Roger hated those creepy cards he’d been getting, the ones with ‘We Want What You Have’ written on them; they were starting to seriously get into his head and mess with it. He felt surveilled, watched over with ill intent. He felt envied, but not in the reassuring, warming way in which he quite liked being envied. The thought of other people wishing they had your level of material affluence was an idea you could sit in front of, like a hearth fire. But this wasn’t like that. This was more like having someone keeping an eye on you and secretly wishing you ill.
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 paintballing, 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 co-operative 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 Jagerbombs. 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
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 prize
