bumpy terrain—a set of potholes, say. Then in the afternoons he teaches children. At night he composes. Sometimes he gets angry with…”
Naz’s mobile gave out a loud double beep. I stopped. Naz picked it up and pressed the “enter” button.
“Heir or descendant,” he read. “From the Middle English sioun and the Old French sion: shoot or twig. First citation 1848. Oxford English Dictionary.”
“Interesting,” I said. I took a sip of my mineral water and thought of the scarab beetle again. “Anyway,” I continued after a moment, setting the glass down, “this guy sometimes gets angry with another person who I’ll need, this motorbike enthusiast who tinkers with his bike out in the courtyard. Fixes it and cleans it, takes it apart, puts it back together again. When he has the motor on, the pianist gets angry.”
Naz processed this one for a while. His eyes went vacant while the thing behind them whirred, processing. I waited till the eyes told me to carry on.
“Then there’s a concierge,” I said. “I haven’t got her face yet—but I’ve got her cupboard. And some other people. But you get the idea.”
“Yes, I get it,” Naz said. “But where will you be while they’re performing their tasks—when they’re in on mode.”
“I shall move throughout the space,” I said, “as I see fit. We’ll concentrate on different bits at different times. Different locations, different moments. Sometimes I’ll want to be passing the liver lady as she puts her rubbish out. Sometimes I’ll want to be out by the motorbike. Sometimes the two at once: we can pause one scene and I’ll run up or down the stairs to be inside the other. Or a third. The combinations are endless.”
“Yes, so they are,” said Naz.
The fish soup came. We sipped it. Then the kedgeree. We ate it. I explained more things to Naz and he processed them. When his eyes told me to wait I waited; then the whirring behind them stopped and I’d go on again. He never once asked why I wanted to do all this: he just listened, processing, working out how to execute it all. My executor.
Before we left the Blueprint Café Naz outlined the rate he’d charge. I told him fine. I gave him my banking details and he told me how to contact him at any time: he’d supervise my project personally, on a full-time basis. At ten the next morning he called me and told me how he thought we should proceed: we should first find a building that approximated to the one I had in mind—at least enough for it to be converted. That was the first step. While this was going on, he’d contact architects, designers and, of course, potential performers.
“Performers isn’t the right word,” I said. “Staff. Participants. Re-enactors.”
“Re-enactors?” he asked.
“Yes,” I told him. “Re-enactors.”
“Would you like me to take charge of seeking out the property?” he asked.
“Well, yes,” I said.
As we hung up I got a clearly defined picture of my building again: first from the outside, then the lobby, my faceless concierge’s cupboard, the main staircase with its black-and-white recurring pattern floor, its blackened wooden handrail with spikes on it. Then Naz’s office superimposed itself over that: the plastic blue and red, the windows, his people walking across the carpets as they set out to look for my place. These people were carrying the image of Time Control’s office out into the city, not the image of my building. This second image started fading in my mind. A sudden surge of fear ran through the right side of my body, from my shin all the way up to my right ear. I sat down, closed my eyes and concentrated on my building really hard. I kept them closed and concentrated on it till it came back and eclipsed the image of the office. I felt better. I stood up again.
I understood then that there was only one person who could take charge of seeking out the property, and that was me.
6
IN SCHOOL, when I was maybe twelve, I had to do art. I wasn’t any good at it, but it was part of the syllabus: one hour and twenty minutes each week—a double period. For a few weeks we were taught sculpture. We were given these big blocks of stone, a chisel and a mallet, and we had to turn the blocks into something recognizable—a human figure or a building. The teacher had an effective way of making us understand what we were doing. The