High-Rise (11 page)

But Royal was drawn to his new neighbours, exemplars beyond anything he had previously imagined of the puritan work ethic. In turn, he knew from Anne that his neighbours found him a puzzling and aloof figure, an automobile-crash casualty in his wheelchair living on the roof of the high-rise in a casual menage with a rich young wife half his age whom he was happy to see taken out by other men. Despite this symbolic emasculation, Royal was still regarded in some way as having the key to the building. His scarred forehead and chromium cane, the white jacket which he affected and wore like a target, together seemed to be the elements of a code that concealed the real relationship between the architect of this huge building and its uneasy tenants. Even Anne's always imminent promiscuities were part of this same system of ironies, appealing to Royal's liking for the "game" situation where one could risk everything and lose nothing.

The effect of all this on his neighbours interested Royal, and particularly on those mavericks such as Richard Wilder, who would set out to climb Everest equipped with nothing more than a sense of irritation that the mountain was larger than himself, or Dr Laing, staring out all day from his balcony under the fond impression that he was totally detached from the high-rise, when in fact he was probably its most true tenant. At least Laing knew his place and kept to it; three nights earlier they had been forced to give Wilder a short sharp lesson.

Thinking about Wilder's intrusion-only one in a series of attempts by people below to break into the top-floor apartments-Royal left the bedroom and checked the bolts on the front door.

Anne waited while he stood in the deserted corridor. There was a continuous sullen murmur from the lower levels carried up the elevator shafts. She pointed to Royal's three suitcases.

"Is that all you're taking?"

"For the time being. I'll come back for anything else."

"Come back? Why should you want to? Perhaps you'd rather stay?"

To himself, rather than to his wife, Royal remarked, "First to arrive, last to leave..."

"Is that a joke?"

"Of
course
not."

Anne placed a hand on his chest, as if searching for an old wound. "It's really all over, you know. I hate to say it, but this place hasn't worked."

"Perhaps not..." Royal took her commiseration with a strong dose of salt. Without realizing it, Anne often played on his sense of failure, frightened by Royal's new resolve to prove himself, this conviction that the building might succeed after all. In addition, their neighbours had accepted him a little too readily as their leader. His partnership in the consortium had been largely paid for by the commissions her father had steered his way, a fact Anne had never let him forget, not to humble Royal so much as to prove her own value to him. The point was made, though. He had come up in the world, all right, in too many senses of the term. In an insane way, his accident might have been an attempt to break out of the trap.

But all this belonged to the past now. As Royal knew, they were leaving just in time. During the last few days life in the high-rise had become impossible. For the first time the top-floor residents were directly involved. The erosion of everything continued, a slow psychological avalanche that was carrying them downwards.

Superficially, life in the apartment building was normal enough-most of the residents left for their offices each day, the supermarket was still open, the bank and hair-dressing salon functioned as usual. Nonetheless, the real internal atmosphere was that of three uneasily coexisting armed camps. A complete hardening of positions had taken place, and there was now almost no contact between the upper, middle and lower groups. During the early part of the day it was possible to move freely around the building, but as the afternoon proceeded this became increasingly difficult. By dusk any movement was impossible. The bank and supermarket closed at three o'clock. The junior school had moved from its vandalized classrooms to two apartments on the 7th floor. Few children were ever seen above the 10th floor, let alone in the sculpture-garden on the roof which Royal had designed for them with so much care. The 10th-floor swimming-pool was a half-empty pit of yellowing water and floating debris. One of the squash courts had been locked, and the other three were filled with garbage and broken classroom furniture. Of the twenty elevators in the building, three were permanently out of order, and by evening the remainder had become the private transit lines of the rival groups who could seize them. Five floors were without electricity. At night the dark bands stretched across the face of the high-rise like dead strata in a fading brain.

Fortunately for Royal and his neighbours, conditions in the upper section of the building had yet to decline so steeply. The restaurant had discontinued its evening service, but a limited luncheon was available each day during the few hours when the small staff could freely enter and leave. However, the two waiters had already gone, and Royal guessed that the chef and his wife would soon follow. The swimming-pool on the 35th floor was usable, but the level had fallen, and the water supply, like that to their own apartment, was dependent on the vagaries of the roof tanks and electric pumps.

From the drawing-room windows Royal looked down into the parking-lot. Many of the cars had not been moved for weeks-windscreens broken by falling bottles, cabins filled with garbage, they sat on flattening tyres, surrounded by a sea of rubbish that spread outwards around the building like an enlarging stain.

This visible index of the block's decline at the same time measured the extent to which its tenants accepted this process of erosion. At times Royal suspected that his neighbours unconsciously hoped that everything would decline even further. Royal had noticed that the manager's office was no longer besieged by indignant residents. Even his own top-floor neighbours, who in the early days had been only too quick to complain about everything, now never criticized the building. In the absence of the manager-still lying in a state of mental collapse in his ground-floor apartment-his dwindling staff of two (the wives of a dubbing-mixer on the 2nd floor and a first violinist on the 3rd) sat stoically at their desks in the entrance lobby, oblivious of the deterioration going on apace over their heads.

What interested Royal was the way in which the residents had become exaggeratedly crude in their response to the apartment building, deliberately abusing the elevators and air-conditioning systems, over-straining the power supply. This carelessness about their own convenience reflected a shuffling of mental priorities, and perhaps the emergence of the new social and psychological order for which Royal was waiting. He remembered the attack on Wilder, who had laughed happily as the group of paediatricians and academics had flailed away at him with their dumb-bells like a troupe of demented gymnasts. Royal had found the episode grotesque, but he guessed that in some obscure way Wilder had been glad to be flung half-conscious into an elevator.

Royal strolled around the shrouded furniture. He raised his stick and slashed at the stale air with the same stroke he had used against Wilder. At any moment a battalion of police would arrive and cart them all off to the nearest jail. Or would they? What played straight into the residents' hands was the remarkably self-contained nature of the high-rise, a self-administered enclave within the larger private domain of the development project. The manager and his staff, the personnel who manned the supermarket, bank and hairdressing salon, were all residents of the apartment building; the few outsiders had left or been sacked. The engineers who serviced the building did so on instructions from the manager, and clearly none had been issued. They might even have been told to stay away-no garbage-collection vehicle had called for several days, and a large number of the chutes were blocked.

Despite the growing chaos around them, the residents showed less interest in the external world. Bales of un-sorted mail lay about in the ground-floor lobbies. As for the debris scattered around the high-rise, the broken bottles and cans, these were barely noticeable from the ground. Even the damaged cars were to some extent concealed by the piles of building materials, wooden forms and sand-pits that had yet to be cleared away. Besides, as part of that unconscious conspiracy to shut out the external world, no visitors came to the high-rise. He and Anne had invited none of their friends to the apartment for months.

Royal watched his wife move about vaguely in her bedroom. Jane Sheridan, Anne's closest friend, had called in and was helping her to pack. The two women were transferring a line of evening gowns from the wardrobe racks to the trunks, and at the same time returning unwanted shirts and trousers from the suitcases back to the shelves. For all the activity it was uncertain whether they were packing on the eve of departure or unpacking on arrival.

"Anne-are you coming or going?" Royal asked. "We hardly stand a chance of making it tonight."

Anne gestured helplessly at the half-filled cases. "It's the air-conditioning-I can't think."

"You won't get out now even if you want to," Jane told her. "We're marooned here, as far as I can see. All the elevators have been commandeered by other floors."

"What? Did you hear that?" Anne stared angrily at Royal, as if his faulty design of the elevator lobbies was directly responsible for these acts of piracy. "All right, we'll leave first thing tomorrow. What about food? The restaurant will be shut."

They had never eaten in the apartment-Anne's gesture of contempt for her neighbours' endless preparation of elaborate meals. The only food in the refrigerator was the dog's.

Royal stared at himself in the mirror, adjusting his white jacket. In the fading light his reflection had an almost spectral vibrancy, making him look like an illuminated corpse. "We'll think of something." A curious answer, he realized, implying that there were other sources of food than the supermarket. He looked down at Jane Sheridan's plump figure. Seeing Royal's subdued expression, she was smiling reassuringly at him. Royal had taken on the task of looking after this amiable young woman since the death of her Afghan.

"The elevators may be free in an hour or so," he told them. "We'll go down to the supermarket." Thinking of the alsatian-presumably asleep on his bed in the penthouse-he decided to exercise it on the roof.

Anne had begun to empty the half-filled suitcases. She seemed barely aware of what she was doing, as if a large part of her mind had been switched off. For all her complaints, she had never telephoned the building manager herself. Perhaps she felt this was beneath her, but nor had she mentioned the smallest criticism to any of their friends in the world beyond the apartment building.

Thinking about this, Royal noticed that the plug of her bedside telephone had been pulled from its socket, and the cable neatly wrapped around the receiver.

As he walked around the apartment before going to search for the dog, he saw that the three other external telephones, in the hall, drawing-room and kitchen, had also been disconnected. Royal realized why they had received no outside calls during the previous week, and felt a distinct sense of security at knowing that they would receive none in the future. Already he guessed that, for all their expressed intentions, they would not be leaving either the following morning or any other.

From the open windows of the penthouse Royal watched the huge birds clustering on the elevator heads fifty feet away. An unfamiliar species of estuarine gull, they had come up the river during the previous months and begun to congregate among the ventilation shafts and water storage tanks, infesting the tunnels of the deserted sculpture-garden. During his convalescence he had watched them arrive as he sat in his wheelchair on the private terrace. Later, when the callisthenics machine had been installed, the birds would hobble around the terrace while he exercised. In some way they were attracted by Royal's white jacket and pale hair, so close in tone to their own vivid plumage. Perhaps they identified him as one of their own, a crippled old albatross who had taken refuge on this remote roof-top beside the river? Royal liked this notion and often thought about it.

The french windows swung in the early evening air. The alsatian had escaped, hunting by itself on the five-hundred-feet-long observation deck. Now that the summer had ended few people went up to the roof. The remains of a cocktail-party marquee, bedraggled in the rain, lay in the gutter below the balustrade. The gulls, heavy wings folded, strutted among the cheese sticks scattered around a cardboard carton. The potted palms had been untended for months, and the whole roof increasingly resembled a voracious garden.

Royal stepped down on to the roof deck. He enjoyed the hostile gaze of the birds sitting on the elevator heads. The sense of a renascent barbarism hung among the overturned chairs and straggling palms, the discarded pair of diamante sunglasses from which the jewels had been picked. What attracted the birds to this isolated realm on the roof? As Royal approached, a group of the gulls dived into the air, soaring down to catch the scraps flung from a balcony ten floors below them. They fed on the refuse thrown into the car-park, but Royal liked to think that their real motives for taking over the roof were close to his own, and that they had flown here from some archaic landscape, responding to the same image of the sacred violence to come. Fearing that they might leave, he frequently brought them food, as if to convince them that the wait would be worth their while.

He pushed back the rusty gates of the sculpture-garden. From the casement of a decorative lantern he took out a box of cereal meal, by rights reserved for the alsatian. Royal began to scatter the grains among the concrete tunnels and geometric forms of the play-sculptures. Designing the garden had given him particular satisfaction, and he was sorry that the children no longer used the playground. At least it was open to the birds. The gulls followed him eagerly, their strong wings almost knocking the cereal box from his hands.