“They need to watch for me, and radio you when I’m on the-let’s see: when did the door open?” I walked back to the step I’d been on when the liver lady’s locks had clicked and jiggled. “The third one down,” I said.
“I’m not directly linked to them,” said Annie, holding up her radio. “We’ll have to go through Naz.”
She radioed him and the chain of communication was set up. The cat people would watch me from their building as I passed the window on the banister bend and, when I hit the third step of the next flight, give the order to open the door-this via Naz, who’d act as the join between the two parties from his office a few streets away. It took ten or so minutes to set this up. When all the links were in place, everyone apart from me went back into the liver lady’s flat, her door was closed again and I walked back up the stairs to the top of the first flight.
I stood there for a while, rocking very slightly forwards and backwards on my planted feet. I felt the point of pressure shifting from my heels to my toes via the arched tendon in between, the plantar fascia, then back again, a three-part chain. I rocked slightly back then slightly forward several times, then headed down the stairs again.
This time I paused in front of the window by the first bend. I even leant against it, resting my forehead on the glass like I had one floor up on the day I’d found the building. I couldn’t see the spotters in the facing building, the two cat men-but I knew they were there. If they’d been marksmen, snipers, they’d have had a clear shot at me right now. I slid both arms slightly up against the window pane. The tingling started in my right hip and seeped upwards, up my spine. I looked at the top branches of a tree below me in the courtyard: a light breeze was buffeting its leaves, making them dance.
I pulled my head away and made to move on down-but hesitated when I noticed a small patch of black moving quite fast against the facing building. It was gone so quickly that I thought it must have been another optical effect, a quirk of the kinked glass. I tried to reproduce it by pressing my forehead back onto the window pane and pulling it away again, but couldn’t make the black patch reappear. I tried it several times without success. I hadn’t imagined it, though: there’d been a streak of black moving fast against the facing building.
Eventually I gave up and moved on down. As I hit the third step I heard a buzz or scrape that came from behind the liver lady’s door. It could have been a radio or it could have been her rubbish bag scraping the floor. An instant later came the jiggle of her latch; then the door opened and she shuffled out again, her rubbish bag in her hand. Once more she stooped to set her bag down, holding her left hand to her lower back as she did this; once more she looked up at me and pronounced her phrase:
“Harder and harder to lift up.”
I answered her as before. Again I felt the sense of gliding, of light density. The moment I was in seemed to expand and become a pool-a still, clear pool that swallowed everything up in its calm contentedness. Again the feeling dwindled as I left the zone around her door. As soon as I’d reached the third step of the next flight I turned round, as before, and said:
“Again.”
We did it again-but this time it didn’t work. She’d steered the rubbish bag through its horizontal arc around her legs and, stooping, started to lower it to the ground when suddenly it slipped out of her hand and fell with a loud clunk. She bent over to pick it up but I stopped her.
“Don’t bother,” I said. “It’s broken the…you know: it won’t be right. Let’s take it from the top again. Someone should clean that patch up, too.”
Her bag had leaked from its bottom right corner, leaving a wet, sticky-looking patch on the floor. Someone came out and mopped this up.
“It looks too clean now,” I said when they’d done this.
Annie came out again and looked.
“We’ll have to dust and sand it again,” she said.
“How long will that take?” I asked.
“A good hour till it looks just like it did before.”
“An hour?” I repeated. “That’s too…I need it to…”
My voice petered out. I was quite upset. I wanted to slip back into it now, right now: the pool, the lightness and the gliding. There was nothing I could do, though: it wouldn’t be right if the floor wasn’t the right texture. I gathered myself together and announced:
“Okay: do it. I’ll move on.”
I’d come back to the liver lady later. And besides, she was just part of the re-enactment: I had a lot still to do, a lot more space to cover.
I walked past the pianist’s flat. The sound of his music grew crisper and sharper as I passed his door, then once again soft and floaty as I moved down from his floor. On the landing below his I passed the boring couple’s flat. This is where the Hoover noise was coming from. The Hoover was being shunted back and forth across a carpet, by the sound of it. The wife re-enactor would be doing it. I moved on, through a patch of neutral space, down past the motorbike enthusiast’s flat. His clangings were still coming from the courtyard, but with less of an echo now: maybe the trees and the swings were getting in the way down here. I carried on down to the lobby.
Here the sensation started returning: the same sense of zinging and intensity. My concierge was standing as instructed-standing quite still in the middle of the lobby with her white ice-hockey mask on. Behind her, to her left-my right-there was a cupboard; beside that, another strip of white, neutral space. As I walked around her in a circle, looking at her from all sides, her stumpy arms and featureless face seemed to emanate an almost toxic level of significance. I cocked my head to one side, then the other; I crouched to the ground and looked at her from there. She looked like a statue in a harbour, towering above the granite-or a spire, a reactor, a communications mast. Being this close to her I felt overexposed after a while-so I opened up her cupboard door and stepped inside.
Here were the broom, the mop and bucket and the industrial Hoover, all in the positions that I’d first remembered and then sketched them in. There was another object, too: a strangely shaped machine for cleaning granite floors. It hadn’t come to me initially-but then when I’d found it stored in there one morning it hadn’t seemed wrong, either, so I’d kept it. I stayed in the cupboard for a long time. In here it felt intimate, warm. I felt I’d burrowed to one of the innermost chambers of the vision I had realized all around me. It was a good position: well placed, with good sightlines. The cupboard door was slightly ajar: I looked out through its slit at the concierge standing in the lobby. She was standing with her back turned to me, the mask straps fastened at the back of her head. Her shoulders rose and fell as she breathed. The view I had of her was like a murderer’s view-hidden, looking through a thin slit at her back.
After a while I stepped back out of the cupboard, crossed the strip of neutral space and came back to the bottom of the staircase. I was about to step into the garden when I heard the main door open behind me, the one that led onto the street. I turned round. A small boy had just walked in: he was one of the pianist’s pupils, arriving for a lesson. He walked across the lobby, towards where the concierge was standing-then caught sight of me and hesitated. He must have been ten or eleven years old. On his back he wore a little satchel-one of Annie’s props, that. He had straight, brown hair and freckles. We stood facing one another, me and him, completely still-three people completely still there in the lobby: myself, this small boy and the concierge. He looked frightened. I smiled at him and said:
“Just carry on. It will all be fine.”
At this the small boy started moving again. He walked past me and started up the staircase. I looked at his satchel as he passed me, his scuffed leather shoes. I watched him walk up and away from me, turning and dwindling. He disappeared from view on the second floor and his footsteps stopped. I heard a muffled bell ring; then the piano music stopped too. I heard the pianist’s chair being scraped back, then his footsteps heading for his door. I waited till the boy was safely in before I went out to the courtyard.