WE HIRED AN ARCHITECT. We hired an interior designer. We hired a landscape gardener for the courtyard. We hired contractors, who hired builders, electricians and plumbers. There were site managers and sub-site managers, delivery coordinators and coordination supervisors. We took on performers, props and wardrobe people, hair and make-up artists. We hired security guards. We fired the interior designer and hired another one. We hired people to liaise between Naz and the builders and managers and supervisors, and people to run errands for the liaisers so that they could liaise better.
Looking at it now, with the advantage-as they say-of hindsight, it strikes me that Naz could probably have devised a more efficient way of doing it. He could have chosen one place, one specific point to start from, and worked out from there in logical procession: chronologically, in a straight line, piece by piece by piece. The approach he took instead was piecemeal-everything springing up at once but leaving huge gaps in between and creating new problems of alignment and compatibility that in their turn required more supervising, more coordination.
“There’s a problem with the windows on the third floor,” Naz told me one day, several weeks into the works.
“I thought all the windows had been finished,” I said.
“Yes,” said Naz, “but now the windows in the main third-floor flat have to come out again so we can lift the piano in.”
Another time we realized we’d got the courtyard ready too soon: trucks would have to drive across it as they removed detritus from the building, ruining the landscaper’s creation.
“Why didn’t we think of that?” I asked Naz.
Naz smiled back. I started suspecting then that his decision to opt for the piecemeal approach was deliberate. As we were driven from one meeting to another-from the site itself, say, to our office in Covent Garden, or to our architect’s office in Vauxhall, or to the workshop of the metallurgist who was making our banisters, or from a Sotheby’s auction of Sixties’ Americana at which we’d been looking at fridges back to the site via Lambeth Town Hall (palms were greased-I’ll say no more)-each time we left the building or came near again we’d see trucks piled high with rubble, earth or ripped-out central-heating units pulling out from its compound and other trucks arriving with scaffolding or new earth or long strips of pine. There’d be small vans full of wiring, caterers’ vans, vans belonging to experts in fields I didn’t know existed: stone-relief consultants, acoustic technicians, non-ferrous-metal welders- London ’s premier in the art since 1932, this third outfit’s van announced proudly on its side.
“So what’s your position in the ferrous-metal league?” I asked them.
“We don’t do ferrous-metal welding,” they replied.
“And where did you rank before ’32?”
“I don’t know that. You’ll have to ask the boss.”
Then there’d be behemoths: giant cranes on wheels, crane lifts with crane-grab limbs, all skeletal and menacing and huge. We’d carry plaster on our clothes into a Mayfair piano salesroom, then carry the contrasting chimes and tinkles of four types of baby grand still humming in our ears on to a used furniture warehouse. We’d receive faxes on the machine we had in our car and stuff them into the back-seat glove compartment as the driver raced us to another meeting, then forget that we’d received them and have them re-faxed or go back to the same office or the same warehouse again-so the humming in our ears was constant, a cacophony of modems and drilling and arpeggios and perpetually ringing phones. The hum, the meetings, the arrivals and departures turned into a state of mind-one that enveloped us within the project, drove us forwards, onwards, back again. I’ve never felt so motivated in my life. Naz understood this, I think now, and cultivated a degree of chaos to keep everybody involved on their toes, fired up, motivated. A genius, if ever there was one.
Not that motivation was otherwise lacking: the people we’d hired were being paid vast amounts of money. What was lacking, if anything, was comprehension: making them understand exactly what it was that was required of them. And making them understand at the same time how little they needed to understand. I didn’t need to make them share my vision, and I didn’t want them to. Why should they? It was my vision, and I was the one with the money. They just had to know what to do. This wasn’t easy, though-making them understand what to do. They were all London ’s premiers: the best plumbers, plasterers, pine outfitters and so on. They wanted to do a really good job and found it hard to get their heads round the proposition that the normal criteria for that didn’t apply in this case.
The thickest groups by far were actors and interior designers. Morons, both. To audition the actors we hired the Soho Studio Theatre for a couple of days after placing an ad in the trade press. It read:
Performers required to be constantly on call in London building over indefinite period. Duties will include repeated re-enactment of certain daily events. Excellent remuneration. Contact Nazrul Ram Vyas on etc. etc.
Naz and I arrived on the first day to find a big crowd in the lobby. We’d got our driver to drop us off round the corner from the theatre rather than right outside, so as not to make an ostentatious entrance: that way, we figured, we’d be able to walk round the lobby incognito for a while, sizing people up.
“That one looks worth auditioning for the motorbike enthusiast,” I mumbled to Naz.
“The one in the jacket?” he mumbled back.
“No, but he looks worth auditioning too, now you mention it. And that frumpy woman over there: a possible concierge, I think.”
“What about the others?” Naz asked, still mumbling.
“We’ll need extras too: all the anonymous, vague neighbours. Those two black guys look vaguely familiar.”
“Which ones?”
“Those two,” I told him, pointing-and right then they all started clicking, wising up. A heavy silence fell across the lobby; everybody glanced at us, then turned away and started pretending to talk again, but in reality they were still glancing at us. One guy came right up to us, held his hand out and said:
“Hello there! My name’s James. I’m really looking forward to this enterprise. You see, I need to fund my studies at RADA, where I’ve been given a place. Now I’ve prepared…”
“What’s RADA?” I said.
“It’s the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. I auditioned, and the tutor told my local authority that I was gifted-his words, not mine.” At this point in his spiel James held his hand up to his chin in an exaggerated manner, and I could tell he’d practised the gesture in the same way as the gay clubbers I’d watched several weeks ago had practised theirs. “But,” he went on, “they wouldn’t give me a grant. So I welcome this whole enterprise. I think it will help me expand. Learn things. My name’s James.”
He still had his hand out. I turned to Naz.
“Can you get rid of half these people?” I asked him. “And give audition slots to the ones I pointed out-and to any others you think might be right. I’m going to get a coffee.”
I went to the very place I’d sat in when I’d watched the clubbers, media types, tourists and homeless people, the Seattle-theme coffee shop just like the one at Heathrow: it was just round the corner from the theatre. I asked for a cappuccino.
“Heyy!” the girl said. It was still a girl, but it was a different girl this time. “Short cap coming up! You have a…”
“Ah yes!” I said, sliding it out. “Absolutely I do! And it’s edging home.”
“I’m sorry?” she asked.
“Eight cups stamped,” I told her. “Look.”
She looked. “You’re right,” she said, impressed. She stamped the ninth cup as she handed me my coffee. “One more and you get a free drink of your choice.”
“Plus a new card!” I said.
“Of course. We’ll give you a new card as well.”
I took my cappuccino over to the same window seat I’d had the last time and sat there looking out onto the intersection of Frith Street and Old Compton Street. There was a homeless person there, but it wasn’t my one. The new one didn’t have a dog-but he did have friends who sallied over to him from their base up the street just like my homeless person’s friends had; but then these didn’t seem like the same people either. The sleeping bag that the new guy had wrapped around him seemed identical to my one’s sleeping bag, though. So did his sweat top.
I’d forgotten about the loyalty-card business. Now I’d been reminded I was really excited by it. I was so close! I gulped my cappuccino down, then strode back to the counter with the card.
“Another cappuccino,” I told the girl.
“Heyy!” she answered. “Short cap coming up. You have a…”
“Of course!” I said. “I was just here!”
“Oh yes!” she said. “Sorry! I’m a zombie! Here, let me…”
She stamped the tenth cup on my card, then said:
“So: you can choose a free drink.”
“Cool,” I said. “I’ll have another cappuccino.”
“On top of your cap, I mean.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ll have another one as well.”
She shrugged, turned round and made me a new one. She pulled out a new card, stamped the first cup on it and handed it to me with my two coffees.
“Back to the beginning,” I said. “Through the zero.”
“Sorry?” she asked.
“New card: good,” I told her.
“Yes,” she said. She looked kind of depressed.
I took my two new coffees back to my seat by the window. I set them side by side and took alternate sips from each, like Catherine had with her drinks in the Dogstar, oscillating between pre-clock and post-clock cups. This was a good day, I decided. I finished my coffees and went back up to the Soho Studio Theatre.
The first person Naz and I saw was the second man I’d picked out as a possible for the motorbike enthusiast. He looked about right: early to mid twenties, brown hair, fairly handsome. He’d prepared a passage to perform for us: some piece of modern theatre by Samuel Beckett.
“We don’t want to hear that,” I said. “We just want to chat for a while, fill you in on what you’ll need to do.”
“Okay,” he said. “Shall I sit here, or stand, or?…”
“Whatever,” I said. “What we’re looking for is this: you’d need to be a motorbike enthusiast. You’d have to be available on a full-time basis-a live-in full-time basis-to occupy a flat on the first floor of an apartment building. You’d need to spend a lot of time out in the building’s courtyard tinkering with a motorbike.”
“Tinkering?” he asked me.
“Fixing it,” I said.
“What do I do once it’s fixed?”
“You take it apart again. Then fix it back.”
He was quiet for a while, thinking about this.
“So you don’t need me to act at all?” he asked eventually.
“No,” I told him. “Not act: just do. Enact. Re-enact.”
He didn’t get the part, as it turned out. The next-but-one motorbike enthusiast possible did. He wasn’t one of the ones who’d been in the lobby. He had less acting experience than the other two-almost none. His movements and his speech seemed less false, less acquired. On top of that he had a bike and knew a bit about them. By the end of the first day I’d found him, plus the husband in the boring couple, plus two or three vague, anonymous neighbours. That was it, though: no one else had been right. Back in the car I said to Naz:
“I’m not so sure the theatre world is the right place to look for re-enactors.”
“You think so?” said Naz.
We discussed it as we were driven to Aldgate-we were meeting a wholesaler of rare and outmoded light fittings. By the time we’d got there I’d become convinced it wasn’t.
“Where else, though?” I wondered aloud as we left Aldgate for Brixton.
“Community centres?” Naz ventured as he stuffed the receipts for the order we’d just made into the glove compartment. “Swimming pools? Supermarket notice boards?”
“Yes,” I said. “Those sound like the right kind of places.”
We cancelled the next day’s audition, and Naz had notices distributed in the new venues. These ones brought us a much broader sweep of people. The old woman who became the liver lady saw it at her bridge evening, the boring couple’s wife at a yoga class. The pianist we hooked in a musicians’ journal-he was doing a Ph.D. in musicology. He was just right for the part: quiet, gloomy, even bald on top. He nodded glumly as I explained to him how he’d have to make mistakes:
“You make mistakes,” I told him, “then you go over the passage you got wrong again, slowing right down into the bit where you messed up. You play it again and again and again-and then, when you’ve got down how to do it without messing up, play it some more times, coming back to normal speed. And then you carry on-at least until you hit your next mistake. You with me?”
“I make the mistakes deliberately?” he asked, looking at the floor. His voice was vacant and monotonous, completely without intonation.
“Exactly,” I said. “In the afternoons you teach young students. School children. Pretty basic stuff. In the evenings you compose. There’s more, but that’s the gist of it.”
“I’ll do it,” he said, still looking away. “Can I huf an obvos?”
“What did you say?” I asked him. He’d mumbled his last phrase into his collar.
He looked up for an instant. He really looked miserable. Then his eyes dropped again and he said, only slightly more clearly:
“Can I have an advance? Against the first two weeks.”
I thought about that for a moment, then I answered:
“Yes, you can. Naz will see to that. Oh-but you’ll have to grow your hair out at the sides. Is that acceptable?”
His eyes moved slowly from one corner of their sockets to another, trying half-heartedly to catch a glimpse of the hair on either side of his pale head. They gave up pretty quickly; he looked down at the floor and nodded glumly again. He was perfect. He signed his contract, Naz gave him some money and he left.
Interior designers were the other nightmare group. We interviewed several. I’d explain to them exactly what I wanted, down to the last detail-and they’d take this as a cue to start creating décor themselves!
“What I’m getting from you is a downbeat, retro look,” one of them told me. “And that’s exciting. Full of possibilities. I think we should have faux-flock wallpaper throughout-Chantal de Witt does a fantastic line in this-and lino carpeting along the hallways. That’s what I’m seeing.”
“I don’t care what you’re seeing,” I told him. “I don’t want you to create a look. I want you to execute the exact look I’ll dictate to you.”
This one stormed out in a huff. Two others agreed in principle to execute the look I wanted but balked when it came to the blank stretches. I’d left blank stretches in my diagrams, as I mentioned earlier-stretches of floor or corridor that hadn’t crystallized inside my memory. Some of these had since come back, but others hadn’t, any more than the concierge’s face, and I’d decided that these parts should be blank in reality, with doorways papered and cemented over, strips of wall left bare and so on. Neutral space. Our architect loved this, but the designers found it quite repulsive. One of them agreed to do it, so we hired him; but when it came to actually realizing it he snapped.
“I don’t care what you’re paying me,” he shouted. “It will destroy me professionally if this gets out. It’s just so ugly!”
We had to fire him. He sued us. Marc Daubenay came in and dealt with him. I don’t know how it turned out. Perhaps the case is still running today, who knows.
So in the end we found a set designer. It was Naz’s idea: a brilliant one. Frank, his name was. He’d designed sets for movies, so he understood the concept of partial décor. Film sets have loads of neutral space-after all, you only have to make the bit the camera sees look real; the rest you leave unpainted, without detail, blank. Frank brought a props woman called Annie with him. She turned out to be vital in the later stages.
Matthew Younger came once to the building during the setting-up period. I’d had him sell four million pounds worth of stocks when I’d first bought the building. It had cost just over four in all: the three and a half price tag, plus conveyancing fees, stamp duty and all that stuff, plus the bribes of two grand each we’d given some of the long-standing tenants to get them to waive their rights and move straight out. Only two had refused, and they’d both changed their minds within a week. I didn’t enquire how they’d been persuaded.
The amazing thing, though, is that by the time Matthew Younger visited me on the site a few weeks later, my portfolio’s value had risen back almost to the level it had been at before he’d sold the shares.
“It’s like yoghurt,” I said, “or a lizard’s tail, that grows back if you yank it off.”
“Speculation!” he said, smiling from ear to ear. His voice boomed up the stairwell, zinging off the loose iron banisters that were being ripped out one by one. They’d looked right in the catalogue, but didn’t any more once we’d installed them, so they were being ripped out and replaced. “The technology and telecommunications sectors are experiencing a boom just now,” he went on. “They’re going stratospheric. This is great, but you must understand that your level of exposure is enormous.”
“Exposure,” I repeated. “I like exposure.” I turned the palms of my hands outwards and raised them both-almost imperceptibly, but still enough to feel a muffled tingling in my right side.
“I’ve prepared you a chart,” said Matthew Younger, taking a large piece of paper from his dossier, “that takes the mean performance of these aggregated sectors over eight years. If you look…”
I felt another type of tingling on my upturned palms-not one coming from inside me but an exterior one, a sensation of lots of little particles falling on it. I looked up: granite crumbs were tumbling from the stairs above us.
“Let’s go outside,” I said.
I led Matthew Younger out into the courtyard. Swings were being installed that day. I hadn’t seen swings in my original vision of the courtyard-but they’d grown there later, as I thought about it further: a concrete patch with swings on and a wooden podium a few feet to its right. Workmen had laid down the cement and were now planting the swings’ bases in it while it was still wet. Matthew Younger held his map up against the sky.
“Look,” he said. “In this first four-year period this chart covers…just here, see?-they rose pretty sharply. But then here, over the next two years, they drop again-and just as sharply, even dipping lower than they were back here. From here they rise again, and from the time when we bought into them their upward thrust has been phenomenal. But if they choose to plummet again…”
“Is there any reason they should?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “All the signs suggest they’ll rise still more. But one can never completely second-guess the market.”
“Isn’t that your job?” I said.
“Well, of course,” he said. “To a large extent. But there is a small degree of randomness-a capricious element that likes occasionally to buck expectations, throw a spanner in the works.”
“A shard,” I said.
“I’m sorry?” he said.
“Go on,” I told him.
“Oh. Right. Well: caution-and above all diversification-can largely neutralize this element. Which brings us back to the question of exposure. Now if…”
“Shh!” I said, holding my hand up. I was looking at the jagged line that ran across his chart: how it jutted and meandered. As his lecture had moved off the figures and onto the randomness stuff he’d let the left side of his chart drop, so the value line was running vertically, like my bathroom’s crack. I let my eyes run up and down it, following its edges and directions.
Matthew Younger saw that I was looking at it and straightened it up.
“No!” I said.
“I’m sorry?” said Matthew Younger.
“It was better when you…Can I keep this chart?”
“Of course!” he boomed back. “Yes, have a proper look at it in your own time. I’ll leave you some stock profiles I’ve prepared here should you wish to diversif…”
His booming was drowned out by drilling coming through an open window on the second floor. Matthew Younger handed me the chart and then a wad of papers, then I showed him out.
“Could you have the word ‘speculation’ looked up?” I asked Naz as we were driven to a glazier’s that afternoon.
“Of course.” He took his mobile out and tapped in a text message.
The reply came ten minutes later:
“The faculty of seeing,” Naz read; “observation of the heavens, stars, etc.; contemplation or profound study of a subject; a conjectural consideration; the practice of buying and selling goods. From the Latin speculari: spy out, watch, and specula: watch tower. First citation…”
“Watch tower,” I said; “heavens: I like that. You could see the heavens better from a watch tower. But you’d be exposed.”
“Yes, I suppose you would,” Naz answered.
On the way back to my building from the glazier’s we detoured via my flat. I was still sleeping there while waiting for my building to be ready, but I was hardly ever there: I’d leave early each morning and return late at night, sleep for a few hours and then take off again. That morning I’d left a tiling catalogue behind; I told the driver to pass by there so that I could pick it up.
When we arrived there, Greg was ringing at my front door. I’d already got out of the car when I saw him-otherwise I might have made the driver drive me round the block and loop back a few minutes later. Greg turned round and saw me: I was trapped.
“My God!” Greg shouted. “Nice car dude!”
I didn’t say anything. It was a nice car, I suppose. It was quite long and had these doors that opened in the middle of the back. It wasn’t ostentatious, though-and anyway I only had it because my Fiesta wouldn’t have taken a desk and fax machine. As soon as everything was up and running I’d get rid of this car and go back to the Fiesta.
Greg stood on my steps, a few feet from me.
“So,” he said. “What’s new? You haven’t called me in six weeks.”
“I’ve been…” I told him, “you know…busy.”
“Doing what?” asked Greg.
“Getting ready to move into a new place.”
“Where?” he asked.
“The other side of Brixton,” I said.
“Other…side…of Brixton,” he repeated.
“Yes,” I said.
We stood there facing one another. After a while I said:
“I’ve got to pick up this tile catalogue, and then go off to a meeting.”
Greg looked past me into the car where Naz was sitting.
“Sure,” he said. “Well…”
“I’ll give you a call,” I told him as I walked past him into my flat. “Later this week. Or early next.”
I didn’t call him-not that week, nor the next, nor the next one either. My project was a programme, not a hobby or a sideline: a programme to which I’d given myself over body and soul. The relationships within this programme would be between me and my staff. Exclusively. Staff: not friends.
Soon after that day we moved our central office from Covent Garden to Brixton. Our activities were pretty localized there by this point. We rented the top floor of a modern blue-and-white office building a few streets away, just off the main drag. It looked modern and official in a dated kind of way-like some Eastern European secret-police headquarters. There were metal blinds drawn crookedly across most of its windows when we took it over, and metal tubes emerging from its sides-air ducts, laundry chutes, who knows what. On the roof were aerials, antennae. Naz set up his headquarters and coordinated things from there while I spent more and more time in my building itself, working on the smaller details with the staff members to whom specific areas of the project had been delegated.
Annie came to play more and more of an important role the further the project progressed, as I mentioned earlier. She and I would run around together finding the right brooms and mops, say, for the concierge’s cupboard. Or we’d get in ashtrays for the hall and work out where to place them, then find that their position clashed with the way doors opened, so have them moved again. Working out compatibility became our main activity. With the piano, for example: this had been delivered and installed, but we still had to find the right degree of absorbency for its flat’s walls. Too much and I wouldn’t hear it at all; too little and it wouldn’t be muffled enough-it had been slightly muffled when I’d first remembered it. To fine-tune things like this we needed everyone to be in sync: the drillers to stop drilling, hammers hammering, sanders sanding and so on, while the pianist started playing.
“How’s that?” Annie asked me as we stood in my flat listening to the music.
“It’s fine,” I said. “But is his window open or closed right now?”
“Is his window opened or closed?” Annie repeated into a two-way radio.
“Closed,” the reply came.
“Closed,” she repeated to me.
“Tell them to open it now,” I said.
“Open it up now,” she repeated.
And so on. We went through several episodes like that. Two-way radios came into play a lot. Mobiles had been good for one-on-one communication, but by now we often needed one-to-several-several-to-several too. So I’d telephone Naz over in his headquarters, and Naz would radio three of our people while he talked to me; then one of them would radio Annie and she’d radio Naz on another channel, and he’d call me back; or I’d call Annie and she’d radio her back-up, or-well, you get the picture. By the final stages, Annie had four support staff directly under her: their radios were tuned to her frequency exclusively.
You could see Naz’s office from the top floors of my building-and, of course, vice versa. We had a telescope installed beside Naz’s main window-a powerful one. Naz had wanted to use CCTV, but I’d told him no: I didn’t want cameras anywhere. I’d made them take away the one mounted at the side gate by the sports track that I’d stood by on the day I’d first discovered the building. The only camera I allowed on site was Annie’s Polaroid. She used it to capture positions and arrangements: what was where in relation to what else. It was quicker than sketches or diagrams. More accurate too. If we’d got something just right but then had to move it while we carried something else through its space, Annie would take a Polaroid snap; then, when we wanted to reinstate whatever it was, we’d just stand in the position she’d taken the snap from holding up the photo while directing people to place such and such an object right, left, a bit further back and so on till it matched the photo. Smart, precise. She was a nice girl.
One afternoon I stood in Naz’s office gazing through the telescope. I gazed for a long time, watching people move around behind my building’s windows. Then I lowered it and gazed at trucks and vans coming and going. They were mostly going, taking stuff away. It amazed me how much had needed to be got rid of throughout the whole project: earth, rubble, banisters, radiators, cookers-you name it. For every cargo that arrived, large or small, another cargo had to be taken away. At least one. If it were possible to gather together and weigh everything brought in over the weeks of set-up and then do the same to everything that had been carried out, I’m pretty sure the second lot would weigh more. This would be true from the beginning, when we were dealing with skipfuls of clutter, right through to the end, when we went round picking up bits of paper with our fingers, making absolutely sure that everything apart from what was meant to be there was removed.
“Surplus matter,” I said, still gazing through the telescope.
“What’s that?” asked Naz.
“All this extra stuff that needs to be carted away,” I said. “It’s like an artichoke-the way there’s always more of it on your plate after you’ve finished than there was before you started.”
“I like artichokes,” said Naz.
“Me too,” I said. “Right now I do, at least. Let’s eat some for supper this evening.”
“Yes, let’s,” Naz concurred. He got onto his phone and told someone to go and buy us artichokes.
It really took shape in the final two weeks. The hallways had been laid, the courtyard landscaped and re-landscaped, the flats fitted or blanked out as my diagrams had stipulated. Now we had to concentrate on the minutiae. We had to get the crack right, for example: the crack in my bathroom wall. I still had the original piece of paper that I’d copied it onto back at that party-plus the diagrams that I’d transcribed it onto over the next twenty-four hours, of course. Frank and I and a plasterer called Kevin spent a long time getting the colour of the plaster all around it right.
“That’s not quite it,” I’d tell Kevin as he mixed it. “It should be more fleshy.”
“Fleshy?” he asked.
“Fleshy: grey-brown pinky. Sort of like flesh.”
He got there in the end, after a day-or-so’s experimenting.
“Not like any flesh I’ve seen,” he grunted as he smeared it on.
That wasn’t the end of it, though: when it dried it darkened, ending up a kind of silver brown. We had to backtrack and remix it so that it would turn out dry the colour that the last mix had when wet. Nor was that the end of it: we hadn’t realized how difficult it would be to get plaster to crack the way we wanted it to.
“I mix plaster so it won’t crack,” Kevin sniffed.
“Well, do wrong what you usually do right, then,” I said.
He mixed it much drier-but then cracks are sort of random: you can’t second-guess which way they’ll go. It took another day of experimenting: trying salt and razor blades and heat and all sorts of devices to get it to crack the right way. Kevin whistled the same tune for hours while he did this: a pop tune, one I thought I recognized. He didn’t whistle the whole tune-just one bit of it, over and over.
“What is it?” I asked him after several hours of whistling and crack-forming, rubbing over and reforming.
“What’s what?”
“That song.”
“History Repeating,” he said. “By the Propellerheads.” He raised his eyebrows and his voice climbed as he half-sang and half-spoke the line that he’d been whistling: “‘All, just-a, little, bit-of, history re-peat-ing.’ See?” Then, stepping back, he asked: “How’s that?”
“It’s quite nice,” I said. “I’ve heard it on the radio.”
“No,” Kevin said. “The crack.”
“Oh! Quite good. Not quite sharp enough, though.”
Kevin sighed and went at it again. Several hours later a scalpel dipped in a mix of TCP and varnish managed to cut and set it in the formation we wanted.
“Satisfied?” asked Kevin.
“Yes,” I answered. “But there’s still the blue and yellow patches to daub on.”
“Not my job,” Kevin said. “I’m out of here.”
We didn’t have much problem finding the right type of large taps for the bathtub-the problem was with making them look old. We had this problem often, as you might imagine: making things look old. The hallway had to be scuffed down with sandpaper and smeared with small amounts of grease-diluted tar. The banisters had to be blasted with vaporized ice to make them oxidize. And then the windows were too crisply transparent: the courtyard and the roofs didn’t look right through them. I couldn’t work out why at first, nor express what was wrong with them: I just kept telling my staff that the courtyard didn’t look right.
“So what’s not right about it?” asked the landscape gardener.
“Nothing’s not right about it: it’s the way it looks through these windows. Too crisp. That’s not how I remembered it.”
“Remembered it?” he asked.
“Whatever,” I said, waving him away. Annie came over and looked. She solved it instantly:
“It’s the type of glass,” she said. “Not old enough.”
Bingo. New glass is totally consistent, doesn’t gloop and run and crimp the things you see through it like old glass does. We had all the panes removed and older ones brought in.
My living room and kitchen came together nicely. We’d knocked interior walls down to get the right open-plan shape. Now we got cracking on the furnishings. I brought the right type of plants in-eventually. That Portuguese woman! Formidable: her voice, her stark physique. She stomped out of her van lugging these beautiful, lush, healthy ferns and spider plants that seemed to cascade out of white ceramic pots.
“These are no good,” I said to Annie. “They’re too lush, too green.”
“Waz wrong wiz zem?” the Portuguese plant woman thundered. “My planz healzy! My planz good!”
“I know they’re good,” I said. “That’s just the problem. I need old and shabby ones in tinny baskets.”
“Baskez no good for zem!” she said, slapping the back of her hand against my arm. “They needz zpaze, zupport. I know waz good for zem!”
Behind her, through the window and across the courtyard, men on the facing roofs were busily replacing the tiles we’d had laid down. They’d been too blood-red, not orangey enough. The Portuguese plant woman took a frond between her fingers, held it up to me and slapped my arm with the back of her free hand again.
“Look! Zmell! My planz iz very healzy!”
I escaped and went to Naz’s while Annie got rid of her. Later that day we picked up some half-dead plants in some old junk shop.
The fridge arrived the next day. We netted it not from the Sotheby’s Americana auction that I mentioned earlier but from an auction site Naz had found on the internet. It looked just right-but its door slightly caught each time you opened it, just like Greg had said all fridge doors do outside of films.
“That sucks!” I said. “That really fucking sucks! You’d have thought that with all of their alleged craftsmanship” (they’d played this aspect of the fridge up on the website) “they could have made one whose door didn’t catch like this. I mean, what’s the whole point of doing all this if it’s still going to catch?”
“What do you mean?” asked Annie.
“It…Just, well…” I said. “It bloody shouldn’t!”
I sat down. I was really upset.
“Don’t worry,” said Annie. “It just needs new rubber.”
Someone was dispatched to get new rubber. While we waited for that to arrive, we tested for the smell of liver frying. An extractor fan had been installed above the liver lady’s stove, its out-funnel on the building’s exterior turned towards the windows of my kitchen and my bathroom. Liver had been bought that day-pig’s liver; but we found that frying just one panful didn’t produce enough smell. Someone else was dispatched to buy more frying pans and a lot more liver. They cooked it in four frying pans at once. Annie and I waited in my flat.
“How’s that?” she asked.
“It’s great,” I told her. “The spit and sizzle is exactly the right volume. There’s just one thing not quite…”
“What?” she asked.
“The smell is kind of strange.”
“Strange?” she repeated-then, into her cackling radio: “Wait a minute. Strange?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sort of strange. A bit like cordite.”
“Cordite? I’ve never smelt cordite. You know what I think it is, though? It’s that the pans are new.”
“Bingo again,” I told her. “That must be it.”
The last two days were “sweep” days. I, Naz, Annie and Frank moved through the building sweeping it for errors: inconsistencies, omissions. We found so many that we thought we’d have to delay the whole thing. The recurring black-on-white floor pattern had continued through a bit of neutral space on the second floor; the door to the concierge’s cupboard had been painted-things like that. Smaller details too: the tar-and-grease coat in the hallway, under the outmoded lights, had too much sheen; it was obvious that the putty holding the new old windows in place had been set only days ago; and so on. And then often fixing one thing just offset another. All the neighbours had been trained up by now and were practising their re-enacted gestures in situ-but then they’d disturb our carefully contrived arrangements as they moved around rehearsing. Crossed wires. One of Annie’s people even misunderstood the word “sweep”.
“What are you doing?” I asked when I found her literally sweeping down the staircase after we’d spent ages lightly peppering it with bus tickets and cigarette butts.
“I’m…” she said; “I thought you…”
“Annie!” I called up the stairwell.
Even after we’d got it all just right we did four more sweeps. We’d jump from one detail to another to see if we’d catch a mistake unawares. We’d move from the bottom to the top and down again, across the courtyard, up the façade of the facing building, back and up the staircase again, over and over and over.
“Feeling nervous?” Naz asked on the final day before the date we’d set to put the whole thing into action.
“Yes,” I told him. I was feeling very nervous. I hadn’t been sleeping well all week. I’d lie awake for half the night, running in my imagination through the events and actions that we were to go through in reality when the time came. I could run through them in a way that made them all work really well, or in a way that made them all mess up and be an abject failure. Sometimes I’d run the failure scenario and then the good one, to cancel the bad one out. At other times I’d be running the good one and the bad one would cut in and make me break out in a panicky sweat. This went on every night for a whole week: me, lying awake in my bed, sweating, nervously rehearsing in my mind re-enactments of events that hadn’t happened but which, nonetheless, like the little bits of history in Kevin’s pop song, were on the verge of being repeated.