Plastic

by Christopher Fowler

  The dancers pushed me steadily back, until I found myself pressed against a gigantic bass speaker. The air vibrated in waves from it, lifting the fine hairs on my arms, rhythmically caressing the tops of my legs. The music changed to some kind of Indian beat that tickled the insides of my thighs. It was a long track, and as it built to a crescendo, so did I. Moving instinctively with the crowd until its mood became mine, I felt as though I had broken through some invisible barrier to join London’s spiritual residents, and that whatever else happened I would always be here, a fossil stamped on the city’s stone heart.

  I decided that if I ever saw Cassandra again I would forgive her for stealing my purse and buy another pill.

  Three quarters of an hour was enough, though. When I came out, I found that I had gone completely deaf. Someone had knocked a beer over my jumper, and it had cleaned most of the blood off, not a washing tip I’d come across before. My hand had been rubber-stamped with a picture of a teapot, which seemed an appropriate tattoo for a housewife.

  I cut away from the river, passing shops that sold real things: meat, coats, hot food. The stores in Hamingwell were the opposite of those ones in Hampstead and Kensington that sold teddy bears, quilted cushions, paper lamps, tiny mosaic mirrors, objects of little use after their unwrapping. Hamingwell’s few independent shops sold car parts, chicken nuggets, PCs, chipboard shelving units, prams, plastic garden furniture in green or white. They weren’t as rough and glitzy as Essex, just cheap and faintly desperate.

  I passed a neon-bright parlour where middle-aged West Indian men sat at formica tables silently staring at a TV mounted high in a corner, as though they were wondering how it got up there. Next door was a tattoo parlour, open and busy. Designs in the window offered a selection of Celtic symbols besides cabalistic images; a hand with an eye in it, another eye atop a pyramid. Barbed wire, angel of death, no hearts and anchors, no ‘I Love Mum’ here. After that a funeral arranger, bare plastic blinds in the window, a single bunch of brown dried flowers in an urn, impossibly unwelcoming. Surely they’re surrounded by fresh-cut flowers every day they’re in business, I thought. It wouldn’t hurt them to take some off a grave and put them in the window. Perhaps they were afraid of welcoming death.

  I passed a plush-carpeted gambling arcade with ornamental dragons in the window. Inside, two Asian kids were solemnly feeding coins into a machine, as if performing some form of penance.

  A fortune-teller’s office: ‘Want To Know The Future? Ask Mrs. Phillips.’ A brave question. Did anyone, truly? I stopped before the open door and tried to see inside, wondering if they could help me with the past instead. Were the things I saw real or merely symptoms of financial withdrawal? The window contained an illuminated model of Buddha in red velveteen plastic, a painted chalk Madonna in cream and blue robes topped with a glittery wire halo, a pink Ganesh surrounded by marigolds, a plastic Shiva balanced on one side-turned foot, and a ceramic crucifixion Jesus with upturned bleeding eyes and a pity-me look. Presumably the multi-denominational approach brought in more customers.

  ‘We’re open for business, darlin’,’ called a woman from somewhere inside.

  ‘I haven’t got any money on me,’ I warned.

  ‘Then come back when you have. This isn’t a charity.’

  I paused uncertainly, no further destination in mind.

  ‘No, wait, come in. It’s a slow night.’

  I took a tentative step inside. A cone of jasmine burned on a sideboard hung with paper garlands, harsh pinks and blues. The fortune teller was seated in a chair of vaguely Egyptian design, a fiftyish black woman in a navy twin-set, a Caribbean church-goer with swollen feet and a psychic sideline. The table before her was covered in a plastic cloth. ‘Do you let Jesus into your life?’

  ‘Uh, I went to church at Christmas,’ I explained uneasily. I hadn’t thought about religion since I was a small girl, and had only wanted to be Mary Magdelene then because she wore robes like a rock star.

  ‘Well, it’s a start. I can’t be choosy. There’s people wasting their money having their cards read over the internet, it’s killing my business. Sit yourself down. But you’ll owe me twelve pounds, you understand? You’re on God’s honour.’ She switched on an electric crystal ball and gave it a wipe with a J-cloth. I sat and folded my hands in my lap. Hard to believe, but the place felt more normal than anything else that night. The room was an amalgam of comfortable childhood memories. ‘Are you Mrs. Phillips?’ I asked.

  ‘The original Mrs. Phillips was my auntie, but she died and passed the gift to me. Give me your handbag.’

  I slipped the leather strap from my shoulder and passed it across the table. I thought I was about to get my palm read, but Mrs. Phillips snapped open the bag’s clasp and had a good rummage about, pulling things out at random and examining them.

  ‘No purse?’

  ‘I got robbed tonight.’

  ‘No? That’s terrible, so many robberies round here and the police do nothing. You see them driving past in their squad cars laughing, why is there always four of them inside? No wonder they get nothing done, going around in fours. I could tell them, split up and you’ll get more done.’ She upturned the bag and tipped its contents onto the table, then spread the items out before her. ‘Your husband left you for another woman, you say?’

  ‘I didn’t say.’

  ‘No, you didn’t. You’re a negative terminal, woman. Not many things you like to do, are there? Lucky colour green.’ She waved the makeup mirror at me. ‘Stay away from red. The colour of madness, bankruptcy, misery. You smell of blood. No children. Not fertile, are you? Think you would be with those hips. Your lucky mineral is plastic.’

  ‘Plastic’s not a mineral.’

  ‘Well, no, but it’s got minerals in it, like coal and stuff. Like your earrings. Who’s doing this, you or me?’

  ‘Why plastic?’ I asked, because I had always liked opals.

  ‘You don’t know the value of nothing.’

  ‘You can tell that just by looking in my handbag?’

  ‘Anyone could. Expensive rubbish. Once you know the proper value of things, you get a better mineral.’

  ‘I didn’t know that was how it worked.’

  ‘There’s a lot you don’t know. You don’t get out much, do you?’ This was said kindly.

  ‘What else don’t I know?’

  Mrs. Phillips was studying my fingers, turning them gently in the light. ‘White ladies can’t bake decent bread because they got the wrong hands. Good cuticles, like moons. Full moon tomorrow night, you stand in its light and find out the truth about yourself.’ She released my hands and rearranged the bag’s contents about the table. ‘Want to know if your man comes back? He doesn’t, and you’re better off for it. Leave him with his woman, she’ll kill him with all her demandin’. Everybody gets one question. What’s yours?’

  ‘Am I ill?’ I had no idea why I would ask such a thing. I’d meant to ask for an explanation about the violence I’d witnessed.

  ‘No, you’re not ill, just uprooted. It will pass.’

  I liked Mrs. Phillips, who suited the dislocation of the night. ‘When will it pass?’

  ‘You have to have your ordeal first, darling. The feeling will go after you perform a positive action.’

  ‘Why did you call me a negative terminal?’

  ‘There’s endings around you. Get yourself rid of them and start again.’ She smiled sadly as she swept everything back into the bag. ‘That’s all. I’ve got to take a pee. Remember you owe me twelve quid.’

  ‘You stay open late.’

  ‘My little girlie is dead,’ Mrs. Phillips explained. ‘Taken by The Lord on her seventeenth birthday. I sleep in the day so I can be closer to her at night.’

  I found myself walking back in the direction of the Ziggurat, but when I looked up at the black hole of the block standing against the protecting purple sky, darker now than the universe behind it, I thought of the girl with her crushed throat and the stitch-headed man who mi
ght still be stalking the building. I wanted to take Cassandra’s advice and go inside, but my nerve still failed me.

  The air from the Thames was brackish and sharp now that there were fewer vehicle fumes to disguise it. I cut the corner of the road, walking through the stacked timber and building supplies, then stopped and opened my mobile. There was no-one to call at this time of night. My mother would be in bed. Who else? Reluctantly, I switched it off. Tomorrow I would go back the apartment in daylight, but not tonight, while darkness removed logic and safety. I resolved to keep walking until I could find a place to sleep. It felt extraordinary to realise that I could take nothing for granted, not even the comfort of somewhere warm to sit, something to eat or drink. I am in public, I thought, and everything I do can be shared by strangers. There was no privacy to be found on the street. Cassandra knew exactly what to expect from men. I could offer a dozen different remedies for getting fruit juice out of a carpet. Which of us was better off?

  I eased off my chafing shoes and walked carefully along the wet pavements. Earlier I’d seen used syringes discarded in the gutter. Tomorrow everything would be normal again. Light restored sanity. Tonight, though, I would keep moving until I could not manage another step.

  At the next corner there was a fight going on, not the kind you see on television, but something real and feral between two groups of men. One kept running forward and jabbing sharply at another’s head before being hauled back by his mates, only to return as his anger rose once more. The other protected his head with his arms, but refused to run away, presenting himself for punishment again and again. His nose was bleeding, and blood was soaking his T-shirt like spilled redcurrant cordial. The pair of them were less like men than different breeds of dog.

  If I wasn’t in Hell, it was at least Purgatory. Unable to witness any further violence tonight, I turned and ran toward the river.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Stefan

  I HADN’T INTENDED to end up beside an RSU soup and sandwich van under another railway arch, but I was ravenous, and the lads there had started talking to me as if I was an old friend.

  They informed me that these services were dying out fast, unfashionable since Move Inside programs were the preferred method of support. The servers wanted to know why they hadn’t seen me before, and thought I was joking when I told them I was going to sleep rough.

  A boy in a grey woolly hat discussed me with his colleague. He recited the facts, a sermon he had delivered too many times: the homeless can’t be registered by GPs, you can stand only a month of sleeping rough before long-term problems set in, forty per cent of all homeless women were victims of sexual or physical abuse. Clearly a speech was required before the doling out of food, like a Victorian lecture. Mind you, I was homeless and about to be divorced, so I guess I should have listened.

  The boy in the van thought I was too old to be a dealer or a sofa surfer. He asked me if I had ever been in care. No, I explained, I’m a housewife, no longer caring how odd it sounded. They gave me a card, the address of a hostel unit offering care and support, detox advice and counselling. I tore it up as soon as I walked round the corner, and ate the sandwich. It was the kind I’d once have made at home, white bread stuffed with hard-boiled eggs. It was good, today’s date on the plastic carton, donated by a chain. The soup was some kind of weird Bovril amalgam, boiled too long, gummy and bitter, but I drained the cup. Every time I moved out of the light I saw the face of the girl on the bedroom floor, skin as pale as paper, her throat a ragged crimson line, a desperate look in her too-large eyes.

  I thought of the money I had thrown around in the past, not out of desire but boredom. I thought of the egg sandwich I had just eaten, someone’s meal for the day, and felt sick with shame.

  I found myself beneath the London Eye, the cables invisible against the sky so that the rim seemed suspended, an enemy of gravity, its glass pods shining like dinosaur eggs, then followed the Embankment until I had unconsciously returned to the site of the Ziggurat. There were benches on the Thames walk, and I gratefully slumped onto one.

  I awoke a few minutes later, my limbs numb. It was colder beside the river. I was still wondering what to do when I heard a movement behind me and turned to see a young man in a fur hood noisily pissing against a wall. When he realised I was there he braked in mid-flow.

  ‘Don’t let me stop you,’ I said, raising a hand and averting my eyes.

  ‘You’re the one standing in my toilet.’ A French accent. The young man buttoned his flies and looked me over. He orbited slowly, then wiped his nose on the back of his hand. In any other situation I would have noticed his eyes, brown with black lashes, dirty curls over a single dark eyebrow. ‘You want a glass of wine?’

  ‘What? No, I just want to sleep.’

  ‘You can’t sleep out here.’

  ‘I don’t have to. I’m staying in there.’ I pointed to the great dark building and was going to say I just want to be left alone, but I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted to talk to strangers who weren’t trying to sell me something. I wanted to touch someone.

  ‘Actually, I do want a drink.’ I nodded in what I hoped was a positive, uncrazy manner.

  ‘In France we don’t trust people who refuse a glass of wine.’ Wide mouth, big grin, white teeth like peppermint pellets. He began to walk away, expecting me to follow him.

  ‘Wait, where are you going?’

  ‘To find a decent bottle. Come, I’ll show you.’

  ‘I don’t know your name.’

  ‘Don’t do formalities, they get in the way. I am Stefan.’ He turned and continued walking backwards, but held out his hand.

  ‘I’m June.’

  ‘Juin.’

  He stopped before a yellow metal ship’s container I had seen from the window of the apartment, then slipped into the diagonal shadow at the rear. I hesitated. ‘Wait, I don’t –’

  ‘Oh come on, you must trust some people. Not everyone is out to hurt you.’ He opened a padlock on a dented steel panel and shoved the door back with a ferrous scrape. ‘Wait.’ He disappeared inside.

  Candlelight bloomed in the doorway. I entered as cautiously as a cat. The angled yellow container was filled with draped bolts of midnight blue silk and pieces of rescued furniture. Fat mismatched cushions covered a battered low bed. If the room had appeared in Wallpaper magazine, its look would have started a fashion.

  ‘I have some Southern French wines to celebrate the end of the summer. A Chateau Minuty, a Bandol. Very leger, le gout, you say taste. I do people favours, they pay me in wine. I like your skin, is so pale, is it soft to touch?’ He teased out the words with his hands.

  ‘You don’t look French,’ I pointed out briskly.

  ‘French Algerian, and now I am a Nicoise. But for a while I live here.’ He pointed to the floor, then smiled again. ‘I’ve been working on the site since they started laying foundations for the building.’

  ‘You helped to build the Ziggurat?’

  ‘I put in windows. You see here.’ He pulled up his T-shirt to reveal a belt lined with different drill-bits, like gun cartridges. His stomach was flat and brown. The wine he finally chose was a Saumur, round and rich. I made sure I saw him pull the cork. He filled two glasses printed with gold silhouettes of Cairo. ‘Like this.’ He cupped his hands around the first glass. ‘You have to make it warm.’

  ‘Do they know you live here, the people you work for?’

  ‘Yes of course. I pay a man. Nobody minds. You can’t see light from outside.’

  ‘But it’s illegal to live without a toilet.’

  ‘It’s illegal to stay without a permit.’ Another smile.

  ‘If anyone catches you…’ I trailed off lamely, aware that when faced with a man who found me appealing, I had raised the thorny topic of inadequate sanitation. My pathetically English inability to accept a compliment was a habit learned from my mother, who still referred to toilet paper as ‘bathroom stationery’ and who complained about living in a mixed-r
aced neighbourhood when a family from Scotland moved into the street.

  ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of.’ He raised his glass in a toast.

  Perhaps not in your life, I thought, watching him. A few days ago I had been sitting at home flicking TV channels, sedated with entertainment. Now I no longer had a television.

  ‘You’re thinking too much, not drinking enough.’

  We touched glasses, glinting Cairos. He was watching me with amusement. It was most disconcerting.

  ‘Are you here on the premises the whole time?’ I asked, sounding like a member of the royal family questioning someone on a walkabout. But I was determined to show a willingness to thaw.

  ‘All day, every day. Most nights too.’

  ‘You see the residents arriving and leaving?’

  ‘I see everyone. I recognise them all. There are not so many of them yet.’

  ‘You know Madame Funes?’

  ‘Yes of course. She is a crazy woman. Parisian. Bof.’ That explains it.

  ‘Did you ever see anything weird going on?’

  ‘Weird?’

  ‘People coming in late at night.’

  ‘Everyone in London comes in late at night, that is what it is for.’

  ‘Have you ever seen a big bald man with a terrible scar right across his head, like this?’ I ran my finger in an S-shape over my hair.

  ‘No, I’ve never seen anyone like that. I was going to offer you some of this, but maybe it’s not such a good idea.’ He indicated the joint in his hand. He rolled the fat paper tighter and lit it, the leaves crackling like scalded ice.

  ‘I’ve never smoked marijuana.’

  ‘It’s all right, we are in Lambeth. It’s almost illegal not to.’

  ‘I have to learn to relax. It’s difficult after so many years.’

  ‘Then this is your first lesson.’ He placed the joint in my hand and lifted it to my lips, then waited with a smile of hopeful approval. I blasted him with a paroxysm of violent spattery coughing, but tried again.

  ‘This time don’t make the end wet.’