Breathe (4 page)

Ben wanders away through the open-plan floor. What should be ordinary is now becoming mysterious to him, because he sees it with fresh eyes.

A girl is on her hands and knees taping a cable along the floor.

A senior staffer is thumping his computer with his fist as the screen fills up with images from old porn films. John Holmes has a moustache, and is alternately fucking two overweight girls. The staffer is mortified with embarrassment.

‘SymaxCorp sets new standards in office efficiency, allowing you to work – ’ Here the DVD voiceover sticks and phases oddly, distorting. ‘– faster faster faster faster faster
faaaasterrrr
… and better than the best from your staff … no matter how urgent your deadline …’

A secretary touches a scanner and her hair stands on end with static.

A worker is lying with his head on his desk. He is surrounded by aspirin packets and bottles.

Another secretary finds her cardigan sticking to the wall behind her. She pulls it free, but it floats away from her body again.

Ben examines a window covered with a spiral of small insects. He presses his hand against the glass and the insects drop away. He returns to his computer screen, where the DVD is still playing. The images are increasingly absurd and divorced from reality. He looks up and imagines the discreet ducts that supply air to the entire building, forming an X-ray of the building’s walls, a maze of tubes he can hear hissing above his head as he works.

‘… creating the ultimate electronic environment. One day this is how all first-world offices will operate …’

Ben watches and listens, and gets jumpy despite himself. There’s something wrong with his chair. It won’t slide forward. The wheels keep catching on the carpet-square floor tiles. He bends down and looks closer. Someone has turned one of them around. He turns it back and finds he has pieced together a large brown bloodstain. What happened here? It seems a lot of blood for a paper cut.

Miranda catches up with him as he swipecards himself out. If he’s honest with himself, he’s been avoiding her all morning. ‘Wait,’ she calls, ‘where are you going?’

‘Outside, to get some fresh air. I’ve got a headache.’

‘Did you know we have a garden here? Okay, it’s kind of indoor, but it smells like real flowers. Really.’ She smiles hopefully at him. She is – he has to admit – incredibly sexy. And she needs him.

The garden is in another part of the building’s great atrium, an eerily pristine leisure area of walkways and flowers. No dogshit. No fag ends. Nothing real at all. It was built as an after-thought to the main building, once the architects realised that they had failed to provide any space where the staff could go to calm down. A completely secure leisure-area, a contradictory concept invented, unsurprisingly, in Los Angeles.

‘Did you hear?’ says Miranda. ‘One of the electricians lost like his entire fucking arm or something last night. Industrial accident. They fired him. Can you believe that? Negligence. They may even sue.’ She seats herself on a green plastic park-bench affair. ‘You’ve seen things for yourself, haven’t you? Are you going to put them all in your report?’

Ben feels bloody-minded today. She pushes, he pulls, that kind of thing. ‘All buildings have quirks,’ he snaps. ‘They’re by-products of advanced technology.’

‘The place is controlled by computers that purify the atmosphere.’

‘Sounds like a good thing.’

‘Not if they’re killing you.’

Ben stops and turns on her. ‘How do you know they are?’

‘Come on, I know, all right?’

‘But how?’

She decides. ‘Felix told me about the radiation. It was in his report to Clarke.’

‘If you’re so damned sure you’re being poisoned, why don’t you tell the management?’

‘Are you kidding? That’s what he did. SymaxCorp has its own security staff. They’re armed with Tasers. This is private property. It’s outside police jurisdiction.’

‘If you think it’s so dangerous, maybe you should just leave.’

‘That’s what they want me to do. If you leave here, you get a black mark on your temp record that stays with you wherever you go. Nobody leaves unless they’re forced to.’

Ben stops and looks at Miranda. She seems determined that he will help her, and he is equally determined to resist, although his determination is taking a few dents. But she’s dangerous to know. Getting into trouble is the last thing he needs to do.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says finally. ‘I’ve lost too many jobs for talking out of turn. This is my last chance. I can’t let you screw it up.’

‘And I’ve had enough jobs to know when something is fucked. Come with me.’ She gets up and takes his hand. Looking around, she opens a door at the side of the lobby. It leads to a darkened stairwell where timer lights switch on. They walk down a ramp into the underground car park. It’s gloomy, claustrophobic and concrete, with the kind of shiny floors that squeak as you turn the wheel.

‘Someone’s been scratching these all over the place,’ Miranda explains, pointing out triple sixes surrounding a crucifix. She looks meaningfully at him. ‘Evil besetting good. And they leave little notes. Look at this one: “GOD IS WATCHING YOU.”’ The words are scrawled all around the basement. In a shadowy corner stall stands a blue BMW covered in dust. ‘You know I told you that Felix left his watch? That’s nothing. He loved his car. He drove it into work but he never drove it home. Why would he have left it here?’

‘What? What? You think the big bad corporation had him whacked? Do you realise how incredibly stupid that sounds?’

‘He isn’t at home, Ben. I checked with his neighbours. He hasn’t been seen. He isn’t anywhere.’

‘Where are the car keys?’

Miranda hasn’t thought of this. ‘I think they were on his belt. On a ring with his flat keys. I know he had only one set.’

Ben stops. ‘And how do you know that, exactly?’

‘I just know, okay?’

‘When was the last time you saw Felix?’

‘He was working late, writing the report for Clarke.’ They look up into the darkness of the basement roof, where the air ducts hiss. ‘And he never left the building.’

‘You want me to start nosing around for his sake?’

‘No. I want you to do it for my sake.’ She peels off her blue shirt and throws it over the TV camera. Then she removes her bra.

‘Jesus, Miranda.’

‘Let’s keep religion out of this,’ she warns, kissing him as she pushes him back across the hood of a car. Resistance is futile. He pulls her down on top of him. But before her nakedness fills his vision, he can’t help but notice that the space they’re in belongs to Clarke.

Later, they return to the garden. The river glistens like silver foil. Above them, a handful of stars have escaped the light pollution of the metropolis. But they are still behind the great glass wall, in the leisure area of the SymaxCorp atrium. Ben wonders if he will ever leave.

‘Chaos and order,’ he tells her. ‘The universe has to be governed by one system or the other. The one you choose to believe in decides the kind of person you are.’ He looks up through the glass at the night sky, at a blood-red moon. ‘You can live in an entirely random way, going wherever you want, taking whatever work comes along – or you can build the world. I thought it was all about taking a stand. But it’s about being part of something.’ He says this admiringly as he tips back his head to look up at the illuminated rows of offices, each little box containing a person lost in concentration.

‘I don’t understand why you would choose to be a battery hen. Always knowing what’s going to happen next.’

‘I’ve tried the other way and it doesn’t work,’ he explains. ‘One day you wake up and find you’ve done nothing with your time on Earth. This way I can make some money, start to create a future.’

‘You think this is order? You think because you’ve entered corporate life, everything else is going to fall into place? This is chaos. That, up there, that’s order.’

‘At least my way I’ll get a little respect.’

Miranda gives a derisive snort of laughter. ‘You could spend twenty years here then get fired. Two days later, no-one would remember you.’

‘You remember Felix.’

She stops laughing. ‘I’m the only one who does. Ben, help me to find him.’

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
Fuck ’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.’