Tom McCarthy: Remainder

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…”