Dave Hart Omnibus Page 8

  I experienced an almost irresistible urge to be violently sick. I could feel myself blushing. This was a disaster – if Rory thought I was definitely going to leave, there would be no point paying me. That would be a catastrophe, compounded by the thought that ‘my’ money would go to some undeserving bastard like Nick Hargreaves. Imagine him spending my money, while I sat at my desk, watching as the days went by and I felt more and more naked and Rory and the whole team waited for me to resign – except I had no job to go to. I’d never be taken seriously again.

  ‘Rory – I’m not leaving.’ I tried to put on my firmest, most resolute voice. ‘I’m not saying I haven’t been tempted, or that there aren’t other opportunities out there, but this works for me, and this is where I’m staying.’

  Even as I said the words, I could see his expression change as he realised that now I might be telling the truth and he struggled not to laugh. And then it dawned on me. This time I’d really fucked myself. If he believed me, which he apparently did, he’d have no reason to pay me well at all – he’d concentrate his firepower on the people who might really leave.

  ‘Thank you.’ He said it with an almost syrupy sincerity. And yes, I believe that at that moment he was sincere, because I’d just saved him several hundred thousand pounds that he could use on someone else.

  Oh, God – why me?

  Friday, 3rd December

  B minus 13

  A FUNNY THING happened today. I got in just about on time, feeling grim after yesterday, but determined not to be ground down by the everyday horror of my life. I’m a survivor, after all. In fact, that’s a common trait among all investment bankers – we’re all survivors. If there had been investment bankers on board the Titanic, everyone else might have drowned, but the investment bankers would have made it to the lifeboats. The women and children might somehow have been left behind – but not the investment bankers. The rescue ships would have arrived and found a few lifeboats and rafts containing… investment bankers. Because whatever happens, we never give up. It defines us. It determines who we are. And if anyone, ever, is inclined to dismiss us, to despise us for our unprincipled greed, or our egotistical superficiality, or the urgency and desperation of our lust for money and material possessions, all I say is this: could you do what we do?

  Anyway, Nick left the Christie’s catalogue on my desk. On my desk. I don’t know why. He and I never discuss things like this – collecting antiques, buying at auction, personal things like that.

  But there it was, and I flicked it open – and saw again the machete from my dream. It was only a few weeks ago, but it feels like a lifetime. I stared at it for an age, and when I looked up, I saw Rory looking at me from his office. I slammed it shut, got up and went straight to the gents. When I got there I splashed water on my face and stared at myself in the mirror. This was freaky. Did he know? Could he have any idea about the dream? Did he have a sense that somehow our destinies might be linked?

  No, he was probably just bored and wondered what I was reading when I should have been working. It took me a few minutes to compose myself before returning to the floor. When I did, I saw that Rory had a visitor. Sir Oliver was with him. I looked around at the team.

  ‘What’s Sir Oliver doing with Rory?’

  Nick looked up from his workstation. ‘Chairman’s annual visit to the trading floor, I suppose. Came down to chat with the team, put names to faces, he said – given the time of year.’

  ‘But – but, I wasn’t…’

  Nick smiled. Yes, he actually smiled. ‘That’s right – you weren’t here. But I don’t think he wanted to see you. He didn’t say anything, anyway.’

  Of course he wouldn’t say anything – but I would have. I’d have told him how much business I’d done during the year, thrown in a few names of key clients, talked about the prospects for next year, how excited I was, the huge potential that’s out there, just waiting to be had – and I missed my chance because I was in the gents’. In my mind’s eye, I’m planting the machete from my dream in the middle of Nick’s forehead, splitting his skull wide open and letting his brains spill out onto the floor.

  But of course I smile. ‘No problem. Maybe I’ll catch him on the way out.’

  ‘Maybe you will.’

  After that I don’t move from my seat, alert for any sign of Sir Oliver getting up to leave. And then, when he does leave, Rory gets up and walks out with him, the two of them with their heads down, engrossed in conversation, and Rory seems to steer him away from the desk, so that he leaves the trading floor by the far exit. In my mind’s eye I play out the scene from that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie when he pilots the Harrier jump-jet, coming up in the hover alongside a skyscraper full of terrorists and sweeping the whole floor with his cannons. Only this time I’m the pilot and I’m sweeping the trading floor, smashing workstations and glass-panelled meeting rooms and doing my best to lower the headcount this side of the bonus.

  I look up and see Nick grinning at me.

  I’M TAKING Wendy to the Barbican for a concert, and I have to go and collect her. It makes no sense, but she’s tired and fraught and when she’s in this mood it’s no use arguing with her. Apparently she was due to see her personal trainer this afternoon, but at the last minute he cancelled her appointment because he had to see another client, and now she’s pissed off. So I leave the City by underground, go home to change into my dinner suit and then drive her back towards the City in the Range Rover, intending to park at the Barbican. I wouldn’t bother, but we’re entertaining one of my more important clients and his wife.

  Needless to say, the traffic is appalling. As I sit on the Embankment and fume, I curse Ken Livingstone and his useless congestion charge. What’s a fiver, for God’s sake? If you really want to keep poor people off the roads, make it a tenner or more. Or introduce special lanes for rich people who can either pay an extra charge or get their firms to pay it for them. That’s the way they used to do it for the old Communist Party officials in Moscow. Why can’t we do it properly and learn from people who really knew how to run a country – they never took any shit from their poor people.

  When we get there, stressed out by the drive, we spot our guests, but we’re running dangerously late if we’re going to have a pre-concert drink. Our guests are the director of the London office of Nippon Heavy Rollers and his wife, Mister and Mrs Kanehara. They’re an ill-matching pair. He’s wearing what looks like a Moss Bros DJ that’s two sizes too big for him, with an elasticated bow tie, which is positioned off-centre, but I daren’t put it straight, because that would make him lose face, whereas she has an evening dress that looks like Catherine Walker and copious strings of pearls, possibly Mikimoto. She’s small and cute and probably in her mid-thirties, whereas her husband is much older, maybe early fifties and a lifelong corporate man. I wonder what she’s like in bed, and how much her husband makes – what would she say to a quick £10k?

  Time is short, so after we apologise for being late, I shoulder my way through the crowd to the bar. I need to get a bottle of champagne, quickly, and get a few glasses down them as fast as possible. The Japanese are hopeless at holding their drink, so the sooner he’s half cut the better.

  As I push my way to the bar and shout my order, an old woman standing beside me hisses, ‘Do you mind? I’ve been waiting here nearly ten minutes.’ A funny thing happens at this point. It’s as if my life is so full of shit that I have to take from all sorts of people, that to begin with, I just assume I have to take it from her as well. But then I do a sort of double-take as I realise that I’ve no reason whatsoever to be afraid of her: even at bonus time, she has nothing on me. I make a point of ostentatiously handing over a fifty pound note and telling the barman to keep the change as I pick up the ice bucket in one hand and four glasses, stems carefully intertwined between my fingers, in the other. Then I lean close to her and whisper in her ear, all the while smiling my usual friendly, engaging smile, ‘Could I make a suggestion?’

  ‘What?’
She looks puzzled, as if I might have something genuinely useful to say.

  ‘Why don’t you go fuck yourself?’ She tries to take a step backwards, but the crush around the bar is too great, and so she has to stay where she is, her face inches from mine as I continue my beaming smile. ‘Just a suggestion – feel free to ignore it.’

  I shrug and smile again as I shoulder my way back through the crowd. YES! Sometimes it’s nice to bite back.

  We down a few glasses, but then the bell sounds and we all rush in to take our seats. Within minutes I’m asleep and only wake up when Wendy nudges me because I’ve started snoring.

  It’s when the lights come up at the interval that I focus on the programme on my lap – it’s open at the list of individual sponsors of the evening’s performance, and there at the top of the list of Platinum Supporters is… Rory.

  I close my eyes and take a deep breath, trying not to lose it altogether, as I imagine this all-knowing, ever-present being pursuing me during my every waking – and sleeping – hour. Wendy casts anxious glances in my direction, recognising the symptoms, and ushers our guests out to the bar.

  When I emerge a few minutes later, my normal self-control restored, Wendy and the Kanehara’s are talking to an old woman who seems vaguely familiar – it’s the old bag from the bar. I’m about to duck behind a pillar when Wendy sees me and calls me over.

  ‘Darling – come over and meet Lady Gore-Williams. Her husband is Sir Brian Gore-Williams, the governor of the Bank of England.’

  Wendy is delighted. She obviously thinks she’s Made a Useful Contact, someone with whom I can Network. Don’t you just hate those pushy corporate wives at drinks parties who positively insist you meet their husband, because he’s the director in charge of internet strategy at Amalgamated Lawnmowers, and who get pissed off when your eyes glaze over and you look over their shoulder for someone more interesting? Anyway, right now I look at the old woman, look at Wendy, look at the Kanehara’s, and imagine spraying an Uzi sub machine-gun round the room, wasting everyone in sight, blazing away until the magazine is empty, peace descends and my last cartridge rolls across the floor amongst the bodies.

  Lady Gore-Williams surprises everyone when she nods at me and smiles. ‘Oh, we’ve already met. Your husband passed on some very useful advice to me, which I’m sure my husband will appreciate. Did you say your name was Hart? I must mention your advice to my husband – I do believe he’s been invited to lunch with your chairman, Sir Oliver Barton, next week. He was saying to me only yesterday that he didn’t think they have much to discuss, but I’m sure I can give him a tip or two.’

  The great thing is, she says it all with the sweetest look of utter sincerity on her face – a harmless, lovable little old lady, as she slides a knife between my ribs and twists it sharply round and round. As my heart sinks further, and a horrible feeling of nausea threatens to loosen my bowels, I can’t help thinking to myself, Christ, and I thought I was good – she’s the one who should be an investment banker.

  Saturday, 4th December

  B minus 12

  TODAY I REACHED the Point of Maximum Desperation. Unlike PMT, PMD comes just once a year – but it’s got to be much worse than a whole year’s worth of PMT. It’s the moment when I realise just how bad things could be if I don’t get paid. Little things can spark it, passing a Porsche showroom or walking down Bond Street, but this year it was the credit card statement. We – by which I mainly mean Wendy – had spent eleven thousand pounds on the credit card in November.

  Now, eleven thousand may not sound like much to you, but in certain poor countries whole families can live on that much for a year! I know this may seem ridiculous, but think about it from my perspective – on a basic salary of a hundred thousand, I simply cannot afford to run up credit card bills like that. So when I got home from the concert late last night and found the credit card statement with the mail on the drawing room table, I sat in an armchair and got utterly and completely depressed. I don’t mean that I was feeling ‘a little low’, or ‘less than a hundred per cent’ – I was FUCKING DEPRESSED! A major league Blackie had descended on me, a whole pack of Churchill’s black dogs, and they weren’t letting go. As if symbolically, my special bottle of Macallan was empty, reflecting the state of my bank account and my bonus prospects going forward. Looking at it, I could swear it was the bloody Bulgarian shot-putter who finished it, probably as revenge after Wendy stupidly re-employed her, mainly out of desperation that the absence of childcare meant she had to stop her sessions with the personal trainer – apparently she needs his help to de-stress, because of all the pressure she goes through at this time of year.

  Anyway, here I was, sitting in a million pound apartment in Sloane Square, a Managing Director of a major investment bank, days away from the annual bonus round, and I was broke. Wendy didn’t make it any better by saying how much she’d saved – yes, saved! – by taking advantage of the fact that the sales start before Christmas these days and actually she had found some amazing bargains: a Donna Karan scarf at a thirty per cent discount, another handbag from Coach at a twenty-five per cent discount, and so many new shoes at amazing savings that I finally lost count. How many shoes can a woman wear? But they were all bargains. In fact she had saved us so much money that now we didn’t have any left.

  The more I thought about it, the more solutions I found. I could always raise the overdraft, get some more credit cards and extend our credit with the various store cards that Wendy uses. The main thing was to act with confidence. We live in a fickle, superficial world, which responds to us so often directly in proportion to our expectation of its response. Of course, I’m rich – very rich, actually. I have investments, naturally, and offshore accounts. So I must be well off. And it must make sense to extend my credit. Otherwise I might take my custom elsewhere, and that would never do, would it? I thrust my jaw out and put on my grim-faced but determined look. I do grim-faced but determined very well. Eleven grand on the credit card was not going to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was solvent and I had a good job. In fact compared to the vast majority of the population I was among the favoured few. It was important to remember that, to keep a sense of perspective that would allow me to bounce back. Have you noticed how I do that? No matter how bad things are, I always bounce back. I have something called resilience. Nothing ever defeats me. Push me over ten, twenty, fifty times and I always bounce back – another smiling investment banker propelled ever onwards in life by invincible self-belief. Phew.

  Tuesday, 7th December

  B minus 9

  THE CHRISTMAS PARTY. It’s strange having it just before the bonus. Normally it’s timed to be a few days later, when most people can pretend to each other that they’ve been fantastically well paid and are happy, successful people, and anyone who can’t hide his depression can get hopelessly plastered at the firm’s expense.

  Only this year was different. Rory sent around an e-mail announcing the date, the venue and most importantly the fact that because of cost-cutting measures, the MD’s were picking up the tab instead of the firm. Yes, I said the fucking MD’s were picking up the tab, and he hadn’t even consulted us. Can you believe that? By now I suppose you can. But the other surprise was the venue. It was going to take place in the staff canteen!

  I’d always known there was a staff canteen somewhere in the basement, but I’d never actually been there. It was a place where support staff and juniors went to get subsidised lunches. Front-line revenue generators like me would never be seen dead there – we were either chained to our workstations or lunching clients at proper restaurants.

  I tried to work out Rory’s game plan. It would look good to management – imposing strict economies on the team – and it would look as if there was a strong team spirit – the MD’s, as the most senior and well paid team members, picking up the tab for everyone else. What he hadn’t said was how much he would be paying personally towards the cost. All MD’s were not exactly equal, so would there
be an even seven-way split between us or would he shoulder more of the burden? Someone checked with his PA and you can guess the answer.

  So anyway, there we were, thirty of us, drinking sparkling wine and serving ourselves with cheap canapés, while making small talk with people we’d sat next to all year, without our spouses (probably doing them a favour), in a room that could seat a hundred and fifty, and was decorated only with some cheap tinsel and baubles. There was no live music – in the past we’d often had live jazz, which definitely hits my spot – and instead the secretaries had brought in CD’s of boy-bands I’d never heard of. Luckily the music was so weird that no one was dancing, so the MD’s were excused the need to show what good sports they were by strutting their stuff on the dance floor. The other piece of good news was that the bill at the end of the evening would definitely not be much. No one could dare to get drunk, in case they said something they shouldn’t. Everyone was hanging around Rory, who seemed utterly bored and kept looking at his watch.

  At nine o’clock, the evening reached its low point: the juniors had made a spoof video. This was a tradition on the team, and a kind of competition among the younger team members, to see who could be the most creative and yet risqué at the same time, pushing the envelope in terms of aggression verging on insubordination towards the MD’s – except Rory, of course.

  Well this year it was different. The lights went down and we all sat around a giant screen TV in the corner of the canteen, drinking more sparkling wine and munching cheese crackers – which by now we were all sick of – and a series of sketches started as the juniors mimicked the idiosyncrasies of the senior team members.

  Except that half of the juniors weren’t on the team anymore.

  It slowly dawned on me – on everyone – that Rory had quietly fired half of them over the previous few weeks. As I looked around, I caught the nervous glances of the few remaining ones, as they saw their old comrades in arms on the screen. It was a cross between a wake and a memorial service. How was it possible that so many young people could quietly disappear in such a short space of time and no one seemed to notice, let alone comment on it? Were we really so self-absorbed that it simply passed us by? They were real people, after all, they had wanted to be investment bankers, they had worked hard, and now they were… well, they were gone. Afterwards I heard that they had not all been terminated – one had been moved to the library, which is worse than being fired. When it came to an end the lights came up and we all applauded politely and Rory said, ‘Well done, everyone,’ and left without saying another word. The other MD’s took their cue from him and left as soon as he was out of the way.