by Adrian White
Katie’s reply in her next article was to point out that she, at least, had chosen to live in this country and hadn't just happened to be born here. As such she was in a better position to compare Ireland with other countries and therefore have a much more informed opinion than the racist pricks who felt threatened every time their country was criticised. She also added that she was passing on the more extreme letters to the Gardai for incitement to racial hatred. The second group of detractors – the Dubs who were so proud of their city – Katie insisted were part of the problem. If Dubliners couldn’t see how the rest of the world saw Dublin, then nothing would ever change.
‘Dubliners are like Scousers,’ she wrote, ‘and you can take that for the insult I mean it to be. You’ve fallen for the myths surrounding your city, and this stops you seeing how dirty and unsafe it really is. You believe that Dublin is the best city in the world, while the rest of us know it’s a dump. You talk about a hundred thousand welcomes, but then you stick a knife in any foreigner you don’t like. You say the craic is mighty, but only if you’re white. And you think you’re loved by everybody but, well, have I got news for you!’
So, of course, there was a whole new round of correspondence asking Katie just who was the racist now? To which Katie replied that if they were really interested in racism, they should take a Dublin taxicab ride – nine times out of ten they’d strike lucky.
‘Nobody is addressing what I’m saying – that Dublin doesn’t work as a city. It doesn’t function well, it’s dirty, and it’s unwelcoming. Try walking the length of O’Connell Street – Dublin’s Champs Elysées! Or try waiting as a pedestrian to cross O’Connell bridge – this is not a safe city. And Ireland’s capital shitty has no striking features to take your breath away. You can pay at the Guinness Hop Store to look out over the city skyline, but there’s nothing there to see. So please, don’t be offended by what I have to say – just do something about it. After all, you keep saying it’s your city.’
This provocative style was why the Independent asked Katie to write in the first place. She had originally written a letter to The Irish Times, asking why Ireland should be such an expensive place to live – what were the benefits; where was the payoff? Other expensive countries could point to an excellent system of social welfare, or a superior standard of living – what did we get for our money in Ireland?
The letter was printed on a day that Katie attended a training seminar at the Irish Management Institute.
“Is that you?” asked the woman in the seat next to Katie.
“I’m afraid so,” said Katie, and smiled.
The woman was a features editor at the Sunday Independent and was delighted to learn that Katie worked as an account manager in the Financial Services Centre. Over dinner that evening, she asked Katie to expand her letter into a full-length article.
Katie’s article – What does that have to do with the price of fish? – caused the kind of stir that newspapers like, and also turned Katie into something of a celebrity. The normally reserved and hidden world of investment banking was suddenly news because a young, successful and good-looking woman had dared to question the government’s economic policy – what’s more, she’d done so with a rigour and authority that made people smile. Katie was asked to contribute on a regular basis, but she initially declined.
“I’m not sure I have anything else to say,” she told the features editor. But of course she did, and Katie was soon contributing a weekly column to the paper. She broadened her subject matter – it was hard to be consistently entertaining about economic policy – and more often than not it was the failings of Ireland’s infrastructure that she wrote about.
‘What’s the point in digging a tunnel if you don’t go under the river? It’s one of the most perverse ideas I’ve ever heard. They claim they’re going to take all this heavy traffic out of the city centre, but to where? Are all the truck drivers for Galway and Cork really going to head north in a tunnel to the car park they call the M50? So they can queue and pay a toll for the bridge across the river?’
Katie enjoyed her observations on the absurdity of modern life in Ireland. Her column was an irritant to the government, and being a thorn in their side is what made Katie such a success.
‘My friends in England often ask me how the health care system works in Ireland. I tell them we pay a Social Insurance levy as they do in England but also pay each time we visit the doctor – they don’t believe me.’
Katie enjoyed the provocation, especially when she forced readers to reveal it was her Englishness they couldn’t handle, and not her argument. For the most part she believed her own rhetoric; she really did care and behind everything she wrote was a genuine concern for life in Ireland to be better.
‘Would it be too difficult to hold a national debate – say, every two years – on the percentage allocation of government spending? Wouldn’t it be nice to specify where our money goes? My guess is that government jets and new ministerial buildings wouldn’t make the cut. Having a say would ease the pain of handing the money over in the first place and, who knows, perhaps it would make the government feel more accountable? Let’s get away from this silly idea that the Minister of Finance is somehow better qualified than we are on how to spend our money.’
During her first TV appearance, she referred twice to Bob Geldof’s reason for leaving Ireland in the seventies – he couldn’t stand the mediocrity – and Katie claimed that nothing much had changed. And yet she still chose to live in Ireland; this, for Katie, was the proof of her sincerity.
It was appearing on television that transformed Katie into a national figure; writing for the Independent was all well and good, but television made her name. On the one hand there was this tough, sexy babe, not afraid of using her looks to unnerve the men in suits across from her. You could see how Katie disarmed them – try as they might, they couldn’t resist letting slip the occasional ‘good girl’, and it was then that Katie moved in for the kill. She dismantled her opponents’ arguments and left them for dead. They knew they’d been had but it was too late; they’d been made to look like gombeens on national television.
(Just as once in a mixed badminton match, Katie’s male opponent had complained that she’d deliberately not worn a bra to distract him. There was no way he could win his argument; he looked like a lech and Katie still won the game.)
So here was Katie, who valued her privacy and yet wrote for a national newspaper; who had more reason than most to keep herself to herself and yet appeared on national television. These were just the extreme examples of the contradiction in Katie’s working life; simply stepping outside her front door was enough to set the contradiction in motion for the day. Her fellow commuters didn’t know her; her work colleagues didn’t know her; and the readers of her newspaper column didn’t know her – they were all just different points on the same scale. A long time ago, she had a choice – whether to stay at home or to go out into the world – and this was her way of living with that choice.
The journey into town gave Katie a further opportunity to prepare for the day ahead. By the time the train arrived at Connolly Station, she had become the public persona she projected. It was a short walk to Katie’s office – a huge building shared by several companies – and she deliberately slowed her pace for this final leg of her commute. She hated turning up to work hot and bothered from walking too fast and besides, there was no need; she was in good time. It was an easy trip each day, all things considered; the only way it could have been easier was if she chose to live in the city centre, but she preferred the remove of Monkstown.
Katie showed her pass to Charlie the security guard. This wasn’t really necessary – it was the scanning of the bar code that let her in – but Charlie had been a fixture on the door from long before Katie’s time, and knew most of what went on in the building.
“Good morning, Charlie,” said Katie, and pushed through the barrier.
“Good morning to you, Ms. Katie McGuire,” he re
plied. “At it again in yesterday’s paper, I see.” Yesterday’s Independent was on the counter, next to Charlie’s elbow and a half-drunk mug of tea.
“And what do you think?” asked Katie. “Did I over-step the mark this time?”
“No more than usual, I’d say, no more than usual.”
Charlie smiled and smoothed down the hair on his scalp.
“Oh well,” said Katie, “give the punters what they want, eh?”
“What you have to say isn’t always what they want.”
“They love it,” said Katie, “and you know they do.”
Katie could feel Charlie’s eyes on her as she walked over to the lift. She guessed he shook his head each day at the waste – Charlie wasn’t alone in presuming that Katie was a lesbian, but if that was what it took then that was fine by Katie. She recognised a couple of the people waiting for the lift, but she didn’t know anyone to speak to. Her office was on the fourth floor, a huge expanse of space that covered an entire floor of the building. Open plan desk arrangements fanned out from the central lift shaft with private offices lining the outer walls. It wasn’t exactly a trading floor, more like somebody’s idea of one.
Katie walked the length of the room to her office, and called out her good mornings to the few colleagues already at their desks. She knew she looked like Sigourney Weaver in the film Working Girl – all business and ready for the day, striding across the floor – but only because Carmel, her assistant, her Melanie Griffith, wouldn’t ever let her forget it.
“Good morning, Ms. Boney-Ass,” said Carmel. She switched off her mobile and dropped it into her bag.
“Good morning, Carmel,” said Katie, and smiled. “How’s the world of Mergers and Acquisitions? Was that Harrison Ford you were just speaking to?”
“You might laugh,” said Carmel, “but one day you’ll find it’s this girl sat in that office of yours, and not that sorry bag of bones you call a behind.”
“Harrison might like my bottom.”
“No,” said Carmel, “he’s going to want something to get a hold of, something to sink his teeth into – and I think I’m just his type.”
“Steady girl,” laughed Katie, “steady.”
The call from Mike came through at three minutes past nine, as though he considered nine o’clock the acceptable time to ring. Katie took no calls before ten-thirty unless Carmel considered it absolutely necessary. Add on the three minutes of Carmel refusing to put Mike through, and you have three minutes into some people’s working day – but not that many people anymore. Katie looked from the phone to the clock and lifted the receiver.
“Carmel?”
“I’m sorry, Katie,” said Carmel, “but he won’t go away.”
“Who is it?”
“That’s just it, he won’t say; he just keeps repeating that it’s imperative he talks only to you. He says he’s a close personal friend.” The conviction drained out of Carmel’s voice. “He’s very nice,” she added as an afterthought.
Katie smiled. It was obviously absurd to Carmel that Katie should have a close personal friend.
“What do you think,” she asked. “Should I take the call?”
“I think he’d better wait like all the others,” said Carmel.
“Niceness just doesn’t cut it, really, does it?”
“It does no harm,” said Carmel, “but it’s not enough to get put through to you. I’ll ask him to call back later.”
Katie replaced the receiver and returned to her newspaper. She’d established this right – to read through the papers each morning before actually doing what was recognisably her job – only by being year after year the best performing account manager in the company. She was disdainful of her colleagues’ cursory glance at the newspapers; they only looked at the business pages, as though this justified the wasted time. She had no patience with anyone who claimed to read the paper each day, when – surprise, surprise – if she referred to something she'd seen, it was always that one particular article they hadn’t read. So much so that Katie occasionally asked certain colleagues if they’d seen such-and-such a piece, just out of bloody-mindedness, and guess what? The results were not encouraging. Katie’s record stood for itself – if she preferred to start her day with a review of the newspapers, the company weren’t about to lose her over something so trivial.
(Katie likened it to all the top management gurus agreeing that a few minutes’ meditation in the workplace produced measurable results. Very few managers could tolerate the sight of an employee just sat at their desk, apparently doing nothing. As though the employee should put up a sign – ‘meditating, now fuck off!’)
Newspapers helped Katie to manage other people’s money, but they also kept her sharp as a person; she was never short of something to talk about, either professionally or socially. And there were so many different types of news – the broadsheets, the tabloids, plus the TV screens outside in the main office, and there was Carmel, a compulsive listener to the radio and a constant source of information. Katie loved it all, loved it all in itself and not just for its application to her job.
This ability to soak up and analyse information from so many different sources was part of what made Katie such a good account manager. She thought very little about buying stock as she read through the papers. She wasn’t certain there was a direct relationship between the two, but, if she didn’t know at least something of what was happening in the world, she would have been less able to make the decisions she took on a daily basis. She also knew that an hour rarely made that much difference to the financial markets; there was always plenty of time for studying figures on a computer screen. Katie made her name by saying it was okay to do nothing if that was what the markets required; when the markets demanded it, the newspapers were dumped immediately.
The crazy thing was that soon everybody who reported directly to Katie thought it best to conscientiously study the papers each morning. It was weird to come out her office for a coffee break and find a floor full of bankers with newspapers spread out on their desks. So much so, she had to persuade them this wasn’t absolutely necessary.
“If you want to read the papers, you can,” she said. “But if you don’t feel the need, don’t just do it for the sake of it.”
Organizations, she thought, and the people in them.
When asked how she consistently achieved such good results – whether by her superiors, her colleagues or, occasionally, the press – she had one piece of advice: always buy under-valued stock. It was simple, too simple for some people, but it was the one thing she insisted upon amongst her own team.
“Never forget this is someone else’s money – it doesn’t even belong to the bank. We’re gambling with other people’s money, but you should behave as though it were your own. The bank pays you money to make more money with other people’s money; if you do that then everybody will be happy.”
Of course this wasn’t the whole story but it was as good a basis as any for a young trader to start out on. Katie’s department was traditionally the company’s training ground for new employees. She much preferred a team of raw recruits to the older, more experienced hands; it was fun and it kept Katie on her toes.
Soon after ten each day, Katie took her coffee break with Carmel in the staff canteen. This was her real breakfast time, her favourite meal of the day, and nothing – nothing! – came between Katie and her coffee. She walked through and made a silent drinking-from-a-cup gesture to Carmel.
Carmel was on the phone, as usual. She took the receiver away from her ear and pointed at the mouthpiece.
“What?” asked Katie.
Carmel covered the receiver with her hand.
“It’s him,” she said. “He’s still on the line.”
“Who?”
Carmel spoke into the phone.
“I’m just putting you on hold again,” she said, and pressed a button on the phone. “The guy from before – he wouldn’t hang up; said he preferred to wait. This guy really want
s to speak to you.”
“That was over an hour ago,” said Katie.
“I know, but what could I do?”
“Hang up on him, maybe? Have you been speaking to him all this time?”
Carmel blushed.
“I told you, he’s really nice.”
“But an hour, Carmel – what have you been talking about? On second thoughts, forget it – I don’t want to know. Come on; let’s go for coffee. If he’s still there when we come back, I’ll speak to him then.”
“He says his name’s Mike,” said Carmel. “He said to tell you that it’s Nice Guy Mike, that you’d know who I mean.”
Katie looked at Carmel.
“Nice Guy Mike – he said that?”
“Yes,” said Carmel. “Do you know who he is?”
“What did he tell you?” asked Katie. She heard the harsh tone in her own voice and corrected it. “I mean, did he tell you why he’s calling?”
“Not really, he just told me his name.”
“In an hour?”
“Well…we mostly talked about me. What do you want me to do?”
Katie leant her weight against Carmel’s desk and breathed in deeply through her nose.
“I don’t know anyone by that name,” she said.
“He said you’d say that.”
“I’d remember anyone calling himself Nice Guy Mike.”
“He said you’d say that too,” said Carmel. “And that you’d ask for his surname, but that you know it already and know why he can’t give it.”
Katie looked at the receiver in Carmel’s hand.
“If he – if it is who he says it is, ask him to call back in half an hour. There’s no need for him to keep holding on; tell him I’ll take his call.”
“He won’t believe me. He won’t hang up.”
“Tell him – tell him if he doesn’t hang up I won’t speak to him. Tell him that, and then you hang up.”
Katie’s young team tended to share the same table for their break each morning. A few people sat alone with a book or a newspaper, but mostly it was an opportunity to chat or joke or flirt. The canteen was shared by the whole building, and there was a loud buzz of conversation among the different groups of employees.