And then the neighbours. They’d been all packed in around me—below, beside and above. That was a vital part of it. The old woman who cooked liver on the floor below, the pianist two floors below her, running through his fugues and his sonatas, practising—I’d have to make sure they were there too. The concierge as well, and all the other, more anonymous neighbours: I’d have to buy a whole building, and fill it with people who’d behave just as I told them to.
And then the view across! The cats, the black cats on the red roofs of the building facing the back of mine across the courtyard. The roofs had been coated in slate tiles, and had risen and fallen in a particular way. If the building I bought didn’t have roofs that looked like that facing the windows of the bathroom and kitchen of my fifth- or sixth- or seventh-floor flat then I’d have to buy the building behind it as well, and have its roofs changed until they looked that way. The building had to be tall enough too—the building behind mine, that is: not just one but two buildings of appropriate size and age would be needed. I thought all this through as I walked along Coldharbour Lane. I thought it through meticulously, still holding the strip of wallpaper.
I could do it all, of course. That was no problem. I had funds. I could not only buy my building and the building behind it, but also hire the staff. I’d need the old lady. She was growing more distinct in my mind: she had white, wiry hair and a blue cardigan. Every day she fried liver in a pan, which spat and sizzled and smelled rich and brown and oily. She’d be stooping down to lower her rubbish bag onto the worn marble or fake-marble landing floor, holding her back with one hand as she did this—and she’d turn to me and speak as I passed by. I couldn’t quite remember what she’d say yet, but this didn’t matter at this stage.
I’d need the pianist too. He was thirty-eight or so. He was tall and thin and very white, bald on top with fuzzy black hair sprouting at the sides. He was a fairly sad character: pretty lonely, didn’t seem to get that many visitors—just children who he’d teach for money. At night he’d compose, slowly and tentatively. In the day he’d practise, pausing when he made mistakes, running over the same passages again and again, slowing right down into the bits that he’d got wrong. The music would waft up just like the smell of the old woman’s liver. In the late afternoons you’d get the skill-less grind of his uninterested pupils, hammering out scales and trivial melodies. Sometimes, in the morning, he’d decide the lines that he’d composed the night before were worthless: you’d hear a discordant thump, then a chair scraping, a door slamming, footsteps dying away beneath the stairs.
The intersection by the telephone box from which I’d phoned Marc Daubenay came and went on the periphery of my attention as I thought these things through. There were people spilling out of a blue bar with blackened windows, old Jamaicans barbecuing chicken outside Movement Cars, more young guys pushing drugs. Then it was the tyre shop and café where the men had watched me as I’d jerked back and forth on the same spot in the street after setting out to meet Catherine; then, before the ex-siege zone, the street that ran parallel to the street perpendicular to mine. Then I was home. I sat on the sofa bed Catherine had half-folded away and carried on thinking these things through, holding the strip of wallpaper. Occasionally I’d look at the pattern I’d drawn across it. Mostly I just sat there holding it, letting the world that I’d remembered grow.
And grow it did. I started seeing the courtyard more clearly—the courtyard between my building and the one with undulating roofs with black cats on them. It had a garden in it, but the garden was pretty run-down. I scanned it in my mind, moving from left to right and back again.
“There’s a motorbike in it!” I said aloud.
It was true: in a small patch of the courtyard, just outside my building’s back door where no grass grew, sat a motorbike. The motorbike was propped up and had some of its lower bolts removed because—of course! It was another neighbour who was working on it. I remembered this man now: the motorbike enthusiast who lived on the first floor. He was in his twenties—quite good-looking, medium-length brown hair. He’d spend his weekends tending to his bike out in the courtyard: stripping bits away and cleaning them, then bolting them back on. Sometimes he’d run the engine for whole twenty-minute stretches, and the pianist would get pissed off: you’d hear his chair scrape back again, his feet pacing around his flat all agitated. This came back to me as I sat on the half-folded-away sofa bed.
I sat there on the sofa bed all night, remembering. Birds started singing outside; then came whirring milk floats, then blue and grey light seeping through the curtains. I remembered a nondescript middle-aged couple who lived on the floor above the motorbike enthusiast, the second floor. No kids. He left each day for work and she stayed in or went shopping or volunteered her time at Oxfam or somewhere like that. Then vaguer neighbours, people you don’t really take much notice of. There was the concierge: I could clearly see the cupboard where she kept her brooms and buckets, but she herself didn’t come to me—her face, her body. I saw the big staircase’s wrought-iron banisters: they had a kind of oxidizing hue, all specked with green. The handrail running above them was made of black wood and had mini-spikes on, little prongs—perhaps for decoration or perhaps to prevent children sliding down them. Then the pattern in the floors: it was a black pattern on white—repetitive, faded. I couldn’t quite make it out exactly, but I got the general sense of it, the way it flowed. I let my mind flow over it, floating above it—sinking into it too, being absorbed by it as though by a worn, patterned sponge. I fell asleep into the building, its surfaces, into the sound of liver sizzling and spitting, piano music wafting up the staircase, birds and milk floats, black cats on red roofs.
The next day was Sunday. This annoyed me. I wanted Monday and its open businesses. I’d need estate agents, employment agencies, who knew what else. And then what if my vision of the whole place faded before Monday came? How long would all the details stay lodged in my memory? I decided to safeguard them by sketching them out. I gathered all the unused paper I could find around my flat and started drawing diagrams, plans, layouts of room and floors and corridors. I blu-tacked each one to my living-room wall as I finished it; sometimes I’d run three or four or five into a big block, a continuous overview. When I’d run out of blank paper, I used the reverse side of letters, bills and legal documents—whatever came to hand.
I sketched my whole remembered flat outward from the crack running down the bathroom wall. The flat was modest but quite spacious. It had wooden floors with rugs covering parts of them. The kitchen was open plan, and ran into the main room. Its window faced the same way as my bathroom’s window did: across the courtyard with the garden and the motorbike. The fridge was old, a 1960s model. Above it hung plants—spider plants, in baskets. I sketched the staircase, adding notes and arrows highlighting the banisters’ spikes and oxidizing hue, the entrance to the flat of the old woman who cooked liver, the spot where she’d set her rubbish down for the concierge to pick up. I sketched the concierge’s cupboard, drawing in the broom, the mop, the Hoover—how they stood together, which way each one leant. The concierge’s face still didn’t come to me, nor did the words the liver lady spoke to me as I passed her, but I let that lie for now. Whole sections of the building didn’t come to me, in fact: stretches of staircase or lobby, the whole third floor landing. I left these vague, unfilled, with just a note in brackets next to inches of blank paper.
In the late afternoon I ordered pizza. While I was waiting for it to arrive, I remembered that Catherine would be arriving back that evening. It was her last evening here before she flew back to America. I transferred my giant, sprawling map from my living-room wall onto the wall of the bedroom, sheet by sheet. She turned up just after I’d eaten the last pizza slice. She looked tired but happy, flushed.
“How was Oxford?” I asked from the kitchen as I put the kettle on. Tea had become the main currency between us, a kind of milky, sickly substitute for actual connection.
“Oxford rocks!” she said. “It kicks ass! It’s so…The way the kids, the students, ride their bikes around town. They’re so cute. So enrowsed in being students…”
“So
what
?” I asked her as I brought the cups into the living room and set them down.
“Engrossed. In cycling around and talking to each other. I was thinking it’d be like great if you could shrink them down and keep them in a tank, like termites. You know those termite kits you get?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes I do.” I looked at her with interest and surprise. I thought that what she had just said was funny and intelligent—the first interesting thing she’d said since she’d arrived in London.
“You could go look at it twice a day and go:
Oh look! See, that one’s studying! That one’s riding his bike!
And they don’t even know you’re watching them. It’s just so…”
She paused there. She was really looking hard for the right word—and I wanted to hear it too, hear what she had to say.
“It’s just so…” I repeated, slowly, prompting her to find it.
“Cute!” she said again. “Just being students, doing what students do.”
I thought back to the time I’d been a student. I’d been conscious all the time that other people in the crappy provincial town, the people who weren’t students, knew I was a student and expected me to be a certain way. I didn’t know how exactly—but I felt this all through the three years I spent there, and this spoiled them. I once went on a demonstration, and the police and onlookers all watched us with a mixture of bemusement and contempt as we shouted out our slogans—and I shouted them out with conviction in time with the other demonstrators just because I knew that everyone was watching and expecting this. I can’t even remember what the demonstration was about.
The kettle boiled. “I’ll go and pour it,” I said. I went back to the kitchen. I was pouring the water into the teapot when I realized that Catherine had followed me through. She was all wide-eyed, earnest. She looked at me and said:
“They were just really happy. Really innocent.”
I put the kettle down and said: “Can I ask you a question?” I was looking straight at her.
“Yes,” she said, in a soft voice.
“What’s the most intense, clear memory you have? The one you can see even if you close your eyes—really see, clear as in a vision?”
The question didn’t seem to surprise her at all. She smiled peacefully, her eyes widened further and she answered:
“It’s when I was a child. In Park Ridge, where I grew up, just outside Chicago. There were swings, these swings, on concrete, with a lawn around them. And there was a raised podium, a wooden deck, a few feet to the swings’ right. I don’t know what it was there for, this podium. Kids jumped on and off it. I did too. I was a kid, of course. But I can see the swings. Playing on them, swinging…”
Her voice trailed off. She didn’t need to go on. I could see her seeing the swings. Her eyes were really, really wide and really sparkling. She looked beautiful. I felt a stirring in my trousers. Catherine knew. She shuffled over to me, opening herself up, waves opening outwards from her sparkling face. I would have kissed her right there if I hadn’t heard a rustle from the bedroom. The evening breeze was tugging through the open window at the pages of my diagrams and sketches, trying to unpick them from the wall. I pushed off from the sideboard, brushed Catherine aside and hurried to my room to close the window.
I stayed in there all night, adding to the sketches, refining them, just staring at them. When morning came, I took Catherine and her big, dirty, purple rucksack down to Movement Cars, and put her in a taxi to the airport. Then I came home, took out the telephone directory and started making calls.
5
NAZRUL RAM VYAS
came from a high-caste family. In India they have a caste system, with the Untouchables at the bottom and the Brahmins at the top. Naz was a Brahmin. He was born and grew up in Manchester, but his parents came over from Calcutta in the Sixties. His father was a bookkeeper. His uncle too, apparently. His grandfather as well. And his father before him too, I wouldn’t be surprised. A long line of scribes, recorders, clerks, logging transactions and events, passing on orders and instructions that made new transactions happen. Facilitators. That made sense: Naz facilitated everything for me. Made it all happen. He was like an extra set of limbs—eight extra sets of limbs, tentacles spreading out in all directions, coordinating projects, issuing instructions, executing commands. My executor.
Before he came into the picture I had endless troubles. I don’t mean with the practicalities: without Naz I didn’t even manage to get to a stage where practicalities became an issue. No: I mean with communicating. Making people understand my vision, what it was I wanted to do. As soon as Catherine had left, I started making phone calls, but these got me nowhere. I spoke to three different estate agents. The first two didn’t understand what I was saying. They offered to show me flats—really nice flats, ones in converted warehouses beside the Thames, with open plans and mezzanines and spiral staircases and balconies and loading doors and old crane arms and other such unusual features.
“It’s not
unusual
features that I’m after,” I tried to explain. “It’s
particular
ones. I want a certain pattern on the staircase—a black pattern on white marble or imitation marble. And I need there to be a courtyard.”
“We can certainly try to accommodate these preferences,” this one said.
“These are not preferences,” I replied. “These are absolute requirements.”
“We have a lovely property in Wapping,” she went on. “A split-level three-bedroom flat. It’s just come on. I think you’ll find…”
“And it’s not one property I’m after,” I informed her. “It’s the whole lot. There must be certain neighbours, like this old woman who lives below me, and a pianist two floors below her, and…”
“This is the property you live in now?” she asked.
The third estate agent I spoke to vaguely got it—at least enough to understand the scale of what I was planning.
“We can’t do that,” she said. “No estate agent can. You need a property developer.”
So I called property developers. These are the people who go and find warehouses beside the Thames in the first place and gut them out, then turn them into open-plan units with mezzanines and spiral staircases and loading doors and old crane arms, and then get estate agents to flog them on to rich people who like that kind of thing. Developers don’t usually deal with individual punters, with the purchaser. They deal in bulk, buying up whole complexes of buildings and hulks of disused schools and hospitals, knocking out units by the score.
“You want to buy a building off us?” the man in the head office of one developer said when I’d got through to him. “Who are you with then?”
“I’m not with anyone,” I said. “I want you to do a building up for me, in a particular way.”
“We don’t do contract work for our competitors,” he said. He had a nasty voice—a cold, cruel voice. I pictured his office: the plywood shelves with files and ledgers full of fiddled numbers, then in the yard outside the workmen in their jeans stained white with sandstone and cement discussing politics or football or whatever it was they were discussing—anything, but not my project. They didn’t care.
I phoned Marc Daubenay. He was out of his office when I called; the austere secretary told me he’d be back in half an hour. I used the time to go through what I’d say to him. With him I felt I could explain the whole thing: why I’d had the idea, why I wanted what I wanted. He’d been through the last five months with me. He’d understand.
He didn’t, of course. When I eventually spoke to him, it came out garbled, just like it had when I’d imagined trying to explain it to my homeless person. I started going on about the crack in the wall of David Simpson’s bathroom, my sense of déjà vu; then I backtracked to how ever since learning to move again I’d felt that all my acts were duplicates, unnatural, acquired. Then walking, eating carrots, the film with De Niro. I could tell from the deep silence at his end each time I paused that he wasn’t getting it at all. I cut to the chase and started describing the red roofs with black cats on and the woman who cooked liver and the pianist and the motorbike enthusiast.
“This was a place you lived?” Marc Daubenay asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “No. I mean, I remember it, but I can’t place the memory.”
“Well, as we argued,” Daubenay said, “your memory was knocked off-kilter by the accident.” He’d emphasized that in his pre-trial papers: how my memory had gone and only slowly returned—in instalments, like a soap opera, although he hadn’t used that metaphor.
“Yes,” I said, “but I don’t think this was a straight memory. It was more complex. Maybe it was various things all rolled together: memories, imaginings, films, I don’t know. But that bit’s not important. What’s important is that I remembered it, and it was crystal-clear. Like in…”
I hesitated there. I didn’t want to use the word “vision”, in case Marc Daubenay got ideas.
“Hello? You still there?”
“Yes,” I said. “I was saying it was crystal-clear.”
“And now you want to find this place?” he asked.
“Not find it,” I said. “Make it.”
“Make it?”
“Build it. Have it built. I’ve been calling estate agents and property developers. None of them understands. I need someone to sort it all out for me. To handle the logistics.”
There was another long, deep silence at Daubenay’s end. I pictured his office in my mind: the wide oak desk with the chair parked in front of it, the tomes of old case histories around the walls, the austere secretary in the antechamber, guarding his door. I gripped my phone’s receiver harder and frowned in concentration as I thought about the wires connecting me to him, Brixton to Angel. It seemed to work. After a while he said:
“I think you need Time Control.”
“Time control?” I repeated. “In what sense?”
“Time Control UK. They’re a company that sort things out for people. Manage things. Facilitators, as it were. A couple of my clients have used them in the past and sent back glowing reports. They’re the leaders in their field. In fact, they
are
their field. Give them a call.”
His voice had the same tone to it as when he’d told me to drink champagne: kind but stern. Paternalistic. He gave me Time Control’s number and wished me good luck.
Time Control UK were based up in Knightsbridge, near where Harrods is. What they did, essentially, was to look after people. Manage things for them, as Daubenay said. Their clients were for the most part busy executives: finance chiefs, CEOs, people like that. The odd film star too, apparently. Time Control ran their diaries for them, planned and logged their meetings and appointments, took and passed on messages, wrote press releases, managed PR. They also ran the more intimate side of their clients’ lives: ordering meals and groceries, getting dry-cleaners to come and take their clothes away and bring them back again, calling in plumbers, phoning them up at eight twenty-five to get them showered and croissanted and shunted into the taxi Time Control had booked to take them to the nine-fifteen they’d set up. They’d organize parties, send birthday cards to aunts and nephews, buy tickets for the second day of the Fourth Test if they’d built a window in that afternoon in the knowledge that this particular client was partial to cricket. Their databases must have been incredible: the architecture of them, their fields.
I called Time Control in the late afternoon, almost immediately after I’d got off the phone to Daubenay. A man answered. He sounded relaxed but efficient. I couldn’t quite picture their office, but I saw those blue and red Tupperware-type in- and out-trays in it somewhere, like the ones they have in nursery-school classrooms. I imagined it as open-plan, with glass or Pyrex inner walls. The background sound was fluffy rather than clipped, which suggested carpets and not floorboards. The man’s voice assured me; I didn’t feel the need to run through my explanation. I just said:
“I’ve been referred to you by my lawyer, Marc Daubenay of Olanger and Daubenay.”
“Oh yes,” the man said, very friendly. Olanger and Daubenay were a well-known firm.
“I need someone to facilitate a large project I have in mind,” I said.
“Wonderful,” the friendly man said. He seemed to understand exactly what I wanted without even asking. “I’ll put you through to Nazrul Vyas, one of our main partners, and you can tell him all about it. Okay?”
“Wonderful,” I said back. It was that word “facilitate” that did it. Worked the magic. Marc Daubenay’s word. As I waited to be put through to Vyas I felt grateful to Daubenay for the first time—not for getting me all that money, but for slotting that word, “facilitate”, onto my tongue.
Vyas sounded young. About my age: late twenties, early thirties. He had a fairly high voice. High and soft, with three layers to it: a Manchester base, an upper layer of southern semi-posh and then, on top of these, like icing on a cake, an Asian lilt. As he spoke his name then my name and then asked how he could help me, he sounded confident, efficient. I couldn’t quite picture his office, but I saw his desktop clearly: it was white and very tidy.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” said Nazrul Vyas.
A pause followed, then I went for it:
“I have a large project in mind,” I said, “and wanted to enlist your help.” “Enlist” was good. I felt pleased with myself.
“Okay,” said Naz. “What type of project?”
“I want to buy a building, a particular type of building, and decorate and furnish it in a particular way. I have precise requirements, right down to the smallest detail. I want to hire people to live in it, and perform tasks that I will designate. They need to perform these exactly as I say, and when I ask them to. I shall most probably require the building opposite as well, and most probably need it to be modified. Certain actions must take place at that location too, exactly as and when I shall require them to take place. I need the project to be set up, staffed and coordinated, and I’d like to start as soon as possible.”
“Excellent,” Naz said, straight off. He didn’t miss a single beat. I felt a surge inside my chest, a tingling. “Let’s meet,” Naz continued. “When’s convenient for you?”
“In an hour?” I said.
“One hour from now is fine,” Naz answered. “Shall I come to you or would you like to come here?”
I thought about this for a moment. I had my diagrams at home, still stuck to the wall of the bedroom, but I didn’t want to show these to him, or give him the back story with the party and the bathroom and the crack—let alone the carrots and the fridge doors. It was all working so well this way. I wanted it to carry on like this, neutral and clear. The image came to me of bubbly, transparent water, large clean surfaces and lots of light.
“In a restaurant,” I said. “A modern restaurant with large windows and a lot of light. Can you arrange this?”
Within five minutes he’d phoned back to tell me that he’d booked a table for us in a place called the Blueprint Café.
“It’s the restaurant of the Design Museum,” Naz explained. “At Butler’s Wharf, beside Tower Bridge. Shall I send you a car?”
“No,” I said. “See you in an hour. What do you look like?”
“I’m Asian,” said Naz. “I’ll be wearing a blue shirt.”
I took a hurried bath, put on some clean, smart clothes and was just walking out of the flat when my phone rang. I’d already turned the answering machine on. It kicked in and I waited in the doorway to see who it would be.
It was Greg. “Yo dude,” his voice said. “Pity you left early Saturday. The party got, like,
todally awesome.
” He said this last word in a mock Californian accent, a Valley Girl voice. “You boned Catherine yet? Maybe you’re boning her right now. You’re pumping her and she’s saying
Oh yes! Give me schools and hospitals! Give me wooden houses!
”
He went on like this for a while. I stood there listening to his voice coming through the answering machine’s tinny speaker, simulating an orgasm. Before the accident I would have found this really funny. Now I didn’t. It’s not that I found it offensive or crass; I didn’t find it anything at all. I stood there watching the answering machine while Greg’s voice came from it. Eventually he hung up and I left.
It was just as well that Naz had told me what he would be wearing: there was another young Asian guy in the Blueprint Café. I’d have known which one was Naz, though, after all. He looked just like I’d imagined him to look but slightly different, which I’d thought he would in any case. He was sitting at a table by the window, keying something into a palmtop organizer. He had an interesting face. For the most part it was frank and open—but his eyes were dark: dark, sunk and intense. He rose to greet me, we shook hands and then we sat down.
“No problems getting here?” he asked.
“No, none at all,” I said. The Blueprint Café’s walls were hung with photographs of eminent British designers. This was good, very good. A waiter appeared and Naz asked for a large bottle of mineral water.