car, I suppose. It was quite long and had these doors that opened in the middle of the back. It wasn’t ostentatious, though—and anyway I only had it because my Fiesta wouldn’t have taken a desk and fax machine. As soon as everything was up and running I’d get rid of this car and go back to the Fiesta.
Greg stood on my steps, a few feet from me.
“So,” he said. “What’s new? You haven’t called me in six weeks.”
“I’ve been…” I told him, “you know…busy.”
“Doing what?” asked Greg.
“Getting ready to move into a new place.”
“Where?” he asked.
“The other side of Brixton,” I said.
“Other…side…of Brixton,” he repeated.
“Yes,” I said.
We stood there facing one another. After a while I said:
“I’ve got to pick up this tile catalogue, and then go off to a meeting.”
Greg looked past me into the car where Naz was sitting.
“Sure,” he said. “Well…”
“I’ll give you a call,” I told him as I walked past him into my flat. “Later this week. Or early next.”
I didn’t call him—not that week, nor the next, nor the next one either. My project was a programme, not a hobby or a sideline: a programme to which I’d given myself over body and soul. The relationships within this programme would be between me and my staff. Exclusively. Staff: not friends.
Soon after that day we moved our central office from Covent Garden to Brixton. Our activities were pretty localized there by this point. We rented the top floor of a modern blue-and-white office building a few streets away, just off the main drag. It looked modern and official in a dated kind of way—like some Eastern European secret-police headquarters. There were metal blinds drawn crookedly across most of its windows when we took it over, and metal tubes emerging from its sides—air ducts, laundry chutes, who knows what. On the roof were aerials, antennae. Naz set up his headquarters and coordinated things from there while I spent more and more time in my building itself, working on the smaller details with the staff members to whom specific areas of the project had been delegated.
Annie came to play more and more of an important role the further the project progressed, as I mentioned earlier. She and I would run around together finding the right brooms and mops, say, for the concierge’s cupboard. Or we’d get in ashtrays for the hall and work out where to place them, then find that their position clashed with the way doors opened, so have them moved again. Working out compatibility became our main activity. With the piano, for example: this had been delivered and installed, but we still had to find the right degree of absorbency for its flat’s walls. Too much and I wouldn’t hear it at all; too little and it wouldn’t be muffled enough—it had been slightly muffled when I’d first remembered it. To fine-tune things like this we needed everyone to be in sync: the drillers to stop drilling, hammers hammering, sanders sanding and so on, while the pianist started playing.
“How’s that?” Annie asked me as we stood in my flat listening to the music.
“It’s fine,” I said. “But is his window open or closed right now?”
“Is his window opened or closed?” Annie repeated into a two-way radio.
“Closed,” the reply came.
“Closed,” she repeated to me.
“Tell them to open it now,” I said.
“Open it up now,” she repeated.
And so on. We went through several episodes like that. Two-way radios came into play a lot. Mobiles had been good for one-on-one communication, but by now we often needed one-to-several—several-to-several too. So I’d telephone Naz over in his headquarters, and Naz would radio three of our people while he talked to me; then one of them would radio Annie and she’d radio Naz on another channel, and he’d call me back; or I’d call Annie and she’d radio her back-up, or—well, you get the picture. By the final stages, Annie had four support staff directly under her: their radios were tuned to her frequency exclusively.
You could see Naz’s office from the top floors of my building—and, of course, vice versa. We had a telescope installed beside Naz’s main window—a powerful one. Naz had wanted to use CCTV, but I’d told him no: I didn’t want cameras anywhere. I’d made them take away the one mounted at the side gate by the sports track that I’d stood by on the day I’d first discovered the building. The only camera I allowed on site was Annie’s Polaroid. She used it