When Laing laughed at this Charlotte drummed her fingers on his arm, as if trying to wake him up.
"Robert! You ought to take all this seriously!"
"I do…"
"You're in a trance!"
Laing looked down at her, suddenly aware that this intelligent and likeable woman was failing to get the point. He placed an arm around her, unsurprised by the fierce way in which she embraced him. Ignoring her small son trying to open the kitchen door, she leaned against it and pulled Laing on to herself, kneading his arms as if trying to convince herself that here at last was something whose shape she could influence.
During the hour they waited for her son to fall asleep her hands never left Laing. But even before they sat down together on her bed Laing knew that, almost as an illustration of the paradoxical logic of the high-rise, their relationship would end rather than begin with this first sexual act. In a real sense this would separate them from each other rather than bring them together. By the same paradox, the affection and concern he felt for her as they lay across her small bed seemed callous rather than tender, precisely because these emotions were unconnected with the realities of the world around them. The tokens that they should exchange, which would mark their real care for each other, were made of far more uncertain materials, the erotic and perverse.
When she was asleep in the early evening light, Laing let himself out of the apartment and went in search of his new friends.
Outside, in the corridors and elevator lobbies, scores of people were standing about. In no hurry to return to his apartment, Laing moved from one group to another, listening to the talk going on. These informal meetings were soon to have an almost official status, forums at which the residents could air their problems and prejudices. Most of their grievances, Laing noticed, were now directed at the other tenants rather than at the building. The failure of the elevators was blamed on people from the upper and lower floors, not on the architects or the inefficient services designed into the block.
The garbage-disposal chute Laing shared with the Steeles had jammed again. He tried to telephone the building manager, but the exhausted man had been inundated with complaints and requests for action of every kind. Several members of his staff had resigned and the energies of the remainder were now devoted to keeping the elevators running and trying to restore power to the 9th floor.
Laing mustered what tools he could find and went into the corridor to free the chute himself. Steele immediately came to his aid, bringing with him a complex multi-bladed cutting device. While the two men worked away, trying to loosen a bundle of brocaded curtain that supported a column of trapped kitchen refuse, Steele amiably regaled Laing with a description of those tenants above and below them responsible for overloading the disposal system.
"Some of these people generate the most unusual garbage-certainly the kind of thing we didn't expect to find here," he confided to Laing. "Objects that could well be of interest to the vice squad. That beautician on the 33rd floor, and the two so-called radiographers living together on the 22nd. Strange young women, even for these days…"
To some extent, Laing found himself agreeing. However petty the complaints might sound, the fifty-year-old owner of the hairdressing salon was endlessly redecorating her apartment on the 33rd floor, and did stuff old rugs and even intact pieces of small furniture into the chute.
Steele stood back as the column of garbage sank below in a greasy avalanche. He held Laing's arm, steering him around a beer can lying on the corridor floor. "Still, no doubt we're all equally guilty-I hear that on the lower floors people are leaving small parcels of garbage outside their apartment doors. Now, you'll come in for a drink? My wife is keen to see you again."
Despite his memories of their quarrel, Laing had no qualms about accepting. As he expected, in the larger climate of confrontation any unease between them was soon forgotten. Her hair immaculately coiffeured, Mrs Steele hovered about him with the delighted smile of a novice madam entertaining her first client. She even complimented Laing on his choice of music, which she could hear through the poorly insulated walls. Laing listened to her spirited description of the continuous breakdown of services within the building, the vandalizing of an elevator and the changing cubicles of the 10th-floor swimming-pool. She referred to the high-rise as if it were some kind of huge animate presence, brooding over them and keeping a magisterial eye on the events taking place. There was something in this feeling-the elevators pumping up and down the long shafts resembled pistons in the chamber of a heart. The residents moving along the corridors were the cells in a network of arteries, the lights in their apartments the neurones of a brain.
Laing looked out across the darkness at the brilliantly lit decks of the nearby high-rise, barely aware of the other guests who had arrived and were sitting in the chairs around him-the television newsreader Paul Crosland, and a film critic named Eleanor Powell, a hard-drinking redhead whom Laing often found riding the elevators up and down in a fuddled attempt to find her way out of the building.
Crosland had become the nominal leader of their clan-a local cluster of some thirty contiguous apartments on the 25th, 26th and 27th floors. Together they were planning a joint shopping expedition to the 10th-floor supermarket the following day, like a band of villagers going on an outing to an unpoliced city.
Beside him on the sofa, Eleanor Powell was watching Crosland in a glazed way while the newsreader, in his florid announcer's style, outlined his proposals for the security of their apartments. Now and then she reached forward with one hand, as if trying to adjust Crosland's image, perhaps alter the colour values of his fleshy cheeks or turn down the volume of his voice.
"Isn't your apartment next to the elevator lobby?" Laing asked her. "You'll need to barricade yourself in."
"What on earth for? I leave the door wide open." When Laing looked puzzled, she said, "Isn't that part of the fun?"
"You think that we're secretly enjoying all this?"
"Don't you? I'd guess so, doctor. Togetherness is beating up an empty elevator. For the first time since we were three years old what we do makes absolutely no difference. When you think about it, that's really rather interesting…"
When she leaned against him, resting her head on his shoulder, Laing said: "Something seems to be wrong with the air-conditioning… there should be some fresh air on the balcony."
Holding his arm, she picked up her bag. "All right. Lift me up. You're a shy lecher, doctor…"
They had reached the french windows when there was an explosion of breaking glass from a balcony high above them. Fragments of glass flicked away like knives through the night air. A large, ungainly object whirled past, no more than twenty feet from the balcony. Startled, Eleanor blundered into Laing. As they caught their balance there was the sound of a harsh metallic collision from the ground below, almost as if a car had crashed. A short but unbroken silence followed, the first true quiet, Laing realized, that the building had known for days.
Everyone crowded on to the balcony, Crosland and Steele grappling together as if each was trying to prevent the other from jumping over the ledge. Pushed along the railing, Laing saw his own empty balcony fifteen feet away. In an absurd moment of panic he wondered if he himself was the victim. All around, people were leaning on their railings, glasses in hand, staring down through the darkness.