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.
Roger opened the envelope. It was stuck down, and for a moment he felt a flash of irritation at the prats who ran the bank, the kind of people who didn’t know the convention about hand-delivered letters, that they were never stuck down, on the basis that it was an implied insult to third parties handling the letter; the convention was that among gentlemen you could rest assured that private correspondence would go unread. But these nouveau twats had no idea about anything like that. He took out the piece of paper. His bonus for the year was ?30,000.
He knew that there was no point saying anything; that it would do no good to cough and splutter and remonstrate. He had been the person on the other side of the desk and was fully informed of the futility of saying or doing anything in protest. And yet he found himself saying:
‘But… what… it isn’t… contribution, billions… fundamentally not fair… when I think of what I’ve done… basic pay… not a question of greed but of necessary…’
Max just sat there wearing his glasses at him. What was the point? There was no point. Roger stopped talking. The white noise began to seem loud; then it went quiet; then it got louder again. Roger felt his stomach twitch, and then churn, and then he had a strange sensation in his oesophagus, accompanied by a gust of something that was like nausea. Then he realised that it was, in fact, nausea. He felt sick. Actually, he more than felt sick, he was going to be sick. Roger slowly rose to a crouching position and leaned forward over the table. He nodded at Max. He turned and left the room. There might have been people in the corridor; he didn’t notice and didn’t care. The lavatory was ten paces away. Roger just made it to a cubicle and then he threw up, three times, so hard that it made his stomach muscles ache.
When Roger finished, he lowered the lid of the toilet and just stayed where he was, kneeling on the floor. Wasn’t this great? Wasn’t this perfect? It was funny to think of all the occasions in a man’s life, all the different contexts, when he was sick. It must add up to hundreds of pukings. Yes, thought Roger. I’ve been sick hundreds of times. There’s a whole thesaurus to describe it. Talking to the great white telephone. Parking a tiger on the pavement. Blowing chunks. But this was different from all the other times he’d thrown up, because on all those other occasions, once he’d been sick, he felt better.
23
On Christmas Eve, the DVDs began arriving at houses in Pepys Road. Except it’s misleading to say DVDs, plural, because in truth they were all the same DVD. The case had a printed label saying ‘We Want What You Have’ but inside the DVD had nothing written on it.
The footage was taken by a hand-held camera and began at the south end of the street, in front of the Kamals’ shop. From the fact that the street was entirely quiet, but that it was daylight, it was possible to deduce that the film had been shot very early in the morning on a summer’s day. At moments the low morning sun dazzled the
