So was South Kensington. Paddington came closest: several buildings round there looked like mine. They looked like mine but weren’t mine. Don’t ask me how I could tell that: I just could.
In the late afternoon I phoned Naz.
“How were they?” he asked.
“Oh, I didn’t go to the ones our people shortlisted,” I told him. “I decided I should look for it myself.”
“I see,” said Naz. “I’ll tell them to discontinue their searches, then.”
“No,” I said. “Tell them to carry on. When we’ve exhausted our original six areas, we’ll broaden out.”
There was a pause at Naz’s end. I pictured the behind of his eyes, the whirring. After a while he said:
“I’ll do that if that’s what you want.”
“Good,” I said. Process: it was necessary.
I didn’t find my building that day. Or the next. When I got home that evening there were two messages for me: one from Greg and one from Matthew Younger. Greg wanted me to call him. Matthew Younger wanted me to call him too: the sectors we’d bought into had climbed ten per cent in value over the last week, presenting us with a great opportunity to top-slice and diversify. I listened to their messages as I lay on the sofa. All the walking I’d done had exhausted me. I took a bath, put a plaster on a blister that had appeared on my right foot and went to bed.
I had a vivid dream. I dreamt that streets and buildings were moving past me, like the commuters had the day I’d stood still outside Victoria Station asking for spare change. The streets and buildings were moving past me on conveyor belts like those long ones that carry you along the corridors of airports. There were several of these moving belts connected to each other—converging and branching off, criss-crossing, ducking behind or under one another like a giant Spaghetti Junction, conveying houses, pavements, lampposts, traffic lights and bridges past me and around me.
My building was in there, being carried along somewhere in the complex interlacings. I caught glimpses of it as it slipped behind another building and was whisked away again to reappear somewhere else. It would show itself to me then slip away again. The belts were like magicians’ fingers shuffling cards: they were shuffling the city, flashing my card, my building, at me and then burying it in the deck again. They were challenging me to shout “Stop!” at the exact moment it was showing: if I could do that, I’d win. That was the deal.
“Stop!” I shouted. Then again: “Stop…Stop!” But I timed each shout just wrong—only a tenth or even hundredth of a second off, but wrong nonetheless. I’d shout “stop” each time I saw my building, and the system of conveyors would grind to a halt—but this took a few seconds, and by the time it was completely still my building had become submerged again.
After a while I closed my eyes, my dream-eyes, and tried to sense when it was coming up. I sensed the rhythm things were moving at, the patterns they were following, and let my imagination slip inside them. I could sense when my building was about to come by. I waited for it to go by twice, and just before it reappeared a third time shouted:
“Stop!”
I knew even as I shouted it that it would work this time. As the conveyors ground to a halt again, my building came to rest directly in front of me. I stepped forward and entered it. I got to see it all even more clearly than I had on the night of David Simpson’s party—got to move around it, relishing its details: the concierge’s cupboard and the staircase with its worn floor, the black-and-white recurring pattern in it, the oxidizing wrought-iron banisters, the black handrail with its spikes. I saw the pianist’s door and the door of the lady who cooked liver, the spot beside it where she placed her rubbish as I passed her, my own flat above her with its open kitchen and its plants, its bathroom with a cracked wall and a window that looked out across a courtyard to a building with red roof tiles and black cats. I got to fully occupy it—not for long, but for a while, until the scene changed and I found myself inside a library negotiating travel prices with a grumpy waitress who was Yugoslavian.
In the morning, after I’d woken up, I started understanding why I hadn’t found my building in the four days