High Rise - Ballard James Graham - Страница 34

An uncertain scene, Robert Laing decided. He could no longer trust his senses. A curious light, grey and humid but at the same time marbled by a faint interior luminosity, hung over the apartment. As he stood among the garbage-sacks in the kitchen, trying to coax a few drops of water from the tap, he peered over his shoulder at the dull fog that stretched like a curtain across the sitting-room, almost an extension of his own mind. Not for the first time he was unsure what time of day it was. How long had he been up? Laing vaguely remembered sleeping on the tartan rug that lay on the kitchen floor, his head pillowed on a garbage-sack between the table legs. He had been wandering about the bedroom where his sister Alice lay asleep, but whether he had woken five minutes ago or the previous day Laing had no means of telling.

He shook his watch, picking at the fractured dial with a grimy finger-nail. The watch had stopped during a scuffle in the 25th floor lobby several days earlier. Although he had forgotten the exact moment, the hands of this broken watch contained the one point of finite time left to him, like a fossil cast on to a beach, crystallizing -for ever a brief sequence of events within a vanished ocean. However, it barely mattered now what time it was-anything rather than night, when it was too terrifying to do more than shelter in the apartment, crouching behind his dilapidated barricade.

Laing turned the cold water tap on and off, listening to the faintly changing tone. At rare intervals, perhaps for a single minute during the day, a green, algae-stained liquid flowed from the tap. These small columns of water, moving up and down the huge system of pipes that ran throughout the building, announced their arrivals and departures with faint changes of note. Listening to this remote and complex music had sharpened Laing's ears, a sensitivity that extended to almost any kind of sound within the building. By contrast his sight, dulled by being used chiefly at night, presented him with an increasingly opaque world.

Little movement took place within the high-rise. As Laing often reminded himself, almost everything that could happen had already taken place. He left the kitchen and squeezed himself into the narrow niche between the front door and the barricade. He placed his right ear to the sounding panel of the wooden door. From the minute reverberations he could tell instantly if a marauder was moving through the abandoned apartments nearby. During the brief period each afternoon when he and Steele emerged from their apartments-a token remembrance of that time when people had actually left the building-they would take turns standing with their hands pressed against the metal walls of an elevator shaft, feeling the vibrations transmitted to their bodies, picking up a sudden movement fifteen floors above or below. Crouched on the staircase with their fingers on the metal rails, they listened to the secret murmurs of the building, the distant spasms of violence that communicated themselves like bursts of radiation from another universe. The high-rise quivered with these tremors, sinister trickles of sound as a wounded tenant crawled up a stairway, a trap closed around a wild dog, an unwary prey went down before a club.

Today, however, befitting this timeless zone with its uncertain light, there was no sound at all. Laing returned to the kitchen and listened to the water-pipes, part of a huge acoustic system operated by thousands of stops, this dying musical instrument they had once all played together. But everything was quiet. The residents of the high-rise remained where they were, hiding behind the barricades in their apartments, conserving what was left of their sanity and preparing themselves for the night. By now what violence there was had become totally stylized, spasms of cold and random aggression. In a sense life in the high-rise had begun to resemble the world outside-there were the same ruthlessness and aggression concealed within a set of polite conventions.

Still uncertain how long he had been awake, or what he had been doing half an hour earlier, Laing sat down among the empty bottles and refuse on the kitchen floor. He gazed up at the derelict washing-machine and refrigerator, now only used as garbage-bins. He found it hard to remember what their original function had been. To some extent they had taken on a new significance, a role that he had yet to understand. Even the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways. Laing pondered this-sometimes he found it difficult not to believe that they were living in a future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted.

Squatting beside his dried-up water-hole like a desert nomad with all the time in the world, Laing waited patiently for the taps to flow. He picked at the dirt on the backs of his hands. Despite his tramp-like appearance he dismissed the notion of using the water to wash. The high-rise stank. None of the lavatories or garbage-disposal chutes were working, and a faint spray of urine hung over the face of the building, drifting across the tiers of balconies. Overlaying this characteristic odour, however, was a far more ambiguous smell, putrid and sweet, that tended to hover around empty apartments, and which Laing chose not to investigate too closely.

For all its inconveniences, Laing was satisfied with life in the high-rise. Now that so many of the residents were out of the way he felt able to relax, more in charge of himself and ready to move forward and explore his life. How and where exactly, he had not yet decided.

His real concern was with his sister. Alice had fallen ill with a non-specific malaise, and spent her time lying on the mattress in Laing's bedroom or wandering half-naked around the apartment, her body shuddering like an oversensitive seismograph at imperceptible tremors that shook the building. When Laing drummed on the waste-pipe below the sink, sending a hollow drone through the empty pipe, Alice called out from the bedroom in her thin voice.

Laing went in to see her, picking his way among the piles of kindling he had made from chopped-up furniture. He enjoyed cutting up the chairs and tables.

Alice pointed to him with a stick-like hand. "The noise-you're signalling again to someone. Who is it now?"

"No one, Alice. Who do you think we know?"

"Those people on the lower floors. The ones you like."

Laing stood beside her, uncertain whether to sit on the mattress. His sister's face was as greasy as a wax lemon. Trying to focus on him, her tired eyes drifted about in her head like lost fish. It crossed his mind briefly that she might be dying-during the past two days they had eaten no more than a few fillets of canned smoked salmon, which he had found under the floorboards in an empty apartment. Ironically, the standard of cuisine in the apartment building had begun to rise during these days of its greatest decline, as more and more delicacies came to light.

However, food was a secondary matter, and Alice was very much alive in other ways. Laing enjoyed her wheedling criticisms of him, as he tried to satisfy her pointless whims. All this was a game, but he relished the role of over-dutiful servant dedicated to a waspish mistress, a devoted menial whose chief satisfaction was a total lack of appreciation and the endless recitation of his faults. In many ways, in fact, his relationship with Alice recapitulated that which his wife had unthinkingly tried to create, hitting by accident on the one possible source of harmony between them, and which Laing had rejected at the time. Within the high-rise, he reflected, his marriage would have succeeded triumphantly.

"I'm trying to find some water, Alice. You'd like a little tea?"

"The kettle smells."

"I'll wash it for you. You mustn't become dehydrated."

She nodded grudgingly. "What's been happening?"

"Nothing… It's already happened." A ripe but not unpleasant smell rose from Alice's body. "Everything is starting to get back to normal."

"What about Alan-you said you'd look for him."

"I'm afraid he's gone." Laing disliked these references to Alice's husband. They introduced a discordant note. "I found your apartment but it's empty now."

Alice turned her head away, indicating that she had seen enough of her brother. Laing bent down and gathered together the kindling she had scattered on the floor beside the mattress. These dining-room chair-legs, well impregnated with glue and varnish, would burn briskly. Laing had looted the chairs from Adrian Talbot's apartment after the psychiatrist's disappearance. He was grateful for this reproduction Hepplewhite-the conventional tastes of the middle-floor residents had served them well. By contrast, those on the lower levels found themselves with a clutter of once-fashionable chromium tubing and undressed leather, useless for anything but sitting on.

All cooking was now done over fires which the residents lit for themselves on their balconies, or in the artificial fireplaces. Laing carried the sticks on to the balcony. As he squatted there he realized that he had nothing to cook. The secret cache of cans he had long ago been obliged to surrender to the orthodontic surgeon next door. In fact, Laing's position was secure thanks only to the morphine ampoules he had concealed.

Although Steele frightened him with his unpredictable cruelties, Laing had attached himself to him out of necessity. So many people had gone, or dropped out of the struggle altogether. Had they deserted the high-rise for the world outside? Laing was sure that they had not. In a sense he depended on the uncertainties of his relationship with the dentist, following his murderous swings like a condemned prisoner in love with a moody jailer. During the previous weeks Steele's behaviour had become frightening. The deliberately mindless assaults on anyone found alone or unprotected, the infantile smearing of blood on the walls of empty apartments-all these Laing watched uneasily. Since his wife's disappearance Steele had been as tautly strung as the huge crossbows which he constructed from piano wire and mounted in the lobbies and corridors, their vicious arrows fashioned from the shafts of golf-clubs. At the same time, however, Steele remained strangely calm, as if pursuing some unknown quest.

Steele slept in the afternoon, giving Laing a chance to prospect for water. As he picked up the kettle he heard Alice call out to him, but when he returned to her she had already forgotten what she wanted.