Tom McCarthy: Remainder

Younger tensed up. He seemed to shrink even more; his voice shrank into silence while he took in what I’d said. Then he struck up that hearty look once more, took a deep breath and boomed out:

“We can do it. Absolutely. It’s your money. I merely advise. I’d advise a degree of diversification-but if you don’t want that, then that’s perfectly…”

“Telecommunications and technology,” I said. As soon as he’d explained how it worked, I’d known exactly what I wanted, instantly. It was my money, not his.

Matthew Younger started flicking through the pages of his almanac. I lifted the filter section off my coffee cup and tried to balance it on the saucer’s edge, but it fell off onto the table. I noticed that the water hadn’t filtered through completely: black goop was still seeping from the gauze bottom, running out across the table’s surface. I dabbed at it with my fingers, trying to stop it reaching the table’s edge and dribbling onto my trousers. But diverting it just made the stream run faster, and I ended up getting it on my trousers and my fingers too. It was sticky and black, like tar.

“I do apologize,” Matthew Younger said. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a clean silk handkerchief. I rubbed my fingers with it until the wet stuff had gone dry and gritty; then I handed it back to him and he started talking me through the telecommunications and technology sections of his almanac.

Within half an hour we’d chosen a company that made small chips for computers, two of the major mobile telephone network providers and one handset manufacturer, one terrestrial telephone and cable television company, an aerospace researcher and manufacturer, an outfit that did encryption for the internet, another that made software whose function I didn’t really understand, a producer of flat audio speakers, some other software people and another micro thing. I can’t remember them all: there were plenty of them. There was a games company, an interactive TV pioneer, a business who make those handheld gadgets that let you know exactly where you are at any given time by bouncing signals into space and back again-more, lots more. By the time I’d left we’d sunk more than eighty per cent of my money into shares. A million we kept in cash and placed in a building society account that Younger helped me fill in the forms for right there. We kept one hundred and fifty thousand in the holding tank account that Marc Daubenay had opened for me that morning.

“I might need cash suddenly,” I said to Matthew Younger as he saw me out of Younger and Younger’s premises.

“Of course,” he answered. “Absolutely. And don’t forget that we can sell shares at any time too. Call whenever you need me. Goodbye.”

It was still rush hour. I didn’t feel like going back into the tube. Instead, I walked down to the river, slowly, through the back streets of Belgravia. When I got there I walked east, crossed Lambeth Bridge, stepped down onto Albert Embankment, found a bench and sat there for a while looking back out across the Thames.

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.