At Bonus Time, No-One Can Hear You Scream Page 8

  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 canapes, 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 risque 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.

  Thursday, 9th December –

  B minus 8

  Bill Myers was fired today. You don't know Bill? I'm not surprised. Bill was the quietest Managing Director on the team, a kind-hearted man approaching fifty years of age, married with four children and always looking as if life had dealt him a bad hand. In the high-flying world of investment banking, Bill was undoubtedly a low-flyer, a turboprop, World War One vintage biplane that had somehow survived because he was vaguely useful and despite his apparent seniority not very expensive. He had been at the firm far too long — nearly eighteen years — and constituted the tribal memory of the team, as well as taking charge of the juniors, training and mentoring them, and looking after some of the duller, less important aspects of the team's work, like monitoring costs. Useful but dull, that was Bill. He commuted every day from somewhere near Brighton and always seemed slightly frayed around the edges. Someone told me he had a handicapped daughter, but I knew that would cut no ice with management. The fact was, Rory could present a senior firing as a decisive act of strong leadership without actually losing much by way of revenue. It would be a pain in the neck for everyone else, because other people would have to pick up some of the administrative and personnel duties that he had handled, but for Rory it was a clear win.

  I suppose it was the eighteen years' service that really did for him. If he had been a sharp job-hopper, never more than two or three years in any one firm, moving from one guaranteed package to the next, he'd have been both richer and better regarded. But he hadn't, so he was poorer and largely disregarded. When he arrived in the morning there was a black bin liner sitting on his desk, a note from Personnel and a security guard hanging ar
ound 'unobtrusively', making sure he did not do anything stupid like smashing his computer screen.

  Not that Bill would ever have done anything like that. Bill could define the term middle-aged: balding, greying, stooping, physically pear-shaped, he did not even look like an investment banker. He saw the bin-liner, went deathly pale, picked up the envelope from Personnel, opened it and read the contents. Then he closed his eyes, breathed a big sigh and looked around at the team, a lost, blank expression on his face.

  'So that's it?' He looked sad and lonely as we all stared at our screens and pretended to be making phone calls.

  As the guard took Bill's pass and company credit card and mobile phone, I glanced across at Rory's office, to see if he was watching. After eighteen years' service, couldn't Bill expect that his boss would at least do the deed face to face? No — the lights were out and the office was empty.

  It was only later, in the gents', that I spoke to Nick Hargreaves.

  'He can't have been making more than three hundred. He's a lifer, or very nearly, and they never get paid.'

  That was Nick's assessment. I nodded. 'Still, three hundred spread around the MD's would help a little.'

  'Nah.' Nick gave a smug grin, as if he was somehow privy to Rory's thinking in a way that I was not. He tapped the side of his nose. 'It's all about positioning. Rory can milk this for a lot more than that. You mark my words.'

  I left the gents' with a spring in my step. This was the first good news in weeks.

  After Bill's desk had been cleared, I decided to think about Christmas presents. Not for myself, of course — I already felt Bill had given me an unexpected surprise — but for the important people in my life: the clients whose fees pay my bonus. As investment banks' services to their clients get more and more commoditised, and clients find it hard to tell the different banks apart, Bartons has sought to distinguish itself from the rest of the pack. We're the generous bank. We give great gifts to the individuals who run major corporates, and in return, they give us great gifts — of fees for deals they never knew they wanted to do. I think of it as a financial eco-system — we send gifts to the clients, and the clients send us gifts from their shareholders, which in turn pay for more gifts, and so on.