Plume

by Will Wiles

  Sitting in a brightly lit room beside a huge picture window, I had the sudden fear that I might be very visible. From the street, I would be as prominent as an overpriced handbag in Selfridges’ Christmas display, and a passing colleague might see me and wonder what I was doing. Nothing very wrong, as it happened, but I feared any line of questioning that attached to one of the loose threads of a lie. And there were plenty of lies and plenty of loose threads. I stared out of the window. The CEO of Harbinger Homes had wrapped up his introduction with a few in-jokes and we were on to the video: the towers of the financial district, hurrying crowds of commuters, shops and buses in the West End, beards and thick-framed glasses being creative in Shoreditch. Maps of the area that made YOLO appear to be the hub of the entire transport network. Computer visualisations of the project as it would appear when completed. The promise of Crossrail. Renderings of room interiors. Dashing young couples touching champagne flutes on balconies, the lights of the city before them.

  I could hardly see the street. The moving lights of cars and the dim nebulae of the streetlights were the clearest, and splashes and smears of reflection. I hoped that the rain would wash the smoke from the sky and scour the hydrocarbons from every surface. The few passers-by had their heads down, cowering under umbrellas or sodden newspapers. But in the shuttered murk of the far side of the street, paleness stirred. Someone was there, a white face sheltered in a gateway, watching me.

  A passing car disrupted the scene long enough for me to lose the face, or whoever it was moved away – but there was something else there, in the lake-bottom sludge, white forms like skulls. I leaned into the glass, wishing that I could wipe away the beating, racing drops that marred its outer surface. There they were, I could see them distinctly. Cockatoos, three of them, perched on the sill of a bricked-up window, sheltered under the arch above.

  It could not be. Simply another manifestation of the odd phenomenon that had dogged me. I would hesitate before saying hallucination, still more before saying vision, but I was seeing something that I could feel sure did not exist as a physical fact. Not even seeing, really, just interpreting a shape in the gloom as a bird – three birds, in this case. What would it be this time? Rubbish bags stuffed into the slats of a ventilator, the hasty zags of a graffito, a family of albino pigeons? Not actual cockatoos.

  I stared at … the source of the impression. Three birds, perched in a line, exactly opposite my window seat, stared back at me. I tried to unlatch the illusion, to break its spell and have the reality of the scene drop into place. It did not. The cockatoos remained. One tipped its head to one side. Another took a step sideways. Was it possible? I knew of the colonies of wild parakeets in London’s parks, a whole population thriving from a few fugitive pets. But cockatoos, really? In midwinter?

  The video presentation came to an end with a flourish of rousing music. White yuppies faded from the screen, replaced by the words YOLO SHOREDITCH on black, and PHASE 3 NOW AVAILABLE. The man from Harbinger Homes led a restrained round of applause as he retook the stage. But he did not stay: he was there to introduce a man who ‘needed no introduction’. Alexander De Chauncey, who followed in a boyish burst of energy, came in for a power handshake with the Harbinger exec. The crowd clapped, and he clapped as well. There was no distance between how he looked in real life and how he looked in the magazine photoshoots – as if he had already been retouched, in the flesh.

  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ he said, acknowledging the applause, closing his eyes and inclining his head modestly, still clapping. ‘Thank you. Let me tell you, it’s such a treat to be involved in this beautiful’ – he prolonged the word in a practised cockney drawl – ‘project right here in Shoreditch, where I started my little business twenty years ago. And as we’ve grown, we’ve witnessed this area’s transformation, and it’s such a treat, ladies and gentlemen, such a treat to be part of a beautiful project like this, which is carrying forward that regeneration. What this is, it isn’t just building, this is placemaking.’

  I had taken out my phone and started recording when De Chauncey came on stage, and I looked down at the jittering heart-attack line on the screen as applause again rippled across the room.

  ‘The beauty, for us gathered in the room today, is in watching the unfolding of this glorious natural process, regeneration. It’s been going on here a while, turning a place where you wouldn’t want to walk down the street at night into a world-class residential investment neighbourhood. In YOLO, we’re seeing the latest stage of that process.

  ‘First of all, you’ve got the artists, the cool kids, the people I call the trendsettlers. Not a lot of dough but loads of savvy, yeah, like me back in the day. I love these guys, the pioneers, the early adopters, the shock troops. You know, scratch an artist, a creative person, and you’ll find an entrepreneur, someone who can see what others can’t, someone who can make something from nothing. And that’s what they’ve done here. But, like I say, not much dough. What they do is bring in the businesses – the coffee shop and the bike shops, and the few investors with the vision to see what the artists saw. That’s where I come in. You look at where the artists are going, and you follow. Shoreditch, Hoxton and Dalston yesterday, Peckham and Hackney Wick and Walthamstow today, Leytonstone and Canning Town and Tottenham tomorrow. You know, the funny part is, I don’t know anything about art. But I love what they do in the property market. So you can call me a critic. A connoisseur.

  ‘After the artists, the money starts coming in – the hipsters, the younger City guys, guys in advertising. People who want buzz, who want to live somewhere a bit edgy, a bit cool, who want realness and authenticity. They’re the ones who establish the neighbourhood as an investment destination. That’s when beautiful projects like this get unlocked, and that’s where you come in, ladies and gentlemen.’

  A friendly murmur of recognition ran through the room. I squirmed in my seat.

  ‘Is there still value to be realised in Shoreditch?’ De Chauncey asked. ‘There assuredly is, ladies and gentlemen; every day we see handsome gain on new developments, especially when bold investors buy off-plan, as the first and second waves of regeneration give way to a stable third-wave ownership community. And Wolfe / De Chauncey is here to help you realise that value. I call it the no-key guarantee: you won’t even have to set foot in your assets. We can offer end-to-end agency service, handling every stage of the tenant journey totally seamlessly. You’ll hardly know they’re there. What we offer is the investment dream: all the advantages of ownership and none of the burden.’

  He paused, as if setting up a punchline.

  ‘Of course, you might be looking to live in the property yourself. Whatever. I’m not here to judge.’

  Laughter. Heads bobbed and I gave the backs of necks an executioner’s eye. Groomed hair, sharp-edged: all had felt the warmth and gentle press of the barber’s electric razor recently. Mine had not. Some of the necks were fat, folded, spammy; others tanned and gym-fit. White collars on coloured shirts. Gold chains. These were them, for sure, these were the owners. Pierce would want to be here – a room rigid with targets.

  I finished the first glass of wine and began the second. The woman sitting three empty seats away from me turned her head, very slightly, precision electronics, keeping her glance discreet, but I still clocked it. I might have muttered something under my breath to draw her attention, an opinion of the people in the room, or she had noticed the chain-drinking. I turned to her and raised my glass cheerily. She turned away, stony. I didn’t take any pleasure. I just didn’t want to be seen.

  De Chauncey’s pitch had the cadence of words spoken many times, a funny story the teller is fond of telling, smooth and pretty as sea-glass. Like most self-made men, he enjoyed reflecting on his beginnings. The tale was given an air of humble, self-deprecating surprise, as if success had been the last thing on his mind, and he couldn’t quite believe it had arrived. Curious that self-unmade men, like myself, had the same obsession with origins, but a harder job fi
nding them. For De Chauncey’s breed, there was always the good decision, the bold move, the happy partnership, the opportunity that others had missed, that spelled success. Whereas I skidded to failure on a smear of circumstances and decisions that hadn’t even felt like decisions when they happened. Maybe it was the same for De Chauncey, really, but he had been able to rationalise it all in a way that I had not, to compose it into a neat story. Of course he would want to justify his success, and make it logical, laudable, only right.

  The opposite view – that his ascent had been a pinball journey of luck and accident – implied that all our fates were simply random, that we were in the passenger seat of life, watching the scenery as we approached the Savoy or the cliff edge. No one wants that. I say that as a storyteller – it was my job to give lives meaning on the page. A narrative, an arc: that was what people wanted. The truth was only an accessory. What was a story but a semblance of truth, a flavour of truth, applied to a collection of details that may or may not be true? And to collect those details, to include some and not others, was to engineer the truth. Not to warp or undermine it – let’s not be judgemental. But to organise it. To give it meaning. Otherwise it was no more than a transcript of a toddler’s unchronological torrent of tear-soaked, dribbling confession: true, no doubt, but impossible to follow.

  De Chauncey, for instance, was editing, as well he might: some colour about setting up his first office in Shoreditch before Shoreditch was Shoreditch, with junkies on the doorstep, and the deals that eased his rise – useful stuff for me, yes, and I could feel myself, without even wanting to, editing the edit to serve what I might want to write. But the story had all the omissions and elisions one expected. The money must always come from somewhere, and circumstances count. He had started just as the city began its long, blazing boom, the eruption of wealth that we were only now coming to the end of. His particular dealings were trifles against the stirring of the leviathan he had ridden for twenty years, which shattered the land and remade it.

  He had moved on from the general spiel about himself and London – one good for any occasion – to the specifics of phase 3 of YOLO Shoreditch. Wolfe / De Chauncey’s investment package for rental property came with the very latest in tenant management technology, thanks to a ground-breaking joint venture with—

  I belched – a sudden upward rush of rotten acid was behind it. It was as if a switch had been thrown, and I had gone from feeling broadly fine to reeling with nausea and knowing, for a fact, that I would vomit, very soon, perhaps too soon to do anything decorous about it. Phase 3 of YOLO Shoreditch might at any moment receive an unholy baptism, right here in the Zebedee function room. I rose from my seat, not fully standing, doing that embarrassed stoop that we do when leaving a cinema during a film, and bumped into the row of chairs, clattering them together. De Chauncey’s patter missed half a beat. Moving as fast as I dared, as if carrying a brimming container within me, I fled up the side of the room and out of the door, barely pausing to demand ‘toilet?’ from one of the clipboard patrol and receive in response a gestured, frowning direction.

  I did catch the name of the company that was the other half of the ground-breaking tenant management joint venture. Bunk Innovation, of course.

  I did not quite make it. Most went into the shining black bowl of Zebedee’s lobby toilet, but some went on the rim, and on the toilet floor, and on the cuff of my jacket and shirt, and on my hand and wrist, which had been clamped over my mouth. I knelt on the hard tiles, panting, looking at the liquid mess I had made. The door behind me was unlocked, there had been no time, but was braced closed by one of my feet. I watched the glints made by the toilet’s gem-hard LED lights on the black ceramic of the bowl and the oily black tiles, breathing hard, then stood. At the sink, I washed out my mouth and splashed water on my face. I rinsed the vomit from my cuffs and rubbed handsoap into them, then rinsed that. It was a fancy brand of soap, called Abattoir, and quite perfumed, but a better smell than the alternative.

  My face was a discouraging sight in the mirror, but no surprise. Sweat and splashed water had made my hair cling to my brow and temples. The bruises and scrapes around my eye resembled exotic mould breaking through the faded wallpaper of my skin. The suit, wrinkled by rain and exertion, did nothing to make my overall appearance more salubrious or respectable – a candidate for embalmment, not a new job. Would I be able to find a new job, if the magazine gave me the push tomorrow? Perhaps I would be able to negotiate resignation or redundancy rather than dismissal, although redundancy seemed unlikely. Redundancy would be winning the lottery, in the overall span of possibilities, and no way would they want to spend money on me. It seemed utopian. Could I imagine myself pursuing other jobs, getting interviews, convincing employers? No, I could not. As soon as I was home all day, the Need would start to swell, pushing out everything else. It would devour the redundancy pay-out. Even if I did somehow get another job, I would never keep it. It was too late.

  More people came into the toilet: three men in sharp suits, two of them conducting a loud conversation. The presentation had come to an end. The newcomers eyed me suspiciously and I wondered if there was any lingering odour. I gave them what I hoped was a dangerous look, and exited.

  Duty remained. I might be able to get De Chauncey in conversation and claw a few printable quotes out of him. But where was he? The clipboard sentinels regarded me with obvious distaste but let me pass, despite my cadaverous complexion and damp clothes. They must have suspected what happened, having seen me leave in such a hurry. My sinuses burned – creeping acid at the back of the throat, or the smell of smoke? I kept my head down and pushed towards the bar. With the presentation over, the attendees had moved to that end of the room and were mingling excitedly. They all appeared terrifically satisfied with what they had just seen. The screens around the room had switched to looping promotional video. Near the door, two of the tight-skirted PRs were setting out rows of gift bags printed with the words ‘You Live … You Love … You YOLO’.

  No sign of De Chauncey. He must still be here, surely, this would be his element, his chance to hand-sell apartments by the dozen. I deviated towards the bar, looking for something to eat, regardless of the silly shape it came in; stripped back to its lining, my stomach was growling and writhing like an injured animal. But the food had been taken away. I took a glass of red wine instead – just the one, I needed to be more careful – and moved to the side of the room. My head throbbed. The throng was thick and noisy and I could feel its contempt for me. I hated them. I didn’t belong here, and I feared that it had become obvious – and I considered Quin’s chicanery in getting me through the door, and De Chauncey’s mention of Bunk. Why was I even surprised? Bunk was everywhere else, worming its way through the city, plugging itself into system after system. It made complete sense that it would have a tie-up with a firm like Wolfe / De Chauncey, edgy, cool, app-using Wolfe / De Chauncey … What was strange was Bunk’s enduring interest in me, Quin’s seeming fascination with my life and the steady progress of my collapse. Just as he had been interfering with Pierce as well – were failing writers his kink?

  Not that losing my free will was much of a threat – I was barely able to exercise it. Keeping control of the most basic functions was more and more of a challenge. My insides felt crushed, and the wine I sipped tasted bad, though it was undoubtedly excellent. I knew I needed food, but I didn’t feel hungry, just weak, as if I might simply crumple to the ground. Seeking greater obscurity, better cover, I headed over to the corner of corners, the display of samples from kitchen, bathroom, hall. I could part-hide there, look busy and interested and purposeful. But it was not the refuge it had been before the presentation – people were there, looking at the taps and carpets and plug sockets as if they were priceless artefacts in the British Museum. And going that way took me closer to the windows. I could not resist looking out, trying to see if the cockatoos were still there. A bright security light had come on across the road, drowning out everything else, maki
ng falling raindrops into welder’s sparks. It was not yet 5 p.m. and outside it was grimmer than midnight. No chance that Pierce would want to go out roaming in this foul weather – not even he could be so determined, and I would have to put my foot down if he tried to insist. I only hoped that he did have some kind of proof or confession for me, whatever it was. It seemed implausible, that he would just sign up with an incriminating sheet of paper, but maybe he would, and I would have evidence of my triumph to take into the meeting – my great achievement, which had fallen into my lap and I had done everything to throw away.

  I turned back to the room and the action set off another tremor of nausea. I had nothing left to bring up, but my body wanted to heave anyway. My instinct was to dash out to the toilets again, but my legs now combined the least mobile characteristics of lead pipes and wet noodles. I managed two staggering steps, into the mock-up of the corner of a kitchen. Ahead was a sink and I slumped over it, clutching the tap, knees sagging. Not real, I told myself, not a real sink, no pipes, but my body clearly regarded it as sufficient. A belch erupted from me and something hot and vile came up into my mouth. With titanic effort I swallowed it back. The sweat on my brow broke surface tension and I felt a cold line run over my temple, coming to rest in an eyebrow. Another spasm raced through my innards and I belched again.

  ‘Oh God,’ I gasped. My vision swam, shining spots swarmed, and the grey started to crawl in at the edges. Might my body give out before my career did? It had not seemed possible before, but now I felt the hospital ward might be closer than the job centre. And it would be entirely my own fault, considering the cocktail I had mixed for myself today, on an almost-empty stomach. ‘Oh, God,’ I said again. ‘I deserve this.’