by Tom McCarthy
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.
8
THE DAY OF THE FIRST RE-ENACTMENT finally arrived. July the eleventh.
We’d decided to begin at 2 p.m. I spent the morning in Naz’s office, then ate a final light lunch with him. The air there was solemn, its heavy silence punctured only by the occasional ringing phone or crackling radio which one of Naz’s staff would answer in hushed tones.
“What is it?” I’d ask Naz each time.
“Nothing,” he’d answer quietly. “Everything’s under control.”
At half-past one I left. Naz’s people stood by the door as I made my way out—three or four of them on each side, forming a kind of tunnel—and wished me luck, their faces grave and sober. Naz took the lift down to the street with me, then, when the car pulled up, turned to face me and shook my hand. He was staying behind to direct all activities from his office. His dark eyes locked on mine while our hands held each other, the thing behind the eyes whirring deep back inside his skull.
Our driver drove me from the office to the building. It was just two minutes’ walk away, but he took me there in the car we’d gone around in while setting all this up. I sat in the back seat and watched the streets slide by: the railway bridge, the sports track with its knitted green wire fence, its battered football goals, its yellow, red and white lane markings, boxes, arcs and circles. I turned my head to look out of the rear window just in time to see the top of Naz’s office disappear from view. Then I turned back—and, as I did, my building slid up to the car and loomed above me like a sculpted monolith, the words Madlyn Mansions still carved in the stone above its front door.
The driver brought the car to a halt in front of it. Annie was waiting on the pavement. She opened the car door and I stepped out.
“All ready?” she asked.
I didn’t know what to answer. Was it ready? Everything had seemed to be in place the evening before. Annie had been there all morning: she’d know better than me if it was ready. Or had she meant was I ready? I didn’t know. How could you gauge these things? What standard would we have gauged them by? A slight ripple of dizziness ran through me, so I let these thoughts go. I smiled back at Annie weakly and we walked up the stone steps into the building.
The same quiet, uneasy atmosphere was reigning here as had reigned in Naz’s office. The bustle and hum of scores of people going about tasks that I’d grown so accustomed to over the last weeks and months had disappeared and been replaced by earnest, hushed, last-minute concentration. The concierge re-enactor was standing in the lobby, while one of the costume people fiddled with the strappings of her face mask. Her face had never come to me—or, to be precise, it had come to me, but only as a blank—so I’d decided she should wear a mask to blank it out. We’d got one of those masks that ice-hockey goaltenders wear: white and pocked with little breathing holes. I stopped in front of her.
“You understand exactly what it is you have to do?” I asked her.
There was a pause behind the mask, then she said:
“Yes. Just stand here.”
Her voice, behind the plastic, was unnatural: it rattled and distorted like those tinny children’s toys that emit cow sounds or little phrases when you shake them. I liked that.
“Exactly. Stand here in the lobby,” I repeated. I nodded at her and the costume person, then moved on towards the stairs.
The glum pianist was already practising up in his third floor flat. We’d chosen something by Rachmaninov for him to play—at first, at least. He’d played me sample pieces by several composers, and I’d liked this one by Rachmaninov best. It was called Second or Third Concerto or Sonata in A Major or B Flat, Minor, Major—something along those lines. What I liked about it was the way it undulated: how it bent and looped. Plus it was very difficult to play, apparently, which was good: he’d really make mistakes. I heard him hit his first snag as I moved onto the staircase. I stood still and grabbed Annie by the arm:
“Listen!” I whispered.
We listened. The pianist paused, then went at it again, slowing right down as he entered the passage that had tripped him up. He repeated it several times, then picked his pace up and returned to the beginning of the sequence, clocking it—then again, a little faster, then again and again and again, speeding it up each time until he was back almost at full speed. Eventually he accelerated out of the passage and on into the rest of the sonata.
“That’s just right,” I said to Annie. “Just right.”
We moved on, up past the motorbike enthusiast’s flat. He wasn’t there, of course: he was out in the courtyard tinkering with his motorbike. I hoped he was, at least: that’s where he was supposed to be. Then past the boring couple’s flat. On the floor above this, the fourth floor, we found Frank. He was standing on the landing with a diagram in his hands, checking the walls and floor—the distribution of filled-in and blank space—against this. Seeing me, he nodded his head in a way that implied he was satisfied with his check, let the hand holding the clipboard drop to his side and told me:
“Everything in order. Good luck.”
We continued upwards. Members of Frank and Annie’s crews were moving off the stairs, retreating behind doors with radios in their hands. We passed the liver lady’s door: I could hear several people shuffling around behind it, and the sound of soft, uncooked liver being laid out on cutting boards. Then we were on my floor. Annie entered my flat with me to check everything was right here, too. It was: the plants were scraggly but alive; the floorboards were scuffed but warm, neither shiny nor dull but somewhere in between; the rug was lying in the right place, slightly ruffled. Annie and I stood facing one another.
“All yours,” she said, smiling warmly. “Call Naz when you’re ready to go.”
I nodded. She left, closing the door behind her.
Before phoning Naz I stood alone in my living room for a while. The layout of the sofas and the coffee table, of the kitchen area—the plants, the counter and the fridge: all this was correct. Below me I could hear radios and TV sets being switched on throughout the building. At least one Hoover was in use. I stepped into the bathroom and looked at the crack on the wall. Just right too: not just the crack but the whole room—taps, wall, colours, crack, everything: perfect. I stepped back into my living room, picked up the phone and called Naz.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good,” he replied. “I’ll start the liver and the cats. We’ll take it from there.”
“Fine,” I said, and hung up.
I walked over to the kitchen window and looked out. Above the staggered, red-tiled rooftops of the facing building, the doors of two of the little cabins opened and two cats were shunted out of each. Three of them started meandering slowly around the roofs, each in his own direction; the fourth just sat down and stayed still—although if I slightly moved my head a centimetre or so to the left the kinked glass made him elongate and slither. A crackle came from downstairs: the snap of wet liver landing on hot oil; then came another one, a third, a fourth. For a few seconds it sounded as though fireworks were being let off a few streets away; then the crackles quietened down into a constant sizzle punctuated by the occasional pop. I wandered back into the bathroom and looked at the cats from there while I waited for the liver’s smell to reach me.
When it did, I stepped back into the living room and called Naz.
“It’s not right,” I said.
“What’s not?” he asked.
“That smell,” I said. “I thought Annie had made sure they’d broken the pans in. So they weren’t new, I mean.”
“I’ll check that with her now,” he said. “Hold on.”
I heard him radio Annie and repeat to her what I’d told him. I heard her radio crackle to his radio and back down the phone line to me. I heard her tell him:
“They are broken in. We went through all this.”
“She says they are broken in,” Naz told me. Then there was a crackle and I heard Annie’s voice ask Naz:
“What’s not right about the smell?”
“What’s wrong with it?” repeated Naz.
“It’s got that sharp edge,” I told him. “Kind of like cordite.”
“A bit like cordite,” I heard him tell her.
“That’s what he said before,” I heard her voice say. “Tell him to give it a few minutes. It should settle down once it gets cooking.”
“Give it a few minutes,” Naz said. “It should…”
“Yes, I heard,” I told him.
I hung up again and walked over to my kitchen area. The plants rustled in their baskets as I passed them, just like I’d first remembered them rustling. I went over to the window. The cats were widely dispersed now, black against the red. I could see three of them: the fourth must have slunk off behind a chimney pot. I brushed past the kitchen unit’s waist-high edge, the same way I’d remembered brushing past it when I’d first remembered the whole building—turning half sideways and then back again. My movement wasn’t deft enough, though, and my shirt caught slightly on the corner as I passed—not violently, snagging, but still staying against the wood for half a second too long, hugging it too thickly. This wasn’t right—wasn’t how I remembered it: my memory was of passing it deftly, letting the shirt brush the woodwork lightly, almost imperceptibly, like a matador’s cape tickling a bull’s horns. I tried it again: this time my shirt didn’t touch the woodwork at all. I tried it a third time: walking past the unit, turning sideways and then back again, trying to make my shirt brush fleetingly against the woodwork as I turned. This time I got the shirt bit right, but not the turning. It was difficult, this whole manoeuvre: I would need to practise.
I moved over to the fridge and pulled the door towards me. The door gave without resistance, opening in a smooth and seamless flow. I closed it, then pulled it towards me again. Again it opened smoothly. I did it a third time: again, faultless. Downstairs the pianist was coming out of a corrective loop, speeding up as he took off for new territory. I opened the fridge faultlessly once more, then closed it for the last time: I was ready to go.
I called Naz again.
“I’d like to leave my flat now,” I told him. “I’ll walk down past the liver lady’s.”
“Okay,” Naz said. “Count thirty seconds from now and then leave your door. Exactly thirty seconds.”
He hung up. I hung up too. I stood in the middle of my living-room floor, counting thirty seconds with my hands slightly raised, palms turned slightly outwards. Then I left my flat.
Moving across the landing and down the staircase, I felt like an astronaut taking his first steps—humanity’s first steps—across the surface of a previously untouched planet. I’d walked over this stretch a hundred times before, of course—but it had been different then, just a floor: now it was fired up, silently zinging with significance. Held beneath a light coat of sandy dust within a solid gel of tar, the flecks of gold and silver in the granite seemed to emit a kind of charge, as invisible as natural radiation—and just as potent. The non-ferrous-metal banisters and the silk-black wooden rail above them glowed with a dark, unearthly energy that took up the floor’s diminished sheen and multiplied its dark intensity. I turned the first corner, glancing th
rough its window as I moved: light from the courtyard bent as it approached me; a long, thin kink travelled across the surface of the facing building, then shot off away to wrinkle more remote, outlying spaces. The red rooftiles were disappearing as I came down, eclipsed by their own underhang as the angle between us widened. Then I turned again and the whole façade revolved away from me.
I continued down the stairs. Sounds travelled to me—but these, too, were subject to anomalies of physics, to interference and distortion. The pianist’s music ran, snagged and looped back on itself, first slowing down then speeding up. The static crackle of the liver broke across the orphaned signals cast adrift from radios and television sets. The Hoover moaned on, sucking matter up into its vacuum. I could hear the motorbike enthusiast clanging down in the courtyard, banging at a nut to loosen it. The clanging echoed off the facing building, the clangs reaching me as echoes almost coinciding with the clangs coming straight up from his banging—almost but not quite. I remembered seeing a boy once kicking a football against a wall, the distance between him and the wall setting up the same delay, the same near-overlap. I couldn’t remember where, though.
I moved on down the staircase. As I came within four steps of the fifth-floor landing I heard the liver lady’s locks jiggle and click. Then her door opened and she moved out slowly, holding a small rubbish bag. She was wearing a light-blue cardigan; her hair was wrapped up in a headscarf; a few white, wiry strands were sprouting from its edges, standing out above her forehead like thin, sculpted snakes. She shuffled forward in her doorway; then she stooped to set her bag down, holding her left hand to her back as she did this. She set the bag down carefully—then paused and, still stooped, turned her head to look up at me.
We’d spent ages practising this moment. I’d showed her exactly how to stoop: the inclination of the shoulders, the path slowly carved through the air by her right hand as it led the bag round her legs and down to the ground (I’d told her to picture the route supporting arms on old gramophone players take, first across and then down), the way her left hand rested on her lower back above the hip, the middle finger pointing straight at the ground. We’d got all this down to a t— but we hadn’t succeeded in working out the words she’d say to me. I’d racked my brains, but the exact line had never come, any more than the concierge’s face had. Rather than forcing it—or, worse, just making any old phrase up—I’d decided to let her come up with a phrase. I’d told her not to concoct a sentence in advance, but rather to wait till the moment when I passed her on the staircase in the actual re-enactment—the moment we were in right now—and to voice the words that sprung to mind just then. She did this now. Still stooped, her face turned towards mine, she released her grip on the bag and said: