and went back to pondering methods of looking for my building in an irrational manner. I’d thought up so many by midday that I’d lost track of half of them. By early afternoon I’d realized that none of them would work in any case, for the good reason that implementing any one of them methodically would cancel its irrational value. I started to feel both dizzy and frustrated, and decided that the only thing to do was walk out of my flat with no plan at all in mind—just walk around and see what happened.
I left my flat, walked down the perpendicular street past my dented Fiesta, then turned into the ex-siege zone, passed the tyre place and café, then the phone box I’d called Marc Daubenay from. I walked to the centre of Brixton, the box junction between the town hall and Ritzy. Normally I’d have turned right to the tube at this point, but today I carried on up towards David Simpson’s road. I don’t know why: I felt like carrying on that way, is all. And then to stay south of the river: that felt sly. All Naz’s people were on the north side; anywhere south was well out of the search’s official radius, and therefore more fruitful hunting ground. If someone knows people are looking for him in a certain place, he finds another place to hide in.
I went up towards Plato Road, but ducked down a street parallel to it before reaching it. To go right back there might have short-circuited things, I reasoned. I turned right, then turned left to balance things up. Then I overshot a turning to the right but doubled back and took it after all. I came across some men laying wires beneath the street and stopped to watch them for a while. They were connecting wires to one another: blue, red and green ones, making the connections. I watched them, fascinated. They knew I was watching, but I didn’t mind. I had eight and a half million pounds, and could do what I wanted. They didn’t seem to mind either—perhaps because they could tell from how I watched them that I respected them. For me, they were Brahmins: top of the pile. More than Brahmins: gods, laying down the wiring of the world, then covering it up—its routes, its joins. I watched them for an age, then walked away with difficulty, really concentrating on each muscle, every joint.
A little after this I found a sports track. It was tucked into a maze of back streets and fenced in by knitted green wire. Inside the first fence another one caged in a beautiful green asphalt pitch. The pitch was multi-purpose. All sorts of markings cut and sliced across it: semicircles, circles, boxes, arcs—in yellow, red and white. It was beautiful for me, but to anyone else it would just have looked shoddy and run-down. Two smaller, decrepit cages stood at either end of this pitch: two football goals. Between the caged-in pitch and the green outer fence a red track ran. The tracks I’d seen in my coma had been like this one: red, with white lines marking out the lanes. A couple of loudspeakers were dangling from poles beside the track; they looked like they weren’t used any more, and probably didn’t work. I stood against the green fence, looking in and thinking about the commentaries I’d had to give during my coma. I stood there thinking for a while, then turned around—and saw my building.
It was my building alright. I knew that instantly. It was a large tenement building, seven floors tall. It was quite old—maybe eighteen nineties, nineteen hundred. It was a dirty cream colour. Off-white. I’d come to it from a strange angle, from the side, but I could see that it had large white windows and black drains and balconies with plants on them. These windows, drains and balconies repeated themselves as the side façade ran on, high and imperious, behind a wall, then turned away and out of sight. Oh, it was definitely mine.
The building had a compound round it, a kind of garden space, but I was separated from this by the wall. In front of me was an iron side door. I tried it: it was shut. It was one of those doors with an electronic keypad and a CCTV camera mounted above it. I moved out of the camera’s field of vision and waited to see if anyone would come through.