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 no higher than the third floor. As if there wasn’t a fourth.
I told Michael that it sounded like an interesting engineering problem, rather than a poltergeist. No, he told me. There was more. While they tried to work out what to do with the lifts, and everyone started reaching for their lawyers, various other strange things began to occur.
• The telephone lines on the fourth floor misbehaved. They would go dead. Or, while working, would pick up crossed lines in unison, so that from each extension could be heard a sample section of the city’s babble.
• Two electricians, called in on a Saturday to sort out the non-functioning sockets in one of the fourth-floor offices, contacted the project manager to report the fourth floor inaccessible due to some joker having bricked up the stairwell on the third-floor landing. The project manager arrived and met the electricians downstairs. Together they took the lift to the third floor because, well, that was as far as it would take them, and went into the adjacent stairwell. The brick wall had vanished. Both electricians fled, upset, ashen (distraught, said Michael), and had refused to work in the building since.
• Four workmen from the roofing contractors were asked to explain their presence on the fourth floor one morning – they could be clearly seen from the ground, moving around behind the windows, and at one point firing up a welding gun, by at least half a dozen people. They insisted that they had been where they were supposed to be – on the roof – the entire time. And indeed, as revealed by subsequent checks, they had no access to the fourth floor. The lift didn’t go there, and the door from the stairwell had been locked the night before by a security guard who reported that he had felt ‘uneasy’ patrolling there, and had sealed it off.
• Carpets on the fourth floor had been replaced three times due to unexplained staining before they just gave up and left them as they were, including one with a strange Australia-shaped discoloration.
• When the CEO of BOX came on his first visit he got out of his car, stared up at the building and asked why there were only three storeys. Those accompanying him, including the chief architect, the project manager and the main contractor, looked from him to the building and back again. But there are four storeys, they told him. He looked at the building and he looked at them, and he looked at the building again. No there are not, he insisted. Then they had that argument, Michael laughed – that argument – about whether a four-storey building was a ground floor and three above it, or whether a four-storey building was a ground floor and four above it, and what was the difference anyway between a storey and a floor. It was only when the CEO used his finger to point and count that they all finally agreed that there was a fourth floor. Inside the building, the CEO remained silent throughout the tour, until, on the fourth floor, he was taken ill and had to leave. The nature of the illness, Michael had not been able to determine. It was simply reported that he had been taken ill, a phrase which, as Michael pointed out, covers everything from the shits to a stroke.
The CEO had not been back since. In fact, Michael believed, there had been efforts made to get BOX out of the deal entirely, and this having apparently failed, the company appeared now to be trying to sell the place without ever having taken up residency, and while still operating out of a cramped two-storey lease in the impossible city centre. But