J. Ballard - High Rise

The bottles of claret had made him pleasantly drowsy. Smearing the red wine across his broad chest, he gazed up amiably at the startled woman who stumbled into the kitchen and tripped across his legs.

As she stared down at him, one hand nervously to her throat, Wilder remembered that she had once been called Charlotte Melville. The name had now detached itself from her, like an athlete's tie-on numeral blown away in a gust of wind. He knew that he had often been in this apartment, and this explained the vague familiarity of the child's toys and the furniture, although the chairs and sofa had been rearranged to conceal various hiding places.

"Wilder…?" As if uncertain about the name, Charlotte Melville pronounced it softly. She had been sheltering during the night with her son in the apartment of the statistician three floors above with whom she had become friendly. At the first light, when everything had settled down, she had come back intending to collect the last of her food reserves before abandoning the apartment for good. Swiftly composing herself, she looked down critically at the burly man with the exposed loins lying like a savage among her wine bottles, his chest painted with red stripes. She felt no sense of loss or outrage, but a fatalistic acceptance of the damage he had casually inflicted on her apartment, like the strong odour of his urine in the bathroom.

He appeared to be half asleep, and she stepped slowly towards the door. Wilder reached out with one hand and held her ankle. He smiled up at her blearily. Climbing to his feet, he circled around her, the tape-recorder raised in one hand as if about to hit her with it. Instead he switched it on and off, playing for her his selection of belches and grunts, obviously pleased with this demonstration of his unexpected expertise. He steered her slowly around the apartment as she backed from one room to the next, listening to his edited mutterings.

The first time he struck her, cuffing her to the bedroom floor, he tried to record her gasp, but the reel had jammed. He freed it carefully, bent down and slapped her again, only stopping when he had recorded her now deliberate cries to his satisfaction. He enjoyed terrorizing her, taping down her exaggerated but nonetheless frightened gasps. During their clumsy sexual act on the mattress in the child's bedroom he left the tape-recorder switched on beside them on the floor and played back the sounds of this brief rape, editing together the noise of her tearing clothes and panting anger.

Later, bored with the woman and these games with the tape-recorder, he hurled the machine into the corner. The sound of himself speaking, however coarsely, introduced a discordant element. He resented speaking to Charlotte or to anyone else, as if words introduced the wrong set of meanings into everything.

After she dressed they had breakfast together on the balcony, sitting at the table with an incongruous old-world formality. Charlotte ate the scraps of canned meat she found on the kitchen floor. Wilder finished the last of the claret, re-marking the red stripes across his chest. The rising sunlight warmed his exposed loins, and he felt like a contented husband sitting with his wife in a villa high on a mountainside. Naively, he wanted to explain to Charlotte his ascent of the apartment building, and shyly pointed to the roof. But she failed to get the point. She fastened her torn clothes around her strong body. Although her mouth and throat were bruised, she seemed unconcerned, watching Wilder with a passive expression.

From the balcony Wilder could see the roof of the high-rise, little more than a dozen floors above him. The intoxication of living at this height was as palpable as anything produced by the wine bottle in his hand. Already he could see the line of huge birds perched on the balustrades, no doubt waiting for him to arrive and take command.

Below, on the 20th floor, a man was cooking over a fire on his balcony, breaking up a coffee table and feeding the legs to the clutch of smouldering sticks on which a soup can was balanced.

A police car approached the perimeter entrance. A few residents were leaving for work at this early hour, neatly dressed in suits and raincoats, briefcases in hand. The abandoned cars in the access roads prevented the police from reaching the main entrance to the building, and the officers stepped out and spoke to the passing residents. Usually none of them would have replied to an outsider, but now they gathered in a group around the two policemen. Wilder wondered if they were going to give the game away, but although he could not hear them, he was certain that he knew what they were saying. Clearly they were pacifying the policemen, reassuring them that everything was in order, despite the garbage and broken bottles scattered around the building.

Deciding to test the defences of the apartment before he went to sleep, Wilder stepped into the corridor. He stood outside the doorway, as the stale air moved past him to the open balcony. He relished the rich smells of the high-rise. Like their garbage, the excrement of the residents higher up the building had a markedly different odour.

Returning to the balcony, he watched the police drive away in their car. Of the twenty or so residents who still left for work each morning, three had turned back, evidently unsettled by the task of convincing the police that all was well. Without looking up, they scurried back to the entrance lobby.

Wilder knew that they would never leave again. The separation of the high-rise from the world around it was now almost complete, and would probably coincide with his own arrival at the summit. Soothed by this image, he sat down on the floor and leaned against Charlotte Melville's shoulder, falling asleep as she stroked the wine-coloured stripes on his chest and shoulders.

At dusk, after he had strengthened the guard, Anthony Royal ordered the candles lit on the dining-room table. Hands in the pockets of his dinner-jacket, he stood at the windows of the penthouse apartment on the 40th floor and looked down across the concrete plazas of the development project. All the tenants who had earlier left for their offices had now parked their cars and entered the building. With their safe arrival, Royal felt for the first time that he could relax, like a captain eager to set sail seeing the last of his crew return from shore-leave in a foreign port. The evening had begun.

Royal sat down in the high-backed oak chair at the head of the dining-table. The candlelight flickered over the silver cutlery and gold plate, reflected in the silk facings of his dinner-jacket. As usual he smiled at the theatricality of this contrived setting, like a badly rehearsed and under-financed television commercial for a high-life product. It had started three weeks earlier when he and Pangbourne had decided to dress for dinner each evening. Royal had ordered the women to extend the dining-room table to its furthest length, so that he could sit with his back to the high windows and the illuminated decks of the nearby buildings. Responding to Royal, the women had brought candles and silverware from secret caches, and served an elaborately prepared meal. Their shadows swayed across the ceiling as if they were moving around the dining chamber of a feudal chief. Sitting in his chair at the far end of the long table, Pangbourne had been suitably impressed.

Of course, as the gynaecologist well knew, the charade was meaningless. A single step beyond the circle of candlelight the garbage-sacks were piled six-deep against the walls. Outside, the corridors and staircases were filled with broken furniture and barricades built from washing-machines and freezer cabinets. The elevator shafts were the new garbage chutes. Not one of the twenty elevators in the apartment building now functioned, and the shafts were piled deep with kitchen refuse and dead dogs. A fading semblance of civilized order still survived in the top three floors, the last tribal unit in the high-rise. However, the one error that Royal and Pangbourne had made was to assume that there would always be some kind of social organization below them which they could exploit and master. They were now moving into a realm of no social organization at all. The clans had broken down into small groups of killers, solitary hunters who built man-traps in empty apartments or preyed on the unwary in deserted elevator lobbies.