This was full of outdoor noises: distant cars and buses, trains and planes, the general subdued roar that air in cities has. Upstairs on the third floor the child started playing scales. These spilled out of the pianist’s window but, not walled in like his own playing had been in the stairwell, dissipated in the summer air. I could see smoke piping from the vent outside the liver lady’s kitchen almost directly above me. I could see my bathroom window sill but not the glass itself: the angle was too sharp. I looked down again. The motorbike enthusiast was three yards to my left. He had stopped banging at his bolt and was now turning it, unscrewing something. On the earth beneath the engine of his bike a patch of oil had formed: it looked kind of like a shadow, but more solid. I stood by his bike for a while, looking at the patch, then said:
“Leave that there when you’ve finished.”
“Leave what?” he asked, looking up at me and slightly squinting.
“Leave that patch,” I said.
“How leave it?” he asked.
“Don’t let it be smudged or covered over. I might want to capture it later.”
“Capture it?” he asked.
“Whatever,” I said. “Just don’t let it get wiped out. Understand?”
“Yes,” he said. “Okay.”
I left him and walked over to the swings. It wasn’t his business to make me explain what I meant by “capture”. It meant whatever I wanted it to mean: I was paying him to do what I said. Prick. I did want to capture it, though: its shape, its shade. These were important, and I didn’t want to lose them. I thought of going back up to my flat to get a piece of paper onto which to transcribe the patch, but decided to do it later, when he wasn’t there. If it rained, though…I sat down on one of the swings and looked up at the sky. It didn’t look like rain: it was blue with the odd billowing cloud. I slid off the swing after a while, pushed it so it continued swinging to and fro and lay on my back beneath it, watching it swing above my head against the sky. The billowing clouds were moving slowly and the swing was moving fast. The blue was still-but two high-up aeroplanes were slicing it into segments with their vapour trails, like Naz and I had done to the city with our pins and threads. Lying on my back, I let my arms slide slightly over the grass away from my sides, turned my palms upwards till the tingling sensation crept through my body again. I lay there for a very long time, tingling, looking at the sky…
Later that evening I was lying in my bath, soaking, gazing at the crack. The pianist’s last pupil had gone, and he’d started composing, playing a phrase then stopping for a long time before playing it again with a new half-phrase tagged onto the end. Liver was crackling and sizzling downstairs. I could smell it. It still wasn’t quite right-still had that slightly acrid edge, like cordite. I brought that up again with Naz when we spoke after my bath.
“We’ll try to get that right,” he told me. “Apart from that, though, how did you think it went?”
“It went…well, it went…” I started. I didn’t know what to tell him.
“Was it a success, in your opinion?” he asked.
Had it been a success? Difficult question. Some things had worked, and some things hadn’t. My shirt had slightly caught against the cutting board, but then the fridge had opened perfectly. The liver lady had come up with that fantastic line but then dropped her rubbish bag when she’d tried to re-enact her movements for a third time. Then there was the question of the smell, of course. But had it been a success? A success at what? Had I expected all my movements to be seamless and perfect instantly? Of course not. Had I expected the detour through understanding that I’d had to take in order to do anything for the last year-for my whole life-to be bypassed straight away: just cut off, a redundant nerve, an isolated oxbow lake that would evaporate? No: that would take work-a lot of work. But today my movements had been different. Felt different. My mind too, my whole consciousness. Different, better. It was…
“It was a beginning,” I told Naz.
“A beginning?” he repeated.
“Yes,” I said. “A very good beginning.”
That night, I dreamt that I and all my staff-Naz, Annie, Frank, the liver lady and the pianist and the motorbike enthusiast and concierge and piano pupil, plus all Naz’s, Frank’s and Annie’s people, the coordinators lurking behind doors, the spotters in the facing building and their back-up people too-I dreamt that all of us had linked ourselves together: physically, arm in arm and standing on each other’s shoulders like a troupe of circus acrobats. We’d linked ourselves together in this way in the formation of an aeroplane. It was an early, primitive plane: a biplane, of the type an early aviator might have used for a record-setting transatlantic flight.
We’d taken off in this formation and were flying above my building and the streets around it. We could look down as we flew and see the courtyard with its trees and swings, its patch of oil beneath the engine of the motorbike. We could see ourselves, our re-enacted doubles, in the courtyard too: the motorbike enthusiast, banging and unscrewing; myself, lying beneath the swings. We could see the cats slinking around the red roofs. If we banked north and glided for a while we could see Naz’s building with its blue-and-white exterior, the aerials on its roof. Through its top windows we could see doubles of Naz’s office team coordinating events in my building. We could see these events too, through walls which had become transparent: the liver lady laying her bag down, talking to me as I passed her, the pianist practising his Rachmaninov, the concierge, the pupil-the whole lot.
We banked again and saw the sports track with its white and red and yellow markings. There were athletes running around this, just like there had been in my coma. I was commentating again. Everything was running smoothly, happily, until I noticed, lying beside the goalposts, these old, greasy escalator parts-the same ones that I’d seen laid out at Green Park Station. As soon as I saw them the whole thing went out of kilter: events in my building, Naz’s people, the athletes and the commentary-the lot. Athletes tripped over, crashing into one another; my flow of words faltered and dried up; the liver lady’s rubbish bag broke, scattering putrid, mouldy lumps of uneaten liver all over the courtyard; the swings’ chains snapped; black cats shrieked and chased their tails. And then our plane-the plane that we’d formed from the interlinking of our bodies: it was stalling, nose-diving towards the ground, whose surface area was crumpling like old tin…
Just before the crash I woke up cold with sweat to the unpleasant smell of congealed fat.
9
FAT BECAME QUITE A PROBLEM, as it goes. Over the next days and weeks the liver lady fried her way through a small mountain of pig liver. She had three or four frying pans on the go at any given time. She might not have been doing it herself: it might have been the back-up, Annie’s people, tossing it all on, slab after slab, letting them slide around and sizzle, turning them over and taking them off again. Whoever was doing the actual cooking, the sheer amount of vaporized fat rising from the frying pans hung around the building. It clogged up the extraction fan, whose out-vent pointed towards my bathroom window. To have this outer part cleaned turned out to be difficult: you couldn’t get at it from inside. We had to hire those window cleaners you see dangling from the tops of skyscrapers to come and scrape the fat out while they hung beside it. It was pretty nerve-wracking to watch. I had the courtyard below them cleared, just in case. I know all about things falling from the sky.