“Everything. The same as before, but at half speed.”
“Like in an action replay on TV?” he asked.
“Well,” I said, “sort of. Only don’t do all your movements in slow motion. Do them normally, but at half the normal speed. Or at the normal speed, but take twice as long doing them.”
They both stood there for a few seconds, taking in what I’d said. Then the taller man, the one with the West Indian accent, started nodding. I saw that his lips were curled into a smile.
“You’re the boss,” he said again.
We took up our positions once more. Inside the phone box this time I examined every surface it had to present. My man, the victim, would have taken all these in-but then his brain would have edited most of them back out again, dismissed them as mundane, irrelevant. A mistake: perhaps if he’d paid more attention to the environment around him some association might have warned him of what was about to happen, even saved his life. He must have done something wrong, crossed someone, broken some code of the underworld. So if he’d looked more carefully at the cabin’s metal wall and taken in the fact that the dull red BMW was passing slowly by, too slowly perhaps, and connected this with the last time he’d seen that car or its reflection, who he’d been with then…who knows? The stencilled figure on the window, the messenger, knew something was up and was trying to announce this with his horn-to blare it out, a warning; his free hand, the one not holding the instrument, was raised in alarm. And then the silence, like the silence in a forest when a predator is on the prowl and every other creature’s gone to ground except his prey, too tied up in his own concerns, in sniffing roots or chewing grass or daydreaming to read the glaring signs…
I stood with the receiver in my hand. The digital display strip said Insert Coins. Outside, from beneath their grid, the windows of Movement Cars promised wide-open spaces opening to even wider distances-airports, stations and removals, light. An empty green beer bottle sat directly beneath the hanging plastic-wrapped flowers; it seemed to be offering itself to them as a vase if only they’d abandon their position in the grid, come down and turn the right way round again. The pavement, when I stepped out onto it this time, seemed even more richly patterned than it had before. Its stained flagstones ran past the phone cabin and Movement Cars to three or so feet before Belinda Road, then gave over to short, staccato brickwork before melting, as the pavement dipped onto the road itself, into poured tarmac. It was like a quilt, a handmade, patterned quilt laid out for this man to take his final steps across and then lie down and die on: a quilted deathbed. It struck me that the world, or chance, or maybe death itself if you can speak of such a thing, must have loved this man in some way to prepare for him such a richly textured fabric to gather and wrap him up in.
The killers had parked and were leaving their car. Behind them the windows of the Green Man rose up, impassive. When my man, the dead man, saw the two men heading for him with their guns out, just as his first apprehension that there was malice in the air-finally gleaned from the arrangement of bodies and objects, from the grimace on the face of one man and the cold, neutral expression of the other-developed into full-blown understanding that they’d come to kill him: in this instant, this sub-instant, he would have searched the space around him for an exit, for somewhere to go, to hide. He would have pictured the space behind the windows, a space he’d seen before: the pub’s lounge with its stools and pool table, the toilets behind this with their window leading to the yard beyond. His mind would have asked this space to take him in, to shelter him-and been told: No, you can’t get there without being shot; it’s just not possible. It would have asked the same question of Movement Cars’ window, and been told: No, there’s a grill here, and you couldn’t pass through glass even if there weren’t. It might even have looked to the holes plumbed into the street’s surface: the water outlet and the London Transport one and the ones with strings of letters and even the one with just the C-and been told, by each one: No, you can’t enter here; you’ll have to find another exit.
The two men had brought their guns out again and were raising them to point at me. I was swinging my right leg over the saddle of my bicycle, looking at them and the space around us. There was only one way out: the strip of pavement on the far side of Belinda Road. It led past the black bar with no name to the bridge and then away along Coldharbour Lane. Separated from the road by a line of bollards, it looked like a sluice, a ramp, a runnel-one that opened to another place where there were no men with guns pointing at me. That’s why my man had chosen that direction. By the time he’d reached the dip into Belinda Road, passing the puddle into which his blood would soon flow, he’d have realized that he’d never make it out that way. That’s why he changed direction. I went over the bike’s handlebars this time serenely, calmly, taking time to greet the now familiar moments of landscape that came at me.
The sky, this time round, had become totally consistent, clouds running together into an unbunched white continuum. The black bar’s outer wall was detailed with reliefs and ridges and long lines of painted gold. The grill over the window of Movement Cars, reflected in the puddle and viewed from this angle, looked like the gridded ceiling of a dodgem ring. The letters were behind it. They weren’t Greek or Russian at alclass="underline" they were the A and r of Airports reversed by the water’s surface. To the puddle’s left two bottle tops lay on the ground. I lay there looking at them. My man would have seen these too. They were beer bottle tops. He would have looked at them and thought about the men who’d drunk the beers and wondered why it couldn’t be him drinking them right now, these beers, off in some other place, around a table with friends perhaps, or at home with his family, instead of lying here being killed. Beyond these was a plastic shopping bag. On the bag’s side were printed the words Got yours? Just before I stood up for the last time I murmured, to the puddle, the white sky, the black bar and the pockmarked, littered road surface around me:
“Yes, I got mine.”
My two assassins took their time in killing me. The slowed-down pace at which they raised and fired their guns, the lack of concern or interest this seemed to imply, the total absence on my part of any attempt to escape although I had plenty of time to do so-all these made our actions passive. We weren’t doing them: they were being done. The guns were being fired, I was being hit, being returned to the ground. The ground’s surface was neutral-neither warm nor cold. Lying on it once more, I looked over at the phone box. It was horizontal now; the stencilled messenger was on his side, his arms spread out, a forensic outline just like I would be within an hour or so. I turned my head the other way. Everything was tilted: bollards leant away from me as they rose like plinths, like columns of temples or Acropolises. The black bar’s exterior ran diagonally down the street, the golden markings on it forming dots and dashes. Its fire doors were closed; two blue-and-white signs on them bore the words Fire Escape Keep Clear-two times, repeated. When I let my head roll slightly back, a bollard hid all these words except for one of the two Escapes. Would my man have seen this, just before the life dribbled out of him towards the puddle? Escape?
Above the word Escape, cloud, white and unbroken. There was no movement anywhere. I lay there doing nothing, staring. I lay there for so long that I wasn’t even staring any more-just lying there with my eyes open while nothing happened. Shadows became longer, deeper; the sky grew slightly darker, more entrenched. There was no noise anywhere, no noise at all-just the massed silence of whole scores of people waiting, like me, infinitely patient.