About The Author
Christopher Fowler lives and works in central London.
After writing several humour books, including
His story
The film version of
Christopher reviews for the
1. WELCOME TO SYMAXCORP
Welcome to the bad world of big business. Companies are like icebergs, mostly hidden from view. Or they’re like hives, where everyone is given a specific job and a limited amount of knowledge. Almost any analogy works, because commerce is amorphous and elusive. If the events of this story have already happened, you won’t be told about them. You’ll be suspicious from the outset, of course. You know how these things tend to shape up. The evil bosses, the downtrodden workers, yadda, yadda.
But this particular company started life as a place that would benefit everyone. It was all planned out by a decent man, albeit a man with little understanding of people and how they work.
It began as an architectural model, a tower of smooth, white-painted balsa and plastic, surrounded by neat round trees. At its base strolled tiny plastic couples. The nearby river was a sheet of shiny blue perspex. The effect was one of space and light, a monument to human endeavour.
The reality is a glittering black jewel box, a saturnine, crystalline spear called the SymaxCorp building. As impersonal as only a modern building can be. The walkways around its rain-bleached base now resemble electronic circuitry, paths snaking between terminals, sparking trade into life. No couples stroll here by the scudding brown river. Workers come, do the job and get the hell out. How can you be comfortable in a building where the windows don’t open? Where the walls reflect back your own lonely image?
Did the designers and architects believe their own lies? Did they ever think, as they peered into the model, that this glass prison would offer freedom and happiness?
It is nearly midnight, and everyone has gone home now. Out of hours, the area has as much life as the surface of the moon.
The entire business district is built in a crescent around the bend in the river. It is less than five years old, but some of the trees have been planted fully grown to provide instant ambience. There are no homes or shops, or old men walking dogs. There is only the fierce crackle of commerce between the hours of nine and six. SymaxCorp is the latest building to be completed, a monolithic cathedral of industry designed not for the benefit of the individual, but for the unification of the masses. Although it is the personification of order, it has not been constructed on a human scale. Everything about it dwarfs the experience of living. If Albert Speer had lived on, this is what he’d have built.
Up on the twentieth floor, a single light shines bright. A salaryman called Felix Draycott is still working, sweating in the icy air, grabbing the last pages of his document as they leave the printer. He hates running out hard copies, but Clarke, his supervisor, refuses to read electronic documents. He hurries between the deserted workstations, heading for the row of glass boxes – individual offices granted only to supervisors – where Clarke stands waiting.
Clarke’s office is decorated with trophies for sporting events – rugby, football, swimming – and endless pictures of his son, in muddy, bloody kit, gap-toothed and downcast, the reluctant champion. There are cups and plaques, and a mounted cricket bat presented by minor royalty. The supervisor is living, through his son, the athletic career that he could never have had himself. Pathetic, really.
Clarke is overweight, red and balding, with a scary combover and a shiny leather built-up boot to compensate for a short leg, which he thinks no-one notices. He’s fifty-three years old, stout and surprisingly strong. And on the inside? Well, let’s just say that he’s been very angry about his life for a very long time.
He reads the document, pacing around the seated Felix.
‘
Felix waits for more.
‘
‘
‘I talked to the R&D people, ran simulations, drew my own conclusions,’ Felix ventures. ‘Obviously it’s not what you want to hear …’
‘No, it’s a remarkable piece of work.’ There’s a
‘But it’s a pity you’ve made so many spelling errors. Small slips, but so important, I feel. “i before e except after c”. Here. Here. Here.
Clarke puts down the document and casually removes the cricket bat from its chromium mount. ‘Tell me, do you ever play cricket?’
‘No,’ Felix admits. ‘Football, sometimes.’ He is suddenly aware of his proximity to Clarke’s built-up boot. ‘That is, uh …’
Clarke takes a practice swing that comes perilously close to Felix’s face. He’s glancing back down at the document. ‘This is a problem for the board. But I think I can crack it.’
‘That’s a weight off my mind,’ Felix admits. He wasn’t too sure how Clarke would react.
Clarke suddenly swings the bat down hard, cracking Felix a shattering blow over the skull, laying him out across his now-exploded chair. The top of Felix’s head is as flat as a deflated football. Blood is leaking from his ears.
‘I’m a tolerant man,’ Clarke tells him, not that Felix can hear, ‘but there’s no excuse for poor spelling.’ He drags Felix’s body off by the collar, down the darkened corridors, humming happily to himself.
The window through which Clarke can be seen is one of thousands, and now the light is extinguished. Endless windows, millions of workspaces. The black mirrored buildings rise up, vast, dark, dense, muscular with struts and cables, soaring floor by floor, until they blot out the sky.
2. MONDAY
