I had an idea. I phoned Naz to tell him:
“I should like,” I said, “a model of the building.”
“A model?”
“Yes, a model: a scale model. Get Roger to make it.” Roger was our architect. “You know when you go into public buildings’ lobbies when they’re being developed and you see those little models showing how it’ll all look when it’s finished…”
“Ah yes, I see,” Naz said. “I’ll get on to him.”
Roger delivered the model to me a day and a half later. It was brilliant. It was about three feet high and four wide. It showed the courtyard and the facing building and even the sports track. There were little figures in it: the motorbike enthusiast next to his bike, the pianist with his bald pate, the liver lady with her headscarf and her snaky strands of hair, the concierge with her stubby arms and white mask. He’d even made a miniscule mop and Hoover for her cupboard. You could see all these because he’d made several of the walls and floors from see-through plastic. On the ones that weren’t see-through he’d filled in the details: light switches and doorknobs, the repeating pattern on the floor. The stretches of neutral space he’d made white. Sections of wall and roof came off too, so you could reach inside. As soon as Roger had left my flat I called Naz.
“Give him a big bonus,” I said.
“How much?” Naz asked.
“Oh, you know: big,” I told him. “And Naz?”
“Yes?”
“I’d like you to…Let’s see…”
The figures of the characters were moveable. I’d picked up the liver lady one while talking and was making it bobble down the stairs and out into the courtyard.
“I’d like you to get the liver lady to go down the stairs and visit the motorbike enthusiast.”
“Now?” he asked.
“Now,” I said, “yes.”
Two minutes later I was standing at my window watching her—the real liver lady—shuffling out into the courtyard. I dragged Roger’s model over to the window so I could see both it and the courtyard at the same time. I picked up the motorbike enthusiast figure and placed him on one of the swings.
“Now,” I told Naz, “I’d like the motorbike enthusiast to go sit on the swing closest to him.”
Not half a minute later I saw the real motorbike enthusiast look up towards my building’s doorway. He was talking to someone; I couldn’t hear what was being said because the pianist was playing his Rachmaninov—but then I didn’t need to. The motorbike enthusiast looked up towards my window, then rose to his feet, walked over to the swing and sat on it.
“I’d prefer him to kneel on it,” I told Naz.
“Kneel?”
“Yes: kneel rather than sit. He should kneel in exactly the same position as he kneels beside his bike in.”
The figure had been cast in that position. Its limbs didn’t move. A few more seconds, and the real motorbike enthusiast changed his position on the swing so he had one knee on the seat.
“And now…” I said. “The pianist! He can go and watch.”
I made the pianist figure do just that: cross over to his window and peer out. Seconds later the piano music stopped below me; then the sound of a chair being pushed back, then footsteps—then his real bald pate popped out of his real window. I lifted the model up and rested it against the window sill so I could look down on the model’s head poking out at the same time as I looked at the real one. The distance made them both look the same size.
Before I sent them all back to their posts, I had the motorbike enthusiast give the swing a hard push. As he did this I did the same thing to the model swing. I watched them both swing. The model swing swung about two and a half times for each time the real swing swung. It also stopped before the real one did. I stayed at my window for a long time, watching the diminishing movements of the real swing. I remembered wind-up musical toys, Fisher Price ones, how they slow down as their mechanism unwinds right out to its end, until it seems that no more music will come from them—but then if you nudge them just a little, they always give one last half-chime, and another half-half-chime, and still more, less and less each time, for up to hours—or weeks—after they first ground to a halt.
The next day I placed my model on my living-room floor. I moved the