Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

Oblivion by Calvin Klein

BY CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

Christopher Fowler has written more than thirty novels and volumes of short stories, including Roofworld, Spanky, Psychoville, and Calabash. He lives in King’s Cross, London.

His work divides into black comedy, horror, satire, mystery, and sets of tales unclassifiable enough to have publishers tearing their hair out. He is now writing the Bryant & May series, a set of classic mystery novels featuring two elderly, argumentative London detectives. In 2009 his autobiography, Paperboy, was published.

About this story, he says, “I had been planning a novel about a shopaholic housewife-turned-vigilante for some while, and it proved to be one of those books everyone seems to love but no one manages to publish—indeed, it recently got to page proofs before the last publishing house collapsed. So with the character still in my head, I freewheeled an urban fantasy around her to create something entirely new. My visions of cities are always happiest in their decline, so it was important to have an exotic, apocalyptic feel to this tale. It’s about a fracture in the consumption cycle that might just turn out to be a good thing.…”

* * *

On the dankest, most miserable Saturday afternoon in September, Helen Abbott went shopping in London with a Derringer .25 sub-compact pistol in her handbag.

The term shopping hardly seemed adequate. What Helen did was blast through Selfridges department store like an armed witch on a mission. Spending money was an intimate thing for her, so she made sure she knew the entire history of the places where she shopped, just as it was a point of honor to memorize the names of all the assistants who offered her their services. She was such a familiar face in Selfridges that the store detectives kept an eye on her, thinking she must be part of some long-term thieving reconnaissance party. She did not look poor, of course, so they suspected her less. She always dressed for shopping as if going on a date: smart beige patent-leather heels and a sleek chocolate-toned skirt, never jeans or trainers, because she was anxious to be noticed and treated with respect.

It was not a good idea to shop in a highly emotional state. On that day, frenzied by the latest proof of her husband’s infidelity (a used Durex Fetherlite condom tossed carelessly onto the back seat of his Mercedes—worse than last time, when it was just a gold earring), she was one thin step away from sitting down in the middle of the street and screaming. Convinced that shopping in quantity released pheromones, she ticktacked at a furious speed across the marble floors, ankles flashing back and forth, charm bracelet jangling, begging the buzz to kick in.

The remains of the summer season fashions had been left on the shelves like hard centers discarded in a ravaged chocolate box, the sales staff as listless and fractious as children trapped in class. As she circumnavigated the territory, a hunter-gatherer on a search for hangered prey, she pushed ever deeper into the undergrowth of her desires.

It was a good way to spend the day.

Lately Helen Abbott had become fascinated with the textures of fashion fabrics, and as she walked she mentally alphabetized them into alpaca, astrakhan, batiste, brocade, cotton, calico, cambric, cheviot, chiffon, chenille, crepe de chine, cretonne, and corduroy. By the time she arrived at damask, denim, and dimity she had already made her first purchase and lost her place in the lexicon of luxury.

Helen had given up on her marriage and her dreams, and only the thought of finding new ways to spite her husband kept her from slitting her own throat. She hated Graham and all of his relatives with an intensity that frightened her. The best way to remain calm, she had found, was to fight through every inch of the day. That was why she booked sessions of yoga, pilates, step classes, aerobics, rowing, and weight training. Six months ago her husband tried to strangle her in a restaurant, and she broke his wrist. The fitness kick was wearing off, though. Last week she had been thrown out of her local spa’s flotation tank for smoking in it.

Helen used to work for a small publishing company in the West End, where she became a kind of hero figure because of her inventive rudeness to men, but they took away her job when she got pregnant, and couldn’t restore it to her when she lost the baby, because it would have looked too obvious. Now she worked for a media company where nothing discernible was produced. A photograph of her office would have offered no clues to her purpose in the world. She was paid an astonishing amount of money to send pointless e-mails and sit in meetings saying nothing. Voicing an opinion was a good way to get fired. When people asked what she did for a living—not that they ever did—she told them that she showed up for work.

Helen never watched TV, because TV was for poor people. Besides, the news was all bad. She never went for a walk, because the streets were unthinkable. So she shopped, passing through the outdoor part of her world as quickly and quietly as possible. Shopping at Selfridges was warm rain on bare skin. The cyclamen zephyrs that drifted over her from the perfumery inflamed her membranes. She loved the way ice-blue counters underlit the ceramic faces of the cosmetic clerks, turning them into mannequins. Their frozen tableaux set her pulse racing. They drifted about her with testers and face brushes as if wielding sacrificial tools in some arcane, forgotten rite.

In housewares, the hanging crescendos of copper pots tightened Helen’s chest muscles until she could barely breathe. There were no stains in these stage kitchens, because no food was ever cooked. Sometimes she pulled open the counter drawers and breathed in their emptiness. She studied the beds covered with purple-beaded casbah cushions, the pastel French cotton sheets imprisoned in plastic as smooth as plate glass, the polished maple dining tables laid for guests who would never ruin everything by turning up. When she touched the smokily elegant vases too slender to hold grocery store flowers but perfectly designed for a single arum lily, she felt safe in the arms of manufacturers.

After shopping, she always wanted a cigarette and a soapy wash, because the entire process was about sex. Buying an inappropriate dress was the equivalent to a thoughtless one-night stand, whereas designer shoes constituted a long-term commitment filled with recrimination and at least one decent orgasm. She hadn’t been penetrated for over eighteen months. At first the dull ache of desire would not go away, but after a while it no longer bothered her. These days her clitoris was located somewhere near Harrods.

As she swept through Oxford Street’s great cathedral of expenditure, she pondered on the verb to spend. It had a sexual connotation, of course, to empty the juices, to flush out, but she wondered why people talked about “spending days,” as though everything was currency. She felt spent. The world felt spent.

Helen really wanted a cigarette. She smoked because it annoyed her husband to find cigarette butts left in egg yolks, coffee cups, toilets, and beds. She sunbathed naked in the garden because it annoyed the neighbors, took ages at supermarket tills because it annoyed the staff, and lit up in restaurants just to watch the look of horror on diners’ faces. These days nonsmokers reacted to cigarette smoke as if they had just been involved in a Sarin gas attack. Sometimes they actually screamed.

Fuck ’em, thought Helen. There are bigger things to worry about; we just pretend there aren’t. How well we all pretend.

Everyone agreed that Graham Abbott was an absolute sweetheart who doted on his wife, but the gentler and kinder he was, the more she detested him and the more he fucked around. He sold false ceilings and had a number of gastric disorders that required him to pick at small amounts of food all day so that she never needed to cook for him at night, which was just as well because the only thing she could do was eggs, an egg being the one food source you actually have to damage to eat.

Helen insolently tapped her gold card against capped teeth as she considered different sweater designs. The staff prowled after her like hungry dogs.

There was always an adrenaline rush when she bought something really expensive, a race of blood cells to the brain and heart as she pressed her card into the reader and watched the assistant delicately folding tissue as if packing a rare dead insect for a long voyage by steamer trunk.

On she went, past the TV monitors of starved catwalk girls dipping at the turn of the runway, up into menswear, a square acre of wood, chrome, and marble where everything smelled of citrus, musk, and leather—all the things she had never smelled on her husband, who only smelled of cigarettes and computers. Soon she was carrying so many purchases that the bag ropes left Japanese-prisoner-of-war marks on her arms.

Through the food hall with its aged ham hocks hanging like the thighs of long-dead chorus girls, past rows of