The Red Road (41 page)

I saw his eyes focus on me as he
added the incentive, clearly promising that he would find some kind
of suitable punishment for me to undertake, GCSEs to sit or not.

“Yes, sir,” both the class and I
responded.

“Good,” Mr Wilder said, bending
down and reaching for the doorstop. “I think it’s best that we
keep the door open from now on, so I can hear that you’re all
getting on with your work. And you still have exams to revise for,
Joe,” he added with a nod to me.

The remainder of the prep was spent
in silence, but at least I got my revision done.

~ ~ ~

R.E. came on a Thursday morning, at
ten, and for the final time I trooped down to the assembly hall,
along with all the other third years, sensing a mixture of both fear
and excitement in the air that this was our final exam.

I opened the paper when I was given
the go ahead to do so, turning immediately to the last page so I can
decide which essay question I would tackle and allocate enough time
for. There were three available.

Write an essay on ONE of the
following topics –

1) Discuss why it is socially
acceptable to assist in the death of a suffering animal, yet
unacceptable to confer the same right to human beings. Is it ever
acceptable to end another person’s life? (20 marks)

2) Discuss the belief systems of
Christianity and ONE other religion, drawing comparisons between the
two. (20 marks)

3) Debate the existence of God,
based on both Christian and Atheist viewpoints. (20 marks)

I grinned to myself as I saw the
last option. Before the prep I had been forced to take, I might have
chosen question one or two, likely making a hash of the former and
stumbling my way through the latter, forgetting key points of
Judaism. I immediately scribbled down on a spare piece of A4 what I
remembered of Peter Dixon’s arguments against God and turned back
to the front of the paper to start on the shorter questions.

By the time the invigilator called
for the end of the exam, I had written a good three sides of A4 on my
essay question, drawing on history, English, various parts of R.E.
itself, and science. It amused me that even though I had written so
much and argued both sides effectively, I had left the question of
God’s existence itself completely unresolved. I figured that would
mean I would be getting an A+.

~ ~ ~

“Are you packing already?” I
asked Baz.

“Yep,” he said, sweeping various
folders and notes binders off his shelves and into some cardboard
boxes. “I’m going to go and find my suitcase in a minute, too.”

“We’ve
literally
just
finished our final exam,” I said.

“And I’m going home tomorrow!”
Baz cheered himself. “My mum is coming to get me tomorrow
afternoon, and then I’m
never ever
going to come back!”

He almost looked as though he was
going to burst from excitement. He had skipped his way from the
assembly room and back up to Butcher, hardly waiting to speak to
anyone else and discover how they had found the exam.

“When are you going to pack?” he
asked me.

“Not for another couple of weeks,”
I shrugged.

“
Seriously
?” he asked.
“Are your parents away again?”

“Not at the moment, but they’re
going to the Netherlands at the start of next week, for a fortnight.
So, I’ve decided to stay and do some of the sixth form classes –
economics, maths and English.”

“Are you mental?” Baz said,
looking at me as if I had just deeply offended him. “Do it when you
start at the sixth form college.”

“I might as well make the most of
the classes while I’m here,” I shrugged. “Won’t be so much of
a shock that way. Besides, there’s no rush to leave just yet –
Rob isn’t leaving until the end of term either, so I won’t have
much to do when I get home.”

“Well, I wouldn’t stay
here,” Baz said, dumping some of his unwanted course notes into the
bin.

“What are you going to do at
home?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Baz shrugged.
“I’ll find something. I just don’t want to be here a minute
longer than I need to be. Maybe I’ll get a summer job. Want to help
me look for my suitcase?”

“Sure,” I said.

We retrieved the Butcher House
storage room key from Mr Somers and waded through the umpteen bags
that were crammed into it. It took us a little longer than we
expected to find Baz’s luggage, his suitcase crushed beneath a much
bigger one. He cursed as he saw that it had become fatally damaged
and would only start to come apart from then on. Not that he cared,
he reiterated, he had no use for it after he got home. I spent most
of the rest of the day helping him prepare to leave.

Both Baz’s mother and father
turned up the following afternoon, as did several other third year
boys’ parents. By my estimation, about half the third years
wouldn’t be returning to St Christopher’s next term. If the
school was even open, that was. I helped Baz load the car, promising
to visit him over the summer when I knew what was happening with my
grades and where I would be going in the autumn. We both suggested
that we have another day out in London with Dave and Rob, and plan
the day a little better this time.

With that, Baz departed St
Christopher’s forever, taking another small piece of me along with
him.

Chapter Twenty-Five

“
A
ren’t
you leaving, Joe?” Seb Silverman asked as I entered the economics
class.

“I am, yeah,” I said, setting my
pens and paper down at a desk and taking the seat. “But I thought
I’d take advantage of the classes, just in case I don’t like
them.”

“Fair enough,” Darren Smith
said.

“It’s the same curriculum too,
obviously,” I added, somewhat unnecessarily.

The other boys nodded and turned
back to what they had been talking about. Ever since I had declared
that I was one of those leaving the school, I had noticed a shift in
attention between people. Those staying now clung a great deal closer
together, subtly and gradually severing the bonds of friendship they
had once held with those they had known since they were nine or ten
years old, whether they were a part of the Clique or not. So much for
friends for life.

The teacher soon entered the class.
It was Mr Davies, as I had expected. He grinned widely as he moved to
the front. This was probably one of the classes that he enjoyed the
most – no pressure, no real expectations or goals, and something he
could almost breeze through. There would be some prep to do and some
tests, I had been told, but nothing taxing and more for the benefit
of the pupil themselves, than the teacher.

Mr Davies introduced himself,
getting to know each of
us in turn before letting us know what the classes would involve. It
would start with an introduction to economics, talking about its
place in the world, why understanding it was important, and how it
impacted our lives. The first class involved discussing various terms
and ended with an example of personal finances. The next few classes
went on to cover public finance, national and international
economics, and impacts of unemployment, inflation and growth.

I found that my decisions to also
study maths and English at A-Level were serving me well. Maths was
helping me to more easily get my head around some the algebra and
equations involved in economics, while English was expanding my
command of the language and helping me to get a better appreciation
of business terms.

The final couple of economics
classes focused on money and banking, a topic that I was very keen on
getting to know more about. Mr Davies commenced by showing us how
economics was put to work in an investment bank, where various
trading principles and practices were used to generate revenue. In
some cases, such as foreign change in low volumes, it was only a
small amount, but in others it led to tremendous sums of money. Being
able to read, anticipate and understand the market were key to
succeeding, I was told.

“Evaluating and anticipating the performance of
counterparties is an important aspect to understanding
the present and future market conditions,”
Mr Davies said, marking down various things on the
whiteboard. “We must therefore be able to assess a counterparty’s
risk. If we
have a large amount of money we intend to invest in a counterparty,
then we need to ensure that they are not liable to default on their
return payments. In some limited circumstances, the ramifications
could be quite disastrous.”

“Such as?” I asked.

“It
could
—”

He put emphasis on the word.

“—lead to a recession under very
extreme circumstances. But recessions aren’t normally caused by
this alone. There are a great number of contributing factors.”

“What caused the recent one?” I
wanted to know.

“A combination of a stock market
collapse, the war in Iraq, a lack of public spending, and a slump in
American real estate. Now, on with the risk assessment,” Mr Davies
said, continuing to write on the whiteboard.

I started to struggle a little with
what I was looking at. There was logic to it, but I couldn’t help
but feel that it was grounded in fantasy. Some of what I was hearing,
reading and writing down didn’t seem to make much sense. I guessed
that it made more sense when you were actually getting your hands
dirty in the actual markets.

“Now, let us say that we have a
counterparty with a credit rating of A,” Mr Davies said, marking
the rating on the already quite cluttered whiteboard. “We wish to
score against the counterparty so we know what its risk might be and
whether we are safe to trade with it. Because it has a number of
subsidiaries, we need to take those into account, too. If one of the
subsidiaries’ credit ratings fails, then it could impact the future
of the parent in the long or short term.”

He looked around the class to ensure
that we were still with him. I nodded my understanding. That much
made sense. I raised my hand.

“Does it bubble up all the way to
the top of the chain?” I asked. “We’ve only got two levels
here, but if we had a level beneath our current subsidiaries—”

“Subsidiaries of subsidiaries,”
Mr Davies said. “Or the grandchildren, as they are sometimes
known.”

“Those would all be affected, too?
So a single subsidiary could affect the very top counterparty?”

“It can, yes, but there are ways
of dealing with that. Trading and investments allows us to do some
very clever things to avoid such problems. We won’t get bogged down
in that now. You can learn about it all next year. We’ll keep this
example simple and only have five subsidiaries,” he continued,
marking them on the board and drawing a line from the parent to each.

“How many might a company have?”
Ben Wild raised his hand.

“Oh,” Mr Davies said, waving the
marker pen around. “They can have anything from one to a few dozen.
But to get the full amount, we might also need to take the
subsidiaries of those subsidiaries into account, as well. Sometimes
we would only descend one or two levels, but in some extreme cases we
would need to sum up all the counterparties over a dozen levels.”

“Bloody hell,” Wild said. “There
could be hundreds.”

“Thousands,” Mr Davies supplied,
still holding the grin he hadn’t lost since first entering the
classroom. He loved this stuff, I could tell.

“Thousands?” William Butt said.
“Fucking hell!”

Mr Davies laughed, ignoring the foul
language. “Don’t worry, you’ll never have to do such a
calculation yourself. It is normally done on a very powerful
computer, instead. As I said, we’ll keep this simple so you can
understand how this all works.

“So, we have our counterparty, St
Christopher’s, and the subsidiaries companies, Butcher, Enfield,
Tudor ... er ... um ...”

“Cookson and Martin,” Silverman
supplied.

“Thank you. Now, we know that
Butcher has a rating of A1; Cookson, a rating of A3; Tudor, a rating
of BA, or
Baaaa
,” he said like a sheep as he wrote it,
chuckling. “And Martin, a rating of C. Now,
what we’d normally do is simply sum up and average the scores of
the subsidiaries, to get an overview of how well the parent might be
performing now and in the future.”

I nodded as I continued to take
notes. Summing up and averaging. Basic maths.

“Enfield House, however, doesn’t
have a rating at all,” Mr Davies then noted, tapping the board.
“Does anyone want to suggest what we can do to figure it out?”

Silence in the classroom. “Can we
look at past performance?” I ventured hesitantly.

“Yes,” Mr Davies said. “We
could look at past performance to get an idea of how well it might
do. That’s not how we want to approach the solution, however. Any
other suggestions?”

“Can’t we just work it out the
same way as the others?” Wild asked.

“Not in this case. We will assume
that either the company is very new or the data has never been made
available. Ideas? It’s staring you right in the face,” Mr Davies
said after some more silence.

“Could we ... average the others
and base it’s score on those?” Silverman asked. From the sound of
his voice, he was quite sure this was a stupid idea. I had to agree.

“Yes! Exactly!” Mr Davies
enthused. “We take the average of the subsidiaries on the same
level that we know of and average out their ratings. We then get the
performance rating we need for the calculation.”

“Really?” Silverman asked.

“Yes, really,” Mr Davies said,
turning back to the board.

I found my hand raised. This didn’t
make any sense. “Um, what if the subsidiaries are unrelated?” I
asked. I tried to think of one. “In this case, we have school
houses, but what about something like a load of subsidiaries that
sell food? Chocolate might be doing well for the parent, but it
doesn’t tell you how well the subsidiaries might be doing selling
cat food. The Mars Corporation makes cat food, as well as Mars Bars,”
I added as the other boys in the classroom looked at me.