I cooked myself some breakfast and pondered how best to make my search irrational. The first idea that came to me was to I-Ching the map: to close my eyes, turn round a few times, stick a pin in blindly and then go and look in whatever area it happened to have landed on. The more I thought about that method, though, the less sly it seemed. Random’s not the same as sly, is it? I tried it with my
A-Z,
just to see what would happen: Mitcham. I tried it a second time: Waltham-stow Marshes. So much for the Wisdom of the Orient.
Colours was the next idea I had: following colours. I could decide to go where, say, yellow things went: a van, an advertising hoarding, someone’s clothes. I could start somewhere, anywhere, and walk down the street the yellow van went down, then wait beside a yellow shop front till a woman wearing yellow trousers went by and I’d follow her. It was completely arbitrary—but it might prompt something, get me looking at things in a way I wouldn’t normally, open chinks up in the camouflage behind which my place was hiding.
Then, following on from that idea, I thought of walking jerkily, erratically. I don’t mean in my walk itself, my gait: I mean that I would start off down one street, then double back suddenly, like I had when I’d set out to Heathrow to meet Catherine but realized that I’d left her flight details behind. Or I’d pretend to be heading one way, waiting to cross a certain road by a pedestrian crossing—then, when the green man appeared, I’d veer off in some other direction, like a striker when he takes a penalty in football and sends the goalkeeper the wrong way.
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: gods, 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.
The building had a lobby. Of course. Almost straight away I saw my concierge’s cleaning cupboard—the one I’d sketched out in my diagram, with broom and mop and Hoover leaning across one another inside. It was six or so feet to the right of where it should have been, but it was the right kind of cupboard. On the lobby’s other side was a little concierge’s booth: a cabin with a sliding window in it. I could see a concierge, a small black man, talking to someone inside the cabin. Both these men’s backs were turned on the main doors—which opened now as a middle-aged West Indian man came out and, seeing me standing there, held one of them for me.
“You going in?” he asked.
I glanced towards the concierge again: his back was still turned.
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
I took the door from the West Indian man and stepped into the lobby.
The street’s sounds disappeared, replaced by the hollow echo of this tall, enclosed space. The sudden change felt like it does inside an aeroplane that suddenly descends, or when a train enters a tunnel and your ears go funny. There were footsteps echoing from somewhere up above and then the murmur of the voices of the concierge and the man he was talking to. The lobby’s floor was grainy—maybe granite. It wasn’t quite right, but I’d be able to change it. I strode quickly and lightly over it, still glancing at the concierge. He was more of a porter than a concierge, but I’d change that too. I’d replace him: it had to be a woman. I could picture her body now: it was middle-aged and pudgy. Her face was still blank.
At the far end of the lobby from the street doors the floor turned into a large, wide staircase. This was perfect. The patterning on its floor wasn’t right either—but the dimensions were perfect. The banister was too new, but I’d get it ripped out and replaced in no time. Looking up, I saw it dwindling and repeating as it turned into each floor. I stood at its base for a moment, watching it dwindling and repeating. It was exciting: the motorbike enthusiast’s flat was just a floor away, the pianist’s only two; two floors above that was the liver lady. I could even see the edges of my own landing as I craned my head back and looked up. I felt a tingling start up in my right side.
Eventually I looked down again and saw a door at the foot of the staircase. Above the door, carved in relief just like the building’s name above the front door, only slightly smaller, was the word
Garden.
I tried this door: it was open, and I stepped into a courtyard. Perfect too: it was large, with trees and bushes, enclosed on all four sides by buildings, by their backs. To my left were several sheds; I’d have those pulled down to make way for the patch of ground the motorbike enthusiast would use. When I stepped further out into the courtyard and turned round to look up at the building, I could see the pianist’s window; three floors above that, the windows to my bathroom and my kitchen. The building facing mine on the courtyard’s far side was similar to mine—equally tall but not identical.
“Good,” I said quietly to myself. “Very good. What colour are its roofs, though?”
This question couldn’t be answered straight away: from here the angle up to the facing building’s roof was too sharp to see the slates, or whether their level rose and fell. I could see hut-like bits protruding from it, though, their tops. That was good too, I thought: they’d have doors in them, most probably, for access to the roof. Just what I needed for the cats: to get them out there so that they could lounge around.
I took one last look at the courtyard, breathed in deeply, went back through the garden door and started up the staircase. The black-on-white recurring pattern wasn’t there, as I mentioned earlier; nor were the wrought-iron banisters with their oxidizing hue and blackened wooden rail above them, but their size and movement—the way they ran and turned—was perfect. The flats started on the first floor. Their front doors were the wrong size: too small. Another thing to change. I recognized my pianist’s one, though. I stood and listened at it for a while. A kind of grating was coming from inside—very subdued, probably pipes and water.
I moved up the staircase, past the boring couple’s flat, on up to where the liver lady lived. Her door was the wrong size, like all the doors, but the spot beside it where she’d place her rubbish bag for the concierge to pick up as I went by: that was just right—minus the pattern, of course. I listened at her door as well and heard a television playing. I walked around the spot she’d place her bag on, looking at it from different angles. I saw where I’d come down the staircase just as her door was opening. Standing there now, I could picture her in greater detail: her wiry hair wrapped in a shawl, the posture of her back as she bent down, the way the fingers of her left hand sat across her lower back and hip. The tingling started up again.
It just remained for me to walk up to my floor. I did this and stood outside my own flat. I listened at the door: no sound. The occupants were probably out at work. I tried to X-ray through the door—not to see what was actually inside but to project what would be: the open-plan kitchen with its Sixties fridge and hanging plants, the wooden floors; off to the right the bathroom with its crack, the pink-grey plaster round it, grooved and wrinkled, the blue and yellow daubs of paint. Then the bit of wall without a mirror where David Simpson’s mirror had been, the bathtub with its larger, older taps, the window that the scent of frying liver wafted in through.