Tom McCarthy - Remainder

“This is the property you live in now?” she asked.

The third estate agent I spoke to vaguely got it-at least enough to understand the scale of what I was planning.

“We can’t do that,” she said. “No estate agent can. You need a property developer.”

So I called property developers. These are the people who go and find warehouses beside the Thames in the first place and gut them out, then turn them into open-plan units with mezzanines and spiral staircases and loading doors and old crane arms, and then get estate agents to flog them on to rich people who like that kind of thing. Developers don’t usually deal with individual punters, with the purchaser. They deal in bulk, buying up whole complexes of buildings and hulks of disused schools and hospitals, knocking out units by the score.

“You want to buy a building off us?” the man in the head office of one developer said when I’d got through to him. “Who are you with then?”

“I’m not with anyone,” I said. “I want you to do a building up for me, in a particular way.”

“We don’t do contract work for our competitors,” he said. He had a nasty voice-a cold, cruel voice. I pictured his office: the plywood shelves with files and ledgers full of fiddled numbers, then in the yard outside the workmen in their jeans stained white with sandstone and cement discussing politics or football or whatever it was they were discussing-anything, but not my project. They didn’t care.

I phoned Marc Daubenay. He was out of his office when I called; the austere secretary told me he’d be back in half an hour. I used the time to go through what I’d say to him. With him I felt I could explain the whole thing: why I’d had the idea, why I wanted what I wanted. He’d been through the last five months with me. He’d understand.

He didn’t, of course. When I eventually spoke to him, it came out garbled, just like it had when I’d imagined trying to explain it to my homeless person. I started going on about the crack in the wall of David Simpson’s bathroom, my sense of déjà vu; then I backtracked to how ever since learning to move again I’d felt that all my acts were duplicates, unnatural, acquired. Then walking, eating carrots, the film with De Niro. I could tell from the deep silence at his end each time I paused that he wasn’t getting it at all. I cut to the chase and started describing the red roofs with black cats on and the woman who cooked liver and the pianist and the motorbike enthusiast.

“This was a place you lived?” Marc Daubenay asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “No. I mean, I remember it, but I can’t place the memory.”

“Well, as we argued,” Daubenay said, “your memory was knocked off-kilter by the accident.” He’d emphasized that in his pre-trial papers: how my memory had gone and only slowly returned-in instalments, like a soap opera, although he hadn’t used that metaphor.

“Yes,” I said, “but I don’t think this was a straight memory. It was more complex. Maybe it was various things all rolled together: memories, imaginings, films, I don’t know. But that bit’s not important. What’s important is that I remembered it, and it was crystal-clear. Like in…”

I hesitated there. I didn’t want to use the word “vision”, in case Marc Daubenay got ideas.

“Hello? You still there?”

“Yes,” I said. “I was saying it was crystal-clear.”

“And now you want to find this place?” he asked.

“Not find it,” I said. “Make it.”

“Make it?”

“Build it. Have it built. I’ve been calling estate agents and property developers. None of them understands. I need someone to sort it all out for me. To handle the logistics.”

There was another long, deep silence at Daubenay’s end. I pictured his office in my mind: the wide oak desk with the chair parked in front of it, the tomes of old case histories around the walls, the austere secretary in the antechamber, guarding his door. I gripped my phone’s receiver harder and frowned in concentration as I thought about the wires connecting me to him, Brixton to Angel. It seemed to work. After a while he said:

“I think you need Time Control.”

“Time control?” I repeated. “In what sense?”

“Time Control UK. They’re a company that sort things out for people. Manage things. Facilitators, as it were. A couple of my clients have used them in the past and sent back glowing reports. They’re the leaders in their field. In fact, they are their field. Give them a call.”

His voice had the same tone to it as when he’d told me to drink champagne: kind but stern. Paternalistic. He gave me Time Control’s number and wished me good luck.

Time Control UK were based up in Knightsbridge, near where Harrods is. What they did, essentially, was to look after people. Manage things for them, as Daubenay said. Their clients were for the most part busy executives: finance chiefs, CEOs, people like that. The odd film star too, apparently. Time Control ran their diaries for them, planned and logged their meetings and appointments, took and passed on messages, wrote press releases, managed PR. They also ran the more intimate side of their clients’ lives: ordering meals and groceries, getting dry-cleaners to come and take their clothes away and bring them back again, calling in plumbers, phoning them up at eight twenty-five to get them showered and croissanted and shunted into the taxi Time Control had booked to take them to the nine-fifteen they’d set up. They’d organize parties, send birthday cards to aunts and nephews, buy tickets for the second day of the Fourth Test if they’d built a window in that afternoon in the knowledge that this particular client was partial to cricket. Their databases must have been incredible: the architecture of them, their fields.

I called Time Control in the late afternoon, almost immediately after I’d got off the phone to Daubenay. A man answered. He sounded relaxed but efficient. I couldn’t quite picture their office, but I saw those blue and red Tupperware-type in- and out-trays in it somewhere, like the ones they have in nursery-school classrooms. I imagined it as open-plan, with glass or Pyrex inner walls. The background sound was fluffy rather than clipped, which suggested carpets and not floorboards. The man’s voice assured me; I didn’t feel the need to run through my explanation. I just said:

“I’ve been referred to you by my lawyer, Marc Daubenay of Olanger and Daubenay.”

“Oh yes,” the man said, very friendly. Olanger and Daubenay were a well-known firm.

“I need someone to facilitate a large project I have in mind,” I said.

“Wonderful,” the friendly man said. He seemed to understand exactly what I wanted without even asking. “I’ll put you through to Nazrul Vyas, one of our main partners, and you can tell him all about it. Okay?”

“Wonderful,” I said back. It was that word “facilitate” that did it. Worked the magic. Marc Daubenay’s word. As I waited to be put through to Vyas I felt grateful to Daubenay for the first time-not for getting me all that money, but for slotting that word, “facilitate”, onto my tongue.

Vyas sounded young. About my age: late twenties, early thirties. He had a fairly high voice. High and soft, with three layers to it: a Manchester base, an upper layer of southern semi-posh and then, on top of these, like icing on a cake, an Asian lilt. As he spoke his name then my name and then asked how he could help me, he sounded confident, efficient. I couldn’t quite picture his office, but I saw his desktop clearly: it was white and very tidy.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” said Nazrul Vyas.

A pause followed, then I went for it:

“I have a large project in mind,” I said, “and wanted to enlist your help.” “Enlist” was good. I felt pleased with myself.