by Tom McCarthy
One other thing about guns: their beauty. As I flicked past the photos, diagrams and illustrations Dr Jauhari used to show the evolution of guns over the ages and the differences between pistols, rifles, machine guns and sub-machine guns, it grew on me how beautiful an object a gun—any gun—is. Some are more beautiful than others, of course, depending on the sleekness of their finish, the curvature of the handle, the thickness of the hammer and a dozen other factors. But just being guns makes them all beautiful. That things so small, so pleasing to the eye, so friendly to the touch—so passive—can contain such force is breathtaking. Then the way they hang just off the body, cradled tenderly like babies, sleeping—till the moment they erupt and carry beauty to another level. No beauty without violence, without death.
Our mole came through eventually. Naz brought the report over to my flat one evening.
“When we ask the Council for permission to use the space,” he said as he handed it to me, “we’ll have to decide what type of licence to apply for. We could…”
“Later,” I said. I took the report and closed the door on him.
It had come in a sealed, unmarked envelope. As I opened this I felt that tingling spreading outwards from the base of my spine. The pages were flaky and the text badly aligned; it had been Xeroxed in a hurry. The language it was written in was clear, which surprised me. I’d expected it to be full of police terminology—people “proceeding” instead of moving, “perpetrators” instead of people and with every noun and action prefaced by “alleged”. In fact, it was stark and straightforward:
The killers,
it said,
parked their car beside the Green Man public bar, stepped out and opened fire with Uzi sub-machine guns. The victim got onto his bicycle and tried to ride away, but turned too sharply into Belinda Road and fell onto the tarmac as the front wheel twisted under him.
I pictured the front wheel twisting and him going down. He must have known then that it was all up. He’d got up again, the report said, and taken two or three more steps down Belinda Road while the killers fired on him some more. Then he’d gone down a final time. He’d been dead by the time the ambulance arrived.
There were pages of detailed diagrams. They showed the layout of the area in which the shooting had happened: the phone box, the street, kerb, bollard, even a puddle into which some of the victim’s blood had flowed. They showed his position first as he stood in the phone box, then as he tried to escape, then as he fell, got up and fell again. They showed the killers’ positions as they parked their car and walked towards him, firing. The three men were drawn in outline with numbers inside the outlines, like you get in children’s colouring books. There were arrows indicating movement and direction.
The longer I stared at these pictures, the more intense the tingling in my upper body grew. It had moved into my brain, like when you eat too much monosodium glutamate in a Chinese restaurant. My whole head was tingling. The diagrams seemed to be taking on more and more significance. They became maps for finding buried treasure, then instructions for assembling pieces of furniture, then military plans, the outline of a whole winter’s arduous and multi-pronged advance across mountains and plains. I drifted off into these plains, these mountains, floating alongside the generals and foot soldiers and cooks and elephants. When I looked up from the diagrams again, Naz was there, standing in front of my sofa with another man.
“When did you come in?” I asked him. “Who’s this?”
“This man’s a doctor,” said Naz. “I’ve been here for the last hour and a half.”
I tried to ask him what he meant by that, but the words were taking a long time to form. The other man opened a bag and took a pen or torch out.
“You were just sitting here,” said Naz. “You’d gone completely vacant. You didn’t notice me, or hear me. I waved my hand in front of your face and you didn’t even move your eyes.”
“How long ago was this?” the doctor asked.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“The whole last hour and a half,” Naz told him. “Until just now, when you came in.”
“Has he experienced any kind of trauma recently?” the doctor asked. He switched his torch-pen on. “What’s his name?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Send this man away.”
“Keep your head still,” the doctor said.
“No,” I said. “Send this man away, Naz, now. Get off my property or I’ll have you arrested.”
“I can’t help you if you won’t let me help you,” he said.
I looked past his ear and thought I saw another cat fall off the roof. I told this man:
“I’m ordering you to leave my property this instant.”
He stood still for a while. Naz did too. The three of us were static for several moments—and while we were I didn’t mind this doctor being here. I’d even have let him stay if he’d only behaved himself and not moved. Eventually, though, he turned to Naz and motioned with his eyes towards the door, then slipped his torch-pen back into his bag and left. Naz saw him out. I heard the two men murmuring together as I went into the bathroom and washed my face. I washed it in cold water and didn’t dry it straight away, but let it drip while I stared at the crack on the wall. I watched the crack as I listened to the doctor walking down the stairs.
When I went back into the living room, Naz was there and the flat’s door was closed. Naz said:
“I think it would be a good idea for you to…”
“Where have you managed to get us to?” I asked him.
He’d got the re-enactors, the car and bicycle and the replica sub-machine guns. He’d rung up to tell me all this, but I hadn’t answered.
“When did you ring?” I asked him.
“Several hours ago. Didn’t you hear the phone?”
“No,” I said. “Not that one.”
I did have a vague memory of ringing—but it was of the phone the black man with the bicycle had used in the phone box outside Movement Cars. His last words would still have been buzzing in his head as he left the phone box, and in the head of the person he’d talked to, their conversation only half-decayed at most. Then he’d have caught sight of his killers. Did he know them? If he did, he still might not have known they’d come to kill him—until they took their guns out. At what point had he realized they were guns? Maybe at first he thought they were umbrellas, or steering-wheel locks, or poles. Then when he realized, as his brain pieced it together and came up with a plan of escape, then changed it, he found out that physics wouldn’t let him carry out the plan: it tripped him up. Matter again: the world became a fridge door, a broken lighter, two litres of blue goop. That’s when he was first hit: as he went over. The first round of bullets struck him in his body, not his head, the report said. They didn’t even make him lose consciousness. He would have known he’d been hit but not really felt it, nor the scrapes he’d received from hitting the ground as he went over the handlebars—would have just vaguely understood that something had occurred, something had changed, that things were different now.
“…and a further licence from the local police,” Naz was saying, “which won’t be a great problem now the Council have given the nod, although the status of the event needs to be determined pretty quickly.”
“What?” I asked him. “What are you saying?”
Naz looked at me strangely, then started again:
“Lambeth Council are happy to give permission for the re-enactment to proceed, but there’s confusion about what type of licence they need to give us,” he said. “It’s not a demonstration and it’s not a street party. The activity that it most closely resembles is filming.”
“No,” I said. “No cameras. No filming. You know that.”
“Yes,” said Naz, “but we should apply for it under filming. We need to designate it as a recognized type of event so they can grant us permission to do it. Filming’s the easiest route. We apply to use the area for a film shoot and then just don’t have any cameras.”
“I suppose so,” I said. “As long as we don’t actually film. How soon can we do it, then?”
“Next week,” said Naz.
“No, that’s not soon enough!” I said.
“There’s not much we can…”
“It needs to be done sooner!” I said. “Why can’t we do it tomorrow?”
“Licence certificates can take days to process,” he explained, “even with the type of bribes we’re paying.”
“Pay bigger bribes, then!” I said. “It won’t last if we wait a whole week!”
“What won’t last?” he asked.
I looked past his head. I could see three cats on the red roof on the far side of the courtyard, which meant that the people over there had replaced the one I’d seen falling. I looked back at Naz.
“Day after tomorrow at the latest!” I said. “The very outside latest!”
He got it all together for the day after that. He got the licence from the Council and the licence from the police, organized all the staff and back-up staff, the caterers and runners and who knows what else. It struck me as I waited that all great enterprises are about logistics. Not genius or inspiration or flights of imagination, skill or cunning, but logistics. Building pyramids or landing spacecraft on Jupiter or invading whole continents or painting divine scenes over the roofs of chapels: logistics. I decided that in the caste scale of things, people who dealt with logistics were higher even than the ones who made connections. I decided to get Matthew Younger to invest in the logistics industry, if there was one.
While I waited I also got Roger to build me a model of the area in which the shooting had taken place: the phone box, pavement, bollards, street, shops and pubs. The model had little cars that you could move around, and a little red bicycle. It also had little human figures: the two killers with their sub-machine guns, the victim. Roger delivered it to me the evening before we did the re-enactment. I removed his model of my building from the coffee table in the living room and placed this new model there instead. I stayed up all night looking at it. I placed the human figures in the positions indicated by the forensic report’s diagrams. I made the two killers park their car, step into the street and advance forward. I made the dead man leave the phone box, climb onto his bicycle, fall off, stumble a few steps forwards and collapse. I watched each phase of the sequence from all angles.
Why was I so obsessed with the death of this man I’d never met? I didn’t stop to ask myself. I knew we had things in common, of course. He’d been hit by something, hurt, laid prostrate and lost consciousness; so had I. We’d both slipped into a place of total blackness, silence, nothing, without memory and without anticipation, a place unreached by stimuli of any kind. He’d stayed on there, gone the whole hog, while I’d been sucked back, via vague sports stadiums, to L-shaped wards and talks of Settlement—but for a short while we’d both stood at the same spot: stood there, lay there, floated there, whatever. Persisted. We’d both stood at the same spot in a more plain sense, too: in the phone box I’d called Marc Daubenay from the day the Settlement came through, this cabin out of whose miniature duplicate I was making the little model of him step again and again and again. Our paths had diverged as soon as we’d left it: I’d stepped out—two times, then passed by it a third and gone up to the airport, whereas he’d stepped out and died; but for a while we’d both stood there, held the receiver, looked at the words Airports, Stations, Light.
To put my fascination with him all down to our shared experience, though, would only be telling half the story. Less than half. The truth is that, for me, this man had become a symbol of perfection. It may have been clumsy to fall from his bike, but in dying beside the bollards on the tarmac he’d done what I wanted to do: merged with the space around him, sunk and flowed into it until there was no distance between it and him—and merged, too, with his actions, merged to the extent of having no more consciousness of them. He’d stopped being separate, removed, imperfect. Cut out the detour. Then both mind and actions had resolved themselves into pure stasis. The spot that this had happened on was the ground zero of perfection—all perfection: the one he’d achieved, the one I wanted, the one everyone else wanted but just didn’t know they wanted and in any case didn’t have eight and a half million pounds to help them pursue even if they had known. It was sacred ground, blessed ground—and anyone who occupied it in the way he’d occupied it would become blessed too. And so I had to re-enact his death: for myself, certainly, but for the world in general as well. No one who understands this could accuse me of not being generous.
In the part of the night where it’s quietest, around three or four o’clock, I started wondering where this black man’s soul had disappeared to as it left his body. His thoughts, impressions, memories, whatever: the background noise we all have in our head that stops us from forgetting we’re alive. It had to go somewhere: it couldn’t just vaporize—it must have gushed, trickled or dripped onto some surface, stained it somehow. Everything must leave some kind of mark. I scoured the thin card surfaces of Roger’s model. They were so white, so blank. I decided to mark them, and went to the kitchen to find something to stain the white card with.
In the cupboard above the kitchen unit that I’d practised turning sideways round, I found vinegar, Worcestershire Sauce and blue peppermint essence. I got a blank piece of paper and experimented with each of these. Worcestershire Sauce made the best stain, by far. I found a half-drunk bottle of wine and tried staining the paper with that too. The consistency was thinner but the colour was fantastic. It looked like blood.
“Blood!” I said aloud to my empty apartment. “I should have used blood in the first place.”
I took a small knife from a drawer, pricked my finger with its point and squeezed the flesh and skin until a small bauble of blood grew on it. Holding my finger upright so as not to lose the bauble, I went back to the living room and pressed it to the card, stamping my print across the middle of the road in blood. Then I sat back and looked at it till morning.
It was a giant print, spanning the pavement on both sides, its contours swirling round bollards, cars and shop fronts, doubling back around the phone box, gathering the killers and their victim together in the same large, undulating sweep. They were too small to make it out, of course, or even to know that it was there. No: it was legible only from above, a landing field for elevated, more enlightened beings.
12
THE ACTUAL SURFACES, when I saw them later that day, were sensational. If the diagrams had been like abstract paintings, then the road itself was like an old grand master—one of those Dutch ones thick with rippling layers of oil paint. Its tarmac was old, fissured and cracked. And its markings! They were faded, worn by time and light into faint echoes of the instructions that they’d once pronounced so boldly. The road was cambered, like most roads. It had rained recently and its central area was dry, but had wet tyre tracks running over it. Its edges were still wet. Around the seams where road met kerb and kerbstone pavement, water and dirt had been skilfully mixed to form muddy, pockmarked ridges. In places these ran into puddles in whose centres hung large clouds of mud hemmed in by borders that turned rusty and then clear, as though the artist had used them to clean his brush.
Chewing gum, cigarette butts and bottle tops had been distributed randomly across the area and sunk into its outer membrane, become one with tarmac, stone, dirt, water, mud. If you were to cut out ten square centimetres of it like you do with fields on school geography trips—ten centimetres by ten centimetres wide and ten more deep—you’d find so much to analyse, so many layers, just so much matter—that your study of it would branch out and become endless until, finally, you threw your hands up in despair and announced to whatever authority it was you were reporting to: There’s too much here, too much to process, just too much.
I arrived at the re-enactment area from the south. Police tape had been unwound across the street where Shakespeare Road ran into Coldharbour Lane, beneath a bridge that crossed the road perpend
icular to the bridge I’d been stopped by on the day of the actual shooting. A policeman had been posted there to turn traffic away. I showed him the pass Naz had biked over to me one hour earlier; he let me through. Naz came over to greet me, but I paused beside the policeman and asked him:
“Were you here on the day the shooting happened?”
“No,” he said.
“I mean, not here here, but just on the other side of the cordoned-off area?”
“I wasn’t there that day,” he said.
I stared at him intently for a few more seconds, then walked on with Naz.
“Slept well?” Naz asked.
I hadn’t slept at all. My tiredness made the dappled pattern of wet and dry patches on the pavement stand out more intensely. The air was bright but not bright-blue: the sun was beaming from behind a thin layer of white cloud. Its light cast shadows and reflections: from the bollards and the phone box and on the surfaces of puddles.
“Whatever,” I said. “How long do we have?”
“We’ve got until six o’clock this evening,” he said.
“Get it extended,” I told him.
“They won’t let us have more time,” he said.
“Pay them,” I said. “Offer them double what we’ve paid already, and if they say no, then double that again. Is all the area between the lines of tape ours?”
“Yes,” said Naz.
The cordoned-off stretch ran between the bridge and the traffic lights I’d been stopped by on the first day—but of this area only about a third was primary re-enactment space. The other two thirds were given over to back-up: cars and boxes, tables, a big van from whose back doors two women were handing out coffee. The vehicles were all parked unusually: not flat against the kerb but willy-nilly, right across the road, irregular.