Breathe - By Christopher Fowler Page 0,1

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.

‘Drains. Drainage. Dampers? … Ducts. Disposal, waste.’

Felix waits for more.

‘See under Suction.’ Clarke flips back a few pages. Felix waits with sweating palms cupped between his thighs.

‘Binary. Bins. Bin liners. Bin fires, small.’ He turns the page. ‘Computers. Coronaries. Cardiac arrest. Very impressive. You’ve really done your homework, Draycott.’ He riffles to the end of the document, reading the conclusion. ‘I like a man who makes up his mind about something.’

‘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 coming. Felix holds his breath.

‘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. Here. It’s not hard to remember. And what’s this, biro?’ Clarke jabs at the page with a fat finger. Even in the freezing machine-fed air, Felix can feel the sweat dripping down his back.

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

The same deserted business district of the city is still silent at dawn. Then a single road-sweeper turns into the street. Window-cleaners set to work. Office cleaners appear beyond the windows, pushing vacuum cleaners across floors. Fluorescent lights flicker on. The pistons of business slowly rise and fall. The great engine of the city is coming to life.

Now an astonishing mass of commuters pours from trains and buses, over bridges, across roads, densely packed and determined, a civilian army on the march. People in stations, at bus stops, weaving between each other as more and more arrive. Yawns, coffee-cups, rubbed faces, snatched cigarettes. Workers through train windows, alighting on platforms, heading to work in their thousands. The crystal citadels unlock their doors as employees filter in.

It is the height of the rush hour. Through the commuter crowds on the platform, a young man called Ben Harper makes his way to work. He smooths his sticky-up hair, too alive to his surroundings to be a typical member of the workforce, too open and innocent and obvious. It’s his first day, but you can tell that just by looking at him.

Ben’s suit is too new. His shoes are too shiny. He grimaces and pulls a pin out of his shirt collar, then peels a price sticker off his briefcase. The shoes hurt because he’s used to trainers. He has never worn a tie before in his life. It took him twenty minutes to do the damned thing up.

Ben stands looking at the awesome SymaxCorp building. My new home, he thinks proudly. The windows glitter darkly in