road by a line of bollards, it looked like a sluice, a ramp, a runnel—one that opened to another place where there were no men with guns pointing at me. That’s why my man had chosen that direction. By the time he’d reached the dip into Belinda Road, passing the puddle into which his blood would soon flow, he’d have realized that he’d never make it out that way. That’s why he changed direction. I went over the bike’s handlebars this time serenely, calmly, taking time to greet the now familiar moments of landscape that came at me.
The sky, this time round, had become totally consistent, clouds running together into an unbunched white continuum. The black bar’s outer wall was detailed with reliefs and ridges and long lines of painted gold. The grill over the window of Movement Cars, reflected in the puddle and viewed from this angle, looked like the gridded ceiling of a dodgem ring. The letters were behind it. They weren’t Greek or Russian at all: they were the A and r of Airports reversed by the water’s surface. To the puddle’s left two bottle tops lay on the ground. I lay there looking at them. My man would have seen these too. They were beer bottle tops. He would have looked at them and thought about the men who’d drunk the beers and wondered why it couldn’t be him drinking them right now, these beers, off in some other place, around a table with friends perhaps, or at home with his family, instead of lying here being killed. Beyond these was a plastic shopping bag. On the bag’s side were printed the words Got yours? Just before I stood up for the last time I murmured, to the puddle, the white sky, the black bar and the pockmarked, littered road surface around me:
“Yes, I got mine.”
My two assassins took their time in killing me. The slowed-down pace at which they raised and fired their guns, the lack of concern or interest this seemed to imply, the total absence on my part of any attempt to escape although I had plenty of time to do so—all these made our actions passive. We weren’t doing them: they were being done. The guns were being fired, I was being hit, being returned to the ground. The ground’s surface was neutral—neither warm nor cold. Lying on it once more, I looked over at the phone box. It was horizontal now; the stencilled messenger was on his side, his arms spread out, a forensic outline just like I would be within an hour or so. I turned my head the other way. Everything was tilted: bollards leant away from me as they rose like plinths, like columns of temples or Acropolises. The black bar’s exterior ran diagonally down the street, the golden markings on it forming dots and dashes. Its fire doors were closed; two blue-and-white signs on them bore the words Fire Escape Keep Clear—two times, repeated. When I let my head roll slightly back, a bollard hid all these words except for one of the two Escapes. Would my man have seen this, just before the life dribbled out of him towards the puddle? Escape?
Above the word Escape, cloud, white and unbroken. There was no movement anywhere. I lay there doing nothing, staring. I lay there for so long that I wasn’t even staring any more—just lying there with my eyes open while nothing happened. Shadows became longer, deeper; the sky grew slightly darker, more entrenched. There was no noise anywhere, no noise at all—just the massed silence of whole scores of people waiting, like me, infinitely patient.
I never left. Not actively, at least. I have vague memories of being lifted, held above a bed of some sort, handled tenderly and delicately, but I can’t really trust these. All I can report with any degree of authority is that I found myself back in my living room some time later, and that that same doctor, or perhaps another one, was shining his little torch into my eyes.
13
I SPENT THE NEXT THREE DAYS drifting into and out of trances. They were like waking comas: I wouldn’t move for long stretches of time, or register any stimuli around me—sound, light, anything—and yet I’d be fully conscious: my eyes would be wide open and I’d seem to be engrossed in something. I’d remain in this state for several hours on end.
I know about these trances because Naz and Doctor Trevellian described them