Plastic

by Christopher Fowler

  Praise for Christopher Fowler

  ‘Fowler writes devilishly clever and mordantly funny novels that are sometimes heartbreakingly moving.’

  Val McDermid, The Times

  ‘Christopher Fowler is an award-winning novelist who would make a good serial killer.’

  Time Out

  ‘An imaginative fun house of a world where sage minds go to expand their vistas and sharpen their wits.’

  New York Times Book Review on the Bryant & May books

  ‘Fowler repeatedly challenges the reader to redraw the boundaries between innocence and malevolence, rationality and paranoia... He has the uncanny ability to invoke terror in broad daylight.’

  The Guardian on Demonised

  ‘His sentences zip along, wonderfully funny or moving – sometimes both.’

  The Independent on Paperboy

  ‘The climax is truly spectacular... this would make a great piece of cinema. It has everything that you could ever want from a thriller.’

  The Eloquent Page on Roofworld

  Also by Christopher Fowler

  Roofworld

  Rune

  Red Bride

  Darkest Day

  Spanky

  Psychoville

  Disturbia

  Menz Insana

  Soho Black

  Calabash

  Breathe

  Paperboy (Autobiography)

  Film Freak (Autobiography)

  BRYANT & MAY

  Full Dark House

  The Water Room

  Seventy Seven Clocks

  Ten Second Staircase

  White Corridor

  The Victoria Vanishes

  Bryant & May On the Loose

  Bryant & May Off the Rails

  The Memory of Blood

  COLLECTIONS

  The Bureau of Lost Souls

  City Jitters

  More City Jitters

  Flesh Wounds

  Sharper Knives

  Personal Demons

  Uncut

  The Devil in Me

  Demonised

  Old Devil Moon

  Red Gloves

  First published 2013 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN (epub): 978-1-84997-638-1

  ISBN (mobi): 978-1-84997-639-8

  Copyright © 2013 Christopher Fowler

  Cover art by Pye Parr

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  FOREWORD

  Joanne Harris

  EVERY YEAR, A million books never see publication. Some are rightly ignored; some die; some are just not saleable enough. Some receive rave rejections before being thrown onto the trash pile. And sometimes one splendid, heroic book fights its way to the top of that pile, bites its thumb at the corporate, commercial world of publishing and announces to the world at large: Read me, or else.

  Plastic is one of these. I was lucky enough to read it in manuscript form some seven or eight years ago. From the first page I was hooked. Dark, compassionate, violent, wise and wittily razor-edged – if Quentin Tarantino had decided to collaborate with Alan Bennett to rewrite Bridget Jones’ Diary, then surely the script would have been something like this. I already knew the author to be the master of urban unease, but to me this new novel went further still. I loved it, raved about it to everyone I knew and assumed that it would just be a matter of time before it became a bestseller.

  In a world where credit rules supreme, where images of unattainable perfection are held up to women as not only achievable, but absolutely necessary, where nobody looks beyond the surface, where to be on TV is everyone’s fantasy and where the acquisition of yet another handbag, yet another pair of shoes, might hold the key to happiness, Plastic has an uncanny resonance. The heroine, June Cryer, whose description of herself as ‘a dead housewife’ comes frighteningly close to home, is the existential Everywoman of the consumer generation. Unloved, unhappy, overweight, she is filled with confusion about the world around her; about her husband, who is leaving her; about the dreams she used to have.

  ‘When I was young I would kneel on my mother’s threadbare sofa and watch snowflakes dissolving against the warm lounge windows, I would stare into the frozen streets as white and muffled as the inside of a pillow and think of a distant future when I would become important to someone. Even in winter my life was sunlit, one giant possibility. How far did I end up from that dream?’

  Her displacement activities, her preoccupation with trivia, with TV, and particularly with shopping as a desperate means of filling an inner void, will strike many a chord amongst those of us who know what it’s like to speed-shop through Selfridges, wielding the plastic with deadly intent, and to return triumphant with the sense of a job well done and a shopping bag full of assorted items that only an obsessive-compulsive on crack would think made any kind of sense…

  All of us have been there. All of us know what it’s like. June speaks for all of us when she says of a visit to Selfridge’s:

  ‘I arrived in front of the building like Caesar at the gates of Rome and swept past the doorman with a look that said ‘I’m about to jag a spike in the monthly national consumer index, so don’t even think of fucking with me’.

  But such pleasures as this have consequences. And as events unfurl with the breathtaking inevitability of a row of collapsing dominoes, June suddenly finds herself on the dark side of consumerism, in a world of shopping at gunpoint, a world in which human flesh is just another commodity to be traded, and where even such a mundane object as a potato peeler may be given a new and sinister role...

  However, in spite of all this, the publishing world was not convinced. Whilst admitting the book was terrific (I don’t think any manuscript has ever been so widely – and furtively – read in-house), editor after editor pronounced it “tricky to sell”. A thriller about shopping, narrated by a housewife? From Sophie Kinsella, from Kathy Lette – from any female writer, in fact – it would have been acceptable. But from Christopher Fowler? Tricky.

  And so Plastic continued to circulate under a series of different titles, acquiring converts wherever it went like some literary underworld movement – a secret Campaign for Real Fiction.

  Finally, here it is, in all its subversive glory.

  Read it with the light on.

  ‘Our houses are not in the street anymore.

  The street is in our houses.’

  Charles Gounod

  CHAPTER ONE

  Dead Housewife

  THERE’S BLOOD EVERYWHERE, and none of it’s where it’s supposed to be.

  On the carpet. On the curtains. All over me. And I know it won’t wash out because this shirt is pure silk. If you don’t want to ruin silk, never sneeze in a Starbucks with a mouth full of blueberry muffin. As I sit here I keep thinking if only I could go back to my old life. I could head into the kitchen and start going through the ironing again, except that the iron is now sticking out of the TV screen.

  My name is June Cryer, and I am a dead housewife.

  To put it another way, I am a pelmet-vacuuming, Tesco-shopping, voucher-clipping, dishwasher-loading, Radio Heart-loving dead housewife who should have stayed home instead of getting into a fight with the kind of men who feature on crime programmes with blurry boxes over their faces.

 
I’d like to comb my hair and put on a bit of lippy, make myself presentable, but I can’t get up. The man standing guard over me is entirely devoid of manners. He has a foil-wrapped burger in his fist, and takes ruminative lumps out of it while he’s deciding where to dump my body. The meat juice is running over his knuckles like blood. My God, we’ve come a long way from Raffles, the Gentleman Thief.

  How the hell did I ever get here?

  All I can think is that I must have fallen into a deep sleep the day I got married, like some character from a fairy tale, except Sleeping Beauty was out cold before she met her prince, and he fought a dragon and slashed his way through a forest of poisonous thorns to get to her, whereas Gordon just said ‘I suppose I should marry you if you’re not going to have a termination’, and instead of the Kiss of True Love bringing me to my senses it was his unrepentant affair with the bitch next door.

  I look up at the Burger-Muncher and realise I am way out of my depth. By the time my neighbours hear about me I’ll be gone. I’ll turn up on the news, found in the long grass of a railway embankment, or floating face-down in the Thames, just another unidentified torso sucked along by the tide. My severed head will be discovered in a freezer bag in the high street, only to be replaced with bunches of lurid garage flowers still wrapped in plastic. Why don’t people take the plastic off? When Princess Diana died it looked like several tons of Quality Street had been dumped outside her house. But that’s how I’ll be found, scattered across the city in half a dozen binliners, recognised by my ankle-chain or the piercings in my ears.

  So much for the dignity of death.

  I’ll probably make the local edition of the six o’clock news. My disapproving neighbours will be interviewed around the corners of their front doors; ‘She was a quiet woman, kept herself to herself, never went out much.’ My best friend will use my disappearance as an opportunity to impose herself on athletic television cameramen. My mother will telephone my husband and commiserate: ‘Well, Gordon, you can’t say I didn’t warn you. I always said she was a bolter. The signs were there, it’s just a shame your name had to be dragged into it.’ Eventually, in death as in life, I will be totally forgotten. And I’ll only have myself to blame.

  As soon as my captor has finished his burger, I’m done for. He still has a quarter left but I can tell he’s sizing me up for removal. Will she go in the lift or do I have to saw her head off first?

  I once had hopes for something better than this. When I was young –

  – when I was young I would kneel on my mother’s faded turquoise sofa and watch snowflakes dissolving against the warm lounge windows, I would stare into the frozen streets as white and muffled as the inside of a pillow and think of a distant future when I would become important to someone. Our TV was always showing The Little Mermaid or Sleeping Beauty, and we always had the colour turned up too bright. I wanted to live in a sunlit glade and find my prince. Was I so wrong for wanting that? I’m not ashamed. But how did I end up so far from those dreams?

  But I can’t just forget what’s happened because this has been the most memorable weekend I’ve had since I was seven, when our caravan got wedged under a car park barrier on the Isle of Sheppey. And I can’t go back because my old life has gone forever. The last couple of days have been a, well I wouldn’t use the word nightmare, because you recover from bad dreams, don’t you?

  Sorry, I know I’m rambling. I think it’s shock.

  They need some decent curtains on the windows in this room. Heals are having a sale, they could get it out of petty cash and keep the receipt because you never know, the colours might clash. Do thugs get expenses?

  I don’t feel well. I think I’m going to be sick.

  I don’t deserve to be in a situation like this. I can no longer make sense of the world. Nothing is in its right place anymore. There are shadows everywhere. Life can cloud over as fast as a spring morning, and suddenly everything becomes hopeless. It seems unfair, like being told you’re seriously ill by a cheerful, harrassed doctor.

  Let me start at the – you know.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mrs. Bloke

  MY FULL NAME is Penelope June Cryer, only I changed my Christian and middle names around because no-one wants to be called Penny Cryer, it sounds like a Victorian newspaper.

  First of all, let me get this straight, I never meant to get involved in anything violent. It’s not like me. I’m too unfashionable. I’m nice. I always buy tea-towels from those boys who call at the front door trying to better themselves. I’ll always put a woolly glove on the railings. I stop and listen to charity muggers until they look for a chance to get away. But nice people finish last, don’t they?

  I know that being a housewife is as boring as a Post Office queue. I wanted something more, but not this. They say loss of innocence is irreversible. Well, my consciousness has been raised. I’ve finally found out what I’ve been missing, and it’s way too much information, I can tell you.

  Look, I’m trying to keep everything together so I can explain, but it’s not easy.

  Today is Sunday, but my descent into chaos goes further back to… well, my old life, my life up to the end of last week, but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where… although I’d say handwriting.

  I did calligraphy at school and have a wonderful signature, with a sweeping Arabic flourish on the end of the ‘Y’ like I’m signing my name to a painting after years of work. I could show you a hundred signatures and they’d all be identical. I could make a biro work upside down, like spacemen. I got married and when the marriage disappointed, I started shopping. I was ready to use my signature in the nation’s stores, and what happened? They introduced pin numbers, which aren’t the same. Signatures were personal. Nobody sees my signature now. It was all I had, damnit. Now I’m just an arrangement of digits in someone’s databank.

  Credit was easy, not really money at all, just tapping out four numbers. I carried no cash. My mother said cash was the filthiest thing you could ever hold in your hand because of all the other people it’s been through. Obviously she’d had little experience of penises.

  I’ve never been good with money. I got a parking fine every single time I moved the car. We’re all supposed to ride bicycles now for the environment, but my mother was a district nurse and says all bicycles ever gave her was saddle-rash and an aversion to wicker.

  I suppose the whole thing really started last Christmas. That was the first time I realised I had a problem.

  I have shopping glands. The only thing I love more than shopping is reassessing my purchases. You know, when you get them home and lay them all out and see exactly what you’ve bought? Remember that great feeling?

  Between December 18th and 24th I spent over £9,450 on presents. The national average is £700. And I don’t even have anyone to buy for except my husband, my mother and a friend who lives down the street. When the bills came in I thought they’d got it wrong, then realised that I didn’t remember the shopping trip at all. I’d parked the car in Selfridges, I’d driven home with the boot and the back seat full of bags, but the bit in between was a complete blank.

  I’d bought electrical goods I would never use, sweaters in triplicate, a yogurt-maker, night-goggles for God’s sake. I’d ordered a cat. Some rare breed with evil, wonky eyes and overactive sweat glands that you have to keep wiping down with a damp cloth; I don’t know, it must have been on TV. Last year I bought a home defibrillator. It’s still in its box in the spare room.

  The realisation of what I had done spoiled Christmas for me. I hid the bills from Gordon until I could figure out what to do. He spent the afternoon slumped in front of the telly performing eating rituals peculiar to the season, peering inside brazil nuts and chewing dried figs on a plastic fork. I bunged a Butterball into the oven but barely touched any of it myself. I had a bottle of Bombay Sapphire, three valiums and a packet of dry-roasted nuts, and sat in the kitchen fretting.

  He went mad at me when he found the bills, but grudgingly paid up. H
e could afford it. Gordon places such importance on looking normal that it really becomes quite strange. He’s the sort of man who wears a tie to a funfair. When I was a kid, I used to stick Welsh flags in seaside sandcastles; thinking about it, it’s really odd, you know? I did it because the Welsh flag always came in a packet with the other flags when you bought a bucket and spade, that’s all. So it was the normal thing to do. Gordon thinks eating dried figs one day a year is normal, but it’s just what you’re used to.

  We all do what we’re used to, and I’m used to Gordon. He was always kind to me, in a vague, thoughtless English way. He often came home with garage carnations (why is one always bright blue?) and a box of Black Magic. Men called Gordon do things like that, they have to live up to the name. He allowed me to assume that he would always be there for me. He made sure our life together was cloaked in common sense.

  That’s how things were with us. We didn’t lead the empowered lives you read about in magazines. People in magazines are only in magazines because they’re not remotely normal. Me, I’m used to being invisible. The kids in our street called me Mrs. Bloke because that’s what I was, the wife of some man they saw going to work every morning, leaving the house with a briefcase. If I was on a soap opera I’d be billed as Woman Carrying Sainsbury’s Bags, Woman Examining Refrigerated Desserts, Woman Peering Crossly Out Of Garden Window.

  I feel special now, singled out for attention after years of transparency, but when you see what I’ve had to go through in the last couple of days, you’ll understand why.