One by One

“You’ve got to understand, it was all just running on a shoestring in those days. It was a joke, those first six months. None of us were getting paid, not that Elliot gave a shit, I don’t think he’d spend any money at all if Topher didn’t make him. He’s been like that ever since school. But the rest of us did mind. Eva was running through her modeling savings like no tomorrow. Topher had finally pissed his parents off so much they’d cut him off without a penny, and he was sofa surfing with old school friends. I was working days at KPMG and nights at Snoop, and right at the bottom of my overdraft. And Liz was just this secretary who answered an advert online and was happy to work for a shit wage. I mean, even then, she dressed like some kind of sister wife, but she was efficient, and she didn’t make a fuss about working out of a crappy rented office with no air-con in South Norwood.”

“I didn’t mean that, I meant how did she end up being the one casting—”

“I’m coming to that. We were about two weeks off launching when we finally ran out of cash. We were just broke—flat broke—not a single avenue left. Credit cards, overdrafts, friends and family—we’d wrung them all dry, and we were about ten grand short of what we needed to keep the lights on. Topher had even sold his Ferrari, but it just wasn’t enough. For about four days it looked like we were going to the wall—we had bills rolling in and contracts we’d signed, and we were getting ‘letters before action’ and bailiff notifications left, right, and center. And then out of nowhere, little Liz pipes up that her grandmother just died and left her ten thousand pounds. And she says she’ll put it into the company. Only she wants security. Not interest—she wants shares in the company, and not just any shares—but voting shares. Well, we left it to the lawyers to argue the split, but the end result was thirty percent shares to Topher, thirty percent to Eva, nineteen to Elliot, nineteen to me, and two percent to Liz.”

“Two percent?” Miranda says. “Of a company that hadn’t raised any capital and was barely solvent? It doesn’t sound like much security for ten grand.”

“Some people might agree,” Rik says dryly. “But she’s getting the last laugh. That ten grand will be worth around twelve million if the buyout goes ahead.”

In my shock, I drop a log. It clatters to the slate hearth, knocking over a little pottery jar that holds firelighters. The jar smashes with a noise that sounds almost absurdly loud, and I catch my breath, ready to apologize, but Rik and Miranda don’t seem to have even noticed, and as I resume stacking the logs more carefully, they are still talking.

“Holy shit,” Miranda says, and she’s laughing, but in a slightly shocked way, as if this is the first time she’s heard the numbers. “I mean I knew the buyout offer was good but…” She looks like she’s doing sums in her head. “So if Liz is getting twelve, then that makes your share—”

“You can do the maths,” Rik says, and there’s a grin pulling at the side of his face. “But that’s the point. If the buyout goes ahead. The investors are getting antsy, and I don’t think they’re going to stand for another round of funding. If Topher just keeps on like this and runs us all into the ground—”

“Yup. Gotcha,” Miranda says, a little bitterly. “Back where we started, in the insolvency courts. But then, surely, it’s a no-brainer for Liz, isn’t it? Okay, Elliot will vote with Topher, we all know that. But if Liz uses her brain and votes with you and Eva, then ka-ching.” She makes a money-rubbing gesture with her fingers.

“Yeah, it’s just a pity Eva’s such a fucking bitch,” Rik says, half under his breath. “She doesn’t make it easy to do the right thing, sometimes.”

I’m trying not to eavesdrop, but it’s hard not to overhear what they’re saying, even above the music, and by the time I have finished clearing up the pottery shards, I know more than I ever expected about Eva’s bullying of the junior staff, Topher’s instability, and Snoop’s precarious financial position. It’s almost a relief when they move on to other topics—plans for tomorrow’s skiing, the crap Wi-Fi, Rik’s wife, who seems to be causing him some grief. At some point one of them turns up the volume on the music so that I can no longer hear their words clearly.

But as I stand, feeling the small of my back complain after the long day of lifting and bending, I do hear the tail end of Miranda’s reply to something Rik said.

“Well, you’re probably right. But in that case, we’ll just have to make her, won’t we?”

The words stay with me as I close the door quietly behind me and move out into the lobby, to stare out at the still-falling snow.

We’ll just have to make her.

Who are they talking about? Liz? Eva? Or someone else completely, Rik’s wife, maybe?

On the face of it, there’s nothing remarkable about her words. It’s a phrase you might hear any day of the week. So why does the cool determination in Miranda’s voice stick in my head?

LIZ



Snoop ID: ANON101

Listening to: Snooping XTOPHER

Snoopers: 0

Snoopscribers: 0

It is 11:02 p.m. I am up in my room. I am in bed, in my dressing gown, but I am not asleep. I am snooping Topher. Not because I want to listen to his music, which is always weird experimental club stuff, but because I am trying to work out whether he is all right.

There is no check-in function on Snoop. As far as location goes, the only way of knowing where people live is if they choose to list their location in the brief paragraph of description attached to each username. Still, some part of me had been hoping that his music choices would give me an insight into his psyche.

I don’t know what I imagined. Sad guitar solos. An infinite loop of “All by Myself.” What he is actually playing is an endless stream of angry Spanish punk rock. Or it could be Portuguese. It sounds annoyed, but that is as much as I can tell. On the plus side he is listening to something and is therefore presumably alive. Though on reflection, I realize I can’t even be sure of that. There’s nothing to say his phone isn’t just streaming to a frozen ditch. After a few minutes I minimize the app with a sigh.

The memory of our conversation on the sofa downstairs is still with me, like a hangover. I know what Topher was trying to do. He was trying to guilt-trip me. Trying to remind me of everything I owe him.

The thought should make me feel angry, and it does, in a way. He is an arrogant public school boy who got lucky with a great idea and, more crucially, a mummy and daddy who were prepared to bankroll him—at least for the first few years. He is everything I’m not. Rich. Entitled. Confident.

But underneath my anger there are some uncomfortable facts. The fact that he took a chance on a gawky, awkward twentysomething, who no one ever looked at twice. The girl from Crawley, smelling of charity shops and hand-me-downs and desperation—he looked past all that and saw the person inside—the real me, dogged, determined, prepared to give 110 percent.

Most important, when I offered to put my grandmother’s money into Snoop, he was the one who told me to stick out for shares, not repayment interest. Rik, Eva, they both tried to persuade me against it. They talked about the uncertainty of the returns—the possibility that Snoop might fold without ever making a profit. But Topher told me that shares would be in my own best interests. And he was right.