High Rise (1987) (14 page)

§

Laing emptied the coffee-percolator over the edge of the balcony. A greasy spray hung across the face of the building, the residue of the cascade of debris now heaved over the side without a care whether the wind would carry it into the apartments below. He carried his breakfast tray into the kitchen. The continuing failure of the electricity supply had destroyed the food in the refrigerator. Bottles of sour milk stood in a mould-infested line. Rancid butter dripped through the grilles. The smell of this rotting food was not without its appeal, but Laing opened a plastic sack and scooped everything into it. He slung the sack into the corridor, where it lay in the dim light with a score of others.

A group of his neighbours was arguing in the elevator lobby, voices raised. A minor confrontation was developing between them and the 28
th
-floor residents. Crosland was bellowing aggressively into the empty elevator shaft. Usually, at this early hour of the day, Laing would have paid no attention to him. Too often Crosland had no idea what he was arguing about—confrontation was enough. Without his make-up, the expression of outrage on his face made Crosland resemble an announcer tricked for the first time into reading an item of bad news about himself.

From the shadows outside his door the orthodontic surgeon emerged with studied casualness. Steele and his hard-faced wife had been standing among the garbage-sacks for some time, keeping an eye on everything. He sidled up to Laing and took his arm in a gentle but complex grip, the kind of hold he might have used for an unusual extraction. He pointed to the floors above.

“They want to seal the doors permanently,” he explained. “They’re going to re-wire two of the elevator circuits so that they move non-stop from the ground floor to the 28
th
.”

“What about the rest of us?” Laing asked. “How do we leave the building?”

“My dear Laing, I don’t suppose they care very much about us. Their real intention is to divide the building in half—here, at the 25
th
floor. This is a key level for the electrical services. By knocking out the three floors below us they will have a buffer zone separating the top half of the building from the lower. Let’s make sure, doctor, that when this happens we are on the right side of the buffers…”

He broke off as Laing’s sister approached, carrying her electric coffee-pot. With a bow, Steele moved away through the shadows, his small feet stepping deftly among the garbage sacks, the centre parting of hair gleaming in the faint light. Laing watched him slide noiselessly into his apartment. No doubt Steele would pick his way with equal skill through the hazards ahead. He never left the building now, Laing had noticed. What had happened to that ruthless ambition? After the battles of the past weeks he was presumably banking on an imminent upsurge in the demand for advanced surgery of the mouth.

As Laing greeted Alice he realized that she too would be excluded if the surgeon was right, living in the darkness on the wrong side of the dividing line with her alcoholic husband. She had come up ostensibly to plug her coffeepot into the power point in Laing’s kitchen, but when they entered the apartment she left it absently on the hall table. She walked on to the balcony and stared into the morning air, as if glad to have the three extra floors beneath her.

“How is Charles?” Laing asked. “Is he at the office?”

“No…He’s taken some leave. Terminal, if you ask me. What about you? You shouldn’t neglect your students. At the present rate we’re going to need every one of them.”

“I’m going in this morning. Would you like me to have a look at Charles on my way?”

Alice ignored this offer. She grasped the handrail and began to rock herself like a child. “It’s peaceful up here. Robert, you’ve no idea what it’s like for most people.”

Laing laughed aloud, amused by Alice’s notion that somehow he had been unaffected by events in the high-rise—the typical assumption of a martyred older sister forced during her childhood to look after a much younger brother.

“Come whenever you want to.” Laing put his arm around her shoulders, steadying her in case she lost her balance. In the past he had always felt physically distanced from Alice by her close resemblance to their mother, but for reasons not entirely sexual this resemblance now aroused him. He wanted to touch her hips, place his hand over her breast. As if aware of this, she leaned passively against him.

“Use my kitchen this evening,” Laing told her. “From what I’ve heard, everything is going to be chaotic. You’ll be safer here.”

“All right—but your apartment is so dirty.”

“I’ll clean it for you.”

Checking himself, Laing looked down at his sister. Did she realize what was happening? Without intending to, they were arranging an assignation.

All over the high-rise people were packing their bags, readying themselves for short but significant journeys, a few floors up or down, laterally to the other end of a corridor. A covert but nonetheless substantial movement of marital partners was taking place. Charlotte Melville was now involved with a statistician on the 29
th
floor, and had almost vacated her apartment. Laing had watched her leave without resentment. Charlotte needed someone who would bring out her forcefulness and grit.

Thinking about her, Laing felt a pang of regret that he himself had found no one. But perhaps Alice would give him the practical support he needed, with her now unfashionable dedication to the domestic virtues. Although he disliked her shrewish manner, with its unhappy reminders of their mother, it gave him an undeniable sense of security.

Holding her shoulders, he looked up at the roof of the high-rise. It seemed months since he had last visited the observation deck, but for the first time he felt no urge to do so. He would build his dwelling-place where he was, with this woman and in this cave in the cliff face.

§

When his sister had gone, Laing began to prepare for his visit to the medical school. Sitting on the kitchen floor, he looked up at the unwashed plates and utensils stacked in the sink. He was leaning comfortably against a plastic sack filled with rubbish. Seeing the kitchen from this unfamiliar perspective, he realized how derelict it had become. The floor was strewn with debris, scraps of food and empty cans. To his surprise, Laing counted six garbage-sacks—for some reason he had assumed that there was only one.

Laing wiped his hands on his dirt-stained trousers and shirt. Reclining against this soft bed of his own waste, he felt like going to sleep. With an effort he roused himself. A continuous decline had been taking place for some time, a steady erosion of standards that affected, not only the apartment, but his own personal habits and hygiene. To some extent this was forced on him by the intermittent water and electricity supply, the failure of the garbage-disposal system. But it also reflected a falling interest in civilized conventions of any kind. None of his neighbours cared what food they ate. Neither Laing nor his friends had prepared a decent meal for weeks, and had reached the point where they opened a can at random whenever they felt hungry. By the same token, no one cared what they drank, interested only in getting drunk as quickly as possible and blunting whatever sensibilities were left to them. Laing had not played one of his carefully built-up library of records for weeks. Even his language had begun to coarsen.

He picked at the thick rims of dirt under his nails. This decline, both of himself and his surroundings, was almost to be welcomed. In a way he was forcing himself down these steepening gradients, like someone descending into a forbidden valley. The dirt on his hands, his stale clothes and declining hygiene, his fading interest in food and drink, all helped to expose a more real version of himself.

Laing listened to the intermittent noises from the refrigerator. The electricity had come on again, and the machine was sucking current from the mains. Water began to trickle from the taps as the pumps started to work. Spurring himself on with Alice’s criticisms, Laing wandered around the apartment, doing what he could to straighten the furniture. But half an hour later, as he carried a garbage-sack from the kitchen into the hallway, he suddenly stopped. He dropped the sack on to the floor, realizing that he had achieved nothing—all he was doing was rearranging the dirt.

Far more important was the physical security of the apartment, particularly while he was away. Laing strode down the long bookcase in the sitting-room, pulling his medical and scientific text-books on to the floor. Section by section, he wrenched out the shelving. He carried the planks into the hall, and for the next hour moved around the apartment, transforming its open interior into a home-made blockhouse. All pieces of heavy furniture, the dining-table and a hand-carved oak chest in his bedroom, he pulled into the hall. With the armchairs and desk he constructed a solid barricade. When he was satisfied with this he moved his food supplies from the kitchen into the bedroom. His resources were meagre, but would keep him going for several days—bags of rice, sugar and salt, cans of beef and pork, and a stale loaf of bread.

Now that the air-conditioning had ceased, the rooms soon became stuffy. Recently Laing had noticed a strong but not unpleasant smell, the characteristic odour of the apartment—himself.

Laing stripped off his grimy sports-shirt and washed himself in the last water flowing from the shower. He shaved and put on a fresh shirt and suit. If he visited the medical school looking like a tramp he might give away to some sharp-eyed colleague what was actually going on in the high-rise. He examined himself in the wardrobe mirror. The gaunt, white-skinned figure with a bruised forehead standing awkwardly in an over-large business suit looked totally unconvincing, like a discharged convict in his release suit blinking at the unfamiliar daylight after a long prison-sentence.

§

After tightening the bolts on the front door, Laing let himself out of the apartment. Fortunately, leaving the high-rise was easier than moving around within it. Like an unofficial subway service, one elevator still travelled by mutual consent to and from the main entrance lobby during office hours. However, the atmosphere of tension and hostility, the complex of overlapping internal sieges, was apparent everywhere. Barricades of lobby furniture and plastic sacks filled with garbage blocked the entrances to individual floors. Not only the lobby and corridor walls, but the ceilings and carpets were covered with slogans, a jumble of coded signals that marked the attacks of raiding parties from floors above and below. Laing had to restrain himself from pencilling the number of his own floor among the numerals, some three feet high, emblazoned across the walls of the elevator car like the entries in a lunatic ledger. Almost everything possible had been vandalized—lobby mirrors fractured, pay-phones torn out, sofa upholstery slashed. The degree of vandalism was deliberately excessive, almost as if it served a more important secondary role, disguising the calculated way in which the residents of the high-rise, by ripping out all the phone lines, were cutting themselves off from the outside world.

For a few hours each day a system of informal truce routes opened like fracture lines throughout the building, but this period was becoming progressively shorter. Residents moved around the building in small groups, sharply on the look-out for any strangers. Each of them wore his floor-level on his face like a badge. During this brief armistice of four or five hours they could move about, contestants in a ritualized ladder-battle allowed between bouts to mount the rungs of their pre-ordained ranks. Laing and his fellow passengers waited as the car made its slow descent, frozen together like mannequins in a museum tableau—‘late twentieth-century high-rise dweller’.

When they reached the ground floor Laing walked cautiously through the entrance, past the shuttered manager’s office and the sacks of unsorted mail. He had not been to the medical school for days, and as he stepped through the glass doors he was struck immediately by the cooler light and air, like the harsh atmosphere of an alien planet. A sense of strangeness, far more palpable than anything within the building, extended around the apartment block on all sides, reaching across the concrete plazas and causeways of the development project.

Looking over his shoulder, as if maintaining a mental life-line to the building, Laing walked across the parking-lot. Hundreds of broken bottles and cans lay among the cars. A health engineer from the central office of the project had called the previous day but left within half an hour, satisfied that these signs of breakdown were no more than teething troubles in the building’s waste-disposal system. As long as the residents made no formal complaint, no action would be taken. Laing was no longer surprised by the way in which the residents, who only a few weeks earlier had been united in their anger over the breakdown of the building’s services, were now just as united in assuring any outsiders that all was well—partly out of a displaced pride in the high-rise, but also out of a need to resolve the confrontation between them without interference, like rival gangs battling across a refuse tip who joined forces to expel any intruder.

Laing reached the centre of the parking-lot, only two hundred yards from the neighbouring high-rise, a sealed rectilinear planet whose glassy face he could now see clearly. Almost all the new tenants had moved into their apartments, duplicating to the last curtain fabric and dish-washer those in his own block, but this building seemed remote and threatening. Looking up at the endless tiers of balconies, he felt uneasily like a visitor to a malevolent zoo, where terraces of vertically mounted cages contained creatures of random and ferocious cruelty. A few people leaned on their railings and watched Laing without expression, and he had a sudden image of the two thousand residents springing to their balconies and hurling down at him anything to hand, inundating Laing beneath a pyramid of wine bottles and ashtrays, deodorant aerosols and contraceptive wallets.

Laing reached his car and leaned against the window pillar. He knew that he was testing himself against the excitements of the world outside, exposing himself to its hidden dangers. For all its present conflict, the high-rise represented safety and security. Feeling the warm cellulose of the window pillar against his shoulder, Laing remembered the stale air in his apartment, tepid with the smell of his own body. By comparison, the brilliant light reflected off the chromium trim of the hundreds of cars filled the air with knives.