Philian Gregory
Simon J. Stephens
Copyright © 2018 Simon Stephens
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN 978 1789011 623
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Contents
Part One:
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Part Two:
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
PART THREE
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Part One:
Chapter One
Philian Gregory was having a bad day. Like the other seven billion or so people with whom he shared the planet, he wasn’t exempt from such days. For the most part, life dealt him a fair number of particularly good days, a majority of middling grey days, and some pretty bad ones as well. This was one of those bad ones. It was probably the worst he’d ever had to endure. Mind you, when you compared it to other people’s worst days, it wasn’t one he’d be willing to trade for theirs. Still, it was a bad day. And to make things worse, it was a bad day in early January when the grey skies yielded no sunshine and the weather’s pathetically half-baked attempt at snow created nothing but dirty slush around his feet.
On days like this, there was sometimes a degree of solace to be had in thinking about all the good things that he still had going for him. Counting your blessings, as his mother used to put it. There were plenty of those. He had money, a home, a job and a small circle of close friends who could always be relied on to be there for him. What made this one of his particularly bad days was that he could find no comfort in such positive thinking. Nor were those blessings a sufficient contrast to the cause of his current situation. The money was never enough, the home was very high maintenance and his job hung in the balance. Worse than that, the friends he might need to bank on weren’t just his friends alone. They were friends that he shared with Amanda. And Amanda was gone.
He shouldn’t really have been surprised to find the note on the dining room table and the key that sat beside it. Having been together for a decade, things had been strained for most of the last year and neither of them found they could summon up the strength or the motivation to try and resolve their numerous problems. She must have planned her departure carefully. All of her personal belongings had been removed and any of the shared property in the apartment had been bisected both meticulously and fairly. She had always been more organised than he was. Even in her leaving, she’d managed the process in fine detail. And that made the thought of friends even more difficult. Who had helped her? Which of their circle had chosen her side and worked behind his back to help her make the move? And, most importantly, where had she gone? Was she with somebody who, up until yesterday, Philian would have shared a glass of red with?
Having returned back to the flat late last night, tired and emptied after a heavy session in the office which had yielded little return, the emptiness of the place hit him like a bereavement. Amanda and he were finished. Any hopes and dreams they’d once had about getting married and starting a family were as dead as the love that they had once enjoyed so intensely. Like most men, Philian had enjoyed moments of fantasy speculation about being a free agent again but now that it had happened, it didn’t seem quite so good. He’d read the note, put the key neatly away in a kitchen drawer and dusted off a bottle of single malt that he’d been meaning to have a go at for quite a while. As a gift that he knew to be worth at least a three-figure sum, that bottle had waited for a celebration that now seemed unlikely ever to happen. What better irony than to tackle it as a means to commiserate instead?
The hangover he now carried, exacerbated by a lack of sleep, made this bad day feel as bad physically as it was mentally. Not the sort of day to be meeting with your boss to discuss your performance, but the promise of just such a meeting was probably the final straw that lifted this day up to the rank of ‘worst ever’, which had only one consolation to it. At least it couldn’t go any higher, although Philian Gregory knew, in his heart of hearts, that the ascent was very likely to continue.
It took a great effort on his part to face the music that day. He could have called in sick. Others did it and for the smallest of reasons. Sickness was considered by many of his colleagues as an addendum to annual leave and one which should be used to the full. Not him though. Fifteen years he’d worked for this company and hadn’t missed a single day to sickness, choosing instead to load up on paracetamol and flu remedies on the rare occasions that he picked up a cold. That sort of self-important pride was a fool’s honour, he knew that. For all he might think it added to his employee value, it was probably something that only he kept an accurate record of. And it wouldn’t be something that could help him today. No, today’s meeting was all about performance and,
on that measure, he’d been sadly lacking of late.
After fifteen years, it was no surprise that he was being categorised as an ‘under-performer’. The City was a place for young men and he wasn’t young anymore. Not in the way that the annual intake was anyway. He still felt as young as ever, even if the years of demanding pressure had formed bags under his eyes and turned his once jet-black hair grey. He still felt capable of holding his own as well. But the passion was fading and with it, the desire to fight like the others did. It was his own doing of course. He should have done what everyone else did and played their City role like an eighties arcade game, jumping to the next level at just the right moment rather than being stuck on a rolling road that had only one end.
The man he was meeting with today had done just that. Philian had studied his background carefully and could tell you the exact dates when Sheridan Harper had made the right leap at the right time. The secret was not to stay loyal to one organisation. Doing that, risked your errors being found out, or you becoming an anonymous part of the furniture. No, you had to move between businesses and make those moves when your own stock was at its highest. That way, you rose up in the ranks and were able to command the highest wages. Unlike Gregory, who remained a steady and safe pair of hands in a dealing room that managed low to medium risk funds, Harper had been adept at this. He’d become Philian’s ultimate boss only three years ago, although strangely enough, they had worked together before. It had been Harper who had interviewed Philian for his first role in the company and who had offered him the lucrative position. That interview was the reason why he was dreading today’s meeting. It had been a harrowing experience and one which showed Sheridan Harper at his most aggressive and most honest.
One of a number of interviews that he had lined up for that hot Summer day at the turn of the century, Philian Gregory had ranked LMBA as one of the top three institutions that he would like to join. Getting the interview had been a surprise as he knew that their intake was small and that, for the most part, that intake consisted of individuals who had been earmarked to join from their sixth-form days. Not wishing to let his own side down, that of the comprehensive kid done good, he had researched LMBA meticulously and was ready for anything they could throw at him. At least he’d thought he’d was.
Kept waiting for ten minutes outside the interview room, he’d calmed himself and tried to look as relaxed as he possibly could. When Harper had called him through and they were seated opposite each other, the grilling had begun. At first, it was a gentle talk around family background and educational achievements, but that softly-softly approach soon gave way to a more intense and much more aggressive and personal probing into the nature of the man who dared to think himself good enough to start with LMBA.
Gregory was told in no uncertain terms that he was something of an anomaly and that working-class Northerners were rarely able to hack it in the big boy’s world that he was presuming to join. His off-the-peg suit was mocked, his accent mimicked and his academic achievements dismissed as being of very little value. This had gone on for a good fifteen minutes, during which time Philian did his best to defend himself and take the line that he thought that Harper wanted him to. Then something had been said about his parents. That was a step too far and Philian had flipped. He’d done so in an incredibly calm and controlled manner, looking Harper directly in the eye and telling him that if this was some sort of test, he thought it in bad taste, whereas, if it was a reflection instead of the nature of LMBA, then he didn’t really want to be a part of it. But he hadn’t left it at that. His parting shot as he packed away his papers in his briefcase was to tell Harper that the loss today was LMBA’s. Irrespective of clothing, education, family background or accent, he had a talent and he would take that talent elsewhere. As he’d opened the door to let himself out, he’d stared again at Harper, who sat impassively looking down at notes, before leaving the room by saying, in his most affected Northern accent, “Rogers and Wright Steel.”
The phone call offering him the job had come two days later. The day after the announcement of the takeover of Rogers and Wright Steel and the trebling of its share price. Philian Gregory hadn’t had the funds to invest and capitalise on his knowledge, but LMBA had made a killing. When all was said and done, they were about results and they knew that Philian had something of a gift. Which he also knew to be true. It was a gift that still existed but which he struggled to exercise these days. It was the same gift that the best poker players had and which they used to add an element of skill to what might be considered a random game of chance. The markets were very much like that. Much of what happened in the City was nothing more than a sophisticated and considered gamble, but the ones who stood out were able to draw in the multiple strands of data that they had access to and make educated guesses about the likely outcomes on certain businesses. Gains were normally little more than a few points of a percentage, but when the stakes were as high as they were in the City, this translated into substantial cash returns. That gift had done well for him over the years. Now, he was beginning to tire a little of the whole thing and wasn’t even sure that he wanted to be beholden to that gift for the rest of his life. For that reason, he was struggling to maintain performance. And for that reason, he found himself seated again outside Harper’s office door, waiting for a meeting that he wasn’t really in the mood for.
The tone of the meeting was set early on. Just as a lot of Simons hated to be called Si, and just as most James’s hated to become Jimmy, the diminutive of Phil grated on Philian every time he heard it. Those who knew him knew this about him. It wasn’t that he was stuck up about his unusual name. It was a name that had a backstory as simple as his parents not being able to agree between Philip and Julian; Philip was his paternal grandfather, Julian, his maternal. After a number of heated arguments, a compromise was reached which saw them conflate the two to reach agreement. Had he been born a girl, no doubt he’d have been Julip. Philian was a part of his identity and he didn’t like that being denied him. Of course, he could only correct certain people on their reducing it. Harper wasn’t one of them.
“Phil, come in,”, he’d said jauntily, pausing a beat to watch Philian’s face as he chose to accept the greeting, “take a seat and let’s get some coffee in. You look like you could use it.”
The coffee had arrived almost instantly, Philian had fielded a few trite questions about nothing in particular, and then the real work of the meeting began.
“So, why are we here?”, Harper asked rhetorically, “Well, I’ll cut to the chase. Take a look at these numbers and tell me what you think.”
A single sheet of A4 paper was passed across the desk and Philian knew immediately what they showed and what his response should be. His name was highlighted in bold at the bottom of the league table that he held, but there were fractional percentage points between him and those in the half-dozen places above him.
“It’s the first time I’ve been there.”, Philian offered as an opener, “And, yes, I know what it tells you, but it’s not quite as simple as that. These are fund yields. They only represent one measure of performance. What else do you want me to say?”
“First time or not,”, Harper replied, “it’s not where we’d expect an experienced manager like you to be. And this is an aggregate of the past quarter. We’re not just talking a momentary blip here. This is a steady decline. Is there anything that we need to know about, because, to be honest, you look rough today?”
“A few upheavals at home,”, Philian replied, knowing that a detailed confession of the numerous challenges that he’d been facing would neither be appreciated nor beneficial, “and yes, they may have affected my performance. I’ll get it on track.”
“Will you though?”, Harper held eye contact for longer than was comfortable, “How do can we be sure? This isn’t candy land you know. This is the real world and those numbers represent hard cash. You’re the longest serving member of the team,
but you’re letting the new kids make a fool of you.”
He paused and finished his coffee, sliding the cup to one side as he opened another folder on his desk.
“This job is about total focus,”, he resumed, “and total commitment. I’ve always wondered why you’ve never jumped ship or sought promotion, but while you were performing, it was never an issue. Now though. Tell me, are you burnt out?”
“Of course, not.”
“Then why?”
“I can’t make any excuses.”, Philian sighed, “Nor do I think you want to hear reasons. I trade in lower risk commodities, so you’ll never see stunning gains from me, and my loyalty to the company brings a little more than financial returns. I have clients who trust me. That must count for something.”
“Let me tell you a hard truth.”, Harper replied, “It’s those same clients who are pressuring me to do something. Sure, they like you and they trust you, but only when things are going well. They want me to act. And act, I’m afraid I have to do.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning this.”, he slid a folded piece of paper across the desk to Philian, “It’s an offer on our part. We think it’s generous.”
“You’re kidding?”, Philian unfolded the paper and glanced at the numbers, “A settlement agreement? You want to pay me off?”
“We can’t take the risk.”, Harper explained, “And I need to be seen to be acting. You’ll find something else and, like I say, those numbers are generous. You can try and get yourself back on track if you want. Frankly speaking, I don’t see it happening, but that’s your call. Bear in mind though, this offer is a one-off. I need to know by the end of the week.”
It was one of those moments that demanded an aggressive response. Philian knew his worth and wasn’t one to be paid off like this. And yet, when he tried to reply, he found that the sum of the events on that bad and getting-increasingly-worse day he was having prevented him finding the will to do so.
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