Remainder (11 page)

He looked up for an instant. He really looked miserable. Then his eyes dropped again and he said, only slightly more clearly:

“Can I have an advance? Against the first two weeks.”

I thought about that for a moment, then I answered:

“Yes, you can. Naz will see to that. Oh—but you’ll have to grow your hair out at the sides. Is that acceptable?”

His eyes moved slowly from one corner of their sockets to another, trying half-heartedly to catch a glimpse of the hair on either side of his pale head. They gave up pretty quickly; he looked down at the floor and nodded glumly again. He was perfect. He signed his contract, Naz gave him some money and he left.

Interior designers were the other nightmare group. We interviewed several. I’d explain to them exactly what I wanted, down to the last detail—and they’d take this as a cue to start creating décor themselves!

“What I’m getting from you is a downbeat, retro look,” one of them told me. “And that’s exciting. Full of possibilities. I think we should have faux-flock wallpaper throughout—Chantal de Witt does a fantastic line in this—and lino carpeting along the hallways. That’s what I’m seeing.”

“I don’t care what you’re seeing,” I told him. “I don’t want you to create a look. I want you to execute the
exact
look I’ll dictate to you.”

This one stormed out in a huff. Two others agreed in principle to execute the look I wanted but balked when it came to the blank stretches. I’d left blank stretches in my diagrams, as I mentioned earlier—stretches of floor or corridor that hadn’t crystallized inside my memory. Some of these had since come back, but others hadn’t, any more than the concierge’s face, and I’d decided that these parts should be blank in reality, with doorways papered and cemented over, strips of wall left bare and so on. Neutral space. Our architect loved this, but the designers found it quite repulsive. One of them agreed to do it, so we hired him; but when it came to actually realizing it he snapped.

“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.