her body. I saw the big staircase’s wrought-iron banisters: they had a kind of oxidizing hue, all specked with green. The handrail running above them was made of black wood and had mini-spikes on, little prongs—perhaps for decoration or perhaps to prevent children sliding down them. Then the pattern in the floors: it was a black pattern on white—repetitive, faded. I couldn’t quite make it out exactly, but I got the general sense of it, the way it flowed. I let my mind flow over it, floating above it—sinking into it too, being absorbed by it as though by a worn, patterned sponge. I fell asleep into the building, its surfaces, into the sound of liver sizzling and spitting, piano music wafting up the staircase, birds and milk floats, black cats on red roofs.
The next day was Sunday. This annoyed me. I wanted Monday and its open businesses. I’d need estate agents, employment agencies, who knew what else. And then what if my vision of the whole place faded before Monday came? How long would all the details stay lodged in my memory? I decided to safeguard them by sketching them out. I gathered all the unused paper I could find around my flat and started drawing diagrams, plans, layouts of room and floors and corridors. I blu-tacked each one to my living-room wall as I finished it; sometimes I’d run three or four or five into a big block, a continuous overview. When I’d run out of blank paper, I used the reverse side of letters, bills and legal documents—whatever came to hand.
I sketched my whole remembered flat outward from the crack running down the bathroom wall. The flat was modest but quite spacious. It had wooden floors with rugs covering parts of them. The kitchen was open plan, and ran into the main room. Its window faced the same way as my bathroom’s window did: across the courtyard with the garden and the motorbike. The fridge was old, a 1960s model. Above it hung plants—spider plants, in baskets. I sketched the staircase, adding notes and arrows highlighting the banisters’ spikes and oxidizing hue, the entrance to the flat of the old woman who cooked liver, the spot where she’d set her rubbish down for the concierge to pick up. I sketched the concierge’s cupboard, drawing in the broom, the mop, the Hoover—how they stood together, which way each one leant. The concierge’s face still didn’t come to me, nor did the words the liver lady spoke to me as I passed her, but I let that lie for now. Whole sections of the building didn’t come to me, in fact: stretches of staircase or lobby, the whole third floor landing. I left these vague, unfilled, with just a note in brackets next to inches of blank paper.
In the late afternoon I ordered pizza. While I was waiting for it to arrive, I remembered that Catherine would be arriving back that evening. It was her last evening here before she flew back to America. I transferred my giant, sprawling map from my living-room wall onto the wall of the bedroom, sheet by sheet. She turned up just after I’d eaten the last pizza slice. She looked tired but happy, flushed.
“How was Oxford?” I asked from the kitchen as I put the kettle on. Tea had become the main currency between us, a kind of milky, sickly substitute for actual connection.
“Oxford rocks!” she said. “It kicks ass! It’s so…The way the kids, the students, ride their bikes around town. They’re so cute. So enrowsed in being students…”
“So what?” I asked her as I brought the cups into the living room and set them down.
“Engrossed. In cycling around and talking to each other. I was thinking it’d be like great if you could shrink them down and keep them in a tank, like termites. You know those termite kits you get?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes I do.” I looked at her with interest and surprise. I thought that what she had just said was funny and intelligent—the first interesting thing she’d said since she’d arrived in London.
“You could go look at it twice a day and go: Oh look! See, that one’s studying! That one’s riding his bike! And they don’t even know you’re watching them. It’s just so…”
She paused there. She was really looking hard for the right word—and I wanted to hear it too, hear what she had to say.
“It’s just so…” I repeated, slowly, prompting her to find it.
“Cute!”