The killers,
it said,
parked their car beside the Green Man public bar, stepped out and opened fire with Uzi sub-machine guns. The victim got onto his bicycle and tried to ride away, but turned too sharply into Belinda Road and fell onto the tarmac as the front wheel twisted under him.
I pictured the front wheel twisting and him going down. He must have known then that it was all up. He’d got up again, the report said, and taken two or three more steps down Belinda Road while the killers fired on him some more. Then he’d gone down a final time. He’d been dead by the time the ambulance arrived.
There were pages of detailed diagrams. They showed the layout of the area in which the shooting had happened: the phone box, the street, kerb, bollard, even a puddle into which some of the victim’s blood had flowed. They showed his position first as he stood in the phone box, then as he tried to escape, then as he fell, got up and fell again. They showed the killers’ positions as they parked their car and walked towards him, firing. The three men were drawn in outline with numbers inside the outlines, like you get in children’s colouring books. There were arrows indicating movement and direction.
The longer I stared at these pictures, the more intense the tingling in my upper body grew. It had moved into my brain, like when you eat too much monosodium glutamate in a Chinese restaurant. My whole head was tingling. The diagrams seemed to be taking on more and more significance. They became maps for finding buried treasure, then instructions for assembling pieces of furniture, then military plans, the outline of a whole winter’s arduous and multi-pronged advance across mountains and plains. I drifted off into these plains, these mountains, floating alongside the generals and foot soldiers and cooks and elephants. When I looked up from the diagrams again, Naz was there, standing in front of my sofa with another man.
“When did you come in?” I asked him. “Who’s this?”
“This man’s a doctor,” said Naz. “I’ve been here for the last hour and a half.”
I tried to ask him what he meant by that, but the words were taking a long time to form. The other man opened a bag and took a pen or torch out.
“You were just sitting here,” said Naz. “You’d gone completely vacant. You didn’t notice me, or hear me. I waved my hand in front of your face and you didn’t even move your eyes.”
“How long ago was this?” the doctor asked.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“The whole last hour and a half,” Naz told him. “Until just now, when you came in.”
“Has he experienced any kind of trauma recently?” the doctor asked. He switched his torch-pen on. “What’s his name?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Send this man away.”
“Keep your head still,” the doctor said.
“No,” I said. “Send this man away, Naz, now. Get off my property or I’ll have you arrested.”
“I can’t help you if you won’t let me help you,” he said.
I looked past his ear and thought I saw another cat fall off the roof. I told this man:
“I’m ordering you to leave my property this instant.”
He stood still for a while. Naz did too. The three of us were static for several moments-and while we were I didn’t mind this doctor being here. I’d even have let him stay if he’d only behaved himself and not moved. Eventually, though, he turned to Naz and motioned with his eyes towards the door, then slipped his torch-pen back into his bag and left. Naz saw him out. I heard the two men murmuring together as I went into the bathroom and washed my face. I washed it in cold water and didn’t dry it straight away, but let it drip while I stared at the crack on the wall. I watched the crack as I listened to the doctor walking down the stairs.
When I went back into the living room, Naz was there and the flat’s door was closed. Naz said:
“I think it would be a good idea for you to…”
“Where have you managed to get us to?” I asked him.
He’d got the re-enactors, the car and bicycle and the replica sub-machine guns. He’d rung up to tell me all this, but I hadn’t answered.
“When did you ring?” I asked him.
“Several hours ago. Didn’t you hear the phone?”
“No,” I said. “Not that one.”
I did have a vague memory of ringing-but it was of the phone the black man with the bicycle had used in the phone box outside Movement Cars. His last words would still have been buzzing in his head as he left the phone box, and in the head of the person he’d talked to, their conversation only half-decayed at most. Then he’d have caught sight of his killers. Did he know them? If he did, he still might not have known they’d come to kill him-until they took their guns out. At what point had he realized they were guns? Maybe at first he thought they were umbrellas, or steering-wheel locks, or poles. Then when he realized, as his brain pieced it together and came up with a plan of escape, then changed it, he found out that physics wouldn’t let him carry out the plan: it tripped him up. Matter again: the world became a fridge door, a broken lighter, two litres of blue goop. That’s when he was first hit: as he went over. The first round of bullets struck him in his body, not his head, the report said. They didn’t even make him lose consciousness. He would have known he’d been hit but not really felt it, nor the scrapes he’d received from hitting the ground as he went over the handlebars-would have just vaguely understood that something had occurred, something had changed, that things were different now.
“…and a further licence from the local police,” Naz was saying, “which won’t be a great problem now the Council have given the nod, although the status of the event needs to be determined pretty quickly.”
“What?” I asked him. “What are you saying?”
Naz looked at me strangely, then started again:
“Lambeth Council are happy to give permission for the re-enactment to proceed, but there’s confusion about what type of licence they need to give us,” he said. “It’s not a demonstration and it’s not a street party. The activity that it most closely resembles is filming.”
“No,” I said. “No cameras. No filming. You know that.”
“Yes,” said Naz, “but we should apply for it under filming. We need to designate it as a recognized type of event so they can grant us permission to do it. Filming’s the easiest route. We apply to use the area for a film shoot and then just don’t have any cameras.”
“I suppose so,” I said. “As long as we don’t actually film. How soon can we do it, then?”
“Next week,” said Naz.
“No, that’s not soon enough!” I said.
“There’s not much we can…”
“It needs to be done sooner!” I said. “Why can’t we do it tomorrow?”
“Licence certificates can take days to process,” he explained, “even with the type of bribes we’re paying.”
“Pay bigger bribes, then!” I said. “It won’t last if we wait a whole week!”
“What won’t last?” he asked.
I looked past his head. I could see three cats on the red roof on the far side of the courtyard, which meant that the people over there had replaced the one I’d seen falling. I looked back at Naz.
“Day after tomorrow at the latest!” I said. “The very outside latest!”
He got it all together for the day after that. He got the licence from the Council and the licence from the police, organized all the staff and back-up staff, the caterers and runners and who knows what else. It struck me as I waited that all great enterprises are about logistics. Not genius or inspiration or flights of imagination, skill or cunning, but logistics. Building pyramids or landing spacecraft on Jupiter or invading whole continents or painting divine scenes over the roofs of chapels: logistics. I decided that in the caste scale of things, people who dealt with logistics were higher even than the ones who made connections. I decided to get Matthew Younger to invest in the logistics industry, if there was one.