“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.
9
FAT BECAME QUITE A PROBLEM,
as it goes. Over the next days and weeks the liver lady fried her way through a small mountain of pig liver. She had three or four frying pans on the go at any given time. She might not have been doing it herself: it might have been the back-up, Annie’s people, tossing it all on, slab after slab, letting them slide around and sizzle, turning them over and taking them off again. Whoever was doing the actual cooking, the sheer amount of vaporized fat rising from the frying pans hung around the building. It clogged up the extraction fan, whose out-vent pointed towards my bathroom window. To have this outer part cleaned turned out to be difficult: you couldn’t get at it from inside. We had to hire those window cleaners you see dangling from the tops of skyscrapers to come and scrape the fat out while they hung beside it. It was pretty nerve-wracking to watch. I had the courtyard below them cleared, just in case. I know all about things falling from the sky.
These men didn’t fall—but the cats did. That’s what I’d seen on the day of the first re-enactment, when I’d pressed my cheek against the window by the turning between my floor and the liver lady’s and then pulled it away: the black streak I’d thought was an optical effect. It wasn’t: it was one of the black cats falling off the roof. By the end of the second day of re-enactments three had fallen. They all died. We’d only bought four in the first place; one wasn’t enough to produce the effect I wanted.
“What do you want to do?” asked Naz.
“Get more,” I said.
“How many more?”
“At a loss rate of three every two days, I’d say quite an amount. A rolling supply. Just keep putting them up there.”
“Doesn’t it upset you?” Naz asked two days later as we stood together in my kitchen looking down into the courtyard at one of his men sliding a squashed cat into a bin bag.
“No,” I said. “We can’t expect everything to work perfectly straight away. It’s a learning process.”
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.