Glass (18 page)

I sighed. ‘How many years were you working on that book?'

He growled and bared his yellow teeth at me.

‘How many?' I asked again.

‘Thirty-two, not including my extended fellowship at All Souls.'

That was longer than I'd been alive. It was a bit of a loss, I had to say.

‘And how old are you now?' I asked.

‘Sixty-one this year.'

‘Well, most people live till say eighty, so you've got time to write something new. But a little bit shorter.'

He growled a little. ‘That is perfectly logical. You rascal.'

‘Or you could try and remember what you wrote,' pitched in my dad, ‘and if you don't remember it, it can't have been that important.'

The Steppenwolf frowned in the way that people sometimes do when they are delighted, but have so recently been upset that they don't feel they can authentically smile.

‘Perhaps I could write a book of aphorisms,' he said with a gleam.

Dad signed,
what's an A-F-O-R-I-Z-M?

I replied,
no idea.

The Steppenwolf signed,
it is an idea made into a simple, elegant sentence. Why are we signing?

We all stayed in after that, talking. There was no alcohol in the flat and my dad didn't go to get any. The late sun gave the asphalt an orange cast, and later still, the tables turned and the city threw its own amber glow at the night, the dark windows of houses mirrored like a lake. I went to my room tired, but pleased to have my father close to me. I hadn't realised how much I missed him until he'd been gone and returned. I wondered if Max would ever come and visit. It seemed unlikely. How would I entertain him? How could I even guarantee that I wouldn't pick a fight? Maybe I was as bad a brother to him as he was to me. Or worse. What if I was worse?
⁶⁶

I tried Lieve's number but she didn't answer. I waited a minute, called again and she'd turned it off.

Perhaps I should quit London, go back to Salisbury and leave all this behind. I wouldn't have any money, so I'd have to move back – well, I couldn't move back home, because it wasn't there any more. Or rather, the house was still there, but they'd probably torn off my mum's carefully selected wallpapers and pulled up the carpets to install generic fake-wooden laminate floors. I wondered what would have happened to all my old stuff. I hadn't particularly wanted it, but it had been nice to know it was there. I had some spare pants there, and a Filofax, and a cassette tape of ‘Brimful of Asha'. Surely they wouldn't dare auction off my pants?
⁶⁷

I had no useful email. One offered me an online loan at 2689% APR, but I declined. Another offered me Viagra, but if anything my extreme sexual prowess was partly to blame for my situation.

The best thing I could do would be to start on the Shard, to pull myself up and out of it all. For a little while, at least, I could be a part of the sky, caught between sun and wind and glass, and leave all the clutter beneath me. Perhaps it was vanity, but I had to go, because I felt that it might be one of the most important experiences in my life; because we had rebuilt Babel, and it hadn't fallen down, and now I wanted to climb it; because I wanted to scrape the sky. People always talked about Manhattan, but if I ever worked there, I would be cleaning with high-rises all around me. The Shard, on the other hand, was brutal and unworldly, sticking out of the ground like a vast pike levelled at God Himself, nothing to touch it in any direction. Not a skyscraper in a sea of skyscrapers, but a stark monolith jutting out beyond the ken of other mortals. An endless field of glass, impossible to read, smooth, hard and cold.

I laid out my clothes and equipment on the floor like a fully dressed person, and it looked like a deflated version of myself. I looked around my bare room. It didn't feel like a home. Not yet, at least. The only place that really felt like home, like a shell, was a house that I couldn't go back to. There was nothing left in the real world that corresponded to my memory of the place. The memory was all I had. A signpost for a lost city. A photo of someone I had loved. I hoped I might find somewhere, one day, that felt like home again. I got under the covers and switched off my sidelight. Lieve's house had a big master bedroom, and a nursery all set up. I was already half asleep, and beginning to dream uneasily that Lieve was shoving my head into the tiny bin in her bathroom, and using her foot to slam the lid over and over and over and over …

18

The Shard
⁶⁸

I rose in the dark and dressed to tentative birdsong. I felt naughty again, like a milkman, catching out my tiredness and pouncing on it before it could overpower me and drag me back down into the bowels of sleep.

As I approached the Shard, Blades smiled broadly, showing off those pure white canines of his. If I wanted teeth like that, I'd have to lay off the sugar. Waffles … Well, I supposed they'd have to go.

We shook hands and looked up. There it was, a ladder to the fading stars, glass and steel tapering out like a long bridge into an indistinct horizon. A veritable palace of glass. The surfaces were smoother and flatter than anything conjured by nature. I could break any of its windows with my insignificant little hand, and yet it stood over us, over everything. It seemed to me that the fragility of the tower was built into its beauty, its perfection held ransom by the whim of an imperfect world. It was a pyramid to dwarf the pyramids, but it was not made of stone; it would not weather over time, rounding or crumbling off, acquiring dunes along its base. It would stand perfect, or it would fall utterly.

‘Come on,' Blades said. ‘The others are up at the top.'

My ears popped in the lift.

‘It's going to take us a while, even with a full team, but this is the last touch before inauguration. There's going to be a huge press call for the prime minister of Qatar and Prince Andrew, so we need to look dashing.' He flashed me a PR smile. ‘This is the biggest building in Europe. Look.'

The lift doors opened and I felt a current run through me. The roots of my hair buzzed. I had almost reached the peak of a building so high that I wouldn't be able to see the people below me. It was two and a half times taller than Salisbury Cathedral, and that was so high that the wind had nearly carried me off. This time, I was so high I felt I could have jumped and floated off into space. Our view was limited only by the curvature of the Earth. Dawn was breaking – at least, it was from up here – and I could see London spread out before me like a felled, titanic hermaphrodite: the giant Eye; the nurturing breast of St Paul's; the Gherkin, phallus of the City. The Olympic Village was there somewhere, too, barely completed and already scheduled for demolition.
⁶⁹
I didn't see Big Ben. It was part of an old Britain that had long been superseded. The clock wasn't even considered accurate any more, and the tower was listing. Once, people would have stared at its gothic heights and been impressed at the empire that could have built such a thing. But really it was just sad. Ben was getting old, too, like everything. You could once have set your watch by him, and now he had to have his own pacemakers. And yet, to be old was still to be alive. Every time the fireworks threw pink shadows on his elaborate cornices and curlicues, and his bell chimed twelve, Ben had cheated the natural course of things for another year.

We arrived at what I thought of as ‘base camp' and I looked around the room. Pete was there, and the blond man from the football, along with about twenty others, all white men in their late twenties or thirties. Everyone was covering their nervousness by shifting from leg to leg and cracking jokes, though the atmosphere felt tense as I breathed it in. I felt like I needed a tank of oxygen to breathe. Here, there were unknown quantities. Blades stood in the middle of the room and clapped his hands like a motivational speaker.

‘Okay everyone, listen up. Most of you know the drill – this is the builders' clean, we've got to make it look pretty before the launch. But I have some bad news and some good news. Bad news is, today will be one of the pinnacles of your professional life. You will, likely as not, never get given an opportunity like this again. You'll go back to cleaning the outsides of crappy office buildings and houses and no one will even notice that you were there.

‘The good news is, I'm warning you in advance. We have thousands of square feet of glass to clean, and if we have to, we'll be back again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that until it's done. There isn't any heavy wind or rain forecast between now and the opening of the building, so how we make it look is how it's going to end up looking in all the photographs from now until forever.' He winked at me. ‘This is your chance to make us look good. Those of you who have been with me for over three years will receive a camera so that you can take photos and video while you're up here, and I'll pair you each off with a newbie.' Someone passed round a few cameras. The men started filming each other and mimed flashing their body parts. The cameras looked unnecessarily bulky, considering that we were going to be lugging them round the outside of the building. Someone fumbled one, and all of the other old hands flinched as he juggled it between his clumsy palms. Blades screamed, ‘Don't drop it!' a little louder than was necessary and it plunged floorwards until, with one last desperate swipe, the dropper grabbed at it and saved it from smashing into pieces.

‘What are you doing
' shouted Blades. ‘This is no time for pissing around.' The other old hands holding cameras looked angry, too. Maybe even a little shaky. Perhaps the cameras were really expensive. They didn't look it.

‘Okay, let's zone back in,' he said, clapping his hands again. ‘Newbies: don't worry. I wouldn't have picked you if I didn't think you had a safe pair of hands.' He glared at the man who had nearly dropped the camera. ‘And we're not heading vertically downwards: it'll be more like eighty-six degrees.'

There was some nervous chuckling around the room.

‘Now I need you all to sign a release.' The blond man who had passed the cameras around now passed round some sheets.

The release was one side of A4, with one long paragraph mitigating Blades PLC against any accident or injury that might occur in the line of duty, up to but not limited to loss of limb, paralysis, trauma and death. I signed it and filled in the sheet up to the bottom, where there were various tick boxes for ethnic category.

NORTHWOODS: 30/06/12 – 04/07/12

    British

    Other Aryan

    Black (inc. ‘African-American')

    Jew/Jewess

    Indian (inc. Pakistani)

    Other Asian

    Other (please specify) _________________________