On the window above the shelf the figure of a messenger blowing a horn was stencilled in silhouette. Beyond it was the caged façade of Movement Cars, with the words Airports, Stations, Light, Removals, Any Distance painted on the window. The letters were painted on in white and with a blue outline that had been extended outwards on each letter’s right so they seemed to be casting shadows. What did Light mean? I picked up the phone’s receiver. I didn’t call anyone or put any money in the slot: I just stood there holding the receiver in my hand. When my phone socket had been ripped out of the wall it had lain across my floor looking disgusting, like something that’s come out of something.
Inside the cabin it was quiet. There was no traffic passing by. My staff ’s vehicles, drawn across the road, formed an insulating wall between the re-enactment zone and the outside. In front of and between the vehicles people stood quite still-all mine, a lot of people-looking straight in my direction, at the phone box. Then I heard the BMW’s motor start up: the sound of a spark plug firing a charge of compressed gasoline and of expanded gas shooting a piston off again and again and again-slowly at first, then faster, then after a few seconds so fast that the individual shots merged into a hum of infinite self-repetition without origin or end. It had begun.
I saw the BMW pass the phone box on the far side of the street from the corner of my eye, and again in the metal of the cabin’s wall, reflected. I set the receiver back onto its cradle and opened the phone box’s door. I stepped out, turned my bicycle around and swung my right leg across its bar. The two men had backed the car into the space I’d shown them and were getting out. They’d parked it just right, exactly where I’d told them to. It was very good. The tingling started in my spine again.
I pushed off the pavement with my foot and let the bike roll forwards, its handlebars wobbling. As its front wheel passed a white foam cup lying on the ground, I looked up and to my left at the two men. They’d taken out their sub-machine guns and were pointing them at me. The man with the West Indian accent opened fire. His gun made a tremendous noise. The other man opened fire too, not half a second after the first one. The noise of the two guns together was quite deafening. The affable man with the London accent grimaced as he shot. The other man’s face was expressionless, indifferent, the face of an assassin.
The tingling grew more intense as I raised my buttocks from the bike’s seat and started pedalling furiously, past the grilled windows of Movement Cars, down the dip into Belinda Road. The two men kept marching on me across Coldharbour Lane, firing as they advanced. Just in front of the brush-cleaning puddle at the edge of Belinda Road I turned the bike’s wheel sharply to the right and went over the handlebars. As I fell to the ground a whole tumult of images came at me: the edge of the black bar with no name, a streak of gold, some sky, a lamppost, tarmac and the coloured patterns floating on the puddle’s surface. After I’d stopped tumbling and become still, the patterns took the form of Greek or Russian letters. I looked away from the puddle, up towards the men: they had stopped firing and were standing still, exactly where I’d told them to stand, by the hexagon-cell patterns in the road. It was all good.
The men were waiting for me to get up again. I pushed myself up with my hands and noticed they were numb. This was good-very, very good. I stood up and felt the tingling rush to my head. The two men fired again. I turned from them, dropped to my knees, then let my upper body sink back down towards the ground until my face lay on the tarmac. I lay there for a few seconds, quite still. Then I rolled over onto my back and stood up again. The two men were getting back into their car.
“Wait!” I shouted at them.
They stopped.
“Wait!” I shouted again. “You shouldn’t drive off. You shouldn’t even walk back to the car. When you’ve stopped shooting at me for the last time, just turn your backs on me and stop.”
“What shall we do when we’ve stopped?” the man with the London accent asked.
“Nothing,” I told him. “Just stop, and stand there with your backs to me. We’ll stop the whole scene there, but hold it for a while in that position. Okay?”
He nodded. I looked at his friend. He nodded too, slowly.
“Good,” I said. “Let’s do it again.”
We resumed our positions. Back in the phone box, I looked through the window. The BMW was turning round by the traffic lights, beside the shortish man I’d noticed earlier. Just over half the crew and back-up people had chosen that end of the area to stand at and watch from; eight or so more were gathered at the far end, the end I’d entered from, beneath the bridge. The cabin’s glass was clear, not wrinkled like the windows of my building. All the same, I looked instinctively across to the roof of the building on the far side of the road, scanning it for cats, then realized my mistake and turned the other way.
The grill across Movement Cars’ façade was, now I looked at it more closely, actually four panels of grill, each panel being made up of three sections of criss-crossing metal lines. It looked like graph paper, with large square areas containing smaller ones that framed, positioned and related every mark or object lying behind them-a ready-made forensic grid. Most of the grid’s squares were pretty blank. The lower left-hand-side one, though, the one closest to the pavement at the corner of Belinda Road, had two bunches of flowers stuffed behind it. They were hanging upside down, wrapped in plastic. Two grid-columns across were the painted words: Movement Cars, Airports, Stations, Light, Removals, Any Distance. They ran over all three of the column’s larger squares; the n and t of Movement ran into the next column, the column to the right. It was Light Removals, not Light then Removals: I knew that already, but had just forgotten that I knew.
The dull red BMW passed the phone box again. Again I saw it twice: once from the corner of my eye and once reflected in the metal of the cabin’s wall-only it seemed flatter and more elongated this time. When the driver turned the engine off, for a half-second or so I could make out the individual firings of the piston as these slowed down and died off. I opened the phone box’s door, stepped out and got onto my bicycle. Again the tingling kicked in as I passed the white foam cup. Again the two men took their guns out and I pedalled furiously. This time when the bike dipped from the pavement to the road I felt my altitude drop, like you do on aeroplanes when they make their descent. The same tumult of images came to me as I went over the handlebars: a portion of the black bar with no name, a streak of gold, some sky, a lamppost, tarmac and the puddle with the Greek or Russian letters floating on its surface. I got up, let them shoot me a second time, went down again and lay with my face on the tarmac looking at the undercarriage of a parked van, at the patterned markings on one of its hubcaps.
I lay there for longer this time than I had the last. There was no noise behind me, no footsteps: the two killers had remembered what I’d told them and were standing there quite still. I lay there on the tarmac for a long time tingling, looking at the hubcap.
Then I got up and we did it again, and again, and again.
After running through the shooting for the fifth time I was satisfied we’d got the actions right: the movement, the positions. Now we could begin working on what lay beneath the surfaces of these-on what was inside, intimate.
“Let’s do it at half speed,” I said.
The black man with the London accent frowned.
“You mean we should drive slower?” he asked.
“Drive, walk, everything,” I said.
One of Naz’s men was striding over to us with a clipboard in his hand. I waved him away and continued: