High-Rise Read Free

and hostesses sharing apartments-had already put him at the centre of various disputes. To some extent the irregular hours of the tenants on the lower levels had cut them off from their neighbours above. In an unguarded moment Laing's sister had whispered to him that there was a brothel operating somewhere in the high-rise. The mysterious movements of the air-hostesses as they pursued their busy social lives, particularly on the floors above her own, clearly unsettled Alice, as if they in some way interfered with the natural social order of the building, its system of precedences entirely based on floor-height. Laing had noticed that he and his fellow tenants were far more tolerant of any noise or nuisance from the floors above than they were from those below them. However, he liked Wilder, with his loud voice and rugby-scrum manners. He let a needed dimension of the unfamiliar into the apartment block. His relationship with Charlotte Melville was hard to gauge-his powerful sexual aggression was overlaid by a tremendous restlessness. No wonder his wife, a pale young woman with a postgraduate degree who reviewed children's books for the literary weeklies, seemed permanently exhausted.
    As Laing stood on the balcony, accepting a drink from Charlotte, the noise of the party came down from the bright air, as if the sky itself had been wired for sound. Charlotte pointed to a fragment of glass on Laing's balcony that had escaped his brush.
    "Are you under attack? I heard something fall." She called to Wilder, who was lounging back in the centre of her sofa, examining his heavy legs. "It's those people on the 31st floor."
    "Which people?" Laing asked. He assumed that she was referring to a specific group, a clique of over-aggressive film actors or tax consultants, or perhaps a freak aggregation of dipsomaniacs. But Charlotte shrugged vaguely, as if it was unnecessary to be more specific. Clearly some kind of demarcation had taken place in her mind, like his own facile identification of people by the floors on which they lived.
    "By the way, what are we all celebrating?" he asked as they returned to the living-room.
    "Don't you know?" Wilder gestured at the walls and ceiling. "Full house. We've achieved critical mass."
    "Richard means that the last apartment has been occupied," Charlotte explained. "Incidentally, the contractors promised us a free party when the thousandth apartment was sold."
    "I'll be interested to see if they hold it," Wilder remarked. Clearly he enjoyed running down the high-rise. "The elusive Anthony Royal was supposed to provide the booze. You've met him, I think," he said to Laing. "The architect who designed our hanging paradise."
    "We play squash together," Laing rejoined. Aware of the hint of challenge in Wilder's voice, he added, "Once a week-I hardly know the man, but I like him."
    Wilder sat forward, cradling his heavy head in his fists. Laing noticed that he was continually touching himself, for ever inspecting the hair on his massive calves, smelling the backs of his scarred hands, as if he had just discovered his own body. "You're favoured to have met him," Wilder said. "I'd like to know why. An isolated character-I ought to resent him, but somehow I feel sorry for the man, hovering over us like some kind of fallen angel."
    "He has a penthouse apartment," Laing commented. He had no wish to become involved in any tug of war over his brief friendship with Royal. He had met this well-to-do architect, a former member of the consortium which had designed the development project, during the final stages of Royal's recovery from a minor car accident. Laing had helped him to set up the complex callisthenics machine in the penthouse where Royal spent his time, the focus of a great deal of curiosity and attention. As everyone continually repeated, Royal lived "on top" of the building, as if in some kind of glamorous shack.
    "Royal was the first person to move in here," Wilder informed him. "There's something