Midland

by James Flint

  Ignoring Mia’s sighs, Alex hustled the three of them to the relevant side of the recently completed Hungerford footbridge, from which vantage point they watched the barge arrive.

  ‘Why do they need the big yellow boxes?’ asked Rufus, as the pontoon was being prepared.

  ‘So the whale doesn’t suffocate. It’s so big and heavy that if you take it out of the water it can’t support its body enough to get air into its lungs.’

  ‘But how’s it breathe?’

  ‘It breathes air, like us. It’s not a fish, it’s a mammal. See that hole there on its head? That’s like its nose. It breathes through that.’

  ‘What’s a mammal?’

  ‘Well …’ Alex thought about this for a second, seeing if he could dredge something up from long-forgotten school Biology lessons. ‘It’s an animal like you and me. Fish breathe underwater and lay eggs for babies. Mammals breathe air and have babies in their tummies. Like Mummy.’

  He winked at his wife, who forced a smile. She wasn’t overjoyed at being compared to the helpless lump of blubber now being hoisted out of the water, though it was fair to say it pretty much described the way she’d felt through the latter months of her last pregnancy. But then the stricken animal was lowered onto the deck, the crowd hurrahed and Mia – who had been on the stage herself before she’d become a mother – experienced a surge of fellow feeling for this unfortunate northern bottlenose. Poor thing, to get separated from its pod and wander deep into the heart of a city, ending up surrounded by this bizarre circus of kindness. It must feel so alone, so lost.

  ‘Will it find its friends, when they take it back?’ Rufus asked.

  ‘I’m sure it will, chéri,’ Mia sniffed. ‘I’m sure it will.’ But she wasn’t sure at all, and she had to bow her three middle fingers and use the soft pads they presented to brush a tear from her cheek before the boy had a chance to see.

  Alex saw, though. He stepped back, put his arm around her, and pulled her to him. She coughed out a little laugh.

  ‘I’m so silly,’ she whispered, as she extracted a ball of tissue from her sleeve and put it to her nose.

  ‘No you’re not. It’s very moving. That’s what I was trying to tell you yesterday.’

  ‘The boat is moving, Dad, the boat is moving,’ Rufus said. He was standing in front of them, peering down at the unfolding drama through the gaps between the railings.

  ‘Yes, yes it is,’ Alex agreed. And the three of them watched as the barge carried the whale and its rescuers, now busily occupied in hosing down their charge with torrents of water, directly underneath their feet.

  ‘There he goes,’ said Alex.

  ‘There he goes, look Rufus, there he goes,’ said Mia.

  ‘There he goes,’ Rufus echoed airily. ‘Bye bye, Mr Whale. He’ll be all right now, won’t he, Dad?’

  ‘He’ll be fine,’ Alex assured him. ‘Don’t worry.’

  They didn’t. Satisfied that the whale would soon be returned safely to his element, the Wolds left the bridge and got on with their day: coffee, cakes and newspapers in a favourite café off Sloane Square, a foray into Peter Jones to buy two tennis rackets and new trainers for Rufus, who had outgrown his favourite pair (which had battery-powered lights in the soles), and a trip to Waitrose to stock up on supplies. It wasn’t till they were home preparing dinner that Alex switched on the dayroom television and heard the whale had died.

  He was stunned. He couldn’t take it in. That had not been supposed to happen. Not after he’d spent an afternoon up to his waist in water, trying to save its life. Not after the sacrifice of a fifteen-hundred-pound suit and a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound pair of shoes. Not after an afternoon AWOL from work and the problems that was going to cause. And especially not after he had spent an evening and an afternoon of quality time investing his son with the important life lessons concerning mankind’s responsibility for the natural world. For a minute or two he couldn’t even speak.

  ‘Look Daddy, the whale,’ said Rufus, pointing at the TV, which was showing footage shot earlier in the day. Mia, less affected than her husband by the news, put down the plastic bag of chlorine-washed salad that had only the day before been harvested from a polytunnel somewhere on the coast of southern Spain, grabbed the remote control, muted the sound and tugged her son away.

  ‘The whale, I want to watch the whale,’ Rufus wailed.

  ‘The whale’s gone home, baby, he’s gone to join his friends.’

  ‘I want to see him!’

  ‘I know, sweetness, but he’s gone. And you saw him earlier.’

  Alex, it seemed, had regained the power of speech. ‘I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it,’ he was saying over and over, under his breath.

  In the corner of the room, nestled inside a hand-tooled leather briefcase that, like the salad, had come from Spain, was his laptop. He unclipped the catch on the bag, retrieved the machine and bashed the words ‘whale’ and ‘industry’ into the search field of a browser. Immediately an orange diode on the router upstairs in his office began blinking furiously as the thousands of writhing giblets of data that had been squirted into the networks by a gigantic bank of flash RAMs in Docklands started to arrive.

  ‘How come we can slaughter thousands of whales every year but not save just one?’ he muttered. ‘What’s wrong with us?’

  Mia said something about there being quotas, but she was more concerned with getting Rufus to turn away from the truth of the world and focus on his colouring set.

  Alex wasn’t listening anyway. He was thinking about his brother. He’d probably be watching this. Knowing Matthew, he’d been on the pontoon with the whale, hosing the damn thing down. Was that why he’d got in the water in the first place? Some weird subconscious urge to connect with his brother? Because for sure they did not connect, and had not done so for too many years.

  It preyed on Alex’s mind, this, all the more since Rufus had been born. Before then, Matthew’s antipathy towards him had been dismissible: sibling rivalry, an annoying phase. But now that he wanted Matthew to be a proper uncle and them all to be a proper family, his brother’s attitude was getting in the way. They’d been close as boys, fortunate to have a big house and garden to play in and the Warwickshire countryside to explore. Camping out in the woods, sledging down Round Hill, making dens in the cow parsley, sneaking cigarettes in the shed – it had been good. Happy. Idyllic even. And then that had all changed.

  Matthew disapproved of what Alex did for a living, of course. Environmental considerations simply did not impinge on share prices, on whether you bought or sold. Sure, if a business traded on that sort of image, fashionable now in certain sectors, it might have an impact. Or if you were involved in one of those ‘ethically’ weighted funds (which Alex was not). But otherwise? Not really. Other things did. But not that.

  To people who had never experienced them, Alex liked to describe the markets as a vast, multi-courted and massively networked game of pelota. Most people, of course, had no more experience of pelota than they did of the markets. But pelota was easier and more fun to describe. Alex had only been to one pelota game, during his friend Carlos’s stag trip to San Sebastián, that mini-Monaco on the northwest coast of Spain in whose harbour Napoleon and Wellington once faced off. A gastronome’s paradise served by three times as many Michelin-starred restaurants as London, the six of them had gone there for the dining, the surfing and the casino. On the third day they’d taken a trip over the mountains, across the dusty Riojan plain, and into a valley town split by a shallow, rocky river where they’d pulled into the car park of a frontón.

  Inside, two teams of two men used curved baskets fitted onto their hands like preposterous fingernails to hurl a hard little latex and leather ball down a long thin court along one side of which hundreds of men sat in steeply raked seating drinking cognac, smoking cigars and cheering.

  Pelota, Carlos had explained, was not like other sports. In other sports there were clear favourites, competitors setting out to be a
s superior to the opposition as possible, with the bookies setting their odds accordingly. But with pelota it was the opposite. The odds always started at evens, the teams deliberately engineered by a supposedly impartial committee – advanced players paired with novices, strong players with weak – until all concerned were happy that the contest was evenly matched.

  Once the game got under way, however, and the red or the blue team (always these colours) started to pull ahead, the odds changed – and that was the point. Now the betting began, live betting and hedging, on the unfolding game. The bookies stood at the front, their backs to the court, offering new odds on rojo or azul and scribbling bets onto little pink slips which they stuffed into split tennis balls and lobbed into the ranks of yelling spectators.

  Unlike their counterparts at dog or horse tracks, the bookmakers didn’t underwrite the bets themselves. Instead they acted as middlemen, matching bets between competing spectators. They’d only offer blue if someone else had placed at least as much with them for red. For someone to win, someone else must lose – the zero-sum aspect of the affair that most reminded Alex of the markets. That, and the raging crescendo of the betting as the game progressed, the intensity whipped up by the sound of the pelota cracking off the front wall like a pistol shot and the party-game frivolity of all the tennis balls flying to and fro. It was hysterical, laughable, and deadly serious all at once.

  On the markets, of course, that frothiness was all largely hidden behind the endless banks of computer screens that had replaced the old-style trading floors, which these days looked much like any other offices. The Nymex in New York, where Alex had done a stint early in his career – and where he’d met Carlos – was one of the last to have that race-day atmosphere. After that he’d spent eighteen months as an energy trader for BP, where his job had been to ‘trade the curve’, which meant, essentially, placing bets on when a commodity – in this case oil, gas, coal, uranium – would be delivered, and at what price.

  The curve stretched from tomorrow to about four years ahead. The closer the trade the steeper it was. Close trades – short trades – had higher liquidity, tended to be smaller in value, and came with less risk attached. Long trades were as a rule much larger. They took place in a much slower market, but the risk was proportionately larger since, over a four-year time span, the chances of the curve shifting shape were that much higher.

  Even in the short term, volatility was a problem. Every morning Alex had to monitor the European weather reports: a cold snap in Germany meant more people would burn oil and the price would rise; rainfall over the Pyrenees translated into a boost in hydroelectric power and a fall-off in demand for fossil fuels. The hotter weather brought by global warming had people falling over themselves to install air-conditioning, changing the nature of summer energy demands, which could be expected to equal winter peaks for the first time. And it brought other, more unexpected changes too: rising river and coastal temperatures were taking local waters beyond the level that could be used to cool nuclear cores. This was a big issue in France, where the scorching summers meant less nuclear power available and more need for coal.

  But weather was rock-solid reliable compared with the wild cards played by politics. A strike in one country might mean a sudden race to buy energy from a neighbour, causing prices to bounce around like a rubber ball. A shock election result might send the markets reeling one way while an asymmetrical event – an explosion in a refinery, a reactor leak, a terrorist attack – might send them reeling the other. Any trader worth his or her salt was alert to all these things and many more besides. Steering a fund through these kinds of rapids and maximising your bonus by coming out on top year on year was no easy task. Matthew was absolutely right that if you were trying to do this, environmental considerations were absolutely not part of your remit.

  But Alex had stopped trading like that some time before. After he’d been hired by Sovereign Brothers in the late Nineties he’d moved across to structured credit: creating and tailoring huge bundles of loans, mainly mortgages, and selling them on as collateralised debt obligations – CDOs – to big pension funds and other institutional investors. It was a new game and he was in early, so by 2004 he had been made a managing director and put in charge of his own team. Perhaps because his father was in property and he was comfortable with the sector, his desk began to specialise in European commercial property bonds. An investor would call up and want to invest say £500 million in a triple-A-rated note yielding 2 per cent above LIBOR, and Alex’s guys would go off and put the deal together, buying up a bunch of debts collateralised by specific mortgages – an office block in Cologne, a port development in Marseille, a business park outside Birmingham – often paying well over the going rate for the underlying square footage in the process. But that didn’t bother them, even though the overblown prices they were paying might artificially inflate the local market: the yield was all that mattered. They’d group the bonds accordingly, sell the senior tranche to the enquiring client, and push the mezzanine and equity tranches out to other punters.

  It was straightforward enough in principle, but things got more complicated when trying to project the risk profile of the various tranches over the lifespan of the CDO. Calculating the probabilities of the various tranches defaulting, and in what order, depended upon a complex set of mathematical concepts known as ‘correlation’. And here Alex had an edge. Almost nobody on either the buy or sell sides really knew how correlation worked, but included in Alex’s undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Mathematics had been modules in statistics and probability theory, for which he’d had a particular affinity. As a result, the cascading values of credit-default sequences were a relatively open book to him, and this gave him the confidence required to structure his products and sell the CDOs to clients, few of whom understood quite what they were buying, and fewer still of whom wanted to admit it.

  He was doing well, but he still thought of himself as small fry. In Alex’s London more than thirty thousand people were earning over half-a-million pounds a year, and much to his chagrin he wasn’t quite yet one of them, was not yet a member of the exclusive club formed by the top 0.1 per cent of British earners, average income £1.1 million, combined income £33 billion – more than the individual GDPs of two-thirds of the world’s countries. At the investment banks the likes of Michael Spencer, Guy Hands and Richard Gnodde were pulling in annual packages worth upwards of £10 million. Star traders like Chris Rokos, who to Alex’s supreme annoyance was actually a year younger than he was, were making even more than that, as were Ian Wace and Paul Marshall, whose hedge fund, based just off the Strand, had earned them £50 million in pay and dividends over the previous two years.

  Incredible though this was, by global standards it was not particularly remarkable. George Soros, Steve Cohen, Edward Lampert and Kenneth Griffin were earning around a billion dollars a year apiece. Ahead of them all was James Simons, a former mathematician and cryptologist whose Renaissance Technologies fund was rumoured to be earning him another half a billion on top of that.

  Even to someone as financially literate as Alex, this was staggering. He was living in the London of the £65 million townhouse, the £15 million restaurant refit, the £2 million studio flat. It was a city that bore almost no relation to the one his father had briefly worked in as a young man. The post-war dream of a relatively equable, stable middle-class society was dreamt now by a dwindling rump of Guardian readers and almost no one else. The period that ran roughly between 1918 and 1978 was beginning to look, not like the brave new future it thought it was, but like an anomaly in history, a brief outbreak of social equality in a riven and polarised world that was now reverting to type.

  And good riddance, was Alex’s considered response. The dream had been a lie in any case, a bubble floating on the last of the blood that had been sucked out of the colonies before their husks had been cut adrift and Britain had retreated into itself like a gorged and aged spider. The great idealistic systems of the twenti
eth century had brought miseries and oppressions orders of magnitude more appalling than the worst horrors dreamt up by the market. To his eyes these were now being replaced by a kind of new Elizabethanism, a golden age of global trade whose overture rang out every second of every day from the vast electronic symphony of the market networks. And for this music Alex felt that we should all be profoundly grateful. Yes, there were losers, there was poverty, there was damage, there was exploitation. But look at what we’d gained! Look at London, how it had been transformed from a rubbish-strewn nightmare of stained, convoluted little streets wrapping themselves around islands of rotting, toxic concrete into its current glorious spectacle. Just to jog along the Thames, as Alex often did when he eventually escaped his desk at night, was to witness a panoply of joys: the Eye, the new bridge at Embankment with its rigging of blue light, the revamped South Bank, the Tate Modern, the Swiss Re Tower, the jukebox of Charing Cross, the helmet-like City Hall and the majestic office blocks that zagged beside it, the glade of towers that mapped the nexus of financial ley lines and confirmed Docklands as a global power centre, and even, further down, the Dome, Blair’s mammary reply to Thatcher’s pyramid-tipped phallus at One Canada Square, which everyone was supposed to hate but with which Alex had never had a problem.

  But Matthew saw none of this. Alex had tried on many occasions to communicate his excitement about it all to him, but his brother just didn’t want to hear it. Matthew’s world had a moral shape, with his goddess Gaia at the top and everything else arranged around her in cowed subordination, and anyone that didn’t like this schema he found impossible to tolerate.

  The phone rang and Alex checked himself. His knees were locked, his elbows tense, his breathing shallow. His gaze, though directed at the television, hadn’t registered anything that had been appearing on the screen for several minutes, and the news had long since left the whale behind. Even with the sound off he recognised the stories: a female PC shot in Manchester, an investigation into a toxic food dye. Big things, important things. Yet here he was, obsessing over one dead animal. Bedway, the whale … maybe he too was dangerously stressed?