Plastic

by Christopher Fowler

  But I had already closed my front door.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Proposition

  THE HOUSE HAD changed. The pastel rooms with their bright corners, as soft and decorative as patterned paper towels, now looked alien and comfortless. It was like going back to someone’s house after attending their funeral.

  When you’re just a housewife, you end up watching too much television, and I’ve watched a lot: celebrity makeovers, comedy quizzes, Top 100s, reality TV, chat shows that consist of TV personalities with the depth of balloon animals. I could run a restaurant or an airline from the knowledge I’ve gained. Worst of all, I got addicted to documentaries. Secrets Of The Pharaohs, Killers Of The Serengeti, Unexplained Weather, Jet Engines Of The 20th Century, Hitler’s Flying Saucers, The Boy Whose Skin Exploded, The World’s Heaviest Teen Mother. I’ve watched so many pseudo-science documentaries that I feel like I’ve been to a third-rate university. I leave the rolling news on all afternoon. I’m sure they interview the same people every day. Woman Outside School, Fat Girl On Sofa, Man In Shop Doorway, Welsh Pensioner In Strange Hat. I see the Sky anchorman reporting from Africa and think ‘horrible John Lewis shirt’, because I’ve touched a John Lewis shirt on a man but I’ve never been to Africa.

  The tanned BBC weather girl was wearing a navy blue jacket with gold buttons and no blouse underneath. Lou was right – even she looked like she might be fun when she wasn’t pointing out incoming cold fronts. She waved an oracular claw across the British Isles to reveal a dirt-streaked whorl: wind, rain and plunging temperatures for the coming weekend. I opened a window, placed my hands over my heart and took a deep breath. It seemed hard to catch the air. The smell of frying steak sharpened the cool evening outside. Through next door’s kitchen window I could see Gordon sitting at the dinner table with his back to me, enjoying someone else’s cooking.

  Shaking slightly, I returned to the lounge and emptied out the rubbish bin, then neatly arranged the pieces of credit cards on the table so that they looked whole once more. I don’t know what I thought I was doing. The one thing on my mind was what would become of me. I only knew the house and the few streets that constituted our neighbourhood.

  I could recall every inch of the view from my windows, the threadbare limes and hornbeams against low-pressure skies, the dusty box hedges, the shadows condensing with the arc of the day. Every morning, the old lady opposite would kneel on a pink rubber pad in her threadbare front garden and snip invisibly at the grass surrounding a solitary rose bush. My home, like hers, had become my fixed point on earth. As a child I had fantasised of distant travel; instead, all movement had gradually ceased until I had almost reached a full stop. I existed in a handful of routes, from the house to the shops and back again, like a chicken or a bus, or an electrical circuit for a very basic appliance.

  I patiently waited for Gordon to finish his dinner, hoping that he would come and talk to me. Some awful camp comic was on television asking a woman about her most embarrassing sexual experience. He wasn’t listening to a word she said, and kept repeating ‘A dildo?’ Mechanical laughter punctuated his lines as he greedily eyed the camera. I went to the window. In the street outside, an old man slipped on the kerb and fell over. There was no-one to help him up. I could have gone to his aid, but remained frozen on the spot. He managed to get himself onto his knees, but the contents of his grocery bag had spilled across the road.

  A few minutes later, Gordon walked into the kitchen and stood at the sink surreptitiously picking his teeth. ‘I can’t stop,’ he told me. ‘I just wanted to let you know that it went very well.’

  ‘What went well?’ I asked, dreading the answer.

  ‘The people who saw the house. A middle-aged couple, they want to make an offer. Not proper Chinese, Asians or something. I wonder if I put it on the market too low. I thought you might prefer to stay with your mother for a while.’

  ‘I can’t go all the way to Leamington Spa.’ She had been living with her cantankerous sister since my father died. ‘Besides, I haven’t told her about us.’

  ‘Well, it’s time you did, isn’t it?’

  ‘Why can’t I just stay here?’

  ‘Well, you can...’ Gordon looked doubtful. ‘Only most of the furniture’s going tomorrow.’

  ‘What do you mean? Where’s it going?’

  ‘To auction. I told you, I have to act quickly. You’re not the only one who’s out of cash.’ He made a half-hearted attempt to look apologetic. ‘I have to go. Hilary’s got a stopover in Amsterdam and said I could go with her.’ He couldn’t get out of the house fast enough, as excited as a schoolboy on a date. ‘I’ll move the rest of my stuff out tomorrow, and I’ll leave you a couple of suitcases in the bedroom. Don’t worry about the house. I can keep an eye on it from next door.’

  ‘I thought perhaps we should talk about practicalities,’ I whispered.

  ‘You mean the money. Look, I’ll be fair, okay? I’ll help you out with the debt, get you into a rented flat. Don’t worry, just go to your mother’s and read your books and I’ll sort it all out when I get back. You might want to go through all your designer clothes, see what you still need. Put the rest on one side and I’ll include them in the auction. The cash could be useful for you.’

  ‘What else is going?’

  ‘They’ll take the furniture if we want them to. Why don’t you just leave out the things that have sentimental value?’

  ‘What about the things that have sentimental value for you?’

  He thought for a hasty moment. ‘There’s nothing I want to keep. I’m going for a fresh start.’

  He was whistling as he went out of the front door. I had never seen him so happy, caught up in the energy of making new plans. I wondered how we had managed to misjudge each other to such a degree. Across the street, I saw Lou’s front door open. She emerged carrying a Nike gym-bag with a rolled towel sticking out of it.

  ‘Can I come with you?’ I called.

  ‘I’m well over the limit,’ she warned me, throwing open the passenger door of her silver Saab. ‘If I go, you go.’

  ‘I just need some air.’ I climbed in and unrolled the window to let the smoke out.

  ‘Darren just came home armed with a bunch of fluorescent daisies and a box of Terry’s All Gold. I have a feeling he may be after intimacy. I had to get out before I was tempted to put ground glass in his coffee. Did you reach a decision about your future?’ Lou looked for a flat surface to stand her Rum Sour on and dug out her keys. At least she’d had the sense to pour her cocktail into a McDonald’s shake cup.

  ‘I guess that’s up to Gordon now. I’m not going to my mother’s house. She’d worm the truth out of me, and then we’d just fight.’

  ‘You can’t go on living in the house until he kicks you out. Have you no pride?’ Lou started the car and lurched away from the kerb.

  ‘I think he’ll just spend his time next door. He wouldn’t auction off the bed, would he?’

  ‘So that’s okay with you, is it, him flogging the furniture and moving in with the next door neighbour? You need to get away for a while, at least for the weekend.’

  ‘How? The weather’s going to be horrible and I’ve got no money.’

  Lou flicked her cigarette end out of the window. ‘Listen, there’s someone I want you to meet. A girl at the pool, she works for some telecommunications firm out of town. Her name’s Julie, she’s off red meat, potatoes, bread and pasta because she’s having an affair with Malcolm, her boss, and she doesn’t want him to see her naked with the lights on until she hits target weight. They’re both married. She was moaning to me about not being able to go away with him because he’s paranoid about burglars. He’s supposed to be in New York on business over the weekend and she wants to be with him, but he doesn’t want to leave his flat unattended for some reason.’

  ‘I’m not sure I follow you.’

  ‘Let’s see if she’s there.’ She crunched the gears and turned out of the street. The old man
who had fallen over was sitting on a wall, trying to get his breath back. His bag had toppled over again, sending apples and peaches into the gutter.

  The gym was housed on the first floor of a converted Victorian swimming baths, a grimly beautiful building banded by frescoes of cavorting maidens. Instead of repointing the graceful sworl of late-nineteenth-century plasterwork in the reception area, the council had chosen to hang sagging plastic banners for sports drinks over it. There was an expensive modern gym in Hamingwell, but Lou had been banned from there for taking a kebab into the sauna.

  ‘Malcolm and Julie want to go away together,’ explained Lou as we headed for the cafeteria, ‘but the alarm system in his apartment building will be off. Malcolm wanted his wife to come up and stay there but she lives out of town and has to look after the dogs. They have this big house in the country. Malcolm’s loaded, runs some kind of consultancy on the side and has always kept a city flat as a shag pad, but his wife suspected so they had to stop using it. He bought a brand-new place to fool her, but the wife found out about that too, so the only chance they’ve got to be together is on business trips. Julie’s been on at me all week to find – hey, Julie.’

  Julie was a skeleton in a leotard with the facial characteristics of a particularly bony Velasquez. The strain of having an affair obviously wasn’t doing her any good. ‘I’ve put on three pounds,’ she complained without noticing that I was facing the upper end of a size twelve. ‘And that’s with coleslaw.’

  ‘It’s covered in mayonnaise, darling. You should try small handfuls of dried spinach on crispbread. This is June.’

  I shook the offered hand. It felt like refrigerated asparagus. I wondered why nobody had told Julie she was anorexic. We had coffee, which seemed like a bad idea in Julie’s case. She carefully added half a pot of soya milk while Lou and I ate doughnuts.

  ‘June could look after your Malcolm’s place for the weekend,’ Lou suggested, her lips dusted with sugar. ‘Water the plants, make sure nothing gets nicked.’

  ‘Could you really?’ Julie craned forward and examined me with an air of desperation. ‘The flat’s absolutely brand new. It’s fantastic and very central, right on the south side of the river near Lambeth Bridge. All kinds of professionals are buying into the building. It’s a beautiful design, some famous French architect. Jeffrey Archer’s put in an offer on a penthouse.’ She sipped tentatively at the coffee, but was exhausted by the effort required to lift the fat ceramic cup.

  ‘Well, perhaps –’ I began.

  ‘Could you really? I don’t know you from Adam, but if you’re a friend of Lou’s I suppose it’s all right. It’s just that Malcolm’s –’ she dropped her voice as though imparting a great secret, ‘so paranoid about security. He owns some quite valuable paintings, horrible old watercolours. The building is having its electrics rewired this weekend so they’ve got to shut everything off until midnight on Sunday. Why these people can’t work around the clock is beyond me. Hardly any of the other flats are occupied yet, and there’s a rumour that they won’t be because, well, there’s the credit crisis, and the landlord is asking too much money.’ Julie spoke so quickly that I had trouble understanding her. I wondered if she could get a sugar rush from Nutrasweet.

  ‘Malcolm moved in early so that he and I could have somewhere to go. His wife wants nothing to do with the place. The paintings are in his mother’s name. The mother handles the insurance premium and doesn’t want the wife to get her hands on anything when they finally divorce. The wife lives in Henley and is on tranquillisers. Malcolm says they don’t sleep together anymore and she says they’re trying for another baby, so somebody’s lying. Obviously I’d pay you for coming in. If we don’t get away together this time, I really think it’ll be over between us.’

  ‘I’m not a hundred per cent sure,’ I said uncertainly. I found the complexity of other people’s relationships rather overwhelming.

  ‘Of course you can, you said you’re broke and Julie’s willing to pay you,’ Lou prompted, unembarrassed.

  ‘What if I break something?’ I hissed at Lou while Julie visited the toilet as a penalty for taking nourishment. ‘Valuable paintings. What if I left a tap running and everything got ruined? He could sue me.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, June, don’t be such a wimp. What could possibly go wrong? She told me she’s willing to donate her entire month’s salary. He must be a fantastic shag. Think of the cash, just for flat-sitting three nights. She can easily afford it.’

  But I just couldn’t agree to do it. I couldn’t leave my comfort zone to go and sleep in an unfamiliar bed. The thought filled me with a strange disturbance. It crossed my mind that I might be agorophobic. I felt as though I had let everyone down, my best friend, even a woman I had never met before today.

  Gordon didn’t come home that night. I tried to settle on my side of the bed, but my feet kept straying to the uncreased sheet beside me. Nothing was in its right place. At two o’clock a car stopped in the street and pumped bassy hip-hop against the windows. At three I abandoned the pretence of slumber and went downstairs to clean out the kitchen cupboards. Why do kitchens look so bright and bare when you turn the lights on in the middle of the night? As I jabbed at the brown figure-eights left by sauce bottles and jam jars, I called myself a pathetic useless doormat, but felt that nothing, not even this, could change me.

  The next morning, innervated by a lack of sleep and vertiginous, disorienting dreams, I called Lou and asked for Julie’s telephone number.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Ziggurat

  ‘MALCOLM WILL GET a bit nervous when I tell him you’re staying there,’ Julie warned me when we met in Starbucks on Wednesday morning.

  She was dressed in a taupe designer suit that was daywear to her, anniversaries and court appearances to the housewives of Hamingwell. She had something in her cheek that rattled against her teeth as she talked. I thought it must be a gobstopper. ‘He’s like a wolf, he has to pee on his own territory and bare his teeth at anyone who steps across the boundary line. And he hates anyone touching his things. He was an only child. You know how they are, always have to collect things, then have to find a place to house it all.’ She spat delicately into her hand and revealed a glass marble. ‘It’s to stop me from eating.’

  A malevolent sky loomed over the town like a coming apocalypse. In the distance, four grey concrete council blocks stood guard, darkening as an iron foundry of a cloudbank settled above them. Getting away was looking more appealing by the second.

  ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t do it,’ I dithered. ‘I wouldn’t want to upset him.’ I was beginning to wish I hadn’t called, but as the auctioneers had taken away most of the furniture, including our bed, there was nowhere to sleep except on the floor of the lounge in Lou’s son’s sleeping bag, which smelled of wasted youth and stale dope. I needed time to figure out a future for myself, and I had one long weekend in which to do it.

  ‘No, it’s fine. I’ll tell him you’re very responsible, but you’d better make sure everything’s exactly as you found it afterwards. He’s been holding back the flight tickets, threatening not to go. I was going to give this to Lou, but she’s gone to a Botox party.’ She produced an envelope from her bag. ‘She’s not trying to get rid of wrinkles, she just wants to look less annoyed. Okay, hand this to Madame Funes, the concierge, and she’ll let you have the apartment key, it’s just a single Yale. She won’t be there when you leave, so Malcolm needs you to return it to his safety deposit box by midnight on Sunday night. It’s near the flat; the address is in the letter.’

  ‘How does that work?’

  ‘It’s like a bank deposit ATM, except that it’s on a timer. You just post the envelope. You can stay until Sunday night, the power should be back on by then, and you can just pull the front door shut behind you when you leave. I don’t suppose the TV or the lights will work, but there are plenty of candles, and the central heating should be on because it’s gas. The fridge has already been emptied. The phone i
sn’t connected yet and you’ll find you have to go to the end of the ground floor corridor to get reception on your mobile, so it should be a peaceful, relaxing weekend.’

  ‘I just want a place to think things through,’ I assured her.

  ‘It’ll be like a retreat, but in the heart of the city. There’s a very good spa nearby if you want to book yourself in for a facial.’ I chose not to tell Julie that such luxuries were now beyond my pocket.

  Julie pulled several squashed Post-It notes from her jacket pocket and sorted through them. She explained that she couldn’t sleep at night without making lists for the next day, and that her state of hypertension was caused by consuming nothing in the past eighteen hours except a glass of lemon-juice, two Carr’s water biscuits and a diet pill. She was so desperate to please Malcolm that she didn’t realise how disturbing it was for other people to watch her eyes shimmering on amphetamines.

  ‘The main thing to remember,’ she said, consulting her notes, ‘is to tell Madame Funes if you’re going out. The keypad to the main entrance will be affected by the building works, which is why Malcolm’s so reluctant to leave. He’s convinced the place is being watched by every burglar in London. He’d go mad if anything went missing.’

  She flicked through to another note. ‘Our flight gets into Heathrow first thing on Monday morning, so he’ll probably go straight to work and come by the flat in the evening.’ Her mouth set itself in a lipless line. ‘We’re leaving first thing the day after tomorrow. That gives me three days to convince him about the divorce. I mean, if she’s going around telling people they’re trying for a baby, she’s obviously mental. He’s got a high pressure job, he can’t afford to have an unstable wife.’ She flicked the marble back in her mouth and rattled it against whitened teeth.