“Yes, so they are,” said Naz.
The fish soup came. We sipped it. Then the kedgeree. We ate it. I explained more things to Naz and he processed them. When his eyes told me to wait I waited; then the whirring behind them stopped and I’d go on again. He never once asked why I wanted to do all this: he just listened, processing, working out how to execute it all. My executor.
Before we left the Blueprint Café Naz outlined the rate he’d charge. I told him fine. I gave him my banking details and he told me how to contact him at any time: he’d supervise my project personally, on a full-time basis. At ten the next morning he called me and told me how he thought we should proceed: we should first find a building that approximated to the one I had in mind-at least enough for it to be converted. That was the first step. While this was going on, he’d contact architects, designers and, of course, potential performers.
“Performers isn’t the right word,” I said. “Staff. Participants. Re-enactors.”
“Re-enactors?” he asked.
“Yes,” I told him. “Re-enactors.”
“Would you like me to take charge of seeking out the property?” he asked.
“Well, yes,” I said.
As we hung up I got a clearly defined picture of my building again: first from the outside, then the lobby, my faceless concierge’s cupboard, the main staircase with its black-and-white recurring pattern floor, its blackened wooden handrail with spikes on it. Then Naz’s office superimposed itself over that: the plastic blue and red, the windows, his people walking across the carpets as they set out to look for my place. These people were carrying the image of Time Control’s office out into the city, not the image of my building. This second image started fading in my mind. A sudden surge of fear ran through the right side of my body, from my shin all the way up to my right ear. I sat down, closed my eyes and concentrated on my building really hard. I kept them closed and concentrated on it till it came back and eclipsed the image of the office. I felt better. I stood up again.
I understood then that there was only one person who could take charge of seeking out the property, and that was me.
6
IN SCHOOL, when I was maybe twelve, I had to do art. I wasn’t any good at it, but it was part of the syllabus: one hour and twenty minutes each week-a double period. For a few weeks we were taught sculpture. We were given these big blocks of stone, a chisel and a mallet, and we had to turn the blocks into something recognizable-a human figure or a building. The teacher had an effective way of making us understand what we were doing. The finished statue, he explained, was already there in front of us-right in the block that we were chiselling away at.
“Your task isn’t to create the sculpture,” he said; “it’s to strip all the other stuff away, get rid of it. The surplus matter.”
Surplus matter. I’d forgotten all about that phrase, those classes-even before the accident, I mean. After the accident I forgot everything. It was as though my memories were pigeons and the accident a big noise that had scared them off. They fluttered back eventually-but when they did, their hierarchy had changed, and some that had had crappy places before ended up with better ones: I remembered them more clearly; they seemed more important. Sports, for example: they got a good spot. Before the accident I’d never been particularly interested in sports. But when my memory came back I found I could remember every school basketball and football game I’d played in really clearly. I could see the layout of the court or pitch, the way I and the other players had moved around it. Cricket especially. I remembered exactly what it had been like to play it in the park on summer evenings. I remembered the games I’d seen on TV: overviews of the field’s layout with diagrams drawn over them showing which vectors were covered and which weren’t, slow-motion replays. Other things became less important than they had been before. My time at university, for example, was reduced to a faded picture: a few drunken binges, burnt out friendships and a heap of half-read books all blurred into a big pile of irrelevance.
The art teacher fluttered back into a good, clear spot of memory. I even remembered his name: Mr Aldin. I thought a lot about what he’d said about stripping away surplus matter when I was learning to eat carrots and to walk. The movement that I wanted to do was already in place, I told myself: I just had to eliminate all the extraneous stuff-the surplus limbs and nerves and muscles that I didn’t want to move, the bits of space I didn’t want my hand or foot to move through. I didn’t discuss this with my physio; I just told it to myself. It helped. Now, as I wondered how to find my building, I thought of Mr Aldin again. The building, I told myself, or he told me, or to be precise my image of the school art room told me, in a voice hovering around paint-splashed wooden tables-the building was already there, somewhere in London. What I needed to do was ease it out, chisel it loose from the streets and the buildings all around it.
How to do this? I’d need to see the block, of course, the slab, London. I had a grotty, dog-eared A-Z but couldn’t get any sense of the whole town from that. I’d need a proper map, a large one. I was about to go and buy one in the nearest newsagent when it struck me that I wasn’t thinking big enough. To do this properly I’d need coordination, back-up. I phoned Naz back.
“I’d like to hire a room,” I told him.
“What kind of room?” he asked.
“A space. An office.”
“Right,” said Naz.
“I’d like to organize the search from there,” I continued. “With maps on the walls, things like that. A kind of military operations room.”
“You’d like to organize the search yourself?” he asked. “I thought I was to…”
“I’d like to take charge, but I’d like you to work with me.”
There was a pause, then Naz said:
“Fine. An office, then.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Any other specifications?”
“No,” I answered. “Just a normal office with a couple of desks in it. Light, windows. Just usual.”
An hour later he’d got me an office in Covent Garden. It had a fax machine, two phone lines, a laptop, marker pens, white sheets of A1, two giant maps of London, some pins to stick one of the maps to the wall and some more pins to stick into it to mark locations. Naz had bought pins of several different colours and some thread to wrap round these, like cheese wire, slicing the town into blocks and wedges.
Naz and I devised a method: we’d cordon off an area of the wall-mounted map with pins and thread, then scan the same area from the second map into the laptop, then, cutting away adjacent streets using the software, send the resulting image to mobiles Naz’s people were carrying. We isolated six main areas we thought most likely to contain my building: Belgravia, Notting Hill, South Kensington, Baron’s Court, Paddington and King’s Cross. Each of these had plenty of tall, tenement-style buildings-not to mention flowing, unbroken streets which, with the slight exception of some buildings round the stations, had escaped the bombing raids of World War Two pretty unscathed.
We set our plan to work. Naz put five of his people on the case: it was their job to walk around each block and wedge of streets we sent to them. We worked methodically, marking off, scanning in and zapping out each section; Naz’s people would then go and walk around it, calling the office each time they saw a building they thought might approximate to mine. Each of them moved up each street in his or her block, then down the next, up the next and so on. One of our phones would ring from time to time: