It was then that the company pulled the dirty trick.
Chapter 4 – The Realisation
‘They’ve stuffed us, Finn,’ said Sylvie at the canteen table midway through their third day.
‘I know, Sylv.’
‘There’s no way back?’
‘I shouldn’t think they’d make it easy.’
By then the nature of their new roles had been made clear, and the work had already begun. They’d learnt a word on their first day: it was Foreclosure. It had been one word amid a blizzard of them coming their way, and easy to lose sight of in that early rush of information. Yet now it stood out in Finn’s mind as if emboldened or italicised, each time he heard it said by an instructor or read it in their training notes. It was a word the company would have had to teach the staff at some point, though prudence seemed to have suggested that it should be once the new roles were filled and the holders had no way back.
On one of those first evenings back home from his new job, Finn had looked the word up in the Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary. He had somehow ended up with the family edition as a kind of living heirloom. Chambers, in plain English, had the word thus:
‘Foreclose – verb, to preclude: to prevent: to bar the right of redeeming.’
Fair enough, and brutal enough. But it was the noun form below this that better caught Finn’s new professional understanding:
‘Foreclosure – a foreclosing: the process by which a mortgagor [i.e. the homeowner], failing to repay the money lent on the security of an estate, is compelled to forfeit his right to redeem the estate (law).’
That seemed closer to the mark in terms of what his new work involved, though still hardly tapped the deep emotional sense in which he was coming to recognise it. Beneath these English definitions though were what he took to be the root words (for he found the abbreviations and italics in dictionaries baffling). Here the term revealed itself to have originated in the French word foreclore, meaning ‘to exclude’, itself formed of foris – ‘outside’, and claudere or clausum – ‘to shut’.
And that was what his working life now entailed: the shutting of people outside.
Sat in the canteen that day then, Finn was feeling pretty maudlin, telling Sylvie,
‘I was so desperate for change that I let myself get duped. And worse, I encouraged you.’
‘We encouraged each other. I’m a big girl, Finn. I got myself into this. I’m just not sure now how to get myself out.’
But her friend was becoming despondent,
‘What really hurts,’ he continued, ‘is that I honestly believed they were helping us, finding us other jobs when ours were threatened. Instead they…’
‘…rushed us into roles that no one in their right mind would apply for?’ Sylvie put her hand on Finn’s, for they were sat close together. ‘You’re such a sweetheart, aren’t you? Never been tough enough for the world.’ She gave him the best smile she could muster, and they sat there awhile, before returning to their desks.
Chapter 5 – Team F
The team structure of the floor on which they found themselves followed a naming convention. It was such an open secret that when Sylvie first heard others talk of it, she wondered whether it was even meant to be a secret at all. And if not, then why not just advertise it, with signs on the walls or hanging from the ceiling?
The floor itself was called simply Mortgages. Taking up the middle of the floor was Team S. Team S made up the rump of the staff, and the S was commonly understood to stand for Sales. Elsewhere was Team U for Underwriting, Team C for Contracts, and Team R for Resolutions (customer relations). There were also three partitioned offices together in one quiet corner for the various floor managers.
At the end of the floor with the best views of the city from their floor-to-ceiling windows, were Team A, A for Acquisitions. Sylvie knew that this would be the team that Finn – and most male staff – would work on through choice, if they had to work on any of the teams. For Team A were the poster boys, the Royal Air Force of the Mortgages floor. The job of Acquisitions was the snaffling of customers from other firms in mortgage transfer deals, offering lower rates or better benefits, and so robbing their competitors of custom.
With its high-pressure, high bonus, low-return-to-high-callrate culture, these men and women (for there were women there, and successfully so) would stay late and miss their lunches. And they would be allowed to do so by supervisors who fed the workaholism of their staff, all in the hope of each making only one or two ‘steals’ a day. For the commission on these would almost double the staff member’s (and their supervisor’s) take-home pay.
(There was also the spiteful pleasure taken among Acquisitions staff of knowing the copious amount of paperwork their competitor would have to prepare for the new mortgage provider.)
Of course, even those in Team A knew that their purpose was ultimately futile. For the rates they had to offer customers to lure them, and the costs of transferring contracts, meant they hardly broke even on these acquired accounts. It was also well-understood that the firm’s competitors each had teams doing exactly the same to them.
In fact, the whole Acquisitions area of the industry was an expensive folly, a power trip for managers, a flexing of the corporate muscles; and with the bill being picked up across the board by customers. Finn had the mental image of large city office buildings growing arms with boxing gloves, fighting each other across the town centre, each blow sending glass shattering down onto the pavement. Old heavyweights proving they were still in the fight.
Yet, if it was possible for any area of their industry to have glamour, then Acquisitions had it. Their staff were the objects of envy and admiration among the Sales and other teams. And having a friend on the A Team was itself a boastable ‘acquisition’, an asset in your after-working socialising (for there was a lot of that). And there was no shortage of people wanting to work there. For if you had to work for pirates, then you’d at least want to be riding at the bow of the ship with your cutlass in hand, rather than be stuck below deck slaving in the galley.
Around the corner from these other teams though, by the staircase entrance and the lift door, was Team F. Their location meant the whole staff passed them at least four times a day – as if to warn them all that that was where they could end up. Of course it didn’t take a genius to work out what the F stood for. The word that couldn’t have been more ubiquitous in Finn’s recent life had it been written backwards across his old T-shirt, so that he saw it every morning in the bathroom mirror – Foreclosure.
However, among the others on the floor, in their private snidey conversations, the team was known as nothing less than ‘Team Failure’. This was as accepted by the occupants of that administrative gulag as by those walking past it – and there were forever people walking past, they looking on mournfully as if whispering, ‘There but for the grace of God go I…’
Sylvie already had a friend in Sales, and so knew a little of the Mortgages floor. She had hoped that her friend’s team was where their sped-up recruitment process would land them. It wasn’t her dream job, and she knew how much her friend could grumble about it. But with the threat of redundancies hanging over them, Sales would’ve seemed like heaven.
Sales was something like Acquisitions-light, with less tension, more successes, lower bonuses and pay – but with just as manic managers. Here was the land of the flipchart at the end of the desks ruling all. Of each week a different cartoon felt-pen representation of each team member and their successes relative to each other, and relative to the management’s expected standards.
At least Team F would be spared this pressure, you might think. But no, for they were learning that they had targets too: of the number of case files prepared each day, to post on to the solicitors who would instigate the unmentionable process that gave their team its initial.
Chapter 6 – A Line in the Sand
Finn hadn’t ever kept his home town a secret as such. Indeed, he had no idea that people
hadn’t known he was from Sommerhill. Or that anyone who didn’t know would have any deep thoughts on the issue. He hadn’t even suffered much of a reaction to the news that the seminar would take him back there.
However, his unexpected confirmation of his home town on the minibus, and Sylvie’s exclaimed ignorance of his origins, now left the matter at the centre of his thoughts. Sommerhill, that outpost of industry, forgotten landmark of the provinces, a joke among metropolitans of where-not-to-go. A place he was proud of, but which he’d known he’d have to leave to look back and see clearly. Or at least leave his part of it, the suburbs that smothered in a freezing-mist embrace.
It wasn’t easy, for the suburbs seduced him in that same clutch. And ever since he had returned there in his thoughts, to those lampposts in the darkness, to the hedgerows, to the homes beyond their drives…
But Finn put such thoughts aside suddenly, realising that his mind was distracting him with images, hiding him in memory. For here he was now, not in the city he had fled to, where he now called home, but far away from there, in a different city. Indeed the place he’d left with such determination, the place he was recalling so vividly now.
And nor was he back in his home town as part of some grand return, a healing of the wounds that had had him leave – or of those other wounds created by tearing himself away. But instead he was back in an utterly meaningless capacity, merely as a small cog in a corporate wheel. He was part of a financial world that neither knew nor would understand the inner current now rushing through him.
Finn was not back there for any reason to do with mood or sense or history or memory, but to attend a conference for mortgage industry workers. He was about to enter a hall to hear a talk on ‘Foreclosure with Forbearance’. He wasn’t even certain of exactly what ‘Forbearance’ meant – perhaps he should have looked that up in his dictionary also. But he had a feeling it was to do with time, patience, taking care with people. And so the talk would be an attempt to square the circle, of somehow claiming it was possible to put families out on the street with kindness.
Finn gasped at the sinking-in horror of it, and had one of those moments of seeing yourself as if from outside yourself. At what point, at any stage of his life up to that moment, had he wished such an existence? Had he ever seen himself in such a role? Had he ever imagined he would have allowed himself, whatever the circumstances, to be corralled into such a fetid field?
‘What had my dreams been?’
He shocked himself by realising he had said that out loud, in the corridor, though thankfully with no one overhearing. And then he became slightly sad at no one overhearing, as he was quite proud of his subconscious statement, and wanted it witnessed and recorded.
Finn continued his train of thought internally now, it hardly under his control. He saw himself half-a-lifetime ago, at seventeen or eighteen: with no idea of what he’d like to be, or of what he’d like to do. He only knew it wasn’t to occupy any one of the half-a-dozen designated roles that life seemed to offer him.
Who were his heroes? The fiercest artists, writers and musicians. What did they advise, what could he take from them? Only to be yourself, be what you felt inside, and not to let the world shape you. They seemed to suggest that this right attitude was all it took to belong to an alternative society, where things were differently-aligned and infinitely more exciting. He hadn’t realised at that age how effortless true talent seemed, or how those in the public eye often spun their own narratives. Or how for most of those scrabbling around on the planet’s surface, unendowed with an illuminating genius, the best option was often to buckle up, try your best, and hope to get out of life alive.
‘Are you going in?’ asked a female delegate. Finn realised he was standing in the flow of traffic, blocking the door. He moved to one side, and gestured with his arms for her to pass. He left her question unanswered though – his current thoughts were too important to let the hateful parade ahead of him get in their way. Where was all this stuff coming from, about his hopes, his youth? What in God’s mercy was the purpose of it coming out now?
As the moments leading up to the mortgage presentation ticked by, so Finn began to notice that the stream of people going in around him was thinning. In fact it had almost stopped, and most of the attendees must have been inside by then. The doors were wedged open, and inside he could see maybe a hundred of them, waiting for the speaker to emerge.
What were these people’s hopes? Had they once dreamed? Had they possessed youth? Finn could scarcely believe it. He saw a room of Jaspers, all intent with their clipboards and eager to learn, no moral qualms pertaining to the nature of their work. And then he caught sight of Jemima’s hair.
That morning she had styled it in a bun and knotted it with a chiffon scarf, and so it was quite unmistakable. There at last in that sea of anonymity was someone Finn had experienced as an individual, and so could credit with human feelings. He knew Jemima disliked the work, perhaps as much as he and Sylvie did. However, by her nature, she found that dislike locked in battle with good sense. He watched her look down at her notepad, and then keenly up at the stage. And as Finn saw her at that moment, he thought that good sense was winning, that Jemima would endure those three hours as a dutiful employee, and give absolutely no sign of her turmoil as her insides rotted.
Chapter 7 – Even Frank?
A further memory emerged then, as if Finn wasn’t juggling enough of them already. It was of yet another staff training event, one from a good few years ago now and entitled ‘Perceptions’. The principle at issue that day had been that looking at your business from a new angle, as an artist might look at their work, would allow you to see the nature of it differently.
Younger and less cynical then, Finn had earnestly struggled to believe that the principles of Modernist sculpture could be applied to the doings of an insurance department. Yet he was floundering, and looked to Sylvie, so often his co-conspirator, who had already written on her notepad,
‘Is there one person in the room who buys this?’
Finn leaned over to write, ‘Only Frank’. For they had earlier noted the resemblance of the speaker to Frank Bough.
But it was what Sylvie then wrote beneath that that had stuck in Finn’s mind, and which came back to him now,
‘EVEN Frank???’
In questioning whether even the speaker believed what he was speaking, Sylvie had out-cynicised her friend, and left him with another of these moments of realisation – which was why he was remembering it now. For with one deft tug, Sylvie had that day pulled not only the last veil from before Finn’s eyes, but also the rug from under Frank… Finn would not be able to look at him straight for the rest of the talk.
It was a chill feeling he was left with, but a truthful one, and Finn was glad to have it. As ‘Perceptions’ rumbled on, breaking out into group exercises and workshops, Finn could only look around the hall, detached, and saying in his head, ‘Every one of us is lying, there is not one person being truthful in this room.’
At one point he fixed Frank in such a perfect glare that Finn considered that he must have punctured the spell. But only for a moment, before a startled Frank rebooted himself, and turned to talk to others about ‘what they’d learned’. Afterwards, at home that evening, Finn had suffered a bout of such guilt and depression that he remembered it still.
Back in the corridor outside ‘Foreclosure with Forbearance’, Finn looked down at the plush carpet, but wasn’t fooled – this floor was as bare as that on which Frank had stood after Sylvie had whipped his rug away. Since then Finn had felt that feeling in all kinds of places, and it scared him. Such as whenever a politician made a defiant speech on the television news. ‘All that bravado,’ Finn would think, ‘but who are you trying to convince? Us or yourself?’
Or at each Armistice Day, when the case for war and sacrifice were re-made. When Britain’s recent wars had been bloody and without result, then wasn’t there just as strong a case to say those deaths had been needless? Wh
o’d admit it? Who would want to? Yet without their iron moral certainty, the ruling class would have wilted during those long years of battle. And this left a question: How could you trust a race of people, even one you belonged to, who with big words and haughty manner could sell any lie to themselves, even a lie that killed?
Finn had lost track of time and space again. He was still outside the double doors. He didn’t know how long he’d been there. He had to go in now. Any longer and the doors would be closed, and he’d make a scene interrupting the introductions. Yet he could not move. Suddenly his thoughts became panic, with the realisation that his simply standing still and not entering the hall was creating a situation for himself, if not yet for others.
His thoughts though were distracted then by voices, as the sound of footsteps approached along the carpeted corridor. A man was asking,
‘So, is this the same presentation you gave in Nottingham last year?’
‘Essentially so,’ a woman answered, ‘though I’ve revised it based on what they responded to.’
The pair spoke in quiet, professional tones. She continued,
‘I noticed how they loved the bit about the “circle of trust”.’
‘Oh yes, of how a customer will still respect an agent’s honesty, even when they don’t like what they’re being told by them?’
‘Yes, and so I’ve expanded it. Meanwhile, softening the later insistence on managers to enforce professional attitudes in their teams.’
‘More carrot, less stick?’
‘It seems to work,’ she concurred.
‘We’ll be starting soon.’
Finn was startled to realise that the man was addressing him directly, as he had been deliberately avoiding eye-contact with the pair.