Tom McCarthy: Remainder

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.

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; Greg 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.

“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.