Nobody did. After a while I walked around the sports track, passed beneath a railway bridge and came to the building from the front.
Oh yes: it was my building. My own, the one that I’d remembered. It was big and old and rose up seven floors. It was off-white at the front too, with windows but no balconies. Its main entrance had a kind of faded grandeur: wide, chequered steps ran from the street to a double doorway above which was carved in stone relief the building’s name: Madlyn Mansions.
I stood in the street looking at my building. People were coming and going through the double doors pretty regularly: normal-looking people, old and young, half white and half West Indian. Residents. After a while I walked up the chequered steps to the door and peered inside.
The building had a lobby. Of course. Almost straight away I saw my concierge’s cleaning cupboard—the one I’d sketched out in my diagram, with broom and mop and Hoover leaning across one another inside. It was six or so feet to the right of where it should have been, but it was the right kind of cupboard. On the lobby’s other side was a little concierge’s booth: a cabin with a sliding window in it. I could see a concierge, a small black man, talking to someone inside the cabin. Both these men’s backs were turned on the main doors—which opened now as a middle-aged West Indian man came out and, seeing me standing there, held one of them for me.
“You going in?” he asked.
I glanced towards the concierge again: his back was still turned.
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
I took the door from the West Indian man and stepped into the lobby.
The street’s sounds disappeared, replaced by the hollow echo of this tall, enclosed space. The sudden change felt like it does inside an aeroplane that suddenly descends, or when a train enters a tunnel and your ears go funny. There were footsteps echoing from somewhere up above and then the murmur of the voices of the concierge and the man he was talking to. The lobby’s floor was grainy—maybe granite. It wasn’t quite right, but I’d be able to change it. I strode quickly and lightly over it, still glancing at the concierge. He was more of a porter than a concierge, but I’d change that too. I’d replace him: it had to be a woman. I could picture her body now: it was middle-aged and pudgy. Her face was still blank.
At the far end of the lobby from the street doors the floor turned into a large, wide staircase. This was perfect. The patterning on its floor wasn’t right either—but the dimensions were perfect. The banister was too new, but I’d get it ripped out and replaced in no time. Looking up, I saw it dwindling and repeating as it turned into each floor. I stood at its base for a moment, watching it dwindling and repeating. It was exciting: the motorbike enthusiast’s flat was just a floor away, the pianist’s only two; two floors above that was the liver lady. I could even see the edges of my own landing as I craned my head back and looked up. I felt a tingling start up in my right side.
Eventually I looked down again and saw a door at the foot of the staircase. Above the door, carved in relief just like the building’s name above the front door, only slightly smaller, was the word Garden. I tried this door: it was open, and I stepped into a courtyard. Perfect too: it was large, with trees and bushes, enclosed on all four sides by buildings, by their backs. To my left were several sheds; I’d have those pulled down to make way for the patch of ground the motorbike enthusiast would use. When I stepped further out into the courtyard and turned round to look up at the building, I could see the pianist’s window; three floors above that, the windows to my bathroom and my kitchen. The building facing mine on the courtyard’s far side was similar to mine—equally tall but not identical.
“Good,” I said quietly to myself. “Very good. What colour are its roofs, though?”
This question couldn’t be answered straight away: from here the angle up to the facing building’s roof was too sharp to see the slates, or whether their level rose and fell. I could see hut-like bits protruding from it, though, their tops. That was good too, I