On the Floor

by Aifric Campbell

  The cab drivers on the street far below are getting fatter on our titbits. They flock like crows around the concourse and eye us in their rear-view mirrors, sometimes asking what we do, going into work at the same time as cleaners. We play it down, don’t want to give the wrong impression about the money we’re making though we know we are overpaid. But that’s what we cost, it’s only the going rate and anyway there is no such thing as value for money. In one year you can make more than your dad made in twenty. The richest 5 per cent of the population owns 35 per cent of the wealth in this country. The poorest 5 owns nothing.

  But ‘enough’ is a dirty word around here, for how could you ever have enough when there is always someone else who has more?

  07:24 Iraq prepared for confrontation, says Latif Nasif Jassem, Iraqi Information Minister. Al’s flag flutters on the top of his monitor. The overhead TV is airing Aziz again, intercut with some F 1-11s. Across the floor, the Grope’s office is still empty. In the centre of the screen, the greenback flips and bounces. Finger on the money pulse. Someone’s PC emits an urgent bleep to sound a stock reaching a critical point. The plunge on the graph could be a buy or a sell prompt, it all depends on who you are, what you want, who you talk to, what you had for breakfast. There is so much you can find out with a bit of keyboard control. Rubber in Jakarta. Civil disturbance in Seoul. T-Bills in Chicago. There is a rising hum to the floor and the throbbing returns to my left temple, sneaks round from the back of my skull.

  Al flops down in his chair beside me and says biotechs are where it’s at. ‘This company is going to make dialysis a thing of the past, Phase III trials just started.’ He side flips the report to land neatly on my desk. ‘Do your clients a favour and just look at the chart, any day now the stock is going to break out.’ I run an index finger along the title, even look down at the first page, as if boning up on renal failure could rescue me from this malaise. This is exactly what rescues Al from a head-on collision with his own shortcomings – a belief in what happens next. He is not about to be toppled by what’s gone before. He is not about to have his future short-circuited by the past. I might do well to follow his lead.

  I lie back in the chair and watch the tickertape roll left-to-right across the opposite wall, last night’s New York close creating the illusion of momentum in my life. But wasn’t that exactly what seduced me so early on? Not the money, but the possibility that life could in fact be as random as a stock chart, that in the next second you could be ricocheted from a trough to a peak and be utterly transformed? I could get up from my chair right now, switch off the screen and walk out into a different life. I could become a cokehead or a mountaineer, screw the guy beside me or even the girl across the way. Gain ten pounds, learn Chinese. I could do anything on a whim and the future could take shape out of the old accumulated past moments lining up right out of the now.

  And how could you not fall in love with this world where there is so much happening, where everything can change in the next moment? With foreknowledge you forego the thrill, life is no more than a fixed match. So what would I have chosen to know in advance? Stephen’s decision to cut me loose? But deep down I knew it was coming. I just hoped it could be delayed for as long as possible.

  ‘Check it out, Geri,’ says Al and I turn round to see him facing the wall behind us with little pieces of sellotape stuck to his right hand. He smoothes out the taped pages and we both stand back to admire the A3 cutout of General Norman Schwarzkopf in his fatigues. ‘Got it from one of my old classmates at First Boston,’ he says and picks up a newspaper caption from his desk and sticks it level with Schwarzkopf’s nose: STORMIN’ NORMAN SQUARES UP FOR WAR.

  ‘Some bullshit feature in there,’ he jerks his head at the Sunday Times lying open on his desk. ‘Taking potshots at Schwarzkopf. I mean, you guys are supposed to be our ally, right?’

  ‘Newsflash, Al. I’m Irish. And Ireland is neutral. We don’t fight wars.’

  ‘They just fight in pubs, Al,’ Rob chips across the monitors. ‘And blow people up.’

  ‘You guys see that guy interviewing Stormin’ Norman last night?’ asks Al.

  ‘Like watching a snuff movie,’ says Rob and Al swivels around tetchily, the way he does whenever Rob cruises into his US political airspace.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. As per usual,’ says Al, chucking a tight paper ball in the bin behind Rob’s head.

  ‘Oh, and you do, right, mate?’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘So you’ve seen one then?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Al tilts his head face up to the ceiling, arms behind his head.

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘He has? You HAVE?’ Rob shoots out of his chair and, in a second, is crouched between the pair of us, doing a quick head scan of the trading floor. ‘Come on mate, spill.’

  Al taps a shiny right shoe under the desk.

  ‘Come on, Al,’ I plead. ‘You can’t just say that and not follow it up.’

  ‘Get a move on, mate,’ says Rob, ‘it’s two minutes to the morning meeting.’

  Al lowers his arms and adjusts his cuffs. ‘It was in my freshman year,’ he grins down at Rob. ‘That’s first year at university to you, dickhead.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ I lean closer.

  ‘Hey, I’m not proud, you know, it was like my roomie’s friend of a friend…’

  ‘That’s flatmate to you, Rob,’ I say.

  ‘Shut the fuck up, Geri. OK, OK. So? Al?’

  ‘He paid like 300 bucks or something for this video, a really shitty copy. And we were wasted one night, so he puts this thing on and there’s just the four of us…’

  Al bends forward in the chair, elbows on knees, considering his spread-eagled hands.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘So we watched it. Or some of it. I can’t remember.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘And then I fell asleep.’

  ‘What happened in the film, I mean?’

  ‘A girl… a Mexican girl… that’s where they, uh, get them. Y’know, smuggle them in or something, or do it there, I guess. It was pretty hard-core stuff, I mean, gangbang and she was a kid really. And then they did it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know, held her down and beat the fuck out of her.’ Al stares straight ahead like he sees something on his Reuters screen.

  ‘Did she die?’ I venture.

  ‘What the hell d’you think, Geri? It was a snuff movie, not Sleeping Beauty.’

  ‘Jesus CHRIST, Al,’ I hiss. ‘You actually watched this?’

  ‘Hey, it’s not like I wanted to, or paid any money or anything. You gotta remember we’d been tequila slamming since lunchtime after this ball game, I can hardly even remember.’ He tugs at his sleeve. ‘Like I said, it was one of those things.’

  ‘I can’t believe you even admit to it.’

  ‘You asked, right? And hey, you guys, I don’t want to hear this coming back.’

  ‘All right, mate, all right. Be cool,’ says Rob.

  ‘So what about the guy who owned the tape?’

  ‘Never saw him again. He was a fucking asshole anyways.’

  Rob stands up, stripping his eyes away from Al for the first time, shaking his head and smiling. ‘Gotta say, mate, I’m impressed. And there’s me thinking you were just a swot.’

  07:29

  I JOIN THE WARM HERD OF BODIES bottlenecking at the entrance to the conference room where the heads of Strategy, Foreign Exchange and Commodities stand in a tight nodding cluster on the podium. All around me is the sweet smell of money in the morning – laundered shirts and expensive cologne. It’s a record turnout what with this countdown to war and everyone wanting to see our battery of analysts flex their clairvoyant muscle, telling us what’s going up, what’s coming down, and how we can make a killing when the bombs start falling. The room is packed to capacity so the door has to stay open with the Asian desk crowding the threshold. I reverse into the forward surge of men b
ehind me and duck sideways to the wall. Zanna stands to the left of the podium power cluster, but within easy touching distance. She’s in profile, a curtain of blonde hair obscuring everything but her nose. Although she is ostensibly shuffling through some loose papers, I know that she is hyper-aware of her natural exclusion from the big boy’s huddle. Ever since she joined Steiner’s Research Department, Zanna has provided a welcome splash of colour against the tedious backdrop of suits that headline every morning meeting. Easily the most glamorous person to walk through the swing doors of the bank, she is a vision of graceful style whose two-year stint at The Wall Street Journal culminated in a front-page exposé about how Steiner’s traders were being sent death threats by the Japanese yakuza because we were making grillions out of a program that calculated the index sixty-three seconds before the Tokyo Stock Exchange computer could. When Zanna’s boss didn’t give her the requisite column inches she demanded after her prize-winning article, she handed in her resignation, telling him the next time she saw him would be when she was firing him, sunshine. While I was yawning my way through my second year at college, Zanna was at Harvard Business School getting second place in the class of ’83 (after Stephen of course), before being snapped up by Steiner’s, who decided that the smart thing to do would be to hire the woman who had pulled their pants down on the front page of the Journal.

  When Stephen introduced us I soon realised Zanna practises secret arts that no other woman working in the City knows: how to tie a scarf so it doesn’t look like a dog collar, how to achieve that ‘no make-up’ look in under five minutes, how to sculpt hair into an effortless French plait. In short, Zanna knows how to present a structured package of feminine beauty and formidable intellect that is guaranteed to catapult her past the Cuban-heeled pack of Women Who Have Made It in the City, the lone wolverines who think that a slap of lipstick and a pair of tits will stop them being taken seriously and that being generally ungroomed in a dykish dark suit is the best way of cracking your head through the glass ceiling.

  When I called round to admire her remodelled master bedroom before Christmas, she flung open the towering wardrobe doors to reveal a compartmentalised nerve centre of order: ghettoised cashmere jumpers alongside horizontal double height rails, a battery of drawers in descending widths, suits cascading into a row of individually bagged party frocks. I breathed in a trace of cedar, and looked down at the row of shoe bags that stretched across the base – Charles Jourdan, Salvatore Ferragamo – thinking this is a wardrobe that could streamline your whole life with the perky announcement that WHATEVER might happen, you would never be inappropriately dressed. Or find yourself at 5 a.m. on a winter morning, holding two stockings under a naked light bulb to check if they are both black, or effing and blinding your way through the cavernous darkness of an overstuffed wardrobe for that blue suit that seems to have vaporised.

  English women, sighed Zanna, closing the wardrobe door, do NOT understand grooming. Hair. Nails. Careers.

  Rosanna P. Vermont is a thirty-year-old Europhile Yank whose mother concordes between her antiques shop on the New Kings Road (where she spends a fortnight crying bravely on her daughter’s shoulders and bemoaning the impossibility of getting a decent latte in this town) and her clapboard divorce settlement in the Hamptons. Zanna’s father, meanwhile, spreads his middle-aged wings in a new pad on the Upper East Side, calling her to say, Honey, haven’t you spent enough time in Europe now? You could have anything you want at my firm, you know? But what Daddy doesn’t see, as he surveys his giant banking kingdom through a glass partition, is that his daughter wants the thrill of pioneering, of doing it her own way in a European banking system that’s still in its infancy compared with what he is offering.

  When he’s not begging her to come home, he’s begging her to send a birthday card to his new girlfriend who is old enough to be her younger sister and – to judge from the photo I saw, bears a remarkable resemblance to Zanna – although she has never mentioned this and I don’t think it’s necessarily constructive to make that kind of connection. I mean, you could argue that Zanna looks very like her mother, in which case it’s just Daddy doing a normal guy thing and trading in his wife for a younger model. In the end, Zanna did, in fact, relent and send a card to the girlfriend, because Daddy needs me to be inclusive.

  Zanna’s favourite movie is Glengarry Glenross.

  Her favourite sayings are:

  Always be closing.

  Never stand in a queue.

  Repeat after me.

  Most people do not see the kindliness in Rosanna P. Vermont, what they see is the chilly veneer. But I know her to be generous in gesture, which I realised only too well 174 days ago when she called me up after Stephen dumped me.

  ‘Geri, are you there?’ Her voice on the answerphone stopped me and my vodka refill halfway across my living room and I was convinced that she could somehow tell I was home. I stood there with the freezer-fresh bottle dripping in my hands, but I couldn’t see a way of talking without sounding like I was cracking up, and I couldn’t bear to see my distress reflected in Zanna’s eyes. ‘You’re there, aren’t you?’ she said when she called again a few hours later. ‘We’re going out. We’re going to get you through this.’

  So we went out and got blasted, after she’d dragged me round Sloane Street, through a jungle of frantic females fingering anything black, shoving me into changing rooms with dresses that I would never have picked off the rails myself. ‘Retail therapy. It gets you through the first wave.’ I capitulated over the red and black Balenciaga, because it was easier than arguing, because the only way to move was forward and because Stephen wasn’t the one sitting at home alone with his mouth impaled on a bottle of Absolut.

  That night we went to the LA Café, brushing past swarms of girls in puffball skirts, and Zanna let me sit at the bar lining up the sea breezes and amusing myself and the barman by composing a Rule Book for Wannabe Female Bankers (subtitle: How to Get On Without Getting Fucked), reading my napkin scrawl aloud to both of them:

  1. Don’t even blink when someone says ‘Cunt’. Better still, say it yourself.

  2. There is NEVER a good reason to cry in the office.

  3. Always remember that two women standing together on a trading floor can only be gossiping; therefore treat all female colleagues with total contempt.

  4. Learn how to drink copiously. Know the point at which you are likely to keel over or shag someone you shouldn’t.

  5. Keep your sexual playground OUTSIDE your office unless you want your performance to become the topic of discussion over the bar.

  6. Never get period pains in the office. Adjust your contraceptive pill cycle so that you menstruate at weekends.

  7. If you absolutely MUST have a baby, avoid a pregnancy and arrange a secret adoption during your summer vacation.

  When Zanna decided enough was enough, she hauled me out onto the street and hailed a cab, gripped me in a cheery hug. Congratulations, Geri, you’ve done your grieving. And sure enough when I woke the next morning and saw Rex curled up on my dress on the floor I realised it had been thirty-five hours since I had cried and that was progress.

  One hundred and fifty-seven days ago she pulled me off the trading floor and into the loo and put her arm around my shoulders in a manner that resembled something approaching the distant kindness of strangers. Never ever on the floor, she said, dabbing at my cheeks. But people lose patience with a grieving that should be over and I soon became a project that did not proceed as planned.

  So in late September Zanna pitched up at my door in loafers, jeans and a French nautical T-shirt like she was an advert for spring cleaning. A renovation of the heart. ‘You should move, trade up, Geri.’ She thrust a Savills brochure into my hand. ‘South Ken is more happening. Kensington is full of Armenian widows droning on about their dead husbands.’

  ‘What is happening to me, Zanna?’

  ‘It’s taking longer than I thought,’ she admitted, a thoughtful sadness about the way she
nodded her head.

  ‘I will never give my heart again.’

  ‘Bullshit. This is not a bereavement, Geri, this is a break-up.’

  ‘Because I will have no heart to give.’

  ‘It’s never the same the second time. You will be better protected.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I just think you endowed the relationship with more than was there.’

  ‘You’re saying I made it all up?’

  ‘I’m saying you invested the relationship with way more than it had.’

  She stood in the kitchen and watched me fiddling with the lid of the kettle. Rex slunk past her to settle on my bare feet.

  ‘So everything I know is wrong.’

  ‘It was a symptom, not a cause, of what’s wrong with your life.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘You haven’t got a plan, Geri. You’ve got the world at your feet, but you act like you don’t want it. You won’t decide where you are going with your life. And Stephen, like the rest of us, knows what he wants.’

  ‘And it’s not me.’

  ‘And it’s not you.’ Zanna patted my cheek. ‘Repeat after me: he is never coming back.’

  ‘He is never coming back.’

  ‘It is so over.’

  ‘It is so over.’