“So as of today we will not require you to carry out your duties and your systems access will be removed this afternoon.” That was the sentence that stung him the most. Just yesterday he has been important, essential to the profitability of the firm. Now he was old news, the next person to say “I used to be a broker”. How the fuck had that happened?
He had worked in The City since he moved to London twelve years ago and had shown both hard work and ability to get onto the swaps desk. Like most South Africans he was naturally self-confident, competitive and hard minded – traits that served him well on his way up. He was also very able to live the lifestyle. Drinking late and turning up to work early was not a problem for him, he could shrug it off. This was an essential skill even after regulation had increased over the past few years and “entertaining” was being scrutinised more closely.
But now what? They had binned his entire business line so it wasn’t like there was an easy move internally and with the COVID-19 thing happening, there was nothing going on anywhere else either. So he was now a nobody, like all the other useless bastards he had seen come and go over the years. That was the worst part for him. Money was fine, the redundancy pay would cover him for a while. It was the fact that he wasn’t essential, wasn’t needed, wasn’t good enough to be kept on.
Working from home meant it wasn’t a long walk to find her downstairs. “They are shutting my desk down”, he said, “I get paid for three months and then get a check, but basically I don’t work there anymore.” She was nice about it, of course she was, but it was obvious she was terrified about what this meant for the future. She was a worrier, especially since the little one had come along. She just wanted safety and security, which working as a broker both provided and didn’t in the sense that the money was good but the lifestyle was a circus. She hated that he so badly needed the success and the stature, although she’d never admit it out loud. She also knew this would make him fucking miserable.
That night he drank pretty much everything that was in the house. The gin he had been given for his birthday, the beer he had bought for the weekend, and the red wine he always had in the rack. He sat downstairs by himself pissed and frantically looking through Linkedin for jobs. Nothing was right and he knew in this market he wouldn’t get anything anyway. The whole country, the whole world, was at a standstill because of the virus.
There was something nagging him though, a thought in the back of his head. It had been there for a couple of years but he had ignored it. Maybe he wasn’t a ruthless city bastard at heart and should think about doing something else. No, he was.
The next few days were like weekends except without the freedom to do anything. Lockdown was in full force so there was no going out of the house except for exercise and shopping. The shopping meant he was able to get more booze which wasn’t just good, it was essential. He repeated that first night for more than a week. Once the family was in bed the drinking would pick up and the various job finder apps would take a beating. Every one that was unsuitable was another boot into the spleen of his pride. He wasn’t fit to do anything. All the exams, years of experience, fuck all. Just another former broker who would end up at some estate agent or recruitment firm. All his previous success in sport, with girls, in business, in studying, was worth precisely nothing now. He was worth precisely nothing now and it was fucking embarrassing.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been big news since it led to the shutdown of a whole Chinese province in February. Now it was all through Europe with Italy and Spain seemingly out of control. It was growing fast in the US, too, with cases and mortalities going through the roof. Markets and economies were getting killed all over the world and people were losing jobs everywhere. At least they were losing theirs for a real reason and not just because their business was no longer worth keeping, he thought, with a bitterness that even shocked himself.
As he had watched the news get progressively worse, he had become more and more engrossed. Partly it filled the gap left by not constantly reading financial news, but he was also genuinely interested. The day the thirteen-year-old boy died, who had no other medical condition, it really got to him. He imagined what it would be like if that were his son. Well, he couldn’t imagine. To lose a child to something like that, and not to even be able to have a proper funeral, would be horrific. That was really the first bit of perspective he had managed to find since being fired.
As the nightly ritual of drinking and job hunting became routine, an unsettling feeling that he was never good enough to be a broker in the first place began to grow. He hadn’t gone to some English private school and then some red brick university. He had grown up on a farm where there was always a job to do and always a criticism to take on board. He had also grown up in a world that couldn’t have been more different to London. Racial divides were very clear and you were always wary of the other.
That feeling that he never should have been there soon turned into anger at himself for having gotten so comfortable. How could he have let himself believe he had a right to be there? Worse, how could he now believe he would get back in? No chance. He had gotten a lot of nice messages from people telling him that he would bounce straight back. One of the most senior people in the business even called him off the record to say he couldn’t believe they had let him go. It didn’t mean anything. Talk is cheap and you have no value until you have value to a firm.
Meanwhile, the pandemic was getting worse. He became much more interested in the human element rather than the economic, a big shift for someone who usually thought about everything in the context of how it would impact interest rates. He really cared about the families being affected. He thought of his own grandparents, all in their eighties and vulnerable. He thought about his mother-in-law who was in her seventies. More often than not though, he thought about the people suffering with the virus in other countries. He felt sympathy for the suggestion that the Italians had been abandoned by their European partners, even if he knew it was really just populist rhetoric. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing in Spain. It was like something he studied in a university history class, a plague.
After a couple of weeks the nightly job hunting stopped. He got bored and it felt futile in the context of a recession. Plus, although he didn’t want to admit it because he didn’t know what it meant for his career, he wasn’t that bothered whether he went back to the city or not. This surprised him and frightened him to the point where he shut it down at first. Of course he needed to get back to the city, that was his life. His career, and the status it brought, was everything to him. Over time though that softened. He had always thought it might not be forever, largely due to her instance that they eventually moved nearer to her family in the north. He knew if that ever materialised the broker path would be closed so he regularly pondered what he might do if he found himself in that situation. He had studied politics with some history modules and loved it. Perhaps he could teach. One of the things he did love about his job was when he got a good new junior and could bring them on. He suddenly realised that liked to help people. This was a major realisation for somebody who had convinced himself for twelve years that making money, drinking booze and being a superstar was all that mattered.
He had two juniors in particular that stood out to him. Both had joined on the firms graduate scheme and been assigned to him. They were hungry and smart, the perfect combination. He molded them both into excellent brokers and he knew they were both grateful. One of them was slightly ahead of the other and would go on to do big things, there was no doubt about that, but they were both a pleasure to teach and to help. Sure, others he had been asked to teach weren’t so good and he didn’t enjoy it so much, but he always tried. At an end of year appraisal once his boss had said that his ability to bring other people on and develop them was his key attribute. He had dismissed this and argued that his ability to make money was his key attribute. His boss was right.
His interest and concern over the pandemic continued to grow. One morning, after the obligatory yet now significantly reduced, job hunting was done, he typed into google “volunteering AND coronavirus”. There were numerous options for donations both in the UK and abroad but what caught his attention was a website seeking volunteers to help people directly. There were various ways one could offer their time from dropping off food to speaking to people on the phone who were at risk of being lonely. Loneliness, despite living with the family and being stuck in the house due to lockdown, was a feeling he had grown very familiar with since he was made redundant. It had felt like nobody had much sympathy for the bloke who lost a job he hadn’t belonged in anyway. He submitted his details but expected little to come of it.
When the reply came asking him when he was able to help out, and offering genuine and warm thanks, he was a bit taken aback. His first response was to ignore it. Who the fuck would want to talk to some dick who had just been sacked by a brokerage? It annoyed him a bit that this was all he was good for, volunteering. Yet surely there were better people out there to speak to. He poured a beer and looked through the jobs section of linkedin for a while before falling asleep on the sofa, pissed for the first time in what felt like ages.
The next morning he felt horrific. This was the first time a hangover had properly gotten to him during all of this and he knew it was because last night he hadn’t really meant it. He had always been the same, if he was on one there was no stopping him and there was no hang over. If he was on it at work there was no stopping him and there was no tiredness or slowing down. If he was in a phase of training there was no break in the discipline. So the fact he was hungover was telling, “you didn’t want to get pissed” he thought as he put on his running gear. He ran his usual route listening to a daily podcast on the pandemic that had become his first source of knowledge each day. Over 500 people had died here that day, again, and there was increased noise around testing numbers being too low. Italy and Spain were seeing better numbers but cases in other parts of the world, Asia and Africa, were picking up. He knew those countries couldn’t possibly have the medical infrastructure they were going to need based on how badly the developed world had handled the numbers of sick and dying.
After he showered and ate he looked at the email again. He was to fill in an online form outlining his availability, which he did cautiously. The response came later that day. A list of people to call and a script to read explaining who he was, as well as some suggested topics of conversation and some “support materials”. It was all surprisingly easy, he thought.
He made his first call the following morning. He had told her what he was planning to do and was given the usual positive response that felt like it was covering up a fear of something new that she didn’t understand. She did seem to be generally supportive and happy that he had found something positive to do, but it wasn’t the nature of it that made her happy per se, which surprised him because he felt like he was doing it for the right reasons.
Maurine was seventy-seven years old and lived in Kent. She had lost her husband some three years earlier and as they had never had any children and neither had siblings, she was on her own. She did have some friends that should we would usually meet up with at the library or local café, but none of them knew how to use the technology that the younger generations were using to keep in touch. This was a bit of a surprise to him, that she didn’t know how to facetime or use zoom, didn’t everyone do it all the time? He also struggled initially with the concept of loneliness. What was there to be lonely about.
A few weeks in he called a man called Pete who lived in York. Pete was eighty-one and had worked his whole life at a company that bought and sold grain. This was clearly a sharp and smart bloke. Their first conversation was about the pandemic and Pete relayed something he had read about the number of elderly people who had died of flu in Italy that winter was far below average, meaning the current death rate could be somewhat misleading. He wouldn’t have known that without reading some serious news coverage. When he told him about his own job, Pete asked questions that suggested he knew a bit about the markets. It was an interesting call.
He called Pete again a couple of days later. He had realised after they first spoke that he hadn’t found out why Pete was part of this program so wanted to ask the questions he knew he was supposed to ask. As it was, Pete’s wife had left him in the nineties and he had never found anyone else. His only son had died in an accident when he was eight. It sounded as though those two events had pushed Pete towards a bit of a solitary personal life. He had been part of the finance function at his company, a chartered accountant, but even when he left the office he kept working and didn’t socialise which meant he had very few friends to draw upon now even if he did know what facetime was. While he was a clever and interesting man, he was lonely for sure. “You can only be by yourself for so long when you’re actually on your own”, he said. “Seeing people on the TV isn’t the same as thanking the bloke behind the counter at the chip shop.”
Pete’s honesty and openness was endearing. It was as if he had realised his own mistake in shutting himself off and had never forgiven himself for it. His wife had left because he worked too hard, got too stressed and drank too much. Something more was behind his words, too, like the implication that there was more to the story. Perhaps Pete had been aggressive, he didn’t know, but there was certainly a regret in Pete’s tone. He opened up himself in return. He felt that Pete would understand the feeling of uselessness he’d had since he’d been let go. He wasn’t quite as straight about his life as Pete had been, he let Pete read between the lines. He said things like “I was pretty high up and felt like I was doing well, so it was a surprise that they didn’t find something for me.” Just enough to show that he felt let down and a bit miffed that he had been allowed to leave. Pete got it. “There are cuts everywhere, son” he said. “You need to realise that a computer will do that job in the next few years anyway, so unless you adapt you would become obsolete. You won’t be the last guy who had done well to be out on his arse.”
He started to call Pete every day, he looked forward to it. The straight to the point conversation about everything from the virus to their lives, the government response to family life, made him really enjoy the company. He avoided the topic of Pete’s son as he knew it was likely a sensitive one and given how long ago it had happened there didn’t seem to be much need. They did talk about marriage though. Pete’s willingness to admit he had lost something good, even if the reason was a little opaque, was enough to give him the confidence to talk about his own situation. He spoke about her in only positive terms, as always, but he did intimate that her fear of change held him back. “Every time I try to do anything she finds a reason to question it, as if it’s going to cause a problem” he said on one call while she was out for a walk. “Give ‘es and example”. He couldn’t, but he knew he was right. “Maybe its in yer head, son” Pete suggested. It wasn’t, he didn’t think.
She had been on quite good form for the last couple of weeks, actually. She said it was because he was on good form. He hadn’t been drinking very much and had been running quite a lot and eating well, so his mood was improved. He had spent a lot of time with the little man and he seemed enthusiastic about it, something she often chastised him for not being on a Saturday morning after a night out with work. He was obviously less stressed, she said. “I like it”.
Pete started to cough on the phone a lot. The first couple of days it wasn’t too bad but it got worse surprisingly quickly, to the extent that it was offensive. By the end of that week he was struggling to say more than three sentences without having a coughing fit, a fact that he shrugged off and apologised for. He told Pete to call 111 but Pete said it wasn’t that bad and he should stop being such a fairy. There was no fever, no other symptoms and besides, Pete hadn’t seen anybody for weeks to catch it from. His food was being delivered to him by local volunteers so he hadn’t even been out of the house except to collect it from the door step. Pete related that fact with palpable resentment; he hadn’t even been outside except to pick up some box left by someone else. It was as if he was saying “is that all I’m capable of now”.
They still spoke for over an hour that day, despite the coughing, about everything; how the market was performing, how she had been in a good mood, how the little man was enjoying having him around the house, how Pete had been reading a book about the D-Day landings which his father had been a part of. “You should be around the house more often, son” he said between fits of splutters, as they were dialing off “its good for you, its good for her and its good for the boy.” It was like talking to an old friend.
The next day Pete didn’t answer the phone. He tried eight or nine times, at ever reducing intervals, but couldn’t get through. In between attempts to call Pete his firm called him to say that a job had come up on another desk and they wanted him to apply for it asap. He would, he said, of course he would, knowing that the call meant it was a done deal anyway. This wasn’t the time, though, as his immediate concern was to find Pete. The following day was the same thing again, except he made double the number of calls. He knew what was happening, even if he didn’t want to admit it to himself, and this was bad. Eventually he called the volunteering organisation who said they would look into it for him.
They called back the following day to say Pete had been admitted to hospital two nights ago having called 111 but had died the following day. It turned out that Pete had lung cancer and was an considered at serious risk hence he was told not to leave the house. It had taken him quite quickly as his body had little to fight it with and the hospital nearest to him didn’t have the resources they needed to handle the number of people like Pete that were pouring through the doors. The fucking hospital didn’t have the resources, in 2020. Was that some kind of joke?
He felt legitimate grief for Pete, not the same nonsense he had felt for the job he lost. This was someone he cared about and who’d had a positive effect on his life. Pete had been a guiding light during a dark spell and he had perhaps been the same for Pete, he certainly hoped so. There was no way to attend Pete’s funeral and there was no family that he could contact. It was just over, as quick as that. He had spoken to this guy on the phone every day for just over two weeks and now it was over. He wasn’t angry or feeling sorry for himself in the way he had felt when he got fired. He was sad and upset that Pete had died, which he understood was something worth being sad and upset about. He now felt the same grief for the family of the thirteen year old that had died a few weeks earlier, and for the grandchildren of the people who had died in Italy, Spain and everywhere else. He felt grief for the fact that the idiot in charge of the US was blaming the Chinese as if they had intentionally caused the deaths of thousands of people in their own country, whom he also felt grief for. He felt grief for the people who were doing everything they could do to help but didn’t have the fucking masks they needed to keep themselves safe. He was upset about Pete, he was upset about the situation across the country, he was upset about what was happening to countries he had spent such great times in and he was upset that he had acted like such a selfish bastard when he first heard about his job.
He cried tears that released the grief he had been feeling for himself. It was an act of cleansing by his own emotional being, as if the very act of weeping would purge his mind of the hurt he had felt since being let go. It wouldn’t stop him being sad about his friend, that was much more real. This was an emotional manifestation of a mental anguish. He was free of that now and ready to go forward, but with Pete’s memory acting as a guide, like a father’s push on his child’s back as he learns to ride his bike.
She was great about it, she could tell he was upset and she really cared. That night they shared a bottle of red wine they had brought back from a holiday in Italy and toasted Pete. They also toasted the fact that he was going back to work the following week, but that was secondary. For now, they just shared a lovely bottle, from a country they adored that was being hurt by the virus, giving thanks to the bloke they never met.