Breathe

4. WEDNESDAY
Ben stands on the forecourt looking up at the building. He knows that his mood is darkening with every passing day, but what can you do? He signed up for the tour of duty. The clouds are even blacker now, and it is raining hard. London suits the rain, he thinks. Everyone goes indoors. He heads into the building with a fresh look of determination. Control is the key, he tells himself. Control.
He stays seated at his workstation for half an hour before Miranda looks furtively around and then wheels her chair over. Before she can speak, Ben holds up his hand to her. ‘All right. All right. I’ll find out what I can.’ So much for his resolve. ‘Tell me one thing. Last night …’
‘It wasn’t because I wanted you to help me, all right? Happy?’
‘Then what was it?’
‘I like you. You have the kind of innocence a girl just wants to wreck.’
‘You’re not like anyone I’ve ever met before. ‘
‘Is that good?’
‘I don’t know. Are you?’
She gives him a dirty smile. ‘I could be better.’
‘I just hope the cameras didn’t pick us up.’
‘You worry too much. What’s the worst that could happen?’
‘Never say that out loud.’
Through his window, Clarke silently observes them speaking. Checking his watch, he heads off to attend a meeting with the board, in a spectacular, hardwood, faux-19th Century conference room overlooking the city skyline. It would be wrong to think of the board members as villains. Nothing is as black and white as that anymore. They’re a group of ordinary, hard-headed businessmen; but their luxurious private world is cocooned, far away from the floors below. They no longer empathise, because they’re dealing now in abstract concepts. The world of business management would rather think about pluralistic environments than toilet dispensers.
‘This deal will turn us into the global standard,’ Clarke promises. ‘It’ll allow us to showcase systems in government buildings all over the world. I’ll have to push the staff hard. We’ll have to go through the night.’
‘Does this mean paying overtime?’ asks the company’s chief accountant.
‘I don’t see how we can legally avoid that.’
‘What you’re asking us is –’
Clarke interrupts. ‘I want your permission to go into Room 3014.’ The directors look at one another in trepidation, but they already know it’s necessary.
Ben checks the floor buttons, and takes the lift to the twelfth floor. He gets out and looks around. An unmarked door leads to another staircase. Climbing the steps, he arrives at a new floor. Apparently there really are two twelfth floors.
Returning to the lift, he heads up to the twenty ninth floor. Another unmarked door leads upwards. He emerges into a dimly lit corridor, plushly-carpeted. At one end of the corridor, he sees a door of polished steel, stencilled as Room 3014. Putting his ear to the cold metal, he hears a low hum emanating from within.
He turns around and walks straight into a tall, cadaverous man in a black suit. Even the senior staff call him Dracula, because he’s the spit-double of Christopher Lee, and he’s never been seen outside of the building in daylight. That’s as far as their imaginations stretch.
‘What are you doing here?’ asks Dr Hugo Samphire, the Chairman of SymaxCorp. ‘This floor is for the exclusive use of the board members.’
‘Dr Samphire. I got lost.’
‘You should have memorised the building plan in your company bible.’
‘I did, but this floor isn’t on it.’
‘Need to know, Mr …’ He squints at Ben’s badge. ‘Harper. Go back to your workstation and do whatever it is we pay you too much to do.’
But he doesn’t. Instead, he meets Miranda in another part of the steel and glass atrium. This part is faux-jungly and filled with tall palms that seem real. Miranda lights a cigarette, with her patented F*ck ’em attitude. People back away from her, because smoking is a sackable offence.
‘I’m not near the sensors, okay? They would set the alarms off. I know where they all are. It helps me to think.’ She blows smoke discreetly. ‘Clarke is tripling everyone’s workload in order to meet Friday’s deadline. After this, all leave is cancelled.’
‘What, you think you can’t handle the pressure?’
‘I’m used to hard work, sonny. What’s the matter with you?’
‘It’s bullshit about the thirtieth floor. There’s no mystery to it. There’s a bigger problem here.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I studied the sick lists. There’s a sharply rising pattern of illnesses. I’m down to see Willis, the staff nurse.’
Miranda throws him a look. ‘Good luck. You’ll need it.’
Willis is middle-aged, and exhausted about it. The staff nurse sits in the building’s medical centre, sticking nicotine patches up her arm. ‘Care for a nicotine patch?’ she offers. ‘They’re great. I always have one around about now.’
‘No thanks. How’s business?’
‘Don’t ask. I can’t sew fingers on, for Christ’s sake. One of the workmen lost two of them.’
‘I guess you must have noticed this.’ Ben shows her a graph of rising sicknesses reported by staff. ‘Headaches. Hallucinations. Mental problems. That’s a lot of strange behaviour.’
Willis keeps sticking, barely bothering to look up. ‘Staff will tell you it’s stress-related. That’s bollocks. Ask someone if they work too hard, they’re not going to say no, are they? Everyone’s under stress; it shouldn’t make that much difference. Nobody smokes or drinks anymore. They should; it’d calm them down. I suppose it might be SBS. Sick Building Syndrome. Except that the building’s constructed from hypoallergenic materials.’
‘Something must be causing this. So many of the women …’
‘The female staff don’t operate collectively, Mr Harper. We’re not nuns. We don’t all get our period at the same time. But there is something, some kind of psychosoma.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I dunno, it’s hard to pinpoint. Natural tendencies get exaggerated under pressure. The sickly ones get sick, the angry ones lose their tempers more, the depressed ones get melancholy. There are chemicals that will do that, but there’s no reason for them being used here.’
‘Has anyone ever tested for them?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’
‘Can you get me data on anything you think qualifies as unusual behaviour?’
‘Sure. I managed to find quite a lot for Felix.’
‘So what happened to the report?’
She studies him with hooded eyes. ‘What do you think?’
It’s early afternoon, and the atmosphere on Ben’s floor is ramping up. People are tense and visibly working faster. In the reception area, the video images and soothing music now play at a faster, more urgent pace. Ben sits at his computer trying to access Felix’s files. He discovers a set of dated reports:
CONTENTS DELETED
CONTENTS DELETED
CONTENTS DELETED
He stretches out his back, then looks around and sees Fitch shouting at June and throwing papers onto the floor.
‘You collate the forms in binders, not with these damned things! It’s not hard to remember.’ Fitch looks exasperated. June is forced to bend and pick everything up.
June mutters under her breath. It sounds like she says: ‘Fitch the bitch.’
‘We don’t have to hire the obese, you know. We’re doing you a favour. You can keep this job or just order yourself more dessert.’ Fitch clutches her forehead, as if in pain. Ben frowns. Even from the little he knows about Fitch, this is uncharacteristically cruel. She’s obviously been drinking. He had her down as more professional. June’s nearly in tears. Ben can’t stand by and do nothing, even though it means breaking his vow. ‘What is your problem?’ he asks Fitch.
‘Inefficiency is my problem, Mr Harper. We get this done right, we win the contract and we all get to keep our jobs. We may even get bonuses at Christmas. Things are going to get a lot tougher around here. You want to be a lightweight, tell me you can’t handle the pressure.’
‘Ben, don’t, it doesn’t matter,’ June interrupts, anxious for her new colleague not to cause a scene.
‘Look,’ Ben tells Fitch, ‘if she’s suffering from stress-related illness, she can report it to me and I’ll take action for her – until then, sober up and back off.’ He storms back to his station in anger.
‘I like you like that,’ Miranda whispers.
‘Well, I don’t like myself like that.’
‘Fitch has been getting at June all week, but I’ve never seen her like this before.’
Clarke sees them talking and calls Ben over with a curt: ‘Harper. My office. Now.’
When Ben comes into the office, Clarke stalks around him in a predatory, unsettling manner. ‘Do yourself a favour. Stay away from Jameson. She’s good at her job. But she’s trouble.’
Ben finds himself defending her. ‘Miranda’s concerned about my predecessor getting dismissed.’
‘Of course she’s concerned. She was going out with him. When she broke it off, he was so upset that he had to leave. He couldn’t bear to keep seeing her.’
Ah. That would explain it.
Miranda runs to catch up with him. He’s leaving for the night. Ben keeps walking.
‘Hey, wait for me. I thought we were spending the evening together.’
‘You didn’t tell me you were going out with Felix.’
‘Did Clarke tell you that? We had a one night stand, all right?’
‘You dumped him.’
‘Bullshit. He ended it, not me.’
‘He couldn’t stay any longer because he felt uncomfortable around you.’
‘Clarke’s trying to divide us, don’t you see? I’m just worried about him. Clarke knows what happened. There has to be a way to make him admit the truth. You know it’s the right thing to do.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I usually get fired for. Doing the right thing.’ Ben carries on, leaving her behind. He doesn’t want to be angry with her, but the devil in him won’t forgive. She catches him up.
‘Ben, I’m not using you. I wouldn’t do that. I think you’re … I don’t know. You care. You’ll make a difference whatever you do. I liked Felix a lot. Now I’ve no-one else. Please Ben.’
The devil wins. Ben leaves for the night. Miranda can do nothing but watch him go.
Up on the twentieth floor, senior manager Meadows sits in a glass box like Clarke’s, ploughing through piles of paperwork while working two computer screens and taking three calls, crazy-busy. His assistant, Jo Cousins, a battle-tough woman in her fifties, puts her head around the door. ‘New York’s on Line 2, Mr Meadows, and your wife’s still holding on 3.’
‘I told you to tell her I’ll call back,’ Meadows hisses. He takes a call, then another, wipes his forehead and examines the flickering call switches, buzzes his assistant. ‘Hold all my calls, Cousins.’
‘I can’t. New York is urgent, I can’t keep –’
‘Hold the f*cking calls!’
Meadows rises and locks Cousins out of the office. For a moment, he thinks he can smell burning. Then he methodically turns off the computer screens and tears the phone jacks out of the wall. He puts on a CD – ‘Barcarolle’ from ‘The Tales Of Hoffmann’ – and cranks the music up high. Next, he begins to take off his clothes, neatly folding each item – shirt, tie, trousers – on his desk.
His flustered assistant sees what is happening and tries the door of the office. Meadows’ behaviour attracts the attention of others.
Now completely naked, the supervisor goes to the window and strikes it with a chair. He has to do this six times before the glass cracks. Cousins hammers on the glass wall as others try to break the office door down.
As the music reaches its height, Meadows climbs out onto the window ledge. His is naked, and has cut himself badly on the broken glass. Meadows’ eyes cloud over a milky white. He braces himself, then swan-dives, out into the sky and the streets below, sailing, sailing all the way down to his death.
There is a rending of flesh and glass as Meadows’ body explodes through the canopy above the station platforms, and home-going commuters scream and run.