by Tom McCarthy
“I don’t care what you’re paying me,” he shouted. “It will destroy me professionally if this gets out. It’s just so ugly!”
We had to fire him. He sued us. Marc Daubenay came in and dealt with him. I don’t know how it turned out. Perhaps the case is still running today, who knows.
So in the end we found a set designer. It was Naz’s idea: a brilliant one. Frank, his name was. He’d designed sets for movies, so he understood the concept of partial décor. Film sets have loads of neutral space—after all, you only have to make the bit the camera sees look real; the rest you leave unpainted, without detail, blank. Frank brought a props woman called Annie with him. She turned out to be vital in the later stages.
Matthew Younger came once to the building during the setting-up period. I’d had him sell four million pounds worth of stocks when I’d first bought the building. It had cost just over four in all: the three and a half price tag, plus conveyancing fees, stamp duty and all that stuff, plus the bribes of two grand each we’d given some of the long-standing tenants to get them to waive their rights and move straight out. Only two had refused, and they’d both changed their minds within a week. I didn’t enquire how they’d been persuaded.
The amazing thing, though, is that by the time Matthew Younger visited me on the site a few weeks later, my portfolio’s value had risen back almost to the level it had been at before he’d sold the shares.
“It’s like yoghurt,” I said, “or a lizard’s tail, that grows back if you yank it off.”
“Speculation!” he said, smiling from ear to ear. His voice boomed up the stairwell, zinging off the loose iron banisters that were being ripped out one by one. They’d looked right in the catalogue, but didn’t any more once we’d installed them, so they were being ripped out and replaced. “The technology and telecommunications sectors are experiencing a boom just now,” he went on. “They’re going stratospheric. This is great, but you must understand that your level of exposure is enormous.”
“Exposure,” I repeated. “I like exposure.” I turned the palms of my hands outwards and raised them both—almost imperceptibly, but still enough to feel a muffled tingling in my right side.
“I’ve prepared you a chart,” said Matthew Younger, taking a large piece of paper from his dossier, “that takes the mean performance of these aggregated sectors over eight years. If you look…”
I felt another type of tingling on my upturned palms—not one coming from inside me but an exterior one, a sensation of lots of little particles falling on it. I looked up: granite crumbs were tumbling from the stairs above us.
“Let’s go outside,” I said.
I led Matthew Younger out into the courtyard. Swings were being installed that day. I hadn’t seen swings in my original vision of the courtyard—but they’d grown there later, as I thought about it further: a concrete patch with swings on and a wooden podium a few feet to its right. Workmen had laid down the cement and were now planting the swings’ bases in it while it was still wet. Matthew Younger held his map up against the sky.
“Look,” he said. “In this first four-year period this chart covers…just here, see?—they rose pretty sharply. But then here, over the next two years, they drop again—and just as sharply, even dipping lower than they were back here. From here they rise again, and from the time when we bought into them their upward thrust has been phenomenal. But if they choose to plummet again…”
“Is there any reason they should?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “All the signs suggest they’ll rise still more. But one can never completely second-guess the market.”
“Isn’t that your job?” I said.
“Well, of course,” he said. “To a large extent. But there is a small degree of randomness—a capricious element that likes occasionally to buck expectations, throw a spanner in the works.”
“A shard,” I said.
“I’m sorry?” he said.
“Go on,” I told him.
“Oh. Right. Well: caution—and above all diversification—can largely neutralize this element. Which brings us back to the question of exposure. Now if…”
“Shh!” I said, holding my hand up. I was looking at the jagged line that ran across his chart: how it jutted and meandered. As his lecture had moved off the figures and onto the randomness stuff he’d let the left side of his chart drop, so the value line was running vertically, like my bathroom’s crack. I let my eyes run up and down it, following its edges and directions.
Matthew Younger saw that I was looking at it and straightened it up.
“No!” I said.
“I’m sorry?” said Matthew Younger.
“It was better when you…Can I keep this chart?”
“Of course!” he boomed back. “Yes, have a proper look at it in your own time. I’ll leave you some stock profiles I’ve prepared here should you wish to diversif…”
His booming was drowned out by drilling coming through an open window on the second floor. Matthew Younger handed me the chart and then a wad of papers, then I showed him out.
“Could you have the word ‘speculation’ looked up?” I asked Naz as we were driven to a glazier’s that afternoon.
“Of course.” He took his mobile out and tapped in a text message.
The reply came ten minutes later:
“The faculty of seeing,” Naz read; “observation of the heavens, stars, etc.; contemplation or profound study of a subject; a conjectural consideration; the practice of buying and selling goods. From the Latin speculari: spy out, watch, and specula: watch tower. First citation…”
“Watch tower,” I said; “heavens: I like that. You could see the heavens better from a watch tower. But you’d be exposed.”
“Yes, I suppose you would,” Naz answered.
On the way back to my building from the glazier’s we detoured via my flat. I was still sleeping there while waiting for my building to be ready, but I was hardly ever there: I’d leave early each morning and return late at night, sleep for a few hours and then take off again. That morning I’d left a tiling catalogue behind; I told the driver to pass by there so that I could pick it up.
When we arrived there, Greg was ringing at my front door. I’d already got out of the car when I saw him—otherwise I might have made the driver drive me round the block and loop back a few minutes later. Greg turned round and saw me: I was trapped.
“My God!” Greg shouted. “Nice car dude!”
I didn’t say anything. It was a nice 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 to capture positions and arrangements: what was where in relation to what else. It was quicker than sketches or diagrams. More accurate too. If we’d got something just right but then had to move it while we carried something else through its space, Annie would take a Polaroid snap; then, when we wanted to reinstate whatever it was, we’d just stand in the position she’d taken the snap from holding up the photo while directing people to place such and such an object right, left, a bit further back and so on till it matched the photo. Smart, precise. She was a nice girl.
One afternoon I stood in Naz’s office gazing through the telescope. I gazed for a long time, watching people move around behind my building’s windows. Then I lowered it and gazed at trucks and vans coming and going. They were mostly going, taking stuff away. It amazed me how much had needed to be got rid of throughout the whole project: earth, rubble, banisters, radiators, cookers—you name it. For every cargo that arrived, large or small, another cargo had to be taken away. At least one. If it were possible to gather together and weigh everything brought in over the weeks of set-up and then do the same to everything that had been carried out, I’m pretty sure the second lot would weigh more. This would be true from the beginning, when we were dealing with skipfuls of clutter, right through to the end, when we went round picking up bits of paper with our fingers, making absolutely sure that everything apart from what was meant to be there was removed.
“Surplus matter,” I said, still gazing through the telescope.
“What’s that?” asked Naz.
“All this extra stuff that needs to be carted away,” I said. “It’s like an artichoke—the way there’s always more of it on your plate after you’ve finished than there was before you started.”
“I like artichokes,” said Naz.
“Me too,” I said. “Right now I do, at least. Let’s eat some for supper this evening.”
“Yes, let’s,” Naz concurred. He got onto his phone and told someone to go and buy us artichokes.
It really took shape in the final two weeks. The hallways had been laid, the courtyard landscaped and re-landscaped, the flats fitted or blanked out as my diagrams had stipulated. Now we had to concentrate on the minutiae. We had to get the crack right, for example: the crack in my bathroom wall. I still had the original piece of paper that I’d copied it onto back at that party—plus the diagrams that I’d transcribed it onto over the next twenty-four hours, of course. Frank and I and a plasterer called Kevin spent a long time getting the colour of the plaster all around it right.
“That’s not quite it,” I’d tell Kevin as he mixed it. “It should be more fleshy.”
“Fleshy?” he asked.
“Fleshy: grey-brown pinky. Sort of like flesh.”
He got there in the end, after a day-or-so’s experimenting.
“Not like any flesh I’ve seen,” he grunted as he smeared it on.
That wasn’t the end of it, though: when it dried it darkened, ending up a kind of silver brown. We had to backtrack and remix it so that it would turn out dry the colour that the last mix had when wet. Nor was that the end of it: we hadn’t realized how difficult it would be to get plaster to crack the way we wanted it to.
“I mix plaster so it won’t crack,” Kevin sniffed.
“Well, do wrong what you usually do right, then,” I said.
He mixed it much drier—but then cracks are sort of random: you can’t second-guess which way they’ll go. It took another day of experimenting: trying salt and razor blades and heat and all sorts of devices to get it to crack the right way. Kevin whistled the same tune for hours while he did this: a pop tune, one I thought I recognized. He didn’t whistle the whole tune—just one bit of it, over and over.
“What is it?” I asked him after several hours of whistling and crack-forming, rubbing over and reforming.
“What’s what?”
“That song.”
“History Repeating,” he said. “By the Propellerheads.” He raised his eyebrows and his voice climbed as he half-sang and half-spoke the line that he’d been whistling: “‘All, just-a, little, bit-of, history re-peat-ing.’ See?” Then, stepping back, he asked: “How’s that?”
“It’s quite nice,” I said. “I’ve heard it on the radio.”
“No,” Kevin said. “The crack.”
“Oh! Quite good. Not quite sharp enough, though.”
Kevin sighed and went at it again. Several hours later a scalpel dipped in a mix of TCP and varnish managed to cut and set it in the formation we wanted.
“Satisfied?” asked Kevin.
“Yes,” I answered. “But there’s still the blue and yellow patches to daub on.”
“Not my job,” Kevin said. “I’m out of here.”
We didn’t have much problem finding the right type of large taps for the bathtub—the problem was with making them look old. We had this problem often, as you might imagine: making things look old. The hallway had to be scuffed down with sandpaper and smeared with small amounts of grease-diluted tar. The banisters had to be bl
asted with vaporized ice to make them oxidize. And then the windows were too crisply transparent: the courtyard and the roofs didn’t look right through them. I couldn’t work out why at first, nor express what was wrong with them: I just kept telling my staff that the courtyard didn’t look right.
“So what’s not right about it?” asked the landscape gardener.
“Nothing’s not right about it: it’s the way it looks through these windows. Too crisp. That’s not how I remembered it.”
“Remembered it?” he asked.
“Whatever,” I said, waving him away. Annie came over and looked. She solved it instantly:
“It’s the type of glass,” she said. “Not old enough.”
Bingo. New glass is totally consistent, doesn’t gloop and run and crimp the things you see through it like old glass does. We had all the panes removed and older ones brought in.
My living room and kitchen came together nicely. We’d knocked interior walls down to get the right open-plan shape. Now we got cracking on the furnishings. I brought the right type of plants in—eventually. That Portuguese woman! Formidable: her voice, her stark physique. She stomped out of her van lugging these beautiful, lush, healthy ferns and spider plants that seemed to cascade out of white ceramic pots.
“These are no good,” I said to Annie. “They’re too lush, too green.”
“Waz wrong wiz zem?” the Portuguese plant woman thundered. “My planz healzy! My planz good!”
“I know they’re good,” I said. “That’s just the problem. I need old and shabby ones in tinny baskets.”
“Baskez no good for zem!” she said, slapping the back of her hand against my arm. “They needz zpaze, zupport. I know waz good for zem!”
