Plume

by Will Wiles

  ‘You really do,’ said the voice of God.

  It was a warmer voice than I expected, almost comforting. He was above me now, blocking out the light. I turned to look into his face. It was Alexander De Chauncey.

  He had stolen up beside me while I was preoccupied. It felt like a sneak attack, but I doubted he had been sneaky. My visual range had shrunk to no further than the rim of the sink, and the blood was gushing in my ears. He could have been clashing cymbals and I wouldn’t have noticed his approach. And here he was, satisfied smile across his well-upholstered face, close enough for me to smell his scent, all vanilla and woodsmoke. And he was judging me. How did he know what I deserved? He knew nothing about me. But I could not find a reply, not even a ‘fuck you’. All I did was stare at him.

  ‘Beautiful, aren’t they?’ he said, and seeing my face wrinkle with incomprehension he gestured to the sink tap, which was still clutched in my hand, the only thing keeping me from slipping slowly to the floor. I was drawing strength from the cold, thick metal. ‘I saw the way you fell on them. You’ve got a great eye. Italian, made at this little family atelier just outside Turin, amazing little place.’

  I didn’t say anything. All those words were known to me, but it was difficult to juice meaning from them.

  ‘That’s the great thing about this project,’ De Chauncey continued. ‘It’s the penthouses that get the attention, of course’ – he motioned to another part of the display, where half a dozen suits were admiring a wall-mounted light – ‘but there are really no low-spec apts at YOLO. It all has the same attention to detail and top-rank design. You do deserve it, is what I’m saying, whatever price point you’re at. Are you considering making a purchase in the building?’

  I have never felt further from a human being. He said this so lightly, as if I could just reach into my jacket pocket and bring out the £800,000 for a one-bed in YOLO. And there were people here who could do that, who bought flats like I bought cans, four or eight at a time. De Chauncey was a pro, so it was possible that this question was merely polite, and he was well aware that the wretch in front of him could not afford a flat. If that were true, he did a superb acting job, and I saw a man who moved naturally through climates of extreme wealth and privilege, far more extreme than even his own. And I could tell, just by looking at him, by looking at his suit and his haircut and smelling his fragrance, that the bath in his house did not touch the wall, you could walk all the way around it.

  ‘I’m a journalist, actually,’ I said. Better not say more.

  ‘Oh, right,’ De Chauncey said. There was no suggestion of disappointment, but his mien shifted angle – from sales to marketing. ‘What can I help you with today? Any questions? Don’t get me started, though, I can talk and talk about YOLO, it’s such a beautiful project.’

  ‘Yeah, there is one thing,’ I said, switching on the recorder in my phone. I had turned it off in the toilet, but not until after I had finished vomiting. That would all be on the first recording, crystal clear. ‘I had to leave during the presentation …’

  ‘I saw,’ De Chauncey said, with no obvious reprimand. ‘Everything OK?’

  ‘Fine, yeah, I was just … I felt a little light-headed.’

  ‘It can get a bit stuffy in a room like this,’ De Chauncey said. ‘You feeling better now?’

  ‘Fine, fine,’ I lied. ‘You had just mentioned your joint venture with Bunk Innovation, but I missed exactly what it was Bunk did for you.’

  De Chauncey raised his eyebrows, enthusiasm lighting his face. ‘Right. Happy to talk about that. It’s beautiful, actually. We’ve been working with them for years on tenant management software. Let me explain properly. Say you own property as an investment.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. Never going to happen, but I could allow myself the miserable dream.

  ‘If you own – say – a gold bar, it sits in a bank vault and never gives you any trouble. It never complains. You don’t have to repaint it every five years. It just holds, and maybe accrues, value. But the best asset class, by far, is residential property in London. Way better than gold bars, or stocks, or anything. Not only does the asset itself accrue value faster than any other possession, it also pays you rent. It’s magic, as investments go.’

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  ‘But it comes with all kinds of obligations: you have to find tenants, collect rent, kick out deadbeats, check for carbon monoxide, repair burst pipes, all kinds of hassle and cost. No one wants to be a landlord to deal with all that, they want the asset and the rent, right?’

  ‘Which is where you come in, as a lettings agent,’ I said. The conversation was making my stomach churn, but I put on a performance of supportive interest. I wanted to appear to be on his side. On the side of the owners.

  De Chauncey raised a thick finger. I saw the glint of a thumb ring. ‘Aha. Yes. That’s what a lettings agent does, sure – manage properties on behalf of owners. But, you know, lettings agents don’t have the best reputation. People have all kinds of prejudices about them.’

  About you, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.

  ‘What people want – what tenants want – is to deal directly with a person, with their landlord. Even if the service is worse, or at least no better. It’s just a more human experience than dealing with an agent, I guess, you know they have a stake. But, you know, a lot of landlords don’t want that. You might be talking about a high-net-worth individual who owns fifty properties, and who’s much too busy and important to worry about every dripping tap and speck of mould. You might be talking about a Far Eastern or Russian investment consortium that owns 200 properties without even seeing them. These are the entities we’re dealing with. You know, they’re not going to take calls from Colin in Camden whose boiler’s making funny noises. But they do deserve access to the world’s premier investment asset, arguably more so than some amateur with a spanner.

  ‘But with Bunk’s help, we’ve built software that solves this problem. We’ve been working on it for years, trialling it in the market, and it runs a treat, flawless. Basically, it’s a machine landlord. Not a machine, a program – an algorithm. It can understand tenants’ emails and reply to them, and it’s all linked up to our job management software, so it can order repairs or whatever based on what they say. If – and this is the great part – if it decides that a repair is needed. It’s a clever beast, it makes decisions, filters out the trivial timewasting stuff, and it does it all without bothering a single human being. It knows how often a tenant has asked for something, and it can monitor their word choices for anger or urgency and so on. It’s beautiful.’

  He glowed with enthusiasm for the machine, and I felt the bile rise in my throat again. The grey closed in. Houses for some, many houses; being ignored by a machine for the rest. It was no way to live. My brow was cold with sweat and I could feel the tremor in the hand I raised to it.

  ‘Are you all right?’ De Chauncey asked, frowning.

  ‘Uh, yeah,’ I said. I didn’t know how much longer I could go on – I had to get home, to rest, above anything else. Was it home, though? What was it? It was a lash against my back to keep me working, a phantom of finance.

  ‘Was there anything else?’ De Chauncey asked, visibly anxious to get away. No more value could be realised from the conversation, it seemed.

  ‘Yeah – yes,’ I said. I had to go on. ‘I should introduce myself – I’m Jack Bick, I work for—’

  ‘For Eddie!’ De Chauncey exclaimed. He raised his head and rolled back on his heels, reeling a little at the happy thought of Eddie. ‘Love Eddie. You were going to come and see me, weren’t you?’

  ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t make it,’ I said. ‘I’ve not been well … It’s been a bad week.’

  ‘You don’t look too well,’ De Chauncey said. ‘Do you need to sit down? Glass of water?’

  ‘I was wondering if you might be able to do the interview, if you could just spare thirty minutes …’

  De Chauncey sucked his teeth loudly. ‘
Next week?’ he said with a grimace.

  ‘I’ve got to take something in tomorrow,’ I said. I no longer cared how desperate or unprofessional I sounded. ‘I’m sorry, I know that’s not your problem.’

  ‘Well, I’m impressed you came out here when you’re ill,’ De Chauncey said. It was disorienting that he was being so reasonable. Then he shrugged, palms up, a motion that took in the whole room around him. ‘But, you know, it’s an important night for me …’

  I sagged. ‘I understand.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ De Chauncey said, flicking out a shining, clanking wristwatch with a practised gesture of display. ‘This’ll wrap up at six or so … about an hour. Where do you live?’

  ‘Pimlico,’ I said.

  ‘Perfect. I’ll be heading back to Chelsea. I’ll give you a lift. We can talk in the car.’

  My legs near failed me – I rocked to one side, and leaned against the sink. ‘That’s great. That’s fantastic. Thank you.’

  ‘Have a sit in reception, you look like you’re on your last legs,’ De Chauncey said. ‘I’ll find you when I’m done here.’

  As the nausea subsided, the sickness returned – the anger and the hatred. I sat in reception with a glass of water like an invalid or a child, tolerated and indulged, told to wait until the grown-ups were finished. The sparks of relief lit by De Chancey’s goodwill were extinguished by a tide of corrosive sludge, all my contempt and resentment. I resented that I was reliant on his generosity, that I had to crawl to him for favours, and his civility, his kindness, made it all the worse. They might make you feel at home for a few seconds here and there, but you’re never at home. This was their world, your flat was still the possession of an anonymous oligarch or investment fund, and there was De Chauncey oiling the wheels of the system, and making his own fortune as he did so. And Quin, too, via whatever ghastly AI switchboard he had built for them, the slumlord Siri.

  And he had been quite right. I might be feathering the nest of some retired Mail on Sunday reader I had never met, watching my own future drain away just as it drew closer, but I did almost prefer that to being the serf of an offshore entity, reduced to pleading with an algorithm. Better a sucker paying for someone else’s Saga holidays than cattle on a spreadsheet. But I still despised my peonage and everything about it. There were people and institutions who regarded ownership as a burden, that was the horror at the core of it, the gulf of understanding I could not cross – and we call these people landlords. It was a chore, to them, to have the unbeatable investment asset of a London flat sullied by the vile needs of tenants. Not so much of a chore, of course, that they were ever prepared to give up the burden of ownership – just enough to ensure that every human dignity could be considered moot. For me, ownership was an unimaginable privilege, a source of security and comfort so distant that it might be Xanadu. An escape from the exhaustions and humiliation of renting. And why is rent such a treadmill of shame? Because of landlords who regard the responsibilities of ownership as a treadmill. Who resent that the provision of a home interferes with their enrichment.

  I sat and seethed and was helpless. Purging myself in the toilets had left me scraped out and shaky, every minute feeling like my last minute of strength. I stared at my phone, letting the glowing screen dissipate the anger – not so that it truly diminished of course, but connecting it to the sea of everyone else’s concerns, their dramas and causes, made it seem small and petty and common, turned some of it into sadness and self-loathing. I mentally composed tweets or Facebook status updates that might actually communicate a little of the inner ocean, and I mentally discarded them. To be overly serious would be to make myself a burden to others, and to ironise and jape was no hope at all, just dishonesty. Best not.

  Pierce had left a three-word voicemail: ‘I’ll text you.’ But no text had followed. Instead there was a message from a stranger on Tamesis: ‘We good to go?’

  The sender’s name was Olipi, and it wasn’t hard to decode: a stealth account for Oliver Pierce, and a possible literary play on words to boot. A way of using the app without the wider public knowing. I checked back and found that Olipi had followed me during the splurge of activity caused by Quin’s post about me. But I had followed back, and I had no memory of doing that. When? Had I known I was following Pierce? I had not gone through all my new followers, following back – on the contrary, I had ignored and avoided that great wedge of notifications. Going through them all was simply too much bother. I looked at the account: it was low-key, anonymous content, but it had checked in at Winterzone the previous night and its connections looked about right, minor London authors, Vice writers, people in publishing. Francis Quin.

  Anyway. It was done. We good to go? No, not me, not in this rain, in this condition. No way was I staying up late for a pointless escapade. But I didn’t want to reply, not yet. If I replied to Pierce right now saying that I didn’t want to spend a third night wandering with him, I was laying myself open to cajoling and persuasion. I was weak, and might yield to his bullying charm. If I waited until I was lodged tight in my flat, away from Pierce and Quin, near the fridge, I could rely on the Need to save me, to give me the strength to ignore Pierce and stay home.

  There were no communications from the office – no missed calls or voicemails, no emails asking where I had gone or demanding I return. And office hours were over. Either I had escaped without consequences, or I had sharpened the blade that was poised over my neck, ready for tomorrow morning.

  Another message from Pierce: ‘I’m waiting.’

  Yeah, me too.

  Suits and skirts streamed out of the function room. Some cast me glances, and I felt judged and wanting. The nausea had long subsided, replaced by a deep weariness.

  Another message from Pierce: ‘Where are you?’

  I hadn’t replied to any of these messages and I didn’t reply to this one.

  The exodus slackened. A few stragglers hung on in the lobby, chatting or waiting for rides. Chairs clattered in the function room and staff shuttled in and out, removing trays of glasses and boxes of bottles. The PRs called to each other in happy, end-of-day voices, quite unlike their cultivated manner earlier.

  Pierce, again, via Tamesis: ‘Never mind. Waiting.’ Was that anger? Melancholy? Genuine unconcern? Never mind what? I pictured him at home, staring at the map on his wall, phone hot in his hand, waiting to get word from me. It was a pathetic thought – whatever the reality of the situation, he clearly did not feel himself to be in the driving seat any more. My invocation of Quin had been magic. Never mind that Quin had no useful proof concerning Pierce’s fraud, Pierce clearly didn’t know that. Or Quin was lying, and did have something; something else, perhaps, some other form of leverage. It was possible. Quin was a man who knew things. And behind Quin was a clean, cold room where banks of servers hummed, panning for secrets in the silt of data that settled under the stream of our lives.

  De Chauncey appeared, carrying four YOLO Shoreditch-branded gift bags, two in each hand. ‘I thought you might want one of these,’ he said, holding out a bag. ‘There’s some bumf about the project in there. And a pen, and a temporary tattoo, I think, which is fun.’

  I mumbled my appreciation.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Fine, thank you,’ I said. ‘Much better. I don’t know what came over me.’

  ‘Ready to go?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘We’ll use one of the office cars. They’re parked just around the corner.’

  I knew the cars he meant – they had been ubiquitous for a decade, zippy little Minis painted in psychedelic Wolfe / De Chauncey colours, forever parked on pavements and blocking pedestrian crossings. A couple of them, from the Pimlico branch, were left on my little street every night. They always had a visual joke – a driver’s door that looked like an X-ray of the driver from the chest down, a transfer in the passenger window so it looked as if they had Will and Kate in the back. I regularly had to fight the urge to run my key along t
he jaunty paintwork of those Minis.

  Outside, De Chauncey opened a large branded umbrella. As it unfurled I was momentarily blinded by a flash of light. I looked up to see what might have been the cause, but saw nothing – nothing apart from the plume, towering over the Shoreditch rooftops, made distinct from the low rainclouds behind by its flickering internal illumination, the upcast light of the fires beneath. No way was it as far as Barking – it could only be a couple of streets distant. The nausea coiled within again as I smelled the smoke, the shattered molecules and chains of poison on the fly.

  Thunder grumbled. That’s what I had seen – lightning, not the first signs of a fit or a stroke.

  ‘Christ, this weather,’ De Chauncey said.

  ‘I’m surprised this rain doesn’t put out the fire,’ I said.

  ‘What fire?’

  ‘Out in Barking,’ I said. ‘The big fire there?’

  ‘Oh, that,’ De Chauncey said. The frown that had creased his placid face disappeared. ‘I thought they put that out already.’

  I froze, stomach churning. ‘I heard it was still alight.’

  ‘Well, it can’t be serious, or it would be in the news.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  We started walking. I switched my phone to record and flashed it at De Chauncey. ‘Do you mind …?’

  ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to stop me if I go on.’

  ‘Go on all you want,’ I said. ‘You were telling me about the software that Bunk wrote for you. The robo-landlord.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ De Chauncey said. ‘Yeah, we’ve been working on it for years, it’s beautiful.’

  ‘But I don’t understand it,’ I said. ‘People hate dealing with lettings agents and corporate landlords, sure, but why would they prefer a machine? Isn’t that worse?’

  De Chauncey chuckled, then looked sideways at me, eyes narrow, appraising. ‘It’s a little sensitive. F.A.Q.’s a mate of yours, isn’t he? I saw on Tamesis.’