Capital (32 page)

Still, it wasn’t all bad. There were times when he managed to put the whole thing entirely out of his mind, and tonight was one of those times. It was the night when, because Roger was the head of his department, he was supposed to take the people who worked for him on a ‘team-building exercise’.

Part of Roger thought this was ridiculous – both the phrase and the idea. If you didn’t have a team you couldn’t build one by going paint-balling, white-water rafting, or ‘any other bullshit that they make you do if you’re a dickhead in the East Midlands who wants to get into Al Qaeda’, as Roger put it, privately, to his peers. What was wrong with going to the pub? And yet, this was how it was done. Roger did not invent modern management culture, and he knew it too well not to go along with it. He knew Pinker Lloyd well enough to know the areas in
which it paid to be iconoclastic and vociferous, and the areas in which it didn’t. As current management fashions went, this one wasn’t worth fighting.

The part of Roger that went with the corporate flow, that quite enjoyed implementing the policies he was told to implement, was proud of his team-building exercises. Because his people were traders, and because traders were supposed to be competitive, acquisitive, and aggressive – a trader who wasn’t those things would be shit at his job – he made them do things which went with the grain. Nothing cooperative or consciousness-raising, no Buddhist meditation retreats. Roger’s usual method was to pick a competitive activity and use the whole budget for his exercise as the prize, winner takes all. He had done it with go-karting and clay pigeon shooting, with great success. Today’s contest was poker. It was Friday night. The £5,000 budget had gone into the kitty, they had booked a room at a poker club in Clerkenwell, and they wouldn’t be leaving until someone had won it all. Now his crew were in the bar, warming up for the main event. The mood in the City was a little anxious since the collapse of Bear Stearns a few weeks before, and though that didn’t have much to do with Roger’s department at Pinker Lloyd, it was still a good moment to let people get together, blow off a little steam and get trashed.

Roger had played some poker, usually with clients who insisted on taking him to some casino or other. He had once watched Eric the barbarian win £100,000 on a single hand of Hold ’em with a full house, aces over jacks. So he knew a little bit; enough to know that any serious poker players would not be drinking alcohol tonight. He was taking a good look to see who was and who wasn’t already at the booze. Most of his boys and all three girls were already on champagne, which was a good sign. A couple of people had clear fizzy drinks which might have been vodka-tonics but which could also be fizzy water. Surprise, surprise, his deputy Mark was one of them. One or two of the better traders were already half-cut. Jez, the best of them all, was three-quarters cut, which wasn’t surprising, since he was drinking Jägerbombs. Good, all good.

At about eight they went into the separate room that Roger had
booked. It was dark, with a low ceiling and a hard-to-define catering smell of old or stale or ignored food. There were two oval tables, each with a dealer sitting at the end wearing a red waistcoat; nine seats for players; nine stacks of chips. Some jostling for position took place, as people chose where they wanted to sit. That was always one of the informative things about team-building exercises, who ganged up with whom, and who was left out. It was like the moments at school when the boys were allowed to pick their own teams – it was useful information to see who was left for last.

His crew were who they were: they wouldn’t respect Roger if he didn’t try to win; in fact the thought of doing anything else never occurred to him. So who was at his table was an issue. Roger ended up at the same table as Mark, which wasn’t what he would have chosen. Nothing specific, just that slight awkwardness which hovered around his deputy and his too-willingness, his too-eagerness, his unctuous body language. Nobody ever seemed to dislike Mark, but he was too whatever-it-was for anyone to actively like him. Roger, with a large Talisker inside him, thought: just another mystery not worth solving. More of a problem was that he was sitting to the right of Slim Tony, called thus to distinguish him from Big Tony, who had in fact left Pinker Lloyd before Slim Tony arrived, but whose nickname lingered in the collective memory, not least because of his habit of always eating at his desk, and never one of anything – three Pret a Manger sandwiches, four Big Macs. Slim Tony was a pointy-faced ‘Essex boy’, in reality from High Wycombe, who had paid his way through university by playing poker online. Roger knew that, because that was the reason he had hired him. The place you didn’t want to be seated in poker was to the right of the strongest player. So that wasn’t good.

On his right was Michelle. Female traders, in Roger’s experience, either went super-girly and manipulative, or were more like alpha males than the alpha males. Michelle was the second type. She was about thirty and came from Bristol. She had a uniform: pinstripe trouser suits, worn with lots of make-up and very short, almost cropped, hair. She was deliberately abrasive and swore conscientiously, painstakingly, as if she had taken a course in it. And yet there was a femininity to her
too; her clothes were always slightly too tight, as if her womanliness wanted to burst out, to contradict the rest of her persona. When Roger wondered about it, which he quite often did, he would speculate about her weekend and holiday self, whether it was gentler and softer. To see her cursing and rowing at work was to wonder if she spent the weekend lying on a chaise longue, having her toenails done while eating Turkish delight and watching
Sex and the City
. He slightly fancied her, truth be told, but Roger was very careful at work, well aware of the ancient City motto, borrowed from the Italian restaurant trade: you fugga da staff, you fugga da business.

Their dealer explained the rules: blinds going up every thirty minutes, to keep it interesting. Roger knew that you had to keep your stack up at least to the level of the average, allowing for the fact that people had been knocked out. No rebuys allowed – when you were out, you were out. Eliminated players could go home or start playing at a separate table with their own money – which is what Roger felt sure they would do. Roger brought his attention to the table. He had played enough poker to have a clue, but not enough to be really good; who had the time for that?

After two hands, there was an all-in after the flop. Michelle, of course it would be her. It was hard to tell whether this was a clueless move or an astute one, making a point of establishing a reputation for crazy aggression right at the start – which would be very Michelle. The hand had been checked all the way round to her, so she could assume no one had anything. Based on what he knew of her, Roger was pretty sure she’d be setting up her table image with not much. If he had any hand at all he would call, but with 8-6 offsuit, that would just be stupid. Roger was in the small blind, Slim Tony in the big, so when Roger folded, the table’s only semi-professional player was left thinking about what to do.

‘You’ve got naff-all, I can tell,’ said Slim Tony. Michelle said nothing, did nothing. ‘Typical girl. They either fold every time you play back at them or they try and pretend to have a cock. Not just any cock, a really massive one. Big, big cock. Have you got a big, big cock, Michelle?’

Roger did a good job of pretending not to be shocked; one or two of the boys were smiling, one or two others frowning; Tony and Michelle knew each other pretty well so he must have a sense of whether or not he was crossing the line. At least Roger hoped so. Michelle, you had to give it to her (as it were), had no expression at all. She was just sitting there. It occurred to Roger that Tony was needling her the wrong way round – if Michelle did have nothing, and was being aggressive with nothing, this would be something she had rehearsed very deeply, so goading her about it would be pushing at a firmly closed door. If Michelle minded people accusing her of being phonily aggressive she would have caved in at work years ago. So Tony would get no information by teasing her about her imaginary cock. Roger had a sudden intuition: she has a good hand. Tony’s got this wrong. Just as he thought that, Tony used his forearm to push all his chips into the middle of the table, and said, ‘All in.’

Michelle flipped her cards over. Ace-king of hearts. Her reputation for acting aggressively had made him think she was pretending to be over-aggressive with a rubbish hand, where in fact she had a monster. Tony, to give him credit, laughed. ‘Fuck!’ He turned his cards over and stood up – he had nothing, king-jack offsuit. The dealer burnt a card and then flipped the three next cards in one move. There was nothing to help Slim Tony. The turn card came; it was an ace, and Tony was drawing dead – there was no way he could win. He put his hands above his head and said, ‘I surrender!’, to general laughter. But before he did that, Roger caught his expression as he looked at Michelle, and it was one of sincere and complete loathing.

Team-building – oh, the wonder of it.

Michelle was nice about it though; she didn’t do more than the minimum necessary gloating. Tony signed to the waiter and ordered a bottle of champagne, which he then drank in about forty minutes. By then three other players had been knocked out; the traders, being traders, were for the most part crazily macho, and seemed to pride themselves on their avidity for going all-in. One or two more knockouts and they could start a cash game of their own. Roger made it to the final table, which had been his minimum goal; but his stack had
been eaten away by the increasingly large blinds, and he had to go all-in with a marginal hand, a pair of fives. He had given in to the need for a couple more whiskies and had a pleasant sense of how the alcohol was mixing with the adrenaline inside him so that he was sharp/blurred, tired/elated, eager for victory but quite keen to go home and sleep. His bet was called by Mark, with ace-jack suited; Mark hit his jack and Roger was knocked out. He pushed back from the table; it was one in the morning but he’d gone too far to leave without finding out who won.

The winner turned out, greatly to his surprise, to be Mark, who knocked Michelle out at quarter to four in the morning. Mark was so fidgety and shifty and twitchy that he was very hard to read; he touched himself constantly, his wrist, his ear, his sleeve, his chest; it was a kind of St Vitus’ dance. He appeared to be equally nervous all the time, which made him hard to decode; in fact it was hard to sit across the table from him. His nervousness made other people start to feel nervous. But it was no bar to his winning the £5,000. The crew, most of them drunk and loud, were shouting, joshing, leaning on each other. Tony was asleep on a sofa. There were plans made for shared taxis, or alternatively to head for a place in Spitalfields that stayed open all night and began serving full English breakfasts at four.

The dealer had already left. The waiter, a Filipino, lingered awhile for tips. He wasn’t paid – tips were his whole income. They were variable; some mornings he went home with nothing, but his record was a thousand pounds. On this occasion, Roger slipped him two hundred quid as he and two others half-carried Mark out into the street. From the waiter’s point of view, it was a happy ending.

P
iotr was still not speaking to Zbigniew. So Zbigniew was no longer speaking to Piotr. But they still lived together. It was awkward sharing a room with someone and not talking to him. In the moments when he was not angry with Piotr, he thought it was going to be something they would one day find very funny. For now, most of the time, he was simply furious. Piotr’s Catholic moralising streak, which had always been the worst part of him, had for the moment ended their friendship.

This was a problem, because if it weren’t for the fact that they temporarily hated each other and weren’t speaking, Zbigniew could have done with his old friend’s advice. He realised that he was going to have to break up with Davina and he needed to do it soon, because the longer he left it the more entangled he felt and the more difficult it would be. It was easy to make bold plans to tell her in her absence; after leaving her flat, going home and all the next day, Zbigniew would have no difficulty crafting messages which perfectly expressed the sentiment: you’re dumped, it’s over, it’s not you it’s me, we mustn’t see each other for a while, but we’ll always be friends, only let’s not call or see each other. He would possess a rocklike certainty about what he needed to do, and how to do it. At about the halfway point between the last time they met and the next time they were due to meet, the certainty would begin to fade, and then as the time to see Davina grew closer, he would
get more and more nervous, and his sense of how things were likely to go would become darker and more realistic. He would mumble, he would say everything wrong, the message was stupidly mixed, it was impossible to dump someone and stay on good terms, besides Davina was hysterical, a madwoman, she would go crazy, she would scream, she would beg, she would shout and throw things, she would weep, she would clutch his leg, it would be impossible, a disaster.

Then, when they met, the thing he always forgot to allow for would kick in. At her flat on the saggy sofa, in the pub, in the cinema bar, at the pizza place, he would sit opposite her, get a good look at her, and feel a surge of lust. He was thinking about ways of dumping her at the same time as he was wanting to have sex with her; and in these circumstances it was always possible to postpone the break-up, while the sex would seem increasingly urgent – after all, it would be the last time! The very last! Then things would take their course, and the sex would be over, and there Davina and Zbigniew would be, on the sofa, or the floor, or the bed, and Zbigniew would be filled with a tormenting mix of complete physical well-being and utter emotional misery. He felt weak, and a coward, and it was worse because in those moments Zbigniew also felt a warmth towards Davina, a sense of emotional closeness and gratitude, which made him feel even more of a shit and weakling. Zbigniew disliked disliking himself.