Free Plastic by Christopher Fowler

Christmas and birthday for the rest of your life. ‘No, you no deliver. No, I say you don’t.’ She placed her hand over the mouthpiece and switched on an unrealistic smile. ‘Can I help you?’
    ‘Mrs. Funes?’
    ‘Madame Funes.’
    ‘I’m collecting keys for Malcolm Phillimore.’ I dug into my purse and handed the concierge Julie’s envelope.
    ‘No, you say this but you no deliver,’ Madame Funes screamed into the phone again, tearing open the letter and groping for the glasses that hung on a gold chain at her bosom. Screwing her face into a knot, she held the paper an inch from the tip of her nose and scanned it before covering the mouthpiece once more. ‘You know there is no electricity this weekend from six o’clock tonight? There is hardly any people staying here because of the doorses.’
    ‘The what?’
    ‘The doorses! The doorses!’ She waved a gold-crusted hand at the entrance.
    ‘I know about the electricity. I’m just looking after the property for the owner.’
    ‘Is good idea, you know, because the locks of the doorses down here is electric so they is open, and anyone, anyone , they can walk right in off the street. I am only going to be here since six o’clock tonight and not on the weekend. So you hand-lock the apartment on inside because anyone can walk in from outside: the rapists, the burglars, the crazy people, you know?’ She wrenched out a drawer, selected the key and passed it across the desk. ‘When you inside you lock yourself in because we have a man here two weeks since who kick a door in bang like this.’ She made a vicious slashing gesture. ‘Crazy for drugs I think, and with a knife. You will need this too for the cooker as it is electric ignition. No need to bring it back, I have many.’ She handed me a plastic cigarette lighter before resuming her telephone discourse. ‘YES, YOU SAY THIS BUT YOU NO DELIVER.’
    I decided to vacate the office before the old lady had a heart attack, and retreated back to the hall. Dragging my suitcase to the lift, I pressed the call button and checked my watch. There were still two hours left before the rest of the electricity was due to be shut off. The apartment was on the seventh floor, one of six penthouses at the top of the building. Little natural light filtered into the corridors. Bundles of coloured wires hung from the unsecured light fittings.
    The folds of the undulating corridor had been fitted with tall opaque windows, but the areas between them remained in darkness. I found myself sliding into the walls as my outstretched hand felt its way across the recessed archways to the apartments. Flicking the cigarette lighter, I searched for the number matching the taped numerals on the key. A penthouse had been constructed in each corner of the building, with two smaller apartments on the long sides between them. Malcolm’s apartment was at the centre of the Ziggurat, sandwiched between the two corner penthouses on the side of the river.
    The lounge I entered from the short hall was spectacular enough to freeze me in my tracks. It was a space imagined for a phantom film, boxes of glass-sided air, brushed steel panels suspended above pale oblongs of wood, three great windows opening to a balcony that overlooked a highway of chromatised water, and light everywhere even on this purblind day, the sky pushing its way in and filling my eyes with furious clouds.
    Yet I had never seen a private home so devoid of personality. It clearly needed my magic touch: knick-knacks, tiebacks, dried flowers, framed photographs. There were no mantelpieces, no shelves, no flat surfaces for the arrangement of clocks and ducks. It was an idealised layout from a department store window, a theatre set for some obscure futurist entertainment, or perhaps a showflat for the world beyond. The paintings were frameless, canvases pinned back like flayed skin. They were abstracts, vast and awful, umber blocks studded with sickly turrets of yellow ochre, so ugly