Plastic (8 page)

I darted back to pay the cab against a timely roll of thunder. It sounded like a decelerated recording of cracking ice cubes, and shook the air.

Julie was right; the keypad wasn’t working. I dragged my blue plastic valise up the steps into a wide parchment-coloured foyer containing a pair of gigantic red corduroy armchairs. The retro-future interior reminded me of the space-station in
2001
. My case left a sidewinding trail of cuprous mud slashes across the marble floor. The walls on either side were darkly mirrored, reflecting the hall in sepia infinities. A sense of intimidation overwhelmed me as the great blank space unfolded. In a city like London space is power, and only the wealthy can afford to reveal so little of themselves. I knew at once that I didn’t belong in a building that smelled of fresh-sawn hardwood and laundered money.

My first task was to find the concierge’s office. Cupping my hands, I peered in through tall doors and saw a small olive-skinned woman with bleached hair and bulbous eyes, shouting into a telephone. She was wedged behind a glass table and seated just around a corner, where her untidy animation would not interfere with the decor. I knocked on the window. The glass panel released a lonely twang as I opened it.

‘You tell me you deliver today and you not deliver,’ the woman shrieked in a manner that would cause any delivery man to tear up the receipt. Her desk was covered in penguins of different sizes. Pinned on the wall behind her were dozens of penguin postcards and several calendars featuring the formal arctic birds diving, sliding and generally falling over one another. If you make the mistake of confiding in a friend that you admire birds of any breed, you’ll be given them every Christmas and birthday for the rest of your life. ‘No, you no deliver. No, I say you don’t.’ She placed her hand over the mouthpiece and switched on an unrealistic smile. ‘Can I help you?’

‘Mrs. Funes?’

‘Madame Funes.’

‘I’m collecting keys for Malcolm Phillimore.’ I dug into my purse and handed the concierge Julie’s envelope.

‘No, you say this but you no deliver,’ Madame Funes screamed into the phone again, tearing open the letter and groping for the glasses that hung on a gold chain at her bosom. Screwing her face into a knot, she held the paper an inch from the tip of her nose and scanned it before covering the mouthpiece once more. ‘You know there is no electricity this weekend from six o’clock tonight? There is hardly any people staying here because of the doorses.’

‘The what?’

‘The doorses! The doorses!’ She waved a gold-crusted hand at the entrance.

‘I know about the electricity. I’m just looking after the property for the owner.’

‘Is good idea, you know, because the locks of the doorses down here is electric so they is open, and anyone,
anyone
, they can walk right in off the street. I am only going to be here since six o’clock tonight and not on the weekend. So you hand-lock the apartment on inside because anyone can walk in from outside: the rapists, the burglars, the crazy people, you know?’ She wrenched out a drawer, selected the key and passed it across the desk. ‘When you inside you lock yourself in because we have a man here two weeks since who kick a door in bang like this.’ She made a vicious slashing gesture. ‘Crazy for drugs I think, and with a knife. You will need this too for the cooker as it is electric ignition. No need to bring it back, I have many.’ She handed me a plastic cigarette lighter before resuming her telephone discourse. ‘YES, YOU SAY THIS BUT YOU NO DELIVER.’

I decided to vacate the office before the old lady had a heart attack, and retreated back to the hall. Dragging my suitcase to the lift, I pressed the call button and checked my watch. There were still two hours left before the rest of the electricity was due to be shut off. The apartment was on the seventh floor, one of six penthouses at the top of the building. Little natural light filtered into the corridors. Bundles of coloured wires hung from the unsecured light fittings.

The folds of the undulating corridor had been fitted with tall opaque windows, but the areas between them remained in darkness. I found myself sliding into the walls as my outstretched hand felt its way across the recessed archways to the apartments. Flicking the cigarette lighter, I searched for the number matching the taped numerals on the key. A penthouse had been constructed in each corner of the building, with two smaller apartments on the long sides between them. Malcolm’s apartment was at the centre of the Ziggurat, sandwiched between the two corner penthouses on the side of the river.

The lounge I entered from the short hall was spectacular enough to freeze me in my tracks. It was a space imagined for a phantom film, boxes of glass-sided air, brushed steel panels suspended above pale oblongs of wood, three great windows opening to a balcony that overlooked a highway of chromatised water, and light everywhere even on this purblind day, the sky pushing its way in and filling my eyes with furious clouds.

Yet I had never seen a private home so devoid of personality. It clearly needed my magic touch: knick-knacks, tiebacks, dried flowers, framed photographs. There were no mantelpieces, no shelves, no flat surfaces for the arrangement of clocks and ducks. It was an idealised layout from a department store window, a theatre set for some obscure futurist entertainment, or perhaps a showflat for the world beyond. The paintings were frameless, canvases pinned back like flayed skin. They were abstracts, vast and awful, umber blocks studded with sickly turrets of yellow ochre, so ugly that they could only be worth a fortune.

Awed into removing my shoes, I made my way to the cold steel altar of the kitchen. Sabatier knives hung in decending order of lethality like razor-sharp musical notes. Everything else lived behind rolling steel shutters. It took both hands to open the refrigerator. I searched for a kettle and found an attenuated steel object that looked as though it might hold water. If Giacometti’s figures were real people, this was where they would cook. The kitchen smelled faintly of the sea rather than food, and for a moment I had a fanciful image of breezes drawing the river estuary into the apartment, but then I saw the Ocean Fresh fragrance bottles plugged into the wall sockets.

A slender steel handle opened the glass walls to the balcony. Outside, atomised rain flew upwards on river winds. London lay in a globe of pale autumnal fog, the twisted, dense patchwork of the land showing through in patches of brown and olive green, stitched by the anthracite thread of roads.

I drew a deep breath and smelled the musk of Thames silt, sharpened through oxygen blooming from Embankment trees. The elements were all around, the dank wind in my hair, moisture dampening my jacket, settling in droplets on my upturned cheek. I wanted to scrub my face clean of makeup and let the passing cloudbank touch my skin. I felt like an angel looking down on the private world of the city, listening to its whispered secrets. Having arrived in a place I could not imagine, I suddenly felt like crying. The rain drifted and swirled. Sometimes the lattice of rainbow-drops rose on rogue air currents, to be flicked down again like turning schools of fish.

A decade of marriage had come to an end. In that time, what had happened in the world beyond the front garden? Celebrities and politicians had fallen from grace, riots and lifestyle revolutions had fleetingly seized the public mood, fads and follies had thrived in the lifespans of midges, failed social experiments had demanded my attention in the bitter, recriminatory pages of the tabloids. Carved into digestible two-minute slots, wars, train wrecks, floods, plagues and assassinations had flashed past me on the evening news with the vacuity of quiz show scores. The last ten years had been a firework display viewed from a safe distance. Since my marriage began, I could not recall coming to London for any reason other than to shop. Now I began to wonder how any person could have remained so disconnected from the world.

Shivering, I backed inside to explore my new surroundings, like a cat left with friends for the holidays.

The rest of the penthouse had more character. A bathroom of sun-faded Cambodian stone. A carved Thai buddha with a fat red candle melted into its lap. An undulating glass shower I could walk into without having to open a door. A textured slate floor that darkened with the first spatter from the great copper showerhead. The steaming water cascaded over my shoulders, reddening skin, scalding away the misery of the last few days. Toiletries, understated and expensive, stood in a pumice recess. I eased a snake of foam from a tube and smeared it across my fat breasts, my pale pudgy stomach, feeling the skin soften beneath my fingers. The urge to cry was stronger than ever. I saw my body twisting in the glass wall of the shower, a distant pale figure, a woman I had never seen before.
I shouldn’t be here. I can’t recognise myself in these surroundings.

Heavy white towels as thick as duvets, matching bathrobes, underfloor heating, lights that faded up by the pressure of my fingertips. If the kitchen was clinical, the bathroom was decadent. No wonder Malcolm’s mistress was so anxious to pin him down to a divorce. I pulled on one of the robes and raised its hood, drifting through the bare white rooms, hugging myself with excitement. It was impossible not to feel like an interloper. I did not have the right credentials to be allowed in here.

I checked the time again. In an hour and ten minutes the electricity would be cut. The implications were worrying and a little exciting. Searching the rooms, anxious to make the most of the time, I found a flat-screen plasma television recessed into a beech-panelled bedroom wall, unclipped the remote and flicked through dozens of channels. Aircraft and dolphins performed silver somersaults through the phosphorescence reflected across the windows. I surfed for American sitcoms, which I enjoyed because you never learned anything real about the characters. My heart rate decelerated to the drifting pace of my dreams. I slept in a way I had not slept for months, years.

When I awoke, I found myself in darkness.

The television screen was inert. I tried the lights. Nothing. My wristwatch read 6:25pm. The lights from the street were reflected upwards by the river, rippling across the ceiling in languid arabesques, the apartment acting in balance to the entropy of the world below.

I rose and pulled the robe tight. The air was coolbox fresh as I carefully made my way across the lounge. Six fat church candles stood on inchoate earthenware plates. Not realising that they were intended for display purposes, I lit each one in turn, illuminating my borrowed palace with wavering ellipses of light.

The refrigerator bulb failed to come on when I opened the door, but a roll of trapped chill air still brushed my bare flesh. Someone had left the clingfilm-wrapped ingredients for a cold meal in the crisper. I made myself a sandwich, bitter rye bread stuffed with ham, lettuce and mayonnaise, something I would never have prepared at home. There I would grill cheese on Mother’s Pride and pour microwaved beans over it. To do so here would have been a sacrilegious act. I ate perched on a tall stool at the chromed breakfast bar, chewing oiled scraps of sun-dried tomato, savouring the flavours, then dipping into jars I had seen in food halls but never tried before.

I carefully wiped my hands before examining the ceiling-high bookcases by candlelight, working my way along the co-ordinated spines. Medical encyclopediae, volumes on skin and eyes and ears, books about burns with colour plates I didn’t dare to examine. It made me wonder about the exact nature of Malcolm’s consultancy. Could he be some kind of medical practitioner? Julia had failed to divulge his role outside of the company. If he was a specialist with a private practice it might explain how he managed to afford such luxury. But I thought they worked in electronic communications. Surely such diverse careers had no overlap.

I was standing in the hall, examining another excruciatingly ugly painting by the light of a candle when I heard a noise in the corridor beyond the apartment. It sounded like someone hitting the floor with the heel of a shoe.

I’m not the kind of person to investigate strange noises in dark buildings, but this one was so odd that I did it without thinking.

Of course, I shouldn’t have.

CHAPTER TEN

Pasiphae

P
EERING INTO THE
dimness of the top floor corridor, I became aware of a tall man in a Nike T-shirt and flappy jogging shorts standing against the distant wall, and my heart-rhythm faltered. The figure remained still with his arm raised as I approached.

‘I thought I heard someone outside,’ I offered nervously. ‘Were you banging?’

He lowered his shoe and flicked hair from his forehead. I couldn’t help noticing that the pupils of his protuberant eyes diverged disconcertingly. ‘I should hope so. We’ve got cockroaches. Bloody great brown things like they have in America. I just chased one the size of a small cat out into the hall. They must come up from the river at high tide. I thought I’d hit it, but if they’re strong enough to breed after a nuclear blast I suppose they can survive a rubberised heel.’

He dropped the shoe and wriggled a bony foot back into it. ‘So I’m not the only one still here. I haven’t seen you before. Hang on a minute.’ He produced a plastic pocket torch and shone it right in my eyes. When I waved the beam aside he ran it over my body, then flicked it to the floor.

‘I suppose you know there’s no power on for the next fifty-four hours. I haven’t seen him lately. Is he away?’

‘Who?

‘The guy who lives here.’

‘I’m looking after the place for the owner, just over the weekend,’ I explained.

‘Ah. I suppose he’s off on business. They always are.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The so-called residents of this block. Our gallant captains of industry. I’m next door to you, corner penthouse of this concrete Shangri-La. North-westerly view. Not exactly Turner’s vision of the river, but north-easterly had already gone. They sold most of these apartments off-plan in Singapore. Absentee owners, all of them.’ He offered a long hand, with fingers that wrapped around mine like crab legs. ‘My name’s Dr. Elliot, by the way.’