Plastic
Praise for Christopher Fowler
‘Fowler writes devilishly clever and mordantly funny novels that are sometimes heartbreakingly moving.’
Val McDermid,
The Times
‘Christopher Fowler is an award-winning novelist who would make a good serial killer.’
Time Out
‘An imaginative fun house of a world where sage minds go to expand their vistas and sharpen their wits.’
New York Times Book Review
on the
Bryant & May
books
‘Fowler repeatedly challenges the reader to redraw the boundaries between innocence and malevolence, rationality and paranoia... He has the uncanny ability to invoke terror in broad daylight.’
The Guardian
on
Demonised
‘His sentences zip along, wonderfully funny or moving – sometimes both.’
The Independent
on
Paperboy
‘The climax is truly spectacular... this would make a great piece of cinema. It has everything that you could ever want from a thriller.’
The Eloquent Page
on
Roofworld
Also by Christopher Fowler
Roofworld
Rune
Red Bride
Darkest Day
Spanky
Psychoville
Disturbia
Menz Insana
Soho Black
Calabash
Breathe
Paperboy
(Autobiography)
Film Freak
(Autobiography)
B
RYANT
& M
AY
Full Dark House
The Water Room
Seventy Seven Clocks
Ten Second Staircase
White Corridor
The Victoria Vanishes
Bryant & May On the Loose
Bryant & May Off the Rails
The Memory of Blood
C
OLLECTIONS
The Bureau of Lost Souls
City Jitters
More City Jitters
Flesh Wounds
Sharper Knives
Personal Demons
Uncut
The Devil in Me
Demonised
Old Devil Moon
Red Gloves
First published 2013 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
ISBN (epub): 978-1-84997-638-1
ISBN (mobi): 978-1-84997-639-8
Copyright © 2013 Christopher Fowler
Cover art by Pye Parr
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
FOREWORD
Joanne Harris
E
VERY YEAR, A
million books never see publication. Some are rightly ignored; some die; some are just not saleable enough. Some receive rave rejections before being thrown onto the trash pile. And sometimes one splendid, heroic book fights its way to the top of that pile, bites its thumb at the corporate, commercial world of publishing and announces to the world at large: Read me, or else.
Plastic
is one of these. I was lucky enough to read it in manuscript form some seven or eight years ago. From the first page I was hooked. Dark, compassionate, violent, wise and wittily razor-edged – if Quentin Tarantino had decided to collaborate with Alan Bennett to rewrite
Bridget Jones’ Diary
, then surely the script would have been something like this. I already knew the author to be the master of urban unease, but to me this new novel went further still. I loved it, raved about it to everyone I knew and assumed that it would just be a matter of time before it became a bestseller.
In a world where credit rules supreme, where images of unattainable perfection are held up to women as not only achievable, but absolutely necessary, where nobody looks beyond the surface, where to be on TV is everyone’s fantasy and where the acquisition of yet another handbag, yet another pair of shoes, might hold the key to happiness,
Plastic
has an uncanny resonance. The heroine, June Cryer, whose description of herself as ‘a dead housewife’ comes frighteningly close to home, is the existential Everywoman of the consumer generation. Unloved, unhappy, overweight, she is filled with confusion about the world around her; about her husband, who is leaving her; about the dreams she used to have.
‘When I was young I would kneel on my mother’s threadbare sofa and watch snowflakes dissolving against the warm lounge windows, I would stare into the frozen streets as white and muffled as the inside of a pillow and think of a distant future when I would become important to someone. Even in winter my life was sunlit, one giant possibility. How far did I end up from that dream?’
Her displacement activities, her preoccupation with trivia, with TV, and particularly with shopping as a desperate means of filling an inner void, will strike many a chord amongst those of us who know what it’s like to speed-shop through Selfridges, wielding the plastic with deadly intent, and to return triumphant with the sense of a job well done and a shopping bag full of assorted items that only an obsessive-compulsive on crack would think made any kind of sense…
All of us have been there. All of us know what it’s like. June speaks for all of us when she says of a visit to Selfridge’s:
‘I arrived in front of the building like Caesar at the gates of Rome and swept past the doorman with a look that said ‘I’m about to jag a spike in the monthly national consumer index, so don’t even
think
of fucking with me’.
But such pleasures as this have consequences. And as events unfurl with the breathtaking inevitability of a row of collapsing dominoes, June suddenly finds herself on the dark side of consumerism, in a world of shopping at gunpoint, a world in which human flesh is just another commodity to be traded, and where even such a mundane object as a potato peeler may be given a new and sinister role...
However, in spite of all this, the publishing world was not convinced. Whilst admitting the book was terrific (I don’t think any manuscript has ever been so widely – and furtively – read in-house), editor after editor pronounced it “tricky to sell”. A thriller about shopping, narrated by a housewife? From Sophie Kinsella, from Kathy Lette – from any female writer, in fact – it would have been acceptable. But from Christopher Fowler? Tricky.
And so
Plastic
continued to circulate under a series of different titles, acquiring converts wherever it went like some literary underworld movement – a secret Campaign for Real Fiction.
Finally, here it is, in all its subversive glory.
Read it with the light on.
‘Our houses are not in the street anymore.
The street is in our houses.’
Charles Gounod
CHAPTER ONE
Dead Housewife
T
HERE’S BLOOD EVERYWHERE
, and none of it’s where it’s supposed to be.
On the carpet. On the curtains. All over me. And I know it won’t wash out because this shirt is pure silk. If you don’t want to ruin silk, never sneeze in a Starbucks with a mouth full of blueberry muffin. As I sit here I keep thinking
if only I could go back to my old life
. I could head into the kitchen and start going through the ironing again, except that the iron is now sticking out of the TV screen.
My name is June Cryer, and I am a dead housewife.
To put it another way, I am a pelmet-vacuuming, Tesco-shopping, voucher-clipping, dishwasher-loading, Radio Heart-loving dead housewife who should have stayed home instead of getting into a fight with the kind of men who feature on crime programmes with blurry boxes over their faces.
I’d like to comb my hair and put on a bit of lippy, make myself presentable, but I can’t get up. The man standing guard over me is entirely devoid of manners. He has a foil-wrapped burger in his fist, and takes ruminative lumps out of it while he’s deciding where to dump my body. The meat juice is running over his knuckles like blood. My God, we’ve come a long way from Raffles, the Gentleman Thief.
How the hell did I ever get here?
All I can think is that I must have fallen into a deep sleep the day I got married, like some character from a fairy tale, except Sleeping Beauty was out cold before she met her prince, and he fought a dragon and slashed his way through a forest of poisonous thorns to get to her, whereas Gordon just said ‘I suppose I should marry you if you’re not going to have a termination’, and instead of the Kiss of True Love bringing me to my senses it was his unrepentant affair with the bitch next door.
I look up at the Burger-Muncher and realise I am
way
out of my depth. By the time my neighbours hear about me I’ll be gone. I’ll turn up on the news, found in the long grass of a railway embankment, or floating face-down in the Thames, just another unidentified torso sucked along by the tide. My severed head will be discovered in a freezer bag in the high street, only to be replaced with bunches of lurid garage flowers still wrapped in plastic. Why don’t people take the plastic off? When Princess Diana died it looked like several tons of Quality Street had been dumped outside her house. But that’s how I’ll be found, scattered across the city in half a dozen binliners, recognised by my ankle-chain or the piercings in my ears.
So much for the dignity of death.
I’ll probably make the local edition of the six o’clock news. My disapproving neighbours will be interviewed around the corners of their front doors; ‘She was a quiet woman, kept herself to herself, never went out much.’ My best friend will use my disappearance as an opportunity to impose herself on athletic television cameramen. My mother will telephone my husband and commiserate: ‘Well, Gordon, you can’t say I didn’t warn you. I always said she was a bolter. The signs were there, it’s just a shame your name had to be dragged into it.’ Eventually, in death as in life, I will be totally forgotten. And I’ll only have myself to blame.
As soon as my captor has finished his burger, I’m done for. He still has a quarter left but I can tell he’s sizing me up for removal.
Will she go in the lift or do I have to saw her head off first?
I once had hopes for something better than this. When I was young –
– when I was young I would kneel on my mother’s faded turquoise sofa and watch snowflakes dissolving against the warm lounge windows, I would stare into the frozen streets as white and muffled as the inside of a pillow and think of a distant future when I would become important to someone. Our TV was always showing
The Little Mermaid
or
Sleeping Beauty
, and we always had the colour turned up too bright. I wanted to live in a sunlit glade and find my prince. Was I so wrong for wanting that? I’m not ashamed. But how did I end up so far from those dreams?