The Freedom Building

by Martin Kendall

  The memory of crashing and of hitting his head against the steering wheel was mysterious, otherworldly . Did it really happen? And was he really here now, remembering it from three and a half years in the future? Had he really become the architect of the Zenith building? The muddy verge approximately where he crashed passed by, and as Janice accelerated from the bend his throat contracted with sickness.

  The sky grew darker as they stopped outside the front gates of his place. The vertical, spear-like bars pointed towards the dark, heavy clouds with readiness as the gates opened automatically. Once inside, John got out of the car into the blustery gale and opened the postbox housed in the back of one of the gate pillars. There were a couple of letters, and he stood there without opening them or doing anything.

  ‘Getting in?’ Janice asked through the open window.

  He stared at her and noticed the same cracks at the edges of her eyes that he saw yesterday in hospital. Today’s make-up was fading.

  ‘No, I’ll walk down.’

  ‘Are you okay, John?’

  He widened his mouth into a smile.

  She drove down the driveway which wound like a descending snake towards his house 120 metres away. It was the same as it always looked with its slate roof, dormer windows and symmetrically proportioned lower windows set in a wall of grey brick – the wife’s choice with the council’s permission, not John’s. He had wanted something more exciting. But his unease with the house was not the wife’s fault in this moment. There seemed something odd about it, something strange, set deeply as it was into the countryside landscape.

  He walked directly to the house across the grass. The garden was encircled by a perimeter of conifers, a little taller now, and the garage appeared the same with a small path between it and the house. Behind the house the garden led down to the ancient, small wood at the bottom; and here, a change really had occurred: the oaks and beaches were decorated with autumnal reds and oranges instead of the stark winter branches to which he was accustomed. The wood disappeared from view as he approached Janice who stood beneath the porch, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Cigarettes!’ he blurted, seizing the joy and having forgotten to get a packet at the petrol station. Remarkably, he hadn’t thought about smoking since leaving the hospital.

  She looked at him oddly, her auburn hair swirling at the edges. Why was she looking at him inquisitively? Had he done something to make her suspect his amnesia?

  ‘You’ve started again?’ she asked.

  He realised his mistake but quickly lit one of her cigarettes, smiling as he did so, hoping that his smile and, therefore, his words appeared to mean that he belittled his possibly recent attempt to stop smoking. Impressive – having stopped smoking. How had he done that? She seemed nonplussed.

  He put the key into the lock and turned it, wondering what surprises lurked inside. The opaque glass door opened effortlessly, and he choked on the cigarette as his clean lungs tried to cope with the unfamiliar tobacco.

  In the dark, stale air, he reached for the kitchen light switch. The bulb in the centre of the room flashed with the sound of a ting, exposing the pine kitchen table and white fridge on the far side for a brief moment before darkening again.

  ‘The bulb’s gone,’ she said behind him.

  In the grey light of the kitchen window, he dropped the damp mail by the sink.

  ‘Could it be the fuse?’ she asked.

  Her dark body by the door scared him a little, echoing the detachment he felt from her and everybody else in this future world, but he steadied himself and moved towards the passageway that led to the side door of the house. It was darker in the passageway, and he opened a cupboard door to reach for the fuse box.

  Back in the lit kitchen, Janice was smiling and he felt a little better. The kitchen was the same as always with the same cups in the cupboards and the same knives and forks in the drawers. Nothing had changed. Janice began making them a tea with milk that smelt only slightly off, and he decided to go upstairs to change.

  At the top of the stairs, he switched on the landing light, glanced at the long mirror on the wall without looking at his face – because he was afraid to see an older person – moved tentatively into his bedroom and turned on the light. The double bed, strutting out from the wall, appeared crumpled on the nearside and reasonably neat on the other: the way he usually left it in the day. The wife’s wallpaper was still there, with cream and pale pink flowers on a white background.

  Whatever had happened to his wife over these past years? Had they finally arranged a divorce? And what about his daughter, Gemma? Had she visited him at all?

  The wind began to howl outside. He twisted the knob of the radiator beneath the window to introduce some heat into the room, opened the doors of his wardrobe and changed into a new shirt, jumper and jeans.

  In the en suite bathroom at the far end of the room, he finally looked at himself in the mirror. A middle-aged man with light brown hair, a receding hairline, a thin mouth and a long thin nose with wide nostrils stared back at him. He seemed familiar at first, as if he hadn’t aged three and a half years, but with the addition of a small scabby mark in the centre of his forehead that signified the place where he had hit his head at the Zenith site. He would have likely had a similar injury when he crashed his car, hitting his head on the steering wheel.

  But as he peered closer at his face, he noticed that something had, after all, changed. The cracks beneath his eyes had grown longer and deeper like Janice’s, and his hairline was further receded than it used to be. He felt unnerved. He had never been afraid of middle age or old age, for that matter, but such an increase in years from one day to the next was unsettling. It seemed that even his body was alien to him, as alien as the crazy doctor in the hospital and Janice’s head. He’d lost three and a half years and here he was, older with a more wrinkled body.

  He closed his eyes and tried to remember something, anything, from the design process. A darkness of impenetrable amnesia appeared before him, and he tried to maintain his composure without succumbing to fear or opening his eyes. What was this amnesia? Where did it come from? The darkness began to give him a dizzying sensation of being sucked into it, similar to the spinning sensation he had felt when crashing his car, so he forcefully and quickly opened his eyes again and walked back into the bedroom.

  On the landing, he peered into the study and saw his great oak desk and large drawing board beside it. Both surfaces were covered with papers and plans that were undoubtedly of the building: the only thing he would have been doing for the past three and a half years. Could he really have designed a building that people were praising all over the world as a work of genius? How could he have done such a thing when he’d never designed anything of particular originality, relatively speaking, in the past?

  He felt a great urge to go over there and look at the papers, but the fear of not being able to see the plans again, along with the threat of the darkness appearing in his vision, stopped him. He didn’t want the same experience that had happened in the Portakabin. He would look at them tomorrow after a good night’s sleep. Surely then, he would be able to see them with his memories returning.

  He glanced into his daughter’s old room. It was still just the way she had left it when she moved out years ago, with pictures of actors on the wall and a map of the world with luminescent highlights of where she wanted to go. The bed was still in the corner. He closed the door and walked back downstairs.

  ‘There’s your tea,’ Janice said, sitting at the table.

  The ghostly sound of the wind buffeted the door as he sat down and opened the damp envelopes he’d collected from the postbox. One was a bank statement, informing him that he had £9018 in his current account. He remembered his wife and wondered whether he was still paying her in monthly instalments. He looked at the statement at the beginning of the month, when his standing order always paid her, and sure enough, on Nov 1, a sum of £800 was paid into the account of Mrs Hillary Gowan. No divorce
yet, then. He’d evidently been too busy with the building and too wealthy from the Zenith contract to worry about this ongoing arrangement. The money from his Zenith contract would be in his other account, which he would check later. The other envelope enclosed a card displaying a picture of an idyllic country scene, and inside was written:

  ‘Dad, Hope you’re okay. I might contact you soon – it’s been a long time. Still in Africa and living well. Congratulations on your building and the beginning of its construction. x’

  He held the card tightly with the painful impression that they hadn’t seen each other for three and a half years. Why else would she congratulate him on his building now, if she hadn’t done so already?

  He walked through the sitting room door to check the rest of the house for any signs of change. Upon first glance, the contents of the room were exactly how he had left them three and a half years ago: the Queen Anne leather chairs, the low coffee table in the middle, the objects on the cast-iron fireplace and the plasma television. Beyond the end of the room through the sliding glass doors, a patio and lawn disappeared into the darkening day.

  5

  In the morning, John loitered at the study doorway, wondering whether to look at the building plans. He had had a bad night, waking up several times and crying out for answers. Now, he desperately wanted to look at them. With his massive amnesia, however, and his inability to see them, blocked by the terrifying, swirling nothingness that seemed to lure him in, he was afraid that there was more to his dizziness yesterday than just the stressful effects of normal concussion, so he decided to look at the plans at work where there were people and the feeling of safety.

  On the gravel driveway, his Jaguar had been parked as promised by Pete who had offered to drive it here last night and then get a taxi home. John had apparently parked it in the car park on the night he went to the site and fell.

  It was an odd experience to see it again. Its green paint, curvaceous lines and big fat tyres appeared new, as if there had been no past, no crash. What had happened in the minutes after he crashed? Had he woken from unconsciousness and phoned for an ambulance? Had the car been too much of a wreck to drive home?

  The press was waiting for him outside his gates.

  ‘Do you remember what happened?’ one female reporter asked, holding a mobile phone at him.

  He ignored them and sped away. Driving again through the bend where he crashed was an odd experience, and he tried wrestling with his fears and present predicament in the only way he knew how: by summing up his life. He was forty-eight years old. He was an architect. He had built his house in the leafy countryside between the towns of Blanworth and Toxon ...

  Except, he wasn’t forty-eight years old: he was fifty-one years old. He wasn’t just an architect: he was a world-famous architect. His house wasn’t really his house: it was the house of the person who’d been living there for the past three and a half years. Or at least, that’s how it felt.

  On Blanworth Road, the brown and green fields continued for miles, undulating softly. But as the ground became hilly towards Toxon, concrete cooling towers appeared on the horizon, bellowing plumes of smoke. On the penultimate hill before reaching the valley, the first buildings appeared – something he wasn’t used to. He knew this road well and had seen vast changes to the outskirts of Toxon over the past couple of decades, with its boundaries eating into the countryside beyond the valley for car showrooms and fast food joints, but never before had he seen buildings this far out.

  The rusty, old town appeared over the last hill. And as he descended into its depths and parked in the multi-storey, he remembered the last time he could recall he had made this journey, on the day he’d learnt about the destruction of the old Zenith building. Where the hell did the last three and a half years go?

  He bought a chocolate bun and newspaper in the shopping centre and walked through the centre of town. Nothing seemed very different: the same shops, fashions and teenagers, loitering outside the medieval church before school. When he approached his building, it appeared the same – grey and windowed. On the seventh floor would be his employees, but how would he respond to them? Had they aged like Janice? Were there any new people?

  In the foyer, a male receptionist, who he didn’t recognise, nodded at him, and John’s heart beat faster as he quickly entered the lift. Would people suspect his massive amnesia? Would they find out? The lift opened with a ting, and he walked tentatively down the corridor, wondering how to enter the office – with a confident grin? They would all know he was just out of hospital, so he could simply smile weakly at them, without conversing. All he wanted to do was get inside his private office and look at the building plans.

  He opened the door. Four or five people were sitting at their desks behind drawing boards and computers, and a couple were chatting by the water machine, close to Pete’s office door on the right of the room. He recognised most of them. He strode forwards down the aisle to his office at the end and was glad everything still looked the same. Employees looked at him with surprise, presumably because he was out of hospital only yesterday. Janice was sitting at her desk outside of his office, like always. She looked up at him with a nonplussed expression and sighed. Today she wore a pink and white striped blouse.

  ‘You’re not even supposed to be working today,’ she said.

  John felt the pleasant sensation that he’d already gained a sense of recent history with somebody since waking in hospital, integrating him a little with this future world: ‘Any messages?’

  ‘They’re all edited in your inbox. Pete wanted to see you if you turned up. He’s got a message from that detective and one from Mann, too.’

  Mann was one of the names he didn’t recognise on his phone.

  He unlocked the door with the same old key and stepped inside. Everything seemed relatively similar: the old beech desk; the black laptop; the leather swivel chair on the other side of the desk; the drawing board, almost two metres in height, by the side of the desk; and the pictures of famous buildings on the walls. What had changed was the addition of a grey metal chest of drawers at the back wall and which looked wide enough for A0 sheets of paper.

  Around the desk, he glanced nervously at the drawing board. On it was a paper with a drawing plan. But before looking at it properly, he looked away – both excited and afraid of what might happen. The plan had to be of the building: the only thing he would have been working on for the past three and a half years. Would he see it properly now and remember everything?

  With a rushing heart, he tried composing himself and gazed at his old laptop. The lettered keys were a little more faded, and the screen had a couple of new scratches. He opened a desk drawer and found a black notebook. He felt an immediate rush of warmth, like seeing an old friend. It was the one he had used to write the rough measurements at the site before driving home and crashing his car. But like his laptop, like Janice, for that matter, and, indeed, like his own body, it was older now; it was also tatty with white abrasions on the side. He skimmed through it from the back to the front and noticed it was full of writing and diagrams. Near the front, he recognised the words he’d written on what seemed three nights ago but which was really three and a half years ago:

  ‘My perimeter walk:

  Length: 60 metres

  Width: 55 metres’

  He smiled at the familiar memory whilst wondering how the hell he could have forgotten everything since then. Hurriedly, he put the notebook in his jacket pocket. Ready now to look at the drawing plan, there was a knock at the door immediately followed by Pete walking in, without warning.

  ‘Glad you’re up and about,’ he said. He pulled a chair from the side of the room and sat opposite John in front of the desk, swiping his hand through his hair that drooped fashionably over his glasses.

  John composed himself once more with the knowledge he would look at the plan soon: ‘Thanks for dropping the car off. I drove in this morning.’

  ‘I knocked once on your door bu
t assumed you were asleep, so I got a cab straight back. So you’re feeling better now?’

  ‘Not good enough to work properly, but I’m feeling pretty relaxed.’

  Pete smiled and swiped his black hair again from his eyes. He looked like a stereotypical architect, always did, wearing black, angular glasses that strangely paralleled his small chiselled face. Today, he was wearing a colourful suit that resembled a Hawaiian shirt. He put a newspaper on the desk in front of John. There was an article marked in pen: ‘Have you read this?’

  John read:

  ‘The sentencing of Abdulla Hussain has reawakened calls by The Muslim Assembly of Britain for the resignation of Mr Wilkinson Junior employed by his father the CEO of Zenith Star Holdings plc.

  Two months after the terrorist attack when the government took the unprecedented step of bailing out Zenith Star which was not insured for terrorism, The Muslim Assembly of Britain, whilst condemning the atrocity, demanded Mr Wilkinson Junior’s resignation. They argued that their taxes should not be used to rescue a firm that supplied clothing to the Israeli Army, especially when the CEO’s son had made disparaging remarks against Muslims wanting to retrieve land from the Israelis which had incited the attack.

  The then Home Secretary, Patti White, said: “Mr Wilkinson Junior’s resignation as a condition for saving Zenith Star would be sending the wrong message to terrorists, but any decision lay with Zenith Star alone.”

  Now that the terrorists have been brought to justice, however, The Muslim Assembly are once again urging the government to put pressure on Mr Wilkinson to demand the resignation of his son. Nobody from Zenith Star was available for comment.’