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Step Two: Enjoy a few minutes of grown-up fiction, and come back for
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Vultures
and Volatility
by Tosin Otitoju
“Oh God, is this thing even moving at all?” she mutters
as rain water crawls down the glass of the car’s windows. There has been a mere drizzle but the clouds
- engorged as they are with dark bile - threaten a great show-down replete with
thunder, lightening, and flood.
“Mr. Yellow, enter that next lane.” She has no time for this slow-crawling
traffic at ten o’clock in the morning, particularly because the markets have
gone mad again.
Her phone rings: “Yes, yes, I know,” she is
saying. With one ear still pressed to
the flat phone she grabs her bags. “Un-fucking-believable,”
she sighs while pushing the vehicle door open.
Thus it is that our financial maven has to walk the
last few meters to the office today. She
is tottering slightly as her tastefully-heeled pumps negotiate the rough stone
and sand street that is already littered with puddles. The two minutes to her building, she is a
mess of missed phone-calls and a mental struggle to rediscover her analytical
methodology. She needs to prioritize and
execute. First, prioritize.
The startled security guards at the gate of the
office building fall over themselves to help with her oversized bag and her
laptop bag. They have never really seen
her outside her chauffeured vehicles before.
She is chuffing under the weight of the bags and the humid tropical
heat. Her armpits itch from the
sweat. She ignores the guards and
quickly makes it to the elevators and up to her office suite.
By the time she gets in she almost knows what to do
but she needs a piece of information:
“Tai, Euro-dollar,” she asks her FX-trader.
“It has just been red all morning, ma,” he says.
She stands at Tai’s desk. Her bags have been taken by the assistant,
unobtrusively into her office. She sees
from the currency charts that their losses could only grow. She calls her dealer in London. She redials.
If he doesn’t respond, she has a back-up plan. He picks up on the third ring: “Honey, you
owe me big time,” he says. “I have a
buyer for 100.”
London is ready to take 100 lots off her. “Sell ASAP.
Confirm,” she says without even waiting to hear the price.
The lots are sold within a minute, with losses enough
to erase three cycles of profit. It
could have been worse. An hour later and
it would have been 2.5 times worse.
She has not saved her company yet. They have accounts in local stocks. Those are down, but she thinks it’s just
jitters; local is not expected to mirror the global market. Inexperienced local traders would not know
that, so she sees an opportunity to make a little “lunch” money off the rebound. “Ram, we should maintain UpVol.” she calls to
Ramesh. “I think we’re looking at a
panic play.”
She is exhausted.
She is in the red, no matter what she does today. Euro-Dollar is their most leveraged account,
and there just isn’t the kind of speed in local to undo their losses. She is trying to get fresh funds to play
with. “Where does one recoup over a
million dollars of losses?” she wonders.
“Who is wet right now?” She dials
the former governor, a client. “There’s
an opening right now, sir. I suggest you
take a look.”
She succeeds, because Sam the former governor says,
“you’ve been doing a good job, young lady.
You have my permission.”
Now smiles broadly, full of sugary charm: “I knew you
would move quickly on a good thing, sir.
How much?”
“Just put the whole thing,” says the governor. “Half.
Eh, I don’t know - you use your judgment, just bring me the
returns.”
“Well on this you could be looking at sixty days with
five or six percent…if you have some cash somewhere not doing anything for
you.”
“You said sixty days?
I see…”
“My guys could assist with the transfer, it’s
top-rate,” she says, and starts typing a message to Esohe, her marketing guy.
The governor says, “I have a daughter like you – very
sharp.”
“Thanks sir.
I’m just doing my job.” She sends the instant message to Esohe: “Chief Sam U. has fish. Confirm.”
She estimates half a million at most in Trust Bank as he hasn’t made any
real money since the elections. She
trusts Esohe to secure most of that total within hours.
Next customer!
She tries the number of another famous “Big Man,” but finds his phones
switched off. He must be
travelling. Her sandwich arrives for
lunch. It’s turkey slices with butter
and egg whites, lettuce and beets, between two extra-thick slices of pumpkin
bread. She asks her assistant to keep
trying the Big Man’s phone. Food is joy,
she thinks as she swirls her tongue around the creamy mix.
She is reading messages too: Chief Sam has three
hundred cash at home, so Esohe is taking it through the bank. She replies, reminding him that there is
three-sixty or so at the bank as well: the chief deposited over 350,000 for a
six-month interest of 2%, and that was six months ago. Things are going better than she
expected. She receives another message
from Barack: “Babe, babe…” It irritates
her how much he uses the word. She deletes
his message.
“The chief has picked up?” she yells over to her
assistant. The chief did say he was
going to be abroad, she suddenly remembers.
He would be several time zones away, in the dead of night.
“I’m still trying, ma.”
“He must still be asleep. I want to be the first person he talks to
when he wakes up.” she snaps back. Now she
checks the news wires – it has been a bloody day in the markets. What she needs most is safety - some treasury
bills or something - but there are no signals she can trust. She could load up on local securities, but that
takes so long that the play would have gone stale. Still, action must be taken quickly.
Her analytical methodology takes all these pieces of
information and outputs an answer that is actionable and exact. She instructs Esohe to call his list – “very high
priority,” she says. She goes fishing
herself, talking to a dozen people from the list. Someone wants to set up a meeting…but she
needs money now, not later. She needs a
million plus, and the big problem is that after tomorrow’s headlines, nobody will
want to invest.
Around three p.m., they finally get the other chief
on the line. “Don’t rush things,” he
says. He seems to suspect
something. Maybe he has seen the
news. “When I get back we can sit down
together. You always look so sweet.” In other words, no cash.
By around four p.m. the money is in from Chief Sam
U. Four hundred thousand only. She is relieved that Esohe made it before the
banks closed. Esohe also has two good leads
from the list, estimated at about eighty thousand. Even if he reels those in tonight, she still
needs half a million.
There are phone calls now from worried clients. She assures them, “we anticipated the
shake-out and are now operating our proprietary plan.” She ignores a phone call from Barack, who
then writes “So bad, Babe.” He is eager
to see her again, that’s what he means by “so bad.” His ardent sex drive irritates her.
She talks to her US brokers – they are just as
shaken. She signs various approvals for
the next day’s transactions. Just before
she can finish up, her assistant alerts that Money FM is on the line, so she
gives a quick radio interview while the staff is gathering around Tai’s desk
for the six o’clock staff meeting.
Ram is worried about a freeze-up in local. His boss has now finished the radio piece and
joined the huddle. Liquidity is always
an issue in such markets, Ram says, and he doesn’t want to be locked in when
there is an adverse movement – that is one horror movie that he never wants to
watch again. But she argues that the
local trade presents “un-missable” short-term gains.
She searches the men’s faces for signs of support. Ram shrugs.
He may disagree with her aggressive plan but she knows he’ll do what she
says and do it with extremely good judgment.
She is not worried about Ram.
“What kind of night can we look forward to on UpVol,
Tai?” she asks. Tai, who has never seen
a trading day like this one before, is too shaken to offer any opinions. He stammers that he’ll run the numbers and
she is annoyed that he wouldn’t just estimate but as usual leans too much on
exact figures.
The office manager, the only one at the meeting with
gray in his hair, does not voice his own worries, but his stiff, shocked
demeanor says all: if this company can’t make fifty thousand within this week,
it may have problems paying staff salaries.
The boss strives to reassure her
team: “money makes more money, it does not just disappear.”
This meeting continues until she receives a reminder
- “you coming?” – for dinner at 7pm with her former classmate. This guy is her old acquaintance, former
friend, fellow alum, something like that.
She is never really sure where to place him. She asks him for 30 minutes, she’s going to
be late. She decides presently that it’s best to
adjourn the meeting and quit the pep-talk, and so they close for the day, tired
and hoping for a bit of good luck to save them.
She picks up her bags, out the door, elevators,
security says goodnight, Mr. Yellow waiting down the stairs, and hurls her body
tired but still fragrant in its yellow blouse – it’s silk, very becoming - and patterned
skirt into the backseat of her jeep. Mr.
Yellow is looking in the rearview mirror with his head cocked, waiting for
instructions.
“We’re going
to Sonar,” she tells him.
“Yes, madam.”
She quickly dabs and sprays and touches-up. Her mirror approves.
At the restaurant-club Sonar, her friend Ego (pronounced
AY-go) watches her enter the main hall. When she reaches the table, he gives her a
kiss on the cheek. “You look tired,” he
says.
“It’s been quite a day. You know.”
She orders chapman and shrimp fried rice.
“You need something stiffer, Child. Take some of this.” She obediently downs his nearly-full glass of
Guinness, despite its bitter taste. Behind
Ego is a Nigerian oil painting - of a royal on horseback amid the crowd at a
Durbar festival. She notices that the
painting is bright while the furniture is dark.
She forgets to be sad, so preoccupied is she with the robe’s blue-white
and the scene’s yellow bright.
The waiter brings her rice. It feels soothing to have her mouth full of
this salty, oily stuff they call fried rice in this town. Soon she is telling Ego of her woes. She knows he has been through worse
situations, she wants his advice. “But a
million is nothing to you” she says finally.
“I just pick up scrap for a living.” he jokes. “I’m the dustbin man.”
“The rich dustbin man,” she says and sips her chapman. If chapman is a mixture of sweet (fruit
punch), sour (lime), and fizzy (soda), this one is mostly sweet, and she loves
it so.
“When the asset is rotten, then I go in.”
She remembers a poem from her childhood, “…flies to a tree and looks around // for
rotting rubbish on the ground” and thinks how her once-fresh assets have
become rotting rubbish…
Ego interrupts her thoughts with “how is your
musician?”
“He’s alright.
At least he doesn’t have to worry about going broke like this.”
Ego looks over her bust with greedy beady eyes. “He’s a lucky boy.”
“Hey, he’s not that young,” she says with a
chuckle.
“Cradle snatcher,” he says, his face laughing hard
but noiselessly. A vein bulges on his
head. It snakes from above his eyebrow
up to the North Pole on his head apparently.
He fits the poem perfectly: “…hunching
shoulders, old bald head // he’d like me better if I were dead.”
The little rhyme is about a vulture. Now she remembers a war movie - was it about
Somalia or Ethiopia? This skin-and-bones
African child in the dry sand, weak, but not quite finished yet. A vulture just a few meters away wanted to
make a meal of the child. Angelina Jolie’s
character - to the rescue - shoos the vulture away and nurses the youth.
“Who will be my Angelina?” she now wonders, feeling
sorry for herself and her financial wreck.
“Yes, another stout,” Ego’s voice rouses her again
from her thoughts. They have known each other since her second
year in Finance at NU, and years later they wound up in the same business
school for their MBAs. She considers
that his voice was never the best thing about him, and now he has lost his good
looks as well. He could be her ugly
Angelina. She could marry the ugly
vulture. She hates the idea so much that
her tummy heaves angrily.
“I have to go home.
It’s been a long day.”
“I’ll come with you,” says Ego, in a very quick
response.
She stops to watch his face for signs that he was
just joking. Still not sure, she chides,
“Ego, seriously now.”
“To the car.
I’ll come with you to the car.
What’s the problem?”
“Sure,” she answers, with relief. The anxiety in her which has just risen so
suddenly again falls so very sharply, making her more tired than ever. She needs some ice-cream or anything
sugary. She calls the waiter and asks
for an ice-cream. The restaurant has
strawberry and chocolate flavours. That
would be good enough.
He has his Guinness, she eats two scoops of
ice-cream. When they finish together,
they pick up all their property – phones and keys and bags – and leave a few
bills on the table. At the car, he
kisses her goodnight. She crawls in the
back of the car feeling disconnected from her mind, unlike the analytical,
methodological maven that she usually is.
Grasping to arrange her thoughts, she finds the poem*:
The
ugly vulture flaps and hops // pecks at scraps and walks and stops // flies to
a tree and looks around // for rotting rubbish on the ground.
He
likes dead things and he pecks them clean // he’s terribly ugly, dull, and mean
// hunching shoulders; old, bald head // he’d like me better if I were dead...
She remembers learning that in primary school: the
class seated in pairs, the wooden desks and chairs, reciting line-by-line after
their teacher during English period.
Mr. Yellow is driving her home and wondering about
the man who just pushed his madam against the back door with a vigorous
kiss. Unlike the other man at the house,
this one looks old enough to be the new boss.
He is glad about that: every woman needs a man to be her proper boss at
home, and every woman needs to be protected.
And the man she has at home now is too young to fit the bill. He looks in the rearview mirror to see her
slumped, asleep, in her seat. “She is a
curvy woman all over,” he thinks, and it makes him aroused.
In a few minutes they reach the condominium
apartments. The boss enters and locks
her front door, and Mr. Yellow is not needed any more. He starts his own long journey home without
the luxury of a private vehicle.
Barack is in, smelling of gin. She takes off her shoes and unhooks her bra
before falling asleep next to him. He
takes off more of her clothes and has sex with her. All she hears is a string of babe this, babe
that, disrupting her sleep.
In the morning she gets her corn flakes and tunes to
the news on cable TV. She has to go in
to work early and work on their big deficit.
She has a headache, so Barack brings her aspirin and water. Later he wants to join her in the
bathroom. “Time,” she complains and so
he stays out. He spreads butter on his
bread and prepares his hot chocolate milk.
He talks to her all through breakfast.
“Babe, you know I never ask you for money…” he says. It irritates her that he begs for money like
a child.
While she gets dressed for work, he keeps talking
about the plan at his studio, to “release two singles,” “test the market.” It irritates her that he has so much faith
that these songs of his will make money.
The real money is not in music, the real money is in money. That money makes more money is an obvious
fact to her. She needs to pay her staff
in two weeks – another fact.
“Babe, you look worried Babe. Is your head still paining?” She is mentally drawing an action plan to
earn fifty thousand within a week on eighty percent working capital. He moves in to touch her neck and
forehead. Her temperature is
normal. He combs his fingers through her
expanse of superstar hair. It pleases
him how it looks just like the hair on black Americans. They kiss with a great amount of desire. In all this, he avoids touching her scalp
where the fibers are sewn onto a rough, stiff basket. They kiss with such an unbearable amount of
desire that she makes time for love.
* Poem is attributed to a Macmillan Primary English
Reader.
