Where the Rain Gets In (3 page)

“Good morning, Charlie,” said Katie, and
pushed through the barrier.

“Good morning to you, Ms. Katie
McGuire,” he replied. “At it again in yesterday’s paper, I see.” Yesterday’s
Independent
was on the counter, next to Charlie’s elbow and a half-drunk mug of tea.

“And what do you think?” asked Katie. “Did
I over-step the mark this time?”

“No more than usual, I’d say, no more
than usual.”

Charlie smiled and smoothed down the
hair on his scalp.

“Oh well,” said Katie, “give the punters
what they want, eh?”

“What you have to say isn’t always what
they want.”

“They love it,” said Katie, “and you
know they do.”

Katie could feel Charlie’s eyes on her
as she walked over to the lift. She guessed he shook his head each day at the
waste – Charlie wasn’t alone in presuming that Katie was a lesbian, but if that
was what it took then that was fine by Katie. She recognised a couple of the
people waiting for the lift, but she didn’t know anyone to speak to. Her office
was on the fourth floor, a huge expanse of space that covered an entire floor
of the building. Open plan desk arrangements fanned out from the central lift
shaft with private offices lining the outer walls. It wasn’t exactly a trading
floor, more like somebody’s idea of one.

Katie walked the length of the room to
her office, and called out her good mornings to the few colleagues already at
their desks. She knew she looked like Sigourney Weaver in the film
Working
Girl
– all business and ready for the day, striding across the floor – but
only because Carmel, her assistant, her Melanie Griffith, wouldn’t ever let her
forget it.

“Good morning, Ms. Boney-Ass,” said
Carmel. She switched off her mobile and dropped it into her bag.

“Good morning, Carmel,” said Katie, and
smiled. “How’s the world of Mergers and Acquisitions? Was that Harrison Ford
you were just speaking to?”

“You might laugh,” said Carmel, “but one
day you’ll find it’s this girl sat in that office of yours, and not that sorry
bag of bones you call a behind.”

“Harrison might like my bottom.”

“No,” said Carmel, “he’s going to want
something to get a hold of, something to sink his teeth into – and I think I’m
just his type.”

“Steady girl,” laughed Katie, “steady.”

The call from Mike came through at three
minutes past nine, as though he considered nine o’clock the acceptable time to
ring. Katie took no calls before ten-thirty unless Carmel considered it
absolutely necessary. Add on the three minutes of Carmel refusing to put Mike
through, and you have three minutes into some people’s working day – but not
that many people anymore. Katie looked from the phone to the clock and lifted
the receiver.

“Carmel?”

“I’m sorry, Katie,” said Carmel, “but he
won’t go away.”

“Who is it?”

“That’s just it, he won’t say; he just
keeps repeating that it’s imperative he talks only to you. He says he’s a close
personal friend.” The conviction drained out of Carmel’s voice. “He’s very
nice,” she added as an afterthought.

Katie smiled. It was obviously absurd to
Carmel that Katie should have a close personal friend.

“What do you think,” she asked. “Should
I take the call?”

“I think he’d better wait like all the
others,” said Carmel.

“Niceness just doesn’t cut it, really,
does it?”

“It does no harm,” said Carmel, “but
it’s not enough to get put through to you. I’ll ask him to call back later.”

Katie replaced the receiver and returned
to her newspaper. She’d established this right – to read through the papers
each morning before actually doing what was recognisably her job – only by
being year after year the best performing account manager in the company. She
was disdainful of her colleagues’ cursory glance at the newspapers; they only
looked at the business pages, as though this justified the wasted time. She had
no patience with anyone who claimed to read the paper each day, when –
surprise, surprise – if she referred to something she'd seen, it was always
that one particular article they hadn’t read. So much so that Katie
occasionally asked certain colleagues if they’d seen such-and-such a piece,
just out of bloody-mindedness, and guess what? The results were not encouraging.
Katie’s record stood for itself – if she preferred to start her day with a
review of the newspapers, the company weren’t about to lose her over something
so trivial.

(Katie likened it to all the top
management gurus agreeing that a few minutes’ meditation in the workplace
produced measurable results. Very few managers could tolerate the sight of an
employee just sat at their desk, apparently doing nothing. As though the
employee should put up a sign – ‘meditating, now fuck off!’)

Newspapers helped Katie to manage other
people’s money, but they also kept her sharp as a person; she was never short
of something to talk about, either professionally or socially. And there were
so many different types of news – the broadsheets, the tabloids, plus the TV
screens outside in the main office, and there was Carmel, a compulsive listener
to the radio and a constant source of information. Katie loved it all, loved it
all in itself and not just for its application to her job.

This ability to soak up and analyse
information from so many different sources was part of what made Katie such a
good account manager. She thought very little about buying stock as she read
through the papers. She wasn’t certain there was a direct relationship between
the two, but, if she didn’t know at least something of what was happening in
the world, she would have been less able to make the decisions she took on a
daily basis. She also knew that an hour rarely made that much difference to the
financial markets; there was always plenty of time for studying figures on a
computer screen. Katie made her name by saying it was okay to do nothing if
that was what the markets required; when the markets demanded it, the
newspapers were dumped immediately.

The crazy thing was that soon everybody
who reported directly to Katie thought it best to conscientiously study the
papers each morning. It was weird to come out her office for a coffee break and
find a floor full of bankers with newspapers spread out on their desks. So much
so, she had to persuade them this wasn’t absolutely necessary.

“If you want to read the papers, you
can,” she said. “But if you don’t feel the need, don’t just do it for the sake
of it.”

Organizations, she thought, and the
people in them.

When asked how she consistently achieved
such good results – whether by her superiors, her colleagues or, occasionally,
the press – she had one piece of advice: always buy under-valued stock. It was
simple, too simple for some people, but it was the one thing she insisted upon
amongst her own team.

“Never forget this is someone else’s
money – it doesn’t even belong to the bank. We’re gambling with other people’s
money, but you should behave as though it were your own. The bank pays you
money to make more money with other people’s money; if you do that then
everybody will be happy.”

Of course this wasn’t the whole story
but it was as good a basis as any for a young trader to start out on. Katie’s
department was traditionally the company’s training ground for new employees.
She much preferred a team of raw recruits to the older, more experienced hands;
it was fun and it kept Katie on her toes.

Soon after ten each day, Katie took her
coffee break with Carmel in the staff canteen. This was her real breakfast
time, her favourite meal of the day, and nothing – nothing! – came between
Katie and her coffee. She walked through and made a silent drinking-from-a-cup
gesture to Carmel.

Carmel was on the phone, as usual. She
took the receiver away from her ear and pointed at the mouthpiece.

“What?” asked Katie.

Carmel covered the receiver with her
hand.

“It’s him,” she said. “He’s still on the
line.”

“Who?”

Carmel spoke into the phone.

“I’m just putting you on hold again,”
she said, and pressed a button on the phone. “The guy from before – he wouldn’t
hang up; said he preferred to wait. This guy really wants to speak to you.”

“That was over an hour ago,” said Katie.

“I know, but what could I do?”

“Hang up on him, maybe? Have you been
speaking to him all this time?”

Carmel blushed.

“I told you, he’s really nice.”

“But an hour, Carmel – what have you
been talking about? On second thoughts, forget it – I don’t want to know. Come
on; let’s go for coffee. If he’s still there when we come back, I’ll speak to
him then.”

“He says his name’s Mike,” said Carmel.
“He said to tell you that it’s Nice Guy Mike, that you’d know who I mean.”

Katie looked at Carmel.

“Nice Guy Mike – he said that?”

“Yes,” said Carmel. “Do you know who he
is?”

“What did he tell you?” asked Katie. She
heard the harsh tone in her own voice and corrected it. “I mean, did he tell
you why he’s calling?”

“Not really, he just told me his name.”

“In an hour?”

“Well…we mostly talked about me. What do
you want me to do?”

Katie leant her weight against Carmel’s
desk and breathed in deeply through her nose.

“I don’t know anyone by that name,” she
said.

“He said you’d say that.”

“I’d remember anyone calling himself
Nice Guy Mike.”

“He said you’d say that too,” said
Carmel. “And that you’d ask for his surname, but that you know it already and
know why he can’t give it.”

Katie looked at the receiver in Carmel’s
hand.

“If he – if it is who he says it is, ask
him to call back in half an hour. There’s no need for him to keep holding on;
tell him I’ll take his call.”

“He won’t believe me. He won’t hang up.”

“Tell him – tell him if he doesn’t hang
up I won’t speak to him. Tell him that, and then you hang up.”

Katie’s young team tended to share the
same table for their break each morning. A few people sat alone with a book or
a newspaper, but mostly it was an opportunity to chat or joke or flirt. The
canteen was shared by the whole building, and there was a loud buzz of
conversation among the different groups of employees.

Katie was unusually quiet. Even when the
talk turned to one of her pet subjects – the crappiness of most TV advertising
– Katie appeared distracted and oblivious to the banter at the table.

“I think the worst one I’ve seen
recently,” said Carmel, “has to be the ad – they’re a department store, I think
– that ends up by claiming that they’re ‘almost nationwide’. I mean, if you’re
not completely nationwide, you don’t mention it, do you? It’s like saying – we
know what we’re doing, almost, but not quite.” She spoke across Katie to
Ronnie, a recent arrival at the company, and one of Katie’s protégés.

“I disagree,” said Ronnie. “The worst
one by far has to be for Irish Rail. You know, where they reel off how many
more carriages they’re running on each line, and then hit us with the punch
line – ‘And more to follow’?”

“Yes,” laughed Carmel. “Like they’re
proud of something they haven’t even done yet, and want to tell the world.”

“Somebody, somewhere,” said Ronnie,
“decided they should run with that ad.”

“An advertising executive,” said Carmel,
“or a room full of advertising executives.”

“Er yeah,” said Ronnie, “right, so we’re
all agreed then? We’ll run with the ‘more to follow’ promise?”

“More to follow – almost nationwide,”
said Carmel.

Katie was pleased to see Ronnie
confident and relaxed at the table – the likes of Carmel were quite
intimidating if you didn’t know them – but she couldn’t bring herself to join
in. A subject like this was often enough for a few Katie McGuire gems, but not
today; she smiled along, but was happy for the coffee break to be over. She
took the lift and walked back to the office with Carmel.

“Are you mad at me over that phone
call?” Carmel was used to Katie being frank with her; if she was in trouble she
wanted to know.

“What – no,” said Katie and walked on.

“Then what the fuck is it?” asked
Carmel, and stopped by her desk.

Katie looked up at Carmel.

“Sorry, I . . . ”

“Are you okay? You don’t look too good –
is it that Mike?”

“No, no – it’s fine. I’m fine.”

“I can get rid of him, if that’s what
you want.”

“No, really, thanks, I’m fine. Put him
through when he calls. I’m sorry if I was being rude. It’s just . . . ”

“A surprise to hear from him?”

“Yes, you could say that.”

“Well, as I said – he seems nice.”