J. Ballard - High Rise

Nonetheless, Wilder welcomed and understood the night-only in the darkness could one become sufficiently obsessive, deliberately play on all one's repressed instincts. He welcomed this forced conscription of the deviant strains in his character. Happily, this free and degenerate behaviour became easier the higher he moved up the building, as if encouraged by the secret logic of the high-rise.

The 10th-floor concourse was deserted. Wilder pushed back the staircase doors with their shattered glass and walked out on to the shopping mall. The bank had closed, along with the hairdressing salon and the liquor store. The last supermarket cashier-the wife of a cameraman on the 3rd floor-sat stoically at her check-out point, presiding like a doomed Britannia over a sea of debris. Wilder strolled around the empty shelves. Rotting packs floated in the greasy water at the bottom of the freezer cabinets. In the centre of the supermarket a pyramid of dog-biscuit cartons had collapsed across the aisle.

Wilder filled a basket with three of the cartons and half a dozen cans of cat-meat. Together they would keep Helen and the boys alive until he could break into an apartment and raid a food cache.

"There's nothing here but pet food," he told the cashier at the check-out. "Have you stopped ordering?"

"There's no demand," she told him. She played absent-mindedly with an open wound on her forehead. "Everyone must have stocked up months ago."

This was not true, Wilder reflected as he walked away towards the elevator lobby, leaving her alone on the huge concourse. As he knew full well, having broken into any number of apartments, few people had any reserve supplies whatever. It was as if they were no longer giving any thought to what they might need the next day.

Fifty feet away, beyond the overturned hair-driers lying outside the salon, the elevator indicator lights moved from right to left. The last public elevator of the day was winding itself up the building. Somewhere between the 25th and 30th floors it would be brought to a halt at the whim of a look-out, marking the end of the mid-day armistice and the beginnings of another night.

Without thinking, Wilder quickened his pace. He reached the doors as the elevator paused at the 9th floor to discharge a passenger. At the last moment, as it resumed its ascent, Wilder pressed the button.

In the few seconds that remained before the doors opened he realized that he had already decided to abandon Helen and his sons for good. Only one direction lay before him-up. Like a climber resting a hundred feet from the summit, he had no option but to ascend.

The elevator doors opened. Some fifteen passengers faced him, standing rigidly together like plastic mannequins. There was a fractional movement of feet as a space was made for Wilder.

Wilder hesitated, controlling his impulse to turn and run down the staircase to his apartment. The eyes of the passengers were fixed on him, wary of his indecision and suspecting that it might conceal a ruse of some kind.

As the doors began to close Wilder stepped forward into the elevator, the cine-camera raised in front of him, and began once again his ascent of the high-rise.

After a delay of twenty minutes, as irritating as a holdup at a provincial frontier post, the elevator moved from the 16th to the 17th floor. Exhausted by the long wait, Wilder stepped through the doors into the lobby, looking for somewhere to throw away his cartons of pet food. Crammed together shoulder to shoulder, the returning cost-accountants and television executives held tightly to their briefcases, eyes averted from each other as they stared at the graffiti on the walls of the car. The steel roof had been removed, and the long shaft rose above their heads, exposed to anyone with a missile casually to hand.

The three passengers who stepped out with Wilder vanished among the barricades that lined the dimly lit corridors. When Wilder reached the Hillmans' apartment he found that the door was securely bolted. There were no sounds of movement from within. Wilder tried without success to force the lock. Conceivably the Hillmans had abandoned the apartment and taken shelter with friends. Then he heard a faint scraping from the hall. Pressing his head to the door, he heard Mrs Hillman remonstrating with herself in a thin voice as she pulled a heavy object across the floor.

After a prolonged tapping and negotiation, during which Wilder was obliged to speak to her in her own wheedling tone, he was admitted to the apartment. A huge barricade of furniture, units of kitchen equipment, books, clothes and table ornaments blocked the hallway, a miniature municipal dump in its own right.

Hillman lay on a mattress in the bedroom. His head was bandaged in a torn evening-dress shirt, through which the blood had seeped on to the pillow. He raised his head as Wilder came in, his hand searching for a section of balcony railing on the floor beside him. Hillman had been one of the first scapegoats to be selected and attacked-his brusque and independent manner made him a natural target. During a raid on the next floor he had been hit on the head by a television award-winner's statuette as he tried to order his way up a defended staircase. Wilder had carried him back to his apartment and spent the night looking after him.

With her husband out of commission, Mrs Hillman depended totally on Wilder, a dependence that he himself in a way enjoyed. When Wilder was away she spent all her time worrying about him, like an over-anxious mother fretting about a wayward child, though as soon as he arrived she forgot who he was.

She tugged at Wilder's sleeve as he looked down at Hillman. She was more concerned about her barricade than her husband and his ominous disturbances of vision. Almost everything movable in the apartment, however small, she had added to the barricade, at times threatening to entomb them for good. Each night Wilder slept through the few hours before dawn slumped in an armchair partly embedded in the barricade. He would hear her moving tirelessly around him, adding a small piece of furniture she had found somewhere, three books, a single gramophone record, her jewellery box. Once Wilder woke to find that she had incorporated part of his left leg. Often it would take him half an hour to dig his way out of the apartment.

"What is it?" Wilder asked her irritably. "What are you doing to my arm?" She was peering at the bag of dog-food, which Wilder, in the absence of any furniture, had been unable to put down. For some reason, he did not want it added to the barricade.

"I've been cleaning up for you," she told him with some pride. "You wanted me to, didn't you?"

"Of course…" Wilder gazed around the apartment in a lordly way. In fact, he barely noticed any changes and, if anything, preferred the apartment to be dirty.

"What's this?" She poked excitedly at the carton, jabbing him roguishly in the ribs as if she had caught a small son with a secret present for her. "You've got a surprise!"

"Leave it alone." Roughly, Wilder fended her away, almost knocking her off her feet. In a way, he enjoyed these absurd rituals. They touched levels of intimacy that had never been possible with Helen. The higher up the building he moved the more free he felt to play these games.

Mrs Hillman wrestled a pack of dog-biscuits out of the bag. Her small body was surprisingly agile. She gazed at the overweight basset hound on the label. Both she and her husband were as thin as scarecrows. Generously, Wilder handed her a can of cat-meat.

"Soak the biscuits in gin-I know you've got a bottle hidden somewhere. It will do you both good."

"We'll get a dog!" When Wilder looked irritated by this suggestion she sidled up to him teasingly, pressing her hands against his heavy chest. "A dog? Please, Dicky…"