window. This second spot was a better one. I’d become good at sensing which are good positions and which aren’t when I’d been in hospital. It’s because you can’t move for yourself. In normal life, where you can move, you take being able to change your position for granted; you don’t even think about it. But when you’re injured and immobile, you have to go exactly where the doctors and nurses put you. Where they put you becomes terribly important—your position in relation to the windows, the doors, the TV set. The ward I spent most time in when I’d come out of intensive care was L-shaped. I was on the short side of the L, the foot, just inset from the corner where the long side hit it. It was a good spot: it had commanding views down both of the ward’s avenues, clear sightlines to the nurses’ enclave and the trolley station and the other little pockets of importance, crinkles in the flow of the ward’s surfaces. In the ward after that I had a really bad spot, in a bed facing the wrong way, facing nowhere in particular, just wrong. Position has been important to me ever since. It’s not just hospital: it’s the accident as well. I was hit because I was standing where I was and not somewhere else—standing on grass, exposed, just like a counter on a roulette table’s green velvet grid, on a single number, waiting…
I went back to the kitchen to top my glass up again, but realized that its level hadn’t sunk at all since the last time I’d filled it, so I just stood in the doorway while two girls beside the punch bowl looked at me.
“You looking for something?” one of them asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m looking for a…for a thing.” I made a kind of twiddling motion with my fingers, a gesture somewhere between opening a bottle with a corkscrew and using a pair of scissors. Then I left the kitchen again.
I was heading down the hallway back towards the main room when I noticed a small room set off the circuit I’d been following up to now. I’d moved round the kitchen each time in a clockwise direction, and round the main room in an anticlockwise one, door-sofa-window-door. With the short, narrow corridor between the two rooms, my circuit had the pattern of an eight. This extra room seemed to have just popped up beside it like the half had in my Settlement: offset, an extra. I stuck my head inside. It was a bathroom. I stepped in and locked the door behind me. Then it happened: the event that, the accident aside, was the most significant of my whole life.
It happened like this. I was standing in the bathroom with the door locked behind me. I’d used the toilet and was washing my hands in the sink, looking away from the mirror above it—because I don’t like mirrors generally—at this crack that ran down the wall. David Simpson, or perhaps the last owner, had stripped the walls, so there was only plaster on them, plus some daubs of different types of paint where David had been experimenting to see how the room would look in various colours. I was standing by the sink looking at this crack in the plaster when I had a sudden sense of déjà vu.
The sense of déjà vu was very strong. I’d been in a space like this before, a place just like this, looking at the crack, a crack that had jutted and meandered in the same way as the one beside the mirror. There’d been that same crack, and a bathtub also, and a window directly above the taps just like there was in this room—only the window had been slightly bigger and the taps older, different. Out of the window there’d been roofs with cats on them. Red roofs, black cats. It had been high up, much higher than I was now: the fifth or sixth or maybe even seventh floor of an old tenement-style building, a large block. People had been packed into the building: neighbours beneath me and around me and on the floor above. The smell of liver cooking in a pan had been wafting to me from the floor below—the sound too, the spit and sizzle.
I remembered all this very clearly. There’d been liver cooking on the floor below—the smell, the spit and sizzle—and then two floors below that there’d been piano music.