some event, to have left this mark. After we’d finished practising one day I went over to it, crouched beside it, poked it with my finger. It was hard, but not brash or unfriendly. Its surface, viewed from just an inch away, was full of little pores—cracked, open, showing paths leading to the growth’s interior.
“It’s like a sponge,” I said.
“What’s that?” asked Samuels, who’d appeared beside me.
“Like a sponge. Flesh. Bits.”
Samuels looked down at the patch, then told me:
“Nazrul wants you to go with him somewhere.”
This was the day, Naz reminded me as we sat in the car being driven back to Chiswick, on which we were to tell the driver re-enactors that we’d switched the re-enactment’s scene back to the actual bank.
“They’re Layer Two, remember?” Naz said. “They have to practise driving through the streets. The story they’ve been given is Story Three, Version One—which it is vital not to mix with Version Two.”
“Fine,” I told him. “Whatever.”
We practised driving through the streets around the real bank. We only did the turning, cutting and stopping bit immediately outside the bank one time, and even then in a subdued way so as not to attract attention—but all the other streets we wove through time and again. It was autumn; trees were turning brown, yellow and red. If I let my eyes glaze over and unfocus the colours merged into a smooth, continual flow. In a few weeks, I thought to myself, the leaves would fall, then lie around in piles until someone carted them away.
“Like artichokes,” I said.
“This is Route Seven,” Naz was telling Driver Re-enactor One. “Route Seven, Version A. Remember that.”
“Or they might just decompose. Merge with each other and the tarmac.”
“At this point,” Naz said, “you can switch over to Route Eight, depending on the variables. There are three…”
“Leaves leave marks too, sometimes,” I said. “Outlines on the tarmac, their own skeletons. Like photos. Or Hiroshima. When they fall.”
Later, as we were driven back towards the warehouse, Naz said to me:
“Two days to go. The mechanism is being set in place this evening.”
The image of the plane dehiscing played across my mind again. I watched it, smiled, then looked back out of the car’s window. The West London traffic was slow. I turned my head forward and stared through the sound-proof glass at the chauffeur’s shoulders. He’d soon be dematerialized as well. I felt very affectionate towards this man. I stared hard at his jacket, letting its blue curves and wrinkles sink into my mind so that I’d remember them afterwards, when he was gone. We passed Shepherd’s Bush, then broke out onto the motorway and speeded up. As we did, Naz turned to me and asked:
“When was it that you came into contact with cordite, then?”
“Cordite?” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been near cordite.”
16
THE DAY CAME, finally. Then again, perhaps it didn’t.
In one sense, the actions we’d decided to perform had all happened already. They’d happened countless times: in our rehearsals at the warehouse, in the robbery training drills the real bank staff and real security guards had been through, and in the thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even millions of robberies that had taken place ever since mankind first started circulating currency. They’d never stopped happening, intermittently, everywhere, and our repetition of them here in Chiswick on this sunny autumn afternoon was no more than an echo—an echo of an echo of an echo, like the vague memory of a football being kicked against a wall somewhere by some boy, once, long after the original boy has been forgotten, faded, gone, replaced by countless boys kicking footballs against walls in every street of every city.
In another sense, though, it had never happened—and, this being not a real event but a staged one, albeit one staged in a real venue, it never would. It would always be to come, held in a future hovering just beyond our reach. I and the other re-enactors were like a set of devotees to a religion not yet founded: patient, waiting for our deity to appear, to manifest himself to us, redeem us; and our gestures were all votive ones, acts of anticipation.
I don’t know. But I know one thing for sure: it was a fuck-up. It went wrong. Matter, for all my intricate preparations, all my bluffs and sleights of hand, played a blinder. Double-bluffed me. Tripped me up again. I know two things: one, it was a fuck-up; two, it was a very happy day.
To start,