“Satisfied?” asked Kevin.
“Yes,” I answered. “But there’s still the blue and yellow patches to daub on.”
“Not my job,” Kevin said. “I’m out of here.”
We didn’t have much problem finding the right type of large taps for the bathtub-the problem was with making them look old. We had this problem often, as you might imagine: making things look old. The hallway had to be scuffed down with sandpaper and smeared with small amounts of grease-diluted tar. The banisters had to be blasted with vaporized ice to make them oxidize. And then the windows were too crisply transparent: the courtyard and the roofs didn’t look right through them. I couldn’t work out why at first, nor express what was wrong with them: I just kept telling my staff that the courtyard didn’t look right.
“So what’s not right about it?” asked the landscape gardener.
“Nothing’s not right about it: it’s the way it looks through these windows. Too crisp. That’s not how I remembered it.”
“Remembered it?” he asked.
“Whatever,” I said, waving him away. Annie came over and looked. She solved it instantly:
“It’s the type of glass,” she said. “Not old enough.”
Bingo. New glass is totally consistent, doesn’t gloop and run and crimp the things you see through it like old glass does. We had all the panes removed and older ones brought in.
My living room and kitchen came together nicely. We’d knocked interior walls down to get the right open-plan shape. Now we got cracking on the furnishings. I brought the right type of plants in-eventually. That Portuguese woman! Formidable: her voice, her stark physique. She stomped out of her van lugging these beautiful, lush, healthy ferns and spider plants that seemed to cascade out of white ceramic pots.
“These are no good,” I said to Annie. “They’re too lush, too green.”
“Waz wrong wiz zem?” the Portuguese plant woman thundered. “My planz healzy! My planz good!”
“I know they’re good,” I said. “That’s just the problem. I need old and shabby ones in tinny baskets.”
“Baskez no good for zem!” she said, slapping the back of her hand against my arm. “They needz zpaze, zupport. I know waz good for zem!”
Behind her, through the window and across the courtyard, men on the facing roofs were busily replacing the tiles we’d had laid down. They’d been too blood-red, not orangey enough. The Portuguese plant woman took a frond between her fingers, held it up to me and slapped my arm with the back of her free hand again.
“Look! Zmell! My planz iz very healzy!”
I escaped and went to Naz’s while Annie got rid of her. Later that day we picked up some half-dead plants in some old junk shop.
The fridge arrived the next day. We netted it not from the Sotheby’s Americana auction that I mentioned earlier but from an auction site Naz had found on the internet. It looked just right-but its door slightly caught each time you opened it, just like Greg had said all fridge doors do outside of films.
“That sucks!” I said. “That really fucking sucks! You’d have thought that with all of their alleged craftsmanship” (they’d played this aspect of the fridge up on the website) “they could have made one whose door didn’t catch like this. I mean, what’s the whole point of doing all this if it’s still going to catch?”
“What do you mean?” asked Annie.
“It…Just, well…” I said. “It bloody shouldn’t!”
I sat down. I was really upset.
“Don’t worry,” said Annie. “It just needs new rubber.”
Someone was dispatched to get new rubber. While we waited for that to arrive, we tested for the smell of liver frying. An extractor fan had been installed above the liver lady’s stove, its out-funnel on the building’s exterior turned towards the windows of my kitchen and my bathroom. Liver had been bought that day-pig’s liver; but we found that frying just one panful didn’t produce enough smell. Someone else was dispatched to buy more frying pans and a lot more liver. They cooked it in four frying pans at once. Annie and I waited in my flat.
“How’s that?” she asked.
“It’s great,” I told her. “The spit and sizzle is exactly the right volume. There’s just one thing not quite…”
“What?” she asked.
“The smell is kind of strange.”
“Strange?” she repeated-then, into her cackling radio: “Wait a minute. Strange?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sort of strange. A bit like cordite.”
“Cordite? I’ve never smelt cordite. You know what I think it is, though? It’s that the pans are new.”
“Bingo again,” I told her. “That must be it.”
The last two days were “sweep” days. I, Naz, Annie and Frank moved through the building sweeping it for errors: inconsistencies, omissions. We found so many that we thought we’d have to delay the whole thing. The recurring black-on-white floor pattern had continued through a bit of neutral space on the second floor; the door to the concierge’s cupboard had been painted-things like that. Smaller details too: the tar-and-grease coat in the hallway, under the outmoded lights, had too much sheen; it was obvious that the putty holding the new old windows in place had been set only days ago; and so on. And then often fixing one thing just offset another. All the neighbours had been trained up by now and were practising their re-enacted gestures in situ-but then they’d disturb our carefully contrived arrangements as they moved around rehearsing. Crossed wires. One of Annie’s people even misunderstood the word “sweep”.
“What are you doing?” I asked when I found her literally sweeping down the staircase after we’d spent ages lightly peppering it with bus tickets and cigarette butts.
“I’m…” she said; “I thought you…”
“Annie!” I called up the stairwell.
Even after we’d got it all just right we did four more sweeps. We’d jump from one detail to another to see if we’d catch a mistake unawares. We’d move from the bottom to the top and down again, across the courtyard, up the façade of the facing building, back and up the staircase again, over and over and over.
“Feeling nervous?” Naz asked on the final day before the date we’d set to put the whole thing into action.
“Yes,” I told him. I was feeling very nervous. I hadn’t been sleeping well all week. I’d lie awake for half the night, running in my imagination through the events and actions that we were to go through in reality when the time came. I could run through them in a way that made them all work really well, or in a way that made them all mess up and be an abject failure. Sometimes I’d run the failure scenario and then the good one, to cancel the bad one out. At other times I’d be running the good one and the bad one would cut in and make me break out in a panicky sweat. This went on every night for a whole week: me, lying awake in my bed, sweating, nervously rehearsing in my mind re-enactments of events that hadn’t happened but which, nonetheless, like the little bits of history in Kevin’s pop song, were on the verge of being repeated.
8
THE DAY OF THE FIRST RE-ENACTMENT finally arrived. July the eleventh.
We’d decided to begin at 2 p.m. I spent the morning in Naz’s office, then ate a final light lunch with him. The air there was solemn, its heavy silence punctured only by the occasional ringing phone or crackling radio which one of Naz’s staff would answer in hushed tones.
“What is it?” I’d ask Naz each time.
“Nothing,” he’d answer quietly. “Everything’s under control.”
At half-past one I left. Naz’s people stood by the door as I made my way out-three or four of them on each side, forming a kind of tunnel-and wished me luck, their faces grave and sober. Naz took the lift down to the street with me, then, when the car pulled up, turned to face me and shook my hand. He was staying behind to direct all activities from his office. His dark eyes locked on mine while our hands held each other, the thing behind the eyes whirring deep back inside his skull.