The horn of a passing car made me snap to. I left my flat and hurried down to a phone box to call Marc Daubenay back. The nearest one was just round the corner, on Coldharbour Lane. As I crossed my road and walked down the one lying perpendicular to it, I thought about the sum: eight and a half million. I pictured it in my mind, its shape. The eight was perfect, neat: a curved figure infinitely turning back into itself. But then the half. Why had they added the half? It seemed to me so messy, this half: a leftover fragment, a shard of detritus. When my knee-cap had set after being shattered in the accident, one tiny splinter had stayed loose. The doctors hadn’t managed to fish it out, so it just floated around beside the ball, redundant, surplus to requirements; sometimes it got jammed between the ball and its socket and messed up the whole joint, locking it, inflaming nerves and muscles. I remember picturing the sum’s leftover fraction, the half, as I walked down the street that day, picturing it as the splinter in my knee, and frowning, thinking: Eight alone would have been better.
Other than that, I felt neutral. I’d been told the Settlement would put me back together, kick-start my new life, but I didn’t feel any different, fundamentally, from when before Marc Daubenay’s secretary had phoned. I looked around me at the sky: it was neutral too-a neutral spring day, sunny but not bright, neither cold nor warm. I passed my Fiesta, which was parked halfway down the street, and looked at its dented left rear side. Someone had crashed into me in Peckham and then driven off, a month or so before the accident. I’d meant to get it fixed, but since coming out of hospital it had seemed irrelevant, like most other things, so the bodywork behind its left rear wheel had stayed dented and crinkled.
At the end of the road perpendicular to mine I turned right, crossing the street. Beside me was a house that, ten or so months previously, two months before the accident, the police had swooped on with a firearms team. They’d been looking for someone and had got a tip-off, I suppose. They’d laid siege to this house, cordoning off the road on either side while marksmen stood in bullet-proof vests behind vans and lampposts, pointing rifles at the windows. It was as I passed across the stretch of road they’d made into a no man’s land for that short while that I realized that I didn’t have Marc Daubenay’s number on me.
I stopped right in the middle of the road. There was no traffic. Before heading back towards my flat to get the number I paused for a while, I don’t know how long, and stood in what had been the marksmen’s sightlines. I turned the palms of my hands outwards, closed my eyes and thought about that memory of just before the accident, being buffeted by wind. Remembering it sent a tingling from the top of my legs to my shoulders and right up into my neck. It lasted for just a moment-but while it did I felt not-neutral. I felt different, intense: both intense and serene at the same time. I remember feeling this way very welclass="underline" standing there, passive, with my palms turned outwards, feeling intense and serene.
I walked back to my flat, not down the road I’d come up but down one that ran parallel to it. I found the number, then set out again down the first road, the one perpendicular to mine. I passed my car again, its dent. The man who’d crashed into me had gone over Give Way markings, then driven off. Just like the accident itself: the other party’s fault each time. I passed through the siege zone again. The man who the police had been looking for hadn’t been in the house. When they’d realized this, the marksmen had wandered out from behind their cover and the regular officers had untied and gathered up the yellow-and-black tape they’d tied across the road to demarcate the restricted area. If you’d arrived there minutes later you wouldn’t have known anything had happened. But it had. There must have been some kind of record-even if just in the memories of the forty, fifty, sixty passers-by who’d stopped to watch. Everything must leave some kind of mark.
Daubenay and I had been cut off in mid-conversation. When I stuck my fifty pence in the phone in the box and called back, the receptionist answered. I’d met her before, several times. She was smart and formal, in her early thirties, slightly horsey.
“Olanger and Daubenay,” she said. “Good afternoon.”
I could see in my mind the desk she sat behind, the leather seats that faced it, the glass coffee table. The reception area looked out over a cobbled courtyard, through a low window to her right.
“Could I have Marc Daubenay’s office please?” I said.
“Putting you through.”
A silence followed, not the quietness of the office but the type of silence you get when no input’s coming down the line. My picture of Olanger and Daubenay faded, ousted by the caged façade of a cab office just beside the phone box. Movement Cars, it said; Airports, Stations, Light, Removals, Any Distance. A man was wheeling a large Coke vending machine into the doorway, tilting it slowly, taking its weight on his shoulders. I wondered what Light meant in this context, and felt a slight wave of that dizziness again. Airports, read the writing on the window. My friend Catherine would be arriving at Heathrow in just over an hour. There was a click on the line, then Marc Daubenay’s secretary picked up.
“Marc Daubenay’s office,” she said.
This woman was older, forty-plus. I’d come across her too, each time I’d visited Marc Daubenay. It was she who’d called me minutes ago. She always looked stern, austere, slightly chastising even. She never smiled. I gave her my name and asked to speak to Daubenay.
“Trying his line now,” she said. “No, I’m afraid it’s busy. He’s talking to someone.”
“Yes, he’s talking to me,” I said. “We were talking, and we got cut off. I think he’s trying to phone me back.”
“If you hang up I’ll tell him to try again.”
“No,” I said, “that’s no good. My phone’s come out of the wall. It’s broken. We were talking and it broke. I’m sure he’s trying to phone me now. Perhaps you could break in and tell him.”
“I’ll have to go through,” she said.
I heard her setting the receiver on its side, then footsteps, voices, hers and Daubenay’s, in the next room. He’s on your line? Daubenay was saying. But his phone’s gone dead. I’ve been trying it for the last ten minutes. She said something to him that I couldn’t make out, then I heard his footsteps coming to the phone in her room, then a rustle as he picked it off the desk.
“You there again?” he said.
“We got cut off,” I told him.
The phone’s display window was counting my money down and had already got to thirty-two. Peak rates. I dug into my pockets for more coins but only pulled out two-pence pieces.
“How much did you hear?” Daubenay asked.
“The figure. Could you say it again?”
“Eight and a half million pounds,” Daubenay repeated. “You understand the terms governing your acceptance of this sum?”
“I can’t tell anyone?”
“You can’t discuss, in any public or recordable format, the nature and/or details of the incident.”
“I remember you telling me that,” I said.
“You’ll lose the whole lot if you do, plus any surplus this might have accrued while in your custody.”
“Accrued, yes,” I said. “I remember that bit too. And is it legally enforceable?”
“It most certainly is,” he answered. “Given the status of these parties, these, uh, institutions, these, uh…”
“Bodies,” I said.
“…bodies,” he continued, “almost anything’s enforceable. I strongly suggest we accept. We’d be crazy not to.”
“What do I have to do?” I asked him.
“Come in tomorrow. They’re biking over documents for you to sign. Come at around eleven: they should be here by then.”
The Coke-machine man was wheeling his empty trolley back out of Movement Cars. It was Light Removals, not Light then Removals. It just looked like that, the way they’d laid the words out. The phone’s display window was in the teens now. Daubenay was congratulating me.