walked across its ceiling or just stood there upside down. As it was, I stayed inside the moment at which I was passing Robber Re-enactor One as he stood over Guard Three just inside the doorway. I lingered in that moment, in the instant I was sweeping past him, for a long time, taking in the posture of his leg, the angle of its knee, the straight line of his left arm as it held the guard below him while the right arm, lifted so its hand was at head level, held a gun to the guard’s head. I drank it all up, absorbing it like blotting paper or like ultra-sensitive film, letting it cut right through me, into me till I became the surface on which it emerged.
Then sound came in: the sound of the shotgun firing off the frightener. The sound was elongated, stretched out so much that it became soft and porous, so it seemed to have slowed down, right down into a hum, gentle and reassuring. Plaster crumbled from the ceiling and fell gently, bitty powder snow. Robber Re-enactor Two was delivering his line:
“Everybody lie down.”
He didn’t shout the line, but rather spoke it in a voice without inflection—deadpan, neutral, just like the voice in which I’d made the tyre-boy re-enactors speak their lines during the blue-goop re-enactment. This line, too, was elongated; it seemed to stretch out on both sides of itself, to build itself an inner chamber in which it could be spoken almost imperceptibly within the longer speaking of it—spoken intimately, a tender echo.
Then it was quiet. The customers and clerks, the real ones who’d replaced the customer and clerk re-enactors we’d stood down, were lying on the floor like babies being put to sleep. Above them, like a mobile hanging from a cot, Robber Re-enactor Two’s shotgun swung. I swung mine too, made it describe an arc across the lobby, an arc like a clock’s pendulum transported to a horizontal plane—a grandfather clock’s pendulum, slow, steady and repetitive.
Another sound came now: the tinkle of glass splintering as Four re-enacted the smashing of the airlock’s first door; then, growing out of that sound, a second as Five re-enacted the smashing of the next door. The glass was high-tech modern glass that crumbles into bits and falls rather than breaking into jagged segments; it fell softly, tinkling like a music box—an old, antique one tinkling out a slow and high-pitched tune, a lullaby.
I started on the sequence that I had to re-enact at this point: moving across the floor and through the broken airlock to join Four and Five, pick up one of the bags and carry it back over to the door and out into the street. This, too, I’d practised endlessly—but it was different now. The bag, just like the van, was more imposing than the bags we’d used before—its weave more regular and repetitive, its thread more fibrous, the small, isolated clusters of letters and numbers dotted about its surface more cryptic than those on the ones I’d carried in rehearsals. It was baggier. It bulged just like the liver lady’s rubbish bag had—bulged irregularly, in a slightly awkward way. It was hard to lift up: I felt it stretching, felt its weight being dispersed around my upper body, the way it acted on each muscle. All my muscles were articulated now, working together, merging as I carried it, merging without my having to tell them how to merge.
“A system,” I said to the cashier. “And I don’t have to learn it first. I’m getting away with it.”
I was getting away with it. For me, the bag held something priceless. Its money was like rubbish to me: rubbish, dead weight, matter—and for that reason it was valuable, invaluable, as precious as a golden fleece or lost ark or Rosetta Stone. I glided across the floor with it towards the door. Four and Five glided in front of me. Two was still standing static, moving his gun from one corner of the bank towards the other and then back again, slow and regular as a lawn-sprinkler. I raised my bag slightly as it and I cleared the airlock’s stump, then lowered it again and let it glide above the carpet like a crop-spraying aircraft gliding over fields of wheat. I let my eyes follow the carpet’s surface as we glided, let them run along its perfectly reproduced gold on red, its turns and cut-backs, the way these repeated themselves regularly for several