Tom McCarthy - Remainder

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.

In the late afternoon I ordered pizza. While I was waiting for it to arrive, I remembered that Catherine would be arriving back that evening. It was her last evening here before she flew back to America. I transferred my giant, sprawling map from my living-room wall onto the wall of the bedroom, sheet by sheet. She turned up just after I’d eaten the last pizza slice. She looked tired but happy, flushed.

“How was Oxford?” I asked from the kitchen as I put the kettle on. Tea had become the main currency between us, a kind of milky, sickly substitute for actual connection.

“ Oxford rocks!” she said. “It kicks ass! It’s so…The way the kids, the students, ride their bikes around town. They’re so cute. So enrowsed in being students…”

“So what?” I asked her as I brought the cups into the living room and set them down.

“Engrossed. In cycling around and talking to each other. I was thinking it’d be like great if you could shrink them down and keep them in a tank, like termites. You know those termite kits you get?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes I do.” I looked at her with interest and surprise. I thought that what she had just said was funny and intelligent-the first interesting thing she’d said since she’d arrived in London.

“You could go look at it twice a day and go: Oh look! See, that one’s studying! That one’s riding his bike! And they don’t even know you’re watching them. It’s just so…”

She paused there. She was really looking hard for the right word-and I wanted to hear it too, hear what she had to say.

“It’s just so…” I repeated, slowly, prompting her to find it.

“Cute!” she said again. “Just being students, doing what students do.”

I thought back to the time I’d been a student. I’d been conscious all the time that other people in the crappy provincial town, the people who weren’t students, knew I was a student and expected me to be a certain way. I didn’t know how exactly-but I felt this all through the three years I spent there, and this spoiled them. I once went on a demonstration, and the police and onlookers all watched us with a mixture of bemusement and contempt as we shouted out our slogans-and I shouted them out with conviction in time with the other demonstrators just because I knew that everyone was watching and expecting this. I can’t even remember what the demonstration was about.

The kettle boiled. “I’ll go and pour it,” I said. I went back to the kitchen. I was pouring the water into the teapot when I realized that Catherine had followed me through. She was all wide-eyed, earnest. She looked at me and said:

“They were just really happy. Really innocent.”

I put the kettle down and said: “Can I ask you a question?” I was looking straight at her.

“Yes,” she said, in a soft voice.

“What’s the most intense, clear memory you have? The one you can see even if you close your eyes-really see, clear as in a vision?”

The question didn’t seem to surprise her at all. She smiled peacefully, her eyes widened further and she answered:

“It’s when I was a child. In Park Ridge, where I grew up, just outside Chicago. There were swings, these swings, on concrete, with a lawn around them. And there was a raised podium, a wooden deck, a few feet to the swings’ right. I don’t know what it was there for, this podium. Kids jumped on and off it. I did too. I was a kid, of course. But I can see the swings. Playing on them, swinging…”

Her voice trailed off. She didn’t need to go on. I could see her seeing the swings. Her eyes were really, really wide and really sparkling. She looked beautiful. I felt a stirring in my trousers. Catherine knew. She shuffled over to me, opening herself up, waves opening outwards from her sparkling face. I would have kissed her right there if I hadn’t heard a rustle from the bedroom. The evening breeze was tugging through the open window at the pages of my diagrams and sketches, trying to unpick them from the wall. I pushed off from the sideboard, brushed Catherine aside and hurried to my room to close the window.

I stayed in there all night, adding to the sketches, refining them, just staring at them. When morning came, I took Catherine and her big, dirty, purple rucksack down to Movement Cars, and put her in a taxi to the airport. Then I came home, took out the telephone directory and started making calls.

NAZRUL RAM VYAS came from a high-caste family. In India they have a caste system, with the Untouchables at the bottom and the Brahmins at the top. Naz was a Brahmin. He was born and grew up in Manchester, but his parents came over from Calcutta in the Sixties. His father was a bookkeeper. His uncle too, apparently. His grandfather as well. And his father before him too, I wouldn’t be surprised. A long line of scribes, recorders, clerks, logging transactions and events, passing on orders and instructions that made new transactions happen. Facilitators. That made sense: Naz facilitated everything for me. Made it all happen. He was like an extra set of limbs-eight extra sets of limbs, tentacles spreading out in all directions, coordinating projects, issuing instructions, executing commands. My executor.

Before he came into the picture I had endless troubles. I don’t mean with the practicalities: without Naz I didn’t even manage to get to a stage where practicalities became an issue. No: I mean with communicating. Making people understand my vision, what it was I wanted to do. As soon as Catherine had left, I started making phone calls, but these got me nowhere. I spoke to three different estate agents. The first two didn’t understand what I was saying. They offered to show me flats-really nice flats, ones in converted warehouses beside the Thames, with open plans and mezzanines and spiral staircases and balconies and loading doors and old crane arms and other such unusual features.

“It’s not unusual features that I’m after,” I tried to explain. “It’s particular ones. I want a certain pattern on the staircase-a black pattern on white marble or imitation marble. And I need there to be a courtyard.”

“We can certainly try to accommodate these preferences,” this one said.

“These are not preferences,” I replied. “These are absolute requirements.”

“We have a lovely property in Wapping,” she went on. “A split-level three-bedroom flat. It’s just come on. I think you’ll find…”

“And it’s not one property I’m after,” I informed her. “It’s the whole lot. There must be certain neighbours, like this old woman who lives below me, and a pianist two floors below her, and…”