High-Rise (15 page)

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.

He turned away from his car, and walked along the parking lane that ran parallel to the apartment building. He was not ready yet to venture into the open air, face his colleagues at the medical school, catch up with the lost student supervisions. Perhaps he would stay at home that afternoon and prepare his notes for his next lecture.

He reached the edge of the ornamental lake, a graceful oval two hundred yards in length, and stepped down on to the concrete floor. Following his shadow, he walked along the gently sloping lake-bed. Within a few minutes he was standing in the centre of the empty lake. The damp concrete, like the surface of an enormous mould, curved away on all sides, smooth and bland, but in some way as menacing as the contours of some deep reductive psychosis. The absence of any kind of rigid rectilinear structure summed up for Laing all the hazards of the world beyond the high-rise.

Unable to stay there any longer, he turned and strode swiftly towards the shore, climbed the bank and ran towards the apartment building between the dusty cars.

Within ten minutes he had returned to his apartment. After bolting the door, he climbed over his barricade and wandered around the half-empty rooms. As he inhaled the stale air he was refreshed by his own odour, almost recognizing parts of his body-his feet and genitalia, the medley of smells that issued from his mouth. He stripped off his clothes in the bedroom, throwing his suit and tie into the bottom of the closet and putting on again his grimy sports-shirt and trousers. He knew now that he would never again try to leave the high-rise. He was thinking about Alice, and how he could bring her to his apartment. In some way these powerful odours were beacons that would draw her to him.

By four o'clock that afternoon the last of the residents had returned to the high-rise. From his balcony Laing watched their cars appear on the approach roads and turn into their spaces in the parking-lot. Briefcases in hand, the drivers made their way to the entrance lobbies. Laing was relieved that all conversation ended when they neared the building. This civilized behaviour in some way unsettled him.

Laing had rested during the afternoon, deciding to calm himself and gather his strength for the night to come. At intervals he climbed over the barricade and peered into the corridor, hoping to catch sight of Steele. Laing's concern for his sister, only three floors below with her twilight husband, made him increasingly restless. He needed an outbreak of violence to provide a pretext to rescue her. If the plan to divide the building succeeded, he would be unlikely to see her again.

Laing paced around the apartment, testing the primitive defensive preparations. Those residents like himself on the upper floors were more vulnerable than they assumed, and might easily find themselves at the mercy of those on the lower levels. Wilder and his henchmen could easily block the exits, destroy the electrical and water-supply inputs, and set fire to the upper floors. Laing imagined the first flames climbing through the elevator shafts and staircases, floors collapsing as the terrified residents were driven to find refuge on the roof.

Unsettled by this lurid vision, Laing disconnected his stereo-speakers and added them to the barricade of furniture and kitchen appliances. Records and cassettes lay about underfoot, but he kicked them out of his way. At the base of his bedroom wardrobe he prised away the floorboards. In this suitcase-sized cavity he hid away his cheque book and insurance policies, tax returns and share certificates. Lastly, he forced in his medical case with vials of morphine, antibiotics and cardiac stimulants. When he nailed the floorboards back into place he felt that he was sealing away for ever the last residues of his previous life, and preparing himself without reservation for the new one to come.

On the surface, the apartment building remained quiet, but much to Laing's relief the first incidents broke out by the early evening. He waited in the lobby through the late afternoon, standing about with a group of his fellow residents. Perhaps, insanely,
nothing
was going to happen? Then a foreign-affairs analyst arrived with the news that there had been a fierce scuffle over an elevator ten floors below. Adrian Talbot, the likeable psychiatrist on the 27th floor, had been drenched in urine as he climbed the stairs to his apartment. There was even a rumour that a 40th-floor apartment had been vandalized. Such an act of provocation guaranteed them all a hot night.

This was followed by a spate of reports that many residents had returned home to find their apartments ransacked, furniture and kitchen equipment damaged, electrical fittings torn out. Oddly enough, no food supplies had been touched, as if these acts of vandalism were deliberately random and meaningless. Had the damage been inflicted by the owners themselves, without realizing what they were doing, in an attempt to bring about an increase in violence?

These incidents continued as the evening settled over the apartment building. From his balcony Laing could see torch-beams flicking to and fro in the windows of the eight blacked-out floors below, as if signalling the preparations of a brutal blood-rite. Laing sat in the darkness on the living-room carpet, his back against the reassuring bulk of the barricade. He was reluctant to switch on the lights, for fear-absurdly, as he knew-that an assailant might attack him from the air outside his balcony. Drinking steadily from a hip-flask of whisky, he watched the early evening television programmes. He turned down the sound, not out of boredom with these documentaries and situation comedies, but because they were meaningless. Even the commercials, with their concern for the realities of everyday life, were transmissions from another planet. Squatting among the plastic garbage-sacks, his furniture piled up behind him, Laing studied these lavish reconstructions of housewives cleaning their immaculate kitchens, deodorants spraying well-groomed armpits. Together they formed the elements of a mysterious domestic universe.

Calm and unfrightened, Laing listened to the strident voices in the corridor. Thinking about his sister, he welcomed these signs of the violence to come. Alice, always fastidious, would probably be repelled by the derelict state of the apartment, but it would do her good to find something to criticize. The sweat on Laing's body, like the plaque that coated his teeth, surrounded him in an envelope of dirt and body odour, but the stench gave him confidence, the feeling that he had dominated the terrain with the products of his own body. Even the prospect that the lavatory would soon be permanently blocked, something that had once filled him with polite dread, was now almost inviting.

This decline in standards of hygiene Laing shared with his neighbours. Emitted from their bodies was a strong scent, the unique signature of the high-rise. The absence of this odour was what most unsettled him about the world outside the apartment block, though its nearest approximation was to be found in the dissecting-room at the anatomy school. A few days earlier Laing had caught himself hanging about his secretary's desk, trying to get close enough to her to detect this reassuring smell. The startled girl had looked up to find Laing hovering over her like a beachcomber in rut.

Three floors above, a falling bottle burst across a balcony. The glass fragments spat away like tracers through the darkness. A record-player by an open window was turned up to full volume. Huge fragments of amplified music boomed into the night.

Laing climbed around his barricade and unlocked the door of his apartment. In the elevator lobby a group of his neighbours were manhandling a steel fire-door across the entrance to the stairway. Five floors below, a raid was in progress. Laing and his fellow clansmen crowded against the fire-door, peering into the darkened stairwell. They could hear the elevator gear reverberating as the car moved up and down, ferrying more attackers to the fray. Rising from the 20th floor, as if from an execution pit, came a woman's scream.

Waiting for Steele to appear and help them, Laing was about to go in search of him. But the lobby and corridors were filled with running people, colliding into each other in the dark as they fought their way back to their apartments on the floors above the 25th. The raiders had been hurled back. Torch-beams swerved across the walls in a lunatic semaphore. Laing slipped in a pool of grease and fell among the swerving shadows. Behind him, an excited woman stepped on his hand, her heel cutting his wrist.

For the next two hours a series of running battles took place in the corridors and staircases, moving up and down the floors as the barricades were reassembled and torn down again. At midnight, as he crouched in the elevator lobby behind the overturned fire-door, debating whether to risk making a run for Alice's apartment, Laing saw Richard Wilder standing among the scattered steel chairs. In one hand he still held his cine-camera. Like a large animal pausing for breath, he followed the huge projections of himself cast upon the walls and ceiling, as if about to leap on to the backs of his own shadows and ride them like a troupe of beasts up the flues of the building.

The confrontation subsided, moving away like a storm towards the lower floors. Laing and his neighbours assembled in Adrian Talbot's apartment. Here they sat on the living-room floor among the broken tables and the easy chairs with their slashed cushions. The torches at their feet formed a circle of light, shining on the bottles of whisky and vodka they shared together.

Arm in a sling, the psychiatrist moved around his vandalized apartment, trying to hang the shattered picture-frames over the slogans aerosolled across his walls in the supermarket paint-section's most fashionable colours. Talbot seemed more numbed by the personal hostility in these anti-homosexual obscenities than by the wholesale destruction of his apartment, but in spite of himself Laing found them stimulating. The lurid caricatures on the walls glimmered in the torch-light like the priapic figures drawn by cave-dwellers.

"At least they've left you alone," Talbot said, crouching beside Laing. "I've obviously been picked out as a scapegoat. This building must have been a powerhouse of resentments-everyone's working off the most extraordinary backlog of infantile aggressions."

"They'll spend themselves."

"Perhaps. I had a bucket of urine thrown over me this afternoon. Much more of that and I may take up a cudgel myself. It's a mistake to imagine that we're all moving towards a state of happy primitivism. The model here seems to be less the noble savage than our un-innocent post-Freudian selves, outraged by all that over-indulgent toilet-training, dedicated breast-feeding and parental affection-obviously a more dangerous mix than anything our Victorian forebears had to cope with. Our neighbours had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse..."