The Fall of Man

Part I chapter 2

Chapter 2

The protesting BBBBBRRrp of rubberised wiper blades dragging on dry car windscreen jolts me awake. It is early morning on a dull Wednesday in April. The sun came up some time ago, but the world outside my car is cold still and grey; leeched of life. However, the other traffic is unsympathetic, and a journey that should be a half hour drive under good conditions has already taken two hours. The only colour that cuts through the leaden haze is the burning amber glow of roadside hazard lights. In a synchronised line of blinking eyes, they glare impassively at the slow-moving caravan of frustrated vehicles.

 After the fifth advert for legal aid, <HAVE YOU OR A LOVED ONE RECENTLY BEEN INVOLVED IN A…> I click the radio off and listen instead to the rhythmic sound of the engine turning over, as the car stands unmoving. Diesel-infused fumes waft in eddies across the bonnet of my vehicle from the exhaust pipe vibrating in front, and percolate inside. I turn on the air conditioning which makes a comforting hum, blocking out the distracting noises outside the car.

 Absently, my eyes trace over the frayed, broken skin around my knuckles where they are flexed on the steering wheel. I need to moisturise more thoroughly; hours sat in hermetically sealed environments is sucking all the water out of my body; leaving me as dry as a wrung-out sponge. Beneath the wheel, my shirt is stretched over the small paunch that hangs forlornly over my belt buckle. The fine blue check pattern of the fabric maps the contours of my flabby belly precisely onto the mixture of cotton and polyester. Another by-product of my sedentary lifestyle.

Gazing through the sealed glass of the windscreen, the rainclouds have dispersed and the flat grey sky overhead is criss-crossed by faint white scars – dissipating contrails that map the trajectories of this morning’s airborne travellers. I think back to the last time I travelled by aeroplane; the brute force of take-off, the plane shaking and straining as it wrenched itself free of gravity’s clutches. It was not my first time flying but nonetheless, as we rose clumsily - engines roaring - through the atmosphere in a lurching, lopsided arc, my face was glued to the cool plastic of the aircraft’s tiny porthole. The thick polycarbonate reduced towns and cities to toys in a child’s play set. Estates of miniature dwellings spread for mile after mile in every direction on an expansive snakes-and-ladders board of winding roads, sporadically peppered with manicured plots of green and littered with the trappings of human existence.

The toy-town landscape was dominated by the open space that is dedicated to vehicles - roads, verges between the roads, borders between the roads and the houses, and of course space to park all of the cars. This abundance of nothing may have been green in colour, but it also seemed bland, functionless and sterile – devoid of nature. From my seat in the heavens, the human environment was both comprehensible and horrifying in its immense repetition – and all of it decaying with exactly the same half-life.

An hour or so later, I sit at my desk. Outside it is hailing. The tiny white stones ping off the glass of my window, as if the weather were a child vying to wrest my attention away from the droning voices and bleeping machines behind me. My toes curl involuntarily inside their shoes, wracked with claustrophobia. On the other side of the glass, little nuggets of ice huddle together in drifts on the deep cill of each window frame. The thought of their small, cool forms settles me somewhat, and the rushing sound in my ears diminishes. I turn back to my desk. The dull glare of my monitor tugs insistently at my eyes like a deep, still pool.

I am sat on the fifteenth floor of a phallic edifice erected some time in the middle of the last century – a lofty tower of repetitive window modules, squatting on a heavy Brutalist plinth of concrete. A few floors above my desk, the weighty penthouse capitulates in a barren, windswept roof terrace. I sometimes have my lunch up there with the quiet birds and the noisy air conditioning plant, enjoying panoramic views of the surrounding squalor. It is a patchwork quilt of monochrome tones; wide roads and box-like offices that reflect the grey skies overhead, all of it swimming in an amorphous, pockmarked tarmac sea of car parks and service yards.