dance.
I pulled my head away and made to move on down—but hesitated when I noticed a small patch of black moving quite fast against the facing building. It was gone so quickly that I thought it must have been another optical effect, a quirk of the kinked glass. I tried to reproduce it by pressing my forehead back onto the window pane and pulling it away again, but couldn’t make the black patch reappear. I tried it several times without success. I hadn’t imagined it, though: there’d been a streak of black moving fast against the facing building.
Eventually I gave up and moved on down. As I hit the third step I heard a buzz or scrape that came from behind the liver lady’s door. It could have been a radio or it could have been her rubbish bag scraping the floor. An instant later came the jiggle of her latch; then the door opened and she shuffled out again, her rubbish bag in her hand. Once more she stooped to set her bag down, holding her left hand to her lower back as she did this; once more she looked up at me and pronounced her phrase:
“Harder and harder to lift up.”
I answered her as before. Again I felt the sense of gliding, of light density. The moment I was in seemed to expand and become a pool—a still, clear pool that swallowed everything up in its calm contentedness. Again the feeling dwindled as I left the zone around her door. As soon as I’d reached the third step of the next flight I turned round, as before, and said:
“Again.”
We did it again—but this time it didn’t work. She’d steered the rubbish bag through its horizontal arc around her legs and, stooping, started to lower it to the ground when suddenly it slipped out of her hand and fell with a loud clunk. She bent over to pick it up but I stopped her.
“Don’t bother,” I said. “It’s broken the…you know: it won’t be right. Let’s take it from the top again. Someone should clean that patch up, too.”
Her bag had leaked from its bottom right corner, leaving a wet, sticky-looking patch on the floor. Someone came out and mopped this up.
“It looks too clean now,” I said when they’d done this.
Annie came out again and looked.
“We’ll have to dust and sand it again,” she said.
“How long will that take?” I asked.
“A good hour till it looks just like it did before.”
“An hour?” I repeated. “That’s too…I need it to…”
My voice petered out. I was quite upset. I wanted to slip back into it now, right now: the pool, the lightness and the gliding. There was nothing I could do, though: it wouldn’t be right if the floor wasn’t the right texture. I gathered myself together and announced:
“Okay: do it. I’ll move on.”
I’d come back to the liver lady later. And besides, she was just part of the re-enactment: I had a lot still to do, a lot more space to cover.
I walked past the pianist’s flat. The sound of his music grew crisper and sharper as I passed his door, then once again soft and floaty as I moved down from his floor. On the landing below his I passed the boring couple’s flat. This is where the Hoover noise was coming from. The Hoover was being shunted back and forth across a carpet, by the sound of it. The wife re-enactor would be doing it. I moved on, through a patch of neutral space, down past the motorbike enthusiast’s flat. His clangings were still coming from the courtyard, but with less of an echo now: maybe the trees and the swings were getting in the way down here. I carried on down to the lobby.
Here the sensation started returning: the same sense of zinging and intensity. My concierge was standing as instructed—standing quite still in the middle of the lobby with her white ice-hockey mask on. Behind her, to her left—my right—there was a cupboard; beside that, another strip of white, neutral space. As I walked around her in a circle, looking at her from all sides, her stumpy arms and featureless face seemed to emanate an almost toxic level of significance. I cocked my head to one side, then the other; I crouched to the ground and looked at her from there. She looked like a statue in a harbour, towering above the granite—or a spire, a reactor, a communications mast. Being this close to her