I moved over to the fridge and pulled the door towards me. The door gave without resistance, opening in a smooth and seamless flow. I closed it, then pulled it towards me again. Again it opened smoothly. I did it a third time: again, faultless. Downstairs the pianist was coming out of a corrective loop, speeding up as he took off for new territory. I opened the fridge faultlessly once more, then closed it for the last time: I was ready to go.
I called Naz again.
“I’d like to leave my flat now,” I told him. “I’ll walk down past the liver lady’s.”
“Okay,” Naz said. “Count thirty seconds from now and then leave your door. Exactly thirty seconds.”
He hung up. I hung up too. I stood in the middle of my living-room floor, counting thirty seconds with my hands slightly raised, palms turned slightly outwards. Then I left my flat.
Moving across the landing and down the staircase, I felt like an astronaut taking his first steps-humanity’s first steps-across the surface of a previously untouched planet. I’d walked over this stretch a hundred times before, of course-but it had been different then, just a floor: now it was fired up, silently zinging with significance. Held beneath a light coat of sandy dust within a solid gel of tar, the flecks of gold and silver in the granite seemed to emit a kind of charge, as invisible as natural radiation-and just as potent. The non-ferrous-metal banisters and the silk-black wooden rail above them glowed with a dark, unearthly energy that took up the floor’s diminished sheen and multiplied its dark intensity. I turned the first corner, glancing through its window as I moved: light from the courtyard bent as it approached me; a long, thin kink travelled across the surface of the facing building, then shot off away to wrinkle more remote, outlying spaces. The red rooftiles were disappearing as I came down, eclipsed by their own underhang as the angle between us widened. Then I turned again and the whole façade revolved away from me.
I continued down the stairs. Sounds travelled to me-but these, too, were subject to anomalies of physics, to interference and distortion. The pianist’s music ran, snagged and looped back on itself, first slowing down then speeding up. The static crackle of the liver broke across the orphaned signals cast adrift from radios and television sets. The Hoover moaned on, sucking matter up into its vacuum. I could hear the motorbike enthusiast clanging down in the courtyard, banging at a nut to loosen it. The clanging echoed off the facing building, the clangs reaching me as echoes almost coinciding with the clangs coming straight up from his banging-almost but not quite. I remembered seeing a boy once kicking a football against a wall, the distance between him and the wall setting up the same delay, the same near-overlap. I couldn’t remember where, though.
I moved on down the staircase. As I came within four steps of the fifth-floor landing I heard the liver lady’s locks jiggle and click. Then her door opened and she moved out slowly, holding a small rubbish bag. She was wearing a light-blue cardigan; her hair was wrapped up in a headscarf; a few white, wiry strands were sprouting from its edges, standing out above her forehead like thin, sculpted snakes. She shuffled forward in her doorway; then she stooped to set her bag down, holding her left hand to her back as she did this. She set the bag down carefully-then paused and, still stooped, turned her head to look up at me.
We’d spent ages practising this moment. I’d showed her exactly how to stoop: the inclination of the shoulders, the path slowly carved through the air by her right hand as it led the bag round her legs and down to the ground (I’d told her to picture the route supporting arms on old gramophone players take, first across and then down), the way her left hand rested on her lower back above the hip, the middle finger pointing straight at the ground. We’d got all this down to a t- but we hadn’t succeeded in working out the words she’d say to me. I’d racked my brains, but the exact line had never come, any more than the concierge’s face had. Rather than forcing it-or, worse, just making any old phrase up-I’d decided to let her come up with a phrase. I’d told her not to concoct a sentence in advance, but rather to wait till the moment when I passed her on the staircase in the actual re-enactment-the moment we were in right now-and to voice the words that sprung to mind just then. She did this now. Still stooped, her face turned towards mine, she released her grip on the bag and said:
“Harder and harder to lift up.”
I froze. Harder and harder to lift up, she’d said. I thought about this as I stood there facing her. Harder and harder to lift up. I liked it. It was very good. As she got older, her bag of rubbish was becoming harder and harder to lift up. She smiled at me, still slightly stooped. It felt just right: all just as I’d imagined it. I stood still, looking back at her, and said:
“Yes. Every time.”
The words just came to me. I spoke them, then I moved on, turning into the next flight of stairs. For a few seconds I felt weightless-or at least differently weighted: light but dense at the same time. My body seemed to glide fluently and effortlessly through the atmosphere around it-gracefully, slowly, like a dancer through water. It felt very good. As I reached the third or fourth step of this new flight, though, this feeling dwindled. By the fifth or sixth one it was gone. I stopped and turned around. The liver lady’s head was disappearing back into her flat and her hand was pulling the door to behind it.
“Wait!” I said.
The door stopped closing and the liver lady poked her head back out. She looked quite nervous. A noise came from behind her, inside the flat.
“That was excellent,” I said. “I’d like to do it again.”
The liver lady nodded.
“Okay, dear,” she said.
“I’ll start at the top of the first flight,” I told her.
She nodded again, shuffled back out towards her rubbish bag, picked it up, then shuffled back into her flat again and closed the door. I started up the staircase-but before I’d reached the bend I heard her door open again behind me and a faster, heavier person step out onto the landing.
“Wait a minute,” said a man’s voice.
I turned round. It was one of Annie’s people.
“What is it?” I asked.
“If you’re going to start from the top of your own flight rather than back in your flat,” he said, “how will she know when to open the door?”
I thought about this. It was a fair question. Annie appeared behind this man.
“What’s the problem?” she asked.
I told her. She pondered it for a while, then said:
“We need someone to watch you and signal to us when the time comes to send her out. But no one can really do that without getting in the way themselves.”
“The cat people!” I said.
“Of course!” said Annie.
The people who’d pushed the cats onto the facing building’s roof would be able to see me from the top-floor windows of that building as I turned the staircase bend: there was a window there.