High Rise, стр. 29

After a delay of twenty minutes, as irritating as a holdup at a provincial frontier post, the elevator moved from the 16th to the 17th floor. Exhausted by the long wait, Wilder stepped through the doors into the lobby, looking for somewhere to throw away his cartons of pet food. Crammed together shoulder to shoulder, the returning cost-accountants and television executives held tightly to their briefcases, eyes averted from each other as they stared at the graffiti on the walls of the car. The steel roof had been removed, and the long shaft rose above their heads, exposed to anyone with a missile casually to hand.

The three passengers who stepped out with Wilder vanished among the barricades that lined the dimly lit corridors. When Wilder reached the Hillmans' apartment he found that the door was securely bolted. There were no sounds of movement from within. Wilder tried without success to force the lock. Conceivably the Hillmans had abandoned the apartment and taken shelter with friends. Then he heard a faint scraping from the hall. Pressing his head to the door, he heard Mrs Hillman remonstrating with herself in a thin voice as she pulled a heavy object across the floor.

After a prolonged tapping and negotiation, during which Wilder was obliged to speak to her in her own wheedling tone, he was admitted to the apartment. A huge barricade of furniture, units of kitchen equipment, books, clothes and table ornaments blocked the hallway, a miniature municipal dump in its own right.

Hillman lay on a mattress in the bedroom. His head was bandaged in a torn evening-dress shirt, through which the blood had seeped on to the pillow. He raised his head as Wilder came in, his hand searching for a section of balcony railing on the floor beside him. Hillman had been one of the first scapegoats to be selected and attacked-his brusque and independent manner made him a natural target. During a raid on the next floor he had been hit on the head by a television award-winner's statuette as he tried to order his way up a defended staircase. Wilder had carried him back to his apartment and spent the night looking after him.

With her husband out of commission, Mrs Hillman depended totally on Wilder, a dependence that he himself in a way enjoyed. When Wilder was away she spent all her time worrying about him, like an over-anxious mother fretting about a wayward child, though as soon as he arrived she forgot who he was.

She tugged at Wilder's sleeve as he looked down at Hillman. She was more concerned about her barricade than her husband and his ominous disturbances of vision. Almost everything movable in the apartment, however small, she had added to the barricade, at times threatening to entomb them for good. Each night Wilder slept through the few hours before dawn slumped in an armchair partly embedded in the barricade. He would hear her moving tirelessly around him, adding a small piece of furniture she had found somewhere, three books, a single gramophone record, her jewellery box. Once Wilder woke to find that she had incorporated part of his left leg. Often it would take him half an hour to dig his way out of the apartment.

"What is it?" Wilder asked her irritably. "What are you doing to my arm?" She was peering at the bag of dog-food, which Wilder, in the absence of any furniture, had been unable to put down. For some reason, he did not want it added to the barricade.

"I've been cleaning up for you," she told him with some pride. "You wanted me to, didn't you?"

"Of course…" Wilder gazed around the apartment in a lordly way. In fact, he barely noticed any changes and, if anything, preferred the apartment to be dirty.

"What's this?" She poked excitedly at the carton, jabbing him roguishly in the ribs as if she had caught a small son with a secret present for her. "You've got a surprise!"

"Leave it alone." Roughly, Wilder fended her away, almost knocking her off her feet. In a way, he enjoyed these absurd rituals. They touched levels of intimacy that had never been possible with Helen. The higher up the building he moved the more free he felt to play these games.

Mrs Hillman wrestled a pack of dog-biscuits out of the bag. Her small body was surprisingly agile. She gazed at the overweight basset hound on the label. Both she and her husband were as thin as scarecrows. Generously, Wilder handed her a can of cat-meat.

"Soak the biscuits in gin-I know you've got a bottle hidden somewhere. It will do you both good."

"We'll get a dog!" When Wilder looked irritated by this suggestion she sidled up to him teasingly, pressing her hands against his heavy chest. "A dog? Please, Dicky…"

Wilder tried to move away from her, but the lewd, wheedling tone and the pressure of her fingers on his nipples unsettled him. Their unexpected sexual expertise excited a hidden strain in his character. Hillman, the dress shirt around his head like a bloody turban, was looking up passively at them, his face drained of all colour. With his visual disturbances, Wilder reflected, the empty apartment would seem to be filled with embracing replicas of himself and Mrs Hillman. He pretended to accost her, out of curiosity running his hands over her buttocks, as small as apples, to see how the injured man would react. But Hillman gave no flicker of recognition. Wilder stopped stroking Mrs Hillman when he saw that she was openly responding to him. It was on other levels that he wanted their relationship to develop.

"Dicky, I know why you came to rescue me…" Mrs Hillman followed him around the barricade, still holding Wilder's arm. "Will you punish them?"

This was another of their games. "Rescue" she visualized primarily in terms of making "them"-that is, all the residents in the high-rise below the i7th floor-eat humble pie and prostrate themselves in an endless line outside her front door.

"I'll punish them," Wilder reassured her. "All right?"

They were leaning against the barricade, Mrs Hillman's sharp-chinned face against his chest. No more ill-suited couple, Wilder decided, could have been cast to play mock-mother and mock-son. Nodding eagerly at the prospect of revenge, Mrs Hillman reached into the barricade and pulled at a black metal pipe. As it emerged, Wilder saw that it was the barrel of a shotgun.

Surprised, Wilder took the weapon from her hands. She was smiling encouragingly, as if expecting Wilder to go out into the corridor at that very moment and shoot someone dead. He broke the breech. Two live shells were in place under the hammers.

Wilder moved the weapon out of Mrs Hillman's reach. He realized that this was probably only one of hundreds of similar firearms in the high-rise-sporting rifles, military service souvenirs, handbag pistols. But no one had fired a single shot, despite the epidemic of violence. Wilder knew perfectly well why. He himself would never bring himself to fire this shotgun, even at the point of death. There was an unspoken agreement among the residents of the high-rise that their confrontation would be resolved by physical means alone.

He jammed the shotgun back into the barricade and pushed Mrs Hillman in the chest. "Go away, rescue yourself…"

As she protested, half-playfully, half in earnest, he began to throw the dog-biscuits at her, scattering them around the bare floor. Wilder enjoyed abusing her. Deriding her in front of her supine husband, he withheld the food from her until she broke down and retreated to the kitchen. The evening progressed happily. Wilder became more and more oafish as the darkness settled over the high-rise, deliberately coarsening himself like a delinquent youth fooling about with a besotted headmistress.

Until two o'clock that morning, during a night intermittently disrupted by outbreaks of violence, Wilder remained within the Hillmans' apartment on the 17th floor. The marked decline in the number of incidents disturbed Wilder-for his ascent of the building he relied on being able to offer himself as an aggressive street-fighter to one or another of the warring groups. However, the open tribal conflicts of the previous week had now clearly ceased. With the breakdown of the clan structure, the formal boundary and armistice lines had dissolved, giving way to a series of small enclaves, a cluster of three or four isolated apartments. These were far more difficult to penetrate and exploit.

Sitting in the darkness on the floor of the sitting-room with Mrs Hillman, their backs to opposite walls, they listened to the muted noises around them. The residents of the high-rise were like creatures in a darkened zoo lying together in surly quiet, now and then tearing at each other in brief acts of ferocious violence.

The Hillmans' immediate neighbours, an insurance broker and his wife, two account executives and a pharmacologist, were listless and unorganized. Wilder had visited them several times, but found that appeals to self-advantage no longer roused them. In fact, only the most blatant expressions of irrational hostility could galvanize their glazed minds. Wilder's feigned and unfeigned rages, his fantasies of revenge roused them briefly from their state of torpor.

This regrouping around more radical and aggressive leaders was taking place all over the high-rise. In the hours after midnight torches flared behind the barricades in the lobbies and corridors, where enclaves of five or six residents squatted among the plastic garbage sacks, inciting each other like wedding guests making themselves drunk in the knowledge that they too will soon be copulating freely among the sweetmeats.

At two o'clock Wilder left the Hillmans' apartment and set about stirring up his neighbours. The men crouched together, clubs and spears in hand, hip-flasks of whisky pooled at their feet. The torch-beams illuminated the garbage-sacks piled high around them, a visible museum of their leavings. Wilder sat in the centre of the group, outlining his plans for another foraging expedition to the floors above. Although they had eaten little for days, his neighbours were reluctant to take part, fearful of the power of the residents above them. Skilfully, Wilder played on their fantasies. Once again, as his imaginary scapegoat, he selected the psychiatrist Adrian Talbot, whom he now accused of molesting a child in a swimming-pool changing cubicle. The untruth of the accusation, which they all well knew, only served to reinforce it. However, before they would move they insisted that Wilder invent an even more lurid crime, as if the imaginary nature of Talbot's sexual offences held the essence of their appeal. By the logic of the high-rise those most innocent of any offence became the most guilty.