Remainder. Part 9

8.

THE DAY OF THE FIRST RE-ENACTMENT finally arrived. July the eleventh.

We'd decided to begin at 2 p.m. I spent the morning in Naz's office, then ate a final light lunch with him. The air there was solemn, its heavy silence punctured only by the occasional ringing phone or crackling radio which one of Naz's staff would answer in hushed tones.

"What is it?" I'd ask Naz each time.

"Nothing," he'd answer quietly. "Everything's under control."

At half-past one I left. Naz's people stood by the door as I made my way out-three or four of them on each side, forming a kind of tunnel-and wished me luck, their faces grave and sober. Naz took the lift down to the street with me, then, when the car pulled up, turned to face me and shook my hand. He was staying behind to direct all activities from his office. His dark eyes locked on mine while our hands held each other, the thing behind the eyes whirring deep back inside his skull.

Our driver drove me from the office to the building. It was just two minutes' walk away, but he took me there in the car we'd gone around in while setting all this up. I sat in the back seat and watched the streets slide by: the railway bridge, the sports track with its knitted green wire fence, its battered football goals, its yellow, red and white lane markings, boxes, arcs and circles. I turned my head to look out of the rear window just in time to see the top of Naz's office disappear from view. Then I turned back-and, as I did, my building slid up to the car and loomed above me like a sculpted monolith, the words Madlyn Mansions Madlyn Mansions still carved in the stone above its front door. still carved in the stone above its front door.

The driver brought the car to a halt in front of it. Annie was waiting on the pavement. She opened the car door and I stepped out.

"All ready?" she asked.

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.

The same quiet, uneasy atmosphere was reigning here as had reigned in Naz's office. The bustle and hum of scores of people going about tasks that I'd grown so accustomed to over the last weeks and months had disappeared and been replaced by earnest, hushed, last-minute concentration. The concierge re-enactor was standing in the lobby, while one of the costume people fiddled with the strappings of her face mask. Her face had never come to me-or, to be precise, it had come to me, but only as a blank-so I'd decided she should wear a mask to blank it out. We'd got one of those masks that ice-hockey goaltenders wear: white and pocked with little breathing holes. I stopped in front of her.

"You understand exactly what it is you have to do?" I asked her.

There was a pause behind the mask, then she said: "Yes. Just stand here."

Her voice, behind the plastic, was unnatural: it rattled and distorted like those tinny children's toys that emit cow sounds or little phrases when you shake them. I liked that.

"Exactly. Stand here in the lobby," I repeated. I nodded at her and the costume person, then moved on towards the stairs.

The glum pianist was already practising up in his third floor flat. We'd chosen something by Rachmaninov for him to play-at first, at least. He'd played me sample pieces by several composers, and I'd liked this one by Rachmaninov best. It was called Second Second or or Third Concerto Third Concerto or or Sonata in A Major Sonata in A Major or or B Flat, Minor, Major- B Flat, Minor, Major-something along those lines. What I liked about it was the way it undulated: how it bent and looped. Plus it was very difficult to play, apparently, which was good: he'd really make mistakes. I heard him hit his first snag as I moved onto the staircase. I stood still and grabbed Annie by the arm: "Listen!" I whispered.

We listened. The pianist paused, then went at it again, slowing right down as he entered the pa.s.sage that had tripped him up. He repeated it several times, then picked his pace up and returned to the beginning of the sequence, clocking it-then again, a little faster, then again and again and again, speeding it up each time until he was back almost at full speed. Eventually he accelerated out of the pa.s.sage and on into the rest of the sonata.

"That's just right," I said to Annie. "Just right."

We moved on, up past the motorbike enthusiast's flat. He wasn't there, of course: he was out in the courtyard tinkering with his motorbike. I hoped he was, at least: that's where he was supposed to be. Then past the boring couple's flat. On the floor above this, the fourth floor, we found Frank. He was standing on the landing with a diagram in his hands, checking the walls and floor-the distribution of filled-in and blank s.p.a.ce-against this. Seeing me, he nodded his head in a way that implied he was satisfied with his check, let the hand holding the clipboard drop to his side and told me: "Everything in order. Good luck."

We continued upwards. Members of Frank and Annie's crews were moving off the stairs, retreating behind doors with radios in their hands. We pa.s.sed the liver lady's door: I could hear several people shuffling around behind it, and the sound of soft, uncooked liver being laid out on cutting boards. Then we were on my floor. Annie entered my flat with me to check everything was right here, too. It was: the plants were scraggly but alive; the floorboards were scuffed but warm, neither s.h.i.+ny nor dull but somewhere in between; the rug was lying in the right place, slightly ruffled. Annie and I stood facing one another.

"All yours," she said, smiling warmly. "Call Naz when you're ready to go."

I nodded. She left, closing the door behind her.

Before phoning Naz I stood alone in my living room for a while. The layout of the sofas and the coffee table, of the kitchen area-the plants, the counter and the fridge: all this was correct. Below me I could hear radios and TV sets being switched on throughout the building. At least one Hoover was in use. I stepped into the bathroom and looked at the crack on the wall. Just right too: not just the crack but the whole room-taps, wall, colours, crack, everything: perfect. I stepped back into my living room, picked up the phone and called Naz.

"Ready?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Good," he replied. "I'll start the liver and the cats. We'll take it from there."

"Fine," I said, and hung up.

I walked over to the kitchen window and looked out. Above the staggered, red-tiled rooftops of the facing building, the doors of two of the little cabins opened and two cats were shunted out of each. Three of them started meandering slowly around the roofs, each in his own direction; the fourth just sat down and stayed still-although if I slightly moved my head a centimetre or so to the left the kinked gla.s.s made him elongate and slither. A crackle came from downstairs: the snap of wet liver landing on hot oil; then came another one, a third, a fourth. For a few seconds it sounded as though fireworks were being let off a few streets away; then the crackles quietened down into a constant sizzle punctuated by the occasional pop. I wandered back into the bathroom and looked at the cats from there while I waited for the liver's smell to reach me.

When it did, I stepped back into the living room and called Naz.

"It's not right," I said.

"What's not?" he asked.

"That smell," I said. "I thought Annie had made sure they'd broken the pans in. So they weren't new, I mean."

"I'll check that with her now," he said. "Hold on."

I heard him radio Annie and repeat to her what I'd told him. I heard her radio crackle to his radio and back down the phone line to me. I heard her tell him: "They are broken in. We went through all this."

"She says they are broken in," Naz told me. Then there was a crackle and I heard Annie's voice ask Naz: "What's not right about the smell?"

"What's wrong with it?" repeated Naz.

"It's got that sharp edge," I told him. "Kind of like cordite."

"A bit like cordite," I heard him tell her.

"That's what he said before," I heard her voice say. "Tell him to give it a few minutes. It should settle down once it gets cooking."

"Give it a few minutes," Naz said. "It should..."

"Yes, I heard," I told him.

I hung up again and walked over to my kitchen area. The plants rustled in their baskets as I pa.s.sed 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 brus.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+rt caught slightly on the corner as I pa.s.sed-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 pa.s.sing it deftly, letting the s.h.i.+rt brush the woodwork lightly, almost imperceptibly, like a matador's cape tickling a bull's horns. I tried it again: this time my s.h.i.+rt 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 s.h.i.+rt brush fleetingly against the woodwork as I turned. This time I got the s.h.i.+rt 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 s.p.a.ces. 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 facade 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- 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 pa.s.sed 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: 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 pa.s.sed 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, Harder and harder to lift up, she'd said. I thought about this as I stood there facing her. she'd said. I thought about this as I stood there facing her. Harder and harder to lift up 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s. 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 sc.r.a.pe that came from behind the liver lady's door. It could have been a radio or it could have been her rubbish bag sc.r.a.ping 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 s.p.a.ce to cover.

I walked past the pianist's flat. The sound of his music grew crisper and sharper as I pa.s.sed his door, then once again soft and floaty as I moved down from his floor. On the landing below his I pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 c.o.c.ked 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sed 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 m.u.f.fled bell ring; then the piano music stopped too. I heard the pianist's chair being sc.r.a.ped 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 gla.s.s 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, uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g 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.