by Tom McCarthy
The place didn’t seem to have changed since I’d last seen it. It still had tyres lined up in a rack on the street outside and more tyres piled up on its roof beside the large-scale garish model baked-beans tin that advertised the next door café. The tyres were normal tyres, real ones, and looked miniature next to the giant tin, like toys. More tyres were leaning in stacks against the shop front, like you see at go-kart tracks. Behind these, painted announcements advertised special deals on tyres both new and part-worn or free fitting. On the pavement outside, a small rectangular contraption stood upright: a waist-high board skewered by a pole set into a heavy base. In the breeze the board span quickly round the pole, flashing two messages at passers-by in quick succession. Both messages said “TYRES”.
There was a more elaborate advertisement swaying around on the pavement a few feet away: a child dressed in a Michelin Man suit. The suit gave him an obese white tyre-girth that swayed as he moved. He was maybe ten, eleven. I could tell it was a boy because he wasn’t wearing the suit’s head. Two older boys had this: these two were standing by the tyre shop’s entrance, kicking the head to one another like a football. As I pulled up they stopped kicking it and sauntered over to my car. They looked at my tyres very earnestly, craning their necks in an exaggerated way—imitating their parents, doubtless, or whoever it was that owned this shop.
I stepped out of the car. “You’ve got a dent,” the oldest boy said. He must have been fifteen.
“I know that,” I told him. “That’s not why I’m here. I’m here because I’ve got a flat tyre.”
The slightly younger boy who’d been kicking the head with him had moved round the car to check the tyres on the passenger side.
“It’s in the boot,” I told them.
I walked round to the back of the car and opened it up. The two boys peered inside, like gangsters in movies—in those scenes where the gangsters open up a car boot in which they’ve stashed a body or a cache of guns. These boys were thinking of those scenes too as I opened up the boot for them: I could tell. They peered in; then the oldest one reached in and lifted the tyre out. The younger tried to help him, but he brushed his hand aside. The youngest one, the one in the Michelin Man suit, had waddled over and tried to join in, but the middling one shoved him away again.
“You’re meant to stand out in the street!” he told him, raising his voice.
“You’re not in charge of me!” the youngest one shouted back.
“Shut up, both of you!” the oldest told them.
The middling one looked down. His face flushed red with hurt. The youngest one swaggered triumphantly beside him in his suit. The oldest boy carried the tyre into the shop. I followed him. The middling boy slouched in behind me but stayed in the doorway, keeping the youngest out. There was no one else in the shop.
“Where are the real people?” I asked.
“I’m real,” the oldest boy said. He looked offended.
“You know…the…the owners,” I said.
“Off to lunch,” he answered.
“Café next door,” added the middling one.
“Well, I could come back when…” I began—but stopped because the oldest boy had dunked my tyre into a tub of water and was slowly turning it round. He seemed to know what he was doing. He stared into the murky water, his eyes taut with concentration. I stared too: it was absorbing, watching the tyre’s bottom edge entering the water and slowly revolving. After a few seconds the boy stopped turning it and pointed:
“There’s your puncture,” he said.
I followed his finger with my eye. Bubbles of air were rising from a silvery slit on the rubber’s surface. It was like mineral water, only dirty.
“Will they be able to fix it?” I asked. “When they come back, I mean.”
“I can fix it,” said the boy.
He hoisted the tyre out of the water and carried it over to a kind of lathe. The tyre was pretty big in proportion to him: he had to half-support it with his knee. Black grime was rubbing off it onto his clothes, which were already smeared with grime all over. He sat down at the lathe and pressed a pedal with his foot, which made a series of clamps tighten round the tyre. Then his foot pressed another pedal and the tyre deflated with a bang. He started daubing glue on from a tin. His hand moved quickly as he did this, dipping and daubing, flashing the brush one way then another. The exaggerated manner he’d had when he sauntered over to the car was gone, eclipsed now by his earnest concentration, his artisanal skill. The middling boy watched him from a few feet away. The youngest boy watched too. The eyes of both of them were full of admiration—longing, almost—as they watched him flick the brush.
He pressed a pedal with his foot; the lathe revolved a quarter-turn between his hands, and he brushed an adjoining spot with glue. He pressed another pedal, and the wheel turned back for him to brush the spot on the other side of the puncture. When he’d brushed all he wanted, he dipped his hand into the tub again, scooped up some water and patted this on the tyre while the three of us stood still, reverent as a congregation at a christening, watching him at his font.
Effortlessly the boy’s hand rose and flipped a lever at the lathe’s side. The lathe hissed as its clamps released my wheel and glided back. The same hand reached up to beside his shoulder to take hold of a blue tube. The tube was hanging just beyond his field of vision, but the hand didn’t need help: it knew just where it was. Its fingers jabbed the tube into my tyre and its thumb depressed a catch; air started flowing into it. A minute later the tyre was mended, inflated and rolling across the tarmac back towards my car. He took it to the boot again and lifted it back in.
“Shouldn’t we put it back on?” I asked. “Drive on it, I mean?”
“No. Keep it as a spare,” he said. “You should rotate them.”
“Rotate, yes,” I said. “Okay.”
He could have told me anything and I’d have said “Okay”. I stood there looking at him for a while longer. We all did. A truce seemed to exist now between the other two boys. After a while I asked him:
“Shall I pay you, then, or…”
“Yes. Pay me,” he said. “Ten pounds.”
I paid him ten pounds. I remembered that my windscreen washer reservoir was empty and I asked him for some fill-up. He glanced at the middling boy and slightly raised his chin; the middling boy ran into the shop and came out with a litre of blue liquid which he and the youngest boy poured into the windscreen washer reservoir for me, operating in sync together now, the youngest one holding the lid off while the middling one poured, then passing the lid over for the middling one to screw on while he, the youngest one, carried the empty bottle over to a bin. They closed the bonnet for me and I got back into my car.
Before I drove off I pushed the windscreen spurter button to make sure it worked. Liquid should have squirted out onto the glass, but nothing happened. I pushed it some more. Still nothing. I got out, opened the bonnet again and checked the reservoir. It was empty.
“It’s all gone!” I said.
The boys peered in. The oldest one got down on his knees and looked under the car.
“There’s no patch,” he said. “It hasn’t leaked. It should be there.” He turned to the middling boy and said: “Go get another bottle.”
Another bottle was brought out and poured into the reservoir. Once more I climbed inside the car and pressed the spurter button. Once more nothing happened—and once more, when we looked inside the reservoir, we found it empty.
“Two litres!” I said. “Where has it all gone?”
They’d vaporized, evaporated. And do you know what? It felt wonderful. Don’t ask me why: it just did. It was as though I’d just witnessed a miracle: matter—these two litres of liquid—becoming un-matter—not surplus matter, mess or clutter, but pure, bodiless blueness. Transubstantiated. I looked up at the sky: it was blue and endless. I looked back at the boy. His overalls and face were covered in smears. He’d taken on these smears so that the miracle could happen, like a Christia
n martyr being flagellated, crucified, scrawled over with stigmata. I felt elated—elated and inspired.
“If only…” I started, but paused.
“What?” he asked.
“If only everything could…”
I trailed off again. I knew what I meant. I stood there looking at his grubby face and told him:
“Thank you.”
Then I got into the car and turned the ignition key in its slot. The engine caught—and as it did, a torrent of blue liquid burst out of the dashboard and cascaded down. It gushed from the radio, the heating panel, the hazard-lights switch and the speedometer and mileage counter. It gushed all over me: my shirt, my legs, my groin.
10
I SHOULD HAVE JUMPED out of the car as fast as I could, but I sat there instead, letting the blue liquid gush all over me. When it had finished gushing it trickled, then dribbled, then dripped. I sat impassive while it ran itself out. It took a long time: even when it seemed to have dripped itself dry it still managed to grind out another half-drip a few seconds later, and another half-half-drip a few seconds after that.
Slowly, tentatively, the three boys edged over to the car and peered in. The youngest one gasped when he saw my trousers soaked in the sticky blue liquid. The other two said nothing: they just stared. I stared too: we all stared at the dashboard and my legs. We stayed there, static like that, for a long while. Then I drove back to my building.
When I got there, I took off my wet clothes and had a bath. I lay in my bath looking at the crack and thinking about what had happened. It was something very sad—not in the normal sense but on a grander scale, the scale that really big events are measured in, like centuries of history or the death of stars: very, very sad. A miracle seemed to have taken place, a miracle of transubstantiation—in contravention of the very laws of physics, laws that make swings stop swinging and fridge doors catch and large, unsuspended objects fall out of the sky. This miracle, this triumph over matter, seemed to have occurred, then turned out not to have done at all—to have failed utterly, spectacularly, its watery debris crashing down to earth, turning the scene of a triumphant launch into the scene of a disaster, a catastrophe. Yes, it was very sad.
I lay there in my bath replaying the event in my mind, scouring its surfaces. There’d been the garish model tin and piled-up tyres, the spinning sign, the swaying tyre-suit of the youngest boy, the lathe with its clamps and pedals and the blue tube full of air. I remembered how the boy had carried the tyre from my car boot to the shop, how grime had rubbed onto his shirt; then how his hands had whipped around it daubing glue on, re-inflating it. I lay for so long remembering that the bath turned cold and my skin wrinkled. After an age I got out and phoned Naz.
“I’d like you to facilitate another project I’m considering,” I said.
“Certainly,” Naz replied. “Tell me about it.”
“I should like a certain area,” I said, “to be reproduced exactly.”
“A small section of the building?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Another place. A tyre repair shop.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Naz said. “If you tell me where it is, I’ll give Roger a call right now and get him to knock you up another model.”
“It’s not a model I require,” I told Naz. “It’s a full-scale reproduction. I should like Roger to reproduce this tyre shop exactly, down to the last detail. Furthermore, I shall require re-enactors to run through a certain event which I’ll outline later. These re-enactors must be children: three of them, aged fifteen, thirteen and eleven. Plus one man of my age. Four people in all, plus back-up. I shall require them to run through this event constantly, round the clock.”
There was a pause at Naz’s end. I pictured his office in the blue-and-white building, how the desks were laid out, the telescope by the window. After a while he said:
“How can they do that?”
This was a good question, but I had the answer:
“We’ll have several teams,” I told him, “relieving one another, in relay.”
“In relay?” he said.
“Yes,” I answered. “We rotate them.”
There was another pause at Naz’s end. I concentrated on his office again, clasping the phone. Eventually he answered:
“Fine.”
His people found a warehouse out at Heathrow. It was on the outskirts of the land owned by the airport—one of a row of old hangars for small private aircraft that the corporation running the whole place hired out. It was large enough to contain a full-scale reproduction of the tyre shop itself—including roof with tyres and garish model baked-beans tin—and of the road outside it where the boy in the Michelin Man suit had swayed beside the spinning sign that said “TYRES TYRES”—and where, of course, the sticky liquid had exploded from my dashboard and cascaded over me.
They also paid the real tyre people, the men who’d been inside the café when the episode had happened, half a grand—nothing—to let Roger, Frank and Annie come and detail everything about the shop: the layout of the shelves, the products on them, their positions, age and state of wear, the dimensions of the garish model baked-beans tin, the lathe inside with its pedals and its clamps, the blue tube full of air and so on. The instruments all had to work, of course. The owner of the real tyre place, a round man of forty-odd, came out and taught us how to use all the equipment. He trained up a team of ten fifteen-year-old boys until they knew how to dip tyres in water and look out for silky bubbles, how to clamp and turn the wheel with their feet while daubing glue on, how to reach their hand behind them to collect the tube of air and guide it to the valve without needing to turn their heads. It took a while.
As far as positions and movements were concerned: I took care of these myself, as before. I showed the Michelin Man boy re-enactor where to stand and sway, and the other two how to kick his head between them. I made them kick it with a minimum of movement, hammering it with their legs mechanically, like zombies or robots. The driver, the person re-enacting my role, had to get out slowly. Like the concierge, he wore a white ice-hockey goaltender’s mask, so as not to overrun my personality with his—or, more precisely, so as not to impose any personality at all. I just wanted the motions and the words, all deadpan, neutral—wanted the re-enactors to act out the motions without acting and to speak the words without feeling, in disinterested voices, as monotonous as my pianist. The oldest boy had to take the tyre from the boot, carry it over to the lathe and fix it; the middling one had to attempt to help him lift it and the oldest had to push his hand away; the youngest one had to come over and then lurk outside the door. I showed them where to step, to lift, to kick, to stand. Most of the time they only had to stand, completely static.
We were ready to go after ten days. I’d had a raised viewing platform built, a little like an opera box, because I’d enjoyed watching the action in my building from above and wanted to have a similar option here. I’d established that I might roam around the re-enactment area itself, and that the re-enactors shouldn’t be put off by this. I chose to begin watching the re-enactment from the platform, though. At some point in the afternoon of the tenth day after the original event, Naz signalled up to me that everything was ready; I nodded back down to him and it began.
A strong fan was switched on in front of the TYRE-TYRE sign, to make it spin. Seconds later the blue Fiesta drove slowly across the warehouse floor past the Michelin Man boy and pulled up next to where the two older boys were kicking his head to one another. The driver, wearing a white ice-hockey mask, stepped out. Slowly, in a monotone, the oldest boy intoned the words:
“You’ve—got—a—dent.”
There was a pause before the driver answered:
“I—know—that—that’s—not—why—I’m—here.”
There was another pause. This was good, very good. They were avoiding all eye contact with one another, just as I’d instructed them. I experienced a sensation that was halfway between the gliding one I’d felt when my liver lady
had spoken to me on the staircase during the first re-enactment in my building and the tingling that had crept up my right side on several other occasions. This mixed sensation grew as we reached the part where the boy intoned the words:
“I—am—real.”
When the sticky blue liquid exploded, I’d meant to leave my box and go down to the car to watch, but found myself fixated where I stood. I could see the re-enactor playing me splattered in the driving seat: his legs spread, his arms raised beside the wheel, his body powerless as the two litres descended on it. The mixed sensation grew still stronger, and I was riveted to my spot on the platform. I made it down the second time round, when the sensation had subsided. This time I stood beside the car and watched the liquid gush out. Frank and Annie had created a whole mini plumbing system in the car, that siphoned the blue liquid off into a sack which was triggered to rupture when the engine was turned on a second time. It wasn’t gushing out quite right, but it was complicated. It took two more run-throughs to tweak that bit. There were other minor hitches: the air in the blue tube hadn’t been set at the right pressure; the spare tyre wasn’t dirty enough to stain the boy’s overalls adequately—pretty minor things. On the whole it went well—very well.
The first team ran through it six times. Each run-through took twenty minutes, give or take a minute either side, plus a change-over of six or so minutes. I didn’t mind the change-over: I kind of liked the pause, the hovering as the sequence clocked itself, ran through the zero, started again. The first team did it for three hours, then the second team took over. I watched them do it six times too, then watched the third team do it twice. In the small hours of the morning I decided to leave.
“Shall I tell them to stop?” Naz asked me as I put my jacket on.
