I went to the very place I’d sat in when I’d watched the clubbers, media types, tourists and homeless people, the Seattle-theme coffee shop just like the one at Heathrow: it was just round the corner from the theatre. I asked for a cappuccino.
“Heyy!” the girl said. It was still a girl, but it was a different girl this time. “Short cap coming up! You have a…”
“Ah yes!” I said, sliding it out. “Absolutely I do! And it’s edging home.”
“I’m sorry?” she asked.
“Eight cups stamped,” I told her. “Look.”
She looked. “You’re right,” she said, impressed. She stamped the ninth cup as she handed me my coffee. “One more and you get a free drink of your choice.”
“Plus a new card!” I said.
“Of course. We’ll give you a new card as well.”
I took my cappuccino over to the same window seat I’d had the last time and sat there looking out onto the intersection of Frith Street and Old Compton Street. There was a homeless person there, but it wasn’t my one. The new one didn’t have a dog-but he did have friends who sallied over to him from their base up the street just like my homeless person’s friends had; but then these didn’t seem like the same people either. The sleeping bag that the new guy had wrapped around him seemed identical to my one’s sleeping bag, though. So did his sweat top.
I’d forgotten about the loyalty-card business. Now I’d been reminded I was really excited by it. I was so close! I gulped my cappuccino down, then strode back to the counter with the card.
“Another cappuccino,” I told the girl.
“Heyy!” she answered. “Short cap coming up. You have a…”
“Of course!” I said. “I was just here!”
“Oh yes!” she said. “Sorry! I’m a zombie! Here, let me…”
She stamped the tenth cup on my card, then said:
“So: you can choose a free drink.”
“Cool,” I said. “I’ll have another cappuccino.”
“On top of your cap, I mean.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ll have another one as well.”
She shrugged, turned round and made me a new one. She pulled out a new card, stamped the first cup on it and handed it to me with my two coffees.
“Back to the beginning,” I said. “Through the zero.”
“Sorry?” she asked.
“New card: good,” I told her.
“Yes,” she said. She looked kind of depressed.
I took my two new coffees back to my seat by the window. I set them side by side and took alternate sips from each, like Catherine had with her drinks in the Dogstar, oscillating between pre-clock and post-clock cups. This was a good day, I decided. I finished my coffees and went back up to the Soho Studio Theatre.
The first person Naz and I saw was the second man I’d picked out as a possible for the motorbike enthusiast. He looked about right: early to mid twenties, brown hair, fairly handsome. He’d prepared a passage to perform for us: some piece of modern theatre by Samuel Beckett.
“We don’t want to hear that,” I said. “We just want to chat for a while, fill you in on what you’ll need to do.”
“Okay,” he said. “Shall I sit here, or stand, or?…”
“Whatever,” I said. “What we’re looking for is this: you’d need to be a motorbike enthusiast. You’d have to be available on a full-time basis-a live-in full-time basis-to occupy a flat on the first floor of an apartment building. You’d need to spend a lot of time out in the building’s courtyard tinkering with a motorbike.”
“Tinkering?” he asked me.
“Fixing it,” I said.
“What do I do once it’s fixed?”
“You take it apart again. Then fix it back.”
He was quiet for a while, thinking about this.
“So you don’t need me to act at all?” he asked eventually.
“No,” I told him. “Not act: just do. Enact. Re-enact.”
He didn’t get the part, as it turned out. The next-but-one motorbike enthusiast possible did. He wasn’t one of the ones who’d been in the lobby. He had less acting experience than the other two-almost none. His movements and his speech seemed less false, less acquired. On top of that he had a bike and knew a bit about them. By the end of the first day I’d found him, plus the husband in the boring couple, plus two or three vague, anonymous neighbours. That was it, though: no one else had been right. Back in the car I said to Naz:
“I’m not so sure the theatre world is the right place to look for re-enactors.”
“You think so?” said Naz.
We discussed it as we were driven to Aldgate-we were meeting a wholesaler of rare and outmoded light fittings. By the time we’d got there I’d become convinced it wasn’t.
“Where else, though?” I wondered aloud as we left Aldgate for Brixton.
“Community centres?” Naz ventured as he stuffed the receipts for the order we’d just made into the glove compartment. “Swimming pools? Supermarket notice boards?”
“Yes,” I said. “Those sound like the right kind of places.”
We cancelled the next day’s audition, and Naz had notices distributed in the new venues. These ones brought us a much broader sweep of people. The old woman who became the liver lady saw it at her bridge evening, the boring couple’s wife at a yoga class. The pianist we hooked in a musicians’ journal-he was doing a Ph.D. in musicology. He was just right for the part: quiet, gloomy, even bald on top. He nodded glumly as I explained to him how he’d have to make mistakes:
“You make mistakes,” I told him, “then you go over the passage you got wrong again, slowing right down into the bit where you messed up. You play it again and again and again-and then, when you’ve got down how to do it without messing up, play it some more times, coming back to normal speed. And then you carry on-at least until you hit your next mistake. You with me?”
“I make the mistakes deliberately?” he asked, looking at the floor. His voice was vacant and monotonous, completely without intonation.
“Exactly,” I said. “In the afternoons you teach young students. School children. Pretty basic stuff. In the evenings you compose. There’s more, but that’s the gist of it.”
“I’ll do it,” he said, still looking away. “Can I huf an obvos?”
“What did you say?” I asked him. He’d mumbled his last phrase into his collar.
He looked up for an instant. He really looked miserable. Then his eyes dropped again and he said, only slightly more clearly:
“Can I have an advance? Against the first two weeks.”
I thought about that for a moment, then I answered:
“Yes, you can. Naz will see to that. Oh-but you’ll have to grow your hair out at the sides. Is that acceptable?”
His eyes moved slowly from one corner of their sockets to another, trying half-heartedly to catch a glimpse of the hair on either side of his pale head. They gave up pretty quickly; he looked down at the floor and nodded glumly again. He was perfect. He signed his contract, Naz gave him some money and he left.
Interior designers were the other nightmare group. We interviewed several. I’d explain to them exactly what I wanted, down to the last detail-and they’d take this as a cue to start creating décor themselves!
“What I’m getting from you is a downbeat, retro look,” one of them told me. “And that’s exciting. Full of possibilities. I think we should have faux-flock wallpaper throughout-Chantal de Witt does a fantastic line in this-and lino carpeting along the hallways. That’s what I’m seeing.”
“I don’t care what you’re seeing,” I told him. “I don’t want you to create a look. I want you to execute the exact look I’ll dictate to you.”
This one stormed out in a huff. Two others agreed in principle to execute the look I wanted but balked when it came to the blank stretches. I’d left blank stretches in my diagrams, as I mentioned earlier-stretches of floor or corridor that hadn’t crystallized inside my memory. Some of these had since come back, but others hadn’t, any more than the concierge’s face, and I’d decided that these parts should be blank in reality, with doorways papered and cemented over, strips of wall left bare and so on. Neutral space. Our architect loved this, but the designers found it quite repulsive. One of them agreed to do it, so we hired him; but when it came to actually realizing it he snapped.