“Yes, really like a sponge,” I said.
Then I was walking from the bank. I walked quite calmly. No one tried to stop me. They all ran and screamed and bumped and fell-but I had a cylinder around me, an airlock. I was walking calmly through the bank’s door, out into the daylight again. I was walking across the street, passing the yellow and white lines, the spot where the raised patch wasn’t. Then I was in the car again and it was pulling out, cutting an arc across the middle of the street, pausing, then gliding on. The street was rotating slowly round: the mothers with pushchairs and the traffic and the traffic wardens and the people at the bus stops and the other windows full of their reflections-rotating around me. I was an astronaut suspended, slowly turning, among galaxies of coloured matter. I closed my eyes and felt the movement, the rotation-then opened them again and was overwhelmed by sunlight. It was streaming from the sun’s chest, gushing out, cascading, splashing off cars’ wheels, bonnets and windscreens and off shop fronts, trickling along the road’s lines and markings, pulsing past people’s legs and along gutters, dribbling from roofs and trees. It was spilling everywhere, overflowing, just too much, too much to absorb.
“So maybe it’s okay for it to fall,” I said.
“Where are the others?” asked the driver re-enactor.
“They have the same texture,” I told him.
“They have what?” he asked. “What was the second gunshot?”
“The same texture,” I said. “Light and blood.”
Two of the other robber re-enactors had joined us in the car now: Five and Two I think, or maybe Five and One. Not Four, in any case. We turned and bumped into another car, paused for a moment and then glided on.
“He dented me and just drove off,” I told them. “The guy in Peckham. I was angry at the time, but that’s fine now, though. Everything’s fine-even the shard in my knee. The half.”
It was fine-all of it. I felt very happy. We’d left the main road and were weaving through side streets, the same ones we’d practised weaving through two days ago. The same trees lined the road on both sides-oaks, ashes and plane trees whose red, brown and yellow leaves were merging again into a flow of colour; some leaves were falling, flickering in the sunlight as they drifted downwards. There was one fir tree too, that wasn’t molting.
“A reciduous tree,” I told the others, pointing it out as we passed it.
They weren’t listening to me. They seemed very unhappy. They were shouting at the driver re-enactor, screaming at him, telling him the whole thing had been real and not a re-enactment, over and over again. I turned to them and told them:
“But it was a re-enactment. That’s the beauty of it. It became real while it was going on. Thanks to the ghost kink, mainly-the kink the other kink left when we took it away.”
This didn’t seem to calm them down at all. They shouted, yelped and whimpered as we drove on through the falling coloured leaves. One of them kept asking what they should all do now.
“Oh, just carry on,” I told him. “Carry right on. It will all be fine.”
I remembered saying this to the boy on the staircase. I recalled his worried face, his satchel and his shoes. I looked straight at the re-enactor who’d asked me the question, smiled at him reassuringly and said:
“You can’t go back there. They won’t understand. Come on with me and everything will be resolved.”
I think he understood that I was right. Of course he couldn’t go back to the bank. What would he do? Explain that it had all been a performance? Throw in the stuff about fridge doors and cigarettes and carrots and De Niro for good measure? He didn’t even know about all that, and didn’t look as though he could have articulated it very coherently even if I’d briefed him on it. He was pretty agitated. They all were. They moaned and wept and yelped and shrieked. I listened to them for a while, trying to work out the rhythm of the various sounds, the moans and wails and yelps-which followed what, how long it took for the whole sequence to repeat itself-but gave up after a while. It was too complex to pin down right now; I’d have to get it re-enacted later. I looked back out of the window at the merging, falling leaves. These faded into concrete, into bridges, stilts and over-passes as we merged with the motorway past Shepherd’s Bush. The concrete, too, was merging, flowing all around us, tilting and swivelling above us, inclining away below, dwindling and disappearing, then emerging again a little later to flow back, converge-these flowing blocks, these columns, all this matter.
Naz met us at the warehouse. He was standing outside it, just inside the compound gates. He opened the car door and looked at me.
“You’ve got blood on you!” he said.
“Money, blood and light,” I told him, beaming as I stepped out of the car. “Naz, it was brilliant!”
Naz stuck his head inside the car where the wailing, yelping re-enactors were still sitting. When they started wailing at him, telling him what had happened, a strange change came over him. It wasn’t dramatic or hystericaclass="underline" it was more like a computer crashing-the way the screen, rather than explode or send its figures dancing higgledy-piggledy around, simply freezes. He pulled his head out of the car; his body stiffened and his eyes went into suspension while the thing behind them tried to whir. I watched him, fascinated, and saw straight away that it couldn’t whir any more: it had frozen. The others were haranguing him, shouting at him that he’d known, he’d set them up, Four’s dead, they’re murderers, this, that, the other. He just stood there on the tarmac, all locked up. The sunlight streamed around him, falling and cascading everywhere. When his eyes switched on again-half-on, as though in shut-down mode already-he asked where the other re-enactors were.
“Who knows?” I said, stepping into the warehouse. “En route, caught, still at the bank. I don’t know. Hey, nice work!”
The duplicate bank had been razed. You could still see where counters and walls had risen from the ground: their stumps were still there-those and a few bits of rubble, a few splinters, a few tears and holes. It was like a smashed-up and rubbed-over ground plan, a ghost replica. I ran my eyes slowly across its surface. I let them linger on the spot from which the tight-end accomplice re-enactor had peeled out, then on the spot where I’d stood, planted, as my gun had described an arc above the floor. I still had my gun now. I was standing in the spot where Robber Re-enactor Two had stood, facing the counters and the airlock. I raised the gun’s barrel with my left hand and made it describe an arc again, slowly sweeping it from side to side. I ran my eyes on to where the lift had borne up the three bags for us to carry; then I ran them back across the ground where the carpet had been, projecting back onto this bare concrete floor its golden lines, the way they turned and cut against the red, repeating.
I glided my eyes over it at a low altitude again-but this time in reverse, the way Two would have seen it as the three of us approached him with our bags. He, too, would have seen Five’s foot feeling for the kink, then seen him topple, seen his torso hurtling towards him, borne by its own momentum. He also would have known that a collision was imminent, that nothing could be done to stop it. Two, the real Robber Re-enactor Two, had come into the warehouse. He’d entered, like I had, from the spot where the duplicate lift had been, the inner area. He was crying, lumbering forwards slowly, aimlessly. I’d got so into replaying the whole event from his perspective that I’d started to overbalance. I let my left leg come up and my left hand leave my shotgun’s barrel; I sucked my stomach in and hunched my shoulders forwards; I let my right leg buckle, straighten and then keel over backwards, carrying the rest of me with it-carrying all of me except my right hand, which stayed raised, its palm still wrapped around the shotgun’s butt, its index finger hooked across the trigger.