These men didn’t fall-but the cats did. That’s what I’d seen on the day of the first re-enactment, when I’d pressed my cheek against the window by the turning between my floor and the liver lady’s and then pulled it away: the black streak I’d thought was an optical effect. It wasn’t: it was one of the black cats falling off the roof. By the end of the second day of re-enactments three had fallen. They all died. We’d only bought four in the first place; one wasn’t enough to produce the effect I wanted.
“What do you want to do?” asked Naz.
“Get more,” I said.
“How many more?”
“At a loss rate of three every two days, I’d say quite an amount. A rolling supply. Just keep putting them up there.”
“Doesn’t it upset you?” Naz asked two days later as we stood together in my kitchen looking down into the courtyard at one of his men sliding a squashed cat into a bin bag.
“No,” I said. “We can’t expect everything to work perfectly straight away. It’s a learning process.”
A more serious problem was the pianist. This one did upset me, plenty: I caught him out red-handed one day, blatantly defrauding me. I’d spent an afternoon concentrating on the lower sections of the staircase, studying the way light fell from the large windows onto the patterned floor. The floor had a repetitive pattern, as I mentioned earlier: when sunlight shone on it directly, which it did on the second floor for three hours and fourteen minutes each day, it filled the corridors of white between the pattern’s straight black lines like water flooding a maze in slow motion. I’d already observed this happening on the top floors, but was working on the lower floors now. I’d noticed that the light seemed deeper down here-more dense and less flighty. Higher up it had more dust specks in it: these were borne upwards by the warm air in the stairwell; when they reached the top floors they hung around like small stars in massive galaxies, hardly moving at all, and this made the air seem lighter.
So anyway, I was lying on the floor observing this phenomenon-speculating, you might say-while the piano music looped and repeated in the background when I saw the pianist walk up the stairs towards me.
This, of course, was physically impossible: I was listening to him practising his Rachmaninov two floors above me at this very moment. But impossible or not, there he was, walking up the stairs towards me. As soon as he caught sight of me he jolted to a standstill, then started to turn-but it was too late: he knew the game was up. He became static again. His eyes scampered half-heartedly around the floor’s maze as though looking for a way out of the quandary he found himself in while at the same time knowing that they wouldn’t find one; the bald crown of his head went even whiter than it usually was. He mumbled:
“Hello.”
“What are you…” I started, but I couldn’t finish the sentence. A wave of dizziness was sweeping over me. The piano music was still spilling from his flat into the sunlit stairwell.
“I had an audition,” he murmured.
“Then who…” I asked.
“Recording,” he said, his eyes still moping at the floor.
“But there are mistakes in it!” I said. “And loopbacks, and…”
“A recording of me. I made it myself, especially. It’s the same thing, more or less. Isn’t it?”
It was my turn to go white now. There were no mirrors in the building, but I’m sure that if there had been and I’d looked in one I would have seen myself completely white: white with both rage and dizziness.
“No!” I shouted. “No, it is not! It is just absolutely not the same thing!”
“Why not?” he asked. His voice was still monotonous and flat but was shaking a little.
“Because…It absolutely isn’t! It’s just not the same because…It’s not the same at all.” I was shouting as loud as I could, and yet my voice was coming out broken and faint. I could hardly breathe. I’d been lying on my side when he came up the stairs towards me, and had only half-risen-a reclining posture, like those dying Roman emperors in paintings. I tried to stand up now but couldn’t. Panic welled up inside me. I tried to be formal. I forced a deep breath into my lungs and said:
“I shall pursue this matter via Naz. You may go now. I should prefer to be alone.”
He turned around and left. I made straight for my flat. No sooner had I got there than I threw up. I lurched into the bathroom and stood holding the sink for a long, long time after I’d finished puking. When I could, I raised my eyes up to the crack; this oriented me again, stopped me feeling dizzy. The building was on my side, even if this bad man wasn’t. When I felt well enough to move, I went into the living room, sat down on my sofa and phoned Naz.
“It’s totally unacceptable!” I told him after I’d explained what had just happened. “Completely totally!”
“Shall I fire him?” asked Naz.
“Yes!” I said. “No! No, don’t fire him. He’s perfect-in the way he looks, I mean. And in the way he plays. Even the way he speaks: that vacant monotone. But give him hell! Really bad! Hurt him! Metaphorically, I mean, I suppose. He has to understand that what he’s done just won’t fly any more. Make him understand that!”
“I’ll talk to him immediately,” Naz said.
“Where are you now?” I asked him.
“I’m in my office,” he said. “I’ll come over. Can I bring you anything?”
“Some water,” I said. “Sparkling.”
I hung up-then phoned him back straight away.
“Find out how often he’s pulled this one, when you talk to him,” I said.
Naz turned up with the water after half an hour. Apparently the pianist was sorry: he hadn’t realized how vital it was that he should actually be playing the whole time. He’d only used the cassette two times before, when he’d needed to do something else, and…
“Something else?” I interrupted. “I don’t pay him to do other stuff! Three times, no less!”
“He’s agreed not to do it again,” Naz said.
“He’s agreed, has he? That’s nice of him. Shall we give him a raise?”
Naz smiled. “Shall I stick a surveillance camera on him?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “No cameras. Find some other way of making sure he’s doing it properly, though.”
The thing behind Naz’s eyes whirred for a while and then he nodded.
It wasn’t unreasonable to expect this guy to play when he’d been paid to play-been paid enormous amounts of money, at that. And the hours weren’t that bad: I generally put the building into on mode for between six and eight hours each day-mostly in stretches of two hours. Sometimes there’d be a five-hour stretch. Once I went right through a night and half the next day. That was my prerogative, though: it had been written in the contracts that all re-enactors and all back-up staff had signed-written right there in big print for them to read.
I moved through the spaces of my building and its courtyard as I saw fit, just like I’d told Naz I would when we’d first met. I roamed around it as my inclination led me. On some days I felt like gathering data: sketching, measuring, transcribing. So I’d copy the patch of oil beneath the motorbike, say-how it elongated, how its edges rippled-then take the drawing over to Naz’s office, have it photocopied several times, then stick the copies in a line across my living room wall, rotating the patch’s formation through three-sixty. I captured lots of places this way: corners, angles against walls, bits of banister. Sometimes instead of sketching them I’d press a piece of paper up against them and rub it around so that their surface left a mark, a smear. Or I measured the amount of time it took the sunlight to first flood and then drain from each floor in the afternoon, or how long it would take for the swings, if pushed with such and such a strength, to come to a complete standstill.