Read Online Plastic by Christopher Fowler - Free Book Online Page A

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