Well, we’re bringing only the most golden threads together tonight, make no mistake about that. A real opportunity to take stock and celebrate. Making something big happen bigger, feel biggest.
In a more concrete sense, this ghastly shindig takes place like clockwork once a year. Your appearance is an emerging unavoidable phenomenon that doesn’t yet have a name, but here we are once again – well, yes.
Viewed from the hotel ballroom’s balcony, the tables in the main hall look a bit like the wheels of some mechanical leviathan. Fake candles shimmer and indicate the machine’s readiness. But no cogs in here tonight, eh? It’s all dinner jackets and twitchy necks, shapeless careers solidifying in the over-egged glam.
Wander, wander, not to find but to get through the time. Finally you catch your breath for the first time at the gauchely named ‘Star Bar’. Prosecco soldiers are ranked and ready on the counter, don’t mind if I do. But even here innocuous choices have minefield-like downsides.
There’s Chris. Standard. Already partaking of the bubbly, and as you pad up you catch the tail end of a chat-up line that you’d assumed had been retired by an EU directive around 1995. Amelia? Amerie? Andrea? Anyway, her gently entreating smile at you to replace her in this duologue is admirably professional.
‘Chris! Alo-ha…’ you offer. This confident-sounding start masks a worry that Chris might be a bit of a doomed choice of companion for tonight’s jamboree. Because Chris is not very on-team. He’s likely to get out of hand and yell things during the award-giving, which represents the ultimate level of decadence in corporate morality.
You like Chris when he’s sober, or at least you distantly approve of his own brand of compromises between time, qualification and money. But something of his devil-may-care attitude freaks you out. You could be him inside three years if you don’t do something – anything – else. Commitment and compromise end up so tightly wound, and nobody likes a clever hang-around. The ambitious might be ugly in motion, but theirs is the only beauty that’s true to its code. Business would rather be profitable than right any day.
‘Ready to enjoy the good news about the five-year plan, comrade?’ Chris is doing a German accent because it’s easier than a Russian one. As most here know only too well, markets are all about reading small signals and Chris’s clip-on bow tie is already at a jaunty angle that heralds massive imminent sell-offs.
‘Ha! Yes – the big party, one more time. Still – might I bag sir a free drink?’
It’s pretty early doors, but Chris’s personal crash already seems pencilled in for about 10.15pm, tops – a prediction that even someone as tangentially connected to the company’s key product lines as you can predict.
Thus far you’ve maintained a pragmatic invisibility, been ambiently skilled, gaining a knack of rewriting your job description without anyone noticing – these well-paid duplicities have kept your city life afloat. But, ah, the annual office party – your attendance can never be simply subtext. This is a night for the full-throated pledges of fealty and, with your luck, a horrifying revisitation of the company song.
Platitudes and plates of food. Endless hours of it. It’s a shame capitalism is never as bracingly vicious as the economics textbooks claim.
But tonight’s a night to celebrate the innovators, so fuck it, why don’t we make this interesting? They’ve hedged the weather, why not bet on the very roller coasters we build for our hires? Give your family a better tomorrow with the Cerebus Staffscape 2015 Galacti-Bond.1
Four to seven repeat visits to the champagne-dispersal area later, everything that should be coming together feels like it’s coming apart. Money and value and influence flow around the room in liquid, pulsing lights and conversational forms. A Strictly Come Dancing pink-blue-ish hue is projected onto every white-shirted surface, rendering the better-looking brokers that bit more Ken doll than they already were. The lighting is intended to function like the bubbly: it’s a glue that says ‘Tonight, you are all stars’ (the ‘s’ should be Bond-villainously sibilant). Communal endeavour is praised to the rafters, despite the fact that most people here have spent all week trying to screw each other over.
Some – the brave, the risk-takers – will be recognised, not from above, but by us all. Well, strictly speaking, it’s recognition from the board of directors in their spiritual role as gifted entrail-readers of the share-owners’ will. But the broad outline is: a long-destined glory lies within our grasp. We are both Koreas, North and South – lofty zombified nationalism and people who are actually good at stuff. A timeless mission, as we build the imaginary progress of a fictional tomorrow.
Chris slumps at a careworn 45 degrees into the seat next to you with two more of tonight’s go-to cocktails, somehow very much in his element.
‘Bloody hell… this is longer than the Oscars,’ he unloads loudly into a room-sized pause. In a daytime, work-a-day context, Chris’s affably focused slave-driving means his team of rapid-rapacity software developers remain pre-eminent. They’re the invisible pillars of the success that tonight’s event will lionise in the more traditional form of the trading-floor Charlies. But it explains his invite, just the same. Businesses take Chrises in vain at their peril – and their short-termism is rarely that short-sighted.
From his beach-recliner angle, Chris is eyeing Susanna, the Forex queen of Level 11, and you Sherlock that there probably isn’t a Mrs Chris. Here every year, yet you always somehow forget that these are also hunting grounds.
Years ago, in a somewhat different place, held together by cheap beer and the nation’s fading ideal of an arts education, you’d studied under a series of very different alpha males. Greek philosophy, European Romanticism, Cartesian dualism and heaps of British mathematico-emotionalism. Imperious and exotic notions about life’s content and motivations. Categories within categories, details that both explained and divided what little an 18-year-old might know about the world. But delivered with the splendid authority of those truly gifted with social awkwardness.
Ironically, you’d laughed at the parlour-game idea of a division between mind and body back then. Yet look at us now. Double lives are everywhere, simultaneous alterna-yous, onion-like layers with never-touching, parallel goals. Now we’re at a poetry reading. Tonight we are corporate boosters with our eye on the prize. If it’s 6am, let’s just agree to have unlikely and excitable opinions about everything. You and I can be so many.
Back here in the hall of the victors there’s only room for the unapologetically present, mind. They even have charming little awards made of plastic to give out – a gender-unfocused statuette for homes that mostly lack for mantelpieces. Breathe, applaud, smile. And the oxygen-plus that fills the room is proper winner-gas, draw deep and think on where you see yourself in five years’ time.
A zing of feedback from the lectern snaps your attention back from the largely unfathomable table fascinator that stands proudly, casting malevolent shadows on the pepper mill and mustard dish.
The fizz is beginning to lose its fizzle in your mouth, proof your mood hedge has probably peaked, and yes, the time now starts with a 10. Timing is admittedly all but you could definitely probably quit now, without offending the elders, couldn’t you?
‘More champagne, sir?’
A pretty if professional smile and big brown eyes. You want to say, ‘You’re beautiful and not part of this drama and I was like you once, I was outside, and I’m not here either, although I am here, and that’s why I’m smiling at you and you’re probably a dancer when not catering to the catering and we could run away together and teach yoga in southern Portugal.’ But you actually say ‘Lovely!’ with a borrowed smile, and we’re all rebubbled.
Chris has been semi-coherently trying to interest you in the concept of an after-party. He’s booked a suite at the hotel, what with having a sensible house too far by train for this kind of night.
You weigh the potential horrors. But in that moment’s pause, Stefanie Bickell (12th floor, private lift to the office’s mythic sky garden), rising star of complex repackaged degradations, has taken to the stage, wide-eyed and clearly much invigorated with her own award of just 10 minutes previous. She takes the mic with, you’ve got to say, an adorably naïve gait, given how many important human resource verticals are looking on. For a few moments the whole thing actually feels as gloriously real as television.
‘Hi everyone! Isn’t this amazing? Whoop! Okay, I am going to read this out properly, I promise… Gary! Don’t, you’re putting me off. So… exciting! The… 2014 award for Most Innovative Structured Investment Vehicle goes to…’
More in-jokes and outward smiles. The prize-winners’ Oscar-ish figurines are featureless, blank and smooth, perhaps another dark clue as to what the future holds. You’re not marooned as such, just incapable of delivering on a stated desire to leave. A tall ladder extends out of the back of the stage, which you would jump onto in front of everyone if only it had some rungs. But it has none. Bugger. Would screaming help? Something for the after-party perhaps, but you only live one night bus away so there’s really no excuse to stay – and yet not enough impetus to be gone.
With luck and the daily guidance app that nags you not to join the circus or form a cult and knows where you live, you’ll make it home again. Somewhere on the way home the two sides of the Venn diagram will blur back into one, and you’ll forget everything in the prize of sleep.