On the Floor (21 page)

‘What will you do with Vulkan, Felix?' A simple answer to a simple question.

Felix unfurls both hands as if weighing the range of possibilities. ‘“All men would have to be perfectly wise before one could infer from what they ought to do, what they will in fact do.” Perhaps you recall the reference?'

‘Descartes' letter to Elizabeth,' I whisper.

‘You are out of your depth in unfamiliar waters, Geraldine. And you are blindly thrashing about. The plucky Irish getting stuck into battles they never win. My intelligence tells me that various parties have been nibbling at the stock. Perhaps there is another shark circling? So I am waiting here in my little den for the interested parties to show their hand.' I picture Felix in his sunlit office framed by the hazy backdrop
of the New Territories, savouring his strategic moment, weighing the balance of power; his drifting gaze coming to rest on a wall-mounted spear.

Aasagi: Removed from the body of a fallen Zulu warrior at Rorkes Drift, Pretoria, 1879.

‘So what will you do with Vulkan, Felix?'

‘Have I not been the most gracious of benefactors? Asking for so little in return? I am beginning to feel that my business is not sufficiently appreciated, Geraldine. Perhaps I should begin to look for service elsewhere.' Felix inspects his pen, head angled to one side and offers me his version of a smile, all those little teeth fighting for space. ‘Like God, I can give and I can take away. I can pull the plug on your career.'

‘Why would you want to?'

‘Sometimes we act simply because we can. To see what happens. When I was a boy it was how I learnt about the world. Cause and effect, my dear. A very pure curiosity.'

‘So what will you do?'

Felix leans forward and makes to rise from his chair. ‘My analysts tell me that the right exit price for Vulkan would be up 30%. And who knows, perhaps the stock may even go all the way there without Mr Lester's help.'

I PICK MY WAY SLOWLY
across the sunshot stone of Exchange Square Two, checking each passing suit just in case Stephen is still lurking about waiting for a chance encounter, as if he could come strolling along at any moment. High above me in Exchange Tower One, Tom will be clock-watching and restless, but he'll read it as a good omen, assume I am still holed up with Felix. On the other side of the world the Grope will be pacing his glass box, waiting for the simple answer to the simple question. He'll call up Kapoor, tell him to
relax, she's got this guy in her pocket
. The bankers will be staring at the silent speakerphone, thumbs jabbing at their HP10s, reworking the spread between best case and worst, running numbers over and over to pass the time. Max-a-Billion will be prowling his suite in the Ritz, waiting for the call. I should go back to the office, but I am not ready.

I plough on through the sticky airlessness down to the Star Ferry terminal and take a seat beside an old man hunched over a paper cup, slurping noodles from wooden chopsticks that rise and fall in a continuous rapid knitting. I sneak three miniatures out of my bag and crack open the lids, drain them one by one. The old man turns and glares, mutters angrily, jabbing an accusing finger. Then he gets up and shuffles off.

There are worse places to be than Hong Kong of course. And worse reasons for being here than the threat of contingency that Felix has so neatly aired.
Quid pro quo
.

The ferry dips and rolls in a tanker's wake and I slide sideways on the wooden bench. A little girl in front turns around and stares at the tears that are spilling now down over my cheeks. She prods her mother's arm, and she also turns; the girl points at my face and the woman bundles her around and they too move away. I do not know what my tears are for since there is no accessible sensation other than the desire to lie down, to sleep, to reach the end of something.

A watery vision of Central wobbles on the receding horizon. Out there somewhere is Stephen, he could be looking down at the water or else already in a cab to Kaitek heading for the afternoon flight. Did he think of me when he stood in front of Felix's steel door? No, not for a second. Zanna is right: it is so over and I am gagging on a dead intimacy, clinging to driftwood like the castaway I am. Felix's taunt nags at my ear.
A very charming man. Very well-bred as they say… Not really from the same side of the tracks, though, are you, my dear? I can see how that would be problematic
. It has taken 182 days of stunned mourning to accept that Stephen and I had never been looking at the same thing, that the lost city of my world is a place he never even imagined.

Oh, but the aura of the unattached is like a smell that seeps into your days. There's no homeward rush after the last ticket is booked and the floor slowly empties and you're lulled into a fitful sleep to the drone of the US desk, the occasional hoot on the open line to New York, the muted roar of applause where some match plays out on low volume TV. At night I lie awake with price histories hovering in the darkness in front of me, replaying trades and patterns on a three-dimensional grid that stretches back years. An obsessive surveillance, or a place to hide, a fear that something has been overlooked or perhaps there is always some new data that could be mined or – worse – some old data that
can be re-cast even when it's too late, the deal is long since done. I still cannot stop myself cluttering up my brain with useless digits, formulae, algorithms. To discard would be to forget, or maybe it is a way of forgetting the important stuff. Like what exactly Stephen and myself talked about the first time we met and all those lost conversations – I estimate 2,304 hours minimum – yet the fragments I remember would barely fill a page. There is an ephemeral quality about the whole relationship now as if it evaporates on examination.

But our Venice finale still screams at me in vivid colour. Every time I replay the closing act I tell myself it's desensitisation I'm seeking, that I'm hoping to reach a point where I can fast-forward, that I will become jaded by the story of my own abandonment. Instead I review it in salacious detail as if I might find some unexplored detail, some new prick of pain. Maybe there is a hidden code in the final act that will transform the story and reveal its true meaning. Didn't I learn that lesson at close range from my own family all those years ago: how the ending becomes the whole story. How it becomes the new beginning that shapes the rest of your life. Isn't this what I have learnt from my own mother? How the last act becomes the defining moment, all that happened and all that you remember: the family in the grip of a crisis, the healing that never happened.

But it's not those memories that rise now from the water's swell, it's the closing scene with Stephen: 182 days ago, at 5.15 a.m. on 17 July 1990, I was standing smoking on the balcony of Stephen's apartment, waiting for him to show up for our 7:10 flight to Venice. He'd spent the past twenty-four hours in competition for a 350 million-dollar deal (for a major European conglomerate whose identity, as usual, he refused to reveal). I was standing smoking in the cool quiet, looking east along Cheyne Walk and thinking: fucking hell. Imagining Stephen huddled with his team in a conference room, spinning their wheels in the agony of The Wait. When all the counter-proposals have been made, all the margins squeezed to shrieking point, when a whole universe of scenario analyses has been explored, when there is nothing to do but Wait For
The Call from some bastard CEO who will shatter the silence with his ring, and say the deal is yours. Or tell you that six months of work has been for nothing, snap you like a twig and leave you howling through gritted teeth.

I could picture the tired trolley of cling-filmed sandwiches beached in the corner of the room, the conference table littered with steel thermoses and bottles of water. No smoking. Even under Maximum Deal Stress, Stephen does not make any concession to human frailty. Spread around the outer circle of the room is a gaggle of multinational Junior Analysts, recently parachuted down to earth from their cosy nests at Wharton, Harvard, Columbia, INSEAD at $105,000 apiece; the fledgling investment bankers who are normally left alone in the office late at night with strict instructions not to play with any matches. Their fresh-faced ambition is being slowly crushed by the tedium of bag-carrying and eighteen-hour days. Tonight they brush up against the Holy Grail of Banking and wonder if they will ever do more than worship at the altar of Stephen Graves, whose foot-last rests in a shoe mortuary at John Lobb of St James, whose meteoric rise to glory has already passed into City mythology. Stephen Graves, who didn't just come top of the class of '83, but who simultaneously, in an impressive demonstration of impeccable time-management skills, cut four strokes off his golf handicap, became intimately acquainted with the off-piste terrain around Chamonix and read the first volume of
A La Recherche du Temps Perdu
(in the original French, of course).

I could picture Stephen with his feet up on the conference table, shooting the breeze with his henchmen Julian (INSEAD) and JJ (Stanford) and entertaining the peripheral audience with anecdotes about the personal idiosyncrasies of the Competition and an endless cascade of stories that include:

Great Deals I Have Done,

Great Deals I Have Stolen from the Jaws of the Competition,

One Great Deal I Lost Through the Scummy Tactics of the Competition, and

Close Shaves During My Off-Piste Adventures on Mont Blanc.

The young associates in the cheap seats inch their pallid faces closer, trying to memorise the names that flow from his tongue, straining to follow the short-hand circumlocutions of a rich history, trying to disguise the fact that they keep missing the punch lines, taking desperate but careful cues from Stephen's inner circle, who lounge in preening intimacy with the boss, but would never dare to put their feet up on the table.

It was 17 July 1990 and this was the closest they'd ever come to a Master of the Universe.

As daylight crawled into the airless room, the ringing phone finally broke the news: the deal would trade away to Goldman's. Stephen took the blow like the man he is.

So when he finally double-parked on the street below at 5.37 a.m., I was thinking how appropriate that we should be leaving for a long weekend, how the baggage of the Lost Deal would be good company for the Ailing Relationship. Although neither of us had actually admitted it might be a last-ditch attempt to resuscitate our union, I knew this even as I booked the flights. When Stephen stepped into the hall, I tried not to focus on his distracted registration of my presence and the departing plane. Instead I counted backwards and calculated that it was thirty-three days since we last had sex and immediately buried this thought in case he could scan it on my forehead.

After the near miss of the flight and the wrong seat numbers and the search for the hotel vaporetto, Stephen said that it was a shame I hadn't booked the Danieli, but I decided to ignore this as we cruised along the Guidecca. And when the Cipriani came into view through the spray, I could almost convince myself that Venice might provide us with inspiration. Standing on the quayside as the porter unloaded our suit-carriers, I actually managed to amuse Stephen by doing the pointing boy scene from
Death in Venice
. He laughed and I realised that this was
the first time either of us had really made the other laugh in a long time. Over a lunchtime Bellini, I watched elegant women pick their way past expensive shops behind the shaded columns of the Piazza San Marco but Stephen was wondering aloud if we should be here at all, what with the summer heat and the crowds and the fact that he's been there, done that. I was reading aloud from the guidebook and planning: tomorrow the Doges and then Arsenale and Stephen was getting edgy about the intensity of an itinerary of things he has already seen and the snippets of history that we would both forget.

Leaning over the Rialto Bridge, he declared that we were definitely not going on a gondola, but even though it looked pretty tacky I still cherished a fleeting hope that he might change his mind, though I knew he wouldn't, because the idea of paying some man to sing at him is more than he could ever bear. Over coffee, Stephen said he wished I wouldn't keep saying how great it was that there are no cars and I told him that one of the pluses about being on holidays was being able to relax your mouth and let anything fall out. But he didn't consider this an excuse for being boring or unselective, there were certain standards. So I took the opportunity to remind him of his ex's mouth which was permanently spewing out mind-numbingly dull observations about the world in which she lived and Stephen said, ‘Yeah, well, that was the main reason I dropped her,' and I said, ‘Well, it took you a year,' and he said, ‘Enough,' and I said, ‘Good. Because I can't think of anything else.'

A frozen silence shuffled behind us as we stumbled through a maze of cobbled streets. A little worm in my head turned and whispered: the end is nigh. But I have never been graceful, could not just lie down and accept that there wasn't a way to rescue this. A cluster of pigeons burst apart when we rounded a sudden corner onto a tiny sunshot piazza and I stopped to stare at a crumbling yellow wall, the hopeless fragility of all these things so lovingly built.

Stephen stepped forward, level with my view. ‘“I have been familiar too long with ruins to dislike desolation.” Byron on Venice,' he added and turned away and I thought of all the things I could say, the good
and the bad, the relevant and the irrelevant, trying not to focus on the personal resonance of his quote. But the distance between us appalled me; he was accelerating away out of my reach, too far gone to turn around and so Venice became the backdrop for the sour dissolve.

In the evening we went through the motions of getting dressed up for dinner, so at least we could look good even if there was no chance that we were going to enjoy ourselves. Maybe rituals are therapeutic. Maybe it would actually have been worse if I just lolled on the bed in a pair of jeans and said I can't be fucked to get dolled up. Stephen looked great but I struggled for a way to say this that didn't sound ironic.