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.
My eyes still closed, I watched the bags emerging now, being lifted from their tray. A lifting feeling moved up through my body; I felt my organs lift inside me. I watched the tight-end accomplice re-enactor peel out of the line by the enquiry desk and, watching this, felt weightless, light and dense at the same time. As he peeled out his shoulders inclined so that the left was slightly lower than the right; they inclined, cut a banked semicircle through the air above the carpet and then straightened again as he glided just behind the other people queuing, parallel to them, and headed to the door.
I pushed my breath out in a sigh, a rush, opening my mouth like someone who’s come up from underwater to emerge into the daylight-and as this breath rushed out of me I opened my eyes and unpacked the whole scene, breathed it all out into the daylight too. It all came out just right, everything in position, where it should be, doing what it should: the bank, the street, its lines, the van. The tight-end accomplice re-enactor was emerging from the door. Then I was emerging too, emerging from the car and gliding across the street towards the bank door as I slipped my ice-hockey mask on, my gliding and slipping mirrored by the four other robber re-enactors gliding from four different positions-two sides of two cars-towards the same point, the same door, like synchronized swimmers gliding from the corners of a pool to fall into formation in the middle.
I knew the formation-knew it intimately. I knew which bit moved where and how the whole thing changed shape as it flowed across the ground. I’d created it; I’d dreamt it up. I’d watched it from the outside, sketched and measured it from sideways on and from behind. I’d projected its components and its angles onto Naz’s tables, pyramids and flow charts, seen them gather and disperse in wisps of steam rising off my bath’s surface. I’d taken my position in it time and time again, moved through it, stepping, turning, swinging till each part of me knew where to go, instinctively, at every point on its trajectory. But none of that compared to now. As I and the others swept in through the door to take up our positions in the phalanx, I knew I was somewhere different-that I’d reached an intimate cell, a chamber far beneath the surface of the movements and positions. I was right inside the pattern, merging, part of it as it changed and, duplicating itself yet again, here, now, transformed itself and started to become real.
The defile yawned open. All edges-of objects and surfaces, the counters and the screens, the carpet, the edges of seconds too-seemed to draw back while remaining where they were; normal distances and measures became huge. I could have done anything: before another person’s eyes had completed a single blink, I could have run about all over, gone and moved cars around in the street outside, swapped babies in their pushchairs, climbed the bank’s walls and walked across its ceiling or just stood there upside down. As it was, I stayed inside the moment at which I was passing Robber Re-enactor One as he stood over Guard Three just inside the doorway. I lingered in that moment, in the instant I was sweeping past him, for a long time, taking in the posture of his leg, the angle of its knee, the straight line of his left arm as it held the guard below him while the right arm, lifted so its hand was at head level, held a gun to the guard’s head. I drank it all up, absorbing it like blotting paper or like ultra-sensitive film, letting it cut right through me, into me till I became the surface on which it emerged.
Then sound came in: the sound of the shotgun firing off the frightener. The sound was elongated, stretched out so much that it became soft and porous, so it seemed to have slowed down, right down into a hum, gentle and reassuring. Plaster crumbled from the ceiling and fell gently, bitty powder snow. Robber Re-enactor Two was delivering his line:
“Everybody lie down.”
He didn’t shout the line, but rather spoke it in a voice without inflection-deadpan, neutral, just like the voice in which I’d made the tyre-boy re-enactors speak their lines during the blue-goop re-enactment. This line, too, was elongated; it seemed to stretch out on both sides of itself, to build itself an inner chamber in which it could be spoken almost imperceptibly within the longer speaking of it-spoken intimately, a tender echo.
Then it was quiet. The customers and clerks, the real ones who’d replaced the customer and clerk re-enactors we’d stood down, were lying on the floor like babies being put to sleep. Above them, like a mobile hanging from a cot, Robber Re-enactor Two’s shotgun swung. I swung mine too, made it describe an arc across the lobby, an arc like a clock’s pendulum transported to a horizontal plane-a grandfather clock’s pendulum, slow, steady and repetitive.
Another sound came now: the tinkle of glass splintering as Four re-enacted the smashing of the airlock’s first door; then, growing out of that sound, a second as Five re-enacted the smashing of the next door. The glass was high-tech modern glass that crumbles into bits and falls rather than breaking into jagged segments; it fell softly, tinkling like a music box-an old, antique one tinkling out a slow and high-pitched tune, a lullaby.
I started on the sequence that I had to re-enact at this point: moving across the floor and through the broken airlock to join Four and Five, pick up one of the bags and carry it back over to the door and out into the street. This, too, I’d practised endlessly-but it was different now. The bag, just like the van, was more imposing than the bags we’d used before-its weave more regular and repetitive, its thread more fibrous, the small, isolated clusters of letters and numbers dotted about its surface more cryptic than those on the ones I’d carried in rehearsals. It was baggier. It bulged just like the liver lady’s rubbish bag had-bulged irregularly, in a slightly awkward way. It was hard to lift up: I felt it stretching, felt its weight being dispersed around my upper body, the way it acted on each muscle. All my muscles were articulated now, working together, merging as I carried it, merging without my having to tell them how to merge.
“A system,” I said to the cashier. “And I don’t have to learn it first. I’m getting away with it.”
I was getting away with it. For me, the bag held something priceless. Its money was like rubbish to me: rubbish, dead weight, matter-and for that reason it was valuable, invaluable, as precious as a golden fleece or lost ark or Rosetta Stone. I glided across the floor with it towards the door. Four and Five glided in front of me. Two was still standing static, moving his gun from one corner of the bank towards the other and then back again, slow and regular as a lawn-sprinkler. I raised my bag slightly as it and I cleared the airlock’s stump, then lowered it again and let it glide above the carpet like a crop-spraying aircraft gliding over fields of wheat. I let my eyes follow the carpet’s surface as we glided, let them run along its perfectly reproduced gold on red, its turns and cut-backs, the way these repeated themselves regularly for several yards then quickened, shortening as the carpet crinkled in the rise up to the kink on which Five, gliding two feet in front of me, was about to re-enact his half-trip. My eyes moved forward to his foot and lingered there, watching it anticipate the kink; I saw the foot surge forwards, its toes pointing downwards, backwards, turning over like a ballet dancer’s toes…
But there was no kink in this carpet. Why should there have been? There had been one at the warehouse, but that had just appeared there. In the rehearsals, after Five had tripped on it that one time, I’d told him to half-trip each time he passed it. I’d even had Frank slip a small piece of wood under the carpet, to make sure the wrinkle stayed there. Five had got so used to half-tripping on it over the weeks of rehearsals-ten, twenty times each day, over and over-that the half-trip had become instinctive, second nature. Now, as we did the re-enactment itself, he applied the same force, gave it the same forward thrust, the same turn of the toes-only there was no kink. The carpet was flat. I saw his foot feel for the kink, and feel more, staying behind while the rest of him moved on. The rest of him moved so far on that eventually it yanked the foot up into the air behind it. His whole back leg rose behind him until it was horizontal, then continued rising until it was so high that his shoulders went down and he toppled over.
He toppled-but before he did, his upper body flew forwards above the carpet unsupported, carried by its own momentum. His arms were pulled back like the arms of a free-falling parachutist; his chest was pushed out like a swan’s chest. It reminded me of a ship’s figurehead I’d once seen-an old ship’s figurehead with lifted head and body thrust out to the waves. I could see that he was about to crash straight into Two. I thought of carrots, and of air traffic controllers, and watched the collision unfold.
It was his head that made first contact. It went into Two’s stomach, which gave in the same way the buffer on the end of a segment of train gives as a new segment is coupled with it. Five’s head drove into Two’s stomach, but his neck seemed to move the other way-to contraflow, its flesh wrinkling back in waves towards his shoulders. It looked like the crumple zones they build into the fronts of modern cars. Two let out a grunt as his own shoulders hunched forwards; his left hand released the barrel of the shotgun, rose into the air, then fell onto Five’s back, where it stayed, tenderly, holding Five’s body in place as the two of them started to go down.
Their fall was long and slow. Two’s left leg had risen from the ground as soon as Five crashed into him; his right leg, though, stayed planted, and for a while held up the whole tangled composition of two heads and torsos, four arms, three legs, a bag and a gun. It seemed to be willing itself to believe it could support the knotted constellation, all this levitated matter, keep it buoyant, carry it on into some imaginary future. It couldn’t, of course: gravity was against it. I watched it buckle like a giraffe’s legs do in old films when the giraffe has been shot by hunters, then give up, resigning itself to its inevitable impact on the ground.
Not all of Two gave up, though: as the rest of him, all his parts and the new parts he’d acquired, Five’s parts, landed over a large area of carpet-twisting and folding as they hit, compressing further in some cases and in others unlocking, breaking apart-his right hand remained raised. The gun was still held in it, the palm wrapped around the butt, the index finger hooked across the trigger. It must have been an instinct to tug back against the last solid thing there was that made him pull this. The gun went off. Four, just in front of me, crumpled and toppled too.
Now the whole scene went static, like it had been on my staircase when the liver lady and I had slowed down so much that we’d come to a standstill. Two and Five lay static on the floor, half joined and half unjoined, like acrobats frozen in mid-manoeuvre. Four lay fetal, curled up, still. I stood still on the floor behind him. The only thing that moved was a deep red flow coming from Four’s chest. It emerged from his chest and advanced onto the carpet.
“Beautiful!” I whispered.
Whines spread across the lobby, running in ripples from the staff and customers, a collective murmur in their sleep as the dream they were all dreaming hit this patch of turbulence. Robber Re-enactor One walked over from the doorway, slid his mask off, looked at Four and said:
“Oh my God!”
His face was white. He slipped Four’s mask off. Four’s face was white too. His eyes were empty. He was pretty dead. One looked up from him and announced in a loud voice:
“Stop the re-enactment!”
No one answered. One looked around him at the whining people. He took three steps in the direction of a corner where two customers were lying. Sensing him approach, they whined more, wriggling, burrowing into the ground. One leant down, placed his hand on one of their shoulders and said:
“He’s hurt. We’ve got to stop the re-enactment now!”
The customer let out a squeal and bucked with fear. One turned away from him and shouted to the staff behind the counters:
“It’s stopped! The re-enactment’s stopped! We have to stop it now!”
Nobody moved. Of course nobody moved. Stop what? This re-enactment was unstoppable. Even I couldn’t have stopped it. Not that I wanted to. Something miraculous was happening. I looked at Two and Five lying on the floor. They seemed now less like acrobats than sculptures. The bag that had slipped from Five’s hand and the gun that now lay beside Two’s looked to me like wedges of surplus matter stripped away to reveal them. Something else was being revealed too, something that had been there all along, present but hidden, now emerging, everywhere. It was palpable: I could sense this new emergence in the very air. The others could sense it too: Five, One and Two were looking around the bank, at the customers and staff and at each other, their eyes widening, their bodies growing more and more alert, inquisitive, aroused. Then One, his voice quivering with slow terror, said, so quietly it was almost to himself:
“They don’t know.”
“What?” said Five.
“They don’t know,” One repeated. “These people don’t know that it’s a re-enactment.”
There was silence for a moment while Five and Two digested what One had just said. One turned to me and, voice still quivering, whispered:
“It’s real!”
The tingling really burst its banks now; it flowed outwards from my spine’s base and flowed all around my body. Once more I was weightless; once again the moment spread its edges out, became a still, clear pool swallowing everything else up in its contentedness. I let my head fall back; my arms started rising outwards from my sides, the palms of my hands turning upwards. I felt I was being elevated, that my body had become unbearably light and unbearably dense at the same time. The intensity augmented until all my senses were going off at once. There was noise all around me, a chorus: screaming, shouting, banging, alarms ringing, people running around bumping into things and each other. I knelt down beside Four. The blood was advancing from his chest in a steady, broad column, marching on across the carpet’s plain, making its gold lines crinkle like flags in a breeze. His bag had slouched into the floor just like the liver lady’s bag had; its contents, no longer suspended in space by his arm, had rearranged themselves into a state of rest. The blood was flowing round it, dampening one of its edges, eddying into a pool behind a crinkle, as though the bag and not he had leaked.
Further on, the blood column had pulled to a halt and pitched camp in the formation of an elongated oval, a deep red patch. On its surface I could see the wall reflected-and the broken glass doors of the airlock, the counter’s edge, part of a poster on the wall, the ceiling. Four had opened himself up, become a diagram, a sketch, an imprint. I lay down flat so that my head was right beside this pool and followed the reflections. The objects-the doors’ stump, the edge, the poster’s corner-had become abstracted, separated from the space around them, freed from distances to float around together in this pool of reproductions, like my staff in their stained-glass window heaven.
“Speculation,” I said; “contemplation of the heavens. Money, blood and light. Removals. Any Distance.”
I moved my head over to Four’s body and poked my finger into the wound in his chest. The wound was raised, not sunk; parts of his flesh had broken through the skin and risen, like rising dough. The flesh was both firm and soft; it gave to the touch but kept its shape. When I brought my eyes right up to it, I saw that it was riddled with tiny holes-natural, pin-prick holes, like breathing holes. Much bigger, irregular cracks had opened among these where bits of shot had entered him. I could see some way into the tunnels that the cracks’ insides formed, but then they turned and narrowed as they disappeared deeper inside him.
“Yes, really like a sponge,” I said.
Then I was walking from the bank. I walked quite calmly. No one tried to stop me. They all ran and screamed and bumped and fell-but I had a cylinder around me, an airlock. I was walking calmly through the bank’s door, out into the daylight again. I was walking across the street, passing the yellow and white lines, the spot where the raised patch wasn’t. Then I was in the car again and it was pulling out, cutting an arc across the middle of the street, pausing, then gliding on. The street was rotating slowly round: the mothers with pushchairs and the traffic and the traffic wardens and the people at the bus stops and the other windows full of their reflections-rotating around me. I was an astronaut suspended, slowly turning, among galaxies of coloured matter. I closed my eyes and felt the movement, the rotation-then opened them again and was overwhelmed by sunlight. It was streaming from the sun’s chest, gushing out, cascading, splashing off cars’ wheels, bonnets and windscreens and off shop fronts, trickling along the road’s lines and markings, pulsing past people’s legs and along gutters, dribbling from roofs and trees. It was spilling everywhere, overflowing, just too much, too much to absorb.
“So maybe it’s okay for it to fall,” I said.
“Where are the others?” asked the driver re-enactor.
“They have the same texture,” I told him.
“They have what?” he asked. “What was the second gunshot?”
“The same texture,” I said. “Light and blood.”
Two of the other robber re-enactors had joined us in the car now: Five and Two I think, or maybe Five and One. Not Four, in any case. We turned and bumped into another car, paused for a moment and then glided on.
“He dented me and just drove off,” I told them. “The guy in Peckham. I was angry at the time, but that’s fine now, though. Everything’s fine-even the shard in my knee. The half.”
It was fine-all of it. I felt very happy. We’d left the main road and were weaving through side streets, the same ones we’d practised weaving through two days ago. The same trees lined the road on both sides-oaks, ashes and plane trees whose red, brown and yellow leaves were merging again into a flow of colour; some leaves were falling, flickering in the sunlight as they drifted downwards. There was one fir tree too, that wasn’t molting.
“A reciduous tree,” I told the others, pointing it out as we passed it.
They weren’t listening to me. They seemed very unhappy. They were shouting at the driver re-enactor, screaming at him, telling him the whole thing had been real and not a re-enactment, over and over again. I turned to them and told them:
“But it was a re-enactment. That’s the beauty of it. It became real while it was going on. Thanks to the ghost kink, mainly-the kink the other kink left when we took it away.”
This didn’t seem to calm them down at all. They shouted, yelped and whimpered as we drove on through the falling coloured leaves. One of them kept asking what they should all do now.
“Oh, just carry on,” I told him. “Carry right on. It will all be fine.”
I remembered saying this to the boy on the staircase. I recalled his worried face, his satchel and his shoes. I looked straight at the re-enactor who’d asked me the question, smiled at him reassuringly and said:
“You can’t go back there. They won’t understand. Come on with me and everything will be resolved.”
I think he understood that I was right. Of course he couldn’t go back to the bank. What would he do? Explain that it had all been a performance? Throw in the stuff about fridge doors and cigarettes and carrots and De Niro for good measure? He didn’t even know about all that, and didn’t look as though he could have articulated it very coherently even if I’d briefed him on it. He was pretty agitated. They all were. They moaned and wept and yelped and shrieked. I listened to them for a while, trying to work out the rhythm of the various sounds, the moans and wails and yelps-which followed what, how long it took for the whole sequence to repeat itself-but gave up after a while. It was too complex to pin down right now; I’d have to get it re-enacted later. I looked back out of the window at the merging, falling leaves. These faded into concrete, into bridges, stilts and over-passes as we merged with the motorway past Shepherd’s Bush. The concrete, too, was merging, flowing all around us, tilting and swivelling above us, inclining away below, dwindling and disappearing, then emerging again a little later to flow back, converge-these flowing blocks, these columns, all this matter.
Naz met us at the warehouse. He was standing outside it, just inside the compound gates. He opened the car door and looked at me.
“You’ve got blood on you!” he said.
“Money, blood and light,” I told him, beaming as I stepped out of the car. “Naz, it was brilliant!”
Naz stuck his head inside the car where the wailing, yelping re-enactors were still sitting. When they started wailing at him, telling him what had happened, a strange change came over him. It wasn’t dramatic or hysterical: it was more like a computer crashing-the way the screen, rather than explode or send its figures dancing higgledy-piggledy around, simply freezes. He pulled his head out of the car; his body stiffened and his eyes went into suspension while the thing behind them tried to whir. I watched him, fascinated, and saw straight away that it couldn’t whir any more: it had frozen. The others were haranguing him, shouting at him that he’d known, he’d set them up, Four’s dead, they’re murderers, this, that, the other. He just stood there on the tarmac, all locked up. The sunlight streamed around him, falling and cascading everywhere. When his eyes switched on again-half-on, as though in shut-down mode already-he asked where the other re-enactors were.
“Who knows?” I said, stepping into the warehouse. “En route, caught, still at the bank. I don’t know. Hey, nice work!”
The duplicate bank had been razed. You could still see where counters and walls had risen from the ground: their stumps were still there-those and a few bits of rubble, a few splinters, a few tears and holes. It was like a smashed-up and rubbed-over ground plan, a ghost replica. I ran my eyes slowly across its surface. I let them linger on the spot from which the tight-end accomplice re-enactor had peeled out, then on the spot where I’d stood, planted, as my gun had described an arc above the floor. I still had my gun now. I was standing in the spot where Robber Re-enactor Two had stood, facing the counters and the airlock. I raised the gun’s barrel with my left hand and made it describe an arc again, slowly sweeping it from side to side. I ran my eyes on to where the lift had borne up the three bags for us to carry; then I ran them back across the ground where the carpet had been, projecting back onto this bare concrete floor its golden lines, the way they turned and cut against the red, repeating.
I glided my eyes over it at a low altitude again-but this time in reverse, the way Two would have seen it as the three of us approached him with our bags. He, too, would have seen Five’s foot feeling for the kink, then seen him topple, seen his torso hurtling towards him, borne by its own momentum. He also would have known that a collision was imminent, that nothing could be done to stop it. Two, the real Robber Re-enactor Two, had come into the warehouse. He’d entered, like I had, from the spot where the duplicate lift had been, the inner area. He was crying, lumbering forwards slowly, aimlessly. I’d got so into replaying the whole event from his perspective that I’d started to overbalance. I let my left leg come up and my left hand leave my shotgun’s barrel; I sucked my stomach in and hunched my shoulders forwards; I let my right leg buckle, straighten and then keel over backwards, carrying the rest of me with it-carrying all of me except my right hand, which stayed raised, its palm still wrapped around the shotgun’s butt, its index finger hooked across the trigger.
Two was as far from me as Four had been from him when he, Two, had shot him, Four, in the bank. He was still moving forwards, lumbering towards me. So I shot him. It was half instinctive, a reflex, as I’d first suspected: to tug against the last solid thing there was, which was the trigger-tug against it as though it were a fixed point that the body could be pulled back up from. But I’d be lying if I said it was only that that made me pull the trigger and shoot Two. I did it because I wanted to. Seeing him standing there in Four’s position as I stood in his, replaying in first my mind and then my body his slow fall, I’d felt the same compulsion to shoot him as I’d felt outside Victoria Station that day to ask passers-by for change. Essentially, it was the movements, the positions and the tingling that made me do it-nothing more.
The new blast echoed round the warehouse. It made its walls tingle too-its walls, its ceiling and its floor. They tingled and hummed and sang and seemed to levitate. Sawdust took off from the floor and swirled around circling in the air; small lumps of rubble jumped. Two levitated too: he took off from the spot where he was standing-took off like a helicopter rising straight up, only he rose up and slightly backwards at the same time. He hovered for a while in the air and then crumpled back into the ground.
I got up, walked over to where he lay and looked down at him. He was lying on his back.
“He should be on his side,” I said, to no one in particular.
I knelt down beside him and pulled him into the same fetal position Four had ended up in. Two’s eyes, too, were empty. He was pretty dead as well. His blood was also flowing-but it wasn’t as clean as Four’s blood. It had these bits in it, these grains and lumps. I poked at his exposed flesh with my finger. It was a lot like Four’s flesh: it had that same sponge-like texture, soft and firm at the same time.
Naz had come into the warehouse. He was moving really slowly. Eventually he stopped a few feet from me, and his eyes tracked across the floor where Two’s blood was gathering in a pool.
“Wow, look at it,” I said. “It’s just a…a thing. A patch. A little bit repeating.”
I prodded Two’s exposed flesh again, felt it first slightly give and then resist.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” I said to Naz. “You could take everything away-vaporize, replicate, transubstantiate, whatever-and this would still be there. However many times.”
Naz didn’t answer. He just stood there, locked up, closed down, vacant. He was pretty useless. I had to lead him back to the car and drive it myself the short distance to the airport terminal with the two remaining re-enactors moaning and quivering around me. We parked in a long-stay car park. I asked Naz to hand us all our tickets. He just turned his head halfway towards me and said nothing. I reached into his jacket, found the tickets, handed the re-enactors theirs and kept hold of mine and Naz’s. I told everyone we’d enter the terminal together and then separate, the two re-enactors heading for their gate while Naz and I went to the special check-in desk for private planes.
“Will we have to pass through a metal detector?” I asked Naz.
Naz stared ahead of him in silence.
“Naz!” I said again. “Do we have to…”
“No,” he answered. His voice had changed so it was somewhere between the same monotone my pianist spoke in and the one I’d instructed my various re-enactors to use.
“That’s good!” I said. “You’re getting into it.”
I folded my shotgun and placed it inside a bag. I liked it now, wanted to keep it with me, carry it around like a king carries around his sceptre. I was feeling even more regal than normal: with Naz out of action I’d assumed direct executive command of everything-logistics, paperwork, the lot. I proclaimed to the car in general:
“There’s nothing to be worried about. It’s a very happy day. A beautiful day. And now we shall all go into the air.”
We left the car, processed across the car park and entered the terminal building, the others lumbering along behind me. I called a halt, mustered them all together and was about to send the two re-enactors off to where they had to go when something caught my eye. It was one of those coffee concessions, the Seattle-theme ones. We were in a different terminal to the one where I’d met Catherine, but this terminal had a concession too-although not in exactly the same spot. The counter, till and coffee machines were arranged differently as well, although they were all the same size and shape and colour as the ones in the first terminal’s concession. It was the same, but slightly different. I approached the counter.
“I’d like nine small cappuccinos,” I said.
“Heyy! Nine short-nine?” he said.
“Yup,” I told him, showing him my loyalty card and handing him a twenty-pound note. “I’ve got nine more to go. So: nine, plus one.”
He started lining the cups up, but a thought struck me and I told him:
“You can strip the other eight away. The other nine, I mean. It’s only the remaining one I want. The extra one.”
He looked perplexed now.
“I can’t really stamp the card and give you your extra one unless I make the other nine.”
“Oh, I’ll pay for the nine,” I said. “But it’s just the tenth I want. You can keep the nine, or throw them out, or do whatever you want. I’ll get nine more next time round.”
“Next time round?” he asked.
“Whatever,” I said.
I paid him; he stamped my card and handed me a new one with the first cup on it stamped, then gave me my extra coffee. I walked back over to where the others had been mustered. Only Naz was still there, standing all locked up and vacant.
“Where have the re-enactors gone?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer, of course. I don’t think he even understood the question.
“Oh, well,” I said. “They can leak. That’s good. So where’s our check-in desk?”
I looked around the terminal. There was a newsagent’s shop a few yards away. Outside it, a free-standing billboard had the evening headline stuck to it. Shares Tumble, it announced.
“That’s good too!” I said. “No: that’s brilliant! It all accrues, then tumbles. Like the sun.”
I found our desk. It was wider than normal desks, which is strange given that the planes people checked into from it were smaller. We checked in; the woman asked us if we had any luggage; I said no, just this little bag; I’d take it with me as hand luggage. We were led through a little door onto the concourse and driven in a strange electric car a bit like a golf buggy out across the airport towards a strip on which a bunch of little planes were lined up. Then we got out, walked a few feet across the tarmac and climbed some steps into a tiny private jet. A stewardess stood at the door to greet us.
“Is your friend alright?” she asked me as we passed her.
“Oh, he’s had a shock,” I said. “He had it coming, though. In all, it’s a very happy day.”
The cockpit was only a few yards from where our seats were. It was separated from the cabin by a small partition door, which was ajar. As we walked past this door the pilot half-turned round and said:
“Welcome aboard, folks.”
I liked the way he half-turned, how he let his upper body swivel without fully revolving. The way he said his line as well. He said it just like pilots are supposed to say it. I’d have to get the whole thing re-enacted one day. We sat down. The stewardess said we’d been cleared to take off straight away, but would we like a drink once we were airborne? She had wine, spirits, tea, coffee, water…
“Coffee!” I said. “I’ll have coffee again.”
Naz didn’t ask for anything. He just stared straight ahead, like a statue. The stewardess asked him to fasten his seatbelt; when he didn’t react to her request, she leant over and fastened it herself. She checked mine too, then gasped and said:
“Oh! You’ve got blood on your wrist. There’s a bit on your face, too. Let me bring you a cloth.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, smiling at her. “That’s just fine. I’ll take a bit of mess into the air with me. It’s only fair.”
She smiled back at me a little awkwardly, then went and strapped herself into her own seat. We taxied across the ground; then we turned, paused, turned again and started accelerating into the long runway, the plane tingling, levitating. We took off, banked, rose, broke through a small, isolated bit of cloud, then stabilized. The stewardess brought coffee. She handed it to me on a tray, like Matthew Younger’s secretary had-but it was in a straight cup, not the three-part type. I sipped it, then looked over at Naz. He was still staring straight ahead-but now he was sweating and mumbling nonsensical half-words beneath his breath. Poor Naz. He wanted everything perfect, neat, wanted all matter organized and filed away so that it wasn’t mess. He had to learn too: matter’s what makes us alive-the bitty flow, the scar tissue, signature of the world’s very first disaster and promissory note guaranteeing its last. Try to iron it out at your peril. Naz had tried, and it had fucked him up. I tried to make out what it was that he was mumbling. It seemed to be data: figures, hours, appointments, places, all abandoning their posts and scrambling for the exits, sweating their way out of him, rats scurrying from a sinking ship.
The pilot’s radio crackled in the cockpit. It made me think of Annie and her back-up people. They’d have taken off within the last hour; perhaps their plane had already exploded. I wondered if it would be over sea or land. If it was land, perhaps a bit of debris might even fall on someone and leave me an heir. I imagined a team of aviation accident investigators reconstructing the plane over a period of months, gathering each scrap of fuselage, piecing them all together like a jigsaw, reconstructing the positions of the passengers and baggage-who’d sat where, whose bag had contained what and so on. Back at the bank the police forensic team would already be running through their paces, the chief investigator choosing a search pattern, his subordinates making sketches and gathering prints while detectives interviewed the witnesses, interviewed eventually the two re-enactors someone would find gibbering insanely in the terminal toilets, making them go over the whole episode again and again and again. Reconstructions, everywhere. I looked down at the interlocking, hemmed-in fields, and had a vision of the whole world’s surface cordoned off, demarcated, broken into grids in which self-duplicating patterns endlessly repeated.
The vision faded as the stewardess emerged from the cockpit. She looked out of sorts.
“The tower have asked if we’d mind turning back,” she said.
“Turning back?” I repeated. I thought about this for a while, then smiled at her and told her: “I suppose not. It might be quite good.”
She smiled back awkwardly again and said:
“I’ll go and tell the captain, then. That you said it’s okay.”
With that, she disappeared into the cockpit. A few seconds later we banked and turned. My coffee cup slid to the side of the table top; coffee sloshed over the edge onto its surface. We righted again. The coffee trickled back into the middle of the table top, towards my sleeve. I didn’t move my hand out of the way; I wanted it to stain it. It was tarry. Matthew Younger had apologized and handed me a handkerchief. Shares Tumble, the headline had said. Five had tumbled, Four had crumpled. Naz was sweating, mumbling. I called the stewardess over.
“A napkin?” she asked, eyeing the spilt coffee.
“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s that I should like us to turn back out again.”
“Out again?” she repeated.
“Yes,” I said. “I should like us to resume our original course now.”
She turned around and went back to the cockpit. After a few moments the plane banked again, but to the other side this time. I felt weight shifting in the cabin and my body, felt myself becoming weightless for an instant, a sensation of being held just above something. On the table top the coffee ran again. The plane turned and then straightened, heading back out. I smiled and looked out of the window. The sun was low on the horizon, making the few clouds in the sky glow blue and red and mauve. Higher up, lingering vapour trails had turned blood crimson. Our trail would be visible from the ground: an eight, plus that first bit where we’d first set off-fainter, drifted to the side by now, discarded, recidual, a remainder. In the cockpit the radio crackled again. The pilot called out to me:
“Now they’re ordering us to turn back.”
“Ordering!” I repeated. “That’s pretty cool.”
We turned and started heading back. The stewardess stood still beside the cabin door, avoiding eye contact with me. After a couple of minutes I called to the pilot.
“I should like you to turn back out once more,” I said.
“We can’t do that,” he called back. “I’m afraid the Civil Aviation Authority’s commands override yours.”
“That’s annoying,” I said. “Isn’t there anything…”
My voice trailed off as I pondered what to do. I liked this turning back and forth in mid-air, this banking one way, straightening, then banking back another, the feeling of weightlessness, suspension. I didn’t want it to stop. I looked around me-then I had a brilliant idea.
“Tell them I’m hijacking you,” I called back to the pilot.
I reached down into my bag, pulled out my shotgun and brought the barrel back up straight. The stewardess screamed. Naz did nothing. The pilot swivelled his upper body halfway round again, saw the gun pointing at the cockpit and shouted:
“Jesus! If you shoot that, we’ll all die.”
“Don’t worry,” I told him. “Don’t worry at all. I won’t let us die. I just want to keep the sequence in place.”
The radio crackled more. The pilot spoke into it in a hushed, urgent voice, telling the tower what was happening. The tower crackled back to him; he half-turned to me again and asked:
“Where do you want to go?”
“Go?” I said. “Nowhere. Just keep doing this.”
“Doing what?” he asked.
“Turning back, then turning out. Then turning back again. The way we’re doing it right now.”
He spoke into his radio again; it crackled back to him; he half-turned towards me and asked:
“You want us to keep turning, out and back, like this?”
“Yup,” I said. “Just keep on. The same pattern. It will all be fine.”
I looked out of the window again. I felt really happy. We passed through a small cloud. The cloud, seen from inside like this, was gritty, like spilled earth or dust flakes in a stairwell. Eventually the sun would set for ever-burn out, pop, extinguish-and the universe would run down like a Fisher Price toy whose spring has unwound to its very end. Then there’d be no more music, no more loops. Or maybe, before that, we’d just run out of fuel. For now, though, the clouds tilted and the weightlessness set in once more as we banked, turning, heading back, again.