault, you blew it.

  Oh, Geri, said Zanna when she called round that afternoon and found me with a pile of photos dumped on the floor. You thought he was coming back, didn’t you? she said, ferreting out my misplaced hope that Stephen’s return might have been a ruse to confess his loneliness and retract his terrible error with an admission of undying love and a plea for forgiveness that would end with us collapsing in each other’s arms. But Stephen is, as Zanna would say, so over me. And the fact that he could be bothered to call round to collect a bunch of possessions that he could easily replace was simply further evidence of the fact that he had already left me a long time ago.

  Zanna was right. Zanna is always right about the ring of steel that encircles the heart.

  ‘Take this,’ Julie holds out a plastic cup. She nods approvingly, watching while I drink. ‘If you don’t mind me saying, Geri, you’ve lost a lot of weight recently’ – and I have to admit that it may be some time since I have eaten. She opens her mouth as if to say more but decides to hold her fire. Instead she waits, twisting her engagement ring, the one we all saw before Tim’s Christmas proposal when Ruben showed up from Hatton Garden, his coat pockets stuffed with shedloads of gear that he carts across town. He does quality gear, none of your rubbish, said Rob as we crouched down by my desk. Like you could tell diamonds from paste without looking at the price tag, I snorted. I’m thinking emeralds to go with her eyes, said Tim, carefully tipping the velvet pouch on to my notebook, holding the ring up to the overhead light. Pay attention, Geri, said Rob, ’cos this is the closest you’ll ever get to one of those unless you buy it yourself, his face so close I could see his scrubbed pores. I mean, you’re not really the marrying kind, are you, G? You’re not interested in all that? Am I right? and I laughed because laughter heals a sting, a sore that goes unnoticed until it’s scratched.

  ‘How do you feel now?’ Julie asks, all worried frown. I stand up unaided and turn towards the floor and the open door where life is playing out before us. Over on the Jap desk Joe Palmer is yelling at Tokyo on the hoot ’n’ holler. Skippy Dolan stands tall on the Block Desk with his middle finger spiked in front of him. There’s lots of air punching going down in France and over by the window I can see Rob in what looks like a face-off with Al.

  ‘Like a million dollars,’ I say and spread my arms wide. Julie smiles in broad relief, for I have been returned to my familiar self and this is the Geri we all know and love.

  3

  on the tape

  07:11

  ’SO HOW ’BOUT YOU GO fucking sell ’em, Al?’ Rob says. Al stands frowning on the other side of the desk, the undialled phone falters in his hand.

  ‘Fucking waste management,’ Rob batters at his keyboard.

  ‘How was I supposed to know you went and bought them for your hedge book?’

  ‘Put your money in Claxin Falls,’ Rob mimics Al’s drawl. ‘The industry of the future.’

  ‘He’s been saying that for months, Rob,’ I tip out a cigarette. ‘And anyway, aren’t you supposed to be the trader who never listens to a single word spoken by a salesperson?’

  ‘I didn’t even have an order, for Chrissake,’ says Al.

  ‘Yeah, well, why don’t you have that etched on your tombstone, mate? Here lies Al, a salesman without an order.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ Al slams down the receiver and walks away.

  ‘So you’ve still got that Claxin?’ I ask.

  Rob scowls at his screen. For months now he has been making hay on his proprietary positions, ever since the Grope told him he could take a punt on whatever he fancied as well as handling client orders. And now Rob is furious because his precious hedge book is groaning under the weight of five million Claxin Falls convertible bonds that have been treading water since he bought them.

  ‘Still got the fuckers. Going nowhere,’ which was exactly what Felix said when I showed him the bonds before Christmas but Rob made the mistake of thinking he saw value where Felix didn’t and went ahead and took them on himself. For six months now Rob’s been on a roll in convertibles, a lucrative exotic that very few people truly understand and a market that Felix adores since it is imperfect and therefore awash with opportunity.

  An instrument of rare beauty, traded by fools who have no idea how to value. So I buy them too cheaply from Merrill’s, Goldman’s, Morgan Stanley. And even from Steiner’s. Felix has been the convertibles king for five years, making a killing out of these quirky little creatures that can generate vast returns. Always pay attention to the activity at the margins, Geraldine, it is the peripheral vision that reveals the real treasure. Look at the ripples, there is so much value at the fringes. He tapped his temple. Shall I tell you why my returns are vastly superior to those of my so-called competitors in the investment community? I’ve always had a soft spot for the undervalued. The misunderstood, underappreciated, unloved asset class, a rich complexity of the hybrid that can only be truly appreciated by those with a more sophisticated palate. Those with a natural curiosity for the unusual. Like fine wines from small vineyards. You can pick them up for a song. The convertible bond is a financial hermaphrodite – outcast and frequently ignored. And I am a connoisseur of the neglected. For in the backwater lies the gem. Much like yourself, my dear.

  This is the kid of creepiness that Felix likes to taunt me with, his thin grey lips screwed into what looks like a leer but is actually the closest he gets to a smile.

  ‘So, Geri,’ Rob perks up, suddenly enlivened. ‘How ’bout you work some of your sales magic? How ’bout you show Bud Light a real big hitter in action?’ Rob jerks his thumb at the brown-haired boy who stands beside him like a gundog in attentive observance. Bud Light is one of the interns we ship in from Columbia, Harvard, INSEAD or even down the road from the LSE, although the American grads like Bud usually wipe the floor with local talent. He is back under Rob’s wing after a brief sojourn in Operations to complete his study of the life cycle of a trade. Rob is an effective teacher who does not provide false shelter from the storms they will meet. He makes the grads run tickets at full tilt to the back office because he believes an early lesson in urgency will make them appreciate the danger of getting things wrong. They listen wide-eyed to his horror stories about lost trade tickets, little slips of pink or blue paper that can mysteriously disappear in the Bermuda triangle: the fifty-foot ocean between a trading floor and the Ops is the most treacherous water where a five million dollar trade can vanish in the ether.

  ‘Come on, G, show Bud here how it’s done.’ Rob rubs his palms, elbows Bud, who nods eagerly.

  ‘What you really mean, Rob, is you want me to find a nice tame client and stuff him into a landfill. So you can dump your shit position in Claxin Falls and save your ass from the Grope who wants to know why you bought such a dog in the first place. Am I right?’

  ‘She’s all heart, our Geri,’ Rob grins. Bud Light follows this exchange like it’s a tennis match. His real name has been erased from my memory sin
ce Rob’s christening after he survived the acid test of a night’s drinking and resurfaced on time the following morning only to puke up in the waste bin. Trainee survival odds lengthen dramatically when you are awarded a nickname, but Bud Light does not know this yet. Still, he has stayed the course with sturdy good humour, is happy to start at the bottom of the food chain and seems to embrace the challenge of moving from overhead to asset and understand that success is entirely his responsibility, that nothing comes to those who sit and wait. You must therefore get the coffees in or make yourself useful while simultaneously remaining invisible and exhibiting a murderous keenness. This is not as difficult as it might sound, though most of the pink-lidded rookies do not make it. Once a boy cried. He’d been despatched on a simple errand, to get a fresh stack of tickets but failed to return before Rob had actually run out. He ambled back to the desk with an insouciant grin and asked Rob where he could get a sandwich. This is not fucking Treetops where we show you the toilet and give you a packed lunch. Last summer when an intern showed up one morning sporting braces with dollar signs Rob picked up a marker and wrote I am a cunt on the kid’s cheek. It turned out to be indelible ink so he had to go and get some stain remover from a hair salon and he was allergic so he went around for a week with a rash.

  ‘Now listen up, Bud,’ Rob points to the screen and reads aloud: ‘07:13 Pentagon confirms 680,000 allied forces in Kuwaiti theatre of operations – White House. Lesson number two thousand three hundred and four: War is opportunity. And Geri is going to demonstrate exactly what that means any minute now, aren’t you, G?’ Bud Light looks from Rob to me, he is soaking it all up, learning the banter protocols of head trader to top producer.

  ‘Five million lovely Claxin Falls on special offer,’ Rob dangles the receiver.

  I flick my speed-dial, thinking that I could just do what I’m paid to and work some client up to pre-war fever pitch, make him believe that the worst thing to do right now would be to sell and that the best course of action would, in fact, be to pre-empt a victory rally and buy some quality merchandise while everybody else is sucking wind. And what could be safer than rubbish? The perfect target is, of course, Arthur at Bishopsgate Asset Management whose ulcerous paranoia about the chronic underperformance of his fund is directly correlated to his inability to resist sales chat. I signal to Rob who clicks onto my line, presses the mute button and hands the receiver to Bud Light to listen in to my call.

  After a little grumbling about how I haven’t been around for a couple of days and my soothing apology that I was away in Hong Kong (seeing a much more important client than him), I find Arthur at exactly the right point of frantic indecision. A few days listening to the news and staring at the screen has tipped him into a pre-war tailspin and he is borderline hysterical about some analyst from Merrill’s who’s just come across the tape saying that oil could drop to twenty-five bucks.

  ‘Forget oil, Arthur,’ I say. ‘Number one, you haven’t got any in your portfolio. Number two, it’s a total red herring. As we were saying last week, you’re cash rich going into this war so you’re way ahead of the pack. Now what you really want to be worrying about is that you might be too light.’

  ‘Light? Too light?’ he mutters in a subdued scream.

  ‘That’s right, Arthur. Remember our strategist who predicted the fall of the Berlin wall? Well, I’ve just come out of a meeting and he’s saying that the war is already in the price, it’s all discounted, so what you really should be worrying about is the risk to performance when the war is over.’

  There’s a moment’s silence while Arthur considers this. ‘I don’t know, Geri.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying, Arthur. Forget all this short-termism. I mean, you’re not a day trader, are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you are running an income fund right?’

  ‘Uh huh, but—’

  ‘Arthur, listen. What you need to be thinking about is what your boss is going to be saying about your performance at the end of the year, when we’re all looking back at the mother of all rallies that happens after the war has been won. I’m talking dollar exposure, high credit ratings, big fat coupons. You know as well as I do that there’s not a lot of stuff like that around. For example. I did a run-through this morning and the only thing I could find was Claxin Falls. 7.5% coupon. Single A, 35% premium with a chart that’s bursting at the seams.’

  I hear Arthur tapping it into his Bloomberg.

  ‘Look at the last two years on the stock chart now and you’ll see what I mean.’

  I lean over and flick open the Value Line report on Al’s desk, omitting to tell Arthur that Steiner’s don’t actually cover the stock. In a carefully-timed passing remark, I mention that I normally wouldn’t get Rob to show any size on US stuff before the market opens, especially on a day like this. But I could probably twist his arm. ‘Seeing as it’s you.’

  ‘Mmmm,’ says Arthur and I know I’m home and dry.

  ‘Hey, Rob,’ I point to the receiver in my hand, which I do not mute, because I want Arthur to hear the exchange. I tell Rob very clearly that I know it’s risky before the stock opens in New York, but Arthur’s a good guy and is there any chance at all that you could show some Claxin Falls? Rob breaks into a grin, climbs up on his desk so he can lean over the two banks of screens and says, just loud enough, ‘Well, I dunno, Geri. I don’t want to get fleeced on the opening.’ He lets his voice trail away and I say that I understand but Arthur really needs some high-quality exposure right now. We wait. Rob watches without moving until I give the hand signal. Then he leans over the desk and says loudly, ‘OK, well, seeing as it’s Arthur, I’ll show five bars at 92.’ He lifts his chin, smiling into my eyes.

  I tell Arthur that he can have five million at 92. ‘Done,’ he says straight away, reminding me to give a special thank you to Rob for helping him out.

  I hang up. ‘You’re done. Five bars at 92.’

  ‘Once a scout always a scout,’ Rob blows me a kiss. ‘That’s fifty grand for the good guys.’ He high-fives Bud Light. ‘Welcome to the dream team.’ Bud Light’s face is aglow with the excitement of witnessing this learning milestone in sales–trader cooperation.

  ‘SOAPY,’ Rob bellows over at the Jap desk where one of the Ops girls is emptying the ticket trays, picking her way through the gauntlet of traders, on the lookout for hands that at any moment could grab her butt or plunge a receiver in between the enormous boobs that all the boys love. But the market is roaring so they are busy and oblivious so she is safe – or maybe she misses the attention, who knows?

  ‘Got a big one for you, darlin,’ he roars and nods to Bud. ‘Give that to Soapy, mate.’

  ‘New one on me.’ Bud picks up the ticket.

  ‘As in Soapy-tit-wank.’

  Bud spins round, his mouth flops open and then he looks over at me just as she pulls up.

  ‘All right, Soaps. Meet Bud here.’

  She mutters a jaded hello and Bud manages a strangled Hi while studiously keeping his flushed gaze away from her chest. Soapy doesn’t linger, just takes the ticket, flicks her long brown hair over her shoulder and turns away.

  I stamp my own ticket, drop it in the out-tray and open the file marked 1991 trades, GM. I look down at the last ticket in there and the post-trade fizz flattens. And I can remember that even as I was writing that one I was thinking exactly what I’m thinking now: so this is it and I am getting nothing out of it, not a rush, not a buzz, it’s all just a big So what. It used to be that one trade led to another and another, and a day, a whole week would fly by in the self-generated challenge of outclassing myself and the rest of the team. I would jump, just to jump the highest. I’d spend the whole night hanging onto the same bar rail, arguing the finer points of where any stock was going, scattering the stats and forecasts in an impressive demonstration of my circus trick. Clearing the Beechers of all hurdles – the Most Difficult Sales Pitch at the Most Inopportune moment – in one sweep used to be all it took to get
me into a blisszone that didn’t know day from night. But somewhere, one day when I wasn’t watching, the spark must have sputtered and died. This is what Felix has been hinting at and it is just a matter of time before the Grope notices that the numbers which might look like a seasonal plateau are actually accelerating into a disinterested decline. I think about time decay, that beautiful slope that charts the death throes of an option as it screams towards a certain expiry, like a meteorite on a steady course for earth and sudden obliteration.

  I turn around to the window and what’s outside our world: a skyline, orange cranes, yellow hardhats. Bloated worms with a murderous hunger boring into the City – glass, steel and stone sprouting everywhere in the post-Crash earth. And somewhere out there is the beginning of all this: the little old lady takes her few quid to the building society, who wires the news to the fund manager, who gives the nod to his dealer, who picks up the phone to a salesman, who shouts across to the trader who says SOLD. So pick a number, place a bet. Look at the graph: here is the high, here is the low. Is this a breakout or a dead-cat bounce? Data is information is interpretation is action. A hundred salesmen plugged into the phone lines with a kaleidoscope of truths, a thousand different ways of looking at the same picture.

  I close the file, slot it back into place beside my Reuters and remind myself that it is only 07:23 and I have already managed to do what I am paid to do – feed the bottom line. I passed on Rob’s dud position to Arthur who doesn’t need it but isn’t smart enough to know when he is being sold a pup or strong enough to say no. I have learnt to be a good liar or, at the very least, a great storyteller, though what the truth is no one has a clue, it is all informed guesswork. Market analysts, stock experts and all of us sales people gather the facts and spin a story that sounds convincing, one which will become self-fulfilling if it creates momentum among the great herd of investors. But in the end it’s no different to watching a dog race, the favourite can stumble on the break or falter at the first bend and be beaten by a rank outsider who crosses the line at 20/1.