“I’ve found a large apartment building with a blue façade near Olympia,” the searcher would say.
“What street?” we’d ask.
“Corner of Longridge Road and Templeton Place.”
“How many floors?”
“…three, four, five-Six!”
“ Longridge Road, Templeton Place,” I or Naz would repeat to the other; the other would find the intersection on the wall-mounted map, stick a purple pin in it, then enter the particulars-six floors, blue façade and so on-into a spreadsheet Naz had created on the laptop. Sometimes both phones rang at once. Sometimes neither of them rang for several hours.
By five or so on the first day the map had nine purple pins stuck in it.
“Let’s go and look at them,” said Naz. “I’ll call us a car.”
“Tomorrow,” I said.
By five o’clock the next day we had fifteen buildings. I’d knocked the car’s arrival back to six, but when it came I told Naz:
“I prefer to wait until tomorrow morning.”
“As you wish,” he said. “I’ll send another car round to your flat at nine.”
I phoned him the next morning at eight-thirty.
“I prefer to make my own way there,” I said.
“I’ll meet you there, then.”
“No. I prefer to go alone.”
“How will you know which places to look in?” he asked.
“I remember them all,” I said.
“Really?” Naz sounded incredulous. “All the exact locations?”
“Yes,” I told him.
“That’s impressive,” he said. “Phone me as and when you need me.”
I didn’t remember each location, of course. But I’d become increasingly aware of something over the last two days: these people wouldn’t find my building. No matter how well I described it to them or how thoroughly they looked, they wouldn’t find my building for a simple reason: it wouldn’t be my building unless I found it myself. By noon on the second day of their search I’d been certain of this.
Why hadn’t I called the search off, then? you might ask. Because I liked the process, liked the sense of pattern. There were people running through the same, repetitive acts-consulting their mobiles, walking up one street, down the next one and up a third, stopping in front of buildings to make phone calls-in six different parts of town. Their burrowing would get inside the city’s block and loosen it, start chiselling away at surplus matter: it would scare my building out, like beaters scaring pheasants out of bushes for a Lord to shoot-six beaters advancing in formation, beating to the same rhythms, their movements duplicating one another. As I started out that day I imagined looking on from overhead, from way above the city, picking out Naz’s people, each one with a kind of tag on them, a dot like police cars have to help police helicopters pick them out. I imagined looking down and seeing them all-plus me, the seventh moving dot, my turning and redoubling etching out the master pattern that the other six were emulating. I imagined looking down from even higher up, the edges of the stratosphere. I stopped for a moment in the street and felt a light breeze moving round my face. I turned the palms of my hands outwards and felt a tingling creeping up the right side of my body. It was good.
I started with Belgravia. I’d walk up one street, down the next and up a third just like Naz’s people had been instructed to do, so as not to miss any out. After two hours of this, though, I realized that my building wasn’t in Belgravia. The area’s clean, white houses with raised porches and white columns didn’t strike any chords with me, even if technically they met the criteria I’d given to the searchers. King’s Cross was the same. So was South Kensington. Paddington came closest: several buildings round there looked like mine. They looked like mine but weren’t mine. Don’t ask me how I could tell that: I just could.
In the late afternoon I phoned Naz.
“How were they?” he asked.
“Oh, I didn’t go to the ones our people shortlisted,” I told him. “I decided I should look for it myself.”
“I see,” said Naz. “I’ll tell them to discontinue their searches, then.”
“No,” I said. “Tell them to carry on. When we’ve exhausted our original six areas, we’ll broaden out.”
There was a pause at Naz’s end. I pictured the behind of his eyes, the whirring. After a while he said:
“I’ll do that if that’s what you want.”
“Good,” I said. Process: it was necessary.
I didn’t find my building that day. Or the next. When I got home that evening there were two messages for me: one from Greg and one from Matthew Younger. Greg wanted me to call him. Matthew Younger wanted me to call him too: the sectors we’d bought into had climbed ten per cent in value over the last week, presenting us with a great opportunity to top-slice and diversify. I listened to their messages as I lay on the sofa. All the walking I’d done had exhausted me. I took a bath, put a plaster on a blister that had appeared on my right foot and went to bed.
I had a vivid dream. I dreamt that streets and buildings were moving past me, like the commuters had the day I’d stood still outside Victoria Station asking for spare change. The streets and buildings were moving past me on conveyor belts like those long ones that carry you along the corridors of airports. There were several of these moving belts connected to each other-converging and branching off, criss-crossing, ducking behind or under one another like a giant Spaghetti Junction, conveying houses, pavements, lampposts, traffic lights and bridges past me and around me.
My building was in there, being carried along somewhere in the complex interlacings. I caught glimpses of it as it slipped behind another building and was whisked away again to reappear somewhere else. It would show itself to me then slip away again. The belts were like magicians’ fingers shuffling cards: they were shuffling the city, flashing my card, my building, at me and then burying it in the deck again. They were challenging me to shout “Stop!” at the exact moment it was showing: if I could do that, I’d win. That was the deal.
“Stop!” I shouted. Then again: “Stop…Stop!” But I timed each shout just wrong-only a tenth or even hundredth of a second off, but wrong nonetheless. I’d shout “stop” each time I saw my building, and the system of conveyors would grind to a halt-but this took a few seconds, and by the time it was completely still my building had become submerged again.
After a while I closed my eyes, my dream-eyes, and tried to sense when it was coming up. I sensed the rhythm things were moving at, the patterns they were following, and let my imagination slip inside them. I could sense when my building was about to come by. I waited for it to go by twice, and just before it reappeared a third time shouted:
“Stop!”
I knew even as I shouted it that it would work this time. As the conveyors ground to a halt again, my building came to rest directly in front of me. I stepped forward and entered it. I got to see it all even more clearly than I had on the night of David Simpson’s party-got to move around it, relishing its details: the concierge’s cupboard and the staircase with its worn floor, the black-and-white recurring pattern in it, the oxidizing wrought-iron banisters, the black handrail with its spikes. I saw the pianist’s door and the door of the lady who cooked liver, the spot beside it where she placed her rubbish as I passed her, my own flat above her with its open kitchen and its plants, its bathroom with a cracked wall and a window that looked out across a courtyard to a building with red roof tiles and black cats. I got to fully occupy it-not for long, but for a while, until the scene changed and I found myself inside a library negotiating travel prices with a grumpy waitress who was Yugoslavian.
In the morning, after I’d woken up, I started understanding why I hadn’t found my building in the four days I’d been working on it: I’d been rational about it. Logical. I needed to go irrational on the whole thing. Illogical. Of course! I’d probably passed it at some point over the last few years already-which meant that it would be recorded somewhere in my memory. Everything must leave some kind of mark. And then even if I hadn’t passed it already, I’d only manage to stalk it down if I moved surreptitiously: not in straight lines and in blocks and wedges but askew-diagonally, slyly, creeping up on it from sideways.