Remainder

by Tom McCarthy

  “No problems getting here?” he asked.

  “No, none at all,” I said. The Blueprint Café’s walls were hung with photographs of eminent British designers. This was good, very good. A waiter appeared and Naz asked for a large bottle of mineral water.

  “Shall we eat?” he asked me.

  I wasn’t particularly hungry. “What do you think?” I asked him back.

  “Something light,” he replied.

  We ordered kedgeree and two small bowls of fish soup. No wine. The waiter walked away towards the kitchen, which was visible behind a large round window. It was designed that way—not totally open, so diners could see every last thing the chefs were doing, but open enough to give them glimpses of the kitchen: blue flames jumping out of frying pans, fingers raining herbs down over dishes, things like that.

  “Before we begin realizing your project,” Naz said, “we need to get a sense of scale. What size of building do you have in mind?”

  “A big one,” I said. “Six or seven floors. Have you ever been to Paris?”

  “I was there two weeks ago,” said Naz.

  “Well, the way buildings are there,” I told him. “Large tenement buildings, with lots of flats stacked on top of one another. That’s the type of building I need. My flat must be on the top floor but one.”

  “And the building opposite? If I remember rightly, you indicated that you’d probably need that building too.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “It should be almost the same height. Perhaps one floor lower. When I say ‘opposite’ I mean facing at the back. Across a courtyard. I need that building for two things only: red tiles on its roofs and black cats walking over this.”

  “Roofs plural?” he asked.

  “They go up and down,” I told him. “Rise and fall. In a particular way. We might have to modify them. We’ll certainly need to modify lots of things throughout the building and the courtyard.”

  “Yes, so you told me,” Naz said. “But tell me about the people you propose to fill the building with. The primary building, I mean. Will they be actually living there?”

  “Well, yes,” I answered. “They can actually live there too. They’ll have to get used to being in two modes, though: on and off.”

  “How do you mean?” asked Naz.

  “Well, on when they’re performing the tasks I’ll ask them to perform. The rest of the time they can do what they want. Like soldiers: they’re on parade at one moment, then afterwards they go and smoke their cigarettes in the guardroom, and have baths and maybe change into civilian clothes. But then a few hours later they have to be back on parade again.”

  The waiter came. Naz’s palmtop organizer was lying in front of him. It was a Psion—one of the companies Matthew Younger and I had bought stocks in. It was lying face up on the table, but Naz wasn’t using it. Instead, he was logging my requirements in his mind, translating them into manoeuvres to be executed. I could tell: something was whirring back behind his eyes. For some reason I thought of scarab beetles, then of the word “scion”. The thing behind Naz’s eyes whirred for a while, then he asked:

  “What tasks would you like them to perform?”

  “There’ll be an old woman downstairs, immediately below me,” I said. “Her main duty will be to cook liver. Constantly. Her kitchen must face outwards to the courtyard, the back courtyard onto which my own kitchen and bathroom will face too. The smell of liver must waft upwards. She’ll also be required to deposit a bin bag outside her door as I descend the staircase, and to exchange certain words with me which I’ll work out and assign to her.”

  “Understood,” said Naz. “Who next?”

  “There’ll also be—what does the word ‘scion’ mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Naz said. “Let’s find out. I’ll contact a colleague and tell him to look it up.”

  He took a tiny mobile from his pocket, switched it on and composed a text message. The phone beeped as he typed each letter in. He laid the phone down on the table top and let it send its message. I pictured his office again: the blue and red Tupperware in- and out-trays, the glass inner walls, the carpets. I traced a triangle in my mind up from our restaurant table to the satellite in space that would receive the signal, then back down to Time Control’s office where the satellite would bounce it. I remembered being buffeted by wind, the last full memory I have before the accident.

  “There’ll also be,” I went on, “on the floor below this old lady, a pianist.”

  “So who else lives on her floor?” Naz asked.

  “No one,” I said. “No one specific, I mean. Just anonymous, vague neighbours.”

  “These vague neighbours: they don’t have to be on parade? On, I mean? They can be off the whole time?”

  “No,” I said. “All the…performers—no, not performers: that’s not the right word…the participants, the…staff…must be…I mean, we’ll need complete…jurisdiction over all the space.”

  “But go on,” Naz said. “Sorry I interrupted you.”

  “You did?” I asked him. I was slightly flustered now; I felt my tone was slipping. I thought of the last formal word I’d used and then repeated it, to bring my tone back up. “Well, yes: jurisdiction. On the floor below the liver lady, or perhaps two floors below, there has to be a pianist. He must be in his late thirties or early forties, bald on top with tufts at the side. Tall and pale. In the day he practises. The music has to waft up in the same way as the liver lady’s cooking smell does. As he’s practising he must occasionally make mistakes. When he makes a mistake he repeats the passage slowly, over and over again, slowing right down into the bit that he got wrong. Like a Land Rover slowing down for bumpy terrain—a set of potholes, say. Then in the afternoons he teaches children. At night he composes. Sometimes he gets angry with…”

  Naz’s mobile gave out a loud double beep. I stopped. Naz picked it up and pressed the “enter” button.

  “Heir or descendant,” he read. “From the Middle English sioun and the Old French sion: shoot or twig. First citation 1848. Oxford English Dictionary.”

  “Interesting,” I said. I took a sip of my mineral water and thought of the scarab beetle again. “Anyway,” I continued after a moment, setting the glass down, “this guy sometimes gets angry with another person who I’ll need, this motorbike enthusiast who tinkers with his bike out in the courtyard. Fixes it and cleans it, takes it apart, puts it back together again. When he has the motor on, the pianist gets angry.”

  Naz processed this one for a while. His eyes went vacant while the thing behind them whirred, processing. I waited till the eyes told me to carry on.

  “Then there’s a concierge,” I said. “I haven’t got her face yet—but I’ve got her cupboard. And some other people. But you get the idea.”

  “Yes, I get it,” Naz said. “But where will you be while they’re performing their tasks—when they’re in on mode.”

  “I shall move throughout the space,” I said, “as I see fit. We’ll concentrate on different bits at different times. Different locations, different moments. Sometimes I’ll want to be passing the liver lady as she puts her rubbish out. Sometimes I’ll want to be out by the motorbike. Sometimes the two at once: we can pause one scene and I’ll run up or down the stairs to be inside the other. Or a third. The combinations are endless.”

  “Yes, so they are,” said Naz.

  The fish soup came. We sipped it. Then the kedgeree. We ate it. I explained more things to Naz and he processed them. When his eyes told me to wait I waited; then the whirring behind them stopped and I’d go on again. He never once asked why I wanted to do all this: he just listened, processing, working out how to execute it all. My executor.

  Before we left the Blueprint Café Naz outlined the rate he’d charge. I told him fine. I gave him my banking details and he told me how to contact him at any time: he’d supervise my project personally, on a full-time basis. At ten the next morning he called me and told me how he thought we should proceed: we should fi
rst find a building that approximated to the one I had in mind—at least enough for it to be converted. That was the first step. While this was going on, he’d contact architects, designers and, of course, potential performers.

  “Performers isn’t the right word,” I said. “Staff. Participants. Re-enactors.”

  “Re-enactors?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I told him. “Re-enactors.”

  “Would you like me to take charge of seeking out the property?” he asked.

  “Well, yes,” I said.

  As we hung up I got a clearly defined picture of my building again: first from the outside, then the lobby, my faceless concierge’s cupboard, the main staircase with its black-and-white recurring pattern floor, its blackened wooden handrail with spikes on it. Then Naz’s office superimposed itself over that: the plastic blue and red, the windows, his people walking across the carpets as they set out to look for my place. These people were carrying the image of Time Control’s office out into the city, not the image of my building. This second image started fading in my mind. A sudden surge of fear ran through the right side of my body, from my shin all the way up to my right ear. I sat down, closed my eyes and concentrated on my building really hard. I kept them closed and concentrated on it till it came back and eclipsed the image of the office. I felt better. I stood up again.

  I understood then that there was only one person who could take charge of seeking out the property, and that was me.

  6

  IN SCHOOL, when I was maybe twelve, I had to do art. I wasn’t any good at it, but it was part of the syllabus: one hour and twenty minutes each week—a double period. For a few weeks we were taught sculpture. We were given these big blocks of stone, a chisel and a mallet, and we had to turn the blocks into something recognizable—a human figure or a building. The teacher had an effective way of making us understand what we were doing. The finished statue, he explained, was already there in front of us—right in the block that we were chiselling away at.

  “Your task isn’t to create the sculpture,” he said; “it’s to strip all the other stuff away, get rid of it. The surplus matter.”

  Surplus matter. I’d forgotten all about that phrase, those classes—even before the accident, I mean. After the accident I forgot everything. It was as though my memories were pigeons and the accident a big noise that had scared them off. They fluttered back eventually—but when they did, their hierarchy had changed, and some that had had crappy places before ended up with better ones: I remembered them more clearly; they seemed more important. Sports, for example: they got a good spot. Before the accident I’d never been particularly interested in sports. But when my memory came back I found I could remember every school basketball and football game I’d played in really clearly. I could see the layout of the court or pitch, the way I and the other players had moved around it. Cricket especially. I remembered exactly what it had been like to play it in the park on summer evenings. I remembered the games I’d seen on TV: overviews of the field’s layout with diagrams drawn over them showing which vectors were covered and which weren’t, slow-motion replays. Other things became less important than they had been before. My time at university, for example, was reduced to a faded picture: a few drunken binges, burnt out friendships and a heap of half-read books all blurred into a big pile of irrelevance.

  The art teacher fluttered back into a good, clear spot of memory. I even remembered his name: Mr Aldin. I thought a lot about what he’d said about stripping away surplus matter when I was learning to eat carrots and to walk. The movement that I wanted to do was already in place, I told myself: I just had to eliminate all the extraneous stuff—the surplus limbs and nerves and muscles that I didn’t want to move, the bits of space I didn’t want my hand or foot to move through. I didn’t discuss this with my physio; I just told it to myself. It helped. Now, as I wondered how to find my building, I thought of Mr Aldin again. The building, I told myself, or he told me, or to be precise my image of the school art room told me, in a voice hovering around paint-splashed wooden tables—the building was already there, somewhere in London. What I needed to do was ease it out, chisel it loose from the streets and the buildings all around it.

  How to do this? I’d need to see the block, of course, the slab, London. I had a grotty, dog-eared A-Z but couldn’t get any sense of the whole town from that. I’d need a proper map, a large one. I was about to go and buy one in the nearest newsagent when it struck me that I wasn’t thinking big enough. To do this properly I’d need coordination, back-up. I phoned Naz back.

  “I’d like to hire a room,” I told him.

  “What kind of room?” he asked.

  “A space. An office.”

  “Right,” said Naz.

  “I’d like to organize the search from there,” I continued. “With maps on the walls, things like that. A kind of military operations room.”

  “You’d like to organize the search yourself?” he asked. “I thought I was to…”

  “I’d like to take charge, but I’d like you to work with me.”

  There was a pause, then Naz said:

  “Fine. An office, then.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Any other specifications?”

  “No,” I answered. “Just a normal office with a couple of desks in it. Light, windows. Just usual.”

  An hour later he’d got me an office in Covent Garden. It had a fax machine, two phone lines, a laptop, marker pens, white sheets of A1, two giant maps of London, some pins to stick one of the maps to the wall and some more pins to stick into it to mark locations. Naz had bought pins of several different colours and some thread to wrap round these, like cheese wire, slicing the town into blocks and wedges.

  Naz and I devised a method: we’d cordon off an area of the wall-mounted map with pins and thread, then scan the same area from the second map into the laptop, then, cutting away adjacent streets using the software, send the resulting image to mobiles Naz’s people were carrying. We isolated six main areas we thought most likely to contain my building: Belgravia, Notting Hill, South Kensington, Baron’s Court, Paddington and King’s Cross. Each of these had plenty of tall, tenement-style buildings—not to mention flowing, unbroken streets which, with the slight exception of some buildings round the stations, had escaped the bombing raids of World War Two pretty unscathed.

  We set our plan to work. Naz put five of his people on the case: it was their job to walk around each block and wedge of streets we sent to them. We worked methodically, marking off, scanning in and zapping out each section; Naz’s people would then go and walk around it, calling the office each time they saw a building they thought might approximate to mine. Each of them moved up each street in his or her block, then down the next, up the next and so on. One of our phones would ring from time to time:

  “I’ve found a large apartment building with a blue façade near Olympia,” the searcher would say.

  “What street?” we’d ask.

  “Corner of Longridge Road and Templeton Place.”

  “How many floors?”

  “…three, four, five—Six!”

  “Longridge Road, Templeton Place,” I or Naz would repeat to the other; the other would find the intersection on the wall-mounted map, stick a purple pin in it, then enter the particulars—six floors, blue façade and so on—into a spreadsheet Naz had created on the laptop. Sometimes both phones rang at once. Sometimes neither of them rang for several hours.

  By five or so on the first day the map had nine purple pins stuck in it.

  “Let’s go and look at them,” said Naz. “I’ll call us a car.”

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  By five o’clock the next day we had fifteen buildings. I’d knocked the car’s arrival back to six, but when it came I told Naz:

  “I prefer to wait until tomorrow morning.”

  “As you wish,” he said. “I’ll send another car round to your flat at nine.”

  I phoned him the next morning a
t eight-thirty.

  “I prefer to make my own way there,” I said.

  “I’ll meet you there, then.”

  “No. I prefer to go alone.”

  “How will you know which places to look in?” he asked.

  “I remember them all,” I said.

  “Really?” Naz sounded incredulous. “All the exact locations?”

  “Yes,” I told him.

  “That’s impressive,” he said. “Phone me as and when you need me.”

  I didn’t remember each location, of course. But I’d become increasingly aware of something over the last two days: these people wouldn’t find my building. No matter how well I described it to them or how thoroughly they looked, they wouldn’t find my building for a simple reason: it wouldn’t be my building unless I found it myself. By noon on the second day of their search I’d been certain of this.

  Why hadn’t I called the search off, then? you might ask. Because I liked the process, liked the sense of pattern. There were people running through the same, repetitive acts—consulting their mobiles, walking up one street, down the next one and up a third, stopping in front of buildings to make phone calls—in six different parts of town. Their burrowing would get inside the city’s block and loosen it, start chiselling away at surplus matter: it would scare my building out, like beaters scaring pheasants out of bushes for a Lord to shoot—six beaters advancing in formation, beating to the same rhythms, their movements duplicating one another. As I started out that day I imagined looking on from overhead, from way above the city, picking out Naz’s people, each one with a kind of tag on them, a dot like police cars have to help police helicopters pick them out. I imagined looking down and seeing them all—plus me, the seventh moving dot, my turning and redoubling etching out the master pattern that the other six were emulating. I imagined looking down from even higher up, the edges of the stratosphere. I stopped for a moment in the street and felt a light breeze moving round my face. I turned the palms of my hands outwards and felt a tingling creeping up the right side of my body. It was good.