We were ready to go after ten days. I’d had a raised viewing platform built, a little like an opera box, because I’d enjoyed watching the action in my building from above and wanted to have a similar option here. I’d established that I might roam around the re-enactment area itself, and that the re-enactors shouldn’t be put off by this. I chose to begin watching the re-enactment from the platform, though. At some point in the afternoon of the tenth day after the original event, Naz signalled up to me that everything was ready; I nodded back down to him and it began.
A strong fan was switched on in front of the TYRE-TYRE sign, to make it spin. Seconds later the blue Fiesta drove slowly across the warehouse floor past the Michelin Man boy and pulled up next to where the two older boys were kicking his head to one another. The driver, wearing a white ice-hockey mask, stepped out. Slowly, in a monotone, the oldest boy intoned the words:
“You’ve-got-a-dent.”
There was a pause before the driver answered:
“I-know-that-that’s-not-why-I’m-here.”
There was another pause. This was good, very good. They were avoiding all eye contact with one another, just as I’d instructed them. I experienced a sensation that was halfway between the gliding one I’d felt when my liver lady had spoken to me on the staircase during the first re-enactment in my building and the tingling that had crept up my right side on several other occasions. This mixed sensation grew as we reached the part where the boy intoned the words:
“I-am-real.”
When the sticky blue liquid exploded, I’d meant to leave my box and go down to the car to watch, but found myself fixated where I stood. I could see the re-enactor playing me splattered in the driving seat: his legs spread, his arms raised beside the wheel, his body powerless as the two litres descended on it. The mixed sensation grew still stronger, and I was riveted to my spot on the platform. I made it down the second time round, when the sensation had subsided. This time I stood beside the car and watched the liquid gush out. Frank and Annie had created a whole mini plumbing system in the car, that siphoned the blue liquid off into a sack which was triggered to rupture when the engine was turned on a second time. It wasn’t gushing out quite right, but it was complicated. It took two more run-throughs to tweak that bit. There were other minor hitches: the air in the blue tube hadn’t been set at the right pressure; the spare tyre wasn’t dirty enough to stain the boy’s overalls adequately-pretty minor things. On the whole it went well-very well.
The first team ran through it six times. Each run-through took twenty minutes, give or take a minute either side, plus a change-over of six or so minutes. I didn’t mind the change-over: I kind of liked the pause, the hovering as the sequence clocked itself, ran through the zero, started again. The first team did it for three hours, then the second team took over. I watched them do it six times too, then watched the third team do it twice. In the small hours of the morning I decided to leave.
“Shall I tell them to stop?” Naz asked me as I put my jacket on.
“No,” I said. “Absolutely not. They should continue. When they’ve done three hours replace them with the third team. Keep rotating them.”
“For how long?” he asked.
“Indefinitely,” I said. “Round the clock. And Naz?”
“Yes?”
“When you leave here yourself, have someone you trust stay and supervise, so no one does a pianist on us.”
“But he won’t be able to supervise it indefinitely,” Naz said.
A good point. I thought about it for a moment, then told him:
“So select several people, and have them work in shifts just like the re-enactors. Rotate them as well.”
I went back five times over the next two weeks to watch the liquid blue explosion and the events leading up to it being re-enacted. In some of the sessions I was pretty analytical, concentrating on several things simultaneously. They were short enough to do that. So three minutes in I’d pay particular attention to what happened just after the oldest boy pushed aside the middling boy’s hand-how the middling boy turned aside to confront the youngest one. Or I’d watch for the car’s route. Its tyres left markings on the warehouse floor; as the sequence was repeated it drove back over its own tracks-sometimes slightly to the left or right, sometimes more or less exactly covering a previous set. On my third visit I had an idea:
“I’d like the car’s route to be changed,” I told the driver re-enactor.
“How do you mean?” he asked. He looked very tired.
“Instead of reversing out this way when you go to take up your position at the end of every sequence,” I said, “I want you to drive the car on forwards, and turn round, and leave along there, and then turn round the other way to come back in.”
“So I’d be doing a figure of eight?” he asked.
“Exactly,” I said.
The change was implemented. Over the following hours and days the car deposited across the floor an eight-a thick black line of run-together turrets and plateaux out of whose edges individuated lines and corners slightly rose, records of the wildest routes. Just to the right of this a large, sticky patch made by the repeated gushing of hundreds of litres of blue liquid stained the floor. I sketched small parts of line and patch in detail, and pressed sheets of paper straight onto them to make prints, which I then stuck to the walls of my flat. If I stared at them for long enough they took on shapes: birds, buildings or the interlocked sections of space stations-and my whole mood would slide from analytical to dreamy. The same slide happened at the re-enactment scene itself. One minute I’d be really concentrating on an aspect of the sequence and the next I’d let the movements mesmerize me, like a bird charmed by a snake: the Fiesta slowly rolling through its well-worn eight, the tyre floating on the boy’s knee to the workshop, his hand pushing the hand of the other boy away, the gliding clamps, the gushing blue-monotonous, hypnotic, endlessly repeating.
In these moments the episode’s sounds took on the aspect of a lullaby. The re-enactors’ voices echoed off the corrugated ceiling; above this, low-flying aeroplanes passed by, whistling and groaning as they left for or arrived from who knows where. The exploding liquid made a rushing, then a trickling sound. The fan hummed from before the beginning of each run-through to after the end. Other sounds emerged from the scene’s edges, from beneath its surfaces-sounds hidden in the enclave where the scraping of the middling boy’s foot met the rustle of the youngest one’s Michelin Man suit, or where the gush of liquid met the roof’s vibrations. Occasionally these sounds seemed to become voices, speaking words and phrases I never quite managed to make out.
I spent a lot of time there, watching. I also spent a lot of time sitting in my living room staring at the sketches and prints, or lying in my bath thinking about the re-enactment, knowing that it was continuing, constantly, on a loop. Sometimes I really concentrated on each moment, each manoeuvre; but sometimes I thought of other matters altogether. For a couple of days I returned to the study of my building, keeping the whole place in on mode for two ten-hour stretches with only two hours’ break between them. Then I drove back out to Heathrow and watched the tyre sequence through fifteen times.