"Well," said David, "there's one more hurdle to jump through. Just a 
formality, really. As head partner | get to introduce you to the floor 
manager, Raymond Macintyre. He's the one with the final say in 
hiring. Come on, I'll take you up to the trading floor.” 


‘Up’ was right. Leaving Peter behind at his desk, Edward and David 
were wordlessly ushered into an opulent glass-sided elevator that 
gave its occupants a view of each floor as they passed through. 
Secluded, plush-walled rooms for meeting clients gave way to hard- 
linoleum warehouses of regimented accountants sitting at their 
computers, who in turn gave way to richly appointed executive 
offices. And finally, with such grandeur that Edward almost 
applauded, the elevator rose through a thick perspex mezzanine— 
literally punching through the glass ceiling, he thought, as if it made 


any difference to the silent, pretty secretary in the thick glasses who 
stood by the door buttons to let them off—to reveal a vast, open- 
plan area where men in designer suits barraged back and forth 
between colossal monitors displaying stock indexes in a hundred 
different countries and huge round glass tables strewn with paper 
like the aftermath of some gargantuan infant's temper tantrum. 


It was a good four times larger than Redmayne—Bracknell's trading 
floor. At the far end, where David was leading him now with assured, 
vigorous strides, was a small enclosed area—comparatively small, 
he realised, as several more steps seemingly failed to bring it any 
closer—clad in light, honey-brown wood. When they finally reached 
the door, a gleaming plaque announced this to be the residence of 
Raymond Macintyre. 


"Here we go—good luck! Just kidding, he's a pussycat, really." 
David smiled reassuringly before rapping the wood with his knuckles 
and swinging it open. 


The prick from the carpark, the wanker in the Merc, looked up from 
scribbling on a notepad and saw them. Recognition flashed 
immediately in his eyes and thin lips slid back from immaculately 
whitened teeth. 


Oh fuck. 


"So David, this is young Edward. Starting off as a junior associate, | 
presume. You must be taken to bring him up here on his first 
interview. Is it love?" There was an edge to his voice that Edward 
couldn't quite pin down but which couldn't be good. 


"Well, he's proposed. And now we're here to get daddy's blessing." 
David winked and stepped aside to give Edward a full, unobstructed 
view of his own demise. 


"I've met him already." Raymond Macintyre started opening a letter 
with a very long, very sharp knife. 


"Really?" David seemed utterly oblivious to the razor-atmosphere 
which Edward felt sure was about to engulf him. 


"Yes. We ran into each other in the car park. Well, almost." A 
dangerous glitter again. 


“Almost never needs apologies,” said Edward. No job at Cooper 
Drake, a dismissal notice probably already waiting for him back at 
Redmayne-Bracknell. His father must be looking at him now and 
laughing his ass off. He'd be looking up, of course. Even if Edward 
was at ground level. 


"No." Turning his attention to David. "This fellow cussed me out for 
backing into his spot. He didn't back down, even when | hinted as 
strongly as | felt able my position in the firm. Called me a ‘wanker’, 
as | recall." Edward saw David's florid face lightening to apricot out 
of the corner of his eye. "Now, how much were you intending to pay 
this young man for the privilege of doing that every day?" 


"Erm, thirty-five thousand. Signing bonus of, ah, three thousand." 
David looked like he would rather be somewhere far, far away. 


Something horrible was moving in Edward's chest, expanding and 
contracting rhythmically. Some parasitic thing, about to burst 
through the sparse flesh over his ribcage. It took him a minute to 
realise it was his heart. The room was filling up with yellow mist. I'm 
going to pass out, Edward thought. Failure, failure, failure. 


"Really? Make it forty thousand. And double his signing bonus. He 
comes in at seven his first day, you hear me? I'll work him until he's 
dry. You may hold me to that." 


Edward almost passed out anyway—David discreetly clapped a 
pally arm around him and steered him to the door. "Well done," he 
muttered. 


The conversation with his manager at Redmayne—Bracknell went as 
well as could be expected; there are better ways to answer "why is 
our primary competitor asking about your work performance?" than 
"here's my notice." The phrase "ungrateful little bitch" was used; 
Edward was sure he'd never seen a man with so many letters after 
his name so closely approximating a primary colour. As it turned out, 
a philosophical expounding of capitalism proved less persuasive for 


those no longer served by your own self-interest. 


On his last Monday at RB he found his name had accidentally been 
added to every slot on the coffee and danish errand rota. On 
Wednesday someone tipped the rubbish bin in his drawer. Edward 
didn't mind. In his last week he signed thirty new contacts and made 
sure to give them all his card. No company—just a name, private 
email and mobile number. 


Edward spent his last weekend before starting work at Cooper 
Drake playing video games and trying for the fifteenth time to crack 
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. He tried to get to sleep early, on the 
assumption that MacIntyre wasn't the sort of man who would be 
disrespected twice if he came in late. 


Instead he lay awake, mind churning. He found himself thinking— 
how much is enough? When have | proved to my father—who, let's 
not forget, is currently hard at work decomposing—that I've applied 
myself? Five million? Ten million? Maybe | need to beat him; that 
would be forty million. 


Of course, he'd never accept I'd earned it, the way he did, putting 
together a company from the ground up. City traders, with their soft 
hands and wacky ties, were as far from Bernard Gradley, the man 
who'd made his millions selling furniture from the back of a van, as 
you could get. Perhaps | need to get a wife and kids just so | can 
leave them everything? Is that it? Do | never get to feel like I've won 
as long as I'm alive? Madness. It's madness. 


Man works to cease from working, he reasoned; the purpose of work 
cannot be more work, as at each stage the objective of work is to 
reduce the total mass of labour left to do. In some ways the City 
exemplified this—you put in crazy hours, worked yourself to the 
bone, took insane risks, and the reward was the accumulation of 
wealth; early retirement while you could still enjoy the leisured 
lifestyle. But what of the grey-haired men who'd spent decades in 
finance, turning their whole lives into one huge accumulator bet as 
though they could take it with them? Bernard Gradley had gone one 
stage further—working month after month, year after year, burning 
his flesh like a candle: he had not enjoyed rest from his work, and he 


had denied it to his wife and son as well. In some ways Edward 
could see the sense in it. Gradley Industries had been a project, a 
great work. In his will he had called it his 'child', his masterpiece. 
What great work was there in finance? 


"Time to get started!" chirped David as he ushered Edward around 
the great glass tables on the top floor of Cooper Drake's great City 
offices. Faces came and went in front of his sleep-starved eyes, 
people he needed to remember as his lifelines. Concentrate, he 
warned himself. 


"This is Elizabeth. Treat her well; she's your source for leads. Her 
analysts work around the clock to tease out data from international 
stock markets and convert it into essential narratives for CD 
brokers." 


At Redmayne—Bracknell you were more or less given a stack of 

newspapers and expected to get on with it. Elizabeth Keating was a 
plain, slightly overweight girl barely older than Edward; she favoured 
him with a winning smile but his mind was already somewhere else. 


Edward would be working in Peter's team—a pod of four associate 
brokers focusing on British and international industry. Each would be 
working to invest money in stocks and shares around the globe; 
blue-chip companies would likely already have a recommendation 
from the firm's analysts—Strong Buy, Buy, Hold, Sell, or Strong Sell, 
but for the majority of startups, medium-size enterprises or just plain 
old-fashioned firms that refused to play PR ball with the market, 
brokers were left with gut feeling and what facts they could dig up 
themselves. 


Edward was issued with a gleaming transparent plastic keycard—his 
research pass, which when swiped into the Cooper Drake systems 
permitted access to their vast, labyrinthine records of stock 
movements over the past century. "Don't lose it," warned David 
—"these things literally cost half your monthly salary. They're laser- 
engraved; everyone's is unique." At Edward's previous firm there 
had been a lengthy keycode instead; you were absolutely forbidden 
to write the thing down, but everyone did it anyway. If you wanted to 
snoop around someone's search history and get some Juicy tips all 


you needed to do was open their drawer and find the sixteen-digit 
number scrawled on the Post-it note. Not that Edward would ever 
admit doing something like that. 


"So Edward, | think I'm gonna throw you in the deep end," drawled 
Peter. "I've got some big aerospace trades and | want you to take a 
look. See what sense you can make of them, you know?" 


That turned out to be not a lot. Edward went half the morning 
believing this was some kind of surreal training exercise or prank 
before he realised what he was seeing were actually Peter's 
positions. He was selling fast-growing R&D stocks with acute 
nervelessness, often missing out on hundreds of thousands, while 
clinging on to big-name shares that showed no signs of ever 
breaking even. Some delicacy required, he reflected, when your 
direct manager is probably the least capable person in the building. 
Peter wasn't even incompetent—he was clueless, making trades 
half an hour after the herd and hoping for the best. Edward would 
bet good money that each of Peter's prematurely abandoned tech 
picks had been the result of some offhand comment by a member of 
his team, while his touching faith in the stagnating giant firms that 
formed the core of his position seemed based on formulaic language 
in press releases no-one—except Peter, apparently—saw as 
exciting or indicative of rapid change anymore. 


"Some bold choices," Edward finally concluded after spending the 
morning sweating over the bizarre pileup of incoherent stock picks 
that constituted Peter's portfolio. 


"Really?" Peter sounded aghast. 


"| mean, | don't think I'll have the nerve for some of these trades for 
a while. Like the Boeing position; that's huge." 


"R-right. | mean, don't just copy what I'm doing. You've got to make 
your own style. To be honest, | think I'm a bit long on Boeing, even." 
A bit? It's been a Strong Sell for two weeks, thought Edward glumly. 
Over the course of the afternoon he was able to cajole Peter into 
abandoning most of his current positions and adopting a far more 
diverse spread with significant spend in the rapidly expanding British 
space sector. Peter finished the day half a mill up, and Edward 


caught him squinting in his direction from behind his shades. 


"So how are things going?" David asked as the traders, at seven, 
slowly began filtering home. 


"Great," said Edward with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. 
"Peter had me take a look at his portfolio; | was able to suggest 
some changes." 


"Ah—good." David rubbed the sides of his nose with his thumbs. 
"Change definitely sounds good where Peter's portfolio's concerned. 
Glad he's started you on something challenging." 


Poor Peter, thought Edward. He's a laughing stock at his own firm 
and he doesn't even know it. 


"Say, will you do something for me?" asked David. It's going to be 
something weird, thought Edward, | know it. For some reason you 
couldn't help taking to David; he was relentlessly affable, though 
Edward sensed a hard core of steel beneath the chubby exterior. 
"Put your arms up, like this." 


David raised both hands above his head, as though he were 
preparing to clap along to an old Gospel song. Edward did likewise, 
wincing as his suit pinched his chest. 


"See this here?"—David ran a finger along the folds that ran from 
shoulder to shoulder on Edward's cheap suit. "These should not 
exist. This is your second trading job; you're pulling in the big bucks, 
well, comparatively speaking. You should get a better suit. | know a 
guy on Ludgate Hill that does the most amazing tailored suits... old 
Greek guy, he gets all his fabrics under the counter from the textile 
manufacturers who supply the big designers; Versace, Newman..." 


"This conversation obviously has anti-gravity properties, because | 
can feel my wallet getting lighter," retorted Edward. 


"You're thinking about it the wrong way. You spend the money to get 
the money. You show up at a client's offices in a cheap suit and 
shabby shoes, you think he's going to give you the time of day, let 
alone all his cash? No, you show up in a tailored suit and you let him 


see his face in everything else. That's how he knows you work." 


"| guess," said Edward. But | /ike my suit, he thought. | don't think it 
looks bad, per se. How often during a meeting with a client do you 
have cause to walk around with your arms above your head? Maybe 
a deodorant manufacturer... He had absolutely no intention of 
visiting David's expensive friend. 


"Yes, Sir has definitely gone up a size in the waist since his last visit. 
Would Sir like me to take out his current suit or place an order for a 
new one?" 


Edward watched as David happily paid more than the price of 
Edward's car for a new pair of trousers and apparently on a whim 
ordered the next size up, too. The wizened gentleman in charge of 
Stathopoulos Fine Tailors and Drapers looked positively ecstatic as 
he took his details and arranged for the garments to be delivered 
hand-pressed and ready to wear. Always good when each time your 
client came in they made a bigger order—fabric-wise, anyway—than 
the time before, Edward mused. David didn't seem to mind his 
weight and appeared to wear it like a badge of his prosperity. 


"Come on then, Ed, you're up next." 


Edward tried his best to look stoic while the old man looped his tape 
measure around various parts of Edward's anatomy, making little 
clucking noises as he scribbled them on a yellowed tailor's pad. 


"Sir is very slim; department store clothes that fit well around the 
chest will be too tight at the shoulders. You lose ease of movement. 
If Sir would just try this..." The old man brought out a mock suit 
frontage with adjustable bands and loosened and tightened them 
while asking Edward to raise and lower his arms, bend at the waist, 
lean sideways. When he was satisfied he totted up a few numbers 
on a pocket calculator. 


"| can have a new suit in Sir's size ready by Thursday. As Sir is a 
new customer | shall make a special rate of seven hundred and fifty 
pounds." 


Edward's jaw made a dedicated bid for freedom from the rest of his 
skull. David sauntered over and rested an arm on Edward's 
shoulder. 


"He'll be paying by plastic." 


While Edward was changing back into his off-the-peg suit—had it 
been this itchy before?—David sat in a leather armchair by the 
tailor's window and sipped tea brought to him by the tailor's equally 
elderly wife. 


"You know, you should be looking at a new car, too. Surprised that 
old thing out there even works. It's like the suit—it's false economy. 
You get a car that gets you there fast, every time, and looks good 
when you arrive." 


"Not much good if you can't find parking," Edward retorted.