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?”