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.
“…and a further licence from the local police,” Naz was saying, “which won’t be a great problem now the Council have given the nod, although the status of the event needs to be determined pretty quickly.”
“What?” I asked him. “What are you saying?”
Naz looked at me strangely, then started again:
“Lambeth Council are happy to give permission for the re-enactment to proceed, but there’s confusion about what type of licence they need to give us,” he said. “It’s not a demonstration and it’s not a street party. The activity that it most closely resembles is filming.”
“No,” I said. “No cameras. No filming. You know that.”
“Yes,” said Naz, “but we should
apply
for it under filming. We need to designate it as a recognized type of event so they can grant us permission to do it. Filming’s the easiest route. We apply to use the area for a film shoot and then just don’t have any cameras.”
“I suppose so,” I said. “As long as we don’t actually film. How soon can we do it, then?”
“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!”
He got it all together for the day after that. He got the licence from the Council and the licence from the police, organized all the staff and back-up staff, the caterers and runners and who knows what else. It struck me as I waited that all great enterprises are about logistics. Not genius or inspiration or flights of imagination, skill or cunning, but logistics. Building pyramids or landing spacecraft on Jupiter or invading whole continents or painting divine scenes over the roofs of chapels: logistics. I decided that in the caste scale of things, people who dealt with logistics were higher even than the ones who made connections. I decided to get Matthew Younger to invest in the logistics industry, if there was one.
While I waited I also got Roger to build me a model of the area in which the shooting had taken place: the phone box, pavement, bollards, street, shops and pubs. The model had little cars that you could move around, and a little red bicycle. It also had little human figures: the two killers with their sub-machine guns, the victim. Roger delivered it to me the evening before we did the re-enactment. I removed his model of my building from the coffee table in the living room and placed this new model there instead. I stayed up all night looking at it. I placed the human figures in the positions indicated by the forensic report’s diagrams. I made the two killers park their car, step into the street and advance forward. I made the dead man leave the phone box, climb onto his bicycle, fall off, stumble a few steps forwards and collapse. I watched each phase of the sequence from all angles.
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.
12
THE ACTUAL SURFACES,
when I saw them later that day, were sensational. If the diagrams had been like abstract paintings, then the road itself was like an old grand master—one of those Dutch ones thick with rippling layers of oil paint. Its tarmac was old, fissured and cracked. And its markings! They were faded, worn by time and light into faint echoes of the instructions that they’d once pronounced so boldly. The road was cambered, like most roads. It had rained recently and its central area was dry, but had wet tyre tracks running over it. Its edges were still wet. Around the seams where road met kerb and kerbstone pavement, water and dirt had been skilfully mixed to form muddy, pockmarked ridges. In places these ran into puddles in whose centres hung large clouds of mud hemmed in by borders that turned rusty and then clear, as though the artist had used them to clean his brush.
Chewing gum, cigarette butts and bottle tops had been distributed randomly across the area and sunk into its outer membrane, become one with tarmac, stone, dirt, water, mud. If you were to cut out ten square centimetres of it like you do with fields on school geography trips—ten centimetres by ten centimetres wide and ten more deep—you’d find so much to analyse, so many layers, just so much
matter—
that your study of it would branch out and become endless until, finally, you threw your hands up in despair and announced to whatever authority it was you were reporting to:
There’s too much here, too much to process, just too much.
I arrived at the re-enactment area from the south. Police tape had been unwound across the street where Shakespeare Road ran into Coldharbour Lane, beneath a bridge that crossed the road perpendicular to the bridge I’d been stopped by on the day of the actual shooting. A policeman had been posted there to turn traffic away. I showed him the pass Naz had biked over to me one hour earlier; he let me through. Naz came over to greet me, but I paused beside the policeman and asked him:
“Were you here on the day the shooting happened?”
“No,” he said.
“I mean, not
here
here, but just on the other side of the cordoned-off area?”
“I wasn’t there that day,” he said.
I stared at him intently for a few more seconds, then walked on with Naz.
“Slept well?” Naz asked.
I hadn’t slept at all. My tiredness made the dappled pattern of wet and dry patches on the pavement stand out more intensely. The air was bright but not bright-blue: the sun was beaming from behind a thin layer of white cloud. Its light cast shadows and reflections: from the bollards and the phone box and on the surfaces of puddles.
“Whatever,” I said. “How long do we have?”
“We’ve got until six o’clock this evening,” he said.
“Get it extended,” I told him.
“They won’t let us have more time,” he said.
“Pay them,” I said. “Offer them double what we’ve paid already, and if they say no, then double that again. Is all the area between the lines of tape ours?”
“Yes,” said Naz.
The cordoned-off stretch ran between the bridge and the traffic lights I’d been stopped by on the first day—but of this area only about a third was primary re-enactment space. The other two thirds were given over to back-up: cars and boxes, tables, a big van from whose back doors two women were handing out coffee. The vehicles were all parked unusually: not flat against the kerb but willy-nilly, right across the road, irregular.
“When you see that, it’s usually because there’s been an accident,” I told Naz.
“Sorry?” he said.
“Or the fair,” I said. “If it’s on grass.”
He looked at me intently for a while. Then his eyes lit up and he said:
“Oh yes, I see. I always liked the fair.”
“Me too,” I said.
We smiled at one another, then I looked across our area. One of Frank’s people who I recognized from the building was lifting replica sub-machine guns from a box and carrying them with another man towards the van the two women were serving coffee from. Another man was stepping from a dull red BMW he’d parked in the middle of the road beside the traffic lights. Another, shortish man I hadn’t seen before was standing two feet behind him, watching the goings-on. I looked back at the ground. Besides being layered and cracked, it was also plumbed: dotted with holes and outlets that had been placed there strategically when the street had first been laid. There was a small cover set into the tarmac that had ‘water’ written on it and another almost identical one that said ‘London Transport’. A larger, rounder one set into a hydrant carried two strings of figures,
EM124
and
B125;
another simply bore the letter
C.
All these openings to tubes and pipelines, outlets and supply points, connections feeding back to who knew where. I saw we had a lot of work to do.
“Where are the re-enactors?” I asked.
“Over there,” said Naz.
He pointed to the van. Three black men were standing around behind it, drinking coffee. Two of them were the same ones I’d pointed out to Naz the day we’d hired the Soho Theatre; the third I’d not seen before. He was riding around in small circles on a red sports bicycle, trying to keep going without putting his feet down.
“Is that the victim?” I asked.
“Yes,” replied Naz.
“Stand him down,” I said. “I’ll take his place. Send the other two over to me. And Naz?”
“Yes?”
“I want to pay the people who’ve done all the organizing bits more.”
“Which ones do you mean?” he asked.
“The people who’ve worked with you to get all the elements of this coordinated. Not the ones who actually do stuff, but the ones who make the other people’s stuff all fit together. You understand?”
“I do,” said Naz. “But you’re already paying them generously.”
“Pay them more generously, then,” I said.
I pressed my thumb to my finger just where I’d stuck the knife in a few hours earlier as I said this. Money was like blood, I figured. I’d barely pricked myself; I had plenty more to give.
Naz walked across to the three black men by the van. I saw him take the man who’d been riding the bicycle in circles to one side and talk to him. The man got off the bike, talked to Naz some more, then strode back to the van, reached in, took out a bag and walked off towards the police tape. The other two, meanwhile, came sauntering over to me. I briefed them.
“What I want you to do,” I said, “is drive that BMW from over there beside the lights to just up there beside the Green Man.”
“Your man talked us through the sequence,” one of them said. He had a London accent and an affable, smiley face.
“Yes,” I told him, “but you must park it just there, see? Exactly there. Its bonnet, front, its nose, should be exactly there, no further forward than the end of the Green Man’s second window. You park it there, then get out—you take your guns with you—and walk across the street firing at me.”
“At you?” the same man asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll be re-enacting the victim’s role. You must walk across the street quite slowly, almost casually, firing at me. But don’t fire until—here, come with me.”
I walked them over to the phone box.
“I’ll start here,” I continued. “I’ll have just left this phone box when you pull up. Or I’ll just be leaving it. I’ll get on my bike and start pedalling, riding in this direction, over here. That’s when you should start shooting: as I come up to just here, where Movement Cars starts.”
“Where should we stand?” the man asked again.
“There,” I said. I walked them back across the street to a spot just in the middle where the cracks branched out into a cell-like pattern of repeating hexagons. “Walk from the car up to here. No further than here, though. You can keep firing, but just stop advancing once you reach this spot. I’ll try to turn into this road here, Belinda Road, and my bike’s handlebars will twist under me, and I’ll fall off, then get up again, and you shoot again and I’ll go down again. You guys should stand here while I do that. Stand here for a while, then go back to the car. Yes, do it like that. Do it just like that.”
The other man spoke now. Unlike his friend he had a strong West Indian accent:
“You’re the boss,” he said.
I signalled over to Naz, who had been talking on his mobile. He came over to us.
“Ready to go?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “What news on the time front?”
“Working on it,” he said.
He called Frank and Annie over. They had Frank’s man in tow, plus the man I’d seen handling the sub-machine guns with him a few minutes earlier. They carried one gun each.
“Sid,” Frank told me by way of introduction. “He’s an effects man I’ve worked with on several films. He’ll show our friends here how the guns work. You can take up your position if you like.”
“Okay,” I said—but I stayed to watch this Sid explain the working of the guns.
“Basically,” said Sid, “they’re like real ten-millimetre Uzis with the chamber taken out. They’ll make a nice bang. You’ve got two magazines,” he went on, pointing to two metallic blocks Frank’s man was holding, “which clip in under here. Look, try it.”
He handed the guns to the two black men. Frank’s man handed them the magazines. They held both awkwardly. Neither could get their magazine to clip in properly. Sid showed them how to wedge the Uzis’ butts against their stomachs just below the ribs and guide the magazines in upwards with their left hand from below, feeling for the slot and catch. They tried it a few times, nodding in satisfaction when they got it right. I envied them. I thought of asking to try too, but didn’t want to get all self-indulgent. Besides, things were moving on. The coffee van was being shifted and the re-enactment area cleared of all personnel. The two black men were being led towards the BMW and handed its keys. The bicycle was being brought to me. I took it, wheeled it over to the phone box, balanced it against the railings just beside this, then opened the phone box’s door and stepped inside.
The street’s sounds drained away and I was back in a cocoon—the same cocoon I’d been placed in when my phone connection had been ripped out of the wall the day the Settlement came through. The cabin had a little shelf in it. Perhaps this black man whose last moments I was re-enacting had rested his address book on this shelf as he made his final phone call. Had the book been shabby, fat and bulging? Yellow? I pictured it as yellow, tattered but not fat. Then it went blue and thin, like those vocabulary books you get in school.
On the window above the shelf the figure of a messenger blowing a horn was stencilled in silhouette. Beyond it was the caged façade of Movement Cars, with the words
Airports, Stations, Light, Removals, Any Distance
painted on the window. The letters were painted on in white and with a blue outline that had been extended outwards on each letter’s right so they seemed to be casting shadows. What did
Light
mean? I picked up the phone’s receiver. I didn’t call anyone or put any money in the slot: I just stood there holding the receiver in my hand. When my phone socket had been ripped out of the wall it had lain across my floor looking disgusting, like something that’s come out of something.
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.