NAZRUL RAM VYAS came from a high-caste family. In India they have a caste system, with the Untouchables at the bottom and the Brahmins at the top. Naz was a Brahmin. He was born and grew up in Manchester, but his parents came over from Calcutta in the Sixties. His father was a bookkeeper. His uncle too, apparently. His grandfather as well. And his father before him too, I wouldn’t be surprised. A long line of scribes, recorders, clerks, logging transactions and events, passing on orders and instructions that made new transactions happen. Facilitators. That made sense: Naz facilitated everything for me. Made it all happen. He was like an extra set of limbs-eight extra sets of limbs, tentacles spreading out in all directions, coordinating projects, issuing instructions, executing commands. My executor.
Before he came into the picture I had endless troubles. I don’t mean with the practicalities: without Naz I didn’t even manage to get to a stage where practicalities became an issue. No: I mean with communicating. Making people understand my vision, what it was I wanted to do. As soon as Catherine had left, I started making phone calls, but these got me nowhere. I spoke to three different estate agents. The first two didn’t understand what I was saying. They offered to show me flats-really nice flats, ones in converted warehouses beside the Thames, with open plans and mezzanines and spiral staircases and balconies and loading doors and old crane arms and other such unusual features.
“It’s not unusual features that I’m after,” I tried to explain. “It’s particular ones. I want a certain pattern on the staircase-a black pattern on white marble or imitation marble. And I need there to be a courtyard.”
“We can certainly try to accommodate these preferences,” this one said.
“These are not preferences,” I replied. “These are absolute requirements.”
“We have a lovely property in Wapping,” she went on. “A split-level three-bedroom flat. It’s just come on. I think you’ll find…”
“And it’s not one property I’m after,” I informed her. “It’s the whole lot. There must be certain neighbours, like this old woman who lives below me, and a pianist two floors below her, and…”
“This is the property you live in now?” she asked.
The third estate agent I spoke to vaguely got it-at least enough to understand the scale of what I was planning.
“We can’t do that,” she said. “No estate agent can. You need a property developer.”
So I called property developers. These are the people who go and find warehouses beside the Thames in the first place and gut them out, then turn them into open-plan units with mezzanines and spiral staircases and loading doors and old crane arms, and then get estate agents to flog them on to rich people who like that kind of thing. Developers don’t usually deal with individual punters, with the purchaser. They deal in bulk, buying up whole complexes of buildings and hulks of disused schools and hospitals, knocking out units by the score.
“You want to buy a building off us?” the man in the head office of one developer said when I’d got through to him. “Who are you with then?”
“I’m not with anyone,” I said. “I want you to do a building up for me, in a particular way.”
“We don’t do contract work for our competitors,” he said. He had a nasty voice-a cold, cruel voice. I pictured his office: the plywood shelves with files and ledgers full of fiddled numbers, then in the yard outside the workmen in their jeans stained white with sandstone and cement discussing politics or football or whatever it was they were discussing-anything, but not my project. They didn’t care.
I phoned Marc Daubenay. He was out of his office when I called; the austere secretary told me he’d be back in half an hour. I used the time to go through what I’d say to him. With him I felt I could explain the whole thing: why I’d had the idea, why I wanted what I wanted. He’d been through the last five months with me. He’d understand.
He didn’t, of course. When I eventually spoke to him, it came out garbled, just like it had when I’d imagined trying to explain it to my homeless person. I started going on about the crack in the wall of David Simpson’s bathroom, my sense of déjà vu; then I backtracked to how ever since learning to move again I’d felt that all my acts were duplicates, unnatural, acquired. Then walking, eating carrots, the film with De Niro. I could tell from the deep silence at his end each time I paused that he wasn’t getting it at all. I cut to the chase and started describing the red roofs with black cats on and the woman who cooked liver and the pianist and the motorbike enthusiast.
“This was a place you lived?” Marc Daubenay asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “No. I mean, I remember it, but I can’t place the memory.”
“Well, as we argued,” Daubenay said, “your memory was knocked off-kilter by the accident.” He’d emphasized that in his pre-trial papers: how my memory had gone and only slowly returned-in instalments, like a soap opera, although he hadn’t used that metaphor.
“Yes,” I said, “but I don’t think this was a straight memory. It was more complex. Maybe it was various things all rolled together: memories, imaginings, films, I don’t know. But that bit’s not important. What’s important is that I remembered it, and it was crystal-clear. Like in…”
I hesitated there. I didn’t want to use the word “vision”, in case Marc Daubenay got ideas.
“Hello? You still there?”
“Yes,” I said. “I was saying it was crystal-clear.”
“And now you want to find this place?” he asked.
“Not find it,” I said. “Make it.”
“Make it?”
“Build it. Have it built. I’ve been calling estate agents and property developers. None of them understands. I need someone to sort it all out for me. To handle the logistics.”
There was another long, deep silence at Daubenay’s end. I pictured his office in my mind: the wide oak desk with the chair parked in front of it, the tomes of old case histories around the walls, the austere secretary in the antechamber, guarding his door. I gripped my phone’s receiver harder and frowned in concentration as I thought about the wires connecting me to him, Brixton to Angel. It seemed to work. After a while he said:
“I think you need Time Control.”
“Time control?” I repeated. “In what sense?”
“Time Control UK. They’re a company that sort things out for people. Manage things. Facilitators, as it were. A couple of my clients have used them in the past and sent back glowing reports. They’re the leaders in their field. In fact, they are their field. Give them a call.”
His voice had the same tone to it as when he’d told me to drink champagne: kind but stern. Paternalistic. He gave me Time Control’s number and wished me good luck.
Time Control UK were based up in Knightsbridge, near where Harrods is. What they did, essentially, was to look after people. Manage things for them, as Daubenay said. Their clients were for the most part busy executives: finance chiefs, CEOs, people like that. The odd film star too, apparently. Time Control ran their diaries for them, planned and logged their meetings and appointments, took and passed on messages, wrote press releases, managed PR. They also ran the more intimate side of their clients’ lives: ordering meals and groceries, getting dry-cleaners to come and take their clothes away and bring them back again, calling in plumbers, phoning them up at eight twenty-five to get them showered and croissanted and shunted into the taxi Time Control had booked to take them to the nine-fifteen they’d set up. They’d organize parties, send birthday cards to aunts and nephews, buy tickets for the second day of the Fourth Test if they’d built a window in that afternoon in the knowledge that this particular client was partial to cricket. Their databases must have been incredible: the architecture of them, their fields.
I called Time Control in the late afternoon, almost immediately after I’d got off the phone to Daubenay. A man answered. He sounded relaxed but efficient. I couldn’t quite picture their office, but I saw those blue and red Tupperware-type in- and out-trays in it somewhere, like the ones they have in nursery-school classrooms. I imagined it as open-plan, with glass or Pyrex inner walls. The background sound was fluffy rather than clipped, which suggested carpets and not floorboards. The man’s voice assured me; I didn’t feel the need to run through my explanation. I just said:
“I’ve been referred to you by my lawyer, Marc Daubenay of Olanger and Daubenay.”
“Oh yes,” the man said, very friendly. Olanger and Daubenay were a well-known firm.
“I need someone to facilitate a large project I have in mind,” I said.
“Wonderful,” the friendly man said. He seemed to understand exactly what I wanted without even asking. “I’ll put you through to Nazrul Vyas, one of our main partners, and you can tell him all about it. Okay?”
“Wonderful,” I said back. It was that word “facilitate” that did it. Worked the magic. Marc Daubenay’s word. As I waited to be put through to Vyas I felt grateful to Daubenay for the first time-not for getting me all that money, but for slotting that word, “facilitate”, onto my tongue.
Vyas sounded young. About my age: late twenties, early thirties. He had a fairly high voice. High and soft, with three layers to it: a Manchester base, an upper layer of southern semi-posh and then, on top of these, like icing on a cake, an Asian lilt. As he spoke his name then my name and then asked how he could help me, he sounded confident, efficient. I couldn’t quite picture his office, but I saw his desktop clearly: it was white and very tidy.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” said Nazrul Vyas.
A pause followed, then I went for it:
“I have a large project in mind,” I said, “and wanted to enlist your help.” “Enlist” was good. I felt pleased with myself.
“Okay,” said Naz. “What type of project?”
“I want to buy a building, a particular type of building, and decorate and furnish it in a particular way. I have precise requirements, right down to the smallest detail. I want to hire people to live in it, and perform tasks that I will designate. They need to perform these exactly as I say, and when I ask them to. I shall most probably require the building opposite as well, and most probably need it to be modified. Certain actions must take place at that location too, exactly as and when I shall require them to take place. I need the project to be set up, staffed and coordinated, and I’d like to start as soon as possible.”
“Excellent,” Naz said, straight off. He didn’t miss a single beat. I felt a surge inside my chest, a tingling. “Let’s meet,” Naz continued. “When’s convenient for you?”
“In an hour?” I said.
“One hour from now is fine,” Naz answered. “Shall I come to you or would you like to come here?”
I thought about this for a moment. I had my diagrams at home, still stuck to the wall of the bedroom, but I didn’t want to show these to him, or give him the back story with the party and the bathroom and the crack-let alone the carrots and the fridge doors. It was all working so well this way. I wanted it to carry on like this, neutral and clear. The image came to me of bubbly, transparent water, large clean surfaces and lots of light.
“In a restaurant,” I said. “A modern restaurant with large windows and a lot of light. Can you arrange this?”
Within five minutes he’d phoned back to tell me that he’d booked a table for us in a place called the Blueprint Café.
“It’s the restaurant of the Design Museum,” Naz explained. “At Butler ’s Wharf, beside Tower Bridge. Shall I send you a car?”
“No,” I said. “See you in an hour. What do you look like?”
“I’m Asian,” said Naz. “I’ll be wearing a blue shirt.”
I took a hurried bath, put on some clean, smart clothes and was just walking out of the flat when my phone rang. I’d already turned the answering machine on. It kicked in and I waited in the doorway to see who it would be.
It was Greg. “Yo dude,” his voice said. “Pity you left early Saturday. The party got, like, todally awesome.” He said this last word in a mock Californian accent, a Valley Girl voice. “You boned Catherine yet? Maybe you’re boning her right now. You’re pumping her and she’s saying Oh yes! Give me schools and hospitals! Give me wooden houses!”
He went on like this for a while. I stood there listening to his voice coming through the answering machine’s tinny speaker, simulating an orgasm. Before the accident I would have found this really funny. Now I didn’t. It’s not that I found it offensive or crass; I didn’t find it anything at all. I stood there watching the answering machine while Greg’s voice came from it. Eventually he hung up and I left.
It was just as well that Naz had told me what he would be wearing: there was another young Asian guy in the Blueprint Café. I’d have known which one was Naz, though, after all. He looked just like I’d imagined him to look but slightly different, which I’d thought he would in any case. He was sitting at a table by the window, keying something into a palmtop organizer. He had an interesting face. For the most part it was frank and open-but his eyes were dark: dark, sunk and intense. He rose to greet me, we shook hands and then we sat down.
“No problems getting here?” he asked.
“No, none at all,” I said. The Blueprint Café’s walls were hung with photographs of eminent British designers. This was good, very good. A waiter appeared and Naz asked for a large bottle of mineral water.
“Shall we eat?” he asked me.
I wasn’t particularly hungry. “What do you think?” I asked him back.
“Something light,” he replied.
We ordered kedgeree and two small bowls of fish soup. No wine. The waiter walked away towards the kitchen, which was visible behind a large round window. It was designed that way-not totally open, so diners could see every last thing the chefs were doing, but open enough to give them glimpses of the kitchen: blue flames jumping out of frying pans, fingers raining herbs down over dishes, things like that.
“Before we begin realizing your project,” Naz said, “we need to get a sense of scale. What size of building do you have in mind?”
“A big one,” I said. “Six or seven floors. Have you ever been to Paris?”
“I was there two weeks ago,” said Naz.
“Well, the way buildings are there,” I told him. “Large tenement buildings, with lots of flats stacked on top of one another. That’s the type of building I need. My flat must be on the top floor but one.”
“And the building opposite? If I remember rightly, you indicated that you’d probably need that building too.”
“That’s right,” I said. “It should be almost the same height. Perhaps one floor lower. When I say ‘opposite’ I mean facing at the back. Across a courtyard. I need that building for two things only: red tiles on its roofs and black cats walking over this.”
“Roofs plural?” he asked.
“They go up and down,” I told him. “Rise and fall. In a particular way. We might have to modify them. We’ll certainly need to modify lots of things throughout the building and the courtyard.”
“Yes, so you told me,” Naz said. “But tell me about the people you propose to fill the building with. The primary building, I mean. Will they be actually living there?”
“Well, yes,” I answered. “They can actually live there too. They’ll have to get used to being in two modes, though: on and off.”
“How do you mean?” asked Naz.
“Well, on when they’re performing the tasks I’ll ask them to perform. The rest of the time they can do what they want. Like soldiers: they’re on parade at one moment, then afterwards they go and smoke their cigarettes in the guardroom, and have baths and maybe change into civilian clothes. But then a few hours later they have to be back on parade again.”
The waiter came. Naz’s palmtop organizer was lying in front of him. It was a Psion-one of the companies Matthew Younger and I had bought stocks in. It was lying face up on the table, but Naz wasn’t using it. Instead, he was logging my requirements in his mind, translating them into manoeuvres to be executed. I could tell: something was whirring back behind his eyes. For some reason I thought of scarab beetles, then of the word “scion”. The thing behind Naz’s eyes whirred for a while, then he asked:
“What tasks would you like them to perform?”
“There’ll be an old woman downstairs, immediately below me,” I said. “Her main duty will be to cook liver. Constantly. Her kitchen must face outwards to the courtyard, the back courtyard onto which my own kitchen and bathroom will face too. The smell of liver must waft upwards. She’ll also be required to deposit a bin bag outside her door as I descend the staircase, and to exchange certain words with me which I’ll work out and assign to her.”
“Understood,” said Naz. “Who next?”
“There’ll also be-what does the word ‘scion’ mean?”
“I don’t know,” Naz said. “Let’s find out. I’ll contact a colleague and tell him to look it up.”
He took a tiny mobile from his pocket, switched it on and composed a text message. The phone beeped as he typed each letter in. He laid the phone down on the table top and let it send its message. I pictured his office again: the blue and red Tupperware in- and out-trays, the glass inner walls, the carpets. I traced a triangle in my mind up from our restaurant table to the satellite in space that would receive the signal, then back down to Time Control’s office where the satellite would bounce it. I remembered being buffeted by wind, the last full memory I have before the accident.
“There’ll also be,” I went on, “on the floor below this old lady, a pianist.”
“So who else lives on her floor?” Naz asked.
“No one,” I said. “No one specific, I mean. Just anonymous, vague neighbours.”
“These vague neighbours: they don’t have to be on parade? On, I mean? They can be off the whole time?”
“No,” I said. “All the…performers-no, not performers: that’s not the right word…the participants, the…staff…must be…I mean, we’ll need complete…jurisdiction over all the space.”
“But go on,” Naz said. “Sorry I interrupted you.”
“You did?” I asked him. I was slightly flustered now; I felt my tone was slipping. I thought of the last formal word I’d used and then repeated it, to bring my tone back up. “Well, yes: jurisdiction. On the floor below the liver lady, or perhaps two floors below, there has to be a pianist. He must be in his late thirties or early forties, bald on top with tufts at the side. Tall and pale. In the day he practises. The music has to waft up in the same way as the liver lady’s cooking smell does. As he’s practising he must occasionally make mistakes. When he makes a mistake he repeats the passage slowly, over and over again, slowing right down into the bit that he got wrong. Like a Land Rover slowing down for bumpy terrain-a set of potholes, say. Then in the afternoons he teaches children. At night he composes. Sometimes he gets angry with…”
Naz’s mobile gave out a loud double beep. I stopped. Naz picked it up and pressed the “enter” button.
“Heir or descendant,” he read. “From the Middle English sioun and the Old French sion: shoot or twig. First citation 1848. Oxford English Dictionary.”
“Interesting,” I said. I took a sip of my mineral water and thought of the scarab beetle again. “Anyway,” I continued after a moment, setting the glass down, “this guy sometimes gets angry with another person who I’ll need, this motorbike enthusiast who tinkers with his bike out in the courtyard. Fixes it and cleans it, takes it apart, puts it back together again. When he has the motor on, the pianist gets angry.”
Naz processed this one for a while. His eyes went vacant while the thing behind them whirred, processing. I waited till the eyes told me to carry on.
“Then there’s a concierge,” I said. “I haven’t got her face yet-but I’ve got her cupboard. And some other people. But you get the idea.”
“Yes, I get it,” Naz said. “But where will you be while they’re performing their tasks-when they’re in on mode.”
“I shall move throughout the space,” I said, “as I see fit. We’ll concentrate on different bits at different times. Different locations, different moments. Sometimes I’ll want to be passing the liver lady as she puts her rubbish out. Sometimes I’ll want to be out by the motorbike. Sometimes the two at once: we can pause one scene and I’ll run up or down the stairs to be inside the other. Or a third. The combinations are endless.”
“Yes, so they are,” said Naz.
The fish soup came. We sipped it. Then the kedgeree. We ate it. I explained more things to Naz and he processed them. When his eyes told me to wait I waited; then the whirring behind them stopped and I’d go on again. He never once asked why I wanted to do all this: he just listened, processing, working out how to execute it all. My executor.
Before we left the Blueprint Café Naz outlined the rate he’d charge. I told him fine. I gave him my banking details and he told me how to contact him at any time: he’d supervise my project personally, on a full-time basis. At ten the next morning he called me and told me how he thought we should proceed: we should first find a building that approximated to the one I had in mind-at least enough for it to be converted. That was the first step. While this was going on, he’d contact architects, designers and, of course, potential performers.
“Performers isn’t the right word,” I said. “Staff. Participants. Re-enactors.”
“Re-enactors?” he asked.
“Yes,” I told him. “Re-enactors.”
“Would you like me to take charge of seeking out the property?” he asked.
“Well, yes,” I said.
As we hung up I got a clearly defined picture of my building again: first from the outside, then the lobby, my faceless concierge’s cupboard, the main staircase with its black-and-white recurring pattern floor, its blackened wooden handrail with spikes on it. Then Naz’s office superimposed itself over that: the plastic blue and red, the windows, his people walking across the carpets as they set out to look for my place. These people were carrying the image of Time Control’s office out into the city, not the image of my building. This second image started fading in my mind. A sudden surge of fear ran through the right side of my body, from my shin all the way up to my right ear. I sat down, closed my eyes and concentrated on my building really hard. I kept them closed and concentrated on it till it came back and eclipsed the image of the office. I felt better. I stood up again.
I understood then that there was only one person who could take charge of seeking out the property, and that was me.