Remainder

by Tom McCarthy

  I thought of the time Catherine and I had got into the boat on the embankment in Paris. It had been morning, a fresh blue one, and the sun had been opening these cracks of light up everywhere across the water—dancing, brilliant slits, opening. Now it was dusk. The city had that closing-ranks look, when it gathers itself up into itself but shuts you out. It was glowing, but it wasn’t heating me. As I sat there it occurred to me that I could go and stand on almost any street, any row, any sector, and buy it—buy the shops, the cafés, cinemas, whatever. I could possess them, but I’d still be exterior to them, outside, closed out. This feeling of exclusion coloured the whole city as I watched it darken and glow, closing ranks. The landscape I was looking at seemed lost, dead, a dead landscape.

  I didn’t want to go back home to Brixton. Catherine was out and about looking at the city too: museums, shopping, stuff like that. I didn’t feel like seeing her anyway. I walked along the embankment towards Waterloo, passing the back of St Thomas’s Hospital. Beside the large doors for supply deliveries and the caged-off refuse area, the staff parking spaces were marked out. Ambulance drivers were lounging beside their vehicles, smoking. Catering staff were wheeling trolleys around. I’d looked forward to that in hospital: the moment when the trolley comes. The conversation the person pushing it makes with you is banal and instantly forgettable, just like the food, but this is good because it means you can have the same conversation again a few hours later, and again the next day, and the next, and still look forward to it. Everything in hospital runs on a loop. I watched the trolleys clatter round their circuits from the kitchens to the wards’ back entrances, the bin bags piling up in the rubbish compound, the ambulance drivers and their vehicles, still between marked lines.

  Eventually I crossed the river again and walked up to Soho. On the corner where Frith Street cuts across Old Compton Street at an exact ninety-degree angle I noticed one of those Seattle-theme coffee shops I’d bought that cappuccino in while waiting to meet Catherine at Heathrow. I remembered that I had a loyalty card, and that if I got all ten of its cups stamped then I’d get an extra cup—plus a new card with ten more cups on it. The idea excited me: clocking the counter, going right round through the zero, starting again. I went inside and ordered a cappuccino.

  “Heyy! Short cap,” the girl said. It was a girl this time. “Coming up. You have a…”

  “Right here,” I said, sliding it across the counter.

  She stamped the second cup and handed me my cappuccino. I took it over to a stool beside the window. It was one of those long, tall windows that take up a whole wall. I sat up against it and watched people going by. It must have been around eight o’clock. Media types were leaving offices and club types were heading into bars and restaurants. Some people were wheeling a screen along the street—one of those baroque old folding screens with oriental decorations on it. There’d been screens like that in hospital—without the decoration, of course: just white folding screens they pulled around your bed when they wanted to turn you over or undress you. The people pushing the screen along Old Compton Street were maybe two or three years younger than me, in their middle to late twenties. They must have been taking it to or from one of the production company studios that are dotted around Soho. They looked like television people: they had short, dyed hair and Diesel and Evisu clothes and small, colourful mobiles in their spare hands and back pockets. I wondered if their phones were helping to project an imaginary future for one of the stocks I was buying into, to propel it upwards.

  I went and bought another cappuccino, got my card stamped a third time and came back to my window seat. The media types pushing the screen had paused in the middle of the street because they’d bumped into another group of media types who were sitting outside one of the other coffee shops. They were all calling over to one another, walking back and forth between the screen and the second coffee shop, waving, laughing. They reminded me of an ad—not a particular one, but just some ad with beautiful young people in it having fun. The people with the screen in the street now had the same ad in mind as me. I could tell. In their gestures and their movements they acted out the roles of the ad’s characters: the way they turned around and walked in one direction while still talking in another, how they threw their heads back when they laughed, the way they let their mobiles casually slip back into their low-slung trouser pockets. Their bodies and faces buzzed with glee, exhilaration—a jubilant awareness that for once, just now, at this particular right-angled intersection, they didn’t have to sit in a cinema or living room in front of a TV and watch other beautiful young people laughing and hanging out: they could be the beautiful young people themselves. See? Just like me: completely second-hand.

  I bought a third cap, got the fourth cup on my card stamped and came back to the stool by the window. The media types and their screen had gone. A car alarm went off a few streets away and continued beeping intermittently, at intervals of three or four seconds. Beside my bed in hospital there’d been a monitor and a plastic lung that had beeped and rasped at roughly the same interval. During the lightening of my coma—that’s their word for it, “lightening”—when my mind was still asleep but getting restless and inventing spaces and scenes for me to inhabit, I’d found myself in large sports stadiums, either athletics venues with tracks marked out on clay and asphalt running round them, or else cricket grounds with white crease and boundary lines painted on the grass. There’d been a commentary and I’d had to join in with it, commentate as well. I’d had to speak my commentary to the rhythm of these beeps and rasps or else I’d fade out of the scene. I’d known the situation was a strange one, that I was unconscious and imagining it, but I’d also known that I had to keep the commentary up, to fill the format, or I’d die.

  As I sat by my window watching people go by, I wondered which of them was the least formatted, the least unreal. Not me—that was for sure. I was an interloper on this whole scene, a voyeur. There were other people sitting behind windows too, in other coffee shops, mirroring me: interlopers too, all of them. Then there were tourists, shuffling awkwardly along and glancing at the people behind windows. Even lower down the pecking order, I decided. Then there were the clubbers. They were mostly gay—scene gay, with tight jeans and gelled hair and lots of piercings. They were like the media types with the screen: performing—to the onlookers, each other, themselves. They crossed from coffee shop to coffee shop, bar to bar, kissing their friends hello and clocking other men exaggeratedly, their gestures all exaggerated, camp. They all had tans, but fake ones, got on sunbeds in expensive gyms or daubed on from a tin. Theatrical, made up, the lot of them.

  I must have been on my sixth cappuccino when I noticed a group of homeless people. They’d been there all the time that I’d been watching, camouflaged against the shop fronts and the dustbins, but I started paying attention to them now, observing them. One of them was sitting wrapped up in a polyester sleeping bag with a dog curled up on his lap. His friends had a spot twenty or so yards up the street—three or four of them. They’d move from their spot intermittently to go and visit him, one at a time, sometimes two; then they’d turn around and head back for their own spot. I watched them intently for a long time. The further-up-the-street people would approach the wrapped-up dog guy with a sense of purpose, as though they had messages for him, important information. They’d impart their messages, then go away; but one of them would come back seven or so minutes later with an update. Sometimes they’d take over from him, filling in his spot while he and his dog sauntered up to theirs.

  I started seeing a regularity to the pattern of their movements, the circuits they made between the two spots, who replaced whom, when and in what order. It was complicated, though: each time I thought I’d cracked the sequence, one of them would move out of turn or strike out on a new route. I watched them for a very long time, really concentrating on the pattern.

  After a while I started thinking that these people, finally, were genuine. That they weren’t interlopers. That
they really did possess the street, themselves, the moment they were in. I watched them with amazement. I wanted to make contact with them. I decided that I would make contact with them. After the wrapped-up dog guy had sat back inside his sleeping bag for the fourth time and I could more or less safely predict that none of his friends would come over to him for seven or so more minutes, I got up from my stool, left the coffee shop and walked across the street to where he sat.

  His dog saw me coming first. It uncurled and perked up, looking at me all alert and sniffing. Then the wrapped-up guy looked up too. He must have been in his late teens. His skin was delicate, very pale with small red dabs on it where veins had burst beneath the surface. I stood in front of him for a while, looking down. Eventually I asked him:

  “Can I talk to you?”

  He looked up at me in the same way as his dog had: quizzically, excited and defensive at the same time.

  “You a Christian then?” he asked.

  “No. No, I’m not a Christian,” I said.

  “I don’t want no nothing from the Christians,” he said. “Make you pray before they feed you and all that. Big bunch of fucking hypocrites.” His voice was slow and drawn out, but quite nasal. It reminded me of strung-out rock stars from the Sixties—Bill Wyman, someone like that. I wondered if he was strung out too.

  “I’m really not a Christian,” I told him. “I just want to talk to you. I want to ask you something.”

  “What?” he said. His mouth stayed open after he’d pronounced the word.

  “I…” I began—then realized that I didn’t know exactly what it was I wanted to ask him. I said: “Can I buy you something to eat?”

  “Give us a tenner if you like,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “Let me buy you a meal. I’ll buy you a big meal, with wine and everything. What do you say?”

  He looked up at me with his mouth still hanging open, thinking. I wasn’t a Christian soul-hunter, and he could tell I wasn’t police. Then his face sharpened and he asked:

  “You ain’t no nonce, is you?”

  “No,” I said. “You don’t have to do anything. I just want to buy you a meal, and talk to you.”

  He scrutinized me for quite a bit longer. Then he closed his mouth, sniffed loudly, smiled and said:

  “Alright.”

  He stepped out of his sleeping bag, whistled to his friends up the street, signalled to one of them to come and take his place, then slapped his thigh and whistled again more quietly, to his dog this time. We headed off together, out of Soho onto Charing Cross Road, heading north. I took him to a Greek place just by Centre Point. The waitress, an old woman with big glasses, didn’t want to let his dog in at first. I handed her a twenty-pound note, told her it would behave itself and asked for a bone for it to gnaw on. We sat down and she brought him a big lamb bone which he chewed beneath the table quietly.

  “What would you like?” she asked. She was all smiles now, after the twenty pounds.

  I ordered a bottle of expensive white wine and mixed starters and asked for a few minutes to decide on our main course. She nodded, still smiling, and walked off to the kitchen.

  “Well!” I said. I leant back in my chair and drew my arms out wide. “Well!”

  My homeless person watched me. He picked up his napkin and fidgeted with it. After a while I asked:

  “Where are you from?”

  “Luton,” he said. “I came here two years ago. Two and a half.”

  “Why did you leave Luton?” I asked him.

  “Family,” he said, still picking at the napkin. “Dad’s an alkie. Beat me up.”

  The waitress came back with our wine. My homeless person watched her breasts as she leant over the table to pour it. I watched them too. Her shirt was unbuttoned at the top and she had nice, round breasts. She must have been about his age, eighteen, nineteen. We watched her as she turned and walked away. Eventually I raised my glass.

  “Cheers!” I said.

  He took his glass and drank from it in large gulps. He gulped down half of it, wiped his sleeve across his mouth, set the glass down and, emboldened by the alcohol already, asked me:

  “What do you want to know then?”

  “Well,” I said. “I want to know…Well, what I want to know is…Okay: when you’re sitting on your patch of street, sitting there wrapped up in your sleeping bag, with your dog curled up in your lap…You’re sitting there, and there are people going by—well, do you…What I really want to know…”

  I stopped. It wasn’t coming out right. I took a deep breath and started again:

  “Look,” I told him. “You know in films, when people do things—characters, the heroes, like Robert De Niro, say—when they do things, it’s always perfect. Anything at all. It could be opening a fridge, or lighting up a—no, say picking up a napkin, for example. The hero would pick it up, and give it a simple little flick, and tuck it in his collar or just fold it on his lap, and then it wouldn’t bother him again for the whole scene. And then his dialogue will be just perfect too. You see what I mean? If you or I tried that, it would keep slipping out and falling.”

  My homeless person picked his napkin up again. “You want me to tuck it in my shirt?” he asked.

  “No,” I told him. “That’s not the point. The point is that I wonder, I just wonder, whether you’re aware of this. When you sit on your corner.”

  “I don’t use no napkins when I eat,” he said.

  “No! I mean, that’s not what I mean. Forget the napkin. It was an example. What I mean is, are you…When you do things—talking with your friends, say, or asking passers-by for money—well, are you…”

  “I only ask them cos I can’t get any,” he said, putting down his napkin. “If I had a job I wouldn’t, would I?”

  “No, look,” I said, reaching my hand out across the table, “that’s…” but my hand hit the wine glass. The glass fell over and the wine sloshed out across the tablecloth. The tablecloth was white; the wine stained it deep red. The waiter came back over. He was…She was young, with large dark glasses, an Italian woman. Large breasts. Small.

  “What do you want to know?” my homeless person asked.

  “I want to know…” I started, but the waiter leant across me as he took the tablecloth away. She took the table away too. There wasn’t any table. The truth is, I’ve been making all this up—the stuff about the homeless person. He existed all right, sitting camouflaged against the shop fronts and the dustbins—but I didn’t go across to him. I watched him and his friends, their circuits down to his spot and back up to theirs again, their sense of purpose, their air of carrying important messages to one another. They swaggered territorially, spitting on the pavement, swinging their shoulders as they changed direction even more exaggeratedly than the media types before them, not even bothering to look round as they crossed the road to see if cars or bikes were coming. They had a point to prove: that they were one with the street; that they and only they spoke its true language; that they really owned the space around them. Crap: total crap. They didn’t even come from London. Luton, Glasgow, anywhere, but somewhere else, far away, irrelevant. And then their swaggering, their arrogance: a cover. Usurpers. Frauds.

  I didn’t go and talk to him. I didn’t want to, didn’t have a thing to learn from him. Besides, I hate dogs, always have.

  4

  A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER, on Saturday, I went to David Simpson’s party. His new flat on Plato Road was on the second floor of a converted house. It was about a hundred years old, I suppose. Not a bad space. He hadn’t done it up yet: there were wires dangling from the ceilings and lines sketched out in pencil on the walls showing where shelves were going to go up, plus little diagrams scrawled beside switches showing the routes electric circuits were to follow. There were boxes everywhere too, full of clothes and books and plates.

  “Oh! Hello!” David said as he opened the door to me. “I heard you were…you know, better.” His eyes were scanning my forehead just above my eyes; Gre
g must have told him about the plastic surgery on the scar.

  “It’s over the right one,” I said.

  “Oh, right,” he answered. “I hadn’t…Here, let me get you a drink.”

  He’d made some kind of punch. It was pink and sweet—perhaps sangria. There were bottles of beer too, and wine. I sipped at the pink punch and moved into the main room. My name was called out: it was Greg.

  “Hey dude!” Greg said as he threw his arm around me. He was already pretty drunk. “Where’s Catherine?”

  “In Oxford,” I told him. She’d gone there for the weekend. She bored me enormously now. Everybody bored me. Everything too. I’d spent the days since my meeting with Matthew Younger pondering what to do with the money. I’d run through all the options: world travel, setting up a business of my own, founding a charitable trust, splurging it all. None of them appealed to me in the least. What kind of charitable trust would I have founded? I didn’t feel strongly about any issues. If I went out on a mad spending spree, what would I buy? I wasn’t interested in art, or clothes, or drugs. The champagne I’d had the other day had tasted acrid, like cordite, and then I’d only bought it because Marc Daubenay had told me I should; I’d tried foie gras once, in Paris: it had made me sick. No: I’d picked up all the options, held each one like a child holding a cheap and crappy toy for a few seconds until, realizing that it’s not going to spin, make music or in any way enchant him, he puts it down again. So I was bored—by people, ideas, the world: everything.

  Greg lurched off to the kitchen to get more drink. I sat down on a sofa and looked around. It seemed a pretty boring party. I didn’t know many of the people there and wasn’t very interested in the ones I did know. David worked in PR or marketing or something like that; he bored me and his friends were boring too. I went and stood beside the window, two or so feet to its right. I stayed there for a while, then moved into the kitchen and topped up my glass. I’d hardly touched it, but it was something to do. I moved back to the main room and met Greg again.