Remainder. Part 8

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: speculari: spy out, watch, and spy out, watch, and specula: specula: watch tower. First citation..." 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.d!" 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 m.u.f.fled enough-it had been slightly m.u.f.fled 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 s.p.a.ce, 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?" 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 gla.s.s," she said. "Not old enough."

Bingo. New gla.s.s is totally consistent, doesn't gloop and run and crimp the things you see through it like old gla.s.s 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 f.u.c.king 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 s.p.a.ce 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- 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 b.u.t.ts.

"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 facade 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.