Plastic

by Christopher Fowler

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Betrayal

  I REALISED I had a problem with spending money. Getting it was easy enough, because I had an allowance from Gordon. He’s always had the same job – he works for Selway, the biggest shoe company in Croydon, no designer labels, just generic menswear, black Oxford toecaps, trainers, workboots, the kind of shoes you see on salesmen who smell like hot cows after two months in the same footgear. Middle-aged men wear belts that are slightly too tight, just as women do with brassieres. Any sales assistant will tell you there’s hardly a woman over thirty who chooses the right bra size. Gordon is nine years older than me, and Head of Regional Sales. He makes good money and was always generous, but when the men in his family hit thirty-five they all start to look like something out of Sofa World, and only notice you when you stand in front of the football and lift their legs to vacuum.

  Gordon and June. Our names went together like Marks & Spencer or Burke & Hare. One never appeared without the other. Before we got married, Gordon didn’t behave like a Gordon. He was more of a Dan or Jack. He was full of grand ideas. He gave me the impression that he wanted to get tattooed and spend a year in Goa before owning a chain of stores that sold personalised sound systems, but after one sniff of an air-conditioned office he was ready for a nameplate on his desk. I didn’t have any grand plans, but I wanted a baby boy. The pregnancy was a surprise and he married me because his mother insisted, and he forgot he ever had dreams, but he remembered to blame me.

  Everything continued to stay normal until just over a month ago, when our son would have been ten. That was when we had the really big fight. I thought I knew all there was to know about a man. They didn’t appear to be much more complicated than video recorders, it was just a matter of programming them correctly. It turns out they’re more like Swedish ovens; certain buttons used in combination produce entirely inexplicable effects.

  It was a special occasion, and I wanted to buy Gordon something special to mark the day, so I decided to borrow the car because the trains were playing up. He kept a spare key inside the mallard. We have this china duck on the mantelpiece. Gordon won’t let me drive his car, not because he thinks I’m a bad driver, he just thinks I’ll crash it and kill someone, so I’ve always taken the train, but they were running late so I risked his new Vauxhall.

  I didn’t tell him I was going to borrow it. I thought he wouldn’t find out if I put the seat and mirror back. I like shopping in London even though the parking is enough to make you stab a traffic warden through the eye, but I decided to head to Croydon because I get bored driving. Except when there’s a radio play on, and even then the sound effects annoy me, especially opening doors and tinkling tea-things.

  The Vauxie’s air conditioning made a terrible rattling noise when I turned it on. I lay down on the seat and shone a torch through the vent on the passenger side but couldn’t see anything, so I unscrewed the panel under it and disconnected the hose. I know how to do basic car maintenance because my father ran a garage and I used to watch him. I still couldn’t see what was making the noise, so I connected the nozzle of my vacuum cleaner to the hose and put it on blow. I was looking down the vent, which was probably a bad idea because something shot out and hit me in the face.

  More accurately, it stuck in my forehead. I felt blood trickling into my eyes. I went back into the house and ran to a mirror. It was a diamond earring, elegant setting, a good-sized blue-white oval stone, and it wasn’t mine. And it was stuck between my eyes. I looked like an Indian woman.

  How does a strange diamond earring get into the air vent of a car only driven by your husband?

  Let me tell you about Gordon. He’s insensible to the grace of living. Desk and office, house and garden, no mysteries that can’t be solved with the contents of a toolbox. I suppose I’d always known about his affairs. It wasn’t the first time he had been unfaithful. He’s not particularly attractive, he’s a little overweight and drifting within range of Pringle jumpers, so I think when the offer of sex came up he just took it.

  He believes everything he reads in the tabloids, especially about immigrants ruining the country. I’ve always wondered what would happen if he met a sexy immigrant, he’d probably blow a fuse puzzling over the paradox. He travelled a fair amount, so there were hotels, and of course his car, which functioned like a combination office and bedroom. I’m pretty sure they were doing it in the Vauxhall because once I searched the glove box and found an empty foil disc of birth control pills and a luggage receipt for Antwerp. But I still couldn’t imagine him being unfaithful – even with all the weird phone calls.

  They were weird because he took the cordless into the shed even when the temperature was below zero, and he had the kind of peculiar strangled conversations men have when they’re trying to hide something. I’d stayed in denial because I wanted our marriage to work, which is an unfashionable view when you see all those trendy women in car commercials kicking men out of their loft apartments. But life wasn’t like that for me, it was about bleach and Hoover bags and quietly crying after midnight so as not to let the neighbours hear. Gordon said we had to talk problems over, but he always managed to talk me out of anything I wanted to change.

  I cleaned the cut on my head and was standing by the garden gate with the earring in my hand feeling a bit dazed when Hilary, my next door neighbour, walked past and spoke without stopping to engage her brain. Hilary is tall and wears a shade of coral gloss lipstick I’m sure they’ve discontinued everywhere except Africa.

  ‘Oh you’ve found it,’ she said, ‘thank God, I’ve been looking everywhere.’

  She thought I’d just picked the earring up in the street. Then she realised the truth and changed colour. Hilary makes herself taller with pinned-up hair that needs a better conditioner than the complimentary kind she hoards from air-crew hotels. Hilary is a BA flight attendant who knows how to blow a whistle for attracting attention, which is something she looks like she’s had a lot of practice at.

  I didn’t know what to say. I numbly handed her the earring, and as I did I had a clear mental picture of Hilary with her tights off and her Zara skirt hiked up astride Gordon in the passenger seat, banging her head against the windscreen. What was so galling is that she’s older than me, one of those old-school British Airways bulldog-women in Belisha-beacon makeup who’s born to wear a Hermes neck scarf with horseshoes on it.

  I had a deal going with Gordon; he always paid for his infidelities. But this was so blatant that as I grabbed the car keys I thought to hell with Croydon, it’s time for Selfridges and Harvey Nicks, the point being that in one afternoon I planned to revenge-shop myself into a coma. If I hadn’t decided to do that I wouldn’t have seen the shoes and I’d never have ended up here, covered in blood.

  I was only going to go shopping, and now I have to die for it, how does that one work out?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Birth Of An Addiction

  BEFORE I MOVED to Hamingwell, I lived with my parents in one of those yellow-brick Edwardian terraced houses that provided a dream-memory of order and safety for its inheritors.

  Our quiet sidestreet was a warm-walled canyon where children played ball games in the road and went to bed while it was still light in the summer months. My parents had been children during the confused decades after the war, and raised me without religion, politics or convictions of any kind in the hope that I would make up my own mind. After their weekly fight they would buy me a small gift to make amends for what I had seen and heard.

  Over the years, the gifts got bigger.

  By the time I was seventeen there was no cupboard space left in my bedroom for new clothes, and I couldn’t take any more of their fighting, so I left home and moved into the flat over the shoe shop where I had a Saturday job. I dated the manager, but when I finished with him he had me thrown out of the flat.

  I knew Gordon because he visited the store as a sales rep, and I started seeing him because he wouldn’t leave me alone. After my marriage I w
as transferred to Kimberley Road, Hamingwell, where the children were posted indoors at their games stations and arguments were whispered because they could be heard through the walls.

  The streets were as silent as those of my youth, but now they were filled with people-carriers, experimental parking layouts and signs on poles explaining penalties. Burglaries and car thefts and waves of graffiti rhythmically appeared as if a high, dirty tide of rebellion had risen and receded in the night. The residents organised teams to watch houses, to secure gardens, to scrub off the effluvium, fighting to maintain the area’s postcard appearance, but the communal effort robbed us of community, and we retreated suspiciously into our homes. We grew sick of digging sharpened screwdrivers out of high street flowerbeds.

  After that, the only time I glimpsed the city again was looking out of department store windows. I couldn’t see that marriage was shrinking my world. You don’t notice changes when they happen incrementally.

  The only existing postcard of the town where I spent ten years of married life shows a yellow brick parade of shop-fronts, a laundrette, a butchers, a newsagent, a green bus garage and a length of empty black tarmac beneath an improbable blue sky. The card had been produced when the parade was newly built and the town just completed. There’s a sense of bareness in the picture, of infant exposure to the world. Constructed on the expanding border of Kent and Greater London, Hamingwell sprang up fully formed. One day it was a mud-tracked building site, a black gap on an aerial night photograph, the next it was an official destination-board, a hotspot of shimmering yellow lights, its junctions freshly marked, its young trees nested in, its starter homes filled with slightly puzzled strangers, and I had been one of them.

  I was nineteen when I arrived there, two months a wife and six months pregnant. It was the first time I had been any distance from my parents’ house. I’m twenty-nine now, one week away from thirty, a birthday I won’t live to see.

  If you lower the postcard and reveal the scene behind it all these years later, you’ll find the laundrette boarded up, the butchers turned into a charity shop, and only the newsagents remaining in a dingy enervated version, its cracked windows pasted with faded lottery stickers. The bus garage is now a tower block and the road is full of fat-wheeled Japanese jeeps. The meadow from which the town took its name has been concreted over as a one-stop shopping plaza, and that, too, has failed. Thanks a bunch, credit crunch.

  The town lost its innocence; a schoolgirl was raped, a toddler went missing. The hopeful couples who came to Hamingwell moved on when the economic downturn hit, but up until three days ago I was still there. Ten years married and still childless, still cemented to the same man. My unborn boy had died, and the infection damaged my ovaries enough to make Gordon lose faith in fatherhood. In towns like Hamingwell, to be without children after a decade is to hang a sign around your neck saying ‘Incomplete As A Human Being’. With a little rearrangement, the town’s name spells ‘Am In Hell.’

  People stand up in meetings and admit I’m an alcoholic, I’m a shoplifter, I’m a Binge Eater. For ten years I was a Housewife – I’d tell anyone, not that anyone asked. On the rare occasions that I voiced any dissatisfaction, Gordon reminded me that at least he had married me, meaning that he might equally not have bothered. For years I kept the postcard on my bedroom table, to remind me that I was once as hopeful as the scene in the picture.

  I kept a clean house; scratch that, I kept an eerily immaculate house, so tidy it looked like a show home, because it had never been stained by emotion. Spotless sofas, price stickers on my wine glasses and yellow tie-tags on my scented bin-liners. I realised I was in a rut when I noticed that our cat’s diet was more varied than mine. At least his dried food came in three types. I kept busy. My husband worked late. My sinks smelled of pine. My surfaces shone. My days were full and my nights were bloody quiet, I can tell you.

  I used to be kind, but I became indifferent. No longer sentient. Once I looked up the antonym of ‘sentient’ in my dictionary and it simply said ‘dead’. Finally I turned into someone else entirely, someone as beaten as a piece of veal, as boring as a supermarket leaflet. How long does it take for a life to change beyond all recognition? Try ten years and a fistful of days. You could say I only had myself to blame, that there are women twenty years older than me who are still cool and slender and sexy, but they always knew how to be like that. When I was nine my mother told me that I would never be able to survive without a man. Thanks a lot, Ma.

  Sorry, where was I up to? I wish I could have a cup of tea, perhaps some plain digestives or a Hobnob. It would calm me down. I’ll tell you everything, I promise. Just the plain simple facts from now.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Art of Speed Acquisition

  ON THAT FISH-TANK-GREY autumn afternoon when I discovered the earring, I went shopping. Actually, the term ‘shopping’ hardly seems adequate. I couldn’t have done more damage to my credit cards if I’d driven over them. What I did was blast through Selfridges like an armed witch on a mission. 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.’

  Spending money is an intimate thing for me, so I made sure I knew the entire history of the places where I shopped, just as it was a point of honour to memorise the names of all the assistants who offered me their services. I was such a familiar face in Selfridges that the store detectives kept an eye on me, thinking I must be part of some long-term thieving reconnaissance party. I didn’t look poor, of course, so they suspected me less. I always dressed for shopping as if going on a date, smart beige patent-leather heels and a sleek chocolate-toned skirt, never jeans or trainers, because I was anxious to be noticed and treated with respect.

  It was not a good idea to shop in a highly emotional state. I was one thin step away from sitting down in the middle of the street and screaming. Convinced that shopping in quantity released pheromones, I tick-tacked at a furious speed across the marble floors, ankles flashing back and forth, charm bracelet jangling, begging the buzz to kick in.

  The remains of the summer season fashions had been left on the shelves like hard centres discarded in a ravaged chocolate box, the sales staff as listless and fractious as children trapped in class. As I circumnavigated the territory, a hunter-gatherer on a search for hangered prey, I pushed ever deeper into the undergrowth of my desires.

  It was a good way to spend the day.

  Lately I had become fascinated with the textures of fashion fabrics, and as I walked I mentally alphabetized them into alpaca, astrakhan, batiste, brocade, cotton, calico, cambric, cheviot, chiffon, chenille, crepe de chine, cretonne and corduroy. By the time I arrived at damask, denim and dimity I had already made my first purchase and lost my place in the lexicon of luxury.

  It’s never a good idea to shop when you’re angry; you’re liable to buy a kitten just so you can have the option of strangling it. As I agonized over proof of Gordon’s infidelity I got close to collapsing onto a stressed-leather browser-sofa to gulp noisy sobs into a Kleenex. Shopping only works as a displacement activity if you do a lot of it, so I metronomed at speed through the city-block-sized department store, brandishing my handbag like a Spartan shield.

  I covered the territory as thoroughly as a soldier flushing out snipers, a hunter-gatherer on a search for spangled prey to flay and wear. I had no fashion agenda in mind. If I was subconsciously looking for a new look, it was to look as invisible as possible. There are women who want to be mistaken for celebrity WAGs, those tanned Twiglets who can prevent their skin from drying up but not their column inches. Fame wasn’t for me; I wanted to be mistaken for one of those Knightsbridge trophy wives who have nothing better to do with their days than creep around retail outlets haranguing staff before heading off to rabbit-nibble a handful of greenery and pine nuts at the kind of restaurant where you can actually smell the hatred of the w
aiting staff. I just needed to fit in. Somewhere. Anywhere. I have control issues. I am a very, very, angry... I can’t... I want...

  Wait. Calm. Count to ten... where was I? Oh yes, killing – but first, shopping.

  I refuse to buy from the internet. Clicking and dragging isn’t a sensual experience. Shopping at Selfridges is a hot bath, a cool rain, a sudden flush of heat in the cervix. I love the ceramic faces of the cosmetic clerks, underlit by ice-blue counters. The frozen tableaux these vacuous mannequins form at their work stations make me feel like the heroine in the stage-play of my life. The lives of salespeople are probably even duller than mine, but I can see the attraction of their job. How could you resist the dramatic tungsten spots and arctic sets that effortlessly place you at the heart of a noir thriller? When that shopgirl was shot dead by her boyfriend in Selfridges a few years back, an act that would have seemed grotesque anywhere else felt entirely appropriate in such a location.

  The cyclamen zephyrs that drifted over me from the perfumery inflamed my membranes. The staff drifted about me with testers and face brushes as if wielding sacrificial tools in some arcane, forgotten rite.

  In housewares, the hanging crescendos of copper pots tightened my chest muscles until I could barely breathe. There were no stains in these stage-kitchens because no food was ever cooked. Sometimes I pulled open the counter drawers and breathed in their emptiness. I studied the beds covered with purple-beaded casbah cushions, the pastel French cotton sheets imprisoned in plastic as smooth as plate glass, the polished maple dining-tables laid for guests who would never ruin everything by turning up. When I touched the smokily elegant vases too slender to hold grocery store flowers but perfectly designed for a single aurum lily, I felt safe in the arms of manufacturers.