“No,” I said, “that’s no good. My phone’s come out of the wall. It’s broken. We were talking and it broke. I’m sure he’s trying to phone me now. Perhaps you could break in and tell him.”
“I’ll have to go through,” she said.
I heard her setting the receiver on its side, then footsteps, voices, hers and Daubenay’s, in the next room.
He’s on your line?
Daubenay was saying.
But his phone’s gone dead. I’ve been trying it for the last ten minutes.
She said something to him that I couldn’t make out, then I heard his footsteps coming to the phone in her room, then a rustle as he picked it off the desk.
“You there again?” he said.
“We got cut off,” I told him.
The phone’s display window was counting my money down and had already got to thirty-two. Peak rates. I dug into my pockets for more coins but only pulled out two-pence pieces.
“How much did you hear?” Daubenay asked.
“The figure. Could you say it again?”
“Eight and a half million pounds,” Daubenay repeated. “You understand the terms governing your acceptance of this sum?”
“I can’t tell anyone?”
“You can’t discuss, in any public or recordable format, the nature and/or details of the incident.”
“I remember you telling me that,” I said.
“You’ll lose the whole lot if you do, plus any surplus this might have accrued while in your custody.”
“Accrued, yes,” I said. “I remember that bit too. And is it legally enforceable?”
“It most certainly is,” he answered. “Given the status of these parties, these, uh, institutions, these, uh…”
“Bodies,” I said.
“…bodies,” he continued, “almost anything’s enforceable. I strongly suggest we accept. We’d be crazy not to.”
“What do I have to do?” I asked him.
“Come in tomorrow. They’re biking over documents for you to sign. Come at around eleven: they should be here by then.”
The Coke-machine man was wheeling his empty trolley back out of Movement Cars. It was
Light Removals,
not
Light
then
Removals.
It just looked like that, the way they’d laid the words out. The phone’s display window was in the teens now. Daubenay was congratulating me.
“What for?” I asked him.
“It’s an unprecedented sum,” he said. “Well done.”
“I didn’t earn it,” I said.
“You’ve suffered,” he replied.
“That’s not really the right…” I said. “I mean, I didn’t choose to—and in any…”
And the phone cut right there, in mid-conversation again.
I walked back to my flat to get more coins. I walked back down the same street parallel to the one perpendicular to mine, then out again along the perpendicular one, as before: past the Fiesta, the ex-siege zone. I put two pound coins in this time. Daubenay seemed surprised to hear me.
“I think we’ve just about got it wrapped up,” he said. “Go and have a glass of champagne. See you at eleven tomorrow.”
He hung up. I felt foolish. It hadn’t been necessary to call him again. Besides, I needed to get to the airport fast now, eight and a half million or not. As I left the phone box I pictured Catherine’s plane somewhere over Europe, bearing down towards the Channel, towards England. I walked back for a third time to my flat, still using the same route, picked up my coat and wallet, and had made it to beside a tyre shop halfway between the siege zone and the phone box when I realized I’d left the piece of paper with the flight number on it in my kitchen.
I turned back again, but stopped immediately as it occurred to me that perhaps I didn’t need the information: I could just look at the arrivals board and see which flight was coming from Harare. There wouldn’t be more than one at any given time. I turned back out and was about to start walking onwards when it struck me that I didn’t know which terminal to go to. I would have to go and get the details after all. But then before I’d taken a single step towards my flat I remembered that they have lists posted up in tube compartments on the Piccadilly Line, telling you which terminal to go to for each airline. I turned round yet again. Two men who’d walked out of a café next to the tyre shop were looking at me. I realized that I was jerking back and forth like paused video images do on low-quality machines. It must have looked strange. I felt self-conscious, embarrassed. I made a decision to go and pick the flight details up after all, but remained standing on the pavement for a few more seconds while I pretended to weigh up several options and then come to an informed decision. I even brought my finger into it, the index finger of my right hand. It was a performance for the two men watching me, to make my movements come across as more authentic.
When I finally broke out of the circuit I’d now covered four or five times, following the same route each time, perpendicular road out and parallel road back, even crossing each road at the same spot, beside the same skip or just after the same manhole cover—when I finally turned left down Coldharbour Lane towards Brixton Tube, it occurred to me that from now on I didn’t need to move along the ground at all. I was so rich that I could have ordered up a helicopter, told it to come and land in Ruskin Park, or if it couldn’t land then hover just above the rooftops, lower a rope and winch me up into its stomach, like they do when rescuing people from the sea. And yet I kept to the ground, ran my eyes along it like a blind man’s fingers reading Braille, concentrating on my passage over it: each footstep, how the knees bend, how to swing my arms. That’s the way I’ve had to do things since the accident: understand them first, then do them.
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.
Almost all the way. One strange thing happened. It might seem trivial to you, but not to me. I remember it very clearly. At Green Park I had to change lines. To do this at Green Park you have to ride the escalator almost to street level and then take another escalator down again. Up in the lobby area, beyond the automatic gates, there were some payphones and a large street map. I was so drawn to these—their overview, their promise of connection—that I’d put my ticket into the gates and walked through towards them before I’d realized that I should have gone back down again instead. To make things worse, my ticket didn’t come back out. I called a guard over and told him what had happened, and that I needed my ticket back.
“It’ll be inside the gate,” he said. “I’ll open it for you.”
He took a key out of his pocket, opened the gate’s ticket-collecting flap and picked up the top ticket. He inspected it.
“This ticket’s only for as far as this station,” he said.
“That’s not mine, then,” I said. “I bought one for Heathrow.”
“If you were the last person to pass through, your ticket should be the top one.”
“I was the last one through,” I told him. “No one came past after me. But that’s not my ticket.”
“If you were the last one through, then this must be your ticket,” he repeated.
It wasn’t my ticket. I started to feel dizzy again.
“Hold on,” the guard said. He reached up into the feeding system on the flap’s top half and pulled another ticket out from where it was wedged between two cogs. “This yours?” he asked.
It was. He gave it back to me, but it had picked up black grease from the cogs when he’d opened the flap, and the grease got on my fingers.
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.
2
AFTER THE ACCIDENT
—some time after the accident, after I’d come out of my coma and my memory had come back and my broken bones had set—I had to learn how to move. The part of my brain that controls the motor functions of the right side of my body had been damaged. It had been damaged pretty irreparably, so the physiotherapist had to do something called “rerouting”.
Rerouting is exactly what it sounds like: finding a new route through the brain for commands to run along. It’s sort of like a government compulsorily purchasing land from farmers to run train tracks over after the terrain the old tracks ran through has been flooded or landslid away. The physiotherapist had to route the circuit that transmits commands to limbs and muscles through another patch of brain—an unused, fallow patch, the part that makes you able to play tiddlywinks, listen to chart music, whatever.
To cut and lay the new circuits, what they do is make you visualize things. Simple things, like lifting a carrot to your mouth. For the first week or so they don’t give you a carrot, or even make you try to move your hand at all: they just ask you to visualize taking a carrot in your right hand, wrapping your fingers round it and then levering your whole forearm upwards from the elbow until the carrot reaches your mouth. They make you understand how it all works: which tendon does what, how each joint rotates, how angles, upward force and gravity contend with and counterbalance one another. Understanding this, and picturing yourself lifting the carrot to your mouth, again and again and again, cuts circuits through your brain that will eventually allow you to perform the act itself. That’s the idea.
But the act itself, when you actually come to try it, turns out to be more complicated than you thought. There are twenty-seven separate manoeuvres involved. You’ve learnt them, one by one, in the right order, understood how they all work, run through them in your mind, again and again and again, for a whole week—lifted more than a thousand imaginary carrots to your mouth, or one imaginary carrot more than a thousand times, which amounts to the same thing. But then you take a carrot—they bring you a fucking carrot, gnarled, dirty and irregular in ways your imaginary carrot never was, and they stick it in your hands—and you know, you just know as soon as you see the bastard thing that it’s not going to work.
“Go for it,” said the physiotherapist. He laid the carrot on my lap, then moved back from me slowly, as though I were a house of cards, and sat down facing me.
Before I could lift it I had to get my hand to it. I swung my palm and fingers upwards from the wrist, but then to bring the whole hand towards where the carrot was I’d have to slide the elbow forwards, pushing from the shoulder, something I hadn’t learnt or practised yet. I had no idea how to do it. In the end I grabbed my forearm with my left hand and just yanked it forwards.
“That’s cheating,” said the physio, “but okay. Try to lift the carrot now.”
I closed my fingers round the carrot. It felt—well, it
felt:
that was enough to start short-circuiting the operation. It had texture; it had mass. The whole week I’d been gearing up to lift it, I’d thought of my hand, my fingers, my rerouted brain as active agents, and the carrot as a no-thing—a hollow, a carved space for me to grasp and move. This carrot, though, was more active than me: the way it bumped and wrinkled, how it crawled with grit. It was cold. I grasped it and went into Phase Two, the hoist, but even as I did I felt the surge of active carrot input scrambling the communication between brain and arm, firing off false contractions, locking muscles at the very moment it was vital they relax and expand, twisting fulcral joints the wrong directions. As the carrot rolled, slipped and plummeted away I understood how air traffic controllers must feel in the instant when they know a plane is just about to crash, and that they can do nothing to prevent it.
“First try,” said my physio.
“At least it didn’t fall on anyone,” I said.
“Let’s go for it again.”
It took another week to get it right. We went back to the blackboard, factoring in the surplus signals we’d not factored in before, then back through visualization, then back to a real carrot again. I hate carrots now. I still can’t eat them to this day.
Everything was like this. Everything, each movement: I had to learn them all. I had to understand how they work first, break them down into each constituent part, then execute them. Walking, for example: now that’s very complicated. There are seventy-five manoeuvres involved in taking a single step forward, and each manoeuvre has its own command. I had to learn them all, all seventy-five. And if you think
That’s not so bad: we all have to learn to walk once; you just had to learn it twice,
you’re wrong. Completely wrong. That’s just it, see: in the normal run of things you never
learn
to walk like you learn swimming, French or tennis. You just do it without thinking how you do it: you stumble into it, literally. I had to take walking lessons. For three whole weeks my physio wouldn’t let me walk without his supervision, in case I picked up bad habits—holding my head wrong, moving my foot before I’d bent my knee, who knows what else. He was like an obsessive trainer, one of those ballet or ice-skating coaches from behind the old iron curtain.
“Toes forward! Forward, damn it!” he’d shout. “More knee! Lift!” He’d bang his fist against the board, against his diagrams.
Every action is a complex operation, a system, and I had to learn them all. I’d understand them, then I’d emulate them. At first, for the first few months, I did everything very slowly.
“You’re learning,” my physio said; “and besides, your muscles are still plastic.”
“Plastic?”
“Plastic. Rigid. It’s the opposite of flaccid. With time they’ll go flaccid: malleable, relaxed. Flaccid, good; plastic, bad.”
Eventually I not only learnt to execute most actions but also came up to speed. Almost up to speed—I never got back to one hundred per cent. Maybe ninety. By April I was already almost up to speed, up to my ninety. But I still had to think about each movement I made, had to understand it. No Doing without Understanding: the accident bequeathed me that for ever, an eternal detour.
After I’d been out of hospital for a week or so, I went to the cinema with my friend Greg. We went to the Ritzy to see
Mean Streets
with Robert De Niro. Two things were strange about this. One was watching moving images. My memory had come back to me in moving images, as I mentioned earlier—like a film run in instalments, a soap opera, one five-year episode each week or so. It hadn’t been particularly exciting; in fact, it had been quite mundane. I’d lain in bed and watched the episodes as they arrived. I’d had no control over what happened. It could have been another history, another set of actions and events, like when there’s been a mix-up and you get the wrong holiday photos back from the chemist’s. I wouldn’t have known or cared differently, and would have accepted them the same. As I watched
Mean Streets
with Greg I felt no lesser a degree of detachment and indifference, but no greater one either, even though the actions and events had nothing to do with me.
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.
I set about wondering when in my life I’d been the least artificial, the least second-hand. Not as a child, certainly: that’s the worst time. You’re always performing, copying other people, things you’ve seen them do—and copying them badly too. No, I decided it had been in Paris, a year before the accident. That’s where I’d met Catherine. She was American, from somewhere outside of Chicago. She worked for a large humanitarian organization, some kind of lobbying outfit. They’d sent her on the same intensive language course my company had sent me on. It strikes me as odd, thinking about it now, that she couldn’t have learnt French back in Illinois. Considering they’d lose me in a year, my company were making a bad investment—but they didn’t claim to be making it on behalf of starving children.
Anyway, I met Catherine while on that course. We hit it off together straight away. We’d get giggling fits in classes. We’d go out and get drunk in the evenings instead of doing homework. One time we found a rowing boat tied up on the Quai Malaquais embankment, climbed inside, untied it from its moorings and were just about to paddle it away using our hands when some men came along and turfed us out. Another time—well, there were lots of other times. The point is, though, that in Paris hanging out with Catherine I felt less self-conscious than I had at any other period of my life—more natural, more in-the-moment. Inside, not outside—as though we’d penetrated something’s skin: the city, perhaps, or maybe life itself. I really felt as though we’d got away with something.
We’d corresponded pretty regularly since then. It had dropped off on my part after the accident, of course, but as soon as I’d got my memory back I’d written to her and brought her up to date. In February, just as I was coming out of hospital, she’d written to tell me that she was being sent to Zimbabwe and would pass through London on the way back. We wrote more frequently after that. Our letters acquired a sexual undertone, something our in-person friendship had never had. I started imagining having sex with her. I developed various fantasy scenarios in which our first seduction might take place, which I’d play, refine, edit and play again.
In one of these scenarios, we were in my flat. We were standing in the hallway between the kitchen and the bedroom, although flashes of Paris and a Chicago which I’d never seen broke in, brasserie windows flanked with skyscrapers and windy canals jostling with the yellow walls. I’d say something witty and suggestive, and Catherine would reply
You’ll have to show me
or
Why don’t you show me?
or
You’re really going to have to show me that,
and then we’d kiss, floating towards my bedroom. In another version, we were somewhere in the country. I’d driven her out in my Fiesta, then drawn up and parked beside a field or wood. I’d have her standing in profile, because she looked better this way, with curly hair half-hiding her cheek. I’d move up close beside her, she’d turn to me, we’d kiss and then we’d end up making love in the Fiesta while treetops full of birds chirped and shrieked in ecstasy.
I never got this second sequence quite down, though, due to the difficulty of manoeuvring us both into the car without bumping our heads or tripping on the belts that always hung out from the doors. And then I’d worry about where I’d parked it, and whether someone might speed round a bend and crash into it like the drive-off guy from Peckham. The other scenario too, the corridor one: as we floated to the bedroom I’d remember there were loads of mouldy coffee cups beside the bed, and that the sheets were old and dirty. If it wasn’t that then it was that the neighbours were right outside and I hadn’t drawn the curtains and they’d start up a conversation through the windows, or—well,
something
always came along and short-circuited these imaginary seductions, fucked them up. Even my fantasies were plastic, imperfect, unreal.