Danger in the Streets of the Sky 3 страница

Unsettled, Laing prepared breakfast, absent-mindedly pouring away most of the coffee he had percolated before he tasted it. With an effort he reminded himself that he was due to demonstrate in the physiology department that morning. Already his attention was fixed on the events taking place within the high-rise, as if this huge building existed solely in his mind and would vanish if he stopped thinking about it. Staring at himself in the kitchen mirror, at his wine-stained hands and unshaven face with its surprisingly good colour, he tried to switch himself on. For once, Laing, he told himself, fight your way out of your own head. The disturbing image of the posse of middle-aged women beating up the young masseuse anchored everything around him to a different plane of reality. His own reaction-the prompt side-step out of their way-summed up more than he realized about the progress of events.

At eight o'clock Laing set off for the medical school. The elevator was filled with broken glass and beer cans. Part of the control panel had been damaged in an obvious attempt to prevent the lower floors signalling the car. As he walked across the parking-lot Laing looked back at the high-rise, aware that he was leaving part of his mind behind him. When he reached the medical school he walked through the empty corridors of the building, with an effort re-establishing the identity of the offices and lecture theatres. He let himself into the dissecting rooms of the anatomy department and walked down the lines of glass-topped tables, staring at the partially dissected cadavers. The steady amputation of limbs and thorax, head and abdomen by teams of students, which would reduce each cadaver by term's end to a clutch of bones and a burial tag, exactly matched the erosion of the world around the high-rise.

During the day, as Laing took his supervision and lunched with his colleagues in the refectory, he thought continually about the apartment building, a Pandora's box whose thousand lids were one by one inwardly opening. The dominant tenants of the high-rise, Laing reflected, those who had adapted most successfully to life there, were not the unruly airline pilots and film technicians from the lower floors, nor the bad-tempered and aggressive wives of the well-to-do tax specialists on the upper levels. Although at first sight these people appeared to provoke all the tension and hostility, those really responsible were the quiet and self-contained residents, like the dental surgeon Steele and his wife. A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere. This was the sort of resident who was content to do nothing but sit in his over-priced apartment, watch television with the sound turned down, and wait for his neighbours to make a mistake.

Perhaps the recent incidents represented a last attempt by Wilder and the airline pilots to rebel against this unfolding logic? Sadly, they had little chance of success, precisely because their opponents were people who were content with their lives in the high-rise, who felt no particular objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and data-processing organizations, and if anything welcomed these invisible intrusions, using them for their own purposes. These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth-century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed.

Alternatively, their real needs might emerge later. The more arid and affectless life became in the high-rise, the greater the possibilities it offered. By its very efficiency, the high-rise took over the task of maintaining the social structure that supported them all. For the first time it removed the need to repress every kind of anti-social behaviour, and left them free to explore any deviant or wayward impulses. It was precisely in these areas that the most important and most interesting aspects of their lives would take place. Secure within the shell of the high-rise like passengers on board an automatically piloted airliner, they were free to behave in any way they wished, explore the darkest corners they could find. In many ways, the high-rise was a model of all that technology had done to make possible the expression of a truly "free" psychopathology.

During the long afternoon Laing slept in his office, waiting until he could leave the medical school and return home. When he left at last he drove at speed past the half-completed television studios, and then was held up for five minutes by a line of bulk-cement carriers entering the construction site. It was here that Anthony Royal had been injured when his car had been crushed by a reversing grader-it often struck Laing as ironic, and in a way typical of Royal's ambiguous personality, that he should not only have become the project's first road casualty, but have helped to design the site of the accident.

Annoyed by the delay, Laing fretted at the wheel. For some reason he was convinced that important events were taking place in his absence. Sure enough, when he reached the apartment building at six o'clock he learned that a number of fresh incidents had occurred. After changing, he joined Charlotte Melville for drinks. She had left her advertising agency before lunch, worried about her son.

"I didn't like him being on his own here-the babysitters are so unreliable." She poured whisky into their glasses, gesturing with the decanter in an alarmed way as if about to toss it over the balcony rail. "Robert, what is happening? Everything seems to be in a state of crisis-I'm frightened to step into an elevator by myself."

"Charlotte, things aren't that bad," Laing heard himself say. "There's nothing to worry about."

Did he really believe that life here was running smoothly? Laing listened to his own voice, and noticed how convincing he sounded. The catalogue of disorder and provocation was a long one, even for a single afternoon. Two successive groups of children from the lower floors had been turned away from the recreation garden on the roof. This walled enclosure fitted with swings, roundabouts and play-sculptures had been specifically intended by Anthony Royal for the amusement of the residents' children. The gates of the garden had now been padlocked, and any children approaching the roof were ordered away. Meanwhile, the wives of several top-floor tenants claimed that they had been abused in the elevators. Other residents, as they left for their offices that morning, had found that their car tyres had been slashed. Vandals had broken into the classrooms of the junior school on the 10th floor and torn down the children's posters. The lobbies of the five lower floors had been mysteriously fouled by dog excrement; the residents had promptly scooped this into an express elevator and delivered it back to the top floor.

When Laing laughed at this Charlotte drummed her fingers on his arm, as if trying to wake him up.

"Robert! You ought to take all this seriously!"

"I do…"

"You're in a trance !"

Laing looked down at her, suddenly aware that this intelligent and likeable woman was failing to get the point. He placed an arm around her, unsurprised by the fierce way in which she embraced him. Ignoring her small son trying to open the kitchen door, she leaned against it and pulled Laing on to herself, kneading his arms as if trying to convince herself that here at last was something whose shape she could influence.

During the hour they waited for her son to fall asleep her hands never left Laing. But even before they sat down together on her bed Laing knew that, almost as an illustration of the paradoxical logic of the high-rise, their relationship would end rather than begin with this first sexual act. In a real sense this would separate them from each other rather than bring them together. By the same paradox, the affection and concern he felt for her as they lay across her small bed seemed callous rather than tender, precisely because these emotions were unconnected with the realities of the world around them. The tokens that they should exchange, which would mark their real care for each other, were made of far more uncertain materials, the erotic and perverse.

When she was asleep in the early evening light, Laing let himself out of the apartment and went in search of his new friends.

Outside, in the corridors and elevator lobbies, scores of people were standing about. In no hurry to return to his apartment, Laing moved from one group to another, listening to the talk going on. These informal meetings were soon to have an almost official status, forums at which the residents could air their problems and prejudices. Most of their grievances, Laing noticed, were now directed at the other tenants rather than at the building. The failure of the elevators was blamed on people from the upper and lower floors, not on the architects or the inefficient services designed into the block.

The garbage-disposal chute Laing shared with the Steeles had jammed again. He tried to telephone the building manager, but the exhausted man had been inundated with complaints and requests for action of every kind. Several members of his staff had resigned and the energies of the remainder were now devoted to keeping the elevators running and trying to restore power to the 9th floor.

Laing mustered what tools he could find and went into the corridor to free the chute himself. Steele immediately came to his aid, bringing with him a complex multi-bladed cutting device. While the two men worked away, trying to loosen a bundle of brocaded curtain that supported a column of trapped kitchen refuse, Steele amiably regaled Laing with a description of those tenants above and below them responsible for overloading the disposal system.

"Some of these people generate the most unusual garbage-certainly the kind of thing we didn't expect to find here," he confided to Laing. "Objects that could well be of interest to the vice squad. That beautician on the 33rd floor, and the two so-called radiographers living together on the 22nd. Strange young women, even for these days…"

To some extent, Laing found himself agreeing. However petty the complaints might sound, the fifty-year-old owner of the hairdressing salon was endlessly redecorating her apartment on the 33rd floor, and did stuff old rugs and even intact pieces of small furniture into the chute.

Steele stood back as the column of garbage sank below in a greasy avalanche. He held Laing's arm, steering him around a beer can lying on the corridor floor. "Still, no doubt we're all equally guilty-I hear that on the lower floors people are leaving small parcels of garbage outside their apartment doors. Now, you'll come in for a drink? My wife is keen to see you again."

Despite his memories of their quarrel, Laing had no qualms about accepting. As he expected, in the larger climate of confrontation any unease between them was soon forgotten. Her hair immaculately coiffeured, Mrs Steele hovered about him with the delighted smile of a novice madam entertaining her first client. She even complimented Laing on his choice of music, which she could hear through the poorly insulated walls. Laing listened to her spirited description of the continuous breakdown of services within the building, the vandalizing of an elevator and the changing cubicles of the 10th-floor swimming-pool. She referred to the high-rise as if it were some kind of huge animate presence, brooding over them and keeping a magisterial eye on the events taking place. There was something in this feeling-the elevators pumping up and down the long shafts resembled pistons in the chamber of a heart. The residents moving along the corridors were the cells in a network of arteries, the lights in their apartments the neurones of a brain.

Laing looked out across the darkness at the brilliantly lit decks of the nearby high-rise, barely aware of the other guests who had arrived and were sitting in the chairs around him-the television newsreader Paul Crosland, and a film critic named Eleanor Powell, a hard-drinking redhead whom Laing often found riding the elevators up and down in a fuddled attempt to find her way out of the building.

Crosland had become the nominal leader of their clan-a local cluster of some thirty contiguous apartments on the 25th, 26th and 27th floors. Together they were planning a joint shopping expedition to the 10th-floor supermarket the following day, like a band of villagers going on an outing to an unpoliced city.

Beside him on the sofa, Eleanor Powell was watching Crosland in a glazed way while the newsreader, in his florid announcer's style, outlined his proposals for the security of their apartments. Now and then she reached forward with one hand, as if trying to adjust Crosland's image, perhaps alter the colour values of his fleshy cheeks or turn down the volume of his voice.

"Isn't your apartment next to the elevator lobby?" Laing asked her. "You'll need to barricade yourself in."

"What on earth for? I leave the door wide open." When Laing looked puzzled, she said, "Isn't that part of the fun?"

"You think that we're secretly enjoying all this?"

"Don't you? I'd guess so, doctor. Togetherness is beating up an empty elevator. For the first time since we were three years old what we do makes absolutely no difference. When you think about it, that's really rather interesting…"

When she leaned against him, resting her head on his shoulder, Laing said: "Something seems to be wrong with the air-conditioning… there should be some fresh air on the balcony."

Holding his arm, she picked up her bag. "All right. Lift me up. You're a shy lecher, doctor…"

They had reached the french windows when there was an explosion of breaking glass from a balcony high above them. Fragments of glass flicked away like knives through the night air. A large, ungainly object whirled past, no more than twenty feet from the balcony. Startled, Eleanor blundered into Laing. As they caught their balance there was the sound of a harsh metallic collision from the ground below, almost as if a car had crashed. A short but unbroken silence followed, the first true quiet, Laing realized, that the building had known for days.

Everyone crowded on to the balcony, Crosland and Steele grappling together as if each was trying to prevent the other from jumping over the ledge. Pushed along the railing, Laing saw his own empty balcony fifteen feet away. In an absurd moment of panic he wondered if he himself was the victim. All around, people were leaning on their railings, glasses in hand, staring down through the darkness.

Far below, embedded in the crushed roof of a car in the front rank, was the body of a man in evening dress. Eleanor Powell, her face like pain, swayed from the rail and pushed her way past Crosland. Laing held tightly to the metal bar, shocked and excited at the same time. Almost every balcony on the huge face of the high-rise was now occupied, the residents gazing down as if from their boxes in an enormous outdoor opera house.

No one approached the crushed car, or the body embedded in its roof. Seeing the burst tuxedo and the small patent-leather shoes, Laing thought that he recognized the dead man as the jeweller from the 40th floor. His pebble spectacles lay on the ground by the front wheel of the car, their intact lenses reflecting the brilliant lights of the apartment building.

 

Up!

 

During the week after the jeweller's death, events moved rapidly in a more disquieting direction. Richard Wilder, twenty-four floors below Dr Laing and for that reason far more exposed to the pressures generated within the building, was among the first to realize the full extent of the changes taking place.

Wilder had been away on location for three days, shooting scenes for a new documentary on prison unrest. A strike by the inmates at a large provincial prison, widely covered by the newspapers and television, had given him a chance to inject some directly topical footage into the documentary. He returned home in the early afternoon. He had telephoned Helen each evening from his hotel and questioned her carefully about conditions in the high-rise, but she made no particular complaints. Nevertheless, her vague tone concerned him.

When he had parked Wilder kicked open the door and lifted his heavy body from behind the steering wheel. From his place on the perimeter of the parking-lot he carefully scanned the face of the huge building. At first glance everything had settled down. The hundreds of cars were parked in orderly lines. The tiers of balconies rose through the clear sunlight, potted plants thriving behind the railings. For a moment Wilder felt a pang of regret-always a believer in direct action, he had enjoyed the skirmishes of the past week, roughing up his aggressive neighbours, particularly those residents from the top floors who had made life difficult for Helen and the two boys.

The one discordant note was provided by the fractured picture window on the 40th floor, through which the unfortunate jeweller had made his exit. At either end of the floor were two penthouse apartments, the north corner occupied by Anthony Royal, the other by the jeweller and his wife. The broken pane had not been replaced, and the asterisk of cracked glass reminded Wilder of some kind of cryptic notation, a transfer on the fuselage of a wartime aircraft marking a kill.

Wilder unloaded his suitcase from the car, and a holdall containing presents for Helen and his sons. On the rear seat was a lightweight cine-camera with which he planned to shoot a few hundred feet of pilot footage for his documentary on the high-rise. The unexplained death of the jeweller had confirmed his long-standing conviction that an important documentary was waiting to be made about life in the high-rise-perhaps taking the jeweller's death as its starting point. It was a lucky coincidence that he lived in the same block as the dead man-the programme would have all the impact of a personal biography. When the police investigation ended the case would move on to the courts, and a huge question mark of notoriety would remain immovably in place over what he liked to term this high-priced tenement, this hanging palace self-seeding its intrigues and destruction.

Carrying the luggage in his strong arms, Wilder set off on the long walk back to the apartment building. His own apartment was directly above the proscenium of the main entrance. He waited for Helen to emerge on to the balcony and wave him in, one of the few compensations for having to leave his car at the edge of the parking-lot. However, all but one of the blinds were still drawn.

Quickening his step, Wilder approached the inner lines of parked cars. Abruptly, the illusion of normalcy began to give way. The cars in the front three ranks were spattered with debris, their once-bright bodywork streaked and stained. The pathways around the building were littered with bottles, cans, and broken glass, heaped about as if they were being continuously shed from the balconies.

In the main entrance Wilder found that two of the elevators were out of order. The lobby was deserted and silent, as if the entire high-rise had been abandoned. The manager's office was closed, and unsorted mail lay on the tiled floor by the glass doors. On the wall facing the line of elevators was scrawled a partly obliterated message-the first of a series of slogans and private signals that would one day cover every exposed surface in the building. Fittingly enough, these graffiti reflected the intelligence and education of the tenants. Despite their wit and imagination, these complex acrostics, palindromes and civilized obscenities aerosolled across the walls soon turned into a colourful but indecipherable mess, not unlike the cheap wallpapers found in launderettes and travel-agencies which the residents of the high-rise most affected to despise.

Wilder waited impatiently by the elevators, his temper mounting. Irritably he punched the call buttons, but none of the cars showed any inclination to respond to him. All of them were permanently suspended between the 20th and 30th floors, between which they made short journeys. Picking up his bags, Wilder headed for the staircase. When he reached the 2nd floor he found the corridor in darkness, and tripped over a plastic sack stuffed with garbage that blocked his front door.

As he let himself into the hall his first impression was that Helen had left the apartment and taken the two boys away with her. The blinds in the living-room were lowered, and the air-conditioning had been switched off. Children's toys and clothes lay about on the floor.

Wilder opened the door of the boys' bedroom. They lay asleep together, breathing unevenly in the stale air. The remains of a meal left from the previous day were on a tray between the beds.

Wilder crossed the living-room to his own bedroom. One blind had been raised, and the daylight crossed the white walls in an undisturbed bar. Uncannily, it reminded Wilder of a cell he had filmed two days earlier in the psychiatric wing of the prison. Helen lay fully dressed on the neatly made bed. He assumed that she was asleep, but as he crossed the room, trying to quieten his heavy tread, her eyes watched him without expression.

"Richard… it's all right." She spoke calmly. "I've been awake-since you rang yesterday, in fact. Was it a good trip?"

She started to get up but Wilder held her head on the pillow.

"The boys-what's going on here?"

"Nothing." She touched his hand, giving him a reassuring smile. "They wanted to sleep, so I let them. There isn't anything else for them to do. It's too noisy at night. I'm sorry the place is in such a mess."

"Never mind the place. Why aren't the boys at school?"

"It's closed-they haven't been since you left."

"Why not?" Irritated by his wife's passivity, Wilder began to knead his heavy hands together. "Helen, you can't lie here like this all day. What about the roof garden? Or the swimming-pool?"

"I think they only exist inside my head. It's too difficult…" She pointed to the cine-camera on the floor between Wilder's feet. "What's that for?"

"I may shoot some footage-for the high-rise project."

"Another prison documentary." Helen smiled at Wilder without any show of humour. "I can tell you where to start."

Wilder took her face in his hands. He felt the slim bones, as if making sure that this tenuous armature still existed. Somehow he would raise her spirits. Seven years earlier, when he had met her while working for one of the commercial television companies, she had been a bright and self-confident producer's assistant, more than a match for Wilder with her quick tongue. The time not spent in bed together they had spent arguing. Now, after the combination of the two boys and a year in the high-rise, she was withdrawing into herself, obsessively wrapped up with the children's most elementary activities. Even her reviewing of children's books was part of the same retreat.

Wilder brought her a glass of the sweet liqueur she liked. Trying to decide what best to do, he rubbed the muscles of his chest. What had at first pleased Wilder, but now disturbed him most of all, was that she no longer noticed his affairs with the bachelor women in the high-rise. Even if she saw her husband talking to one of them Helen would approach, tugging the boys after her, as if no longer concerned with what his wayward sex might be up to. Several of these young women, like the television actress whose Afghan he had drowned in the pool during the blackout, or the continuity girl on the floor above them, had become Helen's friends. The latter, a serious-minded girl who read Byron in the supermarket queues, worked for an independent producer of pornographic films, or so Helen informed him matter-of-factly. "She has to note the precise sexual position between takes. An interesting job-I wonder what the qualifications are, or the life expectancy?"

Wilder had been shocked by this. Vaguely prudish, he had never been able to question the continuity girl. When they made love in her 3rd-floor apartment he had the uneasy feeling that she was automatically memorizing every embrace and copulatory posture in case he was suddenly called away, and might take off again from exactly the same point with another boy-friend. The limitless professional expertise of the high-rise had its unsettling aspects.

Wilder watched his wife sip the liqueur. He stroked her small thighs in an attempt to revive her. "Helen, come on-you look as if you're waiting for the end. We'll straighten everything and take the boys up to the swimming-pool."

Helen shook her head. "There's too much hostility. It's always been there, but now it stands out. People pick on the children-without realizing it, I sometimes think." She sat on the edge of the bed while Wilder changed, staring through the window at the line of high-rises receding across the sky. "In fact, it's not really the other residents. It's the building…"

"I know. But once the police investigation is over you'll find that everything will quieten down. For one thing, there'll be an overpowering sense of guilt."

"What are they investigating?"

"The death, of course. Of our high-diving jeweller." Picking up the cine-camera, Wilder took off the lens shroud. "Have you spoken to the police?"

"I don't know. I've been avoiding everyone." Brightening herself by an effort of will, she went over to Wilder. "Richard-have you ever thought of selling the apartment? We could actually leave. I'm serious."

"Helen…" Nonplussed for a moment, Wilder stared down at the small, determined figure of his wife. He took off his trousers, as if exposing his thick chest and heavy loins in some way reasserted his authority over himself. "That's equivalent to being driven out. Anyway, we'd never get back what we paid for the apartment."

He waited until Helen lowered her head and turned away to the bed. At her insistence, six months earlier, they had already moved from their first apartment on the ground floor. At the time they had seriously discussed leaving the high-rise altogether, but Wilder had persuaded Helen to stay on, for reasons he had never fully understood. Above all, he would not admit his failure to deal on equal terms with his professional neighbours, to outstare these self-satisfied cost-accountants and marketing managers.

As his sons wandered sleepily into the room Helen remarked, "Perhaps we could move to a higher floor."

 

Shaving his chin, Wilder pondered this last comment of his wife's. The frail plea had a particular significance, as if some long-standing ambition had been tapped inside his head. Helen, of course, was thinking in terms of social advancement, of moving in effect to a "better neighbourhood", away from this lower-class suburb to those smarter residential districts somewhere between the I5th and 30th floors, where the corridors were clean and the children would not have to play in the streets, where tolerance and sophistication civilized the air.

Wilder had something different in mind. As he listened to Helen's quiet voice, murmuring to her two sons as if speaking to them from inside a deep dream, he examined himself in the mirror. Like a prize-fighter reassuring himself before a match, he patted the muscles of his stomach and shoulders. In the mental as well as the physical sense, he was almost certainly the strongest man in the building, and Helen's lack of spirit annoyed him. He realized that he had no real means of coping with this kind of passivity. His response to it was still framed by his upbringing, by an over-emotional mother who loved him devotedly through the longest possible childhood she could arrange and thereby given Wilder what he always thought of as his unshakeable self-confidence. She had separated from Wilder's father-a shadowy figure of disreputable back-ground-when he was a small child. The second marriage, to a pleasant but passive accountant and chess enthusiast, had been wholly dominated by the relationship between the mother and her bullock-like son. When he met his future wife Wilder naively believed that he wanted to pass on these advantages to Helen, to look after her and provide an endless flow of security and good humour. Of course, as he realized now, no one ever changed, and for all his abundant self-confidence he needed to be looked after just as much as ever. Once or twice, in unguarded moments during the early days of their marriage, he had attempted to play the childish games he had enjoyed with his mother. But Helen had not been able to bring herself to treat Wilder like her son. For her part, Wilder guessed, love and care were the last things she really wanted. Perhaps the breakdown of life in the high-rise would fulfil her unconscious expectations more than she realized.