Invincible Summer (4 page)

T
HE OBELISK TOWERS
of Canary Wharf, gleaming monuments to financial might, flashed bright semaphores in the morning sun as Eva walked towards them from the station, the block heels of her smart new court shoes clicking satisfyingly against the concrete. Almost a year into her new job she still experienced a frisson of excitement as she stepped into the cavernous lobby of the Morton Brothers building and swiped her security pass at the turnstile before striding towards the lifts. Her internal monologue was still that of an imposter:
tee hee, look where I am, do they really think I belong here?
But the pass that got her into the building and onto the trading floor said otherwise; she was an insider, and today would be her first day as a real
insider now that she had been promoted to a seat on a proper trading desk and was no longer a graduate trainee on a boring government bonds book.

The lift doors glided open at the thirty-second floor and at 6.52am Eva stepped out and walked along the aisle past the banks of flickering screens. There were three seats in her new section and only one was occupied, with the ample form of a gently steaming derivatives trader. As she drew closer she realised the steam was actually rising from the enormous mug of coffee he was clutching, but even so the alcohol fumes rolling off his body seemed render the air around him as watery as the inch of air above the tarmac on a very hot road.

Eva knew exactly who he was: Paul Costanzo, one of the two other members of her new team, whose legendary reputation in the market preceded him mostly in the form of tales of his nighttime exploits. On his desk she could see a framed photo of a younger version of him in a yellow-and-black striped blazer, looking for all the world like a disgruntled bumblebee. This was no doubt an intentional reminder to those around him that he had been working in the financial markets since the days of the old open-outcry exchanges where garishly-jacketed traders had screamed orders for runners to fill with paper tickets, before electronic trading had ushered in a quieter and more efficient era.

Eva drew to a halt by his desk, plastered a friendly but businesslike smile onto her face, and stuck out a hand. ‘Hi. I'm Eva Andrews.'

The disheveled bulk turned slowly towards her. ‘Oh. Right,' he said, ignoring her outstretched hand and reaching for his coffee instead. ‘No one told me the new minion was arriving today.' He peered at her through bleary eyes. ‘Let alone one of the female persuasion.'

Eva glared at him, annoyance overriding expedience. ‘Is that going to be a problem for you?'

‘No need to get feisty now.' He perked up a little, apparently cheered by the hint of combat. ‘It's no problem for me. I'm a feminist, you see.' Then, catching her sceptical look, added, ‘You got a problem with that?'

She smiled despite herself. ‘Not me, fella.'

‘Good. So. Let's do the introductions properly. I'm Big Paul, so called to distinguish me from Little Paul, that short-arse three desks over who, incidentally, will have a fucking coronary if you actually call him Little Paul to his face. Yeah, that's you I'm talking about, small fry,' he called out to the small man shooting a filthy look at him from across the aisle. Ignoring this, he continued, ‘You presumably already met our boss Robert in the interview. He's not in yet. As you may be able to tell from my, ahem, beleaguered demeanour, we had a heavy night at the Rhino with Icap last night and my best guess is that he's still balls-deep in a stripper. So I suppose that leaves me to do your induction.' He ran a hand across his oily brow and took another swig of coffee. ‘Do you want the HR-approved version, or the unvarnished truth?'

Eva eyed him with trepidation. ‘I guess I'd better have the truth.'

‘Right answer. See, I'm a good guy who's been around for a long time and probably the only one here who's going to tell you the things you really need to know. The first rule is: do not shag the traders. It's almost a sport to see who can sleep with the female jubs, that's what you are, right, the desk junior, but don't make the mistake of thinking it's going to lead to the blossoming of great romance because it's not. That includes Robert too, by the way. He's bound to have a pop at you sooner or later. Be firm but civil and he'll respect you for it. There's no such thing as sleeping your way to the top here. Only money talks in this place.'

‘I'll do my best to restrain myself,' said Eva drily.

‘What else? Aside from that, Robert's a great boss because he's a mercenary, a total fucking pirate, and he knows how to corner a decent share of the pie for his team come bonus time. He got so pissed off about his last bonus that he threw his toys out the pram and they added an extra half a million onto it. Can you believe that? An extra half a million. That's sterling, not dollars, mind.' Big Paul's eyes held a distant, wondering look for a moment, then refocused on her with a shrewder glint. ‘Still, don't go getting any ideas. You're not going to be wearing Prada and turning left when you board a plane for a while yet. For the next couple of years you'll work yourself into the ground, thank the Lord for every day you don't get fired and feel pathetically grateful for whatever crumbs you get thrown from the bonus pool. Though obviously however big your bonus is, you should always act like you're pissed off because you were expecting more,' he added.

‘Right. Because other people take you at your own valuation?'

‘Exactly. Value yourself highly and fight your own corner, because no one else is going to do it for you. Now, what else do you need to know?'

‘Well, it would probably help if you talked me through the desk's trading books?'

‘Yeah. But that's not going to happen till I've had at least another three cups of coffee. Did they send you on the Capital Markets course yet?'

‘Yes, a month ago.'

‘Where did you come?'

‘In my group? Top.' Eva delivered this information blandly, secretly gleeful but figuring it was even more impressive to appear casual about it.

‘Ah, brains as well as beauty. Good. But that's not all it takes to do well in this game. It helps of course, but it's about relationships too. You won't be in front of clients for a while, but you're going to want to put yourself about the market a bit, get to know the brokers. They take us out a couple of times a week, all top-notch places.' He peered at her again through bloodshot eyes. ‘Nobu and Chinawhites will probably be more up your street than the Premier League and SophistiCats. Brokers have vast expense accounts to lavish on us because they want our business, so don't hold back. But remember, they may act like your new best friend but you're not their only client and they'd sell their grandmothers for a chunk of commission, so don't drink too much and be indiscreet. That's rule number two: brokers are not your friends.'

Eva stifled a sigh. She was well aware that the City was more geared towards barely-suppressed competition than companionship. The year since she'd arrived in London had been busy but tinged with a sort of loneliness, and she felt a quiet sense of shame that in a city where any night of the week the streets were lined with crowds of people clearly having the time of their lives, she had struggled to properly connect with anyone. If only her old friends had been around, but Sylvie and Lucien were still travelling in India and sending only sporadic and barely legible missives (
Hi, we are in Kerala something something sorry this letter is written on Rizla papers stuck together, it's all we had something something beach party blah blah…
), and a strange gulf had opened up between her and Benedict in the time since the holiday in Corfu. The intimacy of the trip, the one-on-one time without the others, the kiss that almost-but-didn't-quite happen, the intense conversations, had raised the unanswerable question of what they really were to one another then left it hanging, palpable in the air between them.

The silly thing was that she really missed him; she looked forward to his calls with a surprising intensity but whenever she put the phone down she always seemed to be left feeling despondent, like they each wanted something from the other that they weren't quite getting. There was nothing to be done about it, of course. She wasn't an idiot; she wasn't in the market for a long-distance relationship with one of her best friends. But she couldn't help wishing that things would just go back to normal.

‘I reckon the best place to start is for someone to talk you through the pricing models,' Big Paul was saying. ‘Stefan can do that. He's your predecessor and he's just moved onto the Swaps desk. That's him, Swiss guy, over there by the yucca plant.' He gestured towards a man who appeared to be sitting at a desk wearing a wetsuit and flippers.

‘Um. The guy in the wetsuit?'

Big Paul blinked. ‘Yeah.' He turned back to his bank of screens.

Eva took a couple of steps away and then stopped. ‘Er, Paul? Why is he wearing a wetsuit?'

He didn't even look up. ‘What do I look like, the Grand Poobah in Charge of Wetsuits? Who knows? Who cares?'

Eva made her way over to Stefan's desk and cleared her throat. ‘Hi, I'm Eva.'

He swivelled around and half-stood to take her outstretched hand but was impeded by his flippers, causing him to abruptly slump backwards into his chair.

‘I'm the new junior on the Interest Rates Derivatives desk,' she explained. ‘Big Paul said you'd show me the pricing models?'

‘Oh, right. You're the new me. Best of luck with that fat bastard.' He raised his voice loud enough for Big Paul to hear him, but although his target raised his head an inch or two, he maintained the air of a grizzled old lion unwilling to make the effort of swatting a fly. ‘Sit down. Are you good with spreadsheets? Can you program VBA?'

‘I'm not bad. I did some Visual Basic on my Physics degree,' she told him, and then unable to resist any longer, ‘Can I just ask, why are you wearing a wetsuit?'

Stefan scowled at her. ‘The Swaps desk traders paid me two grand to come into work like this today. They want to film me on the way home on the tube. They think it's funny. So what? They get their laughs, I get two grand. Who's laughing now?'

‘You came in to work like that on the tube?'

‘Yeah. You think I'm an idiot?'

Eva grinned. ‘For two grand? I'd have done it for five hundred.'

Stefan's frown finally reassembled itself into a smile. ‘You, I like. Sit down. I'm going to show you all the tricks. And then, because you're a physicist, as a special treat I'm going to tell you about my thesis on Black-Scholes and how volatility in markets is predictably random, like the movement of particles.'

Now she had his measure; Stefan was a geek, her favourite type of person and by far the most useful in the building because they couldn't bear to leave a problem unsolved. One of the quants had even once stayed up all night sorting out a particularly thorny pricing issue she'd gone to him with, unable to bear going to sleep without answering her question. She'd come in the following morning to find him at his desk in the same clothes, surrounded by coffee cups and twitchier than ever, but triumphantly wielding the solution. Sometimes it felt as though the cream of a generation was packed into her building, the Oxbridge engineers and rocket scientists. (So who was building the bridges and making the space rockets? It didn't bear thinking about.)

‘A treat indeed,' smiled Eva, half-joking but mostly just relieved to have found a friendly face.

L
UCIEN LOOKED OUT
across the swaying sea of his people and smiled benevolently. The bass thumped, smoke swirled, and several hundred pairs of hands reached for the roof of the warehouse in South London where his weekly club night, Candy, was rapidly becoming a raging success. Technically he was the promoter rather than the DJ, but he'd picked up enough know-how to mix a few records together while he was in Goa and he liked to take a half-hour slot early in the night just to get this feeling. Plus, the visibility helped with picking up girls. If they'd already seen him up here behind the decks it meant he didn't have to shoehorn being the promoter into every conversation. Not that he really needed the extra boost; success with women came easily to him. He knew he was slightly effeminate-looking, tall and slender with long sooty eyelashes and chiselled cheekbones, but he didn't care. If anything, it worked in his favour. He was non-threatening in appearance, the antithesis of your common-or-garden meathead, so he tended to get a friendly reception when approaching girls. And Lucien liked girls, liked them a lot, although of course it could be said that he didn't like them very deeply, or rather, he liked many of them very deeply but only for very short periods of time.

Lucien had a gift: to see straight into the souls of people and know what they needed to hear, right at that very moment. He'd explained this to a girl named Star he met at a beach party in India, and she told him that she could feel him reaching inside her as he looked into her eyes, so he carried on looking into her eyes all through the tantric sex they had when she took him back to her hotel room. At least, he'd done what he imagined tantric sex was supposed to be like, sitting up and facing each other and it had taken him forever to finish because he'd drunk too much and done too much speed. He'd got an infection afterwards, maybe because it had gone on for so bloody long or maybe because she'd given him something. Either way, it had been a nightmare finding a doctor who spoke enough English to prescribe him antibiotics and it had cost a packet, so he felt a sort of karmic justification for never paying back the two thousand rupees she'd lent him the night before.

He was a free spirit, really, different from the others with their conventional outlooks and tedious career aspirations. They'd been back for six months now and even Sylvie was starting to talk about getting a proper job. Benedict was still a student, avoiding the real world for however many years it would take him to complete a PhD that would apparently land him some boring job that paid bugger all at the end of it while he, Lucien, was doing better than any of them, because he had an entrepreneurial attitude and also because he was just the type of person who attracted good things by giving off the right vibe. The years they'd spent slogging away in the library, he'd spent selling overpriced drugs to the clueless but affluent students of Bristol and making more money in a weekend than the others could make in a month even now.

Still, it seemed as if Eva was doing quite well for herself these days. Apparently she'd been promoted twice in the two years she'd been in her City job. He didn't know exactly what she did, something stultifying to do with finance, but by the sound of it she made a decent amount of dosh. She'd changed quite a bit in the time that he and Sylvie had been away travelling, losing the old pudginess and dressing better too, less of the tie-dye and Doc Martins. And apparently she didn't drink pints anymore; in the bar where they'd all met up before the club she'd ordered a white wine spritzer and he'd almost laughed out loud. The newly-constructed Eva seemed faintly absurd to him, but he could see that she had a bit more of an edge to her now, an attractive aloofness. There had always been a kind of connection between the two of them but there was just something offputtingly wide-eyed about her. She was the sort of girl who sucked you in and then started trying to get you to open up about your feelings, always trying to have conversations about
the big issues
or find out
what made you tick
. Lucien hadn't come this far by being the sort of person who dwelt on such things, and he wasn't about to start now. She'd suckered him into talking about his childhood once, looking at him with wounded eyes as she told him her mother was dead. For some reason it had made him blurt out a bunch of his own private stuff and he'd regretted it ever since because after that when she looked at him he felt weirdly naked, and not in a good way.

Still, there was definitely something about her. There had been that one drunken fumble years ago in Bristol, but he'd had to avoid her for ages afterwards because it had been obvious she was hoping for something more, which he most certainly wasn't. She seemed much cooler towards him now, though, and that had always been like catnip to him. Should he, could he, talk her into a rematch tonight? Might be tricky, because she had Benedict staying at hers, but still, Lucien wasn't one to balk at a challenge.

At that moment his eyes happened to alight upon Benedict standing in the far corner of the room, intermittently visible in the strobe light engaged in animated conversation with a man who appeared to have a tattoo of a cobweb covering half his face. Probably shouldn't have given him that pill, on reflection. It had just been a bit of a laugh, offering a pill to Benedict, who'd always been so straight. Lucien hadn't thought he'd actually take the bloody thing but apparently there was a contagious recklessness in the air tonight, because when Benedict had seen Eva doing one he'd swallowed audibly and said, ‘Go on then, before I change my mind,' and grabbed it out of Lucien's hand, gulping it down with a swig of Evian. They were decent pills tonight too. Lucien was coming up pretty hard and he'd only taken one so far. He was going to make a good bit of wedge on this batch, a lot more than the take on the door by the time he'd paid the DJs and lighting guys and bouncers.

Better go and do the honourable thing, he supposed. In any case, it probably wasn't a bad idea to get off the decks before he made a total twat of himself. He'd messed up that last mix as the pill kicked in, and for a horrible moment the hands had stopped waving and all sort of lowered to half-mast. He'd managed to pull it back by dropping in
Blue Monday
fast and hard, relief washing through him as the semiquaver kick-drum reverberated through the crowd and lent renewed vigour to the pumping fists; a good recovery, but still, better to quit while he was ahead.

‘Bill, take over here, would you?' He motioned to the real DJ who was sullenly awaiting his slot at the end of the mixing desk. ‘Got a bit of business to sort out.'

Lucien clambered down the steps to the dance floor and pushed his way across to the far corner where Benedict was by now having his neck massaged by Spider-Face.

‘A word, mate.'

‘Ah, Lucien. Superb night, thanks for sorting me out with…you know. This here is…this is…'

‘Killer,' Spider-Face interjected helpfully, his warm smile revealing a mouthful of discoloured and broken teeth.

‘Yes, um, Killer here was just telling me about this biker festival he was at last weekend. There's another one coming up in a few weeks, great fun, open to all-comers and not at all what most people expect apparently. We should…'

‘We should and we will, mate,' assured Lucien. ‘Let's all swap numbers before the end of the night. But right now we need to chip off for a few minutes. Eva wants a word. Don't mind do you, Killer?' He steered Benedict away from his beaming companion towards the back of the club.

‘What does Eva want? Where is she?' asked Benedict, pushing his hair back off his face and peering about.

‘Ah, well, that was a bit of a lie to get you away from your new friend, you see. This being your first pill, I should explain a few things to you. When you're loved up on Ecstasy everyone seems like your best mate, but of course what really happens is you wake up the next morning with a Hell's Angel named Killer asleep on your sofa and wonder what the fuck you were thinking. That's if he hasn't stabbed you to death in the night and nicked your TV.'

Benedict attempted to raise an eyebrow but succeeded only in generating a series of seemingly random facial twitches. ‘It's not like you to be so judgemental. You're condemning the man based solely on his appearance and we all know you can't judge a book by its cover. You'd miss out on some very good books that way, all those Penguin Classics with the orange covers for starters because they all look alike, not to mention…'

Lucien raised a hand to cut him off. ‘Yeah, yeah. Call me a judgmental conformist, but I'm going stick my neck out here and say that having a spider's web tattooed across your face is not intended to send the message, “I'm a cuddly, peaceable member of society who under no circumstances would stove in your face with a shovel for the change in your pocket.”'

A hint of doubt finally crept into Benedict's face. ‘Ah. Well. When you put it like that. So, do you know where Eva's got to?'

Where Eva had got to at that very moment was wedged into a tiny toilet cubicle with Sylvie, who was struggling to break a pill in half between her fingers.

‘Shit, I've dropped it. No, there it is.'

‘Oh God, not on the floor. There's wee all over it. We can't take that now.'

‘Oo, hark at you, princess. Here, I'll wipe it off. There, all better. That's your half.'

‘I don't know whether I should do another one anyway. I need to be
compos mentis
for work on Monday.'

Sylvie glared at her through eyes lavishly caked in kohl. ‘Eva. It's forever since we had a proper night out with the whole crew. Even Benedict's dropped a pill, bless him. For one night, take off your metaphorical power suit and relax. We've hardly seen you since we've been back, it's all work, work, work with you. You'll have the whole of Sunday to recover.'

Eva hesitated. She was being pretty reckless by her prevailing standards, but the markets were dead in August and next week would be a quiet one at work. And Sylvie was right: they hadn't seen enough of each other since she'd arrived back from travelling. There wasn't much Eva could do about that; a job like hers came at a price, and that price was putting it before everything else in your life. When you worked fourteen hours a day it didn't leave much time for anything else, and if you were half-hearted about it, well, there were plenty of people lined up behind you ready to take your place.

Still, at least the hard slog was finally starting to pay off. Many of her cohort were falling by the wayside, culled for underperforming or simply buckling under the pressure, and those left standing were finally being promoted into jobs where they wouldn't have to fetch anyone's coffee and would start to get paid the big bucks. Eva was starting to understand that half of being successful was just staying in the game longer than anyone else. The great surprise of the adult world had been that no one really knew what they were doing, and especially not the people who exuded impenetrable confidence. The first year in the job had been soul-crushing; every time she'd asked a question she found that she didn't understand the answer. At first she assumed that this was because she was failing to grasp things that everyone else just magically understood, but lately she'd begun to realise that the reason her questions were often glossed over was that the people around her didn't actually know the answers.

Nobody really knows what they're doing.
This was an epiphany that had scared the bejesus out of her but had also expanded her confidence tenfold, because if the big beasts of the markets didn't have all the answers, then if she could make it her business to be the one who did she would surely be ahead of the game. She'd quietly gone back and examined the fundamentals: there are two sides to every deal, every profit made by one person equates to a loss for someone else, every loan has to be either repaid or defaulted upon at some point in the future, a single dollar is a single dollar and if it's being counted in two places at once then sooner or later there'll be a shortfall. Simple truths, often overlooked.

Understanding everything from first principles gave you a certain confidence that other people could just smell on you, she found. And it wasn't only that; it was also knowing she could pick up the phone to her brokers and get a table at any club or restaurant she wanted in London that night, or tickets to Wimbledon, or pretty much anything else that her heart desired. It might not be finding a cure for cancer, but being greeted by name and given the best table by the maître d' at Coq d'Argent still had a way of making you feel like somebody.

Even Lucien was looking at her differently tonight, with a sort of hungry air about him. After all the times she'd had to quell the stabbing feeling she got from watching him look at countless other girls that way, she recognised it when it was directed at her and savoured an inward glow of satisfaction. The balance of power was shifting between them; she had a new allure and they both knew it. It felt like the stars were starting to align for her at last.

She took a decision and grinned at Sylvie across the toilet cubicle. ‘Go on then. But not that half you just dropped on the floor. Give us a clean one, I know you've got a bag full. I might as well have a whole one anyway.'

Sylvie fished around in her bra for the little bag of pills. ‘Okay, sod it, flush that wet one down the loo. If you're doing another whole one then so am I.'