all the t's

Fiction. Part of “a god in glass” series.

Other parts of the series in order:

prologue, or the end of all things

nicholas(nick)

troublemakers

I rarely worked with other women. Instead I worked with lots of men named T[redacted].

My direct line manager was T. He wore a suffering expression, avoided all conflict and confrontation. His lukewarm personality extended, it seemed, into the pale colour of his skin and the weak handshake he gave me when we first met at the interview.

The second T I met was the complete opposite. If the first T, my manager, was a pale pencil drawing, this T was the embodiment of the words “smooth operator”, in love with his own handsomness, his well-fitting suits and crew-neck sweaters.

He filled me up with hot air and got me to accept and offer that underpaid me severely in comparison with my colleagues on the same team and with the same job titles. More to himself than to me, he justified this glaring discrepancy with a half-mumbled “We have to be fair to the people who have been here longer”. I realised he was an expert at massaging, twisting and turning the truth - a fact, that no doubt had made him excellent at his job and earned him the VP title.

In fact he was so good that even he himself believed those beautiful sentences that sold the corporation as some kind of techologist heaven to stupid naive girls like me.

All I else, I could forgive, except the fact that he had somehow made me accept an offer where I was at a disadvantage and then spun it as some great accomplishment.

“It would be good for your career to spend the next five years at the same company, here”, he said as he shepherded me out of the door.

The third T was in a class of his own and an unlikely character on the floors of the corporation. He reminded me of a gruff, scruffy old sailor. He didn’t take well to people. His first words for me were “How’s your programming skill”. He thought he was all about the no-bullshit, but all he ended up being was a rude asshole.

Sometimes I went to speak to him about work and he didn’t even look at me. Just continued typing at his workstation as he uttered an answer in short, curt sentences.

He had favourites on the floor, of course. Up and coming, career-hungry public school boys from the Home Counties. He held them in great esteem, appointed them to do important, prestigious tasks, let them speak to stakeholders, lead meetings and meet clients.

Sometimes in his mannerisms I detected racist undertones. They were never overt, maybe perhaps even subconscious, but they were there nonetheless, in the way he spoke, in his body language.

At Christmas, I burnt the midnight oil, while all around me the cubicle farm was nearly-empty, littered with half-eaten Waitrose mince pies and boxes of Christmas chocolate. I was in my chair, working with a debugger, determined to prove myself in a thorny investigation of a bug that afflicted the booking of a certain class of European financial instruments. The bug caused a painful downstream issue that had to be manually rectified every time by a small, very stressed assistant, Jennie.

I felt bad for her, for all the stress she had to endure, because our technology was so unstable and unreliable.

In the tech department, the men complained about her incompetence and then compared her to Jimmie, a young man who they went out drinking with and with whom they constantly traded small favours in the hierarchy of the corporation.

Gruff T’s protege came up to me one day. We were working on a new functionality that would hopefully make Jennie’s life easier. He sat next to me and said, in a matter of fact voice as though the matter was solely up to him and already decided, as though he was somehow privy to the internal workings of the cruel machinery that made some have more money than god and trampled others, that Jennie would never become a trader, but Jimmie would.

Jennie got stressed and made mistakes, Jimmie didn’t. I wondered how much of his assessent was based on, was clouded by, the fact that he regularly went out drinking with Jimmie, but I held my tongue.

In those words, in miniature, was the whole cruel hierarchy of the corporation.

I doubled down. I put in extra effort in investigating the bug for Jennie, because, you know women supporting women and all of that, not that it made much of a difference here.

I imagined myself in her shoes, that small, stressed woman, being yelled at by testosterone and entitlement with a good-measure of emotion-stripping British public school education or polo-playing American Ivy League education, dressed up in a white collar shirt, tight dress pants and Italian leather shoes.

I had the pleasure of meeting the particular specimen that Jenny worked with a few weeks into the project.

Gruff T himself, in an unprecedented act of generosity or maybe a desire to throw me under a double-decker, took me downstairs. He had listened to me, with increasing irritation, as I explained what I had uncovered in my investigation of the bug, then said “come on”.

I had already been on the trading floor a few times and found it a noisy, racuous place, where boys (for they were still mostly boys) got to play at being kings. In some places, this vast space had a vaguely male smell, the same kind that lingered on my bed and pillows after a night of rough sex.

There were gym bags and sweaty, smelly sneakers and t-shirts spilling out of the said gym bags onto the stained, carpet floor, abandoned coffee cups, by the dozens on some desks, rows upon rows of them. Miniature blue mold blooms sprouted in the curdled remains.

Large TV monitors played Bloomberg on repeat and every now and then the chatter in the room was punctured by a loud ringing of a bell or a cartoonish yeehaw cowboy sound. It was very fitting for the general tenor of the place. This was a wild west where the hopeful and the ruthless who believed in grabbing the oyster and tearing it to shreds went on to win millions (or at least, so they made it seem).

So gruff T took me downstairs to where the dragons were, marched me past rows upon rows of desks and monitors to the front of the floor and deposited me in front of P - the man whose capricious software was responsible for this whole debacle. P held two boxes of sushi in his hands while talking to someone and gesticulating wildly.

I watched the maki and the nigiri jump around the box. Then after a good five minutes he finally noticed us, placed the boxes on the table, wiped his hand on his dress pants and offerred his hand to me.

I tried my best to explain to him what the problem was, but very soon he grew bored of listening to me, opened up the window and started showing me the bug while complaining. I tried to interject feebly and gruff T, sensing that I was about to royally embarrass myself and the whole department, promptly thanked P and carted me off back to my own floor.

He sat down next to me, called over a colleague and began discussing the bug as though I wasn’t even there. After half an hour or so, satisfied that they would not notice my absence, I slunk back to my own desk, wrote up my findings in an email and sent it off. A week later the bug was fixed, I had earnt some respect in the eyes of my colleagues, but more than ever I felt like an outsider.

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baker street

From the London Notebooks. Written on June 21st, 2018.

Baker Street Tube Station

I come out of the Underground into the disorienting din of traffic on Marylebone Road. The sunlight here is irritating, harsh. For a moment I am lost and bump into tourists rushing for the queue at Madame Tussaud’s.

It’s funny to be lost where one used to live. The internal map of where to go and where to turn is on the top of the tongue, like a word lost but almost remembered, almost caught before slipping back into the folds of memory.

Of course, my monthly budget never afforded the more fashionable quarters. My first apartment was not far from here, but physical distance in London is a poor measure for the social separation of their inhabitants.

The street I lived on was tucked away from dignified splendors of the rituals and ways of affluent London. Here the well-kept turn of the century houses gave way to housing estates and domestic violence shelters, and wisps of litter fluttering in the wind.

The dystopia is already here, just not evenly distributed. Here on the quiet streets and flower-full porticos the cruelties are banal and well hidden behind the how-do-you-dos and good afternoons.

But here and there the veneer of civility is fractured. On the high street, a man lies prostrate on the asphalt. His hands reach toward the feet of strangers walking to lunch or shopping. Politely they skirt his hands and avert their eyes. In the world they inhabit, pretending something or someone is air, will make it air. If you ignore someone or something long enough, it will cease to exist, become invisible, vanish from the world of afternoon tea at Claridge’s and weekends at the golf course.

A woman and a man examine a pair of shoes in the window. Slightly beyond, people laugh and smile. The cafe serves rescued apple juice and organic porridge.

I walk. I look. I choose not to see. I too, am part of their polite fictions.

My reflection glides across the sunglasses of men smoking and lunching, across the tinted windows of expensive cars and black cabs, across the tastefully decorated windows of art galleries and pretty little shops that sell sweet nothings, clothing, cosmetics and ornaments.

I walk past them and past the churchyard where the lunch crowd from the nearby offices has already begun to gather. The tree-lined churchyard the last refuge of peace and refinement before the deafening din of traffic on Marylebone Road.

I look at the pavement. The neck is twisted, the legs frozen, the body lying near the building is that of a bird. I examine it, tendrils of empathy extend toward this creature. It’s a wonder such delicate things can survive this place of constant acceleration.

Why is it easier to see one kind of suffering but not the other?

the most beautiful lights

From the London Notebooks. Written in 2018.

Light is like a silence. It can tell a story, paint a picture.

Sometimes in the morning, the light is so pure, drifting over the Thames and frolicking across the glass faces of the buildings. Everything becomes emphasized, the blue sky and the river and the red bus taking people to work. The red double decker bus.

In the evening sun the clouds in the far west become like a painting. The evening light is always warm and golden, a calm at the end of the day, a lover’s pleasant kiss, a touch on the cheek.

It’s hard to believe all of this is just electricity and magnetism and abstractions built on top of other abstractions. Vibrating strings, atoms, molecules, membranes, nerve cells, humans, families, societies, countries. Movements, revolutions and power. Love, sex and death.

a portrait of a city in a heatwave

From the London Notebooks. Written in 2018.

Today is Sunday, the 29th of July. I’m drinking coffee in a place tucked in between St. James Street and Picton Place and watching the raindrops glide down the windows.

Today is the first time it rains in five weeks. Five weeks of unrelenting, brutal heat, a hot hairdryer blowing on London.

Time has passed between the first day that the sky unveiled in a brilliant, cruel clear blue and this day under a grey cover.

What I mostly remember is dragging myself across Tower Bridge under the exhausted heat of the late afternoon sun, blisters on my feat and a Starbucks cup full of ice pressed to my forehead. And the afternoon in a park.

The grass in the parks is scorched, a prickly, brown, five o’clock shadow of a beard, that used to be an emerald lawn.

E is here. We, the gang of women in tech from London, held together by tenous ties and perhaps our shared trauma of our work in places that don’t want us. I realise, at some point, sitting on A’s picnic blanket, that those ties are not strong enough anymore.

Even the bitterest, overflowing cup becomes empty at some point.

I see B. B says things that make me uncomfortable, but says more about me than B. We should talk about mental health issues, but sometimes I’m not sure how I’m expected to respond. An overwrought expression of sympathy seems too much. A nod too little. I linger between both and manage something.

My brain feels fuzzy and empty today. I spend too much money. I want to do too many things. The scraggly stubby grass beard of Green Park prickles my legs from underneath the blanket.

I think about quitting tech everyday and then, upon seeing the rents on RightMove, immediately cancel that plan. I am just vessel to move money between the VCs that fund the London tech scene and the landlords that house the London tech scene.

I think about the heatwave and the forest fires and the one day the London sky turned a nauseating mustard yellow from some distant sandstorm.

I think about the smell of the air right after a rainstorm. When it all of a sudden becomes easier to breath. The dust settles. The sky with cauliflower grey-blue cloudwisps seems like the most beautiful thing.

I think about Piers Sellers, the astronaut in the Leonardo DiCaprio climate change movie, and his optimisim. The way he looks at the camera after he reveals his terminal cancer diagnosis and smiles. “I wish it all well”, he says.

He passed away a few years ago. He thought we could still, still had time, to get our shit together and do something about climate change. I’m not so sure we can anymore.

I think about this stupid system, right here in this city, that allows some people to own 500 apartments and others to freeze to death at Westminster Tube Station.

Only later, I notice that I’ve sat on a strawberry left by another picnic party. My legs and the blanket are stained red.

nicholas (nick)

Fiction. A part of the “a god in glass” series.

Other pieces in the series: troublemakers prologue

Perhaps it is peculiar to start the chronicle of my period at Big Bank with a man who rarely gave me more than two seconds of his attention and even when he did, surely thought of me as nothing more than an idiotic IT person. But infatuation is a powerful force and, for better or worse, tends to sear into the memory an imprint of the object of affection. It was thus that in the weeks after my resignation the spectre of Nick and what he represented in my fantasies came to haunt me.

The last time I saw Nick was on the rush hour Tube at Canary Wharf several months after I had left the Bank. He was wearing a grey Superdry JPN coat over his dress shirt and speaking, in that overly refined British accent that guarantees an Academy Award to any actor who uses it, to a woman, who I presumed (upon hearing snippets of their conversation) was his colleague. She had a pronounced American accent. They were talking about work. About the New York office where I assumed she was from and about the finance training programme for graduate analysts. She asked about Nick’s junior colleagues. One of these – a Catherine de Blanc I knew very well, the other I had never met. Nick said some things about Catherine which almost made him sound kind, though I knew the reality of their relationship much better and complained about the performance of the other (‘he doesn’t really know the difference between bid and ask, which is quite necessary for performing the job’). I followed them to the platform, eager to catch news of the people that I thought I had left behind in August.

On purpose, I took a place right behind them in the line to board the train so that, luck permitting, we might end up in the same carriage and I could continue being a fly on the wall in their conversation. Although the fire ( a very one sided fire at that) had died a long time ago, the embers remained and I wished I could trade places with the American woman. When we entered the train, the distribution of the rush hour commuters meant that I ended up nearly face to face with Nick, but he was too engrossed in his conversation with this woman to notice me. I carefully studied his body language, his eyes as they looked into her face, the angle at which he leaned on the carriage wall and I tried to infer what he felt about her. They had moved on to a more interesting topic – that of company expensed dinners. I watched his face and tried to guess what he was thinking.

As I was traversing his mental landscape, I suddenly became embarassed of my own appearance. In a rare moment of folly, I had let my hair loose, cascading to my shoulders. I imagined that the static and the winter dryness had rendered it frizzy and unkept. To match my red woollen scarf, I had chosen a deep oxblood lipstick that left the lips brilliantly stained but parched. It had looked good in the faint lights of my bathroom, but now, as I looked at myself through his eyes and in the bright lights of the Jubilee Line carriage, I surely must have looked clownish.

While I was mulling over my ugly appearance, I head a ‘Hello’ from his direction. He had recognized me. We looked each other in the eyes and for a brief moment I remembered the uglier parts of our relationship at the Bank. And without being able to help myself ( the sudden reaction was too visceral to reign in), I mustered as much of hateful passive aggressive politeness as I could and coldly replied ‘Hello.’

I wanted this to continue. I wanted to ask him. I wanted him to ask me. My brain ran tens of simulations of how this conversation could go. How I’d say some funny quip about the trading software I’d worked on, how he’d laugh, how we’d get off at the Tube station together (I was going to London Bridge) and how he’d ask me for a drink, how we’d end up talking and laughing late into the night, walking around the Wharf and perhaps holding hands and then going to my apartment. But he was already back in the conversation with the American woman and I, strictly chucked back in the drawer labelled as ‘To be ignored’, pretended not to notice them, but secretly continued to hand on to the threads of their conversation.

She was talking about cost cutting and how ‘Andy’ (by which I assumed she referred to [redacted] – the head of the [redacted] trading division at the European branch of the Bank) or perhaps DS ( global head of the aforementioned division) had declared in a weekly staff meeting that dinners with brokers could no longer be expensed to the company account. ‘Nick is going to be pissed’, I thought’, she recalled the meeting to him and smiled, carefully studying his face for a reaction.

There were only two stops between Canary Wharf and London Bridge and too soon, the train came to a halt and I got off. I remembered wishing Nick would get off too, perhaps without his colleague so I could exchange a few friendly jabs with him, but he didn’t. The doors closed on his leaning, smiling figure, still deeply engaged in a coversation and the train disappeared into the dark tunnel. I turned and walked up the stairs to take the Northern Line. That was the last time I saw Nicholas Smith.