The Godzone Connection by Mark McKay

Author:Mark McKay [McKay, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mark McKay
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Tokyo, two years earlier.

When Phoebe arrived in Japan, which was the final stop of a mini-odyssey that had already taken her through India, Vietnam and Thailand, she had no plans to work again in private banking. She wanted some kind of work, but she thought it would probably be behind a bar in one of the English-speaking pubs in Tokyo.

Getting fired from the bank in London had been devastating, but once she’d recovered from the initial blow and made the decision to get right out of the UK for a while, she’d come to see it as a blessing in disguise. After eighteen months on the road through countries and cultures that weren’t completely in thrall yet to the Western obsession with conspicuous consumption, her values had changed. She no longer subscribed to the dogma that said your success as a human being was defined by the amount of wealth you generated. Sure, money was still important, but not as important as she once thought, that was all.

She had worked at the bank in London since leaving uni aged 24. She knew she’d been lucky to get such an opportunity and, yes, it was all about the money, as you’d expect if you worked in an investment bank. Phoebe had started as a graduate trainee and had advanced to the position of relationship manager and then, she’d asked about being a trader. So, they let her loose on the trading desks, where she joined a team of mostly male colleagues who practically sprayed their testosterone around the office. They made huge yearly bonuses when the market was up and they went long, and even bigger bonuses when the market was down and they went short. Of course, they got it wrong sometimes, and there’d been some dodgy market manipulations that had made the news, but that was just the way things worked. And they liked the high life, too.

Her move into trading happened a few months after she came back from New Zealand, after seeing her father arrested. The pace was frenetic and she had to learn quickly. She was a little more risk averse than most of the guys around her, and it worked to her advantage. She made steady gains, which resulted in steady bonuses. She bought a two-bedroom apartment on the strength of those bonuses and she got into the culture of the trading floor. If you wanted to survive out there, you had to be one of the boys.

It was ironic, though at the time Phoebe didn’t see it that way, that after getting so upset and indignant about her father being exposed as a drug dealer and then expending so much time and energy on berating him for that unfortunate character flaw, she then fell off her moral high horse and became a habitual drug user herself.

It started harmlessly enough, or so she thought. There was a pub the team would visit after work, most nights of the week. The woman who managed it dealt cocaine from behind the bar.

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