“What for?” I asked him.
“It’s an unprecedented sum,” he said. “Well done.”
“I didn’t earn it,” I said.
“You’ve suffered,” he replied.
“That’s not really the right…” I said. “I mean, I didn’t choose to-and in any…”
And the phone cut right there, in mid-conversation again.
I walked back to my flat to get more coins. I walked back down the same street parallel to the one perpendicular to mine, then out again along the perpendicular one, as before: past the Fiesta, the ex-siege zone. I put two pound coins in this time. Daubenay seemed surprised to hear me.
“I think we’ve just about got it wrapped up,” he said. “Go and have a glass of champagne. See you at eleven tomorrow.”
He hung up. I felt foolish. It hadn’t been necessary to call him again. Besides, I needed to get to the airport fast now, eight and a half million or not. As I left the phone box I pictured Catherine’s plane somewhere over Europe, bearing down towards the Channel, towards England. I walked back for a third time to my flat, still using the same route, picked up my coat and wallet, and had made it to beside a tyre shop halfway between the siege zone and the phone box when I realized I’d left the piece of paper with the flight number on it in my kitchen.
I turned back again, but stopped immediately as it occurred to me that perhaps I didn’t need the information: I could just look at the arrivals board and see which flight was coming from Harare. There wouldn’t be more than one at any given time. I turned back out and was about to start walking onwards when it struck me that I didn’t know which terminal to go to. I would have to go and get the details after all. But then before I’d taken a single step towards my flat I remembered that they have lists posted up in tube compartments on the Piccadilly Line, telling you which terminal to go to for each airline. I turned round yet again. Two men who’d walked out of a café next to the tyre shop were looking at me. I realized that I was jerking back and forth like paused video images do on low-quality machines. It must have looked strange. I felt self-conscious, embarrassed. I made a decision to go and pick the flight details up after all, but remained standing on the pavement for a few more seconds while I pretended to weigh up several options and then come to an informed decision. I even brought my finger into it, the index finger of my right hand. It was a performance for the two men watching me, to make my movements come across as more authentic.
When I finally broke out of the circuit I’d now covered four or five times, following the same route each time, perpendicular road out and parallel road back, even crossing each road at the same spot, beside the same skip or just after the same manhole cover-when I finally turned left down Coldharbour Lane towards Brixton Tube, it occurred to me that from now on I didn’t need to move along the ground at all. I was so rich that I could have ordered up a helicopter, told it to come and land in Ruskin Park, or if it couldn’t land then hover just above the rooftops, lower a rope and winch me up into its stomach, like they do when rescuing people from the sea. And yet I kept to the ground, ran my eyes along it like a blind man’s fingers reading Braille, concentrating on my passage over it: each footstep, how the knees bend, how to swing my arms. That’s the way I’ve had to do things since the accident: understand them first, then do them.
Later, as I sat inside the tube, I felt the need, like I’d done every time I’d taken the tube up to Angel, to picture the terrain the hurtling car was covering. Not the tunnels and the platforms, but the space, the overground space, London. I remembered being transferred from the first hospital to the second one two months or so after the accident, how awful it had been. I’d been laid flat, and all I’d been able to see was the ambulance’s interior, its bars and tubes, a glimpse of sky. I’d felt that I was missing the entire experience: the sight of the ambulance weaving through traffic, cutting onto the wrong side of the road, shooting past lights and islands, that kind of thing. More than that: my failure to get a grip on the space we were traversing had made me nauseous. I’d even thrown up in the ambulance. Riding to Heathrow on the tube, I experienced echoes of the same uneasiness, the same nausea. I kept them at bay by thinking that the rails were linked to wires that linked to boxes and to other wires above the ground that ran along the streets, connecting us to them and my flat to the airport and the phone box to Daubenay’s office. I concentrated on these thoughts all the way to Heathrow.
Almost all the way. One strange thing happened. It might seem trivial to you, but not to me. I remember it very clearly. At Green Park I had to change lines. To do this at Green Park you have to ride the escalator almost to street level and then take another escalator down again. Up in the lobby area, beyond the automatic gates, there were some payphones and a large street map. I was so drawn to these-their overview, their promise of connection-that I’d put my ticket into the gates and walked through towards them before I’d realized that I should have gone back down again instead. To make things worse, my ticket didn’t come back out. I called a guard over and told him what had happened, and that I needed my ticket back.
“It’ll be inside the gate,” he said. “I’ll open it for you.”
He took a key out of his pocket, opened the gate’s ticket-collecting flap and picked up the top ticket. He inspected it.
“This ticket’s only for as far as this station,” he said.
“That’s not mine, then,” I said. “I bought one for Heathrow.”
“If you were the last person to pass through, your ticket should be the top one.”
“I was the last one through,” I told him. “No one came past after me. But that’s not my ticket.”
“If you were the last one through, then this must be your ticket,” he repeated.
It wasn’t my ticket. I started to feel dizzy again.
“Hold on,” the guard said. He reached up into the feeding system on the flap’s top half and pulled another ticket out from where it was wedged between two cogs. “This yours?” he asked.
It was. He gave it back to me, but it had picked up black grease from the cogs when he’d opened the flap, and the grease got on my fingers.
I walked back towards the down escalator, but before I got there I noticed all these escalator steps that were being overhauled. You think of an escalator as one object, a looped, moving bracelet, but in fact it’s made of loads of individual, separate steps woven together into one smooth system. Articulated. These ones had been dis-articulated, and were lying messily around a closed-off area of the upper concourse. They looked helpless, like beached fish. I stared at them as I passed them. I was staring at them so intently that I stepped onto the wrong escalator, the up one, and was jolted onto the concourse again. As my hand slipped over the handrail the black grease got onto my sleeve and stained it.
I have, right to this day, a photographically clear memory of standing on the concourse looking at my stained sleeve, at the grease-this messy, irksome matter that had no respect for millions, didn’t know its place. My undoing: matter.
2
AFTER THE ACCIDENT -some time after the accident, after I’d come out of my coma and my memory had come back and my broken bones had set-I had to learn how to move. The part of my brain that controls the motor functions of the right side of my body had been damaged. It had been damaged pretty irreparably, so the physiotherapist had to do something called “rerouting”.
Rerouting is exactly what it sounds like: finding a new route through the brain for commands to run along. It’s sort of like a government compulsorily purchasing land from farmers to run train tracks over after the terrain the old tracks ran through has been flooded or landslid away. The physiotherapist had to route the circuit that transmits commands to limbs and muscles through another patch of brain-an unused, fallow patch, the part that makes you able to play tiddlywinks, listen to chart music, whatever.