High Rise - Ballard James Graham - Страница 19

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From the open windows of the penthouse Royal watched the huge birds clustering on the elevator heads fifty feet away. An unfamiliar species of estuarine gull, they had come up the river during the previous months and begun to congregate among the ventilation shafts and water storage tanks, infesting the tunnels of the deserted sculpture-garden. During his convalescence he had watched them arrive as he sat in his wheelchair on the private terrace. Later, when the callisthenics machine had been installed, the birds would hobble around the terrace while he exercised. In some way they were attracted by Royal's white jacket and pale hair, so close in tone to their own vivid plumage. Perhaps they identified him as one of their own, a crippled old albatross who had taken refuge on this remote roof-top beside the river? Royal liked this notion and often thought about it.

The french windows swung in the early evening air. The alsatian had escaped, hunting by itself on the five-hundred-feet-long observation deck. Now that the summer had ended few people went up to the roof. The remains of a cocktail-party marquee, bedraggled in the rain, lay in the gutter below the balustrade. The gulls, heavy wings folded, strutted among the cheese sticks scattered around a cardboard carton. The potted palms had been untended for months, and the whole roof increasingly resembled a voracious garden.

Royal stepped down on to the roof deck. He enjoyed the hostile gaze of the birds sitting on the elevator heads. The sense of a renascent barbarism hung among the overturned chairs and straggling palms, the discarded pair of diamante sunglasses from which the jewels had been picked. What attracted the birds to this isolated realm on the roof? As Royal approached, a group of the gulls dived into the air, soaring down to catch the scraps flung from a balcony ten floors below them. They fed on the refuse thrown into the car-park, but Royal liked to think that their real motives for taking over the roof were close to his own, and that they had flown here from some archaic landscape, responding to the same image of the sacred violence to come. Fearing that they might leave, he frequently brought them food, as if to convince them that the wait would be worth their while.

He pushed back the rusty gates of the sculpture-garden. From the casement of a decorative lantern he took out a box of cereal meal, by rights reserved for the alsatian. Royal began to scatter the grains among the concrete tunnels and geometric forms of the play-sculptures. Designing the garden had given him particular satisfaction, and he was sorry that the children no longer used the playground. At least it was open to the birds. The gulls followed him eagerly, their strong wings almost knocking the cereal box from his hands.

Leaning on his stick, Royal swung himself around the pools of water on the concrete floor. He had always wanted his own zoo, with half a dozen large cats and, more important, an immense aviary stocked with every species of bird. Over the years he had sketched many designs for the zoo, one of them-ironically-a high-rise structure, where the birds would be free to move about in those sections of the sky that were their true home. Zoos, and the architecture of large structures, had always been Royal's particular interest.

The drenched body of a Siamese cat lay in the gutter where the birds had cornered it-the small beast had climbed all the way up a ventilation shaft from the warm comfort of an apartment far below, embracing the daylight for a few last seconds before the birds destroyed it. Next to the cat was the carcass of a dead gull. Royal picked it up, surprised by its weight, stepped forward and with a powerful running throw hurled the bird far out into the air. It plummeted towards the ground, in an almost unending downward plunge, until it burst like a white bomb across the bonnet of a parked car.

No one had seen him, but Royal would not have cared anyway. For all his keen interest in his neighbours' behaviour, he found it difficult not to look down on them. The five years of his marriage to Anne had given him a new set of prejudices. Reluctantly, he knew that he despised his fellow residents for the way in which they fitted so willingly into their appointed slots in the apartment building, for their over-developed sense of responsibility and lack of flamboyance.

Above all, he looked down on them for their good taste. The building was a monument to good taste, to the well-designed kitchen, to sophisticated utensils and fabrics, to elegant and never ostentatious furnishings-in short, to that whole aesthetic sensibility which these well-educated professional people had inherited from all the schools of industrial design, all the award-winning schemes of interior decoration institutionalized by the last quarter of the twentieth Century. Royal detested this orthodoxy of the intelligent. Visiting his neighbours' apartments, he would find himself physically repelled by the contours of an award-winning coffee-pot, by the well-modulated colour schemes, by the good taste and intelligence that, Midas-like, had transformed everything in these apartments into an ideal marriage of function and design. In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape. Royal would have given anything for one vulgar mantelpiece ornament, one less than snow-white lavatory bowl, one hint of hope. Thank God that they were at last breaking out of this fur-lined prison.

On either side of him, the rain-soaked concrete stretched away into the evening mist. There were no signs of the white alsatian. Royal had reached the centre of the roof. The gulls sat on the ventilation shafts and elevator heads, watching him with their unusually alert eyes. Thinking that they might already have dined off the dog, Royal kicked aside an overturned chair and set off towards the stairhead, calling out the alsatian's name.

Ten feet from the private terrace at the southern end of the roof, a middle-aged woman in a long fur coat stood by the balustrade. Shivering continuously, she stared out across the development project at the silver back of the river. A trio of lighters followed a tug upstream, and a police patrol boat cruised along the north bank.

As Royal approached he recognized the widow of the dead jeweller. Was she waiting for the police to arrive, in some perverse way too proud to call them herself? He was about to ask if she had seen the alsatian, but he knew already that she would not reply. Her face was immaculately made up, but an expression of extreme hostility came through the rouge and powder, a gaze as hard as pain. Royal held tight to his cane. The woman's hands were hidden from sight, and he almost believed that inside the coat her jewelled fingers held a pair of unsheathed knives. For some reason he was suddenly convinced that she had been responsible for her husband's death, and that at any moment she would seize him and wrestle him over the ledge. At the same time, to his surprise, he found himself wanting to touch her, to put his arm around her shoulders. Some kind of wayward sexuality was at work. For a grotesque moment he was tempted to expose himself to her.

"I'm looking for Anne's alsatian," he said lamely. When she made no reply he added, "We've decided to stay on."

Confused by his response to this grieving woman, Royal turned away and made his way down the staircase to the floor below. Despite the pain in his legs he walked swiftly along the corridor, striking at the walls with his cane.

When he reached the central lobby the sounds of the alsatian's frantic barking rose clearly up the nearest of the five high-speed elevator shafts. Royal pressed his head to the door panel. The elevator car, with the alsatian snarling and leaping inside it, was on the 15th floor, its doors jammed open. Royal could hear the heavy blows of a metal club striking at the floor and walls, and the shouts of three attackers-one of them a woman-as they beat the animal to the floor.

When the dog's yelping subsided, the elevator at last responded to the call button. The car climbed to the top floor, where the doors opened on the barely conscious dog dragging itself around the bloodied floor. The animal's head and shoulders were heavy with blood. Matted hair streaked the walls of the cabin.

Royal tried to reassure it, but the alsatian snapped at his hand, frightened of the stick. Several of his neighbours gathered around, carrying an assortment of weapons-tennis rackets, dumb-bells and walking sticks. They were beckoned aside by a friend of Royal's, a gynaecologist named Pangbourne who lived in the apartment next to the lobby. A swimming partner of Anne's, he often played with the dog on the roof.

"Let me have a look at him… Poor devil, those savages have abused you…" Deftly he insinuated himself into the elevator and began to soothe the dog. "We'll get him back to your apartment. Royal. Then I suggest we discuss the elevator position."

Pangbourne knelt down on the floor, whistling a strange series of sounds at the dog. For some weeks the gynaecologist had been urging Royal to interfere with the building's electrical switching systems, as a means of retaliating against the lower floors. This supposed power over the high-rise was the chief source of Royal's authority with his neighbours, though he suspected that Pangbourne for one was well aware that he would never make use of it. With his soft hands and consulting-room manner the gynaecologist unsettled Royal slightly, as if he were always just about to ease an unwary patient into a compromising obstetric position-in fact, though, Pangbourne belonged to the new generation of gynaecologists who never actually touched their patients, let alone delivered a child. His speciality was the computerized analysis of recorded birth-cries, from which he could diagnose an infinity of complaints to come. He played with these tapes like an earlier generation of sorcerer examining the patterns of entrails. Characteristically, Pangbourne's one affair in the high-rise had been with a laboratory researcher on the and floor, a slim, silent brunette who probably spent all her time tormenting small mammals. He had broken this off soon after the outbreak of hostilities.

Nonetheless, he had a way with the injured alsatian. Royal waited while he calmed the dog and examined its wounds. He held its muzzle in his white hands as if he had just freed the poor beast from its caul. Together, he and Royal half-carried and half-dragged the dog back to Royal's apartment.

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