“I’d like you to get the liver lady to go down the stairs and visit the motorbike enthusiast.”
“Now?” he asked.
“Now,” I said, “yes.”
Two minutes later I was standing at my window watching her—the real liver lady—shuffling out into the courtyard. I dragged Roger’s model over to the window so I could see both it and the courtyard at the same time. I picked up the motorbike enthusiast figure and placed him on one of the swings.
“Now,” I told Naz, “I’d like the motorbike enthusiast to go sit on the swing closest to him.”
Not half a minute later I saw the real motorbike enthusiast look up towards my building’s doorway. He was talking to someone; I couldn’t hear what was being said because the pianist was playing his Rachmaninov—but then I didn’t need to. The motorbike enthusiast looked up towards my window, then rose to his feet, walked over to the swing and sat on it.
“I’d prefer him to kneel on it,” I told Naz.
“Kneel?”
“Yes: kneel rather than sit. He should kneel in exactly the same position as he kneels beside his bike in.”
The figure had been cast in that position. Its limbs didn’t move. A few more seconds, and the real motorbike enthusiast changed his position on the swing so he had one knee on the seat.
“And now…” I said. “The pianist! He can go and watch.”
I made the pianist figure do just that: cross over to his window and peer out. Seconds later the piano music stopped below me; then the sound of a chair being pushed back, then footsteps—then his real bald pate popped out of his real window. I lifted the model up and rested it against the window sill so I could look down on the model’s head poking out at the same time as I looked at the real one. The distance made them both look the same size.
Before I sent them all back to their posts, I had the motorbike enthusiast give the swing a hard push. As he did this I did the same thing to the model swing. I watched them both swing. The model swing swung about two and a half times for each time the real swing swung. It also stopped before the real one did. I stayed at my window for a long time, watching the diminishing movements of the real swing. I remembered wind-up musical toys, Fisher Price ones, how they slow down as their mechanism unwinds right out to its end, until it seems that no more music will come from them—but then if you nudge them just a little, they always give one last half-chime, and another half-half-chime, and still more, less and less each time, for up to hours—or weeks—after they first ground to a halt.
The next day I placed my model on my living-room floor. I moved the figures around once more and issued instructions down the phone to Naz as I did this—only today I didn’t go and look. Just knowing it was happening was enough. I had the concierge pick up the liver lady’s rubbish bag, the motorbike enthusiast kneel in the lobby for two hours, the pianist sit on the closed lid of his piano facing his window for another two—and all the while, as they did this for real, I sat in the same spot on my living-room floor. The day after that I lay beside the model looking at it from the same angle as the sun did. My gaze burst in through the upper staircase window and flooded the floor’s patterned maze, then slowly—very slowly, almost imperceptibly—glazed, lost its focus, darkened and retreated, disappearing from the furthest edge of floor four hours and seven minutes after it had first entered. I did this for each floor I’d previously measured: four hours and seven minutes for the top down to three hours and fourteen minutes for the second.
I only left the building—the whole re-enactment area, I mean: the building and the courtyard and the stretch of streets between there and Naz’s office, with its bridge and sports track—twice during the next month. The first time was to go shopping. I’d been having all that done for me, but one day I got an urge to go and check up on the outside world myself. Nothing much to report. The second time was when I noticed that my old, dented Fiesta which was parked beside the sports track had a flat tyre. I hadn’t driven it in months, and didn’t plan to any time soon—but when I saw the flat tyre I remembered the tyre place beside my old flat: the one I’d paused beside the day the Settlement came through, uncertain whether to go home or press on to the airport.
As soon as I’d remembered it, I started seeing the tyre shop clearly in my mind: its front windows, the pavement where its sign stood, the café next to it. I remembered that a garish model baked-beans tin was mounted on the café’s roof beside a pile of tyres. More tyres had been lined up on the street outside, parked upright in a rack. As these details came back to me, the whole place—which when I’d lived beside it had seemed to me so mundane that I’d barely even noticed it—took on the air of something interesting. Intrigued, I decided to visit it. I borrowed some tools from the motorbike enthusiast, replaced the flat tyre with the spare one and then drove back to where I used to live to have the flat one fixed.
The place didn’t seem to have changed since I’d last seen it. It still had tyres lined up in a rack on the street outside and more tyres piled up on its roof beside the large-scale garish model baked-beans tin that advertised the next door café. The tyres were normal tyres, real ones, and looked miniature next to the giant tin, like toys. More tyres were leaning in stacks against the shop front, like you see at go-kart tracks. Behind these, painted announcements advertised special deals on tyres both new and part-worn or free fitting. On the pavement outside, a small rectangular contraption stood upright: a waist-high board skewered by a pole set into a heavy base. In the breeze the board span quickly round the pole, flashing two messages at passers-by in quick succession. Both messages said “
TYRES
”.
There was a more elaborate advertisement swaying around on the pavement a few feet away: a child dressed in a Michelin Man suit. The suit gave him an obese white tyre-girth that swayed as he moved. He was maybe ten, eleven. I could tell it was a boy because he wasn’t wearing the suit’s head. Two older boys had this: these two were standing by the tyre shop’s entrance, kicking the head to one another like a football. As I pulled up they stopped kicking it and sauntered over to my car. They looked at my tyres very earnestly, craning their necks in an exaggerated way—imitating their parents, doubtless, or whoever it was that owned this shop.
I stepped out of the car. “You’ve got a dent,” the oldest boy said. He must have been fifteen.
“I know that,” I told him. “That’s not why I’m here. I’m here because I’ve got a flat tyre.”
The slightly younger boy who’d been kicking the head with him had moved round the car to check the tyres on the passenger side.
“It’s in the boot,” I told them.
I walked round to the back of the car and opened it up. The two boys peered inside, like gangsters in movies—in those scenes where the gangsters open up a car boot in which they’ve stashed a body or a cache of guns. These boys were thinking of those scenes too as I opened up the boot for them: I could tell. They peered in; then the oldest one reached in and lifted the tyre out. The younger tried to help him, but he brushed his hand aside. The youngest one, the one in the Michelin Man suit, had waddled over and tried to join in, but the middling one shoved him away again.
“You’re meant to stand out in the street!” he told him, raising his voice.
“You’re not in charge of me!” the youngest one shouted back.
“Shut up, both of you!” the oldest told them.
The middling one looked down. His face flushed red with hurt. The youngest one swaggered triumphantly beside him in his suit. The oldest boy carried the tyre into the shop. I followed him. The middling boy slouched in behind me but stayed in the doorway, keeping the youngest out. There was no one else in the shop.
“Where are the real people?” I asked.
“I’m real,” the oldest boy said. He looked offended.
“You know…the…the owners,” I said.
“Off to lunch,” he answered.
“Café next door,” added the middling one.
“Well, I could come back when…” I began—but stopped because the oldest boy had dunked my tyre into a tub of water and was slowly turning it round. He seemed to know what he was doing. He stared into the murky water, his eyes taut with concentration. I stared too: it was absorbing, watching the tyre’s bottom edge entering the water and slowly revolving. After a few seconds the boy stopped turning it and pointed:
“There’s your puncture,” he said.
I followed his finger with my eye. Bubbles of air were rising from a silvery slit on the rubber’s surface. It was like mineral water, only dirty.
“Will they be able to fix it?” I asked. “When they come back, I mean.”
“I can fix it,” said the boy.
He hoisted the tyre out of the water and carried it over to a kind of lathe. The tyre was pretty big in proportion to him: he had to half-support it with his knee. Black grime was rubbing off it onto his clothes, which were already smeared with grime all over. He sat down at the lathe and pressed a pedal with his foot, which made a series of clamps tighten round the tyre. Then his foot pressed another pedal and the tyre deflated with a bang. He started daubing glue on from a tin. His hand moved quickly as he did this, dipping and daubing, flashing the brush one way then another. The exaggerated manner he’d had when he sauntered over to the car was gone, eclipsed now by his earnest concentration, his artisanal skill. The middling boy watched him from a few feet away. The youngest boy watched too. The eyes of both of them were full of admiration—longing, almost—as they watched him flick the brush.
He pressed a pedal with his foot; the lathe revolved a quarter-turn between his hands, and he brushed an adjoining spot with glue. He pressed another pedal, and the wheel turned back for him to brush the spot on the other side of the puncture. When he’d brushed all he wanted, he dipped his hand into the tub again, scooped up some water and patted this on the tyre while the three of us stood still, reverent as a congregation at a christening, watching him at his font.
Effortlessly the boy’s hand rose and flipped a lever at the lathe’s side. The lathe hissed as its clamps released my wheel and glided back. The same hand reached up to beside his shoulder to take hold of a blue tube. The tube was hanging just beyond his field of vision, but the hand didn’t need help: it knew just where it was. Its fingers jabbed the tube into my tyre and its thumb depressed a catch; air started flowing into it. A minute later the tyre was mended, inflated and rolling across the tarmac back towards my car. He took it to the boot again and lifted it back in.
“Shouldn’t we put it back on?” I asked. “Drive on it, I mean?”
“No. Keep it as a spare,” he said. “You should rotate them.”
“Rotate, yes,” I said. “Okay.”
He could have told me anything and I’d have said “Okay”. I stood there looking at him for a while longer. We all did. A truce seemed to exist now between the other two boys. After a while I asked him:
“Shall I pay you, then, or…”
“Yes. Pay me,” he said. “Ten pounds.”
I paid him ten pounds. I remembered that my windscreen washer reservoir was empty and I asked him for some fill-up. He glanced at the middling boy and slightly raised his chin; the middling boy ran into the shop and came out with a litre of blue liquid which he and the youngest boy poured into the windscreen washer reservoir for me, operating in sync together now, the youngest one holding the lid off while the middling one poured, then passing the lid over for the middling one to screw on while he, the youngest one, carried the empty bottle over to a bin. They closed the bonnet for me and I got back into my car.
Before I drove off I pushed the windscreen spurter button to make sure it worked. Liquid should have squirted out onto the glass, but nothing happened. I pushed it some more. Still nothing. I got out, opened the bonnet again and checked the reservoir. It was empty.
“It’s all gone!” I said.
The boys peered in. The oldest one got down on his knees and looked under the car.
“There’s no patch,” he said. “It hasn’t leaked. It should be there.” He turned to the middling boy and said: “Go get another bottle.”
Another bottle was brought out and poured into the reservoir. Once more I climbed inside the car and pressed the spurter button. Once more nothing happened—and once more, when we looked inside the reservoir, we found it empty.
“Two litres!” I said. “Where has it all gone?”
They’d vaporized, evaporated. And do you know what? It felt wonderful. Don’t ask me why: it just did. It was as though I’d just witnessed a miracle: matter—these two litres of liquid—becoming un-matter—not surplus matter, mess or clutter, but pure, bodiless blueness. Transubstantiated. I looked up at the sky: it was blue and endless. I looked back at the boy. His overalls and face were covered in smears. He’d taken on these smears so that the miracle could happen, like a Christian martyr being flagellated, crucified, scrawled over with stigmata. I felt elated—elated and inspired.
“If only…” I started, but paused.
“What?” he asked.
“If only everything could…”
I trailed off again. I knew what I meant. I stood there looking at his grubby face and told him:
“Thank you.”
Then I got into the car and turned the ignition key in its slot. The engine caught—and as it did, a torrent of blue liquid burst out of the dashboard and cascaded down. It gushed from the radio, the heating panel, the hazard-lights switch and the speedometer and mileage counter. It gushed all over me: my shirt, my legs, my groin.