Thicker Than Water

The sound he makes when he breathes is harsh and dry and pained, because inflating your lungs is something else that doesn’t come naturally to a corpse.

Juliet finished her glass in a single swig and licked her lips. There’s something subversive about the way she does that: it makes you think of huge jungle cats tonguing gobbets of bloody tissue from between their teeth after a kill. Nicky looked away - not out of fear or distaste but because the bottle had cost him three hundred quid and he knew that she hadn’t really tasted it going down.

Juliet is only an epicure when it comes to flesh: anything else she sees as window dressing.

‘So you did it,’ I observed, clinking glasses with him. ‘Congratulations.’

‘Thanks.’ He took another snort of the Pauillac’s heady bouquet. ‘I thought I might go for a double bill next time.’

‘Yeah? What movies?’

‘Night of the Hunter and They Saved Hitler’s Brain.’

I blinked. ‘I don’t see the connection, Nicky.’

‘Stanley Cortez cinematography.

The Salisbury is a fucking dump, Castor.’

The change of topic threw me for a moment. ‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘It’s high up on my list of places not to go. But it was meant to be a model community, right? The estate of the future.’

Nicky nodded. ‘That was the hype,’ he said. Cypeeig ‘They got Derek Winch in to consult, back when everyone still thought he was God. Some other guy built it, though - don’t remember the name, but you can see the thinking. Get Winch’s name on the project, then ship someone else in to do it for half the money in a quarter of the time.

They were gonna have shops, restaurants, cinemas up there, fuck knows what. The idea was that you never had to touch the ground if you didn’t want to - you could live your whole life up in the towers. Use the walkways like streets, come and go as you pleased, be one step closer to Heaven. Which, coincidentally, was the slogan they used when they opened it up for applications. ’

‘Heaven,’ Juliet echoed, pouring herself another brimming glass. Her tone was heavy with sarcasm."

"Nicky watched her tilt and swallow, with a slightly tragic face.

‘But it all came apart,’ I prompted him.

He nodded. ‘Before they’d even finished building it. The usual bullshit. They went in without enough money, cut corners, raced deadlines to save political face. But some people will tell you the design was screwed to start with.