You find us in the midst of a champagne gala hosted amid the cavernous, cathedral-sized concrete shell of Canary Wharf Underground Station — closed indefinitely until the “severe structural damage” it had recently sustained had been fixed, and the rubble piled up like Alpine mountains rendered asteroid grey against the walls of the old drained dock into which the station had been built had been cleared — at a little after eight o’clock in the evening. Moonlight, hazy hues of elegant, refined titanium white, drifted down through a vast, ominously foot-shaped hole in the ceiling, bathing hundreds of esteemed guests drawn from the uppermost echelons of the nation’s financial industry, government, and high society in its smart, silver stardust glow: amongst their number, the Mayor of London, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Chief Executive of the Canary Wharf Estate, the Emir of Qatar who owned the land on which it stood, myriad reporters, photographers, and film crews from all the major national newspapers and television networks, and of course, enough celebrities to keep whichever reporter was tasked with writing the Londoner’s Diary column these days busy for a good long while, stalking the unfortunate bastards amidst the tightly-packed flurries of hob-nobbing elites. Some fifty, sixty feet above their heads, above this leviathan subterranean vault that could well have contained St Paul’s or Westminster Abbey whole, were the ruins of London’s second financial district, which, in the infamous words of one Standard reporter, had been quite literally “fucked into the ground” by what they could only describe as “a horny two-mile-high slag with an attitude problem” twelve months to the day beforehand; meanwhile, fifty, sixty feet beneath the grisly, twisted steel stump remnants of the skyscrapers of Canada Square and Bank Street, of HSBC, Citibank, and J.P. Morgan, Aphrodite Rogers, London’s foremost contemporary “starchitect”, and founder of renowned woman-led architectural firm Dite Rogers & Partners, had just finished unveiling her masterplan for the reconstruction of the devastated Canary Wharf business district.
Most of the guests naturally assumed that the sheer scale of the architectural model she’d unveiled – the tallest model skyscrapers being some fifteen or sixteen feet tall — was just genuine testament to the fact that this was perhaps the biggest night of Aphrodite Rogers’ illustrious career so far, and she just wanted to rise to the occasion and show off. However, as they were soon to discover, there was rather more to it than that.
We join the scene at the conclusion of Aphrodite Rogers’ presentation...
“...Now correct me if I’m wrong,” Aphrodite Rogers concluded, with an intoxicating swagger to her voice, “but before we all get back to the business of getting ever more progressively twatted on the finest plonk the Qatari Sovereign Wealth Fund can afford, I believe we have time to field some questions from our friends on Fleet Street. How about you there? The one from the Guardian. Come on. Give me a vaguely intellectual-sounding soft-ball that’ll make me sound like a fucking genius when all your wanky metropolitan liberal readership wake up tomorrow morning and read how I answered it.”
Big-time architects have never particularly been known for their humility. If anything, imagining a profession constituted by a greater concentration of insufferable cunts permanently high on their own sense of self-importance than top-level architecture might be nigh-on impossible. Packed with high-flying politicians and merchant bankers though her audience was on this night, even their ilk truly could not match the sheer unbridled arrogance of a big-name architect, revolutionising the world one iconic design at a time. All that being said, though, we are almost certainly still underselling quite how much of a foul-mouthed, cunty, self-aggrandising diva Aphrodite Rogers truly could be whenever she had some fuck-off massive multi-billion-pound architectural masterplan flanking her on stage, and a few million quid worth of real-estate developer cash in her back pocket.
“Charming as ever, ‘Dite,” the reporter from the Guardian piped up above an uproarious volley of laughter from the crowd, a hint of a chuckle seeping into his own voice in recognition that he, too, considered Aphrodite Rogers’ trademark arrogance endearing after all these years. “Truly. Charming as ever.”
“Oh, you fucking love it, you know you do,” Aphrodite eventually interjected. Eventually. Only once she, and her bombastic moxie, were done snorting up the appreciation of the crowd like so many lines of coke off the bathroom sink of some Michelin-starred restaurant. “Go on, ask the damn question, Rowan. There’s a bottle or five of Bolly down there with my name on them once I’m done chatting poncy architecture shit up here. Don’t keep me waiting.”
The man from the Guardian did not.
“Ms Rogers,” he continued at last, “much has been speculated about your plans to dramatically diverge from the design orthodoxies of the old Canary Wharf estate, before it was... destroyed... by a two-mile-tall kaiju monster vaguely resembling a horny, inebriated middle-aged professional woman in her mid-forties...”
The man from the Guardian stumbled over his words as he recalled the exact details of how the original Canary Wharf estate had come to be annihilated the previous year. Stumbled over the absurdity of it. He’d been an architecture critic long enough to have written his newspaper’s eulogy to the World Trade Center the morning after the planes struck the Twin Towers, and for most of his career since, he thought that no major centre of global finance would ever be eviscerated under stranger, more sudden, or more disturbing circumstances. Until last year. Until this very day, exactly twelve months ago. Until he, and everyone else in the world, watched it happen with their own eyes. On wall-to-wall BBC News coverage. On Twitter. TikTok. YouTube. Freaking Pornhub of all places. Most appropriately of all places, let’s be honest with ourselves.
A woman. In her mid-forties. Three miles tall. Naked and plastered as you fucking like. Ripping the diamond-tipped silver shaft of Number One, Canada Square, centrepiece of the Canary Wharf estate, straight out of the ground; tracing that famous blinking light atop its razor-sharp pyramid head around rock-hard nipples the size of Parliament Hill, on silicone-rounded breasts that could have smothered the rest of Hampstead Heath whole, before drawing it all the way down to the depths of her untamed bush, wiry, and wild, and soaking wet as you damn well like; then she spread herself along the entire, distinctly phallic length of the Greenwich Peninsula just across the river from what would soon become the ruins of Canary Wharf — the Millennium Dome, it must be noted, did not survive the weight of millions of tonnes’ worth of stretch-marked arse slamming down upon it — and as she lay there, brazenly flashing her cunt to half the East End like it was the gaping, gorgon hell-gob of some Eldritch horror risen from the Thames to devour the borough of Tower Hamlets whole, she thrust all fifty storeys of it inside herself, just like an enormous dildo.
And when it transpired that Number One, Canada Square clearly wasn’t going to satisfy her, she went right after the Citigroup headquarters stood immediately to its south. Ripped that out of the ground too. Rammed that inside her and tried using that as her masturbatory aid. And once it became clear that the Citigroup headquarters was going to be even less satisfying a fuck than One Canada Square had been, she went for the HSBC Tower to its north. Softer. Gentler. Curved at the corners. No sharp edges. One might have thought that out of all three of Canary Wharf’s centrepiece skyscrapers, the HSBC Tower might have proven Goldilocks for her giant G-spot, a perfect fit for her colossal horny cunt groaning and salivating over the tip of the Greenwich Peninsula and the ruins of the Dome, but not even that could satisfy her.
So then that giant, drunk, horny two-mile-tall woman in her mid-forties just went absolutely fucking apeshit with drunken, horny rage and demolished the rest of the Canary Wharf estate wholesale. No remorse whatsoever. As though Hell truly hath no fury like a giant middle-aged party-girl who can’t get her rocks off.
“Come on, Rowan. Mister Upper Street, Islington fucking Guardianista over there,” Aphrodite taunted her inquisitor. “I don’t think any of us really need to recap the details of how, exactly, the giant sexy perimenopausal nympho tried using the three main Canary Wharf skyscrapers as huge eight-hundred-foot dildos, then got so pissed off at how unsatisfying a fuck they each were that she just bulldosed the rest out of blue-balled frustration. I think we all remember how it happened, Rowan. Honestly, how the fuck could any of us forget? The question, please.”
This was getting embarrassing for the man from the Guardian now.
But that was kind of how it was, dealing with Aphrodite Rogers. With the working-class Essex girl who made it all the way from the crumbling council estates of Billericay to the best-in-the-goddamned-world Bartlett School of Architecture, and demanded everyone who encountered her knew exactly where she came from. Who insisted upon dressing solely in what could only be described as “cougar leopard-print” bodycon dresses, five-inch high heels, and caked-on make-up; upon downing half a dozen quadruple gin and tonics before every single public appearance, and greeting everyone who attempted to engage her in conversation, no matter how lofty their position on the social hierarchy, with a throaty “Alright, twat?” You had to just roll with the punches, really. The man from the Guardian knew that. He was used to it with her.
Aphrodite Rogers — not her real name — was a character in the most literal possible sense of the word: a kind of drag persona, almost, she permanently embodied to pay homage to her roots. This uncouth little upstart with her wildly maximalist dress sense; her enormous, plastic, perfectly spherical silicone tits whose obvious fakeness she made absolutely no effort to hide, treating them like a pair of ostentatious trophies unapologetically celebrating the irresistible rise of this vile, unwashed state-educated chavette who made it all the way to the top, and struck it filthy rich along the way, to whom they were attached. Her irrepressible brattiness, her arrogance, her propensity not simply for teasing her high-society clientele with a few quick-witted barbs, but for repeatedly bludgeoning them with the sledgehammer humour of a girl born and raised in grimy, flat-roofed pubs surrounded by a bunch of foul-mouthed Essex cockneys. This inimitable manner in which she carried herself through this elite social realm of the rich and powerful to which people like her were not allowed to belong, which almost certainly would have been stamped right out of her at the beginning of her career some thirty years previously, had it not been for the fact she was just that goddamned talented at what she did, and could therefore get away with calling her arrogance and her penchant for viciously insulting everyone she met an eccentric personality trait. With considering it her merely punching up at the class of people who may once upon a time have tried to hold her back.
People like the man from the Guardian, for example — educated at Oxford, son of a former Economist columnist, born and raised in a Primrose Hill townhouse. If he had attempted to repay her brash, insult-laden humour in kind, inevitably it would have been seen as cruelly punching down at a working-class hero who had done the impossible, and endeared herself to the uppermost echelons of society. The onus was on him to maintain an air of restrained professionalism about him throughout this interaction, no matter what Aphrodite Rogers did, and so maintain that air of restrained professionalism he did.
The question. Please.
The man from the Guardian cleared his throat. “Ms Rogers,” he said at last. “Having now seen the designs you’ve produced for the rebuild of Canary Wharf, full of all these naturalistic, soft, curvaceous forms in stark contrast to the straight-edged, glass-and-steel American New Bland style of Cesar Pelli’s original 1990 masterplan, I think I speak for all of us packed into the ruins of this magnificent Underground station tonight when I say that your approach to corporate architecture is a complete breath of fresh air—”
“Cheers, Rowan,” Aphrodite sardonically retorted through pursed lips, rolling her eyes and tapping the obnoxious gilt Rolex on her wrist. “Listen, is this going anywhere, mate?”
“I am getting to the point, Ms Rogers,” said the man from the Guardian, “don’t you worry.” He didn’t waste any more time. “What I really wanted to ask you was about the specific forms you’ve chosen for the buildings that will make up the rebuilt Canary Wharf estate, and the nicknames you’ve given them—”
Aphrodite interrupted. “Well, I’d argue first off that I’m just playing off of what had once, y’know, threatened to become a real established tradition of London skyscraper architecture prior to the ‘08 financial crisis. All these strangely-shaped buildings with their even weirder nicknames. The Shard of Glass. The Walkie-Talkie. The Cheesegrater. That one skyscraper down by Blackfriars Bridge that’s got that bizarre bulge in the middle of it that kinda makes it look pregnant. There was a time when this city really took it as a challenge to sculpt the weird and fucking wonderful on its skyline, and I really want to bring that spirit back in rebuilding the one London business district that was, architecturally, boring as fuck.”
“But very specifically, Ms Rogers — well, I know better than most that London’s no stranger to phallic architecture, as perhaps the most famous of London’s nicknamed skyscrapers, Norman Foster’s Erotic Gherkin, can attest. But let’s just be real here for a second. The Rabbit? The Magic Wand? The Booster Bullet? The Volta? The Bad Dragon? Ms Rogers, I think we’re all aware of your maverick reputation within the world of contemporary architecture, but even taking that into account, it’s striking to me that what you have basically unveiled to the world here tonight is a collection of eight-hundred-foot—”
“Sex toys?”
Aphrodite Rogers’ matter-of-fact tone caught the man from the Guardian by surprise. Schoolboy chuckles rose from the crowd at his expense.
“I-I mean, yes, Ms Rogers,” the man wearily spluttered. “That’s exactly it. Exactly what I mean. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I am not enormously familiar with the world of adult toys—”
“Any heterosexual man says that, and I’m just immediately assuming his wife’s a fucking expert, if you know what I mean.”
More laughter from the crowd. Louder this time. A champagne spit-take from the Mayor for good measure too. Don’t think Aphrodite Rogers didn’t see that. Didn’t revel in his reaction. She. Was fucking. Loving. Every second of this.
“Ms Rogers, please,” the man from the Guardian at last pleaded. “As truly innovative, as stylish, as truly original as these designs you’ve shown off tonight are, I won’t lie, I might argue that it could be construed as a tad offensive to the tens of thousands of victims of the events that transpired here a year ago — the gruesome circumstances under which they and the Canary Wharf estate were... you know...”
“Fucked to death, Rowan? Say it. Fucked to death.”
“If you insist on putting it that way, yes, alright... fucked to death,” he said. “I would just argue that building skyscrapers that look exactly like a collection of elaborate vibrators and dildos, and nicknaming them as such, on the site of a disaster during which a two-mile-tall woman in her mid-forties—”
“Mid-fifties, Rowan. She just looked real good for her age—”
“I don’t know how you can be so sure, but in either case, Ms Rogers, we are still talking about a disaster during which a two-mile-tall woman in her mid-forties or fifties used the three principal skyscrapers surrounding Canada Square as masturbatory aids before essentially mud-wrestling the rest of the Canary Wharf estate into rubble in a fit of frustrated horny rage, and we are still talking about replacing the ruins with a bunch of new office and residential blocks very obviously inspired by sex toys. Can you not see the issue there?”
Aphrodite Rogers paused for a second. Let the man from the Guardian’s question linger in the air of that voluminous concrete cavern for a moment.
“I think you make a very interesting point, Rowan,” Aphrodite Rogers said at last, strutting her way back over to the model of her architectural masterplan at the rear of the stage. Stroking the curvaceous, tentacular length of the Bad Dragon which would form its centrepiece. Giving the Rabbit a quick little kiss and a tickle on the higher of its two bulbous heads. “You are, in fact, completely bang on the fucking money to think I’ve very deliberately designed Canary Wharf Mark Two to resemble a load of weird and wild and wonderful sex toys — to resemble many of my personal favourites, in fact. And my reasoning for doing so is the same as my real reasoning for giving all the new Canary Wharf buildings extra-thick exterior curtain walls. My reasoning for doing so, Rowan, is also the exact same as my real reasoning for using this masterplan as an excuse to debut my pioneering new foundation system.”
“Which is?”
Another long pause. Aphrodite Rogers’ glossy scarlet lips parted, and a sly, sultry little smirk slowly unravelled itself across her face. Almost time for the big reveal, ‘Dite. They ain’t gonna know what has fucking hit them.
“Well, then, Rowan mate. Mister Big-Shot Architecture Critic From The Guardian. Why don’t you let Lovely Ms Aphrodite Rogers explain exactly why she made the skyscrapers of the new-and-improved Canary Wharf estate look like a bunch of sex toys. Why, asks The Man From The Guardian here,” Aphrodite Rogers clamoured to her gathered audience of global elites, the swagger to her voice never more pronounced than it was right then, “did I give them all extra-thick curtain walls that even a six-hundred-foot high, perfectly manicured fist could clench itself right around, tight as you fucking like, without so much as cracking a single pane of glass? Why, he asks, have I decided to construct them all using this brand new, patented, pioneering new foundation system that would not only allow skyscrapers built on an unstable soft marshy bedrock, like that upon which the Canary Wharf estate stands, to have much, much shallower foundations than previous erections of a similar scale, but would also, critically, allow any monstrous, two-mile-tall inebriated horny MILFs on heat who came across them to just grip a solid hold of them, slide them straight out of the ground, and use those eight-hundred-foot bad-boys to fuck themselves silly without damaging any of the buildings, or infrastructure, around them?”
Nervous faces, all of a sudden. Glancing back and forth at each other. Wondering, worriedly, fearfully, where the ever-loving fuck Aphrodite Rogers was going with this. Hoping the apparent implication of what she just said would all turn out to just be another big joke at their expense.
It wasn’t though.
Soon, the Mayor of London, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Chief Executive of the Canary Wharf Estate, the Emir of Qatar who owned the land on which it stood, the myriad reporters, photographers, and film crews from all the major national newspapers and television networks, and of course, all the celebrities who had gathered amongst the cavernous, half-cleared subterranean ruins of Canary Wharf Underground Station would discover exactly how things went down that night, a year ago to the day. Soon, the whole world would discover exactly who that drunken, horny two-mile-high slag with an attitude problem they said destroyed the old Canary Wharf estate. Ripped its three biggest skyscrapers straight out of the ground and fucked herself with them like magnum dildos. Wrestled the rest of the estate into a pile of concrete rubble, twisted steel, broken glass and mushed-up, bloodied bankers’ corpses. Quite literally fucked Canary Wharf, in all its bland, corporate, capitalist magnificence, to death.
“Well, ain’t it obvious?” Aphrodite Rogers asked the gathered crowd rhetorically.” I wanna make sure that, when that two-mile-tall inebriated horny MILF on heat, who I can say was definitely in her mid-fifties despite looking very young for her age these days, eventually does comes back here for Round Two — which she definitely fucking will, by the way — she’s actually satisfied with the selection of skyscraper sex-toys on offer for her. That she doesn’t end up getting so pissed off the same way she did at how seriously fucking uncomfortable they all felt when they were deep inside her giant thirsty cunt — One Canada Square with that stupid sharp pyramid it had for a cock-head; the jagged blockiness of the old Citigroup HQ; or even the HSBC Tower, which, goddamnit, really looked like it should’ve been a better fuck than it was given how rounded and sexually fucking ergonomic its edges were — that she annihilates the rest of the estate out of anger that she just can’t get herself off on none of this bullshit, straight-edged, boring corporate American New Bland fucking 1980s shit. Give me,” she thundered, that smirk on her face having grown into a full on devilish grin, “some fucking curves to play with, innit. A massive sexy tentacle. An Erotic Gherkin that’s both ribbed for her pleasure and can actually take the punishment of being pounded by a giant, size-shifting goddess who went from the estates of Billericay to the motherfucking stratosphere in more ways than just one, yeah.”
Size-shifting fucking goddess?
Yeah. About that.
As it turned out — alongside emerging from the humblest of working-class beginnings to become one of the world’s greatest architects — fifty-five-year-old mother-of-two Aphrodite Rogers, arrogant foul-mouthed upstart who loved to get utterly rat-arsed whenever she had the slightest hint of an excuse to do so Aphrodite Rogers, drunken, horny slag with an attitude problem Aphrodite Rogers, had recently discovered she was able to transform herself into a giant woman who could stand anywhere from the height of a suburban townhouse, to the size of several full-on urban neighbourhoods. A year ago to the very day, in fact, while she was out on the lash with a bunch of close girl friends in a pub overlooking the Thames in Greenwich. A year ago to the very day, in fact, immediately after spending a full half-hour speculating whether any of those big, silver skyscrapers across the river in Canary Wharf would make a decent sex toy. Coincidentally enough. Or perhaps not coincidentally at all.
Quite how she was able to do this, neither she nor medical science in its wisdom could come close to comprehending, but one thing was for certain. Over the past twelve months, Aphrodite Rogers’ architectural designs had really begun to more and more closely resemble a bunch of sex toys rendered massive on the urban landscapes of the world.
And if you were wondering exactly why the architectural model Aphrodite Rogers had brought with her to this grand champagne gala unveiling was quite as oversized as it was, well...
“My esteemed guests — Mister Mayor, Madam Chancellor, His Excellency of Qatar, et. al., et cetera, yadda freaking yadda — I want to thank you all again for gathering here tonight to watch me unveil this masterplan for the reconstruction of the Canary Wharf estate. The same Canary Wharf estate which, if your superior fucking Oxbridge or whatever intellects haven’t quite put two-and-two together yet, the cunt, the tits, the arse, the tongue, the thighs, the feet, this full, uneniably fucking sexy chibang of my middle-aged Essex slag body, so completely obliterated without remorse — or survivors, for that matter — a year ago to this very day,” the architect addressed the crowd before her. Standing a full foot taller than she had at the start of the night. Swelling ever higher by the second. “Now. I’ve talked you all through all the ways in which I’ve ensured that if-slash-when I ever do return to make sweet, tender, masturbatory love to the skyscrapers of the Wharf, they’ll be able to withstand the forces and pressures that come with being ripped out of the ground and thrust deep inside the cunt of a giant, horny middle-aged bitch like myself. Would anybody here like me to give you a little demonstration of them?...”