Our driver drove me from the office to the building. It was just two minutes’ walk away, but he took me there in the car we’d gone around in while setting all this up. I sat in the back seat and watched the streets slide by: the railway bridge, the sports track with its knitted green wire fence, its battered football goals, its yellow, red and white lane markings, boxes, arcs and circles. I turned my head to look out of the rear window just in time to see the top of Naz’s office disappear from view. Then I turned back-and, as I did, my building slid up to the car and loomed above me like a sculpted monolith, the words Madlyn Mansions still carved in the stone above its front door.
The driver brought the car to a halt in front of it. Annie was waiting on the pavement. She opened the car door and I stepped out.
“All ready?” she asked.
I didn’t know what to answer. Was it ready? Everything had seemed to be in place the evening before. Annie had been there all morning: she’d know better than me if it was ready. Or had she meant was I ready? I didn’t know. How could you gauge these things? What standard would we have gauged them by? A slight ripple of dizziness ran through me, so I let these thoughts go. I smiled back at Annie weakly and we walked up the stone steps into the building.
The same quiet, uneasy atmosphere was reigning here as had reigned in Naz’s office. The bustle and hum of scores of people going about tasks that I’d grown so accustomed to over the last weeks and months had disappeared and been replaced by earnest, hushed, last-minute concentration. The concierge re-enactor was standing in the lobby, while one of the costume people fiddled with the strappings of her face mask. Her face had never come to me-or, to be precise, it had come to me, but only as a blank-so I’d decided she should wear a mask to blank it out. We’d got one of those masks that ice-hockey goaltenders wear: white and pocked with little breathing holes. I stopped in front of her.
“You understand exactly what it is you have to do?” I asked her.
There was a pause behind the mask, then she said:
“Yes. Just stand here.”
Her voice, behind the plastic, was unnaturaclass="underline" it rattled and distorted like those tinny children’s toys that emit cow sounds or little phrases when you shake them. I liked that.
“Exactly. Stand here in the lobby,” I repeated. I nodded at her and the costume person, then moved on towards the stairs.
The glum pianist was already practising up in his third floor flat. We’d chosen something by Rachmaninov for him to play-at first, at least. He’d played me sample pieces by several composers, and I’d liked this one by Rachmaninov best. It was called Second or Third Concerto or Sonata in A Major or B Flat, Minor, Major-something along those lines. What I liked about it was the way it undulated: how it bent and looped. Plus it was very difficult to play, apparently, which was good: he’d really make mistakes. I heard him hit his first snag as I moved onto the staircase. I stood still and grabbed Annie by the arm:
“Listen!” I whispered.
We listened. The pianist paused, then went at it again, slowing right down as he entered the passage that had tripped him up. He repeated it several times, then picked his pace up and returned to the beginning of the sequence, clocking it-then again, a little faster, then again and again and again, speeding it up each time until he was back almost at full speed. Eventually he accelerated out of the passage and on into the rest of the sonata.
“That’s just right,” I said to Annie. “Just right.”
We moved on, up past the motorbike enthusiast’s flat. He wasn’t there, of course: he was out in the courtyard tinkering with his motorbike. I hoped he was, at least: that’s where he was supposed to be. Then past the boring couple’s flat. On the floor above this, the fourth floor, we found Frank. He was standing on the landing with a diagram in his hands, checking the walls and floor-the distribution of filled-in and blank space-against this. Seeing me, he nodded his head in a way that implied he was satisfied with his check, let the hand holding the clipboard drop to his side and told me:
“Everything in order. Good luck.”
We continued upwards. Members of Frank and Annie’s crews were moving off the stairs, retreating behind doors with radios in their hands. We passed the liver lady’s door: I could hear several people shuffling around behind it, and the sound of soft, uncooked liver being laid out on cutting boards. Then we were on my floor. Annie entered my flat with me to check everything was right here, too. It was: the plants were scraggly but alive; the floorboards were scuffed but warm, neither shiny nor dull but somewhere in between; the rug was lying in the right place, slightly ruffled. Annie and I stood facing one another.
“All yours,” she said, smiling warmly. “Call Naz when you’re ready to go.”
I nodded. She left, closing the door behind her.
Before phoning Naz I stood alone in my living room for a while. The layout of the sofas and the coffee table, of the kitchen area-the plants, the counter and the fridge: all this was correct. Below me I could hear radios and TV sets being switched on throughout the building. At least one Hoover was in use. I stepped into the bathroom and looked at the crack on the wall. Just right too: not just the crack but the whole room-taps, wall, colours, crack, everything: perfect. I stepped back into my living room, picked up the phone and called Naz.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good,” he replied. “I’ll start the liver and the cats. We’ll take it from there.”
“Fine,” I said, and hung up.
I walked over to the kitchen window and looked out. Above the staggered, red-tiled rooftops of the facing building, the doors of two of the little cabins opened and two cats were shunted out of each. Three of them started meandering slowly around the roofs, each in his own direction; the fourth just sat down and stayed still-although if I slightly moved my head a centimetre or so to the left the kinked glass made him elongate and slither. A crackle came from downstairs: the snap of wet liver landing on hot oil; then came another one, a third, a fourth. For a few seconds it sounded as though fireworks were being let off a few streets away; then the crackles quietened down into a constant sizzle punctuated by the occasional pop. I wandered back into the bathroom and looked at the cats from there while I waited for the liver’s smell to reach me.
When it did, I stepped back into the living room and called Naz.
“It’s not right,” I said.
“What’s not?” he asked.
“That smell,” I said. “I thought Annie had made sure they’d broken the pans in. So they weren’t new, I mean.”
“I’ll check that with her now,” he said. “Hold on.”
I heard him radio Annie and repeat to her what I’d told him. I heard her radio crackle to his radio and back down the phone line to me. I heard her tell him:
“They are broken in. We went through all this.”
“She says they are broken in,” Naz told me. Then there was a crackle and I heard Annie’s voice ask Naz:
“What’s not right about the smell?”
“What’s wrong with it?” repeated Naz.
“It’s got that sharp edge,” I told him. “Kind of like cordite.”
“A bit like cordite,” I heard him tell her.
“That’s what he said before,” I heard her voice say. “Tell him to give it a few minutes. It should settle down once it gets cooking.”
“Give it a few minutes,” Naz said. “It should…”
“Yes, I heard,” I told him.
I hung up again and walked over to my kitchen area. The plants rustled in their baskets as I passed them, just like I’d first remembered them rustling. I went over to the window. The cats were widely dispersed now, black against the red. I could see three of them: the fourth must have slunk off behind a chimney pot. I brushed past the kitchen unit’s waist-high edge, the same way I’d remembered brushing past it when I’d first remembered the whole building-turning half sideways and then back again. My movement wasn’t deft enough, though, and my shirt caught slightly on the corner as I passed-not violently, snagging, but still staying against the wood for half a second too long, hugging it too thickly. This wasn’t right-wasn’t how I remembered it: my memory was of passing it deftly, letting the shirt brush the woodwork lightly, almost imperceptibly, like a matador’s cape tickling a bull’s horns. I tried it again: this time my shirt didn’t touch the woodwork at all. I tried it a third time: walking past the unit, turning sideways and then back again, trying to make my shirt brush fleetingly against the woodwork as I turned. This time I got the shirt bit right, but not the turning. It was difficult, this whole manoeuvre: I would need to practise.