On the Floor

by Aifric Campbell

  By November she had switched to a strategy of tough love, frustrated by my extended convalescence. ‘Your breasts look starved,’ she frowned over my shoulder at the mirror at Harvey Nicks where I stood encased in a pearl-boned bodice with thirty-five intricate hooks and eyes.

  ‘This is not me,’ I said to my reflection.

  ‘That’s good,’ she nodded grimly. ‘Because the old Geri is gone. This is the new one.’

  I fingered the crepe puffball that stood stiff like black meringue. My bare feet seemed a long way down. ‘What’s she like, this new me?’

  Zanna gripped my shoulders as if taking the measure of my skeleton. ‘She knows what she wants and goes out and gets it. And she never looks back.’

  I shrugged her off and she grabbed my arms. ‘OK, so tell me your other great idea, Geri. Your other great plan.’ Her thumbs pressed hard into the bone. ‘That’s right, you haven’t got one. So quit wallowing, grow up. Don’t be so female about it. Don’t get stuck in the victim role.’

  She sighed and released me so suddenly that I swayed a little and scrunched my toes on the carpet. ‘You want to know the truth?’ Zanna folded her arms. ‘It was never going to work out with you and Stephen. I never thought it would. But you were the only one in the world who refused to see it’ – and for a fleeting moment I wanted to smack her in the mouth right there in the changing room, rip the fucking crepe off my body and stuff it down her throat till she gagged. Instead I just smiled and croaked, ‘Thanks.’ She hugged me so fiercely that the bodice dug into my ribs and then said, ‘Now go pay for that dress.’

  The Grope shoulders his way through the crowd up onto the podium and the powercluster parts spontaneously to accommodate his presence. Back in October ’87 when the markets crashed there was a morning just like this when he assembled the whole floor to say this would be something to tell our grandchildren about, If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, and all of us shuffling to attention, none of the usual pushing and shoving at the back, the guys up front lip-chewing with folded arms and quite a few of us nodding at what the Grope said. Like we knew what was happening. Like we understood. Trooping back to the trading floor to man our posts, waiting for the FTSE to limp out of the box and drip blood all over the Topic screens.

  We sat breathless in front of the flickering monitors, watching the Dow struggle to even reach an opening, shuddering through a spiral as the programs puked all over it. Watching a new little twitch in the Grope’s temple as he stalked the floor, stopping to study each trader’s position like he was in a hospital visiting casualties. There is always a price at which we do business and the phones will always be answered. Not like some British banks I could mention. The credit spreads blew out like volcanoes, the black hole that was Rob’s mouth just after taking down some BBB+ bonds at 60 that he could only knock out a few minutes later at 45. This market is disappearing up its own asshole. So they flew in some fire-fighters from New York to show us how to behave in a crisis and they sat around squeezing little American footballs, mispronouncing the names of European companies and going yeah yeah uh huh, putting into practice risk-containment strategies they learnt at business school. Schlepping home in the October evening to watch the TV action-replay of our day, where other people in other banks sat staring at screens, everyone looking to everyone else for an answer.

  Day 2, the Dow was off 22% when someone whispered buying opportunity in the morning meeting and the Grope looked like he was going to machine gun the whole room. Rumours of people jumping off buildings, chickens coming home to get axed, the day that God left the storm-ravaged City and everything spun out of control. When the dust settles, someone is going to pay for this, said Rob. Then the Red Adair hand-holders showed up at the office in their travel suits and shook our hands. Good luck, you guys, like we’d been in the trenches together, took their little leather footballs and jumped in a cab to get the Concorde back to their guaranteed promotions, leaving us with collapsed premiums on all their inherited hedge positions and Rob swearing down the phone to New York for months.

  It all ended in a universal fight about who had predicted this, who understood it and who knew what to do. A big scramble to lay the blame. Saying things like: The markets have a life of their own, which really just means that nobody has an overview, nobody is in charge. Talk about how the index shouldn’t be able to fall like that, blame it on the futures and those smartasses in Chicago, blame it on the champagne, blame it on the arbitrageurs, and then suddenly everything that was good before became bad. Strolling through the debris, picking up the pieces, reconstructing the business, putting toes back in the water and getting philosophical over margaritas about the excesses and how every cloud has a silver lining. Turn disaster into opportunity, seize the chance to get rid of the walking wounded who shouldn’t have had jobs in the first place, get lean and mean down the gym, run a red pen through the expense accounts, cut out the dead wood. Only the fit will survive. Out there in the limbo world of non-banking are the souls of a lot of people we used to know.

  But a year later we were liberated by the release of ‘Wall Street’ and the reconfirmation that greed is good and lunch is for wimps. The traders were flying in truckloads of Brooks Brothers’ button-downs, dragging their girlfriends along to see how cool their jobs looked on a big screen, some even gekkoed their hair but couldn’t carry it off like Michael Douglas. The book stores were swamped with block orders when Bonfire of the Vanities came out and the trading floor was elevated to an art form, 400 pages longer than anything most traders have ever read, but there it was in black and white: we were Masters of the Universe, we were making history while coining it, having a lot more than our fifteen minutes, and we would never die.

  And then the floodgates opened and there was ‘Liar’s Poker’ with real connections and Solly’s just down the road, people who said they knew Michael Lewis and people we actually knew in the actual book, no kidding, check it out, and all the x-rated stuff that wasn’t in the text.

  I stand up on tippy toes and peek over Al’s shoulder to see Zanna speed-scan the room but her professional half-smile takes in the whole audience and doesn’t linger on me. Tucking her papers decisively under her arm, she touches the blue Hermès twist draped over her collarbone and takes a step towards the management huddle. I know she is desperate to have a word but I also know that she won’t be given the chance. This is a day for big boys and heavy weapons and deep voices and the switch to a female frequency might just break the spell. The heavyweight cluster breaks apart and the Grope turns to survey the room, arranging his face into the shape of a beginning. The crowd babble fades to mute. We wait, all eyes on the Grope who nods to his right, ‘Go ahead, Dick.’

  ‘Well, I can tell you one thing. We’re not expecting many sell orders in the oil market the next few days,’ the Head of Commodities breaks the surface tension with a bit of humour.

  ‘As you know, we’ve seen a steady decline from the $41 peak in October when Saddam threatened to start shooting missiles at Israel.’ He rattles through a retrospective chart summary of where crude prices have traded, tapping a finger on the lingering end point of the line as the screen fades into the dull heartbeat of GOLD.

  ‘Don’t expect a rally, guys. Except amongst the Swiss, of course, who’ll be busy stockpiling in their underground bunkers.’ He grins to signal it’s time for another laugh, before assuring us that the only safe haven will be the dollar. This is a cue to the Head of Foreign Exchange and the screen fades to two charts marked $/YEN and $/DM, both dotting into an upward slope. I lower my head into a discreet yawn, so close to Al’s back that I have to be careful not to get lipstick on his shirt.

  The Strategist stands up and rushes through a couple of dense diagrams of the leading indices, the long bond, the theoretical of a spiralling oil rise and is just getting into his stride when the Grope steps forward to deliver the crushing interjection – ‘Thanks Jim’ – signalling a return to the real world where phones are
ringing and time is money. He flicks a button and the screen dies. He looks to the right and then to the left and says, ‘Well, like I said in ’87, this will be one to tell the grandchildren about.’ But he doesn’t do the Kipling quote.

  ‘We all know there’s gonna be a war and we all know who’s gonna win. That leaves only one question: How long is it going to take? My hunch is short and sweet, in a few weeks’ time Baghdad will be burning and this is all a blip. This is yesterday already.’

  Al’s head nods in front of me, and for a moment I believe that the Grope’s glare is fixed on my exposed face.

  ‘So I am here to tell you that life goes on. Now, some of you have been around longer than others and you will know that nothing gets in the way of Steiner’s. This is a time for a clear head, a strong voice and a will to win. We will lose some money but we will make more. We will live to tell the tale. Out there in the desert are four hundred and fifteen thousand of the best ready to kick butt. Remember that when you go back to your desks. We’re fighting a war on all fronts. And Steiner’s will win.’

  There is a momentary pause where I think that somebody might start clapping. All the earnest rookie faces I can see are alive with the thrill of history unfolding all round us but the rest of us, the hardcore platoon of Crash survivors, we know it’s the same old story of damage limitation: watching your ass and living to tell the tale. The trades keep getting bigger and smarter and harder to unwind but just like before, there is traffic on the streets and people going to work, the western world flexing a collective muscle while deadlines expire all around us.

  The Grope waves a hand and we troop out of the room. I turn my head to look for Zanna but I am swept along and swallowed by the shirts. Back out on the trading floor there’s a new mobilised sternness on all the boys’ faces, as if we were landing on the beaches. You need to kiss the cross around your neck and dodge the bullets, pick your way gingerly through the index minefield before a stock tick blows you to bits. Tonight, when darkness falls, the paramedics from Financial Control will sneak out to pick over the remains: whose trading book is haemorrhaging, who’s already dead and who has managed to limp away intact.

  We sit in the best entertainment time zone. In a few hours’ time, the East Coast will be yawning its way into a fury, the Big Guns will be barking across the hoot-and-holler from New York, smooth, seductive, everyone crooning some market song, jargon jumping off their tongues with practised ease. You could listen for hours to the flow: the economists cataloguing the reasons why we don’t know anything, the strategists reducing it all to a binary outcome, the analysts draping their punchlines in caveats and disclaimers, this whole torrent of soothsaying and disinformation funnelled down the throats of the sales force. And in the middle of it all, hunched over their keyboards, the traders’ fingers hover over the button as they prepare to slap their necks on the block: bomb disposal and fuse ignition, the heart of the machine that is Steiner’s & Co.

  I am bent down beneath my desk trying to fish the pack of Silk Cut that I kicked under the pedestal when I hear the throat-clearing rrrrrhum that announces Pie Man’s arrival.

  ‘I – eh – have something for you,’ he says in that breathy wheeze that always sounds like he has just hauled his weight up ten flights of stairs. ‘It’s really interesting.’

  ‘I bet it’s not,’ I say because I already know for sure it won’t be interesting at all.

  He giggles, his laugh is a staccato gasp, a real head-turner until you get used to it.

  ‘I’ll bet it’s some unsolved puzzle from one of your maths journals.’

  Pie Man brings me these little offerings in the hope that they will muster my own enthusiasm for my numerical talent and although I almost always ignore him, he still refuses to accept that the object of his fascination is not mine. I consider staying put here underneath the desk until he goes away but it’s dusty and hot from all the power cables and there are some nasty-looking substances stuck to the underside of the wood. His feet shuffle backwards as I crawl out and settle in the chair.

  It is two years since Pie Man arrived on the floor to join the gaggle of rocket scientists who are going to catapult Steiner’s into the next century. Structured Product Development is the name of this little centre of quantitative innovation that was the brainchild of our CEO Conrad Feinstein. It turns out that although Steiner’s is making shedloads in the Jap warrant market, some of our competition is making way more. The problem is that our business is pretty much entirely based around customer flows while the smart money round at Bankers Trust and Salomon’s is all proprietary. In fact, word is they are raking it in right now with Jap-structured derivatives designed by some clever Maths quants and when Feinstein realised this he told the Grope to go sort it. So the Grope went out and bought an MIT Maths professor (subsequently christened Dr Who by Rob) so tiny that he looks like a schoolboy in a swivel chair. Then Dr Who went out and hired a bunch of Maths post docs that you can still get pretty cheap from UK universities. They arrived and spored: the geeks are cloning and mushrooming and will eventually swallow us like the whale.

  We call them SPUD. Rob also calls it the modelling department ever since he heard them discussing mathematical models and, on a slow day, he will rip out Page 3 and stick the topless poster onto the wall behind them, which always gets a laugh. Just before Christmas he ordered a Santa stripogram and Dr Who surprised us all by getting really into it. When she sat squirming on his lap, he flicked the little snowball tassels on her nipples and emptied out his stocking full of flavoured condoms. Through it all Pie Man sat motionless like he was paralysed but he managed to flee before Rob slipped Madame Claus a tenner to give him a feel.

  ‘Take a look at page 43.’ Pie Man slides a copy of the New Scientist into my line of vision. The cover is a circular whirl of silicone chips swirled into a conch shape arranged so that it vanishes into the distance. There is a pinkish smudge mark on the corner and what looks like sugar crystals stuck to the edge, probably from the biscuits that Pie Man consumes, his huge bulk hunched at his desk.

  Pie Man eats constantly while he works and without breaking concentration, as if this refuelling is essential to the process. And he is getting bigger by the day, a steady swelling that has his trousers now barely hanging on below the bulge of his belly and shows a white triangle of hairy blubber when he tucks in his shirt at the back. He wedges his bulk into the swivel and rolls forward. His two-fingered hands paddle at the keyboard as he leans squinting into the screen. His eyes are getting smaller, receding into the swell of flesh underneath his lids. Each morning he stuffs a Tesco bag of goodies in his pedestal and throughout the day his hand rummages in the top drawer in blind selection: fig rolls and Kimberley Mikado, sponge fingers, Garibaldis with raisins embedded like dead flies, all the soft, cheap and chewy biscuits of childhood. He nibbles around the edges of jammy dodgers like a giant squirrel, small fragments showering the desk until all that remains is the red-clotted centre. But with other brands he’ll often shove the whole biscuit in his mouth and crush it in one swift move, swallow and take another one right away. He swills Coke, eats crisps and his bin piles up with wrappers.

  You are such a fucking slob, Pie Man, said Rob once, pointing to a river of dried mayo down the middle of his tie, so now he eats with the tie slung back over his shoulder, casting furtive glances around the floor as if checking for predators moving in for the kill. He smears his hand across his mouth and belches silently with a slight puff of his cheeks.

  ‘OK, Geri, look, I’ll show you,’ Pie Man rustles the pages, leaning in so close I can smell the sweet scent of vanilla, cut with stale aftershave and a faint body odour. I push my chair back and turn downwind. ‘The genius in the pram’: he reads the centrefold headline aloud and points at the black and white photo of two babies lying side by side in a bassinet. ‘You see, they’ve been doing studies in retardation. Trying to build a systematic cognitive profile of mathematically gifted individuals.’ In the inset picture two girls of eigh
t or nine stand either side of a blackboard with a long chalked proof. They are smiling and wearing checked pinafores. One holds a rag doll and has her hair in ribboned bunches. They are both ugly as sin. But Pie Man is off now, telling me how the latest research says that these kids have an ‘intense drive to master’, that specific tests are better predictors than IQ at showing math and verbal giftedness and that the amount of deliberate practice, blah blah blah. He jabs a pudgy finger on the text.

  ‘And the article says—’

  ‘Not interested.’ I shake a cigarette from the pack on my desk and push the mag to one side. Pie Man rabbit-twitches his head. But he does not slink off to his desk, he just loiters with intent, fingering the pages. I know he wants to urge me towards a deliberate workout so that I can hone my skill, since research shows that training is what makes all the difference, the harder you work the brain muscle the more it will develop. He lingers by my desk trying to seduce me with puzzles and paradoxes, slipping volatility smiles and binomial trees and Monte Carlo simulations into conversation as if they were aphrodisiacs. I keep on telling him I’m not interested, I do not care but Pie Man does not hear the No. He suspects me of false modesty and continues to pester me with this stuff, refusing to accept that I do not want to explore my special talent.

  In the early days I would occasionally perform – recite all the day’s trades in Rob’s book in the correct sequence or the FTSE closes backwards for the last ten days, or solve the equations that Pie Man would scribble down for our little audience. But I soon tired of being the freak show and refused to play. Pie Man tries to tempt me back, always sniffing around mathematical curiosities like a favourite dessert, always finding reasons to hang around my desk, wishing we could be mates or join in conversation about the hanging paradox over a pizza. A few weeks ago he came to tell me that he loved swimming and maybe I’d like to go to the new pool at the Tara Hotel in Kensington with him since he’d overheard me say to Al that I hardly ever swam anymore because it’s so boring on your own.