Tom McCarthy - Remainder (Excerpts)

It took another second or so for me to take in just how much money that was. When I had, I took my hand off the wall and turned suddenly around, towards the window. The movement was so forceful that it pulled the phone wire with it, yanked it right out of the wall. The whole connection came out: the wire, the flat-headed bit that you plug in and the casing of the hole that that plugs into too. It even brought some of the internal wiring that runs through the wall out with it, all dotted and flecked with crumbly, fleshy bits of plaster.
   
"Hello?" I said.

It was no good: the connection had been cut. I stood there for some time, I don't know how long, holding the dead receiver in my hand and looking down at what the wall had spilt. It looked kind of disgusting, like something that's come out of something.

The horn of a passing car made me snap to. I left my flat and hurried down to a phone box to call Marc Daubenay back. The nearest one was just round the corner, on Coldharbour Lane. As I crossed my road and walked down the one lying perpendicular to it, I thought about the sum: eight and a half million. I pictured it in my mind, its shape. The eight was perfect, neat: a curved figure infinitely turning back into itself. But then the half. Why had they added the half? It seemed to me so messy, this half: a leftover fragment, a shard of detritus. When my knee-cap had set after being shattered in the accident, one tiny splinter had stayed loose. The doctors hadn't managed to fish it out, so it just floated around beside the ball, redundant, surplus to requirements; sometimes it got jammed between the ball and its socket and messed up the whole joint, locking it, inflaming nerves and muscles. I remember picturing the sum's leftover fraction, the half, as I walked down the street that day, picturing it as the splinter in my knee, and frowning, thinking: Eight alone would have been better.
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Later, as I sat inside the tube, I felt the need, like I'd done every time I'd taken the tube up to Angel, to picture the terrain the hurtling car was covering. Not the tunnels and the platforms, but the space, the overground space, London. I remembered being transferred from the first hospital to the second one two months or so after the accident, how awful it had been. I'd been laid flat, and all I'd been able to see was the ambulance's interior, its bars and tubes, a glimpse of sky. I'd felt that I was missing the entire experience: the sight of the ambulance weaving through traffic, cutting onto the wrong side of the road, shooting past lights and islands, that kind of thing. More than that: my failure to get a grip on the space we were traversing had made me nauseous. I'd even thrown up in the ambulance. Riding to Heathrow on the tube, I experienced echoes of the same uneasiness, the same nausea. I kept them at bay by thinking that the rails were linked to wires that linked to boxes and to other wires above the ground that ran along the streets, connecting us to them and my flat to the airport and the phone box to Daubenay's office. I concentrated on these thoughts all the way to Heathrow.
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I walked back towards the down escalator, but before I got there I noticed all these escalator steps that were being overhauled. You think of an escalator as one object, a looped, moving bracelet, but in fact it's made of loads of individual, separate steps woven together into one smooth system. Articulated. These ones had been dis-articulated, and were lying messily around a closed-off area of the upper concourse. They looked helpless, like beached fish. I stared at them as I passed them. I was staring at them so intently that I stepped onto the wrong escalator, the up one, and was jolted onto the concourse again. As my hand slipped over the handrail the black grease got onto my sleeve and stained it.

I have, right to this day, a photographically clear memory of standing on the concourse looking at my stained sleeve, at the grease--this messy, irksome matter that had no respect for millions, didn't know its place. My undoing: matter.
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The other thing that struck me as we watched the film was how perfect De Niro was. Every move he made, each gesture was perfect, seamless. Whether it was lighting up a cigarette or opening a fridge door or just walking down the street: he seemed to execute the action perfectly, to live it, to merge with it until he was it and it was him and there was nothing in between. I commented on this to Greg as we walked back to mine.

"But the character's a loser," Greg said. "And he messes everything up for all the other characters."

"That doesn't matter," I answered. "He's natural when he does things. Not artificial, like me. He's flaccid. I'm plastic."

"He's the plastic one, I think you'll find," said Greg, "being stamped onto a piece of film and that. I mean, you've got the bit above your eye, but…"

"That's not what I mean," I said. I'd had a small amount of plastic surgery on a scar above my right eye. "I mean that he's relaxed, malleable. He flows into his movements, even the most basic ones. Opening fridge doors, lighting cigarettes. He doesn't have to think about them, or understand them first. He doesn't have to think about them because he and they are one. Perfect. Real. My movements are all fake. Second-hand."

"You mean he's cool. All film stars are cool," said Greg. "That's what films do to them."

"It's not about being cool," I told him. "It's about just being. De Niro was just being; I can never do that now."

Greg stopped in the middle of the pavement and turned to face me.

"Do you think you could before?" he asked. "Do you think I can? Do you think that anyone outside of films lights cigarettes or opens fridge doors like that? Think about it: the lighter doesn't spark first time you flip it, the first wisp of smoke gets in your eye and makes you wince; the fridge door catches and then rattles, milk slops over. It happens to everyone. It's universal: everything fucks up! You're not unusual. You know what you are?"

"No," I said. "What?"

"You're just more usual than everyone else."

I thought about that for a long time afterwards, that conversation. I decided Greg was right. I'd always been inauthentic. Even before the accident, if I'd been walking down the street just like De Niro, smoking a cigarette like him, and even if it had lit first try, I'd still be thinking: Here I am, walking down the street, smoking a cigarette, like someone in a film. See? Second-hand. The people in the films aren't thinking that. They're just doing their thing, real, not thinking anything. Recovering from the accident, learning to move and walk, understanding before I could act--all this just made me become even more what I'd always been anyway, added another layer of distance between me and things I did. Greg was right, absolutely right. I wasn't unusual: I was more usual than most.
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I felt a kind of vertigo. I knew what I meant but couldn't say it right. I wanted to feel some connection with these Africans. I tried to picture them putting up houses from her housing kits, or sitting around in schools, or generally doing African things, like maybe riding bicycles or singing. I didn't know: I'd never been to Africa, any more than I--or Greg--had ever taken cocaine. I tried to visualize a grid around the earth, a kind of ribbed wire cage like on the champagne bottle, with lines of latitude and longitude that ran all over, linking one place to another, weaving the whole terrain into one smooth, articulated network, but I lost this image among disjoined escalator parts, the ones I'd seen at Green Park earlier. I wanted to feel genuinely warm towards these Africans, but I couldn't. Not that I felt cold or hostile. I just felt neutral.
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When Catherine flew into London on the day the Settlement came through, I arrived at the airport just after her flight was due in. I saw from the Arrivals screens that it had landed and I hurried over to the area where the sliding screen doors separate the customs and immigration area from the public terminal. I leant against a rail and watched passengers emerge from these doors. It was interesting. Some of the arriving passengers scanned the waiting faces for relatives, but most weren't being met. These ones came out carrying some kind of regard to show to the assembled crowd, some facial disposition they'd struck up just before the doors slid open for them. They might be trying to look hurried, as though they were urgently needed because they were very important and their businesses couldn't run without them. Or they might look carefree, innocent and happy, as though unaware that fifty or sixty pairs of eyes were focused on them, just on them, if only for two seconds. Which of course they weren't--unaware, I mean. How could you be? The strip between the railings and the doors was like a fashion catwalk, with models acting out different roles, different identities. I leant against the rail, watching this parade: one character after another, all so self-conscious, stylized, false. Other people really were like me; they just didn't know they were. And they didn't have eight and a half million pounds.

After a while I tired of watching all these amateur performances and decided to buy a coffee from a small concession a few feet away. It was a themed Seattle coffee bar where you buy caps, lattes and mochas, not coffees. When you order they say Heyy! to you, then they repeat your order aloud, correcting the word large into tall, small into short. I ordered a small cappuccino.
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"Ah, here's your coffee," he said.

She was carrying it on a small tray, like the ones stewardesses use in aeroplanes. As she set it down on the polished table I noticed that it was a two-part construction: the cup itself, then, slotted into that, a plastic filter section where the coffee grains themselves were. It made me think of those moon landing modules from the Sixties, the way the segments slot together. There was a saucer too, of course: three parts. The receptionist lowered the whole assemblage gently down onto the table's surface, set a small jar of cream, a bowl of rough-hewn blocks of sugar and a spoon beside it, and then blasted away again with the tray.

"We could certainly look at weighting it that way," Younger continued. "But my point in putting forward the roulette analogy was that it's best to cover several sectors of the…"

"Yes, I understand," I told him. "But I want to know where I am. To occupy a particular sector, rather than be everywhere and nowhere, all confused. I want to have a…a…" I searched for the right word for a long time, and eventually found it: "position."

"A position?" he repeated.

"Yes," I said. "A position. Telecommunications and technology."
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It was still rush hour. I didn't feel like going back into the tube. Instead, I walked down to the river, slowly, through the back streets of Belgravia. When I got there I walked east, crossed Lambeth Bridge, stepped down onto Albert Embankment, found a bench and sat there for a while looking back out across the Thames.

I thought of the time Catherine and I had got into the boat on the embankment in Paris. It had been morning, a fresh blue one, and the sun had been opening these cracks of light up everywhere across the water--dancing, brilliant slits, opening. Now it was dusk. The city had that closing-ranks look, when it gathers itself up into itself but shuts you out. It was glowing, but it wasn't heating me. As I sat there it occurred to me that I could go and stand on almost any street, any row, any sector, and buy it--buy the shops, the cafés, cinemas, whatever. I could possess them, but I'd still be exterior to them, outside, closed out. This feeling of exclusion coloured the whole city as I watched it darken and glow, closing ranks. The landscape I was looking at seemed lost, dead, a dead landscape.

I didn't want to go back home to Brixton. Catherine was out and about looking at the city too: museums, shopping, stuff like that. I didn't feel like seeing her anyway. I walked along the embankment towards Waterloo, passing the back of St Thomas's Hospital. Beside the large doors for supply deliveries and the caged-off refuse area, the staff parking spaces were marked out. Ambulance drivers were lounging beside their vehicles, smoking. Catering staff were wheeling trolleys around. I'd looked forward to that in hospital: the moment when the trolley comes. The conversation the person pushing it makes with you is banal and instantly forgettable, just like the food, but this is good because it means you can have the same conversation again a few hours later, and again the next day, and the next, and still look forward to it. Everything in hospital runs on a loop. I watched the trolleys clatter round their circuits from the kitchens to the wards' back entrances, the bin bags piling up in the rubbish compound, the ambulance drivers and their vehicles, still between marked lines.

Eventually I crossed the river again and walked up to Soho. On the corner where Frith Street cuts across Old Compton Street at an exact ninety-degree angle I noticed one of those Seattle-theme coffee shops I'd bought that cappuccino in while waiting to meet Catherine at Heathrow. I remembered that I had a loyalty card, and that if I got all ten of its cups stamped then I'd get an extra cup--plus a new card with ten more cups on it. The idea excited me: clocking the counter, going right round through the zero, starting again. I went inside and ordered a cappuccino.
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She stamped the second cup and handed me my cappuccino. I took it over to a stool beside the window. It was one of those long, tall windows that take up a whole wall. I sat up against it and watched people going by. It must have been around eight o'clock. Media types were leaving offices and club types were heading into bars and restaurants. Some people were wheeling a screen along the street--one of those baroque old folding screens with oriental decorations on it. There'd been screens like that in hospital--without the decoration, of course: just white folding screens they pulled around your bed when they wanted to turn you over or undress you. The people pushing the screen along Old Compton Street were maybe two or three years younger than me, in their middle to late twenties. They must have been taking it to or from one of the production company studios that are dotted around Soho. They looked like television people: they had short, dyed hair and Diesel and Evisu clothes and small, colourful mobiles in their spare hands and back pockets. I wondered if their phones were helping to project an imaginary future for one of the stocks I was buying into, to propel it upwards.

I went and bought another cappuccino, got my card stamped a third time and came back to my window seat. The media types pushing the screen had paused in the middle of the street because they'd bumped into another group of media types who were sitting outside one of the other coffee shops. They were all calling over to one another, walking back and forth between the screen and the second coffee shop, waving, laughing. They reminded me of an ad--not a particular one, but just some ad with beautiful young people in it having fun. The people with the screen in the street now had the same ad in mind as me. I could tell. In their gestures and their movements they acted out the roles of the ad's characters: the way they turned around and walked in one direction while still talking in another, how they threw their heads back when they laughed, the way they let their mobiles casually slip back into their low-slung trouser pockets. Their bodies and faces buzzed with glee, exhilaration--a jubilant awareness that for once, just now, at this particular right-angled intersection, they didn't have to sit in a cinema or living room in front of a TV and watch other beautiful young people laughing and hanging out: they could be the beautiful young people themselves. See? Just like me: completely second-hand.
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I phoned Marc Daubenay. He was out of his office when I called; the austere secretary told me he'd be back in half an hour. I used the time to go through what I'd say to him. With him I felt I could explain the whole thing: why I'd had the idea, why I wanted what I wanted. He'd been through the last five months with me. He'd understand.

He didn't, of course. When I eventually spoke to him, it came out garbled, just like it had when I'd imagined trying to explain it to my homeless person. I started going on about the crack in the wall of David Simpson's bathroom, my sense of déjà vu; then I backtracked to how ever since learning to move again I'd felt that all my acts were duplicates, unnatural, acquired. Then walking, eating carrots, the film with De Niro. I could tell from the deep silence at his end each time I paused that he wasn't getting it at all. I cut to the chase and started describing the red roofs with black cats on and the woman who cooked liver and the pianist and the motorbike enthusiast.

"This was a place you lived?" Marc Daubenay asked me.

"Yes," I said. "No. I mean, I remember it, but I can't place the memory."

"Well, as we argued," Daubenay said, "your memory was knocked off-kilter by the accident." He'd emphasized that in his pre-trial papers: how my memory had gone and only slowly returned--in instalments, like a soap opera, although he hadn't used that metaphor.

"Yes," I said, "but I don't think this was a straight memory. It was more complex. Maybe it was various things all rolled together: memories, imaginings, films, I don't know. But that bit's not important. What's important is that I remembered it, and it was crystal-clear. Like in…"

I hesitated there. I didn't want to use the word "vision", in case Marc Daubenay got ideas.

"Hello? You still there?"

"Yes," I said. "I was saying it was crystal-clear."

"And now you want to find this place?" he asked.

"Not find it," I said. "Make it."

"Make it?"

"Build it. Have it built. I've been calling estate agents and property developers. None of them understands. I need someone to sort it all out for me. To handle the logistics."

There was another long, deep silence at Daubenay's end. I pictured his office in my mind: the wide oak desk with the chair parked in front of it, the tomes of old case histories around the walls, the austere secretary in the antechamber, guarding his door. I gripped my phone's receiver harder and frowned in concentration as I thought about the wires connecting me to him, Brixton to Angel. It seemed to work. After a while he said:

"I think you need Time Control."

"Time control?" I repeated. "In what sense?"

"Time Control UK. They're a company that sort things out for people. Manage things. Facilitators, as it were. A couple of my clients have used them in the past and sent back glowing reports. They're the leaders in their field. In fact, they are their field. Give them a call."
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"I have a large project in mind," I said, "and wanted to enlist your help." "Enlist" was good. I felt pleased with myself.

"Okay," said Naz. "What type of project?"

"I want to buy a building, a particular type of building, and decorate and furnish it in a particular way. I have precise requirements, right down to the smallest detail. I want to hire people to live in it, and perform tasks that I will designate. They need to perform these exactly as I say, and when I ask them to. I shall most probably require the building opposite as well, and most probably need it to be modified. Certain actions must take place at that location too, exactly as and when I shall require them to take place. I need the project to be set up, staffed and coordinated, and I'd like to start as soon as possible."


"Excellent," Naz said, straight off. He didn't miss a single beat.
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"Before we begin realizing your project," Naz said, "we need to get a sense of scale. What size of building do you have in mind?"

"A big one," I said. "Six or seven floors. Have you ever been to Paris?"

"I was there two weeks ago," said Naz.

"Well, the way buildings are there," I told him. "Large tenement buildings, with lots of flats stacked on top of one another. That's the type of building I need. My flat must be on the top floor but one."

"And the building opposite? If I remember rightly, you indicated that you'd probably need that building too."

"That's right," I said. "It should be almost the same height. Perhaps one floor lower. When I say 'opposite' I mean facing at the back. Across a courtyard. I need that building for two things only: red tiles on its roofs and black cats walking over this."

"Roofs plural?" he asked.

"They go up and down," I told him. "Rise and fall. In a particular way. We might have to modify them. We'll certainly need to modify lots of things throughout the building and the courtyard."

"Yes, so you told me," Naz said. "But tell me about the people you propose to fill the building with. The primary building, I mean. Will they be actually living there?"

"Well, yes," I answered. "They can actually live there too. They'll have to get used to being in two modes, though: on and off."

"How do you mean?" asked Naz.

"Well, on when they're performing the tasks I'll ask them to perform. The rest of the time they can do what they want. Like soldiers: they're on parade at one moment, then afterwards they go and smoke their cigarettes in the guardroom, and have baths and maybe change into civilian clothes. But then a few hours later they have to be back on parade again."
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I traced a triangle in my mind up from our restaurant table to the satellite in space that would receive the signal, then back down to Time Control's office where the satellite would bounce it. I remembered being buffeted by wind, the last full memory I have before the accident.
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"But go on," Naz said. "Sorry I interrupted you."

"You did?" I asked him. I was slightly flustered now; I felt my tone was slipping. I thought of the last formal word I'd used and then repeated it, to bring my tone back up. "Well, yes: jurisdiction. On the floor below the liver lady, or perhaps two floors below, there has to be a pianist. He must be in his late thirties or early forties, bald on top with tufts at the side. Tall and pale. In the day he practises. The music has to waft up in the same way as the liver lady's cooking smell does. As he's practising he must occasionally make mistakes. When he makes a mistake he repeats the passage slowly, over and over again, slowing right down into the bit that he got wrong. Like a Land Rover slowing down for bumpy terrain--a set of potholes, say. Then in the afternoons he teaches children. At night he composes. Sometimes he gets angry with…"

Naz's mobile gave out a loud double beep. I stopped. Naz picked it up and pressed the "enter" button.

"Heir or descendant," he read. "From the Middle English sioun and the Old French sion: shoot or twig. First citation 1848. Oxford English Dictionary."


"Interesting," I said. I took a sip of my mineral water and thought of the scarab beetle again. "Anyway," I continued after a moment, setting the glass down, "this guy sometimes gets angry with another person who I'll need, this motorbike enthusiast who tinkers with his bike out in the courtyard. Fixes it and cleans it, takes it apart, puts it back together again. When he has the motor on, the pianist gets angry."

Naz processed this one for a while. His eyes went vacant while the thing behind them whirred, processing. I waited till the eyes told me to carry on.

"Then there's a concierge," I said. "I haven't got her face yet--but I've got her cupboard. And some other people. But you get the idea."

"Yes, I get it," Naz said. "But where will you be while they're performing their tasks--when they're in on mode."

"I shall move throughout the space," I said, "as I see fit. We'll concentrate on different bits at different times. Different locations, different moments. Sometimes I'll want to be passing the liver lady as she puts her rubbish out. Sometimes I'll want to be out by the motorbike. Sometimes the two at once: we can pause one scene and I'll run up or down the stairs to be inside the other. Or a third. The combinations are endless."

"Yes, so they are," said Naz.
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IN SCHOOL, when I was maybe twelve, I had to do art. I wasn't any good at it, but it was part of the syllabus: one hour and twenty minutes each week--a double period. For a few weeks we were taught sculpture. We were given these big blocks of stone, a chisel and a mallet, and we had to turn the blocks into something recognizable--a human figure or a building. The teacher had an effective way of making us understand what we were doing. The finished statue, he explained, was already there in front of us--right in the block that we were chiselling away at.

"Your task isn't to create the sculpture," he said; "it's to strip all the other stuff away, get rid of it. The surplus matter."

Surplus matter. I'd forgotten all about that phrase, those classes--even before the accident, I mean. After the accident I forgot everything. It was as though my memories were pigeons and the accident a big noise that had scared them off. They fluttered back eventually--but when they did, their hierarchy had changed, and some that had had crappy places before ended up with better ones: I remembered them more clearly; they seemed more important. Sports, for example: they got a good spot. Before the accident I'd never been particularly interested in sports. But when my memory came back I found I could remember every school basketball and football game I'd played in really clearly. I could see the layout of the court or pitch, the way I and the other players had moved around it. Cricket especially. I remembered exactly what it had been like to play it in the park on summer evenings. I remembered the games I'd seen on TV: overviews of the field's layout with diagrams drawn over them showing which vectors were covered and which weren't, slow-motion replays. Other things became less important than they had been before. My time at university, for example, was reduced to a faded picture: a few drunken binges, burnt out friendships and a heap of half-read books all blurred into a big pile of irrelevance.

The art teacher fluttered back into a good, clear spot of memory. I even remembered his name: Mr Aldin. I thought a lot about what he'd said about stripping away surplus matter when I was learning to eat carrots and to walk. The movement that I wanted to do was already in place, I told myself: I just had to eliminate all the extraneous stuff--the surplus limbs and nerves and muscles that I didn't want to move, the bits of space I didn't want my hand or foot to move through. I didn't discuss this with my physio; I just told it to myself. It helped. Now, as I wondered how to find my building, I thought of Mr Aldin again. The building, I told myself, or he told me, or to be precise my image of the school art room told me, in a voice hovering around paint-splashed wooden tables--the building was already there, somewhere in London. What I needed to do was ease it out, chisel it loose from the streets and the buildings all around it.

How to do this? I'd need to see the block, of course, the slab, London. I had a grotty, dog-eared A-Z but couldn't get any sense of the whole town from that. I'd need a proper map, a large one. I was about to go and buy one in the nearest newsagent when it struck me that I wasn't thinking big enough. To do this properly I'd need coordination, back-up. I phoned Naz back.

"I'd like to hire a room," I told him.

"What kind of room?" he asked.

"A space. An office."

"Right," said Naz.

"I'd like to organize the search from there," I continued. "With maps on the walls, things like that. A kind of military operations room."

"You'd like to organize the search yourself?" he asked. "I thought I was to…"

"I'd like to take charge, but I'd like you to work with me."

There was a pause, then Naz said:

"Fine. An office, then."

"Yes," I said.

"Any other specifications?"

"No," I answered. "Just a normal office with a couple of desks in it. Light, windows. Just usual."

An hour later he'd got me an office in Covent Garden.
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By five o'clock the next day we had fifteen buildings. I'd knocked the car's arrival back to six, but when it came I told Naz:

"I prefer to wait until tomorrow morning."

"As you wish," he said. "I'll send another car round to your flat at nine."

I phoned him the next morning at eight-thirty.

"I prefer to make my own way there," I said.

"I'll meet you there, then."

"No. I prefer to go alone."

"How will you know which places to look in?" he asked.

"I remember them all," I said.

"Really?" Naz sounded incredulous. "All the exact locations?"

"Yes," I told him.

"That's impressive," he said. "Phone me as and when you need me."

I didn't remember each location, of course. But I'd become increasingly aware of something over the last two days: these people wouldn't find my building. No matter how well I described it to them or how thoroughly they looked, they wouldn't find my building for a simple reason: it wouldn't be my building unless I found it myself. By noon on the second day of their search I'd been certain of this.

Why hadn't I called the search off, then? you might ask. Because I liked the process, liked the sense of pattern. There were people running through the same, repetitive acts--consulting their mobiles, walking up one street, down the next one and up a third, stopping in front of buildings to make phone calls--in six different parts of town. Their burrowing would get inside the city's block and loosen it, start chiselling away at surplus matter: it would scare my building out, like beaters scaring pheasants out of bushes for a L-rd to shoot--six beaters advancing in formation, beating to the same rhythms, their movements duplicating one another. As I started out that day I imagined looking on from overhead, from way above the city, picking out Naz's people, each one with a kind of tag on them, a dot like police cars have to help police helicopters pick them out. I imagined looking down and seeing them all--plus me, the seventh moving dot, my turning and redoubling etching out the master pattern that the other six were emulating. I imagined looking down from even higher up, the edges of the stratosphere. I stopped for a moment in the street and felt a light breeze moving round my face. I turned the palms of my hands outwards and felt a tingling creeping up the right side of my body. It was good.
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I also considered following a numerical system: starting from point zero I'd turn down the first street on the right, then take the second left, the third right, fourth left and so on. The system could be much more complicated than that, of course: I could bring in fractions and algebra and differentials and who knows what else. Or I could devise a corresponding process using the alphabet: go down the first street I came to whose name starts with a, then carry on until I find a b, a c etc. Or I could apply numeric principles to an alphabetic process: start on a street that began with an a, then advance along the alphabet by the same number of letters contained in the street's name and find the nearest street whose name began with that new letter. Or I could…

The phone rang while I was in the middle of these deliberations. It was Matthew Younger.

"How are you?" he asked.

"Fine," I told him. "I'm looking for a building. What's top-slice?"

    "Ah!" he answered, his voice booming down the line to me. "Top-slicing is what you do when your shares in a certain company have appreciated--risen--and you slice the profit off by selling some until the value of your holding represents what it did when you bought it."

"Why would you want to do that?" I asked.
   
"In order," he explained, "to invest the top-sliced money in another company, thus diversifying your holdings. Now your shares in the technology and telecommunication companies we selected recently have risen overall by a staggering ten per cent in little over one week. While I know how much you favour those two sectors, I just felt that if we top-sliced that ten per cent profit we could invest it in another sector while in no way diminishing your commitment to technology and tele…"

"No," I told him. "Keep them where they are."

There was a pause at his end. I pictured his office: the polished mahogany table, panelled walls and corniced ceiling, the portraits of frail and wealthy men. After a while he came back:

"Fine," he said. "Jolly good. Just touching base, really, with a suggestion--but it's your call entirely."

"Yes," I answered.

I hung up and went back to pondering methods of looking for my building in an irrational manner. I'd thought up so many by midday that I'd lost track of half of them. By early afternoon I'd realized that none of them would work in any case, for the good reason that implementing any one of them methodically would cancel its irrational value. I started to feel both dizzy and frustrated, and decided that the only thing to do was walk out of my flat with no plan at all in mind--just walk around and see what happened.

I left my flat, walked down the perpendicular street past my dented Fiesta, then turned into the ex-siege zone, passed the tyre place and café, then the phone box I'd called Marc Daubenay from. I walked to the centre of Brixton, the box junction between the town hall and Ritzy. Normally I'd have turned right to the tube at this point, but today I carried on up towards David Simpson's road. I don't know why: I felt like carrying on that way, is all. And then to stay south of the river: that felt sly. All Naz's people were on the north side; anywhere south was well out of the search's official radius, and therefore more fruitful hunting ground. If someone knows people are looking for him in a certain place, he finds another place to hide in.

I went up towards Plato Road, but ducked down a street parallel to it before reaching it. To go right back there might have short-circuited things, I reasoned. I turned right, then turned left to balance things up. Then I overshot a turning to the right but doubled back and took it after all. I came across some men laying wires beneath the street and stopped to watch them for a while. They were connecting wires to one another: blue, red and green ones, making the connections. I watched them, fascinated. They knew I was watching, but I didn't mind. I had eight and a half million pounds, and could do what I wanted. They didn't seem to mind either--perhaps because they could tell from how I watched them that I respected them. For me, they were Brahmins: top of the pile. More than Brahmins: G-ds, laying down the wiring of the world, then covering it up--its routes, its joins. I watched them for an age, then walked away with difficulty, really concentrating on each muscle, every joint.

A little after this I found a sports track. It was tucked into a maze of back streets and fenced in by knitted green wire. Inside the first fence another one caged in a beautiful green asphalt pitch. The pitch was multi-purpose. All sorts of markings cut and sliced across it: semicircles, circles, boxes, arcs--in yellow, red and white. It was beautiful for me, but to anyone else it would just have looked shoddy and run-down. Two smaller, decrepit cages stood at either end of this pitch: two football goals. Between the caged-in pitch and the green outer fence a red track ran. The tracks I'd seen in my coma had been like this one: red, with white lines marking out the lanes. A couple of loudspeakers were dangling from poles beside the track; they looked like they weren't used any more, and probably didn't work. I stood against the green fence, looking in and thinking about the commentaries I'd had to give during my coma. I stood there thinking for a while, then turned around--and saw my building.

It was my building alright. I knew that instantly. It was a large tenement building, seven floors tall. It was quite old--maybe eighteen nineties, nineteen hundred. It was a dirty cream colour. Off-white. I'd come to it from a strange angle, from the side, but I could see that it had large white windows and black drains and balconies with plants on them. These windows, drains and balconies repeated themselves as the side façade ran on, high and imperious, behind a wall, then turned away and out of sight. Oh, it was definitely mine.

The building had a compound round it, a kind of garden space, but I was separated from this by the wall. In front of me was an iron side door. I tried it: it was shut. It was one of those doors with an electronic keypad and a CCTV camera mounted above it. I moved out of the camera's field of vision and waited to see if anyone would come through. Nobody did. After a while I walked around the sports track, passed beneath a railway bridge and came to the building from the front.

Oh yes: it was my building. My own, the one that I'd remembered. It was big and old and rose up seven floors. It was off-white at the front too, with windows but no balconies. Its main entrance had a kind of faded grandeur: wide, chequered steps ran from the street to a double doorway above which was carved in stone relief the building's name: Madlyn Mansions.

I stood in the street looking at my building. People were coming and going through the double doors pretty regularly: normal-looking people, old and young, half white and half West Indian. Residents. After a while I walked up the chequered steps to the door and peered inside.
_______________________________________________

Then there'd be behemoths: giant cranes on wheels, crane lifts with crane-grab limbs, all skeletal and menacing and huge. We'd carry plaster on our clothes into a Mayfair piano salesroom, then carry the contrasting chimes and tinkles of four types of baby grand still humming in our ears on to a used furniture warehouse. We'd receive faxes on the machine we had in our car and stuff them into the back-seat glove compartment as the driver raced us to another meeting, then forget that we'd received them and have them re-faxed or go back to the same office or the same warehouse again--so the humming in our ears was constant, a cacophony of modems and drilling and arpeggios and perpetually ringing phones. The hum, the meetings, the arrivals and departures turned into a state of mind--one that enveloped us within the project, drove us forwards, onwards, back again. I've never felt so motivated in my life. Naz understood this, I think now, and cultivated a degree of chaos to keep everybody involved on their toes, fired up, motivated. A genius, if ever there was one.

Not that motivation was otherwise lacking: the people we'd hired were being paid vast amounts of money. What was lacking, if anything, was comprehension: making them understand exactly what it was that was required of them. And making them understand at the same time how little they needed to understand. I didn't need to make them share my vision, and I didn't want them to. Why should they? It was my vision, and I was the one with the money. They just had to know what to do. This wasn't easy, though--making them understand what to do. They were all London's premiers: the best plumbers, plasterers, pine outfitters and so on. They wanted to do a really good job and found it hard to get their heads round the proposition that the normal criteria for that didn't apply in this case.
_______________________________________________

It really took shape in the final two weeks. The hallways had been laid, the courtyard landscaped and re-landscaped, the flats fitted or blanked out as my diagrams had stipulated. Now we had to concentrate on the minutiae. We had to get the crack right, for example: the crack in my bathroom wall. I still had the original piece of paper that I'd copied it onto back at that party--plus the diagrams that I'd transcribed it onto over the next twenty-four hours, of course. Frank and I and a plasterer called Kevin spent a long time getting the colour of the plaster all around it right.

"That's not quite it," I'd tell Kevin as he mixed it. "It should be more fleshy."

"Fleshy?" he asked.

"Fleshy: grey-brown pinky. Sort of like flesh."

He got there in the end, after a day-or-so's experimenting.

"Not like any flesh I've seen," he grunted as he smeared it on.

That wasn't the end of it, though: when it dried it darkened, ending up a kind of silver brown. We had to backtrack and remix it so that it would turn out dry the colour that the last mix had when wet. Nor was that the end of it: we hadn't realized how difficult it would be to get plaster to crack the way we wanted it to.

"I mix plaster so it won't crack," Kevin sniffed.

"Well, do wrong what you usually do right, then," I said.

He mixed it much drier--but then cracks are sort of random: you can't second-guess which way they'll go. It took another day of experimenting: trying salt and razor blades and heat and all sorts of devices to get it to crack the right way. Kevin whistled the same tune for hours while he did this: a pop tune, one I thought I recognized. He didn't whistle the whole tune--just one bit of it, over and over.

"What is it?" I asked him after several hours of whistling and crack-forming, rubbing over and reforming.

"What's what?"

"That song."

"History Repeating," he said. "By the Propellerheads." He raised his eyebrows and his voice climbed as he half-sang and half-spoke the line that he'd been whistling: "'All, just-a, little, bit-of, history re-peat-ing.' See?" Then, stepping back, he asked: "How's that?"

"It's quite nice," I said. "I've heard it on the radio."

"No," Kevin said. "The crack."

"Oh! Quite good. Not quite sharp enough, though."

Kevin sighed and went at it again. Several hours later a scalpel dipped in a mix of TCP and varnish managed to cut and set it in the formation we wanted.

"Satisfied?" asked Kevin.

"Yes," I answered. "But there's still the blue and yellow patches to daub on."

"Not my job," Kevin said. "I'm out of here."
_______________________________________________

We didn't have much problem finding the right type of large taps for the bathtub--the problem was with making them look old. We had this problem often, as you might imagine: making things look old. The hallway had to be scuffed down with sandpaper and smeared with small amounts of grease-diluted tar. The banisters had to be blasted with vaporized ice to make them oxidize. And then the windows were too crisply transparent: the courtyard and the roofs didn't look right through them. I couldn't work out why at first, nor express what was wrong with them: I just kept telling my staff that the courtyard didn't look right.

"So what's not right about it?" asked the landscape gardener.

"Nothing's not right about it: it's the way it looks through these windows. Too crisp. That's not how I remembered it."

"Remembered it?" he asked.

"Whatever," I said, waving him away. Annie came over and looked. She solved it instantly:

"It's the type of glass," she said. "Not old enough."

Bingo. New glass is totally consistent, doesn't gloop and run and crimp the things you see through it like old glass does. We had all the panes removed and older ones brought in.
_______________________________________________

The fridge arrived the next day. We netted it not from the Sotheby's Americana auction that I mentioned earlier but from an auction site Naz had found on the internet. It looked just right--but its door slightly caught each time you opened it, just like Greg had said all fridge doors do outside of films.

"That sucks!" I said. "That really fucking sucks! You'd have thought that with all of their alleged craftsmanship" (they'd played this aspect of the fridge up on the website) "they could have made one whose door didn't catch like this. I mean, what's the whole point of doing all this if it's still going to catch?"

"What do you mean?" asked Annie.

"It…Just, well…" I said. "It bloody shouldn't!"

I sat down. I was really upset.

"Don't worry," said Annie. "It just needs new rubber."

Someone was dispatched to get new rubber. While we waited for that to arrive, we tested for the smell of liver frying. An extractor fan had been installed above the liver lady's stove, its out-funnel on the building's exterior turned towards the windows of my kitchen and my bathroom. Liver had been bought that day--pig's liver; but we found that frying just one panful didn't produce enough smell. Someone else was dispatched to buy more frying pans and a lot more liver. They cooked it in four frying pans at once. Annie and I waited in my flat.

"How's that?" she asked.

"It's great," I told her. "The spit and sizzle is exactly the right volume. There's just one thing not quite…"

"What?" she asked.

"The smell is kind of strange."

"Strange?" she repeated--then, into her cackling radio: "Wait a minute. Strange?"

"Yeah," I said. "Sort of strange. A bit like cordite."

"Cordite? I've never smelt cordite. You know what I think it is, though? It's that the pans are new."

"Bingo again," I told her. "That must be it."

The last two days were "sweep" days. I, Naz, Annie and Frank moved through the building sweeping it for errors: inconsistencies, omissions. We found so many that we thought we'd have to delay the whole thing. The recurring black-on-white floor pattern had continued through a bit of neutral space on the second floor; the door to the concierge's cupboard had been painted--things like that. Smaller details too: the tar-and-grease coat in the hallway, under the outmoded lights, had too much sheen; it was obvious that the putty holding the new old windows in place had been set only days ago; and so on. And then often fixing one thing just offset another. All the neighbours had been trained up by now and were practising their re-enacted gestures in situ--but then they'd disturb our carefully contrived arrangements as they moved around rehearsing. Crossed wires. One of Annie's people even misunderstood the word "sweep".

"What are you doing?" I asked when I found her literally sweeping down the staircase after we'd spent ages lightly peppering it with bus tickets and cigarette butts.

"I'm…" she said; "I thought you…"

"Annie!" I called up the stairwell.

Even after we'd got it all just right we did four more sweeps. We'd jump from one detail to another to see if we'd catch a mistake unawares. We'd move from the bottom to the top and down again, across the courtyard, up the façade of the facing building, back and up the staircase again, over and over and over.

"Feeling nervous?" Naz asked on the final day before the date we'd set to put the whole thing into action.

"Yes," I told him. I was feeling very nervous. I hadn't been sleeping well all week. I'd lie awake for half the night, running in my imagination through the events and actions that we were to go through in reality when the time came. I could run through them in a way that made them all work really well, or in a way that made them all mess up and be an abject failure. Sometimes I'd run the failure scenario and then the good one, to cancel the bad one out. At other times I'd be running the good one and the bad one would cut in and make me break out in a panicky sweat. This went on every night for a whole week: me, lying awake in my bed, sweating, nervously rehearsing in my mind re-enactments of events that hadn't happened but which, nonetheless, like the little bits of history in Kevin's pop song, were on the verge of being repeated.
_______________________________________________

I didn't know what to answer. Was it ready? Everything had seemed to be in place the evening before. Annie had been there all morning: she'd know better than me if it was ready. Or had she meant was I ready? I didn't know. How could you gauge these things? What standard would we have gauged them by? A slight ripple of dizziness ran through me, so I let these thoughts go. I smiled back at Annie weakly and we walked up the stone steps into the building.
_______________________________________________

I hung up again and walked over to my kitchen area. The plants rustled in their baskets as I passed them, just like I'd first remembered them rustling. I went over to the window. The cats were widely dispersed now, black against the red. I could see three of them: the fourth must have slunk off behind a chimney pot. I brushed past the kitchen unit's waist-high edge, the same way I'd remembered brushing past it when I'd first remembered the whole building--turning half sideways and then back again. My movement wasn't deft enough, though, and my shirt caught slightly on the corner as I passed--not violently, snagging, but still staying against the wood for half a second too long, hugging it too thickly. This wasn't right--wasn't how I remembered it: my memory was of passing it deftly, letting the shirt brush the woodwork lightly, almost imperceptibly, like a matador's cape tickling a bull's horns. I tried it again: this time my shirt didn't touch the woodwork at all. I tried it a third time: walking past the unit, turning sideways and then back again, trying to make my shirt brush fleetingly against the woodwork as I turned. This time I got the shirt bit right, but not the turning. It was difficult, this whole manoeuvre: I would need to practise.

I moved over to the fridge and pulled the door towards me. The door gave without resistance, opening in a smooth and seamless flow. I closed it, then pulled it towards me again. Again it opened smoothly. I did it a third time: again, faultless. Downstairs the pianist was coming out of a corrective loop, speeding up as he took off for new territory. I opened the fridge faultlessly once more, then closed it for the last time: I was ready to go.

I called Naz again.

"I'd like to leave my flat now," I told him. "I'll walk down past the liver lady's."

"Okay," Naz said. "Count thirty seconds from now and then leave your door. Exactly thirty seconds."

He hung up. I hung up too. I stood in the middle of my living-room floor, counting thirty seconds with my hands slightly raised, palms turned slightly outwards. Then I left my flat.

Moving across the landing and down the staircase, I felt like an astronaut taking his first steps--humanity's first steps--across the surface of a previously untouched planet. I'd walked over this stretch a hundred times before, of course--but it had been different then, just a floor: now it was fired up, silently zinging with significance. Held beneath a light coat of sandy dust within a solid gel of tar, the flecks of gold and silver in the granite seemed to emit a kind of charge, as invisible as natural radiation--and just as potent. The non-ferrous-metal banisters and the silk-black wooden rail above them glowed with a dark, unearthly energy that took up the floor's diminished sheen and multiplied its dark intensity. I turned the first corner, glancing through its window as I moved: light from the courtyard bent as it approached me; a long, thin kink travelled across the surface of the facing building, then shot off away to wrinkle more remote, outlying spaces. The red rooftiles were disappearing as I came down, eclipsed by their own underhang as the angle between us widened. Then I turned again and the whole façade revolved away from me.

I continued down the stairs. Sounds travelled to me--but these, too, were subject to anomalies of physics, to interference and distortion. The pianist's music ran, snagged and looped back on itself, first slowing down then speeding up. The static crackle of the liver broke across the orphaned signals cast adrift from radios and television sets. The Hoover moaned on, sucking matter up into its vacuum. I could hear the motorbike enthusiast clanging down in the courtyard, banging at a nut to loosen it. The clanging echoed off the facing building, the clangs reaching me as echoes almost coinciding with the clangs coming straight up from his banging--almost but not quite. I remembered seeing a boy once kicking a football against a wall, the distance between him and the wall setting up the same delay, the same near-overlap. I couldn't remember where, though.

I moved on down the staircase. As I came within four steps of the fifth-floor landing I heard the liver lady's locks jiggle and click. Then her door opened and she moved out slowly, holding a small rubbish bag. She was wearing a light-blue cardigan; her hair was wrapped up in a headscarf; a few white, wiry strands were sprouting from its edges, standing out above her forehead like thin, sculpted snakes. She shuffled forward in her doorway; then she stooped to set her bag down, holding her left hand to her back as she did this. She set the bag down carefully--then paused and, still stooped, turned her head to look up at me.

We'd spent ages practising this moment. I'd showed her exactly how to stoop: the inclination of the shoulders, the path slowly carved through the air by her right hand as it led the bag round her legs and down to the ground (I'd told her to picture the route supporting arms on old gramophone players take, first across and then down), the way her left hand rested on her lower back above the hip, the middle finger pointing straight at the ground. We'd got all this down to a t-- but we hadn't succeeded in working out the words she'd say to me. I'd racked my brains, but the exact line had never come, any more than the concierge's face had. Rather than forcing it--or, worse, just making any old phrase up--I'd decided to let her come up with a phrase. I'd told her not to concoct a sentence in advance, but rather to wait till the moment when I passed her on the staircase in the actual re-enactment--the moment we were in right now--and to voice the words that sprung to mind just then. She did this now. Still stooped, her face turned towards mine, she released her grip on the bag and said:

"Harder and harder to lift up."

I froze. Harder and harder to lift up, she'd said. I thought about this as I stood there facing her. Harder and harder to lift up. I liked it. It was very good. As she got older, her bag of rubbish was becoming harder and harder to lift up. She smiled at me, still slightly stooped. It felt just right: all just as I'd imagined it. I stood still, looking back at her, and said:

"Yes. Every time."

The words just came to me. I spoke them, then I moved on, turning into the next flight of stairs. For a few seconds I felt weightless--or at least differently weighted: light but dense at the same time. My body seemed to glide fluently and effortlessly through the atmosphere around it--gracefully, slowly, like a dancer through water. It felt very good. As I reached the third or fourth step of this new flight, though, this feeling dwindled. By the fifth or sixth one it was gone. I stopped and turned around. The liver lady's head was disappearing back into her flat and her hand was pulling the door to behind it.

"Wait!" I said.

The door stopped closing and the liver lady poked her head back out. She looked quite nervous. A noise came from behind her, inside the flat.

"That was excellent," I said. "I'd like to do it again."

The liver lady nodded.

"Okay, dear," she said.

"I'll start at the top of the first flight," I told her.

She nodded again, shuffled back out towards her rubbish bag, picked it up, then shuffled back into her flat again and closed the door. I started up the staircase--but before I'd reached the bend I heard her door open again behind me and a faster, heavier person step out onto the landing.

"Wait a minute," said a man's voice.

I turned round. It was one of Annie's people.

"What is it?" I asked.

"If you're going to start from the top of your own flight rather than back in your flat," he said, "how will she know when to open the door?"

I thought about this. It was a fair question. Annie appeared behind this man.

"What's the problem?" she asked.

I told her. She pondered it for a while, then said:

"We need someone to watch you and signal to us when the time comes to send her out. But no one can really do that without getting in the way themselves."

"The cat people!" I said.

"Of course!" said Annie.

The people who'd pushed the cats onto the facing building's roof would be able to see me from the top-floor windows of that building as I turned the staircase bend: there was a window there.

"They need to watch for me, and radio you when I'm on the--let's see: when did the door open?" I walked back to the step I'd been on when the liver lady's locks had clicked and jiggled. "The third one down," I said.

"I'm not directly linked to them," said Annie, holding up her radio. "We'll have to go through Naz."

She radioed him and the chain of communication was set up. The cat people would watch me from their building as I passed the window on the banister bend and, when I hit the third step of the next flight, give the order to open the door--this via Naz, who'd act as the join between the two parties from his office a few streets away. It took ten or so minutes to set this up. When all the links were in place, everyone apart from me went back into the liver lady's flat, her door was closed again and I walked back up the stairs to the top of the first flight.

I stood there for a while, rocking very slightly forwards and backwards on my planted feet. I felt the point of pressure shifting from my heels to my toes via the arched tendon in between, the plantar fascia, then back again, a three-part chain. I rocked slightly back then slightly forward several times, then headed down the stairs again.

This time I paused in front of the window by the first bend. I even leant against it, resting my forehead on the glass like I had one floor up on the day I'd found the building. I couldn't see the spotters in the facing building, the two cat men--but I knew they were there. If they'd been marksmen, snipers, they'd have had a clear shot at me right now. I slid both arms slightly up against the window pane. The tingling started in my right hip and seeped upwards, up my spine. I looked at the top branches of a tree below me in the courtyard: a light breeze was buffeting its leaves, making them dance.

I pulled my head away and made to move on down--but hesitated when I noticed a small patch of black moving quite fast against the facing building. It was gone so quickly that I thought it must have been another optical effect, a quirk of the kinked glass. I tried to reproduce it by pressing my forehead back onto the window pane and pulling it away again, but couldn't make the black patch reappear. I tried it several times without success. I hadn't imagined it, though: there'd been a streak of black moving fast against the facing building.

Eventually I gave up and moved on down. As I hit the third step I heard a buzz or scrape that came from behind the liver lady's door. It could have been a radio or it could have been her rubbish bag scraping the floor. An instant later came the jiggle of her latch; then the door opened and she shuffled out again, her rubbish bag in her hand. Once more she stooped to set her bag down, holding her left hand to her lower back as she did this; once more she looked up at me and pronounced her phrase:

"Harder and harder to lift up."

I answered her as before. Again I felt the sense of gliding, of light density. The moment I was in seemed to expand and become a pool--a still, clear pool that swallowed everything up in its calm contentedness. Again the feeling dwindled as I left the zone around her door. As soon as I'd reached the third step of the next flight I turned round, as before, and said:

"Again."

We did it again--but this time it didn't work. She'd steered the rubbish bag through its horizontal arc around her legs and, stooping, started to lower it to the ground when suddenly it slipped out of her hand and fell with a loud clunk. She bent over to pick it up but I stopped her.

"Don't bother," I said. "It's broken the…you know: it won't be right. Let's take it from the top again. Someone should clean that patch up, too."

Her bag had leaked from its bottom right corner, leaving a wet, sticky-looking patch on the floor. Someone came out and mopped this up.

"It looks too clean now," I said when they'd done this.

Annie came out again and looked.

"We'll have to dust and sand it again," she said.

"How long will that take?" I asked.

"A good hour till it looks just like it did before."

"An hour?" I repeated. "That's too…I need it to…"

My voice petered out. I was quite upset. I wanted to slip back into it now, right now: the pool, the lightness and the gliding. There was nothing I could do, though: it wouldn't be right if the floor wasn't the right texture. I gathered myself together and announced:

"Okay: do it. I'll move on."

I'd come back to the liver lady later. And besides, she was just part of the re-enactment: I had a lot still to do, a lot more space to cover.

I walked past the pianist's flat. The sound of his music grew crisper and sharper as I passed his door, then once again soft and floaty as I moved down from his floor. On the landing below his I passed the boring couple's flat. This is where the Hoover noise was coming from. The Hoover was being shunted back and forth across a carpet, by the sound of it. The wife re-enactor would be doing it. I moved on, through a patch of neutral space, down past the motorbike enthusiast's flat. His clangings were still coming from the courtyard, but with less of an echo now: maybe the trees and the swings were getting in the way down here. I carried on down to the lobby.

Here the sensation started returning: the same sense of zinging and intensity. My concierge was standing as instructed--standing quite still in the middle of the lobby with her white ice-hockey mask on. Behind her, to her left--my right--there was a cupboard; beside that, another strip of white, neutral space. As I walked around her in a circle, looking at her from all sides, her stumpy arms and featureless face seemed to emanate an almost toxic level of significance. I cocked my head to one side, then the other; I crouched to the ground and looked at her from there. She looked like a statue in a harbour, towering above the granite--or a spire, a reactor, a communications mast. Being this close to her I felt overexposed after a while--so I opened up her cupboard door and stepped inside.

Here were the broom, the mop and bucket and the industrial Hoover, all in the positions that I'd first remembered and then sketched them in. There was another object, too: a strangely shaped machine for cleaning granite floors. It hadn't come to me initially--but then when I'd found it stored in there one morning it hadn't seemed wrong, either, so I'd kept it. I stayed in the cupboard for a long time. In here it felt intimate, warm. I felt I'd burrowed to one of the innermost chambers of the vision I had realized all around me. It was a good position: well placed, with good sightlines. The cupboard door was slightly ajar: I looked out through its slit at the concierge standing in the lobby. She was standing with her back turned to me, the mask straps fastened at the back of her head. Her shoulders rose and fell as she breathed. The view I had of her was like a murderer's view--hidden, looking through a thin slit at her back.

After a while I stepped back out of the cupboard, crossed the strip of neutral space and came back to the bottom of the staircase. I was about to step into the garden when I heard the main door open behind me, the one that led onto the street. I turned round. A small boy had just walked in: he was one of the pianist's pupils, arriving for a lesson. He walked across the lobby, towards where the concierge was standing--then caught sight of me and hesitated. He must have been ten or eleven years old. On his back he wore a little satchel--one of Annie's props, that. He had straight, brown hair and freckles. We stood facing one another, me and him, completely still--three people completely still there in the lobby: myself, this small boy and the concierge. He looked frightened. I smiled at him and said:

"Just carry on. It will all be fine."

At this the small boy started moving again. He walked past me and started up the staircase. I looked at his satchel as he passed me, his scuffed leather shoes. I watched him walk up and away from me, turning and dwindling. He disappeared from view on the second floor and his footsteps stopped. I heard a muffled bell ring; then the piano music stopped too. I heard the pianist's chair being scraped back, then his footsteps heading for his door. I waited till the boy was safely in before I went out to the courtyard.

This was full of outdoor noises: distant cars and buses, trains and planes, the general subdued roar that air in cities has. Upstairs on the third floor the child started playing scales. These spilled out of the pianist's window but, not walled in like his own playing had been in the stairwell, dissipated in the summer air. I could see smoke piping from the vent outside the liver lady's kitchen almost directly above me. I could see my bathroom window sill but not the glass itself: the angle was too sharp. I looked down again. The motorbike enthusiast was three yards to my left. He had stopped banging at his bolt and was now turning it, unscrewing something. On the earth beneath the engine of his bike a patch of oil had formed: it looked kind of like a shadow, but more solid. I stood by his bike for a while, looking at the patch, then said:
   
"Leave that there when you've finished."

"Leave what?" he asked, looking up at me and slightly squinting.

"Leave that patch," I said.

"How leave it?" he asked.

"Don't let it be smudged or covered over. I might want to capture it later."

"Capture it?" he asked.

"Whatever," I said. "Just don't let it get wiped out. Understand?"

"Yes," he said. "Okay."

I left him and walked over to the swings. It wasn't his business to make me explain what I meant by "capture". It meant whatever I wanted it to mean: I was paying him to do what I said. Prick. I did want to capture it, though: its shape, its shade. These were important, and I didn't want to lose them. I thought of going back up to my flat to get a piece of paper onto which to transcribe the patch, but decided to do it later, when he wasn't there. If it rained, though…I sat down on one of the swings and looked up at the sky. It didn't look like rain: it was blue with the odd billowing cloud. I slid off the swing after a while, pushed it so it continued swinging to and fro and lay on my back beneath it, watching it swing above my head against the sky. The billowing clouds were moving slowly and the swing was moving fast. The blue was still--but two high-up aeroplanes were slicing it into segments with their vapour trails, like Naz and I had done to the city with our pins and threads. Lying on my back, I let my arms slide slightly over the grass away from my sides, turned my palms upwards till the tingling sensation crept through my body again. I lay there for a very long time, tingling, looking at the sky…

Later that evening I was lying in my bath, soaking, gazing at the crack. The pianist's last pupil had gone, and he'd started composing, playing a phrase then stopping for a long time before playing it again with a new half-phrase tagged onto the end. Liver was crackling and sizzling downstairs. I could smell it. It still wasn't quite right--still had that slightly acrid edge, like cordite. I brought that up again with Naz when we spoke after my bath.

"We'll try to get that right," he told me. "Apart from that, though, how did you think it went?"

"It went…well, it went…" I started. I didn't know what to tell him.

"Was it a success, in your opinion?" he asked.

Had it been a success? Difficult question. Some things had worked, and some things hadn't. My shirt had slightly caught against the cutting board, but then the fridge had opened perfectly. The liver lady had come up with that fantastic line but then dropped her rubbish bag when she'd tried to re-enact her movements for a third time. Then there was the question of the smell, of course. But had it been a success? A success at what? Had I expected all my movements to be seamless and perfect instantly? Of course not. Had I expected the detour through understanding that I'd had to take in order to do anything for the last year--for my whole life--to be bypassed straight away: just cut off, a redundant nerve, an isolated oxbow lake that would evaporate? No: that would take work--a lot of work. But today my movements had been different. Felt different. My mind too, my whole consciousness. Different, better. It was…

"It was a beginning," I told Naz.

"A beginning?" he repeated.

"Yes," I said. "A very good beginning."

That night, I dreamt that I and all my staff--Naz, Annie, Frank, the liver lady and the pianist and the motorbike enthusiast and concierge and piano pupil, plus all Naz's, Frank's and Annie's people, the coordinators lurking behind doors, the spotters in the facing building and their back-up people too--I dreamt that all of us had linked ourselves together: physically, arm in arm and standing on each other's shoulders like a troupe of circus acrobats. We'd linked ourselves together in this way in the formation of an aeroplane. It was an early, primitive plane: a biplane, of the type an early aviator might have used for a record-setting transatlantic flight.

We'd taken off in this formation and were flying above my building and the streets around it. We could look down as we flew and see the courtyard with its trees and swings, its patch of oil beneath the engine of the motorbike. We could see ourselves, our re-enacted doubles, in the courtyard too: the motorbike enthusiast, banging and unscrewing; myself, lying beneath the swings. We could see the cats slinking around the red roofs. If we banked north and glided for a while we could see Naz's building with its blue-and-white exterior, the aerials on its roof. Through its top windows we could see doubles of Naz's office team coordinating events in my building. We could see these events too, through walls which had become transparent: the liver lady laying her bag down, talking to me as I passed her, the pianist practising his Rachmaninov, the concierge, the pupil--the whole lot.

We banked again and saw the sports track with its white and red and yellow markings. There were athletes running around this, just like there had been in my coma. I was commentating again. Everything was running smoothly, happily, until I noticed, lying beside the goalposts, these old, greasy escalator parts--the same ones that I'd seen laid out at Green Park Station. As soon as I saw them the whole thing went out of kilter: events in my building, Naz's people, the athletes and the commentary--the lot. Athletes tripped over, crashing into one another; my flow of words faltered and dried up; the liver lady's rubbish bag broke, scattering putrid, mouldy lumps of uneaten liver all over the courtyard; the swings' chains snapped; black cats shrieked and chased their tails. And then our plane--the plane that we'd formed from the interlinking of our bodies: it was stalling, nose-diving towards the ground, whose surface area was crumpling like old tin…

Just before the crash I woke up cold with sweat to the unpleasant smell of congealed fat.
_______________________________________________

A more serious problem was the pianist. This one did upset me, plenty: I caught him out red-handed one day, blatantly defrauding me. I'd spent an afternoon concentrating on the lower sections of the staircase, studying the way light fell from the large windows onto the patterned floor. The floor had a repetitive pattern, as I mentioned earlier: when sunlight shone on it directly, which it did on the second floor for three hours and fourteen minutes each day, it filled the corridors of white between the pattern's straight black lines like water flooding a maze in slow motion. I'd already observed this happening on the top floors, but was working on the lower floors now. I'd noticed that the light seemed deeper down here--more dense and less flighty. Higher up it had more dust specks in it: these were borne upwards by the warm air in the stairwell; when they reached the top floors they hung around like small stars in massive galaxies, hardly moving at all, and this made the air seem lighter.

So anyway, I was lying on the floor observing this phenomenon--speculating, you might say--while the piano music looped and repeated in the background when I saw the pianist walk up the stairs towards me.
   
This, of course, was physically impossible: I was listening to him practising his Rachmaninov two floors above me at this very moment. But impossible or not, there he was, walking up the stairs towards me. As soon as he caught sight of me he jolted to a standstill, then started to turn--but it was too late: he knew the game was up. He became static again. His eyes scampered half-heartedly around the floor's maze as though looking for a way out of the quandary he found himself in while at the same time knowing that they wouldn't find one; the bald crown of his head went even whiter than it usually was. He mumbled:

"Hello."

"What are you…" I started, but I couldn't finish the sentence. A wave of dizziness was sweeping over me. The piano music was still spilling from his flat into the sunlit stairwell.

"I had an audition," he murmured.

"Then who…" I asked.

"Recording," he said, his eyes still moping at the floor.

"But there are mistakes in it!" I said. "And loopbacks, and…"

"A recording of me. I made it myself, especially. It's the same thing, more or less. Isn't it?"

It was my turn to go white now. There were no mirrors in the building, but I'm sure that if there had been and I'd looked in one I would have seen myself completely white: white with both rage and dizziness.

"No!" I shouted. "No, it is not! It is just absolutely not the same thing!"

"Why not?" he asked. His voice was still monotonous and flat but was shaking a little.

"Because…It absolutely isn't! It's just not the same because…It's not the same at all." I was shouting as loud as I could, and yet my voice was coming out broken and faint. I could hardly breathe. I'd been lying on my side when he came up the stairs towards me, and had only half-risen--a reclining posture, like those dying Roman emperors in paintings. I tried to stand up now but couldn't. Panic welled up inside me. I tried to be formal. I forced a deep breath into my lungs and said:

"I shall pursue this matter via Naz. You may go now. I should prefer to be alone."

He turned around and left. I made straight for my flat. No sooner had I got there than I threw up. I lurched into the bathroom and stood holding the sink for a long, long time after I'd finished puking. When I could, I raised my eyes up to the crack; this oriented me again, stopped me feeling dizzy. The building was on my side, even if this bad man wasn't. When I felt well enough to move, I went into the living room, sat down on my sofa and phoned Naz.

"It's totally unacceptable!" I told him after I'd explained what had just happened. "Completely totally!"

"Shall I fire him?" asked Naz.

"Yes!" I said. "No! No, don't fire him. He's perfect--in the way he looks, I mean. And in the way he plays. Even the way he speaks: that vacant monotone. But give him hell! Really bad! Hurt him! Metaphorically, I mean, I suppose. He has to understand that what he's done just won't fly any more. Make him understand that!"

"I'll talk to him immediately," Naz said.

"Where are you now?" I asked him.

"I'm in my office," he said. "I'll come over. Can I bring you anything?"

"Some water," I said. "Sparkling."

I hung up--then phoned him back straight away.

"Find out how often he's pulled this one, when you talk to him," I said.

Naz turned up with the water after half an hour. Apparently the pianist was sorry: he hadn't realized how vital it was that he should actually be playing the whole time. He'd only used the cassette two times before, when he'd needed to do something else, and…

"Something else?" I interrupted. "I don't pay him to do other stuff! Three times, no less!"

"He's agreed not to do it again," Naz said.

"He's agreed, has he? That's nice of him. Shall we give him a raise?"

Naz smiled. "Shall I stick a surveillance camera on him?" he asked.

"No," I said. "No cameras. Find some other way of making sure he's doing it properly, though."

The thing behind Naz's eyes whirred for a while and then he nodded.

It wasn't unreasonable to expect this guy to play when he'd been paid to play--been paid enormous amounts of money, at that. And the hours weren't that bad: I generally put the building into on mode for between six and eight hours each day--mostly in stretches of two hours. Sometimes there'd be a five-hour stretch. Once I went right through a night and half the next day. That was my prerogative, though: it had been written in the contracts that all re-enactors and all back-up staff had signed--written right there in big print for them to read.

I moved through the spaces of my building and its courtyard as I saw fit, just like I'd told Naz I would when we'd first met. I roamed around it as my inclination led me. On some days I felt like gathering data: sketching, measuring, transcribing. So I'd copy the patch of oil beneath the motorbike, say--how it elongated, how its edges rippled--then take the drawing over to Naz's office, have it photocopied several times, then stick the copies in a line across my living room wall, rotating the patch's formation through three-sixty. I captured lots of places this way: corners, angles against walls, bits of banister. Sometimes instead of sketching them I'd press a piece of paper up against them and rub it around so that their surface left a mark, a smear. Or I measured the amount of time it took the sunlight to first flood and then drain from each floor in the afternoon, or how long it would take for the swings, if pushed with such and such a strength, to come to a complete standstill.

At other times I lost all sense of measure, distance, time, and just lay watching dust float or swings swing or cats lounge. Some days I didn't even leave my flat: instead, I sat in my living room or lay in my bath gazing at the crack. I'd keep the building in on mode while I did this: the pianist had to play--really play--and the motorbike enthusiast hammer and bang; the concierge had to stand down in the lobby in her ice-hockey mask, the liver lady fry her liver--but I wouldn't move around and visit them. Knowing they were there, in on mode, was enough. I'd lie there in my bath for hours and hours on end, half-floating while the crack on the wall jutted and meandered, hazy behind moving wisps of steam.

I worked hard on certain actions, certain gestures. Brushing past my kitchen unit, for example. I hadn't been satisfied with the way that had gone on the first day. I hadn't moved past it properly, and my shirt had dragged across its edge for too long. The shirt was supposed to brush the woodwork--kiss it, no more. It was all in the way I half-turned so that I was sideways as I passed it. A pretty difficult manoeuvre: I ran through it again and again--at half-speed, quarter-speed, almost no speed at all, working out how each muscle had to act, each ball and socket turn. I thought of bull-fighting again, then cricket: how the batsman, when he chooses not to play the ball, steps right into its path and lets it whistle past his arched flank millimetres from his chest, even letting it flick the loose folds of his shirt as it shoots by. I put the building into off mode for a whole day while I practised the manoeuvre: striding, half-turning as I rose to my toes, letting my shirt brush against it--grazing it like a hovercraft does water--then turning square again as I came down. Then I tried it for real the next day, with the building in on mode. After the two days I had three separate bruises on my side--but it was worth it for the fluent, gliding feeling I got the few times it worked: the immersion, the contentedness.

I worked hard on my exchange with the liver lady too. Not that anything--dropped bag apart--had been wrong with it on the first day we'd done it: I just felt like doing it again and again and again. Hundreds of times. More. No one counted--I didn't, at any rate. I'd break the sequence down to its constituent parts--the changing angle of her headscarf and her stooped back's inclination as I moved between two steps, the swivel of her neck as her head turned to face me--and lose myself in them. One day we spent a whole morning going back and back and back over the moment at which her face switched from addressing me with the last word of her phrase, the up, to cutting off eye contact, turning away and leading first her shoulders then eventually her whole body back into her flat. Another afternoon we concentrated on the instant at which her rubbish bag slouched into the granite of the floor, its shape changing as its contents, no longer suspended in space by her arm, rearranged themselves into a state of rest. I laid out the constituent parts of the whole sequence and relished each of them, then put them back together and relished the whole--then took them apart again.

One day, as I stood by my kitchen window looking down into the courtyard, I had an idea. I phoned Naz to tell him:

"I should like," I said, "a model of the building."

"A model?"

"Yes, a model: a scale model. Get Roger to make it." Roger was our architect. "You know when you go into public buildings' lobbies when they're being developed and you see those little models showing how it'll all look when it's finished…"

"Ah yes, I see," Naz said. "I'll get on to him."

Roger delivered the model to me a day and a half later. It was brilliant. It was about three feet high and four wide. It showed the courtyard and the facing building and even the sports track. There were little figures in it: the motorbike enthusiast next to his bike, the pianist with his bald pate, the liver lady with her headscarf and her snaky strands of hair, the concierge with her stubby arms and white mask. He'd even made a miniscule mop and Hoover for her cupboard. You could see all these because he'd made several of the walls and floors from see-through plastic. On the ones that weren't see-through he'd filled in the details: light switches and doorknobs, the repeating pattern on the floor. The stretches of neutral space he'd made white. Sections of wall and roof came off too, so you could reach inside. As soon as Roger had left my flat I called Naz.

"Give him a big bonus," I said.

"How much?" Naz asked.

"Oh, you know: big," I told him. "And Naz?"

"Yes?"

"I'd like you to…Let's see…"

The figures of the characters were moveable. I'd picked up the liver lady one while talking and was making it bobble down the stairs and out into the courtyard.

"I'd like you to get the liver lady to go down the stairs and visit the motorbike enthusiast."

"Now?" he asked.

"Now," I said, "yes."

Two minutes later I was standing at my window watching her--the real liver lady--shuffling out into the courtyard. I dragged Roger's model over to the window so I could see both it and the courtyard at the same time. I picked up the motorbike enthusiast figure and placed him on one of the swings.

"Now," I told Naz, "I'd like the motorbike enthusiast to go sit on the swing closest to him."

Not half a minute later I saw the real motorbike enthusiast look up towards my building's doorway. He was talking to someone; I couldn't hear what was being said because the pianist was playing his Rachmaninov--but then I didn't need to. The motorbike enthusiast looked up towards my window, then rose to his feet, walked over to the swing and sat on it.

"I'd prefer him to kneel on it," I told Naz.

"Kneel?"

"Yes: kneel rather than sit. He should kneel in exactly the same position as he kneels beside his bike in."

The figure had been cast in that position. Its limbs didn't move. A few more seconds, and the real motorbike enthusiast changed his position on the swing so he had one knee on the seat.

"And now…" I said. "The pianist! He can go and watch."

I made the pianist figure do just that: cross over to his window and peer out. Seconds later the piano music stopped below me; then the sound of a chair being pushed back, then footsteps--then his real bald pate popped out of his real window. I lifted the model up and rested it against the window sill so I could look down on the model's head poking out at the same time as I looked at the real one. The distance made them both look the same size.

Before I sent them all back to their posts, I had the motorbike enthusiast give the swing a hard push. As he did this I did the same thing to the model swing. I watched them both swing. The model swing swung about two and a half times for each time the real swing swung. It also stopped before the real one did. I stayed at my window for a long time, watching the diminishing movements of the real swing. I remembered wind-up musical toys, Fisher Price ones, how they slow down as their mechanism unwinds right out to its end, until it seems that no more music will come from them--but then if you nudge them just a little, they always give one last half-chime, and another half-half-chime, and still more, less and less each time, for up to hours--or weeks--after they first ground to a halt.

The next day I placed my model on my living-room floor. I moved the figures around once more and issued instructions down the phone to Naz as I did this--only today I didn't go and look. Just knowing it was happening was enough. I had the concierge pick up the liver lady's rubbish bag, the motorbike enthusiast kneel in the lobby for two hours, the pianist sit on the closed lid of his piano facing his window for another two--and all the while, as they did this for real, I sat in the same spot on my living-room floor. The day after that I lay beside the model looking at it from the same angle as the sun did. My gaze burst in through the upper staircase window and flooded the floor's patterned maze, then slowly--very slowly, almost imperceptibly--glazed, lost its focus, darkened and retreated, disappearing from the furthest edge of floor four hours and seven minutes after it had first entered. I did this for each floor I'd previously measured: four hours and seven minutes for the top down to three hours and fourteen minutes for the second.

I only left the building--the whole re-enactment area, I mean: the building and the courtyard and the stretch of streets between there and Naz's office, with its bridge and sports track--twice during the next month. The first time was to go shopping. I'd been having all that done for me, but one day I got an urge to go and check up on the outside world myself. Nothing much to report. The second time was when I noticed that my old, dented Fiesta which was parked beside the sports track had a flat tyre. I hadn't driven it in months, and didn't plan to any time soon--but when I saw the flat tyre I remembered the tyre place beside my old flat: the one I'd paused beside the day the Settlement came through, uncertain whether to go home or press on to the airport.

As soon as I'd remembered it, I started seeing the tyre shop clearly in my mind: its front windows, the pavement where its sign stood, the café next to it. I remembered that a garish model baked-beans tin was mounted on the café's roof beside a pile of tyres. More tyres had been lined up on the street outside, parked upright in a rack. As these details came back to me, the whole place--which when I'd lived beside it had seemed to me so mundane that I'd barely even noticed it--took on the air of something interesting. Intrigued, I decided to visit it. I borrowed some tools from the motorbike enthusiast, replaced the flat tyre with the spare one and then drove back to where I used to live to have the flat one fixed.

The place didn't seem to have changed since I'd last seen it. It still had tyres lined up in a rack on the street outside and more tyres piled up on its roof beside the large-scale garish model baked-beans tin that advertised the next door café. The tyres were normal tyres, real ones, and looked miniature next to the giant tin, like toys. More tyres were leaning in stacks against the shop front, like you see at go-kart tracks. Behind these, painted announcements advertised special deals on tyres both new and part-worn or free fitting. On the pavement outside, a small rectangular contraption stood upright: a waist-high board skewered by a pole set into a heavy base. In the breeze the board span quickly round the pole, flashing two messages at passers-by in quick succession. Both messages said "TYRES".

There was a more elaborate advertisement swaying around on the pavement a few feet away: a child dressed in a Michelin Man suit. The suit gave him an obese white tyre-girth that swayed as he moved. He was maybe ten, eleven. I could tell it was a boy because he wasn't wearing the suit's head. Two older boys had this: these two were standing by the tyre shop's entrance, kicking the head to one another like a football. As I pulled up they stopped kicking it and sauntered over to my car. They looked at my tyres very earnestly, craning their necks in an exaggerated way--imitating their parents, doubtless, or whoever it was that owned this shop.

I stepped out of the car. "You've got a dent," the oldest boy said. He must have been fifteen.

"I know that," I told him. "That's not why I'm here. I'm here because I've got a flat tyre."

The slightly younger boy who'd been kicking the head with him had moved round the car to check the tyres on the passenger side.

"It's in the boot," I told them.

I walked round to the back of the car and opened it up. The two boys peered inside, like gangsters in movies--in those scenes where the gangsters open up a car boot in which they've stashed a body or a cache of guns. These boys were thinking of those scenes too as I opened up the boot for them: I could tell. They peered in; then the oldest one reached in and lifted the tyre out. The younger tried to help him, but he brushed his hand aside. The youngest one, the one in the Michelin Man suit, had waddled over and tried to join in, but the middling one shoved him away again.

"You're meant to stand out in the street!" he told him, raising his voice.

"You're not in charge of me!" the youngest one shouted back.

"Shut up, both of you!" the oldest told them.

The middling one looked down. His face flushed red with hurt. The youngest one swaggered triumphantly beside him in his suit. The oldest boy carried the tyre into the shop. I followed him. The middling boy slouched in behind me but stayed in the doorway, keeping the youngest out. There was no one else in the shop.

"Where are the real people?" I asked.

"I'm real," the oldest boy said. He looked offended.

"You know…the…the owners," I said.

"Off to lunch," he answered.

"Café next door," added the middling one.

"Well, I could come back when…" I began--but stopped because the oldest boy had dunked my tyre into a tub of water and was slowly turning it round. He seemed to know what he was doing. He stared into the murky water, his eyes taut with concentration. I stared too: it was absorbing, watching the tyre's bottom edge entering the water and slowly revolving. After a few seconds the boy stopped turning it and pointed:

"There's your puncture," he said.

I followed his finger with my eye. Bubbles of air were rising from a silvery slit on the rubber's surface. It was like mineral water, only dirty.

"Will they be able to fix it?" I asked. "When they come back, I mean."

"I can fix it," said the boy.

He hoisted the tyre out of the water and carried it over to a kind of lathe. The tyre was pretty big in proportion to him: he had to half-support it with his knee. Black grime was rubbing off it onto his clothes, which were already smeared with grime all over. He sat down at the lathe and pressed a pedal with his foot, which made a series of clamps tighten round the tyre. Then his foot pressed another pedal and the tyre deflated with a bang. He started daubing glue on from a tin. His hand moved quickly as he did this, dipping and daubing, flashing the brush one way then another. The exaggerated manner he'd had when he sauntered over to the car was gone, eclipsed now by his earnest concentration, his artisanal skill. The middling boy watched him from a few feet away. The youngest boy watched too. The eyes of both of them were full of admiration--longing, almost--as they watched him flick the brush.

He pressed a pedal with his foot; the lathe revolved a quarter-turn between his hands, and he brushed an adjoining spot with glue. He pressed another pedal, and the wheel turned back for him to brush the spot on the other side of the puncture. When he'd brushed all he wanted, he dipped his hand into the tub again, scooped up some water and patted this on the tyre while the three of us stood still, reverent as a congregation at a christening, watching him at his font.

Effortlessly the boy's hand rose and flipped a lever at the lathe's side. The lathe hissed as its clamps released my wheel and glided back. The same hand reached up to beside his shoulder to take hold of a blue tube. The tube was hanging just beyond his field of vision, but the hand didn't need help: it knew just where it was. Its fingers jabbed the tube into my tyre and its thumb depressed a catch; air started flowing into it. A minute later the tyre was mended, inflated and rolling across the tarmac back towards my car. He took it to the boot again and lifted it back in.

"Shouldn't we put it back on?" I asked. "Drive on it, I mean?"

"No. Keep it as a spare," he said. "You should rotate them."

"Rotate, yes," I said. "Okay."

He could have told me anything and I'd have said "Okay". I stood there looking at him for a while longer. We all did. A truce seemed to exist now between the other two boys. After a while I asked him:

"Shall I pay you, then, or…"

"Yes. Pay me," he said. "Ten pounds."

I paid him ten pounds. I remembered that my windscreen washer reservoir was empty and I asked him for some fill-up. He glanced at the middling boy and slightly raised his chin; the middling boy ran into the shop and came out with a litre of blue liquid which he and the youngest boy poured into the windscreen washer reservoir for me, operating in sync together now, the youngest one holding the lid off while the middling one poured, then passing the lid over for the middling one to screw on while he, the youngest one, carried the empty bottle over to a bin. They closed the bonnet for me and I got back into my car.

Before I drove off I pushed the windscreen spurter button to make sure it worked. Liquid should have squirted out onto the glass, but nothing happened. I pushed it some more. Still nothing. I got out, opened the bonnet again and checked the reservoir. It was empty.

"It's all gone!" I said.

The boys peered in. The oldest one got down on his knees and looked under the car.

"There's no patch," he said. "It hasn't leaked. It should be there." He turned to the middling boy and said: "Go get another bottle."

Another bottle was brought out and poured into the reservoir. Once more I climbed inside the car and pressed the spurter button. Once more nothing happened--and once more, when we looked inside the reservoir, we found it empty.

"Two litres!" I said. "Where has it all gone?"

They'd vaporized, evaporated. And do you know what? It felt wonderful. Don't ask me why: it just did. It was as though I'd just witnessed a miracle: matter--these two litres of liquid--becoming un-matter--not surplus matter, mess or clutter, but pure, bodiless blueness. Transubstantiated. I looked up at the sky: it was blue and endless. I looked back at the boy. His overalls and face were covered in smears. He'd taken on these smears so that the miracle could happen, like a Christian martyr being flagellated, crucified, scrawled over with stigmata. I felt elated--elated and inspired.

"If only…" I started, but paused.

"What?" he asked.

"If only everything could…"

I trailed off again. I knew what I meant. I stood there looking at his grubby face and told him:

"Thank you."

Then I got into the car and turned the ignition key in its slot. The engine caught--and as it did, a torrent of blue liquid burst out of the dashboard and cascaded down. It gushed from the radio, the heating panel, the hazard-lights switch and the speedometer and mileage counter. It gushed all over me: my shirt, my legs, my groin.
_______________________________________________

When I got there, I took off my wet clothes and had a bath. I lay in my bath looking at the crack and thinking about what had happened. It was something very sad--not in the normal sense but on a grander scale, the scale that really big events are measured in, like centuries of history or the death of stars: very, very sad. A miracle seemed to have taken place, a miracle of transubstantiation--in contravention of the very laws of physics, laws that make swings stop swinging and fridge doors catch and large, unsuspended objects fall out of the sky. This miracle, this triumph over matter, seemed to have occurred, then turned out not to have done at all--to have failed utterly, spectacularly, its watery debris crashing down to earth, turning the scene of a triumphant launch into the scene of a disaster, a catastrophe. Yes, it was very sad.
_______________________________________________

When the sticky blue liquid exploded, I'd meant to leave my box and go down to the car to watch, but found myself fixated where I stood. I could see the re-enactor playing me splattered in the driving seat: his legs spread, his arms raised beside the wheel, his body powerless as the two litres descended on it. The mixed sensation grew still stronger, and I was riveted to my spot on the platform. I made it down the second time round, when the sensation had subsided. This time I stood beside the car and watched the liquid gush out. Frank and Annie had created a whole mini plumbing system in the car, that siphoned the blue liquid off into a sack which was triggered to rupture when the engine was turned on a second time. It wasn't gushing out quite right, but it was complicated. It took two more run-throughs to tweak that bit. There were other minor hitches: the air in the blue tube hadn't been set at the right pressure; the spare tyre wasn't dirty enough to stain the boy's overalls adequately--pretty minor things. On the whole it went well--very well.

The first team ran through it six times. Each run-through took twenty minutes, give or take a minute either side, plus a change-over of six or so minutes. I didn't mind the change-over: I kind of liked the pause, the hovering as the sequence clocked itself, ran through the zero, started again. The first team did it for three hours, then the second team took over. I watched them do it six times too, then watched the third team do it twice. In the small hours of the morning I decided to leave.

"Shall I tell them to stop?" Naz asked me as I put my jacket on.

"No," I said. "Absolutely not. They should continue. When they've done three hours replace them with the third team. Keep rotating them."

"For how long?" he asked.

"Indefinitely," I said. "Round the clock. And Naz?"

"Yes?"

"When you leave here yourself, have someone you trust stay and supervise, so no one does a pianist on us."

"But he won't be able to supervise it indefinitely," Naz said.

A good point. I thought about it for a moment, then told him:

"So select several people, and have them work in shifts just like the re-enactors. Rotate them as well."

I went back five times over the next two weeks to watch the liquid blue explosion and the events leading up to it being re-enacted. In some of the sessions I was pretty analytical, concentrating on several things simultaneously. They were short enough to do that. So three minutes in I'd pay particular attention to what happened just after the oldest boy pushed aside the middling boy's hand--how the middling boy turned aside to confront the youngest one. Or I'd watch for the car's route. Its tyres left markings on the warehouse floor; as the sequence was repeated it drove back over its own tracks--sometimes slightly to the left or right, sometimes more or less exactly covering a previous set. On my third visit I had an idea:

"I'd like the car's route to be changed," I told the driver re-enactor.

"How do you mean?" he asked. He looked very tired.

"Instead of reversing out this way when you go to take up your position at the end of every sequence," I said, "I want you to drive the car on forwards, and turn round, and leave along there, and then turn round the other way to come back in."

"So I'd be doing a figure of eight?" he asked.

"Exactly," I said.

The change was implemented. Over the following hours and days the car deposited across the floor an eight--a thick black line of run-together turrets and plateaux out of whose edges individuated lines and corners slightly rose, records of the wildest routes. Just to the right of this a large, sticky patch made by the repeated gushing of hundreds of litres of blue liquid stained the floor. I sketched small parts of line and patch in detail, and pressed sheets of paper straight onto them to make prints, which I then stuck to the walls of my flat. If I stared at them for long enough they took on shapes: birds, buildings or the interlocked sections of space stations--and my whole mood would slide from analytical to dreamy. The same slide happened at the re-enactment scene itself. One minute I'd be really concentrating on an aspect of the sequence and the next I'd let the movements mesmerize me, like a bird charmed by a snake: the Fiesta slowly rolling through its well-worn eight, the tyre floating on the boy's knee to the workshop, his hand pushing the hand of the other boy away, the gliding clamps, the gushing blue--monotonous, hypnotic, endlessly repeating.

In these moments the episode's sounds took on the aspect of a lullaby. The re-enactors' voices echoed off the corrugated ceiling; above this, low-flying aeroplanes passed by, whistling and groaning as they left for or arrived from who knows where. The exploding liquid made a rushing, then a trickling sound. The fan hummed from before the beginning of each run-through to after the end. Other sounds emerged from the scene's edges, from beneath its surfaces--sounds hidden in the enclave where the scraping of the middling boy's foot met the rustle of the youngest one's Michelin Man suit, or where the gush of liquid met the roof's vibrations. Occasionally these sounds seemed to become voices, speaking words and phrases I never quite managed to make out.

I spent a lot of time there, watching. I also spent a lot of time sitting in my living room staring at the sketches and prints, or lying in my bath thinking about the re-enactment, knowing that it was continuing, constantly, on a loop. Sometimes I really concentrated on each moment, each manoeuvre; but sometimes I thought of other matters altogether. For a couple of days I returned to the study of my building, keeping the whole place in on mode for two ten-hour stretches with only two hours' break between them. Then I drove back out to Heathrow and watched the tyre sequence through fifteen times.

On this particular day I requested another change to be implemented. I called Frank and Annie out to the warehouse and asked them:

"Is there any way that you could make the blue liquid not gush out?"

"Well, of course," said Frank. "We just don't make it gush. We de-activate the trigger."

"Yes, but then the liquid would stay in the reservoir, right?" I said.

He nodded yes. I told him:

"That's no good. I want it so that it disappears from the reservoir, then doesn't reappear again. Just disappears."

Annie and Frank looked at one another. Then Annie said, sheepishly:

"But that's impossible."

"I know," I said, "but that's the…I mean, isn't there some way you could make it happen?"

There was another pause, then Frank replied:

"Not really, no."

"I want it to go up," I said, "even if it's harder--hard, I mean. Disappear upwards. Become sky."

They both thought about this for a while. Then Frank said:

"We could make the liquid travel upwards. In a tube, for example. We could lead a tube up from the holding tank towards the ceiling. We could even feed it through the roof and have it all sprayed upwards in a fine mist. But that's…"

"I like that," I said. "Try it. Try some other things along those lines too. See what you can come up with."
_______________________________________________

FORENSIC PROCEDURE is an art form, nothing less. No, I'll go further: it's higher, more refined, than any art form. Why? Because it's real. Take just one aspect of it--say the diagrams: with all their outlines, arrows and shaded blocks they look like abstract paintings, avant-garde ones from the last century--dances of shapes and flows as delicate and skilful as the markings on butterflies' wings. But they're not abstract at all. They're records of atrocities. Each line, each figure, every angle--the ink itself vibrates with an almost intolerable violence, darkly screaming from the silence of white paper: something has happened here, someone has died.

"It's just like cricket," I told Naz one day.

"In what sense?" he asked.

"Each time the ball's been past," I said, "and the white lines are still zinging where it hit, and the seam's left a mark, and…"

"I don't follow," he said.

"It…well, it just is," I told him. "Each ball is like a crime, a murder. And then they do it again, and again and again, and the commentator has to commentate, or he'll die too."

"He'll die?" Naz asked. "Why?"

"He…whatever," I said. "I've got to get out here."

We were in a taxi going past King's Cross. Naz was on his way to meet someone who knew a policeman working in forensics. I was going to the British Library to read about forensic procedure. I'd done this for days now, while I waited for Naz to lay the ground for the re-enactment of this black man's death. I think I'd have gone mad otherwise, so strong was my compulsion to re-enact it. We couldn't re-enact it properly until we'd got our hands on the report about it--the report written by the police forensic team who were dealing with the case. Naz trawled through all the contacts in his database to try to find a way of getting access to this and, while he did, I staved off my hunger for it by devouring every book about forensics I could find.

I read textbooks for students, general introductions meant for members of the public, papers delivered by experts at top-level conferences. I read the handbook every professional forensic investigator in the country has to learn by rote, and learnt it by rote too. It was laid out in paragraphs headed by numbers, then by capital letters, then by roman numerals, then by lower-case letters as they indented further and further from the left-hand margin. Each indentation corresponded to a step or half-step in the chain of actions you must follow when you conduct a forensic search. The whole process is extremely formal: you don't just go ahead and do it--you do it slowly, breaking down your movements into phases that have sections and sub-sections, each one governed by rigorous rules. You even wear special suits when you do it, like Japanese people wearing kimonos as they perform the tea ceremony.

Patterns are important. You move through the crime area in a particular pattern that the head investigator chooses in advance. It could be that he tells you to move forward in straight lanes, like competition swimmers. Or he might cut up the area by laying a grid across it and assigning each investigator one of the grid's zones. Or he might order a spiral search. Me, if I were a head investigator, I'd plump for a figure of eight, and have each of my people crawl round the same area in an endlessly repeating circuit, unearthing the same evidence, the same prints, marks and tracings again and again and again, recording them as though afresh each time.

Patterns are everywhere in forensic investigations. Investigators have to find and recognize the imprints made by, for example, trainers, fingers and tyres. So with tyres you get ribbed patterns, with two pairs of jagged lines; you get aggressive ribbed ones--the same as ribbed but with prongs sticking from the corners of the lines; then you get cross bar--hexagonal blocks with inverted vs in them (my Fiesta's tyres were cross bar); directional--a brick pattern, like two adjoining walls seen from a corner; block--same as directional but all cubistic--and curvilineal, which show a gridded net bending and twisting out of shape. Trainers leave hundreds of types of pattern. Fingerprints are the most complicated: the variations in the whorls and deltas found in them are infinite--no two are ever the same.

Well, all these patterns have to be recorded. Captured, like I'd captured the mark beneath the motorbike that day. You capture fingerprints by sprinkling powder over them, blowing lightly across this to remove the powder not stuck to the miniature wet ridges that the finger's touch has left, then pressing tape onto the remaining powder and removing it again: the pattern sticks to it. Shoe and tyre prints are captured by pouring plaster into the mould the rubber promontories have cut in the earth or mud, letting it set and then lifting it away again, turning space hollowed out by action into solid matter. If the prints are made by wet shoes or by tyres on concrete, then you have to sketch. You're supposed to make constant sketches as a matter of course, in order to record the dimensions of furniture, doors, windows and so on, and the distances between objects and bodies to entrances and exits, just like I had both when I'd first remembered my building and after the re-enactments had begun.

You're supposed to constantly photograph too, like Annie had when we'd been setting my building up. You have to take four types of photographs: close-ups of individual items of evidence, medium-distance ones to record the relative positions of closely related items, long-distance ones that include a landmark to establish the crime scene's location and, finally, ones from other observation points--although it strikes me that the third and fourth types are more or less the same. If I were interested in photos, which I'm not, I'd want to take aerial ones too: first from a crane, then from a circling blimp--one high enough to enable the viewer to make out among the crime scene's larger patterns images and shapes that maverick archaeologists will claim in years to come were put there to guide the spaceships of a master race of aliens down to earth.
_______________________________________________

The next day I went back to the library. I'd read all there was to read about crime-scene searches, so I started reading about guns. I pored over a report by one Dr M. Jauhari, M.Sc., Ph.D., F.A.F.Sc. and Director of the Central Forensic Science Laboratory, Calcutta. At least he was in 1971, when the report was published. Dr Jauhari explained that a firearm functions like a heat engine, converting the chemical energy stored in the propellant into the kinetic energy of the bullet. By way of illustration he compared and contrasted the workings of a firearm with the workings of the internal combustion engine. In the latter, vaporized gasoline is compressed in the cylinder by the piston; then the spark plug fires the gasoline charge, converting it into expanded gas; the pressure resulting from this gas's expansion in turn results in the pressure which drives the piston. That's how a combustion engine works, or how it worked in 1971. A firearm, Dr Jauhari explained, is similar: the primer, the propellant, the chamber and the bullet correspond to the spark plug, the gasoline, the cylinder and the piston--only instead of returning to its starting point and firing off again, the bullet continues right on out into the air. An engine is like a single shot that endlessly repeats itself.

Dr Jauhari was thorough. Before describing types of guns he sketched their function:

A firearm,
    he wrote,

provides a means by which a missile can be hurled from considerable distances with considerable velocity. Its capability to deliver a death blow to a human being even at long ranges of firing makes it a weapon of choice for homicidal purposes. It is occasionally found to get involved in suicidal and accidental shootings also.

People never stop to think about these basic facts when they watch wars and cop shows on the television. People take too much for granted. Each time a gun is fired the whole history of engineering comes into play. Of politics, too: war, assassination, revolution, terror. Guns aren't just history's props and agents: they're history itself, spinning alternate futures in their chamber, hurling the present from their barrel, casting aside the empty shells of past.
_______________________________________________

The longer I stared at these pictures, the more intense the tingling in my upper body grew. It had moved into my brain, like when you eat too much monosodium glutamate in a Chinese restaurant. My whole head was tingling. The diagrams seemed to be taking on more and more significance. They became maps for finding buried treasure, then instructions for assembling pieces of furniture, then military plans, the outline of a whole winter's arduous and multi-pronged advance across mountains and plains. I drifted off into these plains, these mountains, floating alongside the generals and foot soldiers and cooks and elephants. When I looked up from the diagrams again, Naz was there, standing in front of my sofa with another man.

"When did you come in?" I asked him. "Who's this?"

"This man's a doctor," said Naz. "I've been here for the last hour and a half."

I tried to ask him what he meant by that, but the words were taking a long time to form. The other man opened a bag and took a pen or torch out.

"You were just sitting here," said Naz. "You'd gone completely vacant. You didn't notice me, or hear me. I waved my hand in front of your face and you didn't even move your eyes."

"How long ago was this?" the doctor asked.

"I'm fine," I said.

"The whole last hour and a half," Naz told him. "Until just now, when you came in."

"Has he experienced any kind of trauma recently?" the doctor asked. He switched his torch-pen on. "What's his name?"

"I'm fine," I said. "Send this man away."

"Keep your head still," the doctor said.

"No," I said. "Send this man away, Naz, now. Get off my property or I'll have you arrested."

"I can't help you if you won't let me help you," he said.

I looked past his ear and thought I saw another cat fall off the roof. I told this man:

"I'm ordering you to leave my property this instant."

He stood still for a while. Naz did too. The three of us were static for several moments--and while we were I didn't mind this doctor being here. I'd even have let him stay if he'd only behaved himself and not moved. Eventually, though, he turned to Naz and motioned with his eyes towards the door, then slipped his torch-pen back into his bag and left. Naz saw him out. I heard the two men murmuring together as I went into the bathroom and washed my face. I washed it in cold water and didn't dry it straight away, but let it drip while I stared at the crack on the wall. I watched the crack as I listened to the doctor walking down the stairs.

When I went back into the living room, Naz was there and the flat's door was closed. Naz said:

"I think it would be a good idea for you to…"

"Where have you managed to get us to?" I asked him.

He'd got the re-enactors, the car and bicycle and the replica sub-machine guns. He'd rung up to tell me all this, but I hadn't answered.

"When did you ring?" I asked him.

"Several hours ago. Didn't you hear the phone?"

"No," I said. "Not that one."

I did have a vague memory of ringing--but it was of the phone the black man with the bicycle had used in the phone box outside Movement Cars. His last words would still have been buzzing in his head as he left the phone box, and in the head of the person he'd talked to, their conversation only half-decayed at most. Then he'd have caught sight of his killers. Did he know them? If he did, he still might not have known they'd come to kill him--until they took their guns out. At what point had he realized they were guns? Maybe at first he thought they were umbrellas, or steering-wheel locks, or poles. Then when he realized, as his brain pieced it together and came up with a plan of escape, then changed it, he found out that physics wouldn't let him carry out the plan: it tripped him up. Matter again: the world became a fridge door, a broken lighter, two litres of blue goop. That's when he was first hit: as he went over. The first round of bullets struck him in his body, not his head, the report said. They didn't even make him lose consciousness. He would have known he'd been hit but not really felt it, nor the scrapes he'd received from hitting the ground as he went over the handlebars--would have just vaguely understood that something had occurred, something had changed, that things were different now.
_______________________________________________

"Next week," said Naz.

"No, that's not soon enough!" I said.

"There's not much we can…"

"It needs to be done sooner!" I said. "Why can't we do it tomorrow?"

"Licence certificates can take days to process," he explained, "even with the type of bribes we're paying."

"Pay bigger bribes, then!" I said. "It won't last if we wait a whole week!"

"What won't last?" he asked.

I looked past his head. I could see three cats on the red roof on the far side of the courtyard, which meant that the people over there had replaced the one I'd seen falling. I looked back at Naz.

"Day after tomorrow at the latest!" I said. "The very outside latest!"
_______________________________________________

Why was I so obsessed with the death of this man I'd never met? I didn't stop to ask myself. I knew we had things in common, of course. He'd been hit by something, hurt, laid prostrate and lost consciousness; so had I. We'd both slipped into a place of total blackness, silence, nothing, without memory and without anticipation, a place unreached by stimuli of any kind. He'd stayed on there, gone the whole hog, while I'd been sucked back, via vague sports stadiums, to L-shaped wards and talks of Settlement--but for a short while we'd both stood at the same spot: stood there, lay there, floated there, whatever. Persisted. We'd both stood at the same spot in a more plain sense, too: in the phone box I'd called Marc Daubenay from the day the Settlement came through, this cabin out of whose miniature duplicate I was making the little model of him step again and again and again. Our paths had diverged as soon as we'd left it: I'd stepped out--two times, then passed by it a third and gone up to the airport, whereas he'd stepped out and died; but for a while we'd both stood there, held the receiver, looked at the words Airports, Stations, Light.

To put my fascination with him all down to our shared experience, though, would only be telling half the story. Less than half. The truth is that, for me, this man had become a symbol of perfection. It may have been clumsy to fall from his bike, but in dying beside the bollards on the tarmac he'd done what I wanted to do: merged with the space around him, sunk and flowed into it until there was no distance between it and him--and merged, too, with his actions, merged to the extent of having no more consciousness of them. He'd stopped being separate, removed, imperfect. Cut out the detour. Then both mind and actions had resolved themselves into pure stasis. The spot that this had happened on was the ground zero of perfection--all perfection: the one he'd achieved, the one I wanted, the one everyone else wanted but just didn't know they wanted and in any case didn't have eight and a half million pounds to help them pursue even if they had known. It was sacred ground, blessed ground--and anyone who occupied it in the way he'd occupied it would become blessed too. And so I had to re-enact his death: for myself, certainly, but for the world in general as well. No one who understands this could accuse me of not being generous.

In the part of the night where it's quietest, around three or four o'clock, I started wondering where this black man's soul had disappeared to as it left his body. His thoughts, impressions, memories, whatever: the background noise we all have in our head that stops us from forgetting we're alive. It had to go somewhere: it couldn't just vaporize--it must have gushed, trickled or dripped onto some surface, stained it somehow. Everything must leave some kind of mark. I scoured the thin card surfaces of Roger's model. They were so white, so blank. I decided to mark them, and went to the kitchen to find something to stain the white card with.

In the cupboard above the kitchen unit that I'd practised turning sideways round, I found vinegar, Worcestershire Sauce and blue peppermint essence. I got a blank piece of paper and experimented with each of these. Worcestershire Sauce made the best stain, by far. I found a half-drunk bottle of wine and tried staining the paper with that too. The consistency was thinner but the colour was fantastic. It looked like blood.

"Blood!" I said aloud to my empty apartment. "I should have used blood in the first place."

I took a small knife from a drawer, pricked my finger with its point and squeezed the flesh and skin until a small bauble of blood grew on it. Holding my finger upright so as not to lose the bauble, I went back to the living room and pressed it to the card, stamping my print across the middle of the road in blood. Then I sat back and looked at it till morning.

It was a giant print, spanning the pavement on both sides, its contours swirling round bollards, cars and shop fronts, doubling back around the phone box, gathering the killers and their victim together in the same large, undulating sweep. They were too small to make it out, of course, or even to know that it was there. No: it was legible only from above, a landing field for elevated, more enlightened beings.
_______________________________________________

Inside the cabin it was quiet. There was no traffic passing by. My staff 's vehicles, drawn across the road, formed an insulating wall between the re-enactment zone and the outside. In front of and between the vehicles people stood quite still--all mine, a lot of people--looking straight in my direction, at the phone box. Then I heard the BMW's motor start up: the sound of a spark plug firing a charge of compressed gasoline and of expanded gas shooting a piston off again and again and again--slowly at first, then faster, then after a few seconds so fast that the individual shots merged into a hum of infinite self-repetition without origin or end. It had begun.

I saw the BMW pass the phone box on the far side of the street from the corner of my eye, and again in the metal of the cabin's wall, reflected. I set the receiver back onto its cradle and opened the phone box's door. I stepped out, turned my bicycle around and swung my right leg across its bar. The two men had backed the car into the space I'd shown them and were getting out. They'd parked it just right, exactly where I'd told them to. It was very good. The tingling started in my spine again.

I pushed off the pavement with my foot and let the bike roll forwards, its handlebars wobbling. As its front wheel passed a white foam cup lying on the ground, I looked up and to my left at the two men. They'd taken out their sub-machine guns and were pointing them at me. The man with the West Indian accent opened fire. His gun made a tremendous noise. The other man opened fire too, not half a second after the first one. The noise of the two guns together was quite deafening. The affable man with the London accent grimaced as he shot. The other man's face was expressionless, indifferent, the face of an assassin.

The tingling grew more intense as I raised my buttocks from the bike's seat and started pedalling furiously, past the grilled windows of Movement Cars, down the dip into Belinda Road. The two men kept marching on me across Coldharbour Lane, firing as they advanced. Just in front of the brush-cleaning puddle at the edge of Belinda Road I turned the bike's wheel sharply to the right and went over the handlebars. As I fell to the ground a whole tumult of images came at me: the edge of the black bar with no name, a streak of gold, some sky, a lamppost, tarmac and the coloured patterns floating on the puddle's surface. After I'd stopped tumbling and become still, the patterns took the form of Greek or Russian letters. I looked away from the puddle, up towards the men: they had stopped firing and were standing still, exactly where I'd told them to stand, by the hexagon-cell patterns in the road. It was all good.

The men were waiting for me to get up again. I pushed myself up with my hands and noticed they were numb. This was good--very, very good. I stood up and felt the tingling rush to my head. The two men fired again. I turned from them, dropped to my knees, then let my upper body sink back down towards the ground until my face lay on the tarmac. I lay there for a few seconds, quite still. Then I rolled over onto my back and stood up again. The two men were getting back into their car.

"Wait!" I shouted at them.

They stopped.

"Wait!" I shouted again. "You shouldn't drive off. You shouldn't even walk back to the car. When you've stopped shooting at me for the last time, just turn your backs on me and stop."

"What shall we do when we've stopped?" the man with the London accent asked.

"Nothing," I told him. "Just stop, and stand there with your backs to me. We'll stop the whole scene there, but hold it for a while in that position. Okay?"

He nodded. I looked at his friend. He nodded too, slowly.

"Good," I said. "Let's do it again."

We resumed our positions. Back in the phone box, I looked through the window. The BMW was turning round by the traffic lights, beside the shortish man I'd noticed earlier. Just over half the crew and back-up people had chosen that end of the area to stand at and watch from; eight or so more were gathered at the far end, the end I'd entered from, beneath the bridge. The cabin's glass was clear, not wrinkled like the windows of my building. All the same, I looked instinctively across to the roof of the building on the far side of the road, scanning it for cats, then realized my mistake and turned the other way.

The grill across Movement Cars' façade was, now I looked at it more closely, actually four panels of grill, each panel being made up of three sections of criss-crossing metal lines. It looked like graph paper, with large square areas containing smaller ones that framed, positioned and related every mark or object lying behind them--a ready-made forensic grid. Most of the grid's squares were pretty blank. The lower left-hand-side one, though, the one closest to the pavement at the corner of Belinda Road, had two bunches of flowers stuffed behind it. They were hanging upside down, wrapped in plastic. Two grid-columns across were the painted words: Movement Cars, Airports, Stations, Light, Removals, Any Distance. They ran over all three of the column's larger squares; the n and t of Movement ran into the next column, the column to the right. It was Light Removals, not Light then Removals: I knew that already, but had just forgotten that I knew.

The dull red BMW passed the phone box again. Again I saw it twice: once from the corner of my eye and once reflected in the metal of the cabin's wall--only it seemed flatter and more elongated this time. When the driver turned the engine off, for a half-second or so I could make out the individual firings of the piston as these slowed down and died off. I opened the phone box's door, stepped out and got onto my bicycle. Again the tingling kicked in as I passed the white foam cup. Again the two men took their guns out and I pedalled furiously. This time when the bike dipped from the pavement to the road I felt my altitude drop, like you do on aeroplanes when they make their descent. The same tumult of images came to me as I went over the handlebars: a portion of the black bar with no name, a streak of gold, some sky, a lamppost, tarmac and the puddle with the Greek or Russian letters floating on its surface. I got up, let them shoot me a second time, went down again and lay with my face on the tarmac looking at the undercarriage of a parked van, at the patterned markings on one of its hubcaps.

I lay there for longer this time than I had the last. There was no noise behind me, no footsteps: the two killers had remembered what I'd told them and were standing there quite still. I lay there on the tarmac for a long time tingling, looking at the hubcap.

Then I got up and we did it again, and again, and again.

After running through the shooting for the fifth time I was satisfied we'd got the actions right: the movement, the positions. Now we could begin working on what lay beneath the surfaces of these--on what was inside, intimate.

"Let's do it at half speed," I said.

The black man with the London accent frowned.

"You mean we should drive slower?" he asked.

"Drive, walk, everything," I said.

One of Naz's men was striding over to us with a clipboard in his hand. I waved him away and continued:

"Everything. The same as before, but at half speed."

"Like in an action replay on TV?" he asked.

"Well," I said, "sort of. Only don't do all your movements in slow motion. Do them normally, but at half the normal speed. Or at the normal speed, but take twice as long doing them."

They both stood there for a few seconds, taking in what I'd said. Then the taller man, the one with the West Indian accent, started nodding. I saw that his lips were curled into a smile.

"You're the boss," he said again.

We took up our positions once more. Inside the phone box this time I examined every surface it had to present. My man, the victim, would have taken all these in--but then his brain would have edited most of them back out again, dismissed them as mundane, irrelevant. A mistake: perhaps if he'd paid more attention to the environment around him some association might have warned him of what was about to happen, even saved his life. He must have done something wrong, crossed someone, broken some code of the underworld. So if he'd looked more carefully at the cabin's metal wall and taken in the fact that the dull red BMW was passing slowly by, too slowly perhaps, and connected this with the last time he'd seen that car or its reflection, who he'd been with then…who knows? The stencilled figure on the window, the messenger, knew something was up and was trying to announce this with his horn--to blare it out, a warning; his free hand, the one not holding the instrument, was raised in alarm. And then the silence, like the silence in a forest when a predator is on the prowl and every other creature's gone to ground except his prey, too tied up in his own concerns, in sniffing roots or chewing grass or daydreaming to read the glaring signs…

I stood with the receiver in my hand. The digital display strip said Insert Coins. Outside, from beneath their grid, the windows of Movement Cars promised wide-open spaces opening to even wider distances--airports, stations and removals, light. An empty green beer bottle sat directly beneath the hanging plastic-wrapped flowers; it seemed to be offering itself to them as a vase if only they'd abandon their position in the grid, come down and turn the right way round again. The pavement, when I stepped out onto it this time, seemed even more richly patterned than it had before. Its stained flagstones ran past the phone cabin and Movement Cars to three or so feet before Belinda Road, then gave over to short, staccato brickwork before melting, as the pavement dipped onto the road itself, into poured tarmac. It was like a quilt, a handmade, patterned quilt laid out for this man to take his final steps across and then lie down and die on: a quilted deathbed. It struck me that the world, or chance, or maybe death itself if you can speak of such a thing, must have loved this man in some way to prepare for him such a richly textured fabric to gather and wrap him up in.

The killers had parked and were leaving their car. Behind them the windows of the Green Man rose up, impassive. When my man, the dead man, saw the two men heading for him with their guns out, just as his first apprehension that there was malice in the air--finally gleaned from the arrangement of bodies and objects, from the grimace on the face of one man and the cold, neutral expression of the other--developed into full-blown understanding that they'd come to kill him: in this instant, this sub-instant, he would have searched the space around him for an exit, for somewhere to go, to hide.
_______________________________________________

The two men had brought their guns out again and were raising them to point at me. I was swinging my right leg over the saddle of my bicycle, looking at them and the space around us. There was only one way out: the strip of pavement on the far side of Belinda Road. It led past the black bar with no name to the bridge and then away along Coldharbour Lane. Separated from the road by a line of bollards, it looked like a sluice, a ramp, a runnel--one that opened to another place where there were no men with guns pointing at me. That's why my man had chosen that direction. By the time he'd reached the dip into Belinda Road, passing the puddle into which his blood would soon flow, he'd have realized that he'd never make it out that way. That's why he changed direction. I went over the bike's handlebars this time serenely, calmly, taking time to greet the now familiar moments of landscape that came at me.

The sky, this time round, had become totally consistent, clouds running together into an unbunched white continuum. The black bar's outer wall was detailed with reliefs and ridges and long lines of painted gold. The grill over the window of Movement Cars, reflected in the puddle and viewed from this angle, looked like the gridded ceiling of a dodgem ring. The letters were behind it. They weren't Greek or Russian at all: they were the A and r of Airports reversed by the water's surface. To the puddle's left two bottle tops lay on the ground. I lay there looking at them. My man would have seen these too. They were beer bottle tops. He would have looked at them and thought about the men who'd drunk the beers and wondered why it couldn't be him drinking them right now, these beers, off in some other place, around a table with friends perhaps, or at home with his family, instead of lying here being killed. Beyond these was a plastic shopping bag. On the bag's side were printed the words Got yours? Just before I stood up for the last time I murmured, to the puddle, the white sky, the black bar and the pockmarked, littered road surface around me:

"Yes, I got mine."
_______________________________________________

Above the word Escape, cloud, white and unbroken. There was no movement anywhere. I lay there doing nothing, staring. I lay there for so long that I wasn't even staring any more--just lying there with my eyes open while nothing happened. Shadows became longer, deeper; the sky grew slightly darker, more entrenched. There was no noise anywhere, no noise at all--just the massed silence of whole scores of people waiting, like me, infinitely patient.
_______________________________________________

I turned now to the concierge.

"Now, you," I told her, "are already static. I mean, you just stand there in the lobby doing nothing. Which is good. But now I want you to do nothing even slower."

She looked confused, my concierge. She had her mask off and was holding it in her hand, but her face was kind of mask-like--like those theatre masks they had in ancient times: worried, haggard, filled with a low-level kind of dread.

"What I mean," I told her, "is that you should think more slowly. Not just think more slowly, but relate to everything around you slower. So if you move your eyes inside your mask, then move them slowly and think to yourself: Now I'm seeing this bit of wall, and still this bit, and now, so slowly, inch by inch, the section next to it, and now an edge of door, but I don't know it's door because I haven't had time to work it out yet--and think all this really slowly too. You see what I mean now?"

The dread on her face seemed to heighten slightly as she nodded back at me.

"It's important," I told her. "I'll know if you're doing it right. Do it right and I'll make sure you get a bonus. I'll give you all bonuses if you get it right."

I broke the meeting up and told people to go to their positions. I went up to my flat and looked at the crack in the bathroom while I waited. I hadn't gone through this in quite a while. A smell was hanging in the air: the smell of congealed fat. I poked my head out of the window and looked down at the liver lady's out-vent. It had clogged up again. The fat caking its slats was turning black. New vapour was starting to squeeze its way out, accompanied by the sound of liver starting to sizzle. Within a few seconds the new liver's smell had reached me. It still had that sharp and acrid edge, like cordite. We'd tried and tried to get rid of it, and failed--besides which, no one else but me smelt cordite. I did, though, beyond question: cordite.

The phone rang in my living room. It was Naz, telling me that everything was ready.

"Slowed right down, right?" I asked him.

"Slowed right down, just as you requested," he replied.

I left my flat and walked down the first flight of stairs. I started walking down them really slowly; but then after a few steps I got bored, so I went back to normal speed. I wasn't bound by the rules--everyone else was, but not me.

The pianist, playing at half speed as I'd asked him, made his first mistake and repeated the passage, then again, then again, more and more slowly each time. I stopped beside the window at the stairs' first turning and looked out. I held my eyes level with a kink in the glass pane, then moved my head several millimetres down so that the kink enveloped a cat who was slinking along the facing rooftop. I let my head slide very slowly to the side so that the cat stayed in the centre of the kink, as though the kink were a gun's viewfinder and the cat a target. By jolting my head slightly to one side and back again I found that I could make the cat move back to where it had been a second earlier. I did this for a while: the more the cat moved forwards, the more I kinked it back to where it had been before, minutely moving and jolting my head as I looped it. Eventually it disappeared from view and I moved on.
_______________________________________________

The next day I went and watched the sunlight falling from the windows onto the patterned floor of the staircase. I lay on the small landing where the stairs turned between the second and third floors and stared. The sunlight filled the corridors of white between the pattern's straight black lines like water flooding a maze in slow motion, like it had the first time I'd observed it some weeks back--but this time the light seemed somehow higher, sharper, more acute. It also seemed to flood it more quickly than it had before, not slower.

I didn't slip into a trance this time--quite the opposite. I sat back up and wondered why it should seem faster when I'd made the whole building run slower. I decided to time it, went to borrow Annie's watch--then realized I'd have to wait until tomorrow for the sunlight to flood across then leave that patch again. I stood the building down again, got some rest and staked out the spot at the same time the next day, Annie's watch--with precision sports timer that measured down to tenths and hundredths of seconds--at hand.

When I'd timed it before, the whole process had taken three hours and fourteen minutes. I remembered. Today, when the light's front edge arrived, I started the watch, then watched the edge trickle furtively across the landing like the advance guard of an army, the first scouts and snipers. In its wake the bolder, broader block, the light's main column, moved in and occupied the floor making no secret of its presence, covering the whole plain with its dazzling brilliance, its trumpets and flags and cannons. I lay there watching and timing, letting the watch run right through to the moment, several minutes after the main column's eventual departure, when the sunlight's rearguard, its last stragglers, took one final look back over the deserted camp and, becoming frightened of the massing troops of darkness, scurried on.

When I'd timed this before it had taken three hours and fourteen minutes. This time it all took place within three hours. Within two hours, forty-three minutes and twenty-seven point four-five seconds, to be precise. I didn't like this. Something had gone wrong. I called in Frank and Annie.

"The sunlight's not doing it right," I said.

Neither of them answered at first. Then Annie asked:

"What do you mean, not doing it right?"

"I mean," I said, "that it's running over the floor too quickly. I measured the time the shaft falls from these windows onto the floor, from the first moment that it hits it to the time it leaves. I measured it when we first started doing these re-enactments, and I measured it today, and I can tell you without a doubt that it's going faster now than it was then."

There was another pause, then Annie ventured, in a quiet, nervous voice:

"It's later in the year."

"What's later in the year?" I asked.

"It's later now than it was when you first measured it," Annie explained. "Later in the year, further from midsummer. The sun's at a different angle to us than it was."

I thought about that for a while until I understood it.

"Right," I said. "Of course. I mean…of course. I mean, I knew that, but I hadn't…I hadn't, I mean…Thank you. You may go now, both."

Frank and Annie slunk back to their posts. I stayed there in the dull light of the stairwell, looking up. I thought of the sun up in space, a small star no bigger in comparison with other stars than those tiny specks of dust I'd seen suspended at the stairwell's top some weeks ago, when the real sun was closer to us. It struck me that the specks would be there now, right up above me, hanging from nothing, just floating in the neutral, neither warm nor cold air, and that when the sun disappeared completely they might fall.
_______________________________________________

"History," said one. "It's lethal, all this debris. Look: propeller, head."

"Flotsam," said the other. "Jetsam. All these little bits, repeating. The real event he can't even discuss."
_______________________________________________

"The principle's the same, though, isn't it?" said Samuels. "You want to re-stage…"

"Re-enact," I corrected him.

"Re-enact," he continued, "a bank heist."

"Yes," I said, "that's correct. But down to the last details, ones you wouldn't bother putting in a film. In films you just have stuff to show the cameras: just fronts, enough to make it look right on the outside. I want it to be right. Intimately right, inside."

"For the audience?" he asked.

"No," I told him. "For me."
_______________________________________________

Naz's phone beeped just then. He scrolled through the display and read aloud:

"In military parlance, a narrow way along which troops can march only by files or with a narrow front, especially a mountain gorge or pass. The act of defiling, a march by files. 1835. Also a verb: to bruise, corrupt. From the French défiler and the Middle English defoul."

"Very good," I said. "Very good indeed."

"Yes," Naz said. "It's an excellent term. Marching in files."

"A defile in time," I said. "A kink."

"That too," said Naz.

"What's that?" asked Samuels.

I turned to him and said:

"You're hired."
_______________________________________________

I decided to sit out the next couple of run-throughs. I put a marker, one of the spare re-enactors, in for me, stood to one side and watched. It was all working very well. The way Robber One's leg held the door open, slightly bent; the movement of Robber Two's gun as it described an arc across the lobby from inside the main door while Robber Three did the same but faster and from the floor's centre, like the second and third hands of a clock set slightly apart; the way the tight end-accomplice turned as he peeled out of the line, his shoulders inclining so the left was slightly lower than the right, then straightening again; the sight of the clerks, customers and security men lying horizontal on the floor, static and abject--all these movements and positions carried an intensity that emanated way beyond them. As I stood watching them I felt that tingling start up at my spine's base again.

Samuels came over and stood beside me for a while, watching the re-enactors running through their interlocking sequences.

"We used to do this too," he said after a while.

"Do what?" I asked.

"Dry runs. Simulations. Before any major robbery. We didn't just go through it on paper: we rehearsed it too, like this."

I turned and looked at him.

"You mean you'd re-enact the robberies in advance?" I asked, incredulous.

"Well, yes, that's what I'm saying. Not re-enact: pre-enact, I suppose. But yes, of course."

I thought about that, hard. It started to make me feel dizzy. I walked over to Naz and told him that I wanted to go home.

"What?" he said, staring intently into space.

"I need to go home," I said again.

He stared straight ahead for a few more seconds; then, eventually, he turned to me and said: "Oh, right. I'll have you driven back."

An hour later I was lying in my bath looking at the crack on the wall again.
_______________________________________________

"Naz!" I told him. "Listen to me! Naz!"

"What?" he asked.

"I've had an idea," I said. I gulped, and tasted soap. I was so excited that I could hardly speak. "I should like," I continued, "to transfer the re-enactment of the bank heist to the actual bank."

There was a pause, then Naz said:

"That's good. Yes: very good. I'll go about making arrangements with the bank."

"Arrangements?" I said. "What arrangements?"

"To procure it," he said. "We'll have to do it on a Sunday, obviously. Or a bank holiday."

"No!" I said. "Don't get their permission."

"I don't understand," he said. "I thought you just said you wanted to do it in the bank. The bank we modelled our bank on, in Chiswick, right?"

"Right!" I said. "But I don't want them to know we'll do it. We'll just do it there, our re-enactment, right there in the bank!"

"But what about the staff? We'll have to replace the real staff with re-enactors."

"No we won't!" I told him. "We'll just stand our staff re-enactors down and use the real staff."

"But how will they know that it's a re-enactment and not an actual hold-up?"

"They won't!" I said. "But it doesn't matter: they've been trained to do exactly what the re-enactors have been trained to do. Both should re-enact the same movements identically. Naz? Are you there?"

There was a long, long pause. When Naz eventually spoke, his voice was very deep and very slow.

"That's brilliant," he said. "Just brilliant."
_______________________________________________

There was this one big, dark patch on the concrete where some engine oil or tar must have been spilt before we moved there; it was semi-solid, like black mould or a small growth or birth mark sprouting from the surface of the ground. I told Annie's people to remove it, scrub it off. There wasn't an oil patch on the road in Chiswick. They went at it with brushes, then with trowels, then with all types of chemicals, but it was unshiftable. On the third day of running through the getaway sequence, after I'd put a marker in for myself so that I could watch it from the outside--the cars turning, stopping, cutting, looping back--this dark patch kept snagging my attention as the cars cut past it. It was annoying me. I thought of something that the short councillor had said to me a few days earlier, and called Naz over.

"What?" he asked.

"I'd like you to have the word 'residual' looked up."

"Residual?"


Naz tapped a message into his mobile, then stood with me watching the cars turn and cut. His eyes, still sunk, glowed darkly. After a while he said:

"We'll need to disappear afterwards."

"Disappear?" I said. I looked up at the sky. It was blue. It was a bright, clear early autumn day. "How can we disappear?"

"Get out. Cover our tracks. We should remove all traces of our activities here, and get ourselves and all the re-enactors well out of the picture."

"Where can we all go?" I asked.

"It's very complicated," Naz said. "There are several…"

Just then, his phone beeped. He scrolled through his menu and read:

"Of or pertaining to that which is left--e.g. in mathematics."

"Left over like the half," I said. "A shard."

"In physics," Naz continued, "of what remains after a process of evaporation; in law, that which--again--remains of an estate after all charges, debts, etc. have been paid. Residuary legatee: one to whom the residue of an estate is paid. Resid…"
   
"Accrued," I said.

"What?" Naz asked.

"Go on," I said.

"Residual analysis: calculus substituting method of fluxions, 1801. Residual heat of a cooling globe, 1896. Residual error in a set of observations, 1871."

"It's because the time of year had changed. But that's not how he used it."

"Who?" asked Naz.

"The short councillor," I said. "He used it like a…you know, like a thing. A residual."

"A noun," said Naz. "What short councillor?"

"Yes, that's right: a noun. This strange, pointless residual. And he pronounced the s as an s, not as a z. Re-c-idual. Have it looked up with that spelling."

"What spelling?" Naz asked.

"R-e-c-i-d-u-a-l."

Naz tapped at his mobile again. I looked away, back up at the sky. A mile or so away, on the main runways, aeroplanes were taxying, turning and taking off, these huge steel crates all packed with people and their clutter moaning and tingling as they stretched their arms out, palms up, rising. Planes that had taken off earlier were dwindling to specks that hung suspended in the air's outer reaches for a while, then disappeared. I thought back to my stairwell, then to the tyre and cascading sticky liquid re-enactment that we'd done in this same warehouse. I'd told Annie and Frank to come up with something, some device, that would stop the blue goop from falling on me--make all its particles go up instead, become sky, disappear. Frank had thought of feeding it up through a tube towards the ceiling and then through the roof, transforming it into a mist.

"We could do that," I said.

"What's that?" Naz asked.

"All vaporize and be sprayed upwards. When we have to disappear, like you said. Remove traces, all that stuff."

Naz's eyes went vacant while the thing behind them whirred. Another plane passed overhead, moaning and tingling.

"Or just take planes," I said. "They'll take us out of the picture."

Naz's whole body tensed. He was completely static for a while, his musculature suspended while the calculating part of him took all the system's energy. After a while the body part switched back on and he said:

"Planes are a very good idea." He thought for a while more, then added: "Two planes. No, three. We'll have to separate the re-enactors who'll have been at the bank from the others. They can't mix before they board their flights."

"Fine," I said. "Whatever."

"And then…" Naz began; his phone beeped. He looked at it, then slipped it back into his pocket and continued: "And then we'd also have to separate…"

"Is that the dictionary people?" I asked him. "What do they say?"

"Word not found," he said.

"What do they mean, not found?"

"'Recidual': word not found," he repeated.

I started to feel dizzy.

"It must be there," I said. "A noun: r-e-c-i…"

"I spelt it that way," Naz said; "just as you told me. They say there's no 'recidual' in the dictionary."

"Well tell them to go and find a bigger dictionary, then!" I said. I was really feeling bad now. "And if you see that short councillor here…"

"What short councillor?" Naz asked.

I leant against the replicated bank's exterior, against a white stone slab. The stone was neither warm nor cold; it had an outer layer of grit that kind of slid against the solid stone beneath it. Nearby, the cars turned and cut.

"I should like…" I started. "Naz…"

Naz wasn't paying attention to me. He was standing quite still, looking out across the runways. Luckily Samuels turned up just then, put his arm around my waist and held me upright.

"You should go home," someone said.

I was driven back to my building. Naz came by a few hours later, in the middle of the night. He looked dreadful: sallow-cheeked and gaunt.

"What have you found?" I asked him.

"There's just one way…" he began.

"One way to what?" I said. "What's this got to do…"

"Just one way to stop information leakage. To be absolutely certain."

"Yes, but what about 'recidual'?" I asked.

"No: this is more important," Naz said. "Listen."

"No!" I said. I sat up on my sofa. "You listen, Naz: I say what's important. Tell me what they found."

Naz's eyes rested on a spot vaguely near my head for a few seconds. I could see him running what I'd just said past his data-checkers, and deciding I was right: I did say what was important. Without me, no plans, no Need to Know charts, nothing. He turned his head sideways, reached into his pocket, took his mobile out and said:

"They found similar words, but not that one. They looked in the complete twelve-volume dictionary. Do you want me to read you what they found?"

"Of course I do!" I told him.

"Recision," he read; "the act of rescinding, taking away (limb, act of parliament, etc.). Recidivate: to fall back, relapse--into sickness, sin, debt…"

"Matthew Younger thinks I'm too exposed," I said. "But exposure is good. How could it all have happened in the first place if I hadn't been exposed?"

"Recidivist: one who recidivates; recidivous, of or pertaining to a…and so on. But that's all," Naz said. "No recidual." He put his mobile back into his pocket and continued: "I have to discuss a matter of the utmost…"

"I think it might be something to do with music," I said. "A recidual. Hey! Call my pianist up. He'll know."

"I'll do that after we've been through this matter I have to discuss with you," he said. "It's absolutely vital. I've realized there's only one way to ensure that…"

"No. Call him up now!" I said.

Naz paused again, then realized he had no choice but to comply, stood up and made the necessary call. Five minutes later my pianist was in my living room. One of his two tufts of hair was flattened, while the other sprouted outwards from his temple. His eyes were puffy; one of them was caked with sleep. He shuffled slowly forwards, then stopped three or so yards from me.

"What's a recidual?" I asked him.

He stared glumly at my carpet and said nothing. I could tell he'd heard my question, though, because the top of his bald pate whitened.

"A recidual," I said again. "It must be something to do with music."

He still didn't say anything.

"Like capriccioso," I continued, "con allegro--all those things that they write in the margins. The composers. Or a type of piece, its name, like a concerto, a sonata: a recidual."

Therz a rosotatof," my pianist mumbled sadly.

"What?" I said.

"There's a recitative," he said in his dull monotone. "In opera. Recitatif. Recitativo. Half singing, half speaking."

"That's good," I said, "but…"

"Or a recital," he continued, his pate whitening still more.

"A recital," I said. "Yes."

I thought about that for a while. Eventually my pianist asked:

"Can I go now?"

"No," I said. "Stay there."

I stared at his bald pate more, letting my vision blur into its whiteness. I stared for a long time. I don't know how long; I lost track. Eventually he was gone, and Naz was trying to grab hold of my attention.

"What?" I said. "Where's my pianist?"

"Listen," said Naz. "There's only one way."

"One way to what?" I asked.

"One way to guarantee there'll be no information leakage."

"Oh, that again," I said.

"The only way," Naz went on, his voice quiet and softly shaking, "is to eliminate the channels it could leak through."

"What do you mean, 'eliminate'?" I asked him.

"Eliminate," he said again. His voice was shaking so much it reminded me of spoons in egg-and-spoon races, the way they shake and rattle--as though the task of carrying what it had to say were too much. It still shook as Naz continued: "Remove, take out, vaporize."

"Oh, vaporize," I said. "A fine mist, yes. I like that."

Naz stared straight at me now. His eyes looked as though they were about to burst.

"I could organize that," he said, his voice a croak now.

"Oh, yes, fine, go ahead," I told him.

"Do you understand?" he asked.

I looked at him, trying to understand. He could organize for channels to be vaporized. Channels meant people. He spoke again, more slowly:

"I…could…organize… that…" he croaked again.

Beads of sweat were growing on his temples. Vaporize, I thought: Naz wants to vaporize these people. I pictured them again being fed through a tube and propelled upwards, turned into a mist, becoming sky. I thought first of the re-enactors who'd be with me in the bank, pictured them dematerializing, going blue, invisible, not there. They'd be the first ones to be vaporized. But then the other ones, the ones who'd been stood down: they'd have to be vaporized as well. And then--

"How many channels would you need to vaporize?" I asked.

He looked back at me, sallow, manic, ill, and croaked:

"All of them. The whole pyramid."

I looked at him again, and tried to understand that too. The whole pyramid meant not just the re-enactors: it meant all the back-up people--Annie, Frank, their people and the people that liaised between their people and the other people's people. The sub-back-up people too: the electricians, carpenters and caterers.

"The whole lot of them!" I said. "Everyone! How would you…"

"When they're in the air," Naz said, his voice still croaking. "We get them all up in the air--all of them, every last member of your staff--and then…"

"Every last member! That means my liver lady and my pianist! And my motorbike enthusiast and my boring couple and my concierge as well!"

"It's the only way," Naz repeated. "We get them all up in an aeroplane, and then…"

He stopped speaking, but his eyes still stared straight at me, making sure I understood what he was telling me. I looked away from them and saw in my mind's eye a plane bursting open and transforming itself into cloud.

"Wow!" I said. "That's beautiful."

I saw it in my mind again: the plane became a pillow ripping open, its stuffing of feathers rushing outwards, merging with the air.

"Wow!" I whispered.

I saw it a third time--this time as a puff, a dehiscence, a flower erupting through its outer membrane and exploding into millions of tiny pollen specks, becoming light. I'd never seen something so wonderful before.

"Wow! That is really beautiful," I said.

We sat in silence for a while, Naz sweating and bulging, I running this picture through my mind again and again and again. Eventually I turned to him and told him:

"Yes, fine. Go ahead."

Naz stood up and walked towards the door. I told him to put the building into on mode; he left; then I got into my bath.

I lay there for the rest of the night, picturing planes bursting, flowers dehiscing. I felt happy--happy to have seen such a beautiful image. I listened to the pianist's notes run, snag and loop, to liver sizzling and the vague electric hum of televisions, Hoovers and extractor fans. I listened to these fondly: this would be one of the last times. My pyramid was like a Pharaoh's pyramid. I was the Pharaoh. They were my loyal servants, all the others; my reward to them was to allow them to accompany me on the first segment of my final voyage. As I watched steam drifting off the water and up past the crack, I pictured all my people lifted up, abstracted, framed like saints in churches' stained-glass windows, each eternally performing their own action. I pictured the liver lady bright-coloured and two-dimensional, bending slightly forward lowering her rubbish bag, her left hand on her hip, the pianist sitting in profile at his piano practising, the motorbike enthusiast flat, kneeling, fiddling with his engine. I pictured the back-up people framed holding bright walkie-talkies and bright clipboards in bright, colourful Staff Heaven, the cat putter-outers reunited with the cats they'd posted there before them while extras hovered round the edges like cherubic choruses. I pictured this all night, lying in my bath, watching steam rising, vaporizing.
_______________________________________________

"When was it that you came into contact with cordite, then?"

"Cordite?" I said. "I don't think I've ever been near cordite."
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Occasionally I'd let my eyes run out to corners, looking, like the other re-enactors, for an edge, although I knew there was no edge, that the re-enactment zone was non-existent, or that it was infinite, which amounted in this case to the same thing. Mostly I'd make my head move slowly forwards past the door frame where the metal gave over to glass, advancing it so there was more window in which more street was revealed. It kept on coming, rolling in, expanding, more and more of it: people, trees, lampposts, cars and buses, shop fronts with reflective windows in which more cars, buses, people and trees flowed and luxuriated, all rolling in slowly, coming to me, here.
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Whines spread across the lobby, running in ripples from the staff and customers, a collective murmur in their sleep as the dream they were all dreaming hit this patch of turbulence. Robber Re-enactor One walked over from the doorway, slid his mask off, looked at Four and said:
   
"Oh my G-d!"

His face was white. He slipped Four's mask off. Four's face was white too. His eyes were empty. He was pretty dead. One looked up from him and announced in a loud voice:

"Stop the re-enactment!"

No one answered. One looked around him at the whining people. He took three steps in the direction of a corner where two customers were lying. Sensing him approach, they whined more, wriggling, burrowing into the ground. One leant down, placed his hand on one of their shoulders and said:

"He's hurt. We've got to stop the re-enactment now!"

The customer let out a squeal and bucked with fear. One turned away from him and shouted to the staff behind the counters:

"It's stopped! The re-enactment's stopped! We have to stop it now!"

Nobody moved. Of course nobody moved. Stop what? This re-enactment was unstoppable.
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"Speculation," I said; "contemplation of the heavens. Money, blood and light. Removals. Any Distance."

I moved my head over to Four's body and poked my finger into the wound in his chest. The wound was raised, not sunk; parts of his flesh had broken through the skin and risen, like rising dough. The flesh was both firm and soft; it gave to the touch but kept its shape. When I brought my eyes right up to it, I saw that it was riddled with tiny holes--natural, pin-prick holes, like breathing holes. Much bigger, irregular cracks had opened among these where bits of shot had entered him. I could see some way into the tunnels that the cracks' insides formed, but then they turned and narrowed as they disappeared deeper inside him.
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I closed my eyes and felt the movement, the rotation--then opened them again and was overwhelmed by sunlight. It was streaming from the sun's chest, gushing out, cascading, splashing off cars' wheels, bonnets and windscreens and off shop fronts, trickling along the road's lines and markings, pulsing past people's legs and along gutters, dribbling from roofs and trees. It was spilling everywhere, overflowing, just too much, too much to absorb.
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I looked back out of the window at the merging, falling leaves. These faded into concrete, into bridges, stilts and over-passes as we merged with the motorway past Shepherd's Bush. The concrete, too, was merging, flowing all around us, tilting and swivelling above us, inclining away below, dwindling and disappearing, then emerging again a little later to flow back, converge--these flowing blocks, these columns, all this matter.
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I looked around the terminal. There was a newsagent's shop a few yards away. Outside it, a free-standing billboard had the evening headline stuck to it. Shares Tumble, it announced.

"That's good too!" I said. "No: that's brilliant! It all accrues, then tumbles. Like the sun."
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Poor Naz. He wanted everything perfect, neat, wanted all matter organized and filed away so that it wasn't mess. He had to learn too: matter's what makes us alive--the bitty flow, the scar tissue, signature of the world's very first disaster and promissory note guaranteeing its last. Try to iron it out at your peril. Naz had tried, and it had fucked him up. I tried to make out what it was that he was mumbling. It seemed to be data: figures, hours, appointments, places, all abandoning their posts and scrambling for the exits, sweating their way out of him, rats scurrying from a sinking ship.
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Reconstructions, everywhere. I looked down at the interlocking, hemmed-in fields, and had a vision of the whole world's surface cordoned off, demarcated, broken into grids in which self-duplicating patterns endlessly repeated.
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The sun was low on the horizon, making the few clouds in the sky glow blue and red and mauve. Higher up, lingering vapour trails had turned blood crimson. Our trail would be visible from the ground: an eight, plus that first bit where we'd first set off--fainter, drifted to the side by now, discarded, recidual, a remainder. In the cockpit the radio crackled again. The pilot called out to me:

"Now they're ordering us to turn back."

"Ordering!" I repeated. "That's pretty cool."

We turned and started heading back. The stewardess stood still beside the cabin door, avoiding eye contact with me. After a couple of minutes I called to the pilot.

"I should like you to turn back out once more," I said.

"We can't do that," he called back. "I'm afraid the Civil Aviation Authority's commands override yours."

"That's annoying," I said. "Isn't there anything…"

My voice trailed off as I pondered what to do. I liked this turning back and forth in mid-air, this banking one way, straightening, then banking back another, the feeling of weightlessness, suspension. I didn't want it to stop. I looked around me--then I had a brilliant idea.

"Tell them I'm hijacking you," I called back to the pilot.

I reached down into my bag, pulled out my shotgun and brought the barrel back up straight. The stewardess screamed. Naz did nothing. The pilot swivelled his upper body halfway round again, saw the gun pointing at the cockpit and shouted:

"Jesus! If you shoot that, we'll all die."

"Don't worry," I told him. "Don't worry at all. I won't let us die. I just want to keep the sequence in place."

The radio crackled more. The pilot spoke into it in a hushed, urgent voice, telling the tower what was happening. The tower crackled back to him; he half-turned to me again and asked:

"Where do you want to go?"

"Go?" I said. "Nowhere. Just keep doing this."

"Doing what?" he asked.

"Turning back, then turning out. Then turning back again. The way we're doing it right now."

He spoke into his radio again; it crackled back to him; he half-turned towards me and asked:

"You want us to keep turning, out and back, like this?"

"Yup," I said. "Just keep on. The same pattern. It will all be fine."

I looked out of the window again. I felt really happy. We passed through a small cloud. The cloud, seen from inside like this, was gritty, like spilled earth or dust flakes in a stairwell. Eventually the sun would set for ever--burn out, pop, extinguish--and the universe would run down like a Fisher Price toy whose spring has unwound to its very end. Then there'd be no more music, no more loops. Or maybe, before that, we'd just run out of fuel. For now, though, the clouds tilted and the weightlessness set in once more as we banked, turning, heading back, again.
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