“At this point,” Naz said, “you can switch over to Route Eight, depending on the variables. There are three…”
“Leaves leave marks too, sometimes,” I said. “Outlines on the tarmac, their own skeletons. Like photos. Or Hiroshima. When they fall.”
Later, as we were driven back towards the warehouse, Naz said to me:
“Two days to go. The mechanism is being set in place this evening.”
The image of the plane dehiscing played across my mind again. I watched it, smiled, then looked back out of the car’s window. The West London traffic was slow. I turned my head forward and stared through the sound-proof glass at the chauffeur’s shoulders. He’d soon be dematerialized as well. I felt very affectionate towards this man. I stared hard at his jacket, letting its blue curves and wrinkles sink into my mind so that I’d remember them afterwards, when he was gone. We passed Shepherd’s Bush, then broke out onto the motorway and speeded up. As we did, Naz turned to me and asked:
“When was it that you came into contact with cordite, then?”
“Cordite?” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been near cordite.”
16
THE DAY CAME, finally. Then again, perhaps it didn’t.
In one sense, the actions we’d decided to perform had all happened already. They’d happened countless times: in our rehearsals at the warehouse, in the robbery training drills the real bank staff and real security guards had been through, and in the thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even millions of robberies that had taken place ever since mankind first started circulating currency. They’d never stopped happening, intermittently, everywhere, and our repetition of them here in Chiswick on this sunny autumn afternoon was no more than an echo-an echo of an echo of an echo, like the vague memory of a football being kicked against a wall somewhere by some boy, once, long after the original boy has been forgotten, faded, gone, replaced by countless boys kicking footballs against walls in every street of every city.
In another sense, though, it had never happened-and, this being not a real event but a staged one, albeit one staged in a real venue, it never would. It would always be to come, held in a future hovering just beyond our reach. I and the other re-enactors were like a set of devotees to a religion not yet founded: patient, waiting for our deity to appear, to manifest himself to us, redeem us; and our gestures were all votive ones, acts of anticipation.
I don’t know. But I know one thing for sure: it was a fuck-up. It went wrong. Matter, for all my intricate preparations, all my bluffs and sleights of hand, played a blinder. Double-bluffed me. Tripped me up again. I know two things: one, it was a fuck-up; two, it was a very happy day.
To start, then, from the moment-the long, stretched-out moment-during which we waited, set in our positions, for it to begin, to start again: we sat, seven of us, six robber re-enactors and two drivers, in two cars, one parked on each side of the street outside the bank. We sat in silence, waiting. The other re-enactors in my car looked through the windows fascinated, watching shoppers, businessmen, mothers with pushchairs and traffic wardens walking up and down the pavement, entering and leaving shops, crossing the road, milling around at bus stops. They watched them intently, looking for cracks in their personas-inconsistencies in their dress, the way they moved and so on-that might show them up as the re-enactors they’d been told they were. Their eyes followed these people round corners, trying to spot the re-enactment zone’s edge. They’d been told that the zone would be wide and not demarcated as clearly as the shooting ones had been; that its edges would be blurred, buffered by side and back streets as they merged gradually, almost imperceptibly, with real space. They’d been told this-but they still looked for some kind of boundary.
I watched too, with the same fascination. I stared amazed at the passers-by: their postures, their joints’ articulation as they moved. They were all doing it just right: standing, moving, everything-and this without even knowing they were doing it. The pavement’s very surface seemed as charged, as fired up as my staircase had been when I’d moved down it on the day of the first building re-enactment. The markings on the surface of the road-perfect reproductions of the ones outside my warehouse, lines whose pigmentation, texture and layout I knew so well-seemed infused with the same toxic level of significance. The whole area seemed to be silently zinging, zinging enough to make detectors, if there’d been detectors for this type of thing, croak so much that their needles went right off the register and broke their springs.
Occasionally I’d let my eyes run out to corners, looking, like the other re-enactors, for an edge, although I knew there was no edge, that the re-enactment zone was non-existent, or that it was infinite, which amounted in this case to the same thing. Mostly I’d make my head move slowly forwards past the door frame where the metal gave over to glass, advancing it so there was more window in which more street was revealed. It kept on coming, rolling in, expanding, more and more of it: people, trees, lampposts, cars and buses, shop fronts with reflective windows in which more cars, buses, people and trees flowed and luxuriated, all rolling in slowly, coming to me, here.
“It’s arriving,” one of the re-enactors said; “the van’s arriving.”
I’d listened to him speak those same words countless times already, in rehearsals. I’d scripted them myself; I’d told him to say exactly those ones, to repeat the word “arriving” and replace “it’s” with “the van’s” in the second half, although the “it” already was the van. I’d heard them over and over, spoken in exactly the same tone, at the same speed, volume and pitch-but now the words were different. During our rehearsals, they’d been accurate-accurate in that we’d had the replica van turn up and park in the replica road as the re-enactor practised speaking them. Now, though, they were more than accurate: they were true. The van-the real van with real guards inside-was arriving, pulling into the real stump-road and parking. It had turned up of its own accord, and turned the words into the truest ever spoken. The van did more than turn up: it emerged-emerged into the scene, like a creature emerging from a cave or like a stain, a mark, an image emerging across photographic paper when it’s dunked in liquid. It emerged: started out small, then grew, and then was big and there-right there, where it was meant to be.
I watched it, utterly fixated. It was a perfect likeness of the van we’d used up at the warehouse. More than perfect: it was identical in make and size and registration, in the faded finish on its sides, the way its edges turned-but then it was more, more even than the sum of all its likenesses. Sitting above the rubbed-out and rerouted yellow line, resting on its bulging rubber tyres, its dull, pobbled steps waiting to be trodden on, its dirty indicators and exhaust protruding from its rear-sitting there, it seemed bigger, its sides more faded, its tyres more bulging, its edges more turning, its steps more pobbled, more ready to take weight and relinquish it again, its indicators and exhaust more dirty, more protruding. There was something excessive about its sheer presence, something overwhelming. It made me breathe in sharply, suddenly; it made my cheeks flush and my eyes sting.
“Wow,” I whispered. “That’s just…wow.”
The van emerged into the scene; men emerged from it and the whole event emerged, like a photo emerging. I didn’t even need to see it. I closed my eyes and let it all develop in my mind. I pictured the scene inside the bank: Guards One and Two were being checked in at the far end of the counter; they were passing through the airlock, through the first and now the second set of doors, into the inner area. They were handing the sacks of new notes to the cashier; the cashier, in perfect imitation of our stood-down cashier re-enactor, was preparing a receipt for them and calling up the bags of old notes from the vaults downstairs, the ones we wanted. They were waiting; we were waiting; the guard in the van was waiting, and so were its pobbled steps, its indicators and exhaust; the street was waiting: yellow and white lines, kerbs and pavements were all waiting, waiting while the lift emitted its little electric whine, its cables taut with the strain of bearing these lumps up from the building’s insides, shoving them out into the world.