John McNee’s Reviews > High-Rise > Status Update

Let the psychotics take over. They alone understood what was happening.

His burly figure, trousers open to expose his heavy genitalia, glared at him from the mirrors in the bedroom. He was about to break the glass, but the sight of his penis calmed him, a white club hanging in the darkness. He would have liked to dress it in some way, perhaps with a hair-ribbon tied in a floral bow.

"The model here seems to be less the noble savage than our un-innocent post-Freudian selves, outraged by all that over-indulgent toilet-training, dedicated breast-feeding and parental affection - obviously a more dangerous mix than anything our Victorian forebears had to cope with. Our neighbours had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse..."

Almost everything possible had been vandalised - lobby mirrors fractured, pay-phones torn out, sofa upholstery slashed. The degree of vandalism was deliberately excessive, almost as if it served a more important secondary role, disguising the calculated way in which the residents of the high-rise, by ripping out all the phone lines, were cutting themselves off from the outside world.

During the previous hour a few trivial incidents had occurred - the middle-aged wife of a 28th-floor account executive had been knocked unconscious into the half-empty swimming-pool and a radiologist from the 7th floor had been beaten up among the driers in the hairdressing salon - but in general everything within the high-rise was normal.

Five floors were without electricity. At night the dark bands stretched across the face of the high-rise like dead strata in a fading brain.

During the electricity blackout the eighteen-year-old wife of a fashion photographer on the 38th floor had been assaulted in the hairdressing salon by an unknown woman. Presumably in retaliation, three air-hostesses from the 2nd floor were aggressively jostled by a party of marauding top-floor matrons led by the strong-shouldered wife of the jeweller.

Laing had first met Charlotte in the 35th-floor swimming pool, where he usually swam, partly to be on his own, and partly to avoid the children who used the 10th-floor pool. When he invited her to a meal in the restaurant she promptly accepted, but as they sat down at the table she said pointedly, 'Look, I only want to talk about myself.'
Laing had liked that.