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birdscreeches · 6 years

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Pamahiin || Aisha R.

"Pamahiin roughly translates to English as ‘folk superstition’. An unjustified yet widely held belief.”

My lolo had slept on a banig on the floor of a room filled to the brim with four grandchildren’s worth of stuffed toys, action figures, and school books. My lola slept on a bed right next to him in the same room, and when I asked him why he didn’t just sleep there—there was certainly plenty of space—he’d always tell me the floor was better for his back. More natural, or something. I just figured he had a personal vendetta against beds.

This is the same room he died in. Much to what I’m sure would’ve be his utter dismay, he didn’t die on his banig. Instead, at around six in the morning in my senior year of high school, he died on a hospital bed.

We bought the bed. We also bought several oxygen tanks, an IV stand, a wheelchair, something that functioned like a heart monitor, and a lot of different tubes for a lot of different things. In a room filled with toys and childhood keepsakes, we built him a hospital room. Thinking about the room and the sickening contrast between past and present and a future that was ending sent a sour pang through my chest. Like somebody had taken a metal bar and ran it across the bones of my ribcage. Xylophone sounds of guilt I couldn’t stand to hear every day.

To create silence, I pretended the room didn’t exist anymore.

It worked rather well until the morning Nanay had pulled me into the not-room. I was already dressed in my uniform, my bag weighing my shoulders down, when she told me to say something to Lolo before I left. Or before he did.

“Feeling ko malapit na,” she told me.

So I went. I barely looked at Lolo. He hadn’t been able to speak for months, by that point. He was more a corpse than anything. No more was the weird old dude who truly believed sleeping on the floor was more comfortable. Just a body we were keeping alive in a room I erased.

Not wanting to be rude, I forced myself to look at him, if only for a second. The eyes that looked back at me were murky and unseeing. Around us, various toys looked at me with the same kind of gaze.

“See you later, Lolo.” I said.

Unable to last any longer, I headed out of the room that didn’t exist and out of the house. Standing by the garden, I tapped my foot impatiently, waiting to leave for school.

A couple of seconds later, his heart stopped beating.

A little bit after that, I’m told what basically amounted to the fact that the last thing my lolo heard was my lie.

Now, the thing to focus on here shouldn't be his death, but the room. The not-room. The room I rendered gone. This was a neat superpower of mine; I could flip a switch in my brain and change what was and what wasn’t.

It all started with the spoon.

As a child, my lola taught me the intricacies of superstition. Don’t go bed with your hair wet, or you’ll go insane. Jump on new years, and maybe we can stop buying you Cherifer. If you drop your utensils, you will get a visitor. I found immense joy in these small magics of life, that one thing could cause another even if it didn’t make any sense. It didn’t have to. Afterall, with my superpower, I made it all true.

All I had to do was believe hard enough.

To the skeptics, I raise the fact that the galaxy revolved around the Earth because people believed it to be. The world was flat because people believed it to be. There’s somewhere we go after we die because we believe it’s real. We can rearrange the cosmos, shape planets, and live after life is over. If that wasn’t a superpower, I didn’t know what was.

One pathetic night at ten years old, I ate dinner alone. Everybody was busy or out or something and I was ten years old and alone. Petulantly, I threw my hand out, pushed my spoon off the the table, and watched it clatter to the floor. You will get a visitor.

I waited one second. Nothing.

Two. Still nothing.

Three, and something in my chest began to hurt. A bar dragged across my ribs, clanging around.

Four. The notes inside me said how dare you.

Five seconds in, I scrambled to the ground and picked the spoon up.

At the end of that night, nobody did come. My point here wasn’t that my superpower was bullshit, but instead that there was a caveat to it. I could believe in what I wanted, I could change my own reality and make things real or not-real, but the consequence to that power would always catch up.

A sound, a feeling, a something. Whatever it was, it always asked me the same thing: what have you done?

Twenty minutes after my lolo's heart stopped beating, we did end up leaving for school. My tito had taken us through the regular traffic that trickled Marikina into Katipunan Avenue, the normal slog of slow moving cars. Usually, the radio would quietly croon 70s and 80s music into the morning. 105.9 DZG-FM Mega Manila's first and only retro hit station—

On that day, nobody touched the radio. The rumble of the engine was the only sound to be heard.

In the passenger seat, my brother took a nap. Next to me, my younger sister had her earphones in, staring out the window, unmoving. I folded and unfolded the cuffs of my jacket over and over again until we arrived school and I clambered out of the car.

Class that day was almost hilariously uneventful. I returned a red pen to one of my classmates (I had lost all my own red pens). I took a Math final (I failed it very badly). I dry heaved into a toilet (the cuffs of my jacket were folded up). I put one leg in front ot the other, and kept walking, and nobody asked me anything. It was a normal day, and if it wasn’t, I told myself it was. I could rearrange planets, if I wanted. One day was child’s play.

In my gut, I didn’t feel the stirrings of mourning so much as the sound of a clinking spoon against the floor. Count the seconds now. How long until I caved? How long until the reality I crafted myself started to thrum with shame?

Lolo was my mom’s father, and Nanay had always been the type to get things done inordinately fast. After school, my sister and I were taken to a holding room in Loyola Memorial Park. There, everything was set up. Catering, relatives who were called from the province throughout the day, an army monobloc chairs, and of course, a coffin where Lolo now laid in. The only thing we were missing was one of those tarps all dead people seemed to have, but this was obviously a rush job.

“Maybe next time,” I joked to a couple of kittens I found under the table laden with food. There were two of them. A grey one and an orange one.

At around eight in the evening, we held a small mass in the holding room. Being a close family member, I got the front row seats. The priest was nice. He told jokes and had a voice that was made for condolences, and I enjoyed listening to him until he started the homily. His homily was about what I said to Lolo before his heart gave up. “See you later.” He went on for a long time about how he found it beautiful. Meanwhile, I wanted to go find a bathroom to try to vomit in again, but I stood my ground. I figured if I was going to have a reaction that strong, it would be because this was a wake. Not because of my lie. Not because of me. Somebody was dead, and all I could think about was myself. How dare you.

Shut the room closed and pretend it didn’t exist. My mind was no different. Obfuscate. Reroute. Distract. For the rest of the homily, I tuned out the voice of the priest and instead looked to the coffin.

I saw Lolo pretty clearly behind the glass. He looked off. In the middle of a solemn mass where I could hear my Lola crying, where, in my periphery, I saw my older sister’s tears fall to the floor, I almost laughed. I almost doubled over when I realized they put makeup on him. There was powder on his face. He had lip tint. My gut hurt from keeping it in. God, I thought. He would’ve fucking hated this.

When the mass was over, teary relatives filtered outside and began to eat. It’s amazing what food and company can do, because in roughly five minutes, all the tears were gone, replaced now by boisterous stories and loud conversation. Feeling a little safer, I told somebody about the makeup thing. When I’m met with laughter, I smile for the first time that entire day.

One by one, I watched everybody leave. They’d be back tomorrow. There’d be more people tomorrow. I sat by the food table, all the catering stuff cleared out and gone, and played with the kittens. They cuddled onto my lap, happy to have warmth and attention as I cooed over them.

It was at that moment, with my hands full of purring fluff, that I realized I hadn’t cried the entire day. While my hands moved over soft fur, I realized I hadn’t cried today because he didn’t die today. His heart stopped beating, but he was already dead for a long time. At least for me he was. At least I had created the story in my head to make it like he was. Here were the not-rooms and magic spoons and people who were dead before a doctor declared them dead. It’s one hell of a superpower. It’s one hell of a responsibility too, but I was sixteen and stupid and still counting down for the moment where I scramble for the spoon. To the sound of soft mews, I realized that the pin had dropped. Now it was a matter of when I’d pick it up.

The orange kitten pawed at the rolled down cuff of my jacket. Its claw dragged a faint line of red against my skin.

And I bled.

Now the worrying thing is that for the past month, I’ve been dreaming. This was an anomaly. My anxiety usually meant restless nights which usually meant that most of my dreams were lost to exhaustion. Dreams for me felt like something you needed to pull free from a strong undercurrent. It just so happened my grip has always been weak.

When I did dream, when I did remember them, it’s because instead of having to hold on, the dream clamped around my wrist, crawled up my arm, and wrapped itself around my neck. When I did dream, I woke up gasping. A slight change of semantics now; when I did dream, technically, it’s because they were always nightmares.

I preferred restless blurs any day, but for the past month, I haven’t been lucky.

The dreams vary slightly each and every time. Sometimes I was at school. I was at home. I was at the grocery store. I was at the Jollibee a minute walk away. Sometimes there’s somebody with me and sometimes I was alone. Sometimes there was rain. Sometimes there was fire.

But the constant was my teeth. No matter what happened, I always felt something shatter in my mouth. One by one, bloodied tooth shards came loose. They tumbled past my lips and into my shaking hands. When I thought all my teeth were gone, that finally, it’s done, it started all over again with new teeth breaking and coming apart. On one horrifying occasion, I pressed my hand to my mouth to to keep it shut. The teeth continued to break nonetheless and I felt them slide down my throat.

I woke up gasping.

Teeth falling out was a common enough recurring dream that the interpretations were limitless. If Freud was to be believed, these dreams either meant I needed to get laid soon or get off more. Others said that fear was taking control of my life, as if I didn’t know that already. My brother told me that maybe, I needed to see a dentist. I told him to fuck off.

“It means somebody is going to die,” Nanay told me over lunch. We were at a sushi place, and she popped a salmon sashimi into her mouth as if she didn’t just say the creepiest thing ever.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” she said. Another salmon. “Pamahiin.”

“I’ve doomed us all, then.”

“You have to bite on aluminum,” Nanay pointed her chopsticks at me. “And then say ‘this will not happen’.”

I made a show of biting down on my fork (I could never get the hang of chopsticks) before releasing it. “This will not happen.”

“No, you have to say it while you’re biting down.”

“Theeehs will nohh hapehn?” I tried again, fork in my mouth. My younger sister started to laugh.

“And you have to do it as many times as you had the dream.”

“That’s—it’s been a month, that’s over twenty times! You’re messing with me!”

“I’m not! I’m your mother,” she faux gasped.

“You do know that that fork is made of steel, right?” Tatay said. My younger sister lost it, bending over and laughing like a loon.

When I got home, I googled the pamahiin. Various sources confirmed that Nanay wasn’t messing with me, but they did say that it wasn’t aluminum you had to bite on, but wood. Between a faceless blog page and my own mother, I decided to believe the one who could whack me in the head.

When everybody had fallen asleep, I went to the kitchen and tore off a small square of aluminum foil. I folded it, bit down, and said, “This will not happen. This will not happen. This will not happen.” My garbled, pleading litany.

That night, my teeth fell onto the floor of my dreamscape yet again.

Who would I use my superpower on next?

Almost midnight on the day Lolo’s heart stopped beating, it was finally time for us to leave. Nanay would stay behind; it was her job to keep watch. Vaguely, I remembered something about aswangs stealing dead bodies in the night. Good luck to whatever aswang dared go against her.

I pried Orange and Grey off of my hoodie, waved goodbye to Nanay, and sleepily climbed into the car with the rest of my family. Tired and weary, I watched the bright blurs of streetlights zoom past, looking forward to passing out in my bed.

But then instead of turning right onto J.P, Rizal after crossing the river, Tatay kept driving straight.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Somewhere.”

“Why?”

“Never go straight home after a wake,” he said. Ah. Right.

Which is how we ended up at a Ministop across Sta. Elena High School.

I idly walked through the aisles of the store, instinctually gravitating towards the candy section. As I looked upon a selection of Cadburys, I thought about whatever spirits that had hitched a ride with us doing the same. Would they like fruit and nut, or just plain chocolate? I thought, laughing a little to myself. Would they be pissed knowing of all places we left them, it was at a goddamn Ministop? I thought, imagining a Sadako like figure tapping her foot by the cashier.

Would they wonder why I didn’t cry at my own lolo’s wake? I thought, my laughter dying down. Would they wonder if I had feelings? I thought, my stomach began to sink. Would they wonder if I had a heart?

In this too-bright aisle, surrounded by sweets, the spirits we were brushing off, and the ghost I refused to even acknowledge, tears welled up in my eyes. They didn’t fall. I blinked them away before they could, but not before my rib cage rattled the dissonant notes of something terrible.

The funny thing was that this wasn’t because I suddenly accepted he died, as if there was something about the ambiance of a convenience store that hammered the point in. I accepted he died long before, but as tears threatened to spill past my eyes like dream teeth falling out of my mouth, like a spoon clattering to the ground, I realized that the glacial five seconds had finally passed. What have you done? I told myself a story so hard I believed it. How dare you? I switched mourning for safety. What is the price you’ll pay? It’ll follow me home. It’ll follow me everywhere.

“Are you going to get anything?” Tatay asked, pulling me out of my haze. “Cadbury?”

“Nah,” I told him. My eyes were expertly clear when I looked at him, but he didn’t look convinced. “Are we going now?”

“Yeah,” he said. So we all walked out, a bunch of assholes who loitered in a convenience store without buying anything, and got into the car.

In the rearview mirror, I watched the Ministop get smaller and smaller til we finally turned on the road going home. We were safe now. No more spirits

Nobody touched the radio. The rumble of the engine was the only sound to be heard. In my head, I heard a something more. I’m bringing something home with me, I thought, listening to the tiny little clangs. Something was playing my bones, and it sounded like shame.

I shut my eyes, laid my head against the window, and pretended I didn’t hear it at all.

#written for the memoir submission for my nonfiction class #this piece could totally improve on things like cohesion and flow but for now. this is it.#death cw #non fic

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elevenhoursinfront-blog · 7 years

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February 24th 2017

Steve left for work at 0530. He woke me up today which was rubbish as I struggled to get back to sleep. I eventually did, around 0700. I then slept through my alarm at 0900 to 1015. I’m awful when I go back to sleep because I sleep for longer than I would’ve done if I slept straight through. That’s why I also shouldn’t nap. My naps aren’t 30 minutes long, they’re 4 hours long. Some people consider that a sleep. I don’t.

Everyone was leaving the room as I got up. I went down to breakfast. Again, not that hungry. I only had Weetabix. Breakfast is rubbish when you’re lonely. I felt slightly better about being on my own though, yesterday was just a bit of a shock to the system. I got back to the room and it was empty. The room is never empty so it was nice just to potter about knowing nobody was watching me. I got into the shower where I experienced the worst palpitations I’ve had in a long while. Probably the worst in the last couple of years actually. The hospital said I have an extra electric pulse. They wanted to put me on ‘Beat Blockers’ but that means being on medication for the rest of my life. My mum suggested that I say no. I was roughly 19 when they suggested it and Mum didn’t think I should spend the next 70 years on medication. They weren’t really going to help either. It passed after about 3 minutes.

I sat on my bed and chilled for a minute. I managed to FaceTime Tom as he is basically nocturnal. Tom is my gay best friend. I have to say that he is my gay best friend otherwise people think I’m cheating on Steve. Tom and I are like a married couple. We argue, fight and call each other names but it’s all love. Lots of love. We’ve known each other for years now. He calls himself “her gay best friend”. He loves it.

It got to roughly 1200 when I really needed to give myself a kick up the bum. It didn’t help that it was cloudy outside. I went down to reception to ask if there were any jobs going. Luckily, when you stay at hostels, you can apply to work for them. You don’t get paid but you get free accommodation. Steve and I are paying $466 a week for the hostel. By doing 15 hours a week, I could bring that down to $233. We could pay less too if we moved rooms. You get cheaper rooms by adding more people and taking away the bathroom. We’re happy where we are though. I couldn’t imagine sharing a room with 14 people for the sake of a couple of dollars a night. I also couldn’t imagine not having a toilet/shower in my room. Where do people get changed? There aren’t changing rooms. Plus there’s only 2 showers and 1 toilet between the rest of the rooms on the floor. So, 50 people? No thank you. Reception will let me know when there are vacancies. They told me one girl is leaving soon so it wouldn’t be long.

I had sorted my CV’s out yesterday so they were ready to just be handed out. Unfortunately, this took a lot longer than I had anticipated. Reason being - I’m a tart. I was too scared to walk into places and ask to leave my CV there. I’ve never had to do it before and my social anxiety was through the roof. I walked past a restaurant 6 times and sat on a wall before deciding that I couldn’t do it. It was really stressful. I went to another restaurant and looked at the menu outside for a good 3 minutes. I forced myself in and handed it to a member of bar staff. It was fine. Why was I panicking so much? I panicked a whole lot more as I continued. I walked to the Holiday Inn where I planned on handing it in. Nope - couldn’t do it. I walked in and straight back out. What is wrong with me? I continued my walk round to the DeVere hotel where I said was going to be the first place I handed my CV into. I worked in a DeVere at home for 3-4 years so it was a perfect place to start. I walked past it twice before forcing myself in. I did it. 2 CV’s in about 30 minutes. All within a 5-10 minute vicinity. As I was walking back towards the hostel, I past another restaurant/pub/bar place where Steve and I went into once. I walked in to hand my CV and walked out again. I must’ve looked like a complete and utter weirdo. I went back inside and handed my CV in. That was enough for one day. 3 CV’s I managed to hand in before feeling exhausted with anxiety. I will apply online. Much easier.

It was only 1400 when I was finished being a tart and I couldn’t sit in the room doing nothing… I jumped onto the train for 2 stops to Town Hall where all the main shops are. I only wanted to go into Starbucks to apply for more jobs online. I ordered a skinny latte and sat down. I sat on a long booth with multiple tables alongside each other. There was a man next to me working away. In Starbucks, they ask for your name to put on the drink. I’m sure you’re aware - who hasn’t been to Starbucks? Any who, my cup was next to this man’s cup. Before I know it, I’m crying. My cup said “Charlie” and the man’s cup said “Alan”. For those of you that don’t know, that’s my Dad’s name. I sat there and imagined being next to my dad. I must’ve looked like the world’s most unstable person today. How embarrassing. Also, in case you hadn’t realised, I’m the most emotional person in the world. I cry at anything. Everything, in fact. My phone started to ring as I tried to man up. It was an Australian number. I have about 5 missed calls from numbers that I don’t know because I’m too scared to answer them. I did manage to answer before it rang off and lucky I did too. An interview from my brave CV handout today. 1/3 contacted me. Good odds if you ask me. It was the restaurant/pub/bar place that I hadn’t even planned on handing it in to. Tuesday at 1100. Fingers crossed. I left Starbucks. No more emotions please.

I walked around the shops - Topshop, Zara etc to keep myself occupied. Why does the time go so fast when you’re shopping? Before I knew it, it was 1530. Steve finishes at 1530 so I had to get myself back to the hostel. I wanted to hear about his day. I also wanted to travel back just before rush hour. I got onto the train for the 2 stops and got back to the room about 1600. Steve got in at 1630 as he has slightly further to travel. His day was pretty much the same as yesterday. He did remember his fork and water though. He told me straight away to get ready as he was taking me out. He wanted to treat me as I was feeling low and because he got a job.

We both got showered and ready to go out. It was about 1730 when we left. We got on the train to Martin Place (one stop) and then a bus down to Circular Quay. Circular Quay is where the Harbour Bridge and Opera House is as I’ve mentioned before. We walked along the front for a while before going into a restaurant. I was lovely. We shared a bottle of Rioja and had 2 courses. Starter was a chicken and sweetcorn soup. Sounds quite disgusting (to me) but it was amazing. Steve said it was the best soup he had ever eaten. I had steak for dinner and Steven had the “Challenger Burger”. By the way, he didn’t manage it all. Eyes bigger than belly comes to mind…

We sat at the table after dinner for quite some time finishing off the wine and talking. For the first time ever, I heard Steve say that he loves his mum. He literally said “I love my Mum”. I’ve never heard Steve say anything like that before. Steve isn’t open with his feelings whatsoever, about anything. His mum always tells him that she loves him but he hasn’t ever said it back. It was nice to hear. Steve calls himself a ‘Nanny’s boy’ though. He adores his grandparents. He could talk about them for hours. I wish my grandparents were around long enough for me to have a relationship like that with them. I tell Steve how lucky he is all the time. They treat me all the same though, they’re wonderful. We planned on going bar hopping through the night but we were too full up to even move. If I’m honest, I just wanted to get into my pyjamas. There’s no better feeling than getting into your pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers with a cup of tea. God I miss that. I still haven’t had a cup of tea since I’ve been here. We left Circular Quay and got the train home. We went onto the laptop to try and plan our year. We have no plans set in stone but rough ideas on what we want to see. I think it’s something similar to - Sydney until April/May time, Queensland somewhere for farm work May, June, July time. Then travel down from Cairns to Brisbane doing the East Coast through August. Maybe. Then Brisbane, Melbourne and/or Perth for the next few months. We will be spending Christmas and New Year’s Eve in Sydney. The plan is to be on a private party boat on the harbour for New Year’s Eve. Steve would like to see Alice Springs but I’m not sure we will get time too. He also wants to see Tasmania, New Zealand and Fiji. Luckily, he realises we’re not made of money. We have a few places to play around with though.

It got to 2300 and Steve was starting to fall asleep. I was too but I had no excuse to be other than I’m lazy and I can sleep for England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, as I’ve also mentioned before. It’s now 0000 and people are just going out. Steve and I are yet to go ‘out out’ properly but there’s plenty of time to do so.

At least, I thought there was. Until I realised today, we are almost done with one month out of twelve.

1/12. That’ll make you happy Dad.

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viralhottopics · 7 years

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Libor scandal: the bankers who fixed the worlds most important number | Liam Vaughan and Gavin Finch

The Long Read: With arrogant disregard for the rules, traders colluded for years to rig Libor, the banks lending rate. But after the crash, the regulators were on their trail

At the Tokyo headquarters of the Swiss bank UBS, in the middle of a deserted trading floor, Tom Hayes sat rapt before a bank of eight computer screens. Collar askew, pale features pinched, blond hair mussed from a habit of pulling at it when he was deep in thought, the British trader was even more dishevelled than usual. It was 15 September 2008, and it looked, in Hayess mind, like the end of the world.

Hayes had been woken up at dawn in his apartment by a call from his boss, telling him to get to the office immediately. In New York, Lehman Brothers was hurtling towards bankruptcy. At his desk, Hayes watched the world processing the news and panicking. As each market opened, it became a sea of flashing red as investors frantically dumped their holdings. In moments like this, Hayes entered an almost unconscious state, rapidly processing the tide of information before him and calculating the best escape route.

Hayes was a phenomenon at UBS, one of the best the bank had at trading derivatives. So far, the mounting financial crisis had actually been good for him. The chaos had let him buy cheaply from those desperate to get out, and sell high to the unlucky few who still needed to trade. While most dealers closed up shop in fear, Hayes, with a seemingly limitless appetite for risk, stayed in. He was 28, and he was up more than $70 million for the year.

Now that was under threat. Not only did Hayes have to extract himself from every deal he had done with Lehman, he had also made a series of enormous bets that in the coming days interest rates would remain stable. The collapse of Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest investment bank in the US, would surely cause those rates, which were really just barometers of risk, to spike. As Hayes examined his trading book, one rate mattered more than any other: the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, a benchmark that influences $350 trillion of securities and loans around the world. For traders such as Hayes, this number was the Holy Grail. And two years earlier, he had discovered a way to rig it.

Libor was set by a self-selected, self-policing committee of the worlds largest banks. The rate measured how much it cost them to borrow from each other. Every morning, each bank submitted an estimate, an average was taken, and a number was published at midday. The process was repeated in different currencies, and for various amounts of time, ranging from overnight to a year. During his time as a junior trader in London, Hayes had got to know several of the 16 individuals responsible for making their banks daily submission for the Japanese yen. His flash of insight was realising that these men mostly relied on inter-dealer brokers, the fast-talking middlemen involved in every trade, for guidance on what to submit each day.

Brokers are the middlemen in the world of finance, facilitating deals between traders at different banks in everything from Treasury bonds to over-the-counter derivatives. If a trader wants to buy or sell, he could theoretically ring all the banks to get a price. Or he could go through a broker who is in touch with everyone and can find a counter-party in seconds. Hardly a dollar changes hands in the cash and derivatives markets without a broker matching the deal and taking his cut. In the opaque, over-the-counter derivatives market, where there is no centralised exchange, brokers are at the epicentre of information flow. That puts them in a powerful position. Only they can get a picture of what all the banks are doing. While brokers had no official role in setting Libor, the rate-setters at the banks relied on them for information on where cash was trading.

Most traders looked down on brokers as second-class citizens, too. Hayes recognised their worth. He saw what no one else did because he was different. His intimacy with numbers, his cold embrace of risk and his unusual habits were more than professional tics. Hayes would not be diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome until 2015, when he was 35, but his co-workers, many of them savvy operators from fancy schools, often reminded Hayes that he wasnt like them. They called him Rain Man.

By the time the market opened in London, Lehmans demise was official. Hayes instant-messaged one of his trusted brokers in the City to tell him what direction he wanted Libor to move. Typically, he skipped any pleasantries. Cash mate, really need it lower, Hayes typed. Whats the score? The broker sent his assurances and, over the next few hours, followed a well-worn routine. Whenever one of the Libor-setting banks called and asked his opinion on what the benchmark would do, the broker said incredibly, given the calamitous news that the rate was likely to fall. Libor may have featured in hundreds of trillions of dollars of loans and derivatives, but this was how it was set: conversations among men who were, depending on the day, indifferent, optimistic or frightened. When Hayes checked the official figures later that night, he saw to his relief that yen Libor had fallen.

Hayes was not out of danger yet. Over the next three days, he barely left the office, surviving on three hours of sleep a night. As the market convulsed, his profit and loss jumped around from minus $20 million to plus $8 million in just hours, but Hayes had another ace up his sleeve. ICAP, the worlds biggest inter-dealer broker, sent out a Libor prediction email each day at around 7am to the individuals at the banks responsible for submitting Libor. Hayes messaged an insider at ICAP and instructed him to skew the predictions lower. Amid the chaos, Libor was the one thing Hayes believed he had some control over. He cranked his network to the max, offering his brokers extra payments for their cooperation and calling in favours at banks around the world.

By Thursday, 18 September, Hayes was exhausted. This was the moment he had been working towards all week. If Libor jumped today, all his puppeteering would have been for nothing. Libor moves in increments called basis points, equal to one one-hundredth of a percentage point, and every tick was worth roughly $750,000 to his bottom line.

For the umpteenth time since Lehman faltered, Hayes reached out to his brokers in London. I need you to keep it as low as possible, all right? he told one of them in a message. Ill pay you, you know, $50,000, $100,000, whatever. Whatever you want, all right?

All right, the broker repeated.

Im a man of my word, Hayes said.

I know you are. No, thats done, right, leave it to me, the broker said.

Hayes was still in the Tokyo office at 8pm when that days Libors were published. The yen rate had fallen 1 basis point, while comparable money market rates in other currencies continued to soar. Hayess crisis had been averted. Using his network of brokers, he had personally sought to tilt part of the planets financial infrastructure. He pulled off his headset and headed home to bed. He had only recently upgraded from the superhero duvet hed slept under since he was eight years old.

Hayess job was to make his employer as much money as possible by buying and selling derivatives. How exactly he did that the special concoction of strategies, skills and tricks that make up a traders DNA was largely left up to him. First and foremost he was a market-maker, providing liquidity to his clients, who were mostly traders at other banks. From the minute he logged on to his Bloomberg terminal each morning and the red light next to his name turned green, Hayes was on the phone quoting guaranteed bid and offer prices on the vast inventory of products he traded. Hayes prided himself on always being open for business no matter how choppy the markets. It was his calling card.

Hayes likened this part of his job to owning a fruit and vegetable stall. Buy low, sell high and pocket the difference. But rather than apples and pears, he dealt in complex financial securities worth hundreds of millions of dollars. His profit came from the spread between how much he paid for a security and how much he sold it for. In volatile times, the spread widened, reflecting the increased risk that the market might move against him before he had the chance to trade out of his position.

All of this offered a steady stream of income, but it wasnt where the big money came from. The thing that really set Hayes apart was his ability to spot price anomalies and exploit them, a technique known as relative value trading. It appealed to his lifelong passion for seeking out patterns. During quiet spells, he spent his time scouring data, hunting for unseen opportunities. If he thought that the price of two similar securities had diverged unduly, he would buy one and short the other, betting that the spread between the two would shrink.

Everywhere he worked, Hayes set up his software to tell him exactly how much he stood to gain or lose from every fraction of a move in Libor in each currency. One of Hayess favourite trades involved betting that the gap between Libor in different durations would widen or narrow: whats known in the industry as a basis trade. Each time Hayes made a trade, he would have to decide whether to lay off some of his risk by hedging his position using, for example, other derivatives.

Hayess dealing created a constantly changing trade book stretching years into the future, which was mapped out on a vast Excel spreadsheet. He liked to think of it as a living organism with thousands of interconnected moving parts. In a corner of one of his screens was a number he looked at more than any other: his rolling profit and loss. Ask any decent trader and he will be able to give it to you to the nearest $1,000. It was Hayess self-worth boiled down into a single indisputable number.

Tom Hayes was a phenomenon at UBS, one of the best the bank had at trading derivatives. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

By the summer of 2007, the mortgage crisis in the US caused banks and investment funds around the world to become skittish about lending to each other without collateral. Firms that relied on the so-called money markets to fund their businesses were paralysed by the ballooning cost of short-term credit. On 14 September, customers of Northern Rock queued for hours to withdraw their savings after the bank announced it was relying on loans from the Bank of England to stay afloat.

After that, banks were only prepared to make unsecured loans to each other for a few days at a time, and interest rates on longer-term loans rocketed. Libor, as a barometer of stress in the system, reacted accordingly. In August 2007, the spread between three-month dollar Libor and the overnight indexed swap a measure of banks overnight borrowing costs jumped from 12 basis points to 73 basis points. By December it had soared to 106 basis points. A similar pattern could be seen in sterling, euros and most of the 12 other currencies published on the website of the British Bankers Association each day at noon.

Everyone could see that Libor rates had shot up, but questions began to be asked about whether they had climbed enough to reflect the severity of the credit squeeze. By August 2007, there was almost no trading in cash for durations of longer than a month. In some of the smaller currencies there were no lenders for any time frame. Yet, with trillions of dollars tied to Libor, the banks had to keep the trains running. The individuals responsible for submitting Libor rates each day had no choice but to put their thumb and forefinger in the air and pluck out numbers. It was clear that their best guesses were unrealistically optimistic.

A game of brinkmanship had developed in which rate-setters tried to predict what their rivals would submit, and then come in slightly lower. If they guessed wrong and input rates higher than their peers, they would receive angry phone calls from their managers telling them to get back into the pack. On trading floors around the world, frantic conversations took place between traders and their brokers about expectations for Libor.

Nobody knew where Libor should be, and nobody wanted to be an outlier. Even where bankers tried to be honest, there was no way of knowing if their estimates were accurate because there was no underlying interbank borrowing on which to compare them. The machine had broken down.

Vince McGonagle, a small and wiry man with a hangdog expression, had been at the enforcement division of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in Washington for 11 years, during which time his red hair had turned grey around the edges. A practising Catholic, McGonagle got his law degree from Pepperdine University, a Christian school in Malibu, California, where students are prepared for lives of purpose, service and leadership.

While his classmates took highly paid positions defending companies and individuals accused of corporate corruption, McGonagle opted to build a career bringing cases against them. He joined the agency as a trial attorney and was now, at 44, a manager overseeing teams of lawyers and investigators.

McGonagle closed the door to his office and settled down to read the daily news. It was 16 April, 2008, and the headline on page one of the Wall Street Journal read: Bankers Cast Doubt on Key Rate Amid Crisis. It began: One of the most important barometers of the worlds financial health could be sending false signals. In a development that has implications for borrowers everywhere, from Russian oil producers to homeowners in Detroit, bankers and traders are expressing concerns that the London interbank offered rate, known as Libor, is becoming unreliable.

The story, written at the Journals London office near Fleet Street, went on to suggest that some of the worlds largest banks might have been providing deliberately low estimates of their borrowing costs to avoid tipping off the market that theyre desperate for cash. That was having the effect of distorting Libor, and therefore trillions of dollars of securities around the world.

The journalists sources told him that banks were paying much more for cash than they were letting on. They feared if they were honest they could go the same way as Bear Stearns, the 85-year-old New York securities firm that had collapsed the previous month.

The big flaw in Libor was that it relied on banks to tell the truth but encouraged them to lie. When the 150 variants of the benchmark were released each day, the banks individual submissions were also published, giving the world a snapshot of their relative creditworthiness. Historically, the individuals responsible for making their firms Libor submissions were able to base their estimates on a vibrant interbank money market, in which banks borrowed cash from each other to fund their day-to-day operations. They were prevented from deviating too far from the truth because their fellow market participants knew what rates they were really being charged. Over the previous few months, that had changed. Banks had stopped lending to each other for periods of longer than a few days, preferring to stockpile their cash. After Bear Stearns there was no guarantee they would get it back.

With so much at stake, lenders had become fixated on what their rivals were inputting. Any outlier at the higher that is, riskier end was in danger of becoming a pariah, unable to access the liquidity it needed to fund its balance sheet. Soon banks began to submit rates they thought would place them in the middle of the pack rather than what they truly believed they could borrow unsecured cash for. The motivation for low-balling was not tied to profit many banks actually stood to lose out from lower Libors. This was about survival.

Ironically, just as Libors accuracy faltered, its importance rocketed. As the financial crisis deepened, central bankers monitored Libor in different currencies to see how successful their latest policy announcements were in calming markets. Governments looked at individual firms submissions for clues as to who they might be forced to bail out next. If banks were lying about Libor, it was not just affecting interest rates and derivatives payments. It was skewing reality.

There was no inkling at this stage that traders such as Hayes were pushing Libor around to boost their profits, but here was a benchmark that relied on the honesty of traders who had a direct interest in where it was set. Libor was overseen by the British Bankers Association (BBA). In both cases, the body responsible for overseeing the rate had no punitive powers, so there was little to discourage firms from cheating.

When McGonagle finished reading the Wall Street Journal article, he emailed colleagues and asked them what they knew about Libor. His team put together a dossier, including some preliminary reports from within the financial community. In March, economists at the Bank for International Settlements, an umbrella group for central banks around the world, had published a paper that identified unusual patterns in Libor during the crisis, although it concluded these were not caused by shortcomings in the design of the fixing mechanism.

A month later, Scott Peng, an analyst at Citigroup in New York, sent his customers a research note that estimated the dollar Libor submissions of the 18 firms that set the rate were 20 to 30 basis points lower than they should have been because of a prevailing fear among the banks of being perceived as a weak hand in this fragile market environment.

While there was no evidence of manipulation by specific firms, McGonagle was coming around to the idea of launching an investigation.

In 2009, Hayes was lured away from UBS to join Citigroup. The head of Citigroups team in Asia, the former Lehman banker Chris Cecere, a small, goateed American with a big reputation for finding new ways to make money, had been given millions of dollars to attract the best talent and Hayes was his round-one pick.

It wasnt just the $3m signing bonus that had won Hayes over. The promise of a fresh start at one of the worlds biggest banks, with him at centre stage in its aggressive expansion into the Asian interest-rate derivatives market, had proved too tempting to resist. After persuading him to join, Cecere boasted to colleagues that hed found a real fucking animal, who knows everybody on the street.

Citigroup in Canary Wharf, London Photograph: DBURKE / Alamy/Alamy

Cecere set in motion plans for Citigroup to join the Tibor (Tokyo interbank offered rate) panel which, Hayes would crow, was even easier to influence than Libor because fewer banks contributed to it. Hayes wanted to hit the ground running when he started trading, and being able to influence the two benchmarks that helped determine the profitability of the bulk of his positions was an important step. Another was bringing Citigroups own London-based Libor-setters on board.

On the afternoon of 8 December, Cecere was at his desk on the Tokyo trading floor. He had an office but seldom used it, preferring to be amid the action. He believed that six-month yen Libor was too high. After checking the submissions from the previous day, he was surprised to see that Citigroup had input one of the highest figures.

Cecere contacted the head of the risk treasury team in Tokyo, Stantley Tan, and asked him to find out who the yen-setter was and request that he lower his input by several basis points. It turned out the risk treasury desk in Canary Wharf was responsible for the banks Libor submissions.

I spoke to our point man in London, Tan wrote back to Cecere that afternoon. I have asked him to consider moving quotes [lower].

Cecere checked the Libors again later that night and was annoyed to see that Citigroup had only reduced its six-month rate by a quarter of a basis point.

He wrote to Tan, Can you speak with him again?

The following day, Tan went back to the treasury desk in London as requested. He also forwarded the message chain to Andrew Thursfield, Citigroups head of risk treasury in London. The response he got back from his UK counterpart left little room for misinterpretation: it was a thinly veiled warning to back off.

Hayes, who sat just behind his boss, was not on the email chain, but Cecere sent it to him.

Thursfield was a straitlaced man in his forties who had spent more than 20 years in risk management at Citigroup after joining as a graduate trainee. He saw himself as the guardian of the firms balance sheet and didnt take kindly to being told how to do his job by a pushy trader who knew nothing of the intricacies of bank funding.

Rather than lowering the inputs, Thursfields team increased its submission days later, pushing the published Libor rates higher. Hayes would have to try a different tack. On 14 December he sent an email to his London counterpart, asking him to approach the rate-setters directly.

Do you talk to the cash desk and did we know in advance? Hayes asked, referring to the banks decision to bump up its Libor submissions. We need good dialogue with the cash desk. They can be invaluable to us. If we know ahead of time we can position and scalp the market.

What Hayes didnt realise was that no amount of schmoozing was going to get the rate-setters onside. Unlike some banks, Citigroup was taking the CFTCs investigation into Libor seriously. In March 2009, Thursfield had personally delivered an 18-page presentation via video link to investigators on the rate-setting process. The cash traders werent about to risk their necks for someone they didnt know who worked on the other side of the world.

It wasnt just that they knew they were being watched. Thursfield was not only a stickler for the rules but had taken a personal dislike to Hayes when the pair had met three months earlier. It was October 2009, shortly after Hayes had accepted the job at Citigroup, and his boss had sent him to London to meet the banks key players.

Good to meet you. You can help us out with Libors. I will let you know my axes, Hayes said by way of an opening gambit when he was introduced to Thursfield.

Unshaven and dishevelled, Hayes told the Citigroup manager how the cash desk at UBS frequently skewed its submissions to suit his book. He boasted of his close relationships with rate-setters at other banks and how they would do favours for each other. Hayes was trying to charm Thursfield, but he had badly misjudged the man and the situation. The following day Thursfield called his manager, Steve Compton, and relayed his concerns.

Once you stray on to talking about Libor fixings, I mean we just paid another $75,000 bill to the lawyer this week for the work theyre doing on the CFTC investigation, Thursfield said. Whoever is the desk head, or whatever, [should] have a close watch on just what hes actually doing and how publicly. Its all, you know, very much barrow-boy-type [behaviour].

The knock on Hayess door came at 7am on a Tuesday, two weeks before Christmas 2012. Hayes padded down the bespoke pine staircase of his newly renovated home in Woldingham, Surrey,to let in more than a dozen police officers and Serious Fraud Office investigators. A year before, he had been fired from Citigroup, and shortly afterwards returned to the UK, where he married his girlfriend Sarah Tighe.

Hayes stood at his wifes side as the officers swept through the property, gathering computers and documents into boxes and loading them into vehicles parked at the end of the gravel driveway. The couple had only moved in a fortnight before. Their infant son was upstairs in bed. Traffic was heavy by the time the former trader was led to the back of a waiting car. The 20-mile crawl from Surrey to the City of London passed in silence.

Bishopsgate police station is a grey, concrete building on one of the financial districts busiest thoroughfares. In a formal interview, Hayes was told he had been brought in to answer questions relating to allegations that between 2006 and 2009 he had conspired to manipulate yen Libor with two of his colleagues. Hayes responded that he planned to help but would need time to consider the 112 pages of evidence so would not be answering any questions that day. It was late when he arrived back in Surrey.

In June, Barclays had become the first bank to reach a settlement with authorities, admitting to rigging the rate and agreeing to pay a then-record 290 million in fines. From the moment Barclays had settled, sparking a political firestorm that burned for weeks, Hayess destiny had been leading to this point. The Serious Fraud Office (SFO), which had previously resisted launching a probe into Libor rigging, was forced to reverse its position and on 6 July issued a statement announcing it would be undertaking a criminal investigation. That week the government launched its own review into the scandal. The British public and its politicians were out for scalps.

On 19 December, eight days after his arrest, Hayes was at home on his computer when a news bulletin popped up with a link to a press conference in Washington. As cameras flashed, Attorney General Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Departments criminal division, took turns outlining the $1.5bn settlement the authorities had reached with UBS over Libor. The Swiss bank, they explained, had pleaded guilty to wire fraud at its Japanese arm. Then came the sucker punch.

In addition to UBS Japans agreement to plead guilty, two former UBS traders have been charged, in a criminal complaint unsealed today, with conspiracy to manipulate Libor, said Breuer. Tom Hayes has also been charged with wire fraud and an antitrust violation. Neither Tan nor Cecere has ever been charged with wrongdoing.

At that moment the full horror of the situation hit Hayes for the first time. The two most powerful lawyers in the US planned to extradite him on three separate criminal charges, each carrying a 2030 year sentence. Less than 24 hours later, a member of Hayess legal team was on the phone to the SFO to discuss cutting a deal.

Fighting the charges seemed futile: the UBS settlement made reference to more than 2,000 attempts by Hayes and his colleagues to influence the rate over a four-year period. He was the star attraction, the Jesse James of Libor, as he would later tell it. The US authorities had yet to issue extradition papers, but it was only a matter of time.

So began a race to convince the SFO to take on Hayes as a sort of chief informant, who in return would receive leniency and, more importantly, an agreement that he would be dealt with in the UK.

To secure this arrangement Hayes had to agree to tell the SFO everything he knew and promise to testify against everybody involved. Crucially, he also had to plead guilty to dishonestly rigging Libor. It was not enough to admit trying to influence the rate. He had to confess that he knew it was wrong.

During two days of so-called scoping interviews to test his knowledge of the case, Hayes talked openly about his campaign to rig Libor, for the first time in his life. At the SFOs offices near Trafalgar Square he admitted he had acted dishonestly and brought the investigators attention to aspects of the case they knew nothing about. The interviews covered everything from his entry into the industry and his trading strategies to how the Libor scheme began and the various individuals who helped him rig the rate. They barely had to prod to get him to talk. Hayes seemed to relish reliving moments from his past. His voice sped up when he talked about heady days piling into positions, squeezing the best prices from brokers and playing traders off against each other.

The first thing you think is wheres the edge, where can I make a bit more money, how can I push, push the boundaries, maybe you know a bit of a grey area, push the edge of the envelope, he said in one early interview. But the point is, you are greedy, you want every little bit of money that you can possibly get because, like I say, that is how you are judged, that is your performance metric.

Paper coffee cups piled up as Hayes went over the minutiae of the case. At one stage, Hayes was asked about how he viewed his attempts to move Libor around. The exchange would prove crucial.

Well look, I mean, its a dishonest scheme, isnt it? Hayes said. And I was part of the dishonest scheme, so obviously I was being dishonest.

Main photograph: Tom Archer/Barcroft Media

This article is adapted from The Fix: How Bankers Lied, Cheated and Colluded to Rig the Worlds Most Important Number by Liam Vaughan and Gavin Finch (Wiley, 19.99). To order a copy for 16.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846