Read by Gloria Sanders
Black Cod was the name of the Japanese restaurant opposite our offices in Canary Wharf. It’s closed now, but in the boom years it was where we took clients visiting from Tokyo if we wanted more exciting Japanese cuisine than sashimi or tempura. Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t quite El Bulli, or The Fat Duck, or any of the other really way out Michelin-starred places, but then most of the clients we entertained were portfolio managers for the big Japanese semiconductor and automotive conglomerates. They had conservative palates.
Most of the time, dealing with clients based in Tokyo was straightforward. It was all done by email or over the phone. Darryl Ferris, my boss, the head of equity sales, took the view that, for all the complexity of some of the products we were broking, we might as well be working in a butcher’s shop.
“It’s simple,” he used to say during the induction course for new members of the team. “Clients call me. They say to me, Mr Darryl, which sausages are good today? I say Mr Mikimoto, let me see what I’ve got in the sausage department. I have a look and I sell them the good sausages. They put the good sausages in their portfolio and then they can fuck off and play golf for the rest of the day. They’re happy. We’re happy. And everybody makes a lot of money.”
Darryl had started his working life as a porter down the road in the meat market at Smithfield, and prided himself on the fact that he still hadn’t scrubbed all the blood out from under his nails.
It was only when things went wrong, when we advised clients on a product and they lost money, that it became more complicated. And if that happened with a Japanese client, well they always wanted to have the discussion face to face. That was the other reason why Black Cod was such a good venue. It was high up, which nearly always gave a difficult conversations a crucial sense of perspective. The long curving windows encircled the restaurant like the seaweed around a sushi roll. You might go into lunch expecting a rough ride, but a few bottles of sake and a good meal later, once everyone had clinked glasses and said Kanpai to the birds’ eye view of the Thames snaking away towards Tower Bridge, and you’d emerge back on track. The client would fly back to Narita as happy as a fat fucking Buddha and you’d try your best not to repeat the mistake.
The last time we went to Black Cod was August 2008, less than a month before Lehman Brothers collapsed. Our client, Mr Noguchi, was portfolio manager for a major trading house. He’d become concerned about the performance of some of the US residential mortgage-backed securities we’d brokered. Darryl thought they were good sausages. We all did. You only had to look at the stats. Plus, you have to remember what the climate was like back then. The Japanese were getting next to nothing on their domestic investments, so they’d all become tempted by what was on offer overseas. Even the riskier, lower-grade sausages. Junk bonds, credit default swaps, and, of course, the collateralised debt obligations linked to US housing loans. Anything that was offering higher returns. They swallowed it all.
“Where do you want to do the meeting?” I asked Darryl.
“Black Cod,” he said. “You, me, Mr Noguchi and Kevlar Sally.”
Around the middle of that summer, as I’m sure you’ll remember, things had started taking a turn for the worse. All over the US, subprime borrowers were defaulting on their mortgages – posting the keys back through the door and walking away – and all of a sudden the income is drying up on the pool of loans underpinning the securities the Japanese had been filling their plates with. And that meant we were getting more calls from Tokyo, asking for face time.
There were five of us at the meal. Mr Noguchi, Miss Kawabata his assistant, myself, Darryl and Sarah Keifer, the interpreter – Kevlar Sally, as we called her. Kevlar was the most unassuming person you could imagine. Doll-like features and immaculately groomed. But completely unflappable, even in a shit storm. She had what Darryl liked to call Kate Adie eyes. A steely and unwavering thousand-yard stare. Eyes that said “I’m bulletproof”. I’ve been at investor conferences where Kevlar has been interpreting. I’ve heard her deliver brutal putdowns to questions from the floor in the clipped and neutral tones of an air stewardess demonstrating how the oxygen masks work. It’s a bit like watching Hello Kitty beat the crap out of her opponent in a cage fight. Plus Darryl had a thing for her. Mind you, he had a thing for Kate Adie too.
“Mr Noguchi has asked that I only translate his replies,” she told us both at the start of the meal.
“His passive understanding of English is excellent, so you may address him directly when you respond to the matters he wishes to discuss.”
“Sure thing, Sally. We’re in your capables.” Darryl said.
Noguchi was your typical in-house portfolio manager. Slightly heavy around the waist, with thinning hair and a light sheen of moisture across his forehead and nose, as if someone had just given him a glaze with the ambre solaire.
“It is regrettable,” Kevlar began. “That the performance of some areas of the portfolio has been so lacklustre in recent months. I take very seriously this matter as I believe it was you, Mr Ferris, who recommended the products to us.” She was translating as Mr Noguchi was speaking, not even waiting for him to finish his sentences. That’s what I find so amazing about interpreting. The way people like Kevlar can just dive right into the head of somebody else, so that there is no gap between them. It’s like some sort of ventriloquist voodoo. He speaks, she opens her mouth and, hey presto, it’s intelligible.
“My firm has concerns that perhaps you have not been sufficiently thorough in your research before recommending certain products to us. We take this matter very seriously as ultimately it is the assets of our shareholders that we are investing.”
“Welcome to the world, Mr Noguchi,” Darryl replied, looking directly at his client. “You aren’t the first and you won’t be the last to make a loss. We all need to get things in perspective,” he said. “There is something in the nature of money that means at any given point in time, some will have and others will have not. Rule number one. It comes and it goes. Like the tide. Let’s just say we’re at low tide right now.” Darryl smiled and gestured to the window with the panoramic view of the Thames.
Noguchi did not look amused. He wiped his mouth with his napkin before speaking. After a few seconds Kevlar picked up the translation.
“I wonder,” Kevlar said. “If you even know what we are eating right now?”
Darryl flinched. If there was one thing he hated, it was anybody questioning his competence.
As it happened, that day we’d ordered the tasting menu, just to make things simple. They’d brought a few amuse-bouches to start us off, but by that stage we were onto the mains.
“Of course I do,” Darryl said. “It’s black cod. We’re eating black cod.”
Black cod was also the signature dish of the restaurant. The chef did it under the grill. The skin light and crisp and golden, the flesh flaky and imbued with a richness that was hard to describe. It sort of dissolved on your tongue and left you feeling all warm and satisfied. Back then, I used to think of it as the taste of money.
Mr Noguchi said something else to Miss Kawabata under his breath, then spoke aloud so Kevlar could translate.
“And this black cod, maybe you would have me believe this is a species native to the seas around the United Kingdom?”
Darryl looked annoyed.
“Sure it is,” he said. “Black cod. It’s like the black swan, Mr Noguchi. For years and years all we see are white cod. White cod, white cod, white cod. For centuries. That’s all we know. We decide there is no other colour of cod. Fishermen keep hauling the same catch, night after night. Their nets full of the stuff. Endless albino fish, stretching to infinity. They’re longing to see some other hue. A hint of brown maybe. A suggestion of magenta. But no. Just more fucking white cod. And then one dark and stormy night this particular fisherman, he pulls in his net, and lo and behold, among all the white cod, there’s a black fucker flapping on the deck. And after that, everything’s different. It’s a world with black cod in it.”
Kevlar waited until Noguchi had responded.
“But this is nothing more than cod dipped in soy sauce. It is the sauce that makes the flesh black,” she said. “It is not some mythical black fish. Yet you would have me think I am eating something special.”
Darryl smiled.
“It’s caveat emptor, Mr Noguchi. Buyer beware. You bought the products. You have your own due diligence, and we can’t use promissory language. You know the way it works. Did you not think to investigate what was in them?”
Kevlar conferred with Noguchi.
“Did you not think to carry out your own checks before recommending them?”
“Look Mr Noguchi. I’m just a salesman. I look around and if I like the look of something, if the numbers stack up, I’ll sell it to you in good faith. I’m not going to start asking endless questions.”
He paused, and I could sense he was about to say something stupid. “And at the end of the day, it’s not my money.”
There was a silence from the other side of the table. Kevlar waited for Noguchi to respond.
“In my country,” she said. “The host is responsible for what he serves to his guest. He would never think to prepare food he did not understand. His guest is his responsibility, just as our money was yours.”
“I sell sausages,” said Darryl. “If you don’t like my sausages, go somewhere else.”
“But what is in your sausages?” Kevlar paused. Mr Noguchi’s speech had become more guttural. Sometimes the Japanese do that. When the men speak among themselves. Their speech loses all its politeness and becomes terser, harder. “Lips and arseholes,” she said after a moment. “Lips and arseholes. That is what you serve me. Do you have no shame? Do you have no respect for other people’s money?”
It might have gone on like that for a few more minutes, Noguchi expressing his indignation and Darryl batting it all away like a politician, but at that moment something happened.
There was a gasp from one of the waitresses in another part of the restaurant. In a few seconds the whole room seemed to have lost its vague happy buzz. Everything was harder edged all of a sudden. People were standing up from their tables and pointing towards the long picture window that ran along the north side, giving that incredible panorama of Canary Wharf. It was towards our office building that they were pointing.
I stood up and went over to the window. Darryl had his phone in his hand and was angrily texting, probably letting his boss, Tony Edwards, know that Noguchi was pissed off. Noguchi and Miss Kawabata were unsure of what was happening in the restaurant. They looked like foreign tourists at a busy railway station. Kevlar was still sitting at the table, implacable as ever, waiting for the next exchange between Noguchi and Darryl.
When I looked out of the window, I could see what everyone else in the restaurant was so alarmed by. There was someone up on the roof of our building. A man. An office worker in a suit and tie. Nothing out of the ordinary about that, except that he was there on the roof and not in his office. Everywhere beneath him you could see people in their fishbowls, going about their business, photocopying or sitting in meeting rooms around oval tables. And here he was, a fish out of his fishbowl. On the roof. He was close to the edge, too, and for a moment I tried to find a rational explanation to it all. I thought he might be someone from facilities management, inspecting something. Perhaps the winches that secured the window-cleaning cradle, or the ventilation units with their circling fans.
“Darryl, come over. What’s going on?”
He stood beside me.
“Fuck me. That muppet’s going to jump,” he said.
A few of the people closest to us in the restaurant turned and glared at Darryl when he said that. but there were plenty who were transfixed. They just kept on watching, noses pressed to the glass. It was something none of us had ever witnessed before. We didn’t know what it meant. And then the guy did it. He stepped right to the edge of the building, put his toes together like a diver on the high-dive board, and jumped.
Sometimes experience is the most wonderful thing. It leaves you feeling enriched and alive; a sort of tingling that travels to the ends of your limbs. And sometimes, like this, it can make you feel as if you’ve swallowed something really bad.
Kevlar Sally came over to the window and stood behind us.
“Other people’s money, eh chaps?” she said. “I’ll email you the invoice for today.”
And then she, along with Mr Noguchi and Miss Kawabata, left the restaurant.
It took a while for things to work themselves through the system. Darryl didn’t make it beyond the first cull, which came in December. Exercises, that’s what the HR departments call them, these redundancy tsunamis. As if they’re just part of the company’s keep-fit routine; which I suppose in some sense they are.
Black Cod closed in late 2009, when the credit crunch had really started to bite. It didn’t have big debts, not like some. Not like Darryl, for instance, with his three-bed semi in Putney, a mortgage five times his annual salary, and two kids in private school. No, the size of the restaurant’s debt wasn’t the issue. It was just that the creditors, the people who the money belonged to, had decided that enough was enough. They called time on the loans. Other people’s money.
It’s like when you watch a fisherman let the fish take the line further and further out to sea, and you think he’ll let it run for ever. He won’t. At some point he’s going to lock the line and start reeling it in. And it’s only then that you get to try something new, something you’ve not had before. Because it’s at that point you taste the hook.
(c) Gregory Jackson, 2015
Gregory Jackson has studied at City Lit under Zoë Fairbairns and John Petherbridge. His writing has appeared in The Mays, The Independent, and the Bridport Prize anthology. He lives in London.
Gloria Sanders's work includes audio-book narration for the RNIB and frequent collaborations with Cabinets of Curiosity. She has performed her devised one-woman show with Hide and Seek Theatre, The Clock, at the Brighton Fringe, the Pleasance, Islington, and the Artscene Festival in Ghent. She is fluent in Spanish.
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