I saw this councillor again, the next afternoon, or perhaps the one after that. I was feeling a lot stronger and had ventured out of my building to take some air beside the sports track. I was leaning by the knitted green wire fence watching a football team train. They were practising shooting: their coach placed ball after ball on the green asphalt surface among all the intersecting lines and circles and they ran up, one after the other, and kicked the balls into the goal, or tried to. Some of the balls missed, ricocheted back off the fence and got in the next shooter’s way. The coach was shouting at his players to encourage them:
“Project!” he told them. “Will it in the goal. Take your time. Slow each second down.”
This was good advice. You could see the ones who got the balls in breaking their movements into segments, really concentrating on each one. It wasn’t that they took more time than the ones who missed-rather that they made the same amount of time expand. That’s what all good sportsmen do: fill time up with space. That’s what sprinters are doing when they run a hundred metres in less than ten seconds: they’re expanding every second, every half-second, as though the moment were a cylinder around them and they were pushing its edges outwards so it takes in more track, more for them to run down before they reach the second’s edge. A boxer who can duck, feint, twist and lunge before his opponent even sees him move, or a batsman who can calmly read, decode and play the swing and bounce of the hurtling balclass="underline" they’re filling time up with space too. So are men who can catch bullets: it’s easy enough if you just give yourself enough room to manoeuvre in. Watching these football players shoot now, I felt a huge wave of sadness for the three men who’d been killed, and an even greater one at not having managed, in my re-enactments, to fill the instant of their death with so much space that it retrieved them, kinked them back to life. Impossible, I know, but I still felt responsible, and sad.
The coach had introduced a new rule: if a player missed, he had to run around the track that hemmed the football pitch in. Three or four of them were jogging round it sluggishly, beneath the broken loudspeakers.
“In his coma,” a voice beside me said, “he had to give a commentary.”
It was the short councillor again. He was standing by the fence beside me with his fingers poking through the diamond-shaped green holes. He must have been standing there for some time without me noticing him.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s true.” I didn’t remember telling him that bit, about the sports dreams in my coma as I lay unconscious in the weeks after the accident. “There was a format,” I said, “and I had to fill it, or I’d die.”
“And ever since that time he’s felt unreal. Inauthentic.”
“Yes,” I replied. I didn’t remember telling him that bit either, but I must have done and then forgotten that I’d told him as I slipped into my trance.
“So when, recently, has he felt most real?” the short councillor asked. “When has he felt least inauthentic?”
It was a very good question. I’d been so busy, so driven over the last few months, moving from project to project, from the building re-enactments to the tyre shop ones and then on to the shootings, that I hadn’t paused to take stock of them all, to compare and contrast them, to ponder the question: Which one has worked best? They’d all had the same goal, their only goaclass="underline" to allow me to be fluent, natural, to merge with actions and with objects until there was nothing separating us-and nothing separating me from the experience that I was having: no understanding, no learning first and emulating second-hand, no self-reflection, nothing: no detour. I’d gone to these extraordinary lengths in order to be real. And yet I’d never stopped and asked myself if it had worked. Naz had kind of asked me after the first building re-enactment-and the question had struck me as odd. The realness I was after wasn’t something you could just “do” once and then have “got”: it was a state, a mode-one that I needed to return to again and again and again. Opioids, Trevellian had said: endogenous opioids. A drug addict doesn’t stop to ask himself: Did it work? He just wants more-bigger doses, more often: more.
And yet it was a good question, coming as it did: here, in front of this caged-in sports pitch, from the short councillor. Venturing outside after days of trances I felt lucid, fresh, refreshed. The clang of footballs hitting the caged goal was sharp; his question sharpened my whole mind, turned me into a sportsman, made me slow time down, expand it, push its edges out and move around inside it. I thought back over the last months, and beyond: right back to Paris, to the feeling that I’d had with Catherine of getting away with something. I thought back over the serenity, the floating sensation that I’d felt when walking past my liver lady as she put the bin bag out; over my elation when the blue goop had seemed to have dematerialized and become sky; the intense and overwhelming tingling that had fulgurated when I’d opened myself up and become passive lying on the tarmac by the phone box and had stayed with me for days; I let my thoughts run right up to that same morning. And yet to the simple question When had I felt least unreal? the answer was not any of these times.
It was, it slowly dawned on me, another time: a moment that had come about not through an orchestrated re-enactment, but by chance-without back-up people, two-way radios, architects, police moles and forensic reports, without piano loops and licences and demarcated zones. I’d been alone: alone and yet surrounded by people. They’d been streaming past me, on the concourse outside Victoria Station. Commuters. I’d been going to see Matthew Younger: I’d come out of the tube just as rush hour was beginning, and commuters-men and women dressed in suits-had hurried past me. I’d stood still, facing the other way, feeling them hurrying, streaming. I’d turned the palms of my hands outwards, felt the tingling begin-and been struck by the thought that my posture was like the posture of a beggar, holding his hands out, asking passers-by for change. The tingling had grown; after a while I’d decided that I would ask them for change. I’d started murmuring:
“Spare change…spare change…spare change…”
I’d stood like this, gazing vaguely in front of me and murmuring spare change, for several minutes. Nobody had given me any; I didn’t need or want their change: I’d just received eight and half million pounds. But being in that particular space, right then, in that particular relation to the others, to the world, had made me so serene, so intense that I’d felt almost real. I remembered, standing next to the short councillor now, having felt exactly that way: almost real. I turned to him and said:
“It was when I was outside Victoria Station, looking for my stockbroker’s office, asking passers-by for change.”
The short councillor smiled-the type of smile that implied he’d known what my answer would be before I’d even given it.
“Demanding money of which he most certainly had no need,” he said. “That’s what’s made him feel most real.”
“Demanding money, yes,” I told him, “but also the sense of…”
“Of what?” he asked.
“Of being on the other side of something. A veil, a screen, the law-I don’t know…”
My voice petered out. The short councillor looked at me for a while, then said:
“Demanding money, having passed onto the other side, he says. The question follows: What will he do next?”
What would I do next? Another good question. It should be something like the scene outside Victoria that day. Perhaps I could just re-enact exactly that: hire the concourse and get my staff to be streaming commuters while I stood with my hands out facing them, asking them for change. I pictured it, but it didn’t really catch my imagination. Re-enacting it wouldn’t be enough: there’d be something missing, something fundamental.