I think he would rather die than appear stupid. I envy him really. He seems to exist without any difficulty, as if everything is easy. He is a very calm man, a sort of still point, who’s always at the centre of some derangement or other. His mother is Catherine Anderson, who I mentioned – the Catherine Anderson, the actress. His father, estranged from both of them, is currently serving a jail term for a ridiculous fraud perpetrated against a children’s charity somewhere in France, or Switzerland maybe. I think Michael is quite embarrassed about his parents. It’s difficult to get him to talk about them, though I’m always trying, just because I’m so curious. I think they’re fascinating. He will talk about his father sometimes, in a disparaging tone, full of distance and tired amusement, as if he’s talking about the latest misadventures of a character from a soap opera. Even then he’ll only talk about him while we’re alone or with other close friends. About his mother he was never very voluble. I used to think that was a kind of modesty, as if he was afraid that people would think he was making himself interesting by invoking her name. But I don’t think that now. I just don’t think he likes her very much. We used to get the occasional reference to whatever it was that she was up to, and annoyance that she had turned up to see him unannounced, or that she’d wanted him to accompany her to some function or party or other and how he felt obliged but resentful, as if it was her who was using him. But lately, he doesn’t mention her at all – not since she gave a long interview to a Sunday newspaper in which she detailed her elaborate sexual history. I don’t think they’re talking.
So, over lunch, Michael told me the story of the building ghost. Or should that be the ghost building? Michael is an architect. He works for Edwards Patten Associates – the people who designed the Lacon Tower, among other things, and the new Technology Museum which won a big award last year. I like the museum. At least, I like the photographs I’ve seen of it. It seems rather elegant. The Lacon Tower, on the other hand, always looks to me like it’s about to fall down. It makes my stomach lurch a little every time I see it. I don’t like heights. Michael tells me that it contains movement in its line. He has a voice he adopts when he talks about his work, and I’m never sure if it’s just another one of his voices or whether it’s actually the real one. It’s quieter, more intense. He tells me that the design of the Lacon Tower is intended to convey forward momentum, like the bold cursive script of a self-confident person. I asked Michael about this, about whether it is really possible to speak about a building in other terms – to say that building design, architecture, is like something else, like people or water or air or handwriting. He admitted to me that he never thought of architecture in that way – as being like other things. He thought of it simply as itself – as function and line and, to some degree, intellectual occupation of a space. He thought about architecture – in other words, in the language of architecture – without the need to translate. He tells me that the similes of architecture are simply an interface with the lay community. A way of talking to the likes of me. Do you think that is true? I don’t know whether it’s true or whether he’s just teasing me. I don’t know any other architects.
Comparisons make life easier, I suppose. We have two eyes. We see things in double before we can see them at all. In double and upside down, as far as I can remember. They are projected on to the backs of our inner skulls, and some process of the brain makes sense of them. We can’t see one thing unless it’s next to another.
Michael told me about a building project that the practice has been involved with at quite a superficial, technical level. A small team, which doesn’t include Michael, have designed a necessarily complicated access route, vehicle and pedestrian, from street to underground car park, in a new office building in some previously anonymous inner suburb which is now attracting a number of fairly prestigious media consultancy companies for a reason which Michael, he said, knows but has forgotten. I’m not entirely sure what a ‘media consultancy company’ is, but I didn’t ask. If I asked Michael to explain all the terms he uses we’d never finish a conversation. The project is a new build on the site of a nondescript, three-storey office and retail unit which had been destroyed by fire. The principal architects designed an attractive (though dated, said Michael) strip-windowed affair, with the name of the commissioning company, BOX, in art-deco pushpin steel lettering on one side, vertically, at the front. Actually, I know about BOX. I thought they were an advertising company. I know about them because I know someone who works for them. Not very well. But I do know her. And we had talked once about the possibility of my doing some work for them. Or with them, as she put it. She had asked me to send her a portfolio, which I never did. I interrupted Michael to tell him this, and he frowned at me.
—Why didn’t you?
—Why didn’t I what?
—Send them your stuff? Could have been something there, you know.
—They’re advertisers.
—Oh, no one is an advertiser any more. They’re brand presentation, media strategy, perception creation – all that.
—Well, I don’t do that.
—No, I know you don’t do that, of course you don’t do that, but the fact is you can do that, you can do it in your sleep. Visuals, I mean – the striking image, the simple stroke that conjures up a world of complexity. Don’t laugh at me. That’s their language. Could have been good money in it, you know. They’re worth a fortune. Why else would they be getting us in to make their bloody underground car park tunnel all lovely and light and poncing inspirational. The word was in the brief. Still might be money in it, for you I mean. If this whole thing doesn’t knock them off line. You should send them something.
The building, Michael went on, is one storey higher than its predecessor, and was completed on time and within budget. But it’s empty, unused. Because, Michael said, hunched down over his plate, eyes wide, putting on a voice, it’s haunted. Haunted by the building it’s replaced.
I had to wait until Michael went and got himself another pot of tea before I heard any more. It might be possible to guess that he’s the son of an actress and a con man if you didn’t already know. K gets quite bored with it all sometimes, but I enjoy spending time with Michael. I’m not sure what it is in life that he takes seriously. His work, perhaps. He likes films and music and always knows what’s new without ever describing it as anything other than old hat. And he wears, as it happens, old hats. Especially in this kind of weather. I can’t ever imagine him with an umbrella. He has a terrible fear of seeming very enthusiastic, and you can see him sometimes, taking a breath, calming himself down, dampening everything. And at the same time, he has a fear of not having anything to say. He looks stereotypically alternative, with his close-cropped hair, his experiments with beards, moustaches and sideburns, his black-framed glasses, his shoulder bag and his clever T-shirts and his canny shoes. A lot of our friends look like this. Vaguely arty, mildly unconventional, conscious of the irony but incorporating it. They incorporate everything really. And, of course, they are wholly incorporated.
The first manifestation of the haunting, Michael told me, was the inability of the lifts to reach the top floor. The first time this had happened the lift engineers quickly solved, or seemed to solve, the problem. But within hours, the malfunction recurred. Each time the lift attempted to rise above the third floor it stalled and would not budge. Endless diagnoses were made. Electronic problems, gear mechanisms that were faulty or misaligned, magnetic interference, inadvertent vacuums – all were blamed in turn and then discounted. Every time they changed something it seemed they had fixed it – the lift would climb to the fourth floor – and then it would stall again, within a day, or within hours, or within minutes. A fortune was spent on delicate sensors and measuring machines, and countless man hours were invested in analysing the data. The architects went through their plans again and again, the lift engineers removed the entire cabling system. The builders rebuilt part of the lift shaft. The cabling system was reinstalled. It worked for three days. And then, to the despair of everyone involved, and much to Michael’s amusement, the lift would once more climb
