On the Floor (34 page)

‘Did they let the bad guys walk away?' Joe whipcracks the phone cord against his thigh. Rob flinches in his chair.

‘No, they did not,' says Al. ‘They killed them all.'

‘That's right, they killed 'em all. Every last one.'

Heads bob in silent consensus.

‘You always kill the bad guy,' says Joe. ‘'Cos if you don't…'

‘The bad guy just comes back and kills you,' says Al on cue.

Rob exhales. The bewildered chorus that is the Jap desk exhale. Joe tips forward as if he is taking a bow for his performance and raises the receiver to his ear. ‘You still there, mate?' he barks and spins away, back to his pitch, pulling on the black cord as if he is reeling himself into shore.

Al is already back on the blower beside me, squeezing his mini football, spinning some yarn about a bomb-proof tech stock to one of his Swiss clients. The PC screens flicker and the lights blink a power surge and I wonder what a life would be without all this. Once there was a five-minute cut on the floor and the place stopped and we just stood around looking helpless. Dead black phones hooked in metal desk clips like cardiac chargers. Without the screens and the chargers we are nothing. They feed us, give us the power to carry on.

I remember a jaded Saturday on an extended business trip to Tokyo when I took a spontaneous bullet train out of the city to kill a few hours that shopping couldn't. Stepped off at Nikko in the countryside air and walked northwards through tapered streets of shuttered houses. Crossed a footbridge over a clear rush of water where a passing crocodile of giggling girl guides stared at me and I stumbled on what looked like a cemetery. Row upon manicured row of miniature stone Buddha statues with red rags tied around their stone heads. That evening in a
heaving whisky bar in Roppongi I asked Yoko-san what they were.
Self-immolators
, he replied in perfect East Coast.
The families come to tie the red ribbons, like you guys would bring flowers
.

So circle the wagons, it's time to go. Asia has long since gone to bed and Europe will soon be out to lunch while the East Coast files for the subway. A temporary hush will settle on the floor, while the screens still blink. A surreal silence, on the brink as we wait for the next move.

I grab my bag and switch off my Reuters. Al looks up puzzled in mid-flow so I smile, pat him on the shoulder, give him a little salute. He carries on talking, watches me walk around the desk to stand behind Rob who is making a whooping noise into the phone and tapping his screen. He waves Bud Light to run a ticket over to the stock desk and clicks mute.

‘You had me worried there when you didn't show. What's up, G?' he brushes his hand lightly along the inside of my bandaged hand. ‘You really OK?'

‘Yeah, fine.' It isn't difficult to smile at him.

‘Well, you look like shit,' he grins and his touch is gone.

He clicks the receiver. ‘Fuck's sake, Jonno, keep your shirt on. I'm here.' And as I turn away Rob calls out where am I going because there is a block of that Amgen up for grabs but he's got to take it right now and what do I think, would Felix care before the stock opens?

‘Dunno,' I swing round and spread my arms wide.

‘But what do you think?'

‘I think that if you can't take a risk, you might as well be dead,' I say and start the long private walk up through the bank of desks, past the hunched shoulders and the bobbing warrant traders.

The Grope leaps up, all teeth, when I appear in the doorway. Julie comes in to give me my travel wallet and he says something about a great result. He pats me on the shoulder – carefully as if I might shatter at his touch. Then as I turn to leave, he grabs my hand and he's shaking it and holding on as if he's clinging to a rock, and he seems smaller and
oddly transparent as if he is fading into outline. He is vanishing, he is yesterday already and I know that I will never see him again.

I retrieve my hand and back out the door and I'm talking without saying anything, it's just my mouth that's moving, every other part of me is already gone.

But it seems that in the end all of this is easy now, oh so much easier than Rex grinning in the rear view at seven this morning, excited at having his full range of toys in the boot with him, maintaining an urgent whine all the way to Richmond Park. He ran off across the crisp dark grass and I followed him up through the spare wood and out onto the wide grassy slope that rolls down to the road. In the centre of the space in front of me a man flew a model plane, red with a grey stripe along the side. When it landed, he ran towards it holding his sports jacket tight round his body. He was short and fat and out of breath. I bent to pick it up for him, but he shouted: ‘No no, leave it, I'll get it,' waving his hands like he was in distress. I stretched out my arm, thumb upturned and erased him. There was something crumbling inside me, this desire to cry.

I found the place without much of a problem with the vet's biroed directions on my knee. A long line of houses with deep gardens set back from the road and a stone's throw to the Park. Oh, but it was just the hardest thing. Rex leapt right out of the car as if he was arriving home or something and ran off to chase a collie bitch who came flying out from the back of the house. Leaving me with the woman who looked like she had sounded on the phone, sort of shapeless and with a creased, smiling face. While I unloaded Rex's toys and blanket and crate of dog food and his vaccination card and leads, she kept saying, ‘Are you sure you won't have some tea, dear,' even though she knew I couldn't do that.

Rex came hurling towards us with the collie in hot pursuit and disappeared through a gap in the hedge. I lit a cigarette and, looking mostly up at the sky, said a few unnecessary things about his habits and
stuff, things she didn't need to know but that I needed to tell her. A way of spinning it out. And then I stubbed the cigarette on the ground and said, ‘Well, I'll be off then.'

She touched my arm and said, ‘Don't you worry,' and she called Rex and he came to her panting, with flecks of saliva on the fur of his neck where the collie had been play-biting.

He stood lolling his hot pink tongue like a cartoon dog and I went to hug him, but this huge lump rose in my throat and my face got all hot so I mumbled ‘Thanks' without looking at her and fled to the car. The woman stood on the pavement, Rex beside her with his ears cocked, tongue hanging loose and happy and I drove off and they got smaller in the mirror, the tears pouring down my face so that when I got to the corner I had to stop because I couldn't see and I had to scream just once to ease the pressure in my throat. Sitting there with the engine running and my head pressing into the steering wheel, these snapshots – Rex the fluffy puppy, Rex sitting in the bath, Rex cowering at the vet's, Rex slobbering over his tennis ball – they flashed past and I thought I'd lose my mind, but eventually I got the tears under control and headed on eastwards. Feeling, Christ, just feeling so much older. Like I was missing a limb or something. Like I was finally and completely alone.

THE STREETS ARE WARMING UP
to lunchtime but the bar is empty when I walk in and find him behind his pristine counter polishing glasses.

‘So, Faustino, what would you say if I told you I was kidnapped by a man for a whole day?'

He puts down the glass, folds the cloth over his shoulder and stares at me. ‘He hwan money for you?'

‘You mean ransom? No, he didn't want money.'

‘What he wan if no money? He shakes his head, leans closer. 'He hwan you do sex?'

‘Maybe. But he didn't force me.'

Faustino spreads his arms wide on the bar. ‘What he hwan?'

‘I think maybe he just wanted to teach me an important lesson.'

‘Ah. Is very fucked up people.'

‘Yes. Very fucked up.'

‘How you get haway?

‘I told him a story and then he just opened the door.'

He frowns, runs a doubtful finger along the fine line of his chin.

‘You don't believe me, do you, Faustino?'

‘Sure, sure. We all love good story.' He reaches down and places the Absolut bottle on the counter. ‘You hwan double?'

‘No, Faustino.' I offer him a hand. ‘I just came to say goodbye.'

Zanna was on the phone when I walked into her office. She stood immediately and began to wrap up the call, with none of the usual imperious hand signals holding me at bay.

‘Geri,' she said with strained formality when she'd put down the receiver.

‘I came to say goodbye.'

‘You're going already? Now?' I could hear the hesitation in her intent, she was testing our shallow waters, wondering if a breathing space could retrieve the situation. But we both know that there isn't a route map back to the beginning, that friendship is supposed to be about sharing the manageable best until the fun wears out and life really is too short to stick around patching up old baggage.

‘My car's waiting downstairs.'

‘I was going to tell you that I will be leaving too—'

‘Going back to New York? Yes. It figures.' And I can picture her already tripping along Wall Street in her early morning sneakers, expertly outmanoeuvring the flooding suits.

She nods, twisting her lips to the side. ‘In the spring. It's been decided.'

‘That's nice,' I say. ‘So you can both be together.'

She opens her mouth but reconsiders. The taste of humble pie hard to take.

‘So what about Rex?'

‘Dogs are like kids, you know, they need a stable home.' I touch the glass iceberg, press down hard on the jagged edges and when I turn my palm over there are little pink pressure spots.

‘Anything you need a hand with just ask,' her voice almost a whisper.

‘There is just one thing.'

‘Go ahead.' She steels herself for the payback she deserves. Moves round the desk to face me and I realise for the first time that I am actually a good couple of inches taller than her, which is something I never noticed in all these years.

‘Anything,' she says for she is ready. And this is the Zanna I know, who is always closing or seizing the moment, who never stands in a queue. There is a defiant tilt to her chin as she waits for my axe to fall, and the petty curiosity drains from me and is replaced by a surge of memory: the first time I saw her, the first time she strode onto the trading floor swinging that bob; I can see her fixing my mascara in the ladies at the Ritz,
look up, Geri, and for Chrissake don't blink
; I can feel her hand on my back as she looks over my shoulder in the mirror and I know that she is exactly who she purports to be. She is Rosanna P. Vermont and history may have separated us from a future but the past doesn't have to be revised. There is something about good faith in the air. She is not un-brave. She doesn't scurry off to hide in a cave. She will live and die by the sword and she will always face the music.

‘What?' she says now, for Zanna is ready to count the cost.

‘Repeat after me.'

She cocks her head.

‘Repeat after me,' I say again and her puzzled face breaks into a smile.

‘Repeat after me,' she whispers shakily and I see her eyes tear up. She twitches her nose against this unfamiliar sensation and I reach out to pat her shoulder but my hand flounders in the space between us and just brushes the side of her arm. Zanna bites her lip hard and I walk through the open door and out into the corridor with that last picture of her. The bitten lip, the useless tears, my flailing hand.

I will try to remember her this way just because I can. And I will try to remember us intact. It is a beginning.

I dump my suit carrier and slam the door. The driver says how it's not such a great time to be travelling and then we head off through the City streets. He keeps up a monologue about the war and how he wishes he had CNN and I'm thinking how these days never get fully light. We inch through the West End in a receding drizzle and every single thing I see looks like it's melting away.

I imagine Pie Man hunched over a café table in Liverpool Street chewing over some algorithms; he has scoped out what Bankers Trust are up to and he is electrified by possibility. He reaches for the second Eccles cake and his hand freezes, paralysed over the plate. He kicks back the chair, gathers his papers together and strides out. Hurries purposefully forwards and breaks into a run along Bishopsgate, he is chasing the shadow of a big fat boy and in a moment he will outrun him and take flight for the very first time.

I picture the Grope opening his display cabinet and fingering the mementos, releasing the ghosts, all sorts of past tense rushing up to greet him. They have talked it over and Lauren says maybe it's time. He hears the thunk of a chip shot on the green in Fort Lauderdale: Lauren reminds him of the grandchild they will be able to see. He flicks a speck of dust from the Stars 'n' Stripes. Better not to wait for the call, better to call time yourself. Better to throw in your own towel than have it ripped from your body. He turns away and picks up the phone to New York.