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
‘M
ALCOLM 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 isn’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.
On Friday afternoon I packed the absurdly large suitcase my husband had thoughtfully left out for me, and posted my house keys back through the letter box as I left, more as gesture of independence than practicality. I stood at the end of the leaf-stickered front garden and looked up at the house in which I had spent the last ten years of my life. Bare rooms showed beyond unlit windows, just as they had on the day we’d arrived. They appeared smaller, as though they were shrinking now that life had left them, like the roots of a dying tree. Oddly, it didn’t feel strange to be leaving the rest of my belongings behind. Most had been purchased in shopping blitzes, and held no meaning once the transactions had been completed.
I caught the train to Waterloo and watched the commuter towns of Kent give way to the tin-shed factory outlets of the South London suburbs. It was hard to tell where the city began, but at one point all of the green spaces I could see from the graffiti-scratched window vanished, to be replaced by angular grey streets and Victorian back-to-back houses with narrow gardens. I was entering a city I no longer knew, a jumble of disconnected office blocks and thoroughfares that no longer bore any resemblance to the city of my childhood half-memories. After this weekend I would be forced to stay with my mother in Leamington Spa until the divorce, and no matter how hard I tried, we would fight and I would be miserable. I would once more end up renting a small flat and working in a local shop, and at that grimly inevitable point my life would have turned full circle, because of an earring, because of indifference. All I had left was a brief period of transition between a reticent past and an unpromising future. I wanted something to happen.
Of course it did, and that decided my fate.
Friday morning was cold, and I knew I should have worn thicker tights. I queued to catch a taxi behind incoming passengers, tourists and business staff with laptops tucked under their arms like clipboards. The cab was a final extravagant gesture before embarking on my new frugal life, but even as I sat watching the etiolated Edwardian buildings slide by the rain-hazed window, I wondered if my husband might somehow be persuaded to come home.
I didn’t understand how someone with such a thin soul could give up on me so easily unless he was forcibly bewitched. Perhaps he had never cared for me deeply in the first place, and I couldn’t bear to imagine that.
The glistening cab turned off in the direction of St. Thomas’s Hospital, affording me a glimpse of the London Eye’s great wire wheel, its transparent capsules creeping incrementally between the buildings. The day was so dark that tourists were using camera flashes, so that each pod sparkled with sharp points of light.
Slowly shunting along the Albert Embankment between ribboned roadworks toward Lambeth Bridge, we finally entered a deserted new road that sloped away from the river. The cab came to a stop deep in the shadow of the Embankment. Above it, the sky split with a flash and rain began thundering onto the roof.
‘There you go.’ The driver pulled up. ‘You know where you are, love?’ He shouted to make himself heard.
‘Not really, no,’ I called back.
‘You got the river in front, the railway behind you, that goes down to Queenstown Battersea and Clapham Junction, Black Prince Road on the far side, Old Paradise Street on this side and Lambeth High Street just around that corner. Tell you how I know, ’cause my old mum used to live beside the Lilian Baylis School, before that lot was all council flats. This place is brand new, used to be waste ground, bombed flat during the war. Jeffrey Archer’s buying a penthouse flat, right at the top there. What a cunt.’ He aimed a fat ringed finger at the roof.
I opened the taxi door and found myself faced with a splashing terrain of churned mud, bricks, waterlogged ditches and cables. ‘Could you help me to the front steps?’ I shouted, jamming the door open with my leg and pulling at the heavy case.
‘I can’t love, I did my back in watching the women’s curling.’ He watched from beneath his baseball cap as I struggled with the case. Rain bounced in an effervescence around my ankles as I dragged it beneath the white concrete portico of the apartment block, and stopped to look up.
Elegant chrome letters backlit with strips of azure neon read:
The Ziggurat.
Slate-edged windows finished in curvilinear mosaics rose above me. Only a few were illuminated
.
The wall of the building folded back on itself in an undulating shape that provided its residents with panoramic postcard-London views. The smallest apartment sat in the lowest east corner and belonged to the building’s caretaker. It looked out into a dark box formed by the underside of the bridge and a mildewed stanchion of the roundabout; the views were reserved for those with purchasing power.
The paved area in front of the entrance was pitted with deep holes. Drums of yellow cable lay on their sides like giant cottonreels. Although the block was unfinished, purple and silver graffiti tags at juvenile-delinquent height had already sprouted along the white base wall. I had once seen a photograph of the City Road Police Station taken in 1900, and there was graffiti all the way along the base of the building, so it was nothing new.
In the brochure I later discovered (and presumably on the website virtual tour I didn’t take) the Ziggurat was helplessly described as modern gothic. Designed by Jean-Claude Corbeau – the man himself, not one of his international teams – it boasted a steep mansard roof, but in place of a mansard’s traditional attic windows were long balconies on sprung steel pivots. At the four corners stood bell turrets as grim as prison watchtowers, their peaks finished in titanium tiles to reflect the silver of the sky, lending the building a baroque, angular elegance that was described by one architectural critic as ‘a hypertense anorexic’s response to the Bilbao Guggenheim’, presumably intended as a compliment. Although doubtless admired in the rarified circles of building academics, the Ziggurat appeared to defy the rules of
Feng Shui
; it seemed misplaced, caught uncomfortably on a dark reach of the river, forced into an angle that would benefit the residents’ sight of the city but not their spiritual well-being. It was too pleased with its self-importance. I thought of Shelley’s Ozymandias. What would be left of this arrogant structure in years to come? ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair’ indeed. There’s a reason why so many architects of skyscrapers are men.