by Tom McCarthy
“Hey dude!” he said, throwing the same arm round me. “So where’s Catherine?” He was slightly drunker than he’d been a quarter of an hour ago.
“She’s in Oxford,” I said.
He lurched off again and I moved back to the sofa, then to the spot beside the window. This second spot was a better one. I’d become good at sensing which are good positions and which aren’t when I’d been in hospital. It’s because you can’t move for yourself. In normal life, where you can move, you take being able to change your position for granted; you don’t even think about it. But when you’re injured and immobile, you have to go exactly where the doctors and nurses put you. Where they put you becomes terribly important—your position in relation to the windows, the doors, the TV set. The ward I spent most time in when I’d come out of intensive care was L-shaped. I was on the short side of the L, the foot, just inset from the corner where the long side hit it. It was a good spot: it had commanding views down both of the ward’s avenues, clear sightlines to the nurses’ enclave and the trolley station and the other little pockets of importance, crinkles in the flow of the ward’s surfaces. In the ward after that I had a really bad spot, in a bed facing the wrong way, facing nowhere in particular, just wrong. Position has been important to me ever since. It’s not just hospital: it’s the accident as well. I was hit because I was standing where I was and not somewhere else—standing on grass, exposed, just like a counter on a roulette table’s green velvet grid, on a single number, waiting…
I went back to the kitchen to top my glass up again, but realized that its level hadn’t sunk at all since the last time I’d filled it, so I just stood in the doorway while two girls beside the punch bowl looked at me.
“You looking for something?” one of them asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m looking for a…for a thing.” I made a kind of twiddling motion with my fingers, a gesture somewhere between opening a bottle with a corkscrew and using a pair of scissors. Then I left the kitchen again.
I was heading down the hallway back towards the main room when I noticed a small room set off the circuit I’d been following up to now. I’d moved round the kitchen each time in a clockwise direction, and round the main room in an anticlockwise one, door-sofa-window-door. With the short, narrow corridor between the two rooms, my circuit had the pattern of an eight. This extra room seemed to have just popped up beside it like the half had in my Settlement: offset, an extra. I stuck my head inside. It was a bathroom. I stepped in and locked the door behind me. Then it happened: the event that, the accident aside, was the most significant of my whole life.
It happened like this. I was standing in the bathroom with the door locked behind me. I’d used the toilet and was washing my hands in the sink, looking away from the mirror above it—because I don’t like mirrors generally—at this crack that ran down the wall. David Simpson, or perhaps the last owner, had stripped the walls, so there was only plaster on them, plus some daubs of different types of paint where David had been experimenting to see how the room would look in various colours. I was standing by the sink looking at this crack in the plaster when I had a sudden sense of déjà vu.
The sense of déjà vu was very strong. I’d been in a space like this before, a place just like this, looking at the crack, a crack that had jutted and meandered in the same way as the one beside the mirror. There’d been that same crack, and a bathtub also, and a window directly above the taps just like there was in this room—only the window had been slightly bigger and the taps older, different. Out of the window there’d been roofs with cats on them. Red roofs, black cats. It had been high up, much higher than I was now: the fifth or sixth or maybe even seventh floor of an old tenement-style building, a large block. People had been packed into the building: neighbours beneath me and around me and on the floor above. The smell of liver cooking in a pan had been wafting to me from the floor below—the sound too, the spit and sizzle.
I remembered all this very clearly. There’d been liver cooking on the floor below—the smell, the spit and sizzle—and then two floors below that there’d been piano music. Not recorded music playing on a CD or the radio, but real, live music, being played on a piano by the man who lived there, a musician. I remembered how it had sounded, its rhythms. Sometimes he’d paused, whenever he’d hit a wrong note or lost his place. He’d paused and started the passage again, running through it slowly, slowing right down as he approached the bit he’d got wrong. Then he’d played it several times correctly, running through it again, speeding it up again till he was able to play it back at speed without fluffing it up. I remembered all this clearly—crystal-clear, as clear as in a vision.
I remembered it all, but I couldn’t remember where I’d been in this place, this flat, this bathroom. Or when. At first I thought I was remembering a flat in Paris. Not the one I’d stayed in when I did my course—that hadn’t looked anything like the one unfolding in my memory, inside or outside: there’d been no cats on roofs, no liver and no piano music, no similar bathroom with an identical crack on the wall—but perhaps someone else’s: Catherine’s, or someone we’d both known, another student. But we hadn’t visited any of the other students’ places. No: it wasn’t Paris. I searched back further in my past, right back to when I’d been a child. No use. I couldn’t place this memory at all.
And yet it was growing, minute by minute as I stood there in the bathroom, this remembered building, spreading outwards from the crack. The neighbour who’d cooked liver on the floor below me had been an old woman. I’d passed her on the stairs most days. I had a memory of passing her outside her flat’s door as she placed her rubbish on the landing. She’d say something to me; I’d say something back, then carry on past her. She’d been putting out her rubbish for the concierge to pick up. The building that I was remembering had had a concierge, just like Parisian apartment buildings have. The staircase had had iron banisters and worn marble or fake marble floors with patterns in them. I remembered what it had been like to walk across them: how my shoes had sounded on their surface, what the banisters had felt like to the touch. I remembered how it had felt inside my apartment, moving through it: from the bathroom with the crack in its wall to the kitchen and living room, the way plants hanging in baskets from the ceiling had rustled as I’d passed them, how I’d turned half sideways as I’d passed the kitchen unit’s waist-high edge—turned sideways and then deftly back again in one continuous movement, letting my shirt brush the woodwork. I remembered how all this had felt.
Most of all I remembered this: that inside this remembered building, in the rooms and on the staircase, in the lobby and the large courtyard between it and the building facing with the red roofs with black cats on them—that in these spaces, all my movements had been fluent and unforced. Not awkward, acquired, second-hand, but natural. Opening my fridge’s door, lighting a cigarette, even lifting a carrot to my mouth: these gestures had been seamless, perfect. I’d merged with them, run through them and let them run through me until there’d been no space between us. They’d been real; I’d been real—been without first understanding how to try to be: cut out the detour. I remembered this with all the force of an epiphany, a revelation.
Right then I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my money. I wanted to reconstruct that space and enter it so that I could feel real again. I wanted to; I had to; I would. Nothing else mattered. I stood there staring at the crack. It all came down to that: the way it ran down the wall, the texture of the plaster all around it, the patches of colour to its right. That’s what had sparked the whole thing off. I had to get it down somehow—exactly, how it forked and jagged. Someone was knocking at the door.
“Hang on!” I called out.
“Hurry up!” a man’s voice shouted back.
I looked around. Beside the bathtub were two paint cans; lying on one of their lids were a tape measure and a pencil. I picked up the pencil, tore off a strip of paper that was still clinging to the wall beneath the window and started copyi
ng the way the crack ran. I copied it really carefully. Meticulously. The knocking came again: two sets of knocks this time.
“We’re bursting out here!” a girl’s voice called through.
“Yeah: hurry up!” the same man’s voice repeated.
I ignored them and carried on copying the crack. I had to start again two times—the first because I’d made the scale too big to fit the whole crack in, then once more when I realized that the flip side of the wallpaper was smoother than the bubbly side which I’d been drawing on, and so would make for a more accurate transcription. I copied it, meticulously, noting in brackets aspects such as texture and colour. After I’d finished copying the crack I stood there for a few more moments, letting the whole vision settle down inside me: bathroom, flat, staircase, building, courtyard, roofs and cats. I needed it to settle deep enough for it to stay. I closed my eyes for a few seconds, to see if I could see it in my mind, in darkness. I could. When I was satisfied of that I opened them again and left the bathroom.
“I’m bursting!” the girl told me again. It was one of the two girls who’d been in the kitchen earlier. She pushed past me into the bathroom.
“You been giving birth in there?” the man who’d told me to hurry up asked.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“Giving birth. Is that what took you so long?”
“No,” I said. I took my coat and walked out of the party with my strip of wallpaper.
I walked down to the main Brixton intersection, where the giant box junction spreads across the tarmac from the town hall to the Ritzy cinema. It must have been midnight or so. Brixton was alive and kicking. There were red and yellow sports cars gridlocked on Coldharbour Lane, black guys in baseball caps touting for cab firms, younger black guys in big puffy jackets pushing cannabis and crack, black girls with curled and flattened hair and big round hips wrapped up in stretchy dresses screeching into mobiles, white girls queuing outside the Dogstar, chewing gum and smoking at the same time. They all came and went—people, lights, colours, noise—on the periphery of my attention. I walked slowly, with the strip of wallpaper, thinking of the room, the flat, the world I’d just remembered.
I was going to recreate it: build it up again and live inside it. I’d work outwards from the crack I’d just transcribed. The plaster round the crack was pinky-grey, all grooved and wrinkled from when it had been smeared on. There’d been a patch of blue paint just above it, to the left (its right), and, one or two feet to the left of that, a patch of yellow. I’d noted this down, but could remember it exactly anyway: left just above it blue then two more feet and yellow. I’d be able to recreate the crack back in my own flat—smear on the plaster and then add the colours; but my bathroom wasn’t the right shape. It had to be the same shape and same size as the one David’s had made me remember, with the same bathtub with its older, different taps, the same slightly bigger window. And it had to be on the fifth, sixth or seventh floor. I’d need to buy a new flat, one high up.
And then the neighbours. They’d been all packed in around me—below, beside and above. That was a vital part of it. The old woman who cooked liver on the floor below, the pianist two floors below her, running through his fugues and his sonatas, practising—I’d have to make sure they were there too. The concierge as well, and all the other, more anonymous neighbours: I’d have to buy a whole building, and fill it with people who’d behave just as I told them to.
And then the view across! The cats, the black cats on the red roofs of the building facing the back of mine across the courtyard. The roofs had been coated in slate tiles, and had risen and fallen in a particular way. If the building I bought didn’t have roofs that looked like that facing the windows of the bathroom and kitchen of my fifth- or sixth- or seventh-floor flat then I’d have to buy the building behind it as well, and have its roofs changed until they looked that way. The building had to be tall enough too—the building behind mine, that is: not just one but two buildings of appropriate size and age would be needed. I thought all this through as I walked along Coldharbour Lane. I thought it through meticulously, still holding the strip of wallpaper.
I could do it all, of course. That was no problem. I had funds. I could not only buy my building and the building behind it, but also hire the staff. I’d need the old lady. She was growing more distinct in my mind: she had white, wiry hair and a blue cardigan. Every day she fried liver in a pan, which spat and sizzled and smelled rich and brown and oily. She’d be stooping down to lower her rubbish bag onto the worn marble or fake-marble landing floor, holding her back with one hand as she did this—and she’d turn to me and speak as I passed by. I couldn’t quite remember what she’d say yet, but this didn’t matter at this stage.
I’d need the pianist too. He was thirty-eight or so. He was tall and thin and very white, bald on top with fuzzy black hair sprouting at the sides. He was a fairly sad character: pretty lonely, didn’t seem to get that many visitors—just children who he’d teach for money. At night he’d compose, slowly and tentatively. In the day he’d practise, pausing when he made mistakes, running over the same passages again and again, slowing right down into the bits that he’d got wrong. The music would waft up just like the smell of the old woman’s liver. In the late afternoons you’d get the skill-less grind of his uninterested pupils, hammering out scales and trivial melodies. Sometimes, in the morning, he’d decide the lines that he’d composed the night before were worthless: you’d hear a discordant thump, then a chair scraping, a door slamming, footsteps dying away beneath the stairs.
The intersection by the telephone box from which I’d phoned Marc Daubenay came and went on the periphery of my attention as I thought these things through. There were people spilling out of a blue bar with blackened windows, old Jamaicans barbecuing chicken outside Movement Cars, more young guys pushing drugs. Then it was the tyre shop and café where the men had watched me as I’d jerked back and forth on the same spot in the street after setting out to meet Catherine; then, before the ex-siege zone, the street that ran parallel to the street perpendicular to mine. Then I was home. I sat on the sofa bed Catherine had half-folded away and carried on thinking these things through, holding the strip of wallpaper. Occasionally I’d look at the pattern I’d drawn across it. Mostly I just sat there holding it, letting the world that I’d remembered grow.
And grow it did. I started seeing the courtyard more clearly—the courtyard between my building and the one with undulating roofs with black cats on them. It had a garden in it, but the garden was pretty run-down. I scanned it in my mind, moving from left to right and back again.
“There’s a motorbike in it!” I said aloud.
It was true: in a small patch of the courtyard, just outside my building’s back door where no grass grew, sat a motorbike. The motorbike was propped up and had some of its lower bolts removed because—of course! It was another neighbour who was working on it. I remembered this man now: the motorbike enthusiast who lived on the first floor. He was in his twenties—quite good-looking, medium-length brown hair. He’d spend his weekends tending to his bike out in the courtyard: stripping bits away and cleaning them, then bolting them back on. Sometimes he’d run the engine for whole twenty-minute stretches, and the pianist would get pissed off: you’d hear his chair scrape back again, his feet pacing around his flat all agitated. This came back to me as I sat on the half-folded-away sofa bed.
I sat there on the sofa bed all night, remembering. Birds started singing outside; then came whirring milk floats, then blue and grey light seeping through the curtains. I remembered a nondescript middle-aged couple who lived on the floor above the motorbike enthusiast, the second floor. No kids. He left each day for work and she stayed in or went shopping or volunteered her time at Oxfam or somewhere like that. Then vaguer neighbours, people you don’t really take much notice of. There was the concierge: I could clearly see the cupboard where she kept her brooms and buckets, but she herself didn’t come to me—her face, her body. I saw the big
staircase’s wrought-iron banisters: they had a kind of oxidizing hue, all specked with green. The handrail running above them was made of black wood and had mini-spikes on, little prongs—perhaps for decoration or perhaps to prevent children sliding down them. Then the pattern in the floors: it was a black pattern on white—repetitive, faded. I couldn’t quite make it out exactly, but I got the general sense of it, the way it flowed. I let my mind flow over it, floating above it—sinking into it too, being absorbed by it as though by a worn, patterned sponge. I fell asleep into the building, its surfaces, into the sound of liver sizzling and spitting, piano music wafting up the staircase, birds and milk floats, black cats on red roofs.
The next day was Sunday. This annoyed me. I wanted Monday and its open businesses. I’d need estate agents, employment agencies, who knew what else. And then what if my vision of the whole place faded before Monday came? How long would all the details stay lodged in my memory? I decided to safeguard them by sketching them out. I gathered all the unused paper I could find around my flat and started drawing diagrams, plans, layouts of room and floors and corridors. I blu-tacked each one to my living-room wall as I finished it; sometimes I’d run three or four or five into a big block, a continuous overview. When I’d run out of blank paper, I used the reverse side of letters, bills and legal documents—whatever came to hand.
I sketched my whole remembered flat outward from the crack running down the bathroom wall. The flat was modest but quite spacious. It had wooden floors with rugs covering parts of them. The kitchen was open plan, and ran into the main room. Its window faced the same way as my bathroom’s window did: across the courtyard with the garden and the motorbike. The fridge was old, a 1960s model. Above it hung plants—spider plants, in baskets. I sketched the staircase, adding notes and arrows highlighting the banisters’ spikes and oxidizing hue, the entrance to the flat of the old woman who cooked liver, the spot where she’d set her rubbish down for the concierge to pick up. I sketched the concierge’s cupboard, drawing in the broom, the mop, the Hoover—how they stood together, which way each one leant. The concierge’s face still didn’t come to me, nor did the words the liver lady spoke to me as I passed her, but I let that lie for now. Whole sections of the building didn’t come to me, in fact: stretches of staircase or lobby, the whole third floor landing. I left these vague, unfilled, with just a note in brackets next to inches of blank paper.
