Capital (16 page)

Quentina’s situation was this. In Harare in the summer of 2003 she had been arrested, interrogated, beaten, released by the police, snatched by goons on her way home, taken to a house, told that she had seventy-two hours to leave the country, then beaten and left by the roadside. After being treated in hospital she had been smuggled out of the country by missionaries, and came to England on a student visa which she had always intended to overstay. To make a long story short, she had overstayed on purpose, applied for asylum, been rejected, been arrested and sentenced to deportation, but the judge at the final appeal had ruled that she could not be sent back to Zimbabwe because there were grounds for thinking that if she was she would be killed. At that point Quentina had entered a legal state of semi-existence. She had no right to work and could claim only subsistence-level benefits, but she couldn’t be imprisoned and deported. She was not a citizen of the UK but she could not go anywhere else. She was a non-person.

The limbo state in which she was supposed to live did not correspond with reality: she had no right to do the things she needed to do to stay sane and solvent. Fortunately, Quentina’s lawyer knew of a charity that took in people like her, the Refuge. This was a group that addressed the needs of stateless people and owned a series of properties
around the country. It was in this way that Quentina had come to be living in a terraced house in Tooting with thirteen other stateless women and a house manager. The charity split nationalities up because it didn’t like the idea of national cliques developing in the different houses and it thought that refugees learned English more quickly if they weren’t with their own language group. That was a mistake in Quentina’s view, but it was their charity, not hers, so she shared the house with a Sudanese woman, a Kurd, a Chinese woman who had arrived the day before and so far had not spoken, an Algerian, and two Eastern European women whose precise nationalities Quentina did not know.

Living in the Refuge house with these people was not straightforward. Work was even less so. The charity supplied food to its ‘clients’ – that was the word – but could not, legally, pay them. Quentina found she had no ability to do nothing all day and that sitting around the house, and not having any disposable income of her own, gave her acute claustrophobia – a sense of being trapped, powerless, inside her own head. This was made worse by the fact that she was, in actuality, genuinely powerless, with no ability to affect her own destiny in any of the relevant important ways. So she decided that she would have to do something with her days, would have to work, in order not to go insane.

There was a kind of grapevine among the refugees on exactly this issue, and that was how she came to encounter ‘Kwame Lyons’. He was known as someone who knew someone who could get identity papers for you and therefore through whom you could find work, as long as you were willing to pay him his cut. Quentina had no idea for how many people he provided this service, but she knew there was no way she was Lyons’s only – that word again – ‘client’. She didn’t know and didn’t want to know how many ‘clients’ Lyons had, how he got hold of the identity papers, whether he used the identity ‘Kwame Lyons’ with all his clients, how much money he was making, or his real name.

Quentina had been told that one of the best places to go and work was a minicab company known to hire drivers with dodgy paperwork, but she also heard that a. they didn’t employ women and b. the company
was owned by one of the big South London crime families, as a way of laundering cash. The fake ID papers were enough illegality for Quentina, who was temperamentally law-abiding and who also thought that staying on the right side of the law was good practical policy. There was a certain irony that her entire existence was lawless and stateless, but never mind. So she acted on advice from a traffic warden she met in the street, a man from Zambia, who told her about Control Services and the fact that they hired a high proportion of West and Southern Africans. She had taken her fake ID, filled out a form, filled out another form as part of a test, and got the job, and here she was eighteen months later with the lowest rate of upheld appeals of any Control Services employee.

Quentina began to feel tired as she got closer to the hostel. She had been on her feet all day, and though she was used to it, they still ached. With luck there would be some hot water left; she was the only one of the ‘clients’ with a regular job and therefore the only one who arrived at home after five wanting a bath or shower. Quentina had always been clean and fastidious, but she had never really understood baths until coming to this cold country. Now a soak in steaming water was a significant physical pleasure. Tomorrow would be a day off; one of the blessings of work was that it made free time feel like a treat. She would watch a movie on the DVD player, have a drink, maybe go out dancing and look for a party. Quentina knew that she should probably call her lawyer to hear if there was any news, being as it was the Friday before Christmas and things would slow to a halt over the holidays, but she couldn’t quite face it. If there was good news she would hear it and if there was bad it would not be made any worse by being delayed. And the overwhelming probability was that there would be no news, that her state of not-ness would continue. If you are lukewarm I will spit you out of my mouth. That’s what the Bible said. Quentina did not think of herself as lukewarm, but it was hard to deny that she had been spat out.

At the end of the road where she lived an African woman with a gigantic bag of what looked like yams, maybe from Brixton Market, was pausing for a breather. The woman looked at Quentina assessingly
as she walked past. I wouldn’t mind some of whatever she’s going to cook tonight, thought Quentina. Never mind, nearly home. Well, not home, but where she lived. She turned the corner, still in her traffic warden’s uniform, still the most unpopular woman in the street, still spreading fear and confusion wherever she went.

W
hen Roger had something important on at work, he did something that he never told people about because it was so feminine-sounding: he made a huge deal of his washing and grooming in the morning. He showered and shaved as usual, shampooed and conditioned his hair; then he moisturised with a face mask which he left on for ten minutes, trimmed any stray nose or ear hair, rubbed some oil into his legs and chest, took some vitamins, took some artichoke pills for his liver, did some stretches, went downstairs in his dressing gown and ate a bowl of microwaved porridge. Then he dressed in his best clothes: his softest, lushest Savile Row shirt and its matching tie, a pocket square, antique cufflinks Arabella had found on eBay, the suit he’d had made bespoke after a bonus, the handmade shoes and underneath it all, the slinkiest secret of them all, his special lucky silk underpants, brought back by Arabella from a shopping junket to Antwerp. The paradoxical effect of all this pampering was to make him feel fortified, defended, ready for trouble.

It was thus armoured that, on Friday 21 December, Roger went into the conference room at Pinker Lloyd ready to open the envelope that would tell him what he would be getting for his bonus. Going into the room, with its white noise switched on so that it was scientifically impossible to eavesdrop, and with the walls turned opaque for the meeting, Roger felt confident, fit and healthy, braced for whatever would come.

In the room was Max, the head of the Compensation Committee. Junior employees receiving their bonuses would tend to have more than one person in the room, in case they flipped out in a bad year, which meant that they had to have more than one person in the room in good years too, so that the number of people in the room didn’t become an immediate give-away as to the size of the bonus. Heads of department got more credit than that, so Roger knew he’d be talking to one person only and guessed that it would probably be Max. The protocol for this meeting was that direct line managers didn’t usually come to it.

Max was one of those men who were summed up by their glasses. As contact lenses and corrective eye surgery became increasingly ubiquitous, glasses were turning into a deliberate statement – not just the type of glasses but the whole fact of wearing them. They were a way of being above vanity (popular with nerds and certain kinds of actor or musician), or of trying to look more intelligent (popular with off-duty models), or of expressing intellectual disdain for disguise in a form-follows-function way (architects, designers), or of being too poor or too not-bothered. In Max’s case, the glasses were a form of defence mechanism or camouflage. They helped hide his face. At the same time they tried to look cool: but this was an each-way bet and as so often with each-way bets, it didn’t come off. Max’s specs had narrow wire frames and were technocratic in a way that tried to express personality but did not.

When Roger had been more junior, by this point he would already have known the tenor of the bonus meetings – what kind of mood music was being sent out about bonuses in general. So you would be braced for a downer or psyched about a good year. Now, as a head of department, he had no warning. No point trying to pick up cues in body language from Max; he did deadpan for a living. His form of deadpan was smiley and let’s-be-friends. Although it was famously true that nothing you said in the room had any effect on your compensation, people sometimes liked to have their say anyway, and it was no bad thing to let people blow off some steam at someone other than their boss. Roger’s own assessments would have a direct effect on the
bonus packets of his subordinates, and they would know that, and some of them would not be happy bunnies, and that was just the way things went.

‘Roger!’ Max said, pointing at the seat opposite.

‘Max,’ said Roger. ‘Petra well? Toby and Isabella?’

‘All good,’ said Max. ‘Arabella? Conrad?’ – and then there was a half-a-beat or quarter-of-a-beat pause while he stretched for the name; which meant that Roger had won this exchange. ‘Joshua?’

‘Fit as fleas,’ said Roger. ‘You know what they’re like about Christmas. They go mad, can’t get enough presents, impossible demands. And of course the children are excited about it too.’

The two men shared a smile. Max reached into the leather folder in front of him and took out an envelope. Roger, who had been feeling cool and even-tempered in his silk knickers, felt his heart rate and blood pressure shoot up. A pound sign followed by a one with six zeros, one with six zeros, one with six zeros. Two with six zeros? No, that was greedy. One with six zeros.

‘Good year for the department,’ said Max.

Yesssssss!

‘The figures speak for themselves.’

Yesssssss!

‘As you know, it isn’t always straightforward to, ah, parse the relevant figures from our competitors, so the comparison can’t be exact, but we are confident that your department’s performance is in the top quartile for the sector.’

Roger knew that, or strongly suspected it, but it was still good to hear.

‘Your personal evaluations are strong. The Compensation Committee is of the view that your performance overall is strong.’

Yesssssss! This wasn’t million-quid talk. This was two million, maybe more. Could he be heading for two and a half? A quarter of the way to ten million pounds. He and Arabella might even have sex!

‘There is of course a context for all this,’ Max went on. Now, for a smaller man than Roger, a man with less steady nerves, this might have been a warning note, an incitement to panic; maybe, even, an
invitation to think about missed mortgage payments, promised but unbought diamond necklaces, the deferment of holiday plans; because to a lesser man than Roger, Max’s words might have sounded awfully like a ‘But’. Roger, however, was a veteran of Pinker Lloyd assessments. This was getting on for his twentieth. He knew that, just as a judge delivering a summing-up likes to make both sides in court shit themselves before reaching his conclusion, a member of the compensation committee likes to have you thinking about bread and water before he gives you a villa in Poggibonsi with a line of cypresses down the drive, a small vineyard, and a heated swimming pool.

Actually there was something to think about there. Minchinhampton was fine but, as previously noted, could be seen as dowdy, and it only took one wet summer to put you permanently off the whole holidays-in-England thing. A bonus of £2.5 million would, once he’d paid for all the things he had to pay for, salted some away in the pension and VCTs and all that, leave him with a fair few quid left over. It was said you could get somewhere pretty habitable on Ibiza for a million quid. Worth thinking about.

Roger’s attention had only wavered for a moment, but when he got his focus back, Max was saying,

‘… and of course the context for this is not just the wider problems in the industry, the cloud no larger than a man’s hand and all that, and the repricing of insurance and swaps. That’s just the general weather. In addition, there has been the difficulty we have been having with our Swiss subsidiary.’

And all of a sudden, just like that, Roger felt his bonus beginning to shrink. This was not mood music, this was an actual, genuine, no-bones-about-it ‘But’. That weaselly little fucker Max was giving him bad news from behind his glinting Nazi metal specs.

‘… goes beyond routine volatility into areas of genuine loss. Once the extent of our subsidiary vehicle’s exposure to the US market in insecure securitisations was fully known, in particular the fact that those losses are still not precisely assessed, though known as reaching into the ten figures in euros …’

Max was telling him that the bank had lost a couple of hundred million
euros this year. This was through their Swiss subsidiary’s exposure to subprimes. Well whoop de flipping doo. Roger stopped listening. He was getting it in the arse, and didn’t need to know the details. Max talked on for a bit more and then the moment came when he slid the envelope across the table. It was clear that his bonus was going to be minute, could even be as little as his annual pay of £150,000. In practical terms, that would be the same as being dragged out the back of the office and finished off with a bullet in the back of the neck.