I only left the building-the whole re-enactment area, I mean: the building and the courtyard and the stretch of streets between there and Naz’s office, with its bridge and sports track-twice during the next month. The first time was to go shopping. I’d been having all that done for me, but one day I got an urge to go and check up on the outside world myself. Nothing much to report. The second time was when I noticed that my old, dented Fiesta which was parked beside the sports track had a flat tyre. I hadn’t driven it in months, and didn’t plan to any time soon-but when I saw the flat tyre I remembered the tyre place beside my old flat: the one I’d paused beside the day the Settlement came through, uncertain whether to go home or press on to the airport.
As soon as I’d remembered it, I started seeing the tyre shop clearly in my mind: its front windows, the pavement where its sign stood, the café next to it. I remembered that a garish model baked-beans tin was mounted on the café’s roof beside a pile of tyres. More tyres had been lined up on the street outside, parked upright in a rack. As these details came back to me, the whole place-which when I’d lived beside it had seemed to me so mundane that I’d barely even noticed it-took on the air of something interesting. Intrigued, I decided to visit it. I borrowed some tools from the motorbike enthusiast, replaced the flat tyre with the spare one and then drove back to where I used to live to have the flat one fixed.
The place didn’t seem to have changed since I’d last seen it. It still had tyres lined up in a rack on the street outside and more tyres piled up on its roof beside the large-scale garish model baked-beans tin that advertised the next door café. The tyres were normal tyres, real ones, and looked miniature next to the giant tin, like toys. More tyres were leaning in stacks against the shop front, like you see at go-kart tracks. Behind these, painted announcements advertised special deals on tyres both new and part-worn or free fitting. On the pavement outside, a small rectangular contraption stood upright: a waist-high board skewered by a pole set into a heavy base. In the breeze the board span quickly round the pole, flashing two messages at passers-by in quick succession. Both messages said “TYRES”.
There was a more elaborate advertisement swaying around on the pavement a few feet away: a child dressed in a Michelin Man suit. The suit gave him an obese white tyre-girth that swayed as he moved. He was maybe ten, eleven. I could tell it was a boy because he wasn’t wearing the suit’s head. Two older boys had this: these two were standing by the tyre shop’s entrance, kicking the head to one another like a football. As I pulled up they stopped kicking it and sauntered over to my car. They looked at my tyres very earnestly, craning their necks in an exaggerated way-imitating their parents, doubtless, or whoever it was that owned this shop.
I stepped out of the car. “You’ve got a dent,” the oldest boy said. He must have been fifteen.
“I know that,” I told him. “That’s not why I’m here. I’m here because I’ve got a flat tyre.”
The slightly younger boy who’d been kicking the head with him had moved round the car to check the tyres on the passenger side.
“It’s in the boot,” I told them.
I walked round to the back of the car and opened it up. The two boys peered inside, like gangsters in movies-in those scenes where the gangsters open up a car boot in which they’ve stashed a body or a cache of guns. These boys were thinking of those scenes too as I opened up the boot for them: I could tell. They peered in; then the oldest one reached in and lifted the tyre out. The younger tried to help him, but he brushed his hand aside. The youngest one, the one in the Michelin Man suit, had waddled over and tried to join in, but the middling one shoved him away again.
“You’re meant to stand out in the street!” he told him, raising his voice.
“You’re not in charge of me!” the youngest one shouted back.
“Shut up, both of you!” the oldest told them.
The middling one looked down. His face flushed red with hurt. The youngest one swaggered triumphantly beside him in his suit. The oldest boy carried the tyre into the shop. I followed him. The middling boy slouched in behind me but stayed in the doorway, keeping the youngest out. There was no one else in the shop.
“Where are the real people?” I asked.
“I’m real,” the oldest boy said. He looked offended.
“You know…the…the owners,” I said.
“Off to lunch,” he answered.
“Café next door,” added the middling one.
“Well, I could come back when…” I began-but stopped because the oldest boy had dunked my tyre into a tub of water and was slowly turning it round. He seemed to know what he was doing. He stared into the murky water, his eyes taut with concentration. I stared too: it was absorbing, watching the tyre’s bottom edge entering the water and slowly revolving. After a few seconds the boy stopped turning it and pointed:
“There’s your puncture,” he said.
I followed his finger with my eye. Bubbles of air were rising from a silvery slit on the rubber’s surface. It was like mineral water, only dirty.
“Will they be able to fix it?” I asked. “When they come back, I mean.”
“I can fix it,” said the boy.
He hoisted the tyre out of the water and carried it over to a kind of lathe. The tyre was pretty big in proportion to him: he had to half-support it with his knee. Black grime was rubbing off it onto his clothes, which were already smeared with grime all over. He sat down at the lathe and pressed a pedal with his foot, which made a series of clamps tighten round the tyre. Then his foot pressed another pedal and the tyre deflated with a bang. He started daubing glue on from a tin. His hand moved quickly as he did this, dipping and daubing, flashing the brush one way then another. The exaggerated manner he’d had when he sauntered over to the car was gone, eclipsed now by his earnest concentration, his artisanal skill. The middling boy watched him from a few feet away. The youngest boy watched too. The eyes of both of them were full of admiration-longing, almost-as they watched him flick the brush.
He pressed a pedal with his foot; the lathe revolved a quarter-turn between his hands, and he brushed an adjoining spot with glue. He pressed another pedal, and the wheel turned back for him to brush the spot on the other side of the puncture. When he’d brushed all he wanted, he dipped his hand into the tub again, scooped up some water and patted this on the tyre while the three of us stood still, reverent as a congregation at a christening, watching him at his font.
Effortlessly the boy’s hand rose and flipped a lever at the lathe’s side. The lathe hissed as its clamps released my wheel and glided back. The same hand reached up to beside his shoulder to take hold of a blue tube. The tube was hanging just beyond his field of vision, but the hand didn’t need help: it knew just where it was. Its fingers jabbed the tube into my tyre and its thumb depressed a catch; air started flowing into it. A minute later the tyre was mended, inflated and rolling across the tarmac back towards my car. He took it to the boot again and lifted it back in.
“Shouldn’t we put it back on?” I asked. “Drive on it, I mean?”
“No. Keep it as a spare,” he said. “You should rotate them.”
“Rotate, yes,” I said. “Okay.”
He could have told me anything and I’d have said “Okay”. I stood there looking at him for a while longer. We all did. A truce seemed to exist now between the other two boys. After a while I asked him: