Part 19 (1/2)

There was silence for a moment while Five and Two digested what One had just said. One turned to me and, voice still quivering, whispered: ”It's real!”

The tingling really burst its banks now; it flowed outwards from my spine's base and flowed all around my body. Once more I was weightless; once again the moment spread its edges out, became a still, clear pool swallowing everything else up in its contentedness. I let my head fall back; my arms started rising outwards from my sides, the palms of my hands turning upwards. I felt I was being elevated, that my body had become unbearably light and unbearably dense at the same time. The intensity augmented until all my senses were going off at once. There was noise all around me, a chorus: screaming, shouting, banging, alarms ringing, people running around b.u.mping into things and each other. I knelt down beside Four. The blood was advancing from his chest in a steady, broad column, marching on across the carpet's plain, making its gold lines crinkle like flags in a breeze. His bag had slouched into the floor just like the liver lady's bag had; its contents, no longer suspended in s.p.a.ce by his arm, had rearranged themselves into a state of rest. The blood was flowing round it, dampening one of its edges, eddying into a pool behind a crinkle, as though the bag and not he had leaked.

Further on, the blood column had pulled to a halt and pitched camp in the formation of an elongated oval, a deep red patch. On its surface I could see the wall reflected-and the broken gla.s.s doors of the airlock, the counter's edge, part of a poster on the wall, the ceiling. Four had opened himself up, become a diagram, a sketch, an imprint. I lay down flat so that my head was right beside this pool and followed the reflections. The objects-the doors' stump, the edge, the poster's corner-had become abstracted, separated from the s.p.a.ce around them, freed from distances to float around together in this pool of reproductions, like my staff in their stained-gla.s.s window heaven.

”Speculation,” I said; ”contemplation of the heavens. Money, blood and light. Removals. Any Distance.”

I moved my head over to Four's body and poked my finger into the wound in his chest. The wound was raised, not sunk; parts of his flesh had broken through the skin and risen, like rising dough. The flesh was both firm and soft; it gave to the touch but kept its shape. When I brought my eyes right up to it, I saw that it was riddled with tiny holes-natural, pin-p.r.i.c.k holes, like breathing holes. Much bigger, irregular cracks had opened among these where bits of shot had entered him. I could see some way into the tunnels that the cracks' insides formed, but then they turned and narrowed as they disappeared deeper inside him.

”Yes, really like a sponge,” I said.

Then I was walking from the bank. I walked quite calmly. No one tried to stop me. They all ran and screamed and b.u.mped and fell-but I had a cylinder around me, an airlock. I was walking calmly through the bank's door, out into the daylight again. I was walking across the street, pa.s.sing the yellow and white lines, the spot where the raised patch wasn't. Then I was in the car again and it was pulling out, cutting an arc across the middle of the street, pausing, then gliding on. The street was rotating slowly round: the mothers with pushchairs and the traffic and the traffic wardens and the people at the bus stops and the other windows full of their reflections-rotating around me. I was an astronaut suspended, slowly turning, among galaxies of coloured matter. I closed my eyes and felt the movement, the rotation-then opened them again and was overwhelmed by sunlight. It was streaming from the sun's chest, gus.h.i.+ng out, cascading, splas.h.i.+ng off cars' wheels, bonnets and windscreens and off shop fronts, trickling along the road's lines and markings, pulsing past people's legs and along gutters, dribbling from roofs and trees. It was spilling everywhere, overflowing, just too much, too much to absorb.

”So maybe it's okay for it to fall,” I said.

”Where are the others?” asked the driver re-enactor.

”They have the same texture,” I told him.

”They have what?” he asked. ”What was the second gunshot?”

”The same texture,” I said. ”Light and blood.”

Two of the other robber re-enactors had joined us in the car now: Five and Two I think, or maybe Five and One. Not Four, in any case. We turned and b.u.mped into another car, paused for a moment and then glided on.

”He dented me and just drove off,” I told them. ”The guy in Peckham. I was angry at the time, but that's fine now, though. Everything's fine-even the shard in my knee. The half.”

It was fine-all of it. I felt very happy. We'd left the main road and were weaving through side streets, the same ones we'd practised weaving through two days ago. The same trees lined the road on both sides-oaks, ashes and plane trees whose red, brown and yellow leaves were merging again into a flow of colour; some leaves were falling, flickering in the sunlight as they drifted downwards. There was one fir tree too, that wasn't molting.

”A reciduous tree,” I told the others, pointing it out as we pa.s.sed it.

They weren't listening to me. They seemed very unhappy. They were shouting at the driver re-enactor, screaming at him, telling him the whole thing had been real and not a re-enactment, over and over again. I turned to them and told them: ”But it was a re-enactment. That's the beauty of it. It became real while it was going on. Thanks to the ghost kink, mainly-the kink the other kink left when we took it away.”

This didn't seem to calm them down at all. They shouted, yelped and whimpered as we drove on through the falling coloured leaves. One of them kept asking what they should all do now.

”Oh, just carry on,” I told him. ”Carry right on. It will all be fine.”

I remembered saying this to the boy on the staircase. I recalled his worried face, his satchel and his shoes. I looked straight at the re-enactor who'd asked me the question, smiled at him rea.s.suringly and said: ”You can't go back there. They won't understand. Come on with me and everything will be resolved.”

I think he understood that I was right. Of course he couldn't go back to the bank. What would he do? Explain that it had all been a performance? Throw in the stuff about fridge doors and cigarettes and carrots and De Niro for good measure? He didn't even know about all that, and didn't look as though he could have articulated it very coherently even if I'd briefed him on it. He was pretty agitated. They all were. They moaned and wept and yelped and shrieked. I listened to them for a while, trying to work out the rhythm of the various sounds, the moans and wails and yelps-which followed what, how long it took for the whole sequence to repeat itself-but gave up after a while. It was too complex to pin down right now; I'd have to get it re-enacted later. I looked back out of the window at the merging, falling leaves. These faded into concrete, into bridges, stilts and over-pa.s.ses as we merged with the motorway past Shepherd's Bush. The concrete, too, was merging, flowing all around us, tilting and swivelling above us, inclining away below, dwindling and disappearing, then emerging again a little later to flow back, converge-these flowing blocks, these columns, all this matter.

Naz met us at the warehouse. He was standing outside it, just inside the compound gates. He opened the car door and looked at me.

”You've got blood on you!” he said.

”Money, blood and light,” I told him, beaming as I stepped out of the car. ”Naz, it was brilliant!”

Naz stuck his head inside the car where the wailing, yelping re-enactors were still sitting. When they started wailing at him, telling him what had happened, a strange change came over him. It wasn't dramatic or hysterical: it was more like a computer cras.h.i.+ng-the way the screen, rather than explode or send its figures dancing higgledy-piggledy around, simply freezes. He pulled his head out of the car; his body stiffened and his eyes went into suspension while the thing behind them tried to whir. I watched him, fascinated, and saw straight away that it couldn't whir any more: it had frozen. The others were haranguing him, shouting at him that he'd known, he'd set them up, Four's dead, they're murderers, this, that, the other. He just stood there on the tarmac, all locked up. The sunlight streamed around him, falling and cascading everywhere. When his eyes switched on again-half-on, as though in shut-down mode already-he asked where the other re-enactors were.

”Who knows?” I said, stepping into the warehouse. ”En route, caught, still at the bank. I don't know. Hey, nice work!” caught, still at the bank. I don't know. Hey, nice work!”

The duplicate bank had been razed. You could still see where counters and walls had risen from the ground: their stumps were still there-those and a few bits of rubble, a few splinters, a few tears and holes. It was like a smashed-up and rubbed-over ground plan, a ghost replica. I ran my eyes slowly across its surface. I let them linger on the spot from which the tight-end accomplice re-enactor had peeled out, then on the spot where I'd stood, planted, as my gun had described an arc above the floor. I still had my gun now. I was standing in the spot where Robber Re-enactor Two had stood, facing the counters and the airlock. I raised the gun's barrel with my left hand and made it describe an arc again, slowly sweeping it from side to side. I ran my eyes on to where the lift had borne up the three bags for us to carry; then I ran them back across the ground where the carpet had been, projecting back onto this bare concrete floor its golden lines, the way they turned and cut against the red, repeating.

I glided my eyes over it at a low alt.i.tude again-but this time in reverse, the way Two would have seen it as the three of us approached him with our bags. He, too, would have seen Five's foot feeling for the kink, then seen him topple, seen his torso hurtling towards him, borne by its own momentum. He also would have known that a collision was imminent, that nothing could be done to stop it. Two, the real Robber Re-enactor Two, had come into the warehouse. He'd entered, like I had, from the spot where the duplicate lift had been, the inner area. He was crying, lumbering forwards slowly, aimlessly. I'd got so into replaying the whole event from his perspective that I'd started to overbalance. I let my left leg come up and my left hand leave my shotgun's barrel; I sucked my stomach in and hunched my shoulders forwards; I let my right leg buckle, straighten and then keel over backwards, carrying the rest of me with it-carrying all of me except my right hand, which stayed raised, its palm still wrapped around the shotgun's b.u.t.t, its index finger hooked across the trigger.

Two was as far from me as Four had been from him when he, Two, had shot him, Four, in the bank. He was still moving forwards, lumbering towards me. So I shot him. It was half instinctive, a reflex, as I'd first suspected: to tug against the last solid thing there was, which was the trigger-tug against it as though it were a fixed point that the body could be pulled back up from. But I'd be lying if I said it was only that that made me pull the trigger and shoot Two. I did it because I wanted to. Seeing him standing there in Four's position as I stood in his, replaying in first my mind and then my body his slow fall, I'd felt the same compulsion to shoot him as I'd felt outside Victoria Station that day to ask pa.s.sers-by for change. Essentially, it was the movements, the positions and the tingling that made me do it-nothing more.

The new blast echoed round the warehouse. It made its walls tingle too-its walls, its ceiling and its floor. They tingled and hummed and sang and seemed to levitate. Sawdust took off from the floor and swirled around circling in the air; small lumps of rubble jumped. Two levitated too: he took off from the spot where he was standing-took off like a helicopter rising straight up, only he rose up and slightly backwards at the same time. He hovered for a while in the air and then crumpled back into the ground.

I got up, walked over to where he lay and looked down at him. He was lying on his back.

”He should be on his side,” I said, to no one in particular.

I knelt down beside him and pulled him into the same fetal position Four had ended up in. Two's eyes, too, were empty. He was pretty dead as well. His blood was also flowing-but it wasn't as clean as Four's blood. It had these bits in it, these grains and lumps. I poked at his exposed flesh with my finger. It was a lot like Four's flesh: it had that same sponge-like texture, soft and firm at the same time.

Naz had come into the warehouse. He was moving really slowly. Eventually he stopped a few feet from me, and his eyes tracked across the floor where Two's blood was gathering in a pool.

”Wow, look at it,” I said. ”It's just a...a thing. A patch. A little bit repeating.”

I prodded Two's exposed flesh again, felt it first slightly give and then resist.

”Isn't it beautiful?” I said to Naz. ”You could take everything away-vaporize, replicate, transubstantiate, whatever-and this would still be there. However many times.”

Naz didn't answer. He just stood there, locked up, closed down, vacant. He was pretty useless. I had to lead him back to the car and drive it myself the short distance to the airport terminal with the two remaining re-enactors moaning and quivering around me. We parked in a long-stay car park. I asked Naz to hand us all our tickets. He just turned his head halfway towards me and said nothing. I reached into his jacket, found the tickets, handed the re-enactors theirs and kept hold of mine and Naz's. I told everyone we'd enter the terminal together and then separate, the two re-enactors heading for their gate while Naz and I went to the special check-in desk for private planes.

”Will we have to pa.s.s through a metal detector?” I asked Naz.

Naz stared ahead of him in silence.

”Naz!” I said again. ”Do we have to...”

”No,” he answered. His voice had changed so it was somewhere between the same monotone my pianist spoke in and the one I'd instructed my various re-enactors to use.

”That's good!” I said. ”You're getting into it.”

I folded my shotgun and placed it inside a bag. I liked it now, wanted to keep it with me, carry it around like a king carries around his sceptre. I was feeling even more regal than normal: with Naz out of action I'd a.s.sumed direct executive command of everything-logistics, paperwork, the lot. I proclaimed to the car in general: ”There's nothing to be worried about. It's a very happy day. A beautiful day. And now we shall all go into the air.”

We left the car, processed across the car park and entered the terminal building, the others lumbering along behind me. I called a halt, mustered them all together and was about to send the two re-enactors off to where they had to go when something caught my eye. It was one of those coffee concessions, the Seattle-theme ones. We were in a different terminal to the one where I'd met Catherine, but this terminal had a concession too-although not in exactly the same spot. The counter, till and coffee machines were arranged differently as well, although they were all the same size and shape and colour as the ones in the first terminal's concession. It was the same, but slightly different. I approached the counter.

”I'd like nine small cappuccinos,” I said.

”Heyy! Nine short-nine?” he said.

”Yup,” I told him, showing him my loyalty card and handing him a twenty-pound note. ”I've got nine more to go. So: nine, plus one.”

He started lining the cups up, but a thought struck me and I told him: ”You can strip the other eight away. The other nine, I mean. It's only the remaining one I want. The extra one.”