High-Rise (19 page)

Deciding to test the defences of the apartment before he went to sleep, Wilder stepped into the corridor. He stood outside the doorway, as the stale air moved past him to the open balcony. He relished the rich smells of the high-rise. Like their garbage, the excrement of the residents higher up the building had a markedly different odour.

Returning to the balcony, he watched the police drive away in their car. Of the twenty or so residents who still left for work each morning, three had turned back, evidently unsettled by the task of convincing the police that all was well. Without looking up, they scurried back to the entrance lobby.

Wilder knew that they would never leave again. The separation of the high-rise from the world around it was now almost complete, and would probably coincide with his own arrival at the summit. Soothed by this image, he sat down on the floor and leaned against Charlotte Melville's shoulder, falling asleep as she stroked the wine-coloured stripes on his chest and shoulders.

At dusk, after he had strengthened the guard, Anthony Royal ordered the candles lit on the dining-room table. Hands in the pockets of his dinner-jacket, he stood at the windows of the penthouse apartment on the 40th floor and looked down across the concrete plazas of the development project. All the tenants who had earlier left for their offices had now parked their cars and entered the building. With their safe arrival, Royal felt for the first time that he could relax, like a captain eager to set sail seeing the last of his crew return from shore-leave in a foreign port. The evening had begun.

Royal sat down in the high-backed oak chair at the head of the dining-table. The candlelight flickered over the silver cutlery and gold plate, reflected in the silk facings of his dinner-jacket. As usual he smiled at the theatricality of this contrived setting, like a badly rehearsed and under-financed television commercial for a high-life product. It had started three weeks earlier when he and Pangbourne had decided to dress for dinner each evening. Royal had ordered the women to extend the dining-room table to its furthest length, so that he could sit with his back to the high windows and the illuminated decks of the nearby buildings. Responding to Royal, the women had brought candles and silverware from secret caches, and served an elaborately prepared meal. Their shadows swayed across the ceiling as if they were moving around the dining chamber of a feudal chief. Sitting in his chair at the far end of the long table, Pangbourne had been suitably impressed.

Of course, as the gynaecologist well knew, the charade was meaningless. A single step beyond the circle of candlelight the garbage-sacks were piled six-deep against the walls. Outside, the corridors and staircases were filled with broken furniture and barricades built from washing-machines and freezer cabinets. The elevator shafts were the new garbage chutes. Not one of the twenty elevators in the apartment building now functioned, and the shafts were piled deep with kitchen refuse and dead dogs. A fading semblance of civilized order still survived in the top three floors, the last tribal unit in the high-rise. However, the one error that Royal and Pangbourne had made was to assume that there would always be some kind of social organization below them which they could exploit and master. They were now moving into a realm of no social organization at all. The clans had broken down into small groups of killers, solitary hunters who built man-traps in empty apartments or preyed on the unwary in deserted elevator lobbies.

Royal looked up from the polished table as one of the women walked into the room, a silver tray in her strong arms. Watching her, he remembered that she was Mrs Wilder. She wore one of Anne's well-cut trouser-suits, and not for the first time Royal thought how easily this intelligent woman had fitted into the upper levels of the high-rise. Two weeks earlier, when she was found cowering with her sons in an empty apartment on the 19th floor after Wilder abandoned her, she was totally exhausted, numbed by hunger and indignation. Whether in quest of her husband, or responding to some dim instinct, she had begun to climb the building. The raiding party brought her to the top floor. Pangbourne had wanted to throw out this anaemic and rambling woman, but Royal overruled him. Somewhere below, Wilder was still making his ascent of the high-rise, and his wife might one day be a valuable hostage. Led away, she joined the group of outcast wives who lived with their children in the next apartment, earning their keep by working as house servants.

Within days Mrs Wilder had regained her strength and self-confidence. No longer stunned and stoop-shouldered, she reminded Royal of the serious and attractive wife of an up-and-coming television journalist who had arrived at the high-rise a year earlier.

He noticed that she was clearing away Pangbourne's place setting, returning the immaculate silverware to her tray.

"They seem clean enough," Royal told her. "I don't think Dr Pangbourne will notice." When she ignored him and continued to remove the cutlery, Royal asked, "Have you heard from him? I take it he won't be joining me this evening?"

"Or any evening. He's decided to decline in future." Mrs Wilder glanced across the table at Royal, almost as if she had felt a flicker of concern for him. She added matter-of-factly, "I should be wary of Dr Pangbourne."

"I always have been."

"When a man like Dr Pangbourne loses his appetite for food it's reasonable to assume that he has something much more interesting between his teeth-and much more dangerous."

Royal listened to her cool advice without comment. He was not surprised that the dinners had come to an end. Both he and Pangbourne, anticipating the inevitable break-up of the last clan within the apartment building, had now retired to their quarters at opposite ends of the roof, each taking his women with him. Pangbourne had moved into the penthouse once owned by the dead jeweller. Strangely enough, Royal reflected, they would soon be back where they had begun, each tenant isolated within his own apartment.

Something warned him to dispense with this meal but he waited for Mrs Wilder to serve him. Having survived so far, nothing that the gynaecologist could do would put him off his stride. During the past months almost all traces of his accident had vanished, and Royal felt stronger and more confident than ever before. He had won his attempt to dominate the high-rise, and amply proved his right to rule this huge building, even though at the cost of his marriage. As for the new social order that he had hoped to see emerge, he knew now that his original vision of a high-rise aviary had been closer to the truth than he guessed. Without knowing it, he had constructed a gigantic vertical zoo, its hundreds of cages stacked above each other. All the events of the past few months made sense if one realized that these brilliant and exotic creatures had learned to open the doors.

Royal sat back as Mrs Wilder served him. Since his own kitchen lacked any equipment, all his meals were prepared in the apartment next door. Mrs Wilder reappeared with her tray, stepping over the garbage-sacks that lined the hallway-for all their descent into barbarism, the residents of the high-rise remained faithful to their origins and continued to generate a vast amount of refuse.

As usual, the main course consisted of a piece of roast meat. Royal never asked about the source of the meat-dog, presumably. The women had the supply situation well in hand. Mrs Wilder stood beside him, gazing into the night air as Royal tasted the heavily spiced dish. Like a well-trained housekeeper, she was waiting for Royal to give some indication of approval, though she never seemed concerned by either praise or criticism. She spoke in a flat voice unlike the animated tone she used with Anne and the other women. In fact, Mrs Wilder spent more time with his wife than Royal did himself. Six women lived together in the adjacent apartment, ostensibly so that they could be more easily protected from a surprise attack. Sometimes Royal would visit Anne, but there was something daunting about the closely knit group of women, sitting on their beds surrounded by the garbage-sacks, together looking after the Wilder children. Their eyes would watch him as he hesitated in the door, waiting for him to go away. Even Anne had withdrawn from him, partly out of fear of Royal, but also because she realized that he no longer needed her. At last, after all the months of trying to maintain her superior status, Anne had decided to join her fellow residents.

"Good-it's excellent again. Wait... before you go." Royal put down his fork. Casually, he asked, "Have you heard anything of him? Perhaps someone has seen him?"

Mrs Wilder shook her head, bored by this roundabout questioning. "Who...?"

"Your husband-Richard, I think he was called.
Wilder
."

Mrs Wilder stared down at Royal, shaking her head as if not recognizing him. Royal was certain that she had not only forgotten the identity of her husband, but of all men, including himself. To test this, he placed his hand on her thigh, feeling the strong muscle. Mrs Wilder stood passively with her tray, unaware of Royal fondling her, partly because she had been molested by so many men during the past months, but also because the sexual assault itself had ceased to have any meaning. When Royal slipped two of his fingers into her natal cleft she reacted, not by pushing his hand away, but by moving it to her waist and lightly holding it there as she would the straying hands of her children.

When she had gone, taking the portion of meat which Royal always left for her, he sat back at the long table. He was glad to see her go. Without asking him, Mrs Wilder had laundered his white jacket, washing out the bloodstains which Royal at one time had worn so proudly and which had given him, not merely his sense of authority, but his whole unstated role within the high-rise.

Had she done this deliberately, knowing that it would emasculate him? Royal could still remember the period of endless parties, when the apartment building had been lit up like a drunken liner. Royal had played the role of feudal chief to the hilt, presiding each evening over the council meetings held in his drawing-room. As they sat together in the candlelight, these neurosurgeons, senior academics and stockbrokers displayed all the talents for intrigue and survival exercised by years of service in industry, commerce and university life. For all the formal vocabulary of agendas and minutes, proposed and seconded motions, the verbal paraphernalia bequeathed by a hundred committee meetings, these were in effect tribal conferences. Here they discussed the latest ruses for obtaining food and women, for defending the upper floors against marauders, their plans for alliance and betrayal. Now the new order had emerged, in which all life within the high-rise revolved around three obsessions-security, food and sex.

Leaving the table, Royal picked up a silver candlestick and carried it to the window. All the lights in the high-rise were out. Two floors, the 40th and the 37th, were left with electric current, but they remained unlit. The darkness was more comforting, a place where real illusions might flourish.

Forty floors below, a car turned into the parking-lot and threaded its way through the maze of access lanes to its place two hundred yards from the building. The driver, wearing a flying-jacket and heavy boots, stepped out and hurried head-down towards the entrance. Royal guessed that this unknown man was probably the last resident to leave the building and set off for his office. Whoever he was, he had found a route to and from his apartment.

Somewhere on the roof, a dog whimpered. Far below, from the mouth of an apartment twenty storeys down the cliff face, there was a brief isolated scream-whether of pain, lust or rage no longer mattered. Royal waited, his heart starting to race. A moment later there was a second scream, a meaningless wail. These cries were the expressions of totally abstracted emotions, detached from the context of events around them.

Royal waited, expecting one of his retinue to enter and inform him of the probable reasons for these disturbances. Apart from the women in the next apartment, several of the younger male residents-a gallery owner from the 39th floor, and a successful hairdresser from the 38th-usually lounged about in the corridor among the garbage-sacks, leaning on their spears and keeping an eye on the staircase barricades.

Picking up his chromium cane, Royal left the dining-room, a single candle in its silver stick lighting his way. As he stumbled over the black plastic bags he wondered why they had never heaved them over the side. Presumably they held this rubbish to themselves less from fear of attracting the attention of the outside world than from a need to cling to their own, surround themselves with the mucilage of unfinished meals, bloody bandage scraps, broken bottles that once held the wine that made them drunk, all faintly visible through the semi-opaque plastic.

His apartment was empty, the high-ceilinged rooms deserted. Cautiously, Royal stepped into the corridor. The guard-post by the barricades was unmanned, and no lights gleamed through the doorway of the adjacent apartment where the women lived. Surprised by the absence of light from the usually busy kitchen, Royal walked through the darkened hallway. He kicked aside a child's toy and raised the candlestick above his head, trying to pick out any sleeping human figures in the surrounding rooms.

Open suitcases lay on the mattresses that covered the floor of the master-bedroom. Royal stood in the doorway, a medley of scents crowding around him in the darkness, brilliant wakes left behind them by these fleeing women. Hesitating for a moment, he reached into the room and switched on the light.

The instant electric glow, so unfamiliar after the wavering candlelight and twitching torch-beams, shone down on the six mattresses in the room. Half-packed suitcases lay on top of each other, as if the women had left at a moment's notice, or at some prearranged signal. Most of their clothes had been left behind, and he recognized the trouser-suit which Mrs Wilder had worn to serve his dinner. The racks of Anne's dresses and suits hung in the wardrobes like a store display.