While I waited I also got Roger to build me a model of the area in which the shooting had taken place: the phone box, pavement, bollards, street, shops and pubs. The model had little cars that you could move around, and a little red bicycle. It also had little human figures: the two killers with their sub-machine guns, the victim. Roger delivered it to me the evening before we did the re-enactment. I removed his model of my building from the coffee table in the living room and placed this new model there instead. I stayed up all night looking at it. I placed the human figures in the positions indicated by the forensic report’s diagrams. I made the two killers park their car, step into the street and advance forward. I made the dead man leave the phone box, climb onto his bicycle, fall off, stumble a few steps forwards and collapse. I watched each phase of the sequence from all angles.
Why was I so obsessed with the death of this man I’d never met? I didn’t stop to ask myself. I knew we had things in common, of course. He’d been hit by something, hurt, laid prostrate and lost consciousness; so had I. We’d both slipped into a place of total blackness, silence, nothing, without memory and without anticipation, a place unreached by stimuli of any kind. He’d stayed on there, gone the whole hog, while I’d been sucked back, via vague sports stadiums, to L-shaped wards and talks of Settlement-but for a short while we’d both stood at the same spot: stood there, lay there, floated there, whatever. Persisted. We’d both stood at the same spot in a more plain sense, too: in the phone box I’d called Marc Daubenay from the day the Settlement came through, this cabin out of whose miniature duplicate I was making the little model of him step again and again and again. Our paths had diverged as soon as we’d left it: I’d stepped out-two times, then passed by it a third and gone up to the airport, whereas he’d stepped out and died; but for a while we’d both stood there, held the receiver, looked at the words Airports, Stations, Light.
To put my fascination with him all down to our shared experience, though, would only be telling half the story. Less than half. The truth is that, for me, this man had become a symbol of perfection. It may have been clumsy to fall from his bike, but in dying beside the bollards on the tarmac he’d done what I wanted to do: merged with the space around him, sunk and flowed into it until there was no distance between it and him-and merged, too, with his actions, merged to the extent of having no more consciousness of them. He’d stopped being separate, removed, imperfect. Cut out the detour. Then both mind and actions had resolved themselves into pure stasis. The spot that this had happened on was the ground zero of perfection-all perfection: the one he’d achieved, the one I wanted, the one everyone else wanted but just didn’t know they wanted and in any case didn’t have eight and a half million pounds to help them pursue even if they had known. It was sacred ground, blessed ground-and anyone who occupied it in the way he’d occupied it would become blessed too. And so I had to re-enact his death: for myself, certainly, but for the world in general as well. No one who understands this could accuse me of not being generous.
In the part of the night where it’s quietest, around three or four o’clock, I started wondering where this black man’s soul had disappeared to as it left his body. His thoughts, impressions, memories, whatever: the background noise we all have in our head that stops us from forgetting we’re alive. It had to go somewhere: it couldn’t just vaporize-it must have gushed, trickled or dripped onto some surface, stained it somehow. Everything must leave some kind of mark. I scoured the thin card surfaces of Roger’s model. They were so white, so blank. I decided to mark them, and went to the kitchen to find something to stain the white card with.
In the cupboard above the kitchen unit that I’d practised turning sideways round, I found vinegar, Worcestershire Sauce and blue peppermint essence. I got a blank piece of paper and experimented with each of these. Worcestershire Sauce made the best stain, by far. I found a half-drunk bottle of wine and tried staining the paper with that too. The consistency was thinner but the colour was fantastic. It looked like blood.
“Blood!” I said aloud to my empty apartment. “I should have used blood in the first place.”
I took a small knife from a drawer, pricked my finger with its point and squeezed the flesh and skin until a small bauble of blood grew on it. Holding my finger upright so as not to lose the bauble, I went back to the living room and pressed it to the card, stamping my print across the middle of the road in blood. Then I sat back and looked at it till morning.
It was a giant print, spanning the pavement on both sides, its contours swirling round bollards, cars and shop fronts, doubling back around the phone box, gathering the killers and their victim together in the same large, undulating sweep. They were too small to make it out, of course, or even to know that it was there. No: it was legible only from above, a landing field for elevated, more enlightened beings.
12
THE ACTUAL SURFACES, when I saw them later that day, were sensational. If the diagrams had been like abstract paintings, then the road itself was like an old grand master-one of those Dutch ones thick with rippling layers of oil paint. Its tarmac was old, fissured and cracked. And its markings! They were faded, worn by time and light into faint echoes of the instructions that they’d once pronounced so boldly. The road was cambered, like most roads. It had rained recently and its central area was dry, but had wet tyre tracks running over it. Its edges were still wet. Around the seams where road met kerb and kerbstone pavement, water and dirt had been skilfully mixed to form muddy, pockmarked ridges. In places these ran into puddles in whose centres hung large clouds of mud hemmed in by borders that turned rusty and then clear, as though the artist had used them to clean his brush.
Chewing gum, cigarette butts and bottle tops had been distributed randomly across the area and sunk into its outer membrane, become one with tarmac, stone, dirt, water, mud. If you were to cut out ten square centimetres of it like you do with fields on school geography trips-ten centimetres by ten centimetres wide and ten more deep-you’d find so much to analyse, so many layers, just so much matter-that your study of it would branch out and become endless until, finally, you threw your hands up in despair and announced to whatever authority it was you were reporting to: There’s too much here, too much to process, just too much.
I arrived at the re-enactment area from the south. Police tape had been unwound across the street where Shakespeare Road ran into Coldharbour Lane, beneath a bridge that crossed the road perpendicular to the bridge I’d been stopped by on the day of the actual shooting. A policeman had been posted there to turn traffic away. I showed him the pass Naz had biked over to me one hour earlier; he let me through. Naz came over to greet me, but I paused beside the policeman and asked him:
“Were you here on the day the shooting happened?”
“No,” he said.
“I mean, not here here, but just on the other side of the cordoned-off area?”
“I wasn’t there that day,” he said.
I stared at him intently for a few more seconds, then walked on with Naz.
“Slept well?” Naz asked.
I hadn’t slept at all. My tiredness made the dappled pattern of wet and dry patches on the pavement stand out more intensely. The air was bright but not bright-blue: the sun was beaming from behind a thin layer of white cloud. Its light cast shadows and reflections: from the bollards and the phone box and on the surfaces of puddles.