Plastic

by Christopher Fowler

  On Friday afternoon I packed the absurdly large suitcase my husband had thoughtfully left out for me, and posted my house keys back through the letter box as I left, more as gesture of independence than practicality. I stood at the end of the leaf-stickered front garden and looked up at the house in which I had spent the last ten years of my life. Bare rooms showed beyond unlit windows, just as they had on the day we’d arrived. They appeared smaller, as though they were shrinking now that life had left them, like the roots of a dying tree. Oddly, it didn’t feel strange to be leaving the rest of my belongings behind. Most had been purchased in shopping blitzes, and held no meaning once the transactions had been completed.

  I caught the train to Waterloo and watched the commuter towns of Kent give way to the tin-shed factory outlets of the South London suburbs. It was hard to tell where the city began, but at one point all of the green spaces I could see from the graffiti-scratched window vanished, to be replaced by angular grey streets and Victorian back-to-back houses with narrow gardens. I was entering a city I no longer knew, a jumble of disconnected office blocks and thoroughfares that no longer bore any resemblance to the city of my childhood half-memories. After this weekend I would be forced to stay with my mother in Leamington Spa until the divorce, and no matter how hard I tried, we would fight and I would be miserable. I would once more end up renting a small flat and working in a local shop, and at that grimly inevitable point my life would have turned full circle, because of an earring, because of indifference. All I had left was a brief period of transition between a reticent past and an unpromising future. I wanted something to happen.

  Of course it did, and that decided my fate.

  Friday morning was cold, and I knew I should have worn thicker tights. I queued to catch a taxi behind incoming passengers, tourists and business staff with laptops tucked under their arms like clipboards. The cab was a final extravagant gesture before embarking on my new frugal life, but even as I sat watching the etiolated Edwardian buildings slide by the rain-hazed window, I wondered if my husband might somehow be persuaded to come home.

  I didn’t understand how someone with such a thin soul could give up on me so easily unless he was forcibly bewitched. Perhaps he had never cared for me deeply in the first place, and I couldn’t bear to imagine that.

  The glistening cab turned off in the direction of St. Thomas’s Hospital, affording me a glimpse of the London Eye’s great wire wheel, its transparent capsules creeping incrementally between the buildings. The day was so dark that tourists were using camera flashes, so that each pod sparkled with sharp points of light.

  Slowly shunting along the Albert Embankment between ribboned roadworks toward Lambeth Bridge, we finally entered a deserted new road that sloped away from the river. The cab came to a stop deep in the shadow of the Embankment. Above it, the sky split with a flash and rain began thundering onto the roof.

  ‘There you go.’ The driver pulled up. ‘You know where you are, love?’ He shouted to make himself heard.

  ‘Not really, no,’ I called back.

  ‘You got the river in front, the railway behind you, that goes down to Queenstown Battersea and Clapham Junction, Black Prince Road on the far side, Old Paradise Street on this side and Lambeth High Street just around that corner. Tell you how I know, ’cause my old mum used to live beside the Lilian Baylis School, before that lot was all council flats. This place is brand new, used to be waste ground, bombed flat during the war. Jeffrey Archer’s buying a penthouse flat, right at the top there. What a cunt.’ He aimed a fat ringed finger at the roof.

  I opened the taxi door and found myself faced with a splashing terrain of churned mud, bricks, waterlogged ditches and cables. ‘Could you help me to the front steps?’ I shouted, jamming the door open with my leg and pulling at the heavy case.

  ‘I can’t love, I did my back in watching the women’s curling.’ He watched from beneath his baseball cap as I struggled with the case. Rain bounced in an effervescence around my ankles as I dragged it beneath the white concrete portico of the apartment block, and stopped to look up.

  Elegant chrome letters backlit with strips of azure neon read: The Ziggurat. Slate-edged windows finished in curvilinear mosaics rose above me. Only a few were illuminated. The wall of the building folded back on itself in an undulating shape that provided its residents with panoramic postcard-London views. The smallest apartment sat in the lowest east corner and belonged to the building’s caretaker. It looked out into a dark box formed by the underside of the bridge and a mildewed stanchion of the roundabout; the views were reserved for those with purchasing power.

  The paved area in front of the entrance was pitted with deep holes. Drums of yellow cable lay on their sides like giant cottonreels. Although the block was unfinished, purple and silver graffiti tags at juvenile-delinquent height had already sprouted along the white base wall. I had once seen a photograph of the City Road Police Station taken in 1900, and there was graffiti all the way along the base of the building, so it was nothing new.

  In the brochure I later discovered (and presumably on the website virtual tour I didn’t take) the Ziggurat was helplessly described as modern gothic. Designed by Jean-Claude Corbeau – the man himself, not one of his international teams – it boasted a steep mansard roof, but in place of a mansard’s traditional attic windows were long balconies on sprung steel pivots. At the four corners stood bell turrets as grim as prison watchtowers, their peaks finished in titanium tiles to reflect the silver of the sky, lending the building a baroque, angular elegance that was described by one architectural critic as ‘a hypertense anorexic’s response to the Bilbao Guggenheim’, presumably intended as a compliment. Although doubtless admired in the rarified circles of building academics, the Ziggurat appeared to defy the rules of Feng Shui; it seemed misplaced, caught uncomfortably on a dark reach of the river, forced into an angle that would benefit the residents’ sight of the city but not their spiritual well-being. It was too pleased with its self-importance. I thought of Shelley’s Ozymandias. What would be left of this arrogant structure in years to come? ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair’ indeed. There’s a reason why so many architects of skyscrapers are men.

  I darted back to pay the cab against a timely roll of thunder. It sounded like a decelerated recording of cracking ice cubes, and shook the air.

  Julie was right; the keypad wasn’t working. I dragged my blue plastic valise up the steps into a wide parchment-coloured foyer containing a pair of gigantic red corduroy armchairs. The retro-future interior reminded me of the space-station in 2001. My case left a sidewinding trail of cuprous mud slashes across the marble floor. The walls on either side were darkly mirrored, reflecting the hall in sepia infinities. A sense of intimidation overwhelmed me as the great blank space unfolded. In a city like London space is power, and only the wealthy can afford to reveal so little of themselves. I knew at once that I didn’t belong in a building that smelled of fresh-sawn hardwood and laundered money.

  My first task was to find the concierge’s office. Cupping my hands, I peered in through tall doors and saw a small olive-skinned woman with bleached hair and bulbous eyes, shouting into a telephone. She was wedged behind a glass table and seated just around a corner, where her untidy animation would not interfere with the decor. I knocked on the window. The glass panel released a lonely twang as I opened it.

  ‘You tell me you deliver today and you not deliver,’ the woman shrieked in a manner that would cause any delivery man to tear up the receipt. Her desk was covered in penguins of different sizes. Pinned on the wall behind her were dozens of penguin postcards and several calendars featuring the formal arctic birds diving, sliding and generally falling over one another. If you make the mistake of confiding in a friend that you admire birds of any breed, you’ll be given them every Christmas and birthday for the rest of your life. ‘No, you no deliver. No, I say you don’t.’ She placed her hand over the mouthpiece and switched on an unrealistic smile. ‘Can I help yo
u?’

  ‘Mrs. Funes?’

  ‘Madame Funes.’

  ‘I’m collecting keys for Malcolm Phillimore.’ I dug into my purse and handed the concierge Julie’s envelope.

  ‘No, you say this but you no deliver,’ Madame Funes screamed into the phone again, tearing open the letter and groping for the glasses that hung on a gold chain at her bosom. Screwing her face into a knot, she held the paper an inch from the tip of her nose and scanned it before covering the mouthpiece once more. ‘You know there is no electricity this weekend from six o’clock tonight? There is hardly any people staying here because of the doorses.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The doorses! The doorses!’ She waved a gold-crusted hand at the entrance.

  ‘I know about the electricity. I’m just looking after the property for the owner.’

  ‘Is good idea, you know, because the locks of the doorses down here is electric so they is open, and anyone, anyone, they can walk right in off the street. I am only going to be here since six o’clock tonight and not on the weekend. So you hand-lock the apartment on inside because anyone can walk in from outside: the rapists, the burglars, the crazy people, you know?’ She wrenched out a drawer, selected the key and passed it across the desk. ‘When you inside you lock yourself in because we have a man here two weeks since who kick a door in bang like this.’ She made a vicious slashing gesture. ‘Crazy for drugs I think, and with a knife. You will need this too for the cooker as it is electric ignition. No need to bring it back, I have many.’ She handed me a plastic cigarette lighter before resuming her telephone discourse. ‘YES, YOU SAY THIS BUT YOU NO DELIVER.’

  I decided to vacate the office before the old lady had a heart attack, and retreated back to the hall. Dragging my suitcase to the lift, I pressed the call button and checked my watch. There were still two hours left before the rest of the electricity was due to be shut off. The apartment was on the seventh floor, one of six penthouses at the top of the building. Little natural light filtered into the corridors. Bundles of coloured wires hung from the unsecured light fittings.

  The folds of the undulating corridor had been fitted with tall opaque windows, but the areas between them remained in darkness. I found myself sliding into the walls as my outstretched hand felt its way across the recessed archways to the apartments. Flicking the cigarette lighter, I searched for the number matching the taped numerals on the key. A penthouse had been constructed in each corner of the building, with two smaller apartments on the long sides between them. Malcolm’s apartment was at the centre of the Ziggurat, sandwiched between the two corner penthouses on the side of the river.

  The lounge I entered from the short hall was spectacular enough to freeze me in my tracks. It was a space imagined for a phantom film, boxes of glass-sided air, brushed steel panels suspended above pale oblongs of wood, three great windows opening to a balcony that overlooked a highway of chromatised water, and light everywhere even on this purblind day, the sky pushing its way in and filling my eyes with furious clouds.

  Yet I had never seen a private home so devoid of personality. It clearly needed my magic touch: knick-knacks, tiebacks, dried flowers, framed photographs. There were no mantelpieces, no shelves, no flat surfaces for the arrangement of clocks and ducks. It was an idealised layout from a department store window, a theatre set for some obscure futurist entertainment, or perhaps a showflat for the world beyond. The paintings were frameless, canvases pinned back like flayed skin. They were abstracts, vast and awful, umber blocks studded with sickly turrets of yellow ochre, so ugly that they could only be worth a fortune.

  Awed into removing my shoes, I made my way to the cold steel altar of the kitchen. Sabatier knives hung in decending order of lethality like razor-sharp musical notes. Everything else lived behind rolling steel shutters. It took both hands to open the refrigerator. I searched for a kettle and found an attenuated steel object that looked as though it might hold water. If Giacometti’s figures were real people, this was where they would cook. The kitchen smelled faintly of the sea rather than food, and for a moment I had a fanciful image of breezes drawing the river estuary into the apartment, but then I saw the Ocean Fresh fragrance bottles plugged into the wall sockets.

  A slender steel handle opened the glass walls to the balcony. Outside, atomised rain flew upwards on river winds. London lay in a globe of pale autumnal fog, the twisted, dense patchwork of the land showing through in patches of brown and olive green, stitched by the anthracite thread of roads.

  I drew a deep breath and smelled the musk of Thames silt, sharpened through oxygen blooming from Embankment trees. The elements were all around, the dank wind in my hair, moisture dampening my jacket, settling in droplets on my upturned cheek. I wanted to scrub my face clean of makeup and let the passing cloudbank touch my skin. I felt like an angel looking down on the private world of the city, listening to its whispered secrets. Having arrived in a place I could not imagine, I suddenly felt like crying. The rain drifted and swirled. Sometimes the lattice of rainbow-drops rose on rogue air currents, to be flicked down again like turning schools of fish.

  A decade of marriage had come to an end. In that time, what had happened in the world beyond the front garden? Celebrities and politicians had fallen from grace, riots and lifestyle revolutions had fleetingly seized the public mood, fads and follies had thrived in the lifespans of midges, failed social experiments had demanded my attention in the bitter, recriminatory pages of the tabloids. Carved into digestible two-minute slots, wars, train wrecks, floods, plagues and assassinations had flashed past me on the evening news with the vacuity of quiz show scores. The last ten years had been a firework display viewed from a safe distance. Since my marriage began, I could not recall coming to London for any reason other than to shop. Now I began to wonder how any person could have remained so disconnected from the world.

  Shivering, I backed inside to explore my new surroundings, like a cat left with friends for the holidays.

  The rest of the penthouse had more character. A bathroom of sun-faded Cambodian stone. A carved Thai buddha with a fat red candle melted into its lap. An undulating glass shower I could walk into without having to open a door. A textured slate floor that darkened with the first spatter from the great copper showerhead. The steaming water cascaded over my shoulders, reddening skin, scalding away the misery of the last few days. Toiletries, understated and expensive, stood in a pumice recess. I eased a snake of foam from a tube and smeared it across my fat breasts, my pale pudgy stomach, feeling the skin soften beneath my fingers. The urge to cry was stronger than ever. I saw my body twisting in the glass wall of the shower, a distant pale figure, a woman I had never seen before. I shouldn’t be here. I can’t recognise myself in these surroundings.

  Heavy white towels as thick as duvets, matching bathrobes, underfloor heating, lights that faded up by the pressure of my fingertips. If the kitchen was clinical, the bathroom was decadent. No wonder Malcolm’s mistress was so anxious to pin him down to a divorce. I pulled on one of the robes and raised its hood, drifting through the bare white rooms, hugging myself with excitement. It was impossible not to feel like an interloper. I did not have the right credentials to be allowed in here.

  I checked the time again. In an hour and ten minutes the electricity would be cut. The implications were worrying and a little exciting. Searching the rooms, anxious to make the most of the time, I found a flat-screen plasma television recessed into a beech-panelled bedroom wall, unclipped the remote and flicked through dozens of channels. Aircraft and dolphins performed silver somersaults through the phosphorescence reflected across the windows. I surfed for American sitcoms, which I enjoyed because you never learned anything real about the characters. My heart rate decelerated to the drifting pace of my dreams. I slept in a way I had not slept for months, years.

  When I awoke, I found myself in darkness.

  The television screen was inert. I tried the lights. Nothing. My wristwatch read 6:25pm. The lights fr
om the street were reflected upwards by the river, rippling across the ceiling in languid arabesques, the apartment acting in balance to the entropy of the world below.

  I rose and pulled the robe tight. The air was coolbox fresh as I carefully made my way across the lounge. Six fat church candles stood on inchoate earthenware plates. Not realising that they were intended for display purposes, I lit each one in turn, illuminating my borrowed palace with wavering ellipses of light.

  The refrigerator bulb failed to come on when I opened the door, but a roll of trapped chill air still brushed my bare flesh. Someone had left the clingfilm-wrapped ingredients for a cold meal in the crisper. I made myself a sandwich, bitter rye bread stuffed with ham, lettuce and mayonnaise, something I would never have prepared at home. There I would grill cheese on Mother’s Pride and pour microwaved beans over it. To do so here would have been a sacrilegious act. I ate perched on a tall stool at the chromed breakfast bar, chewing oiled scraps of sun-dried tomato, savouring the flavours, then dipping into jars I had seen in food halls but never tried before.

  I carefully wiped my hands before examining the ceiling-high bookcases by candlelight, working my way along the co-ordinated spines. Medical encyclopediae, volumes on skin and eyes and ears, books about burns with colour plates I didn’t dare to examine. It made me wonder about the exact nature of Malcolm’s consultancy. Could he be some kind of medical practitioner? Julia had failed to divulge his role outside of the company. If he was a specialist with a private practice it might explain how he managed to afford such luxury. But I thought they worked in electronic communications. Surely such diverse careers had no overlap.