Tom McCarthy - Remainder

“There’ll also be,” I went on, “on the floor below this old lady, a pianist.”

“So who else lives on her floor?” Naz asked.

“No one,” I said. “No one specific, I mean. Just anonymous, vague neighbours.”

“These vague neighbours: they don’t have to be on parade? On, I mean? They can be off the whole time?”

“No,” I said. “All the…performers-no, not performers: that’s not the right word…the participants, the…staff…must be…I mean, we’ll need complete…jurisdiction over all the space.”

“But go on,” Naz said. “Sorry I interrupted you.”

“You did?” I asked him. I was slightly flustered now; I felt my tone was slipping. I thought of the last formal word I’d used and then repeated it, to bring my tone back up. “Well, yes: jurisdiction. On the floor below the liver lady, or perhaps two floors below, there has to be a pianist. He must be in his late thirties or early forties, bald on top with tufts at the side. Tall and pale. In the day he practises. The music has to waft up in the same way as the liver lady’s cooking smell does. As he’s practising he must occasionally make mistakes. When he makes a mistake he repeats the passage slowly, over and over again, slowing right down into the bit that he got wrong. Like a Land Rover slowing down for bumpy terrain-a set of potholes, say. Then in the afternoons he teaches children. At night he composes. Sometimes he gets angry with…”

Naz’s mobile gave out a loud double beep. I stopped. Naz picked it up and pressed the “enter” button.

“Heir or descendant,” he read. “From the Middle English sioun and the Old French sion: shoot or twig. First citation 1848. Oxford English Dictionary.”

“Interesting,” I said. I took a sip of my mineral water and thought of the scarab beetle again. “Anyway,” I continued after a moment, setting the glass down, “this guy sometimes gets angry with another person who I’ll need, this motorbike enthusiast who tinkers with his bike out in the courtyard. Fixes it and cleans it, takes it apart, puts it back together again. When he has the motor on, the pianist gets angry.”

Naz processed this one for a while. His eyes went vacant while the thing behind them whirred, processing. I waited till the eyes told me to carry on.

“Then there’s a concierge,” I said. “I haven’t got her face yet-but I’ve got her cupboard. And some other people. But you get the idea.”

“Yes, I get it,” Naz said. “But where will you be while they’re performing their tasks-when they’re in on mode.”

“I shall move throughout the space,” I said, “as I see fit. We’ll concentrate on different bits at different times. Different locations, different moments. Sometimes I’ll want to be passing the liver lady as she puts her rubbish out. Sometimes I’ll want to be out by the motorbike. Sometimes the two at once: we can pause one scene and I’ll run up or down the stairs to be inside the other. Or a third. The combinations are endless.”

“Yes, so they are,” said Naz.

The fish soup came. We sipped it. Then the kedgeree. We ate it. I explained more things to Naz and he processed them. When his eyes told me to wait I waited; then the whirring behind them stopped and I’d go on again. He never once asked why I wanted to do all this: he just listened, processing, working out how to execute it all. My executor.

Before we left the Blueprint Café Naz outlined the rate he’d charge. I told him fine. I gave him my banking details and he told me how to contact him at any time: he’d supervise my project personally, on a full-time basis. At ten the next morning he called me and told me how he thought we should proceed: we should first find a building that approximated to the one I had in mind-at least enough for it to be converted. That was the first step. While this was going on, he’d contact architects, designers and, of course, potential performers.

“Performers isn’t the right word,” I said. “Staff. Participants. Re-enactors.”

“Re-enactors?” he asked.

“Yes,” I told him. “Re-enactors.”

“Would you like me to take charge of seeking out the property?” he asked.

“Well, yes,” I said.

As we hung up I got a clearly defined picture of my building again: first from the outside, then the lobby, my faceless concierge’s cupboard, the main staircase with its black-and-white recurring pattern floor, its blackened wooden handrail with spikes on it. Then Naz’s office superimposed itself over that: the plastic blue and red, the windows, his people walking across the carpets as they set out to look for my place. These people were carrying the image of Time Control’s office out into the city, not the image of my building. This second image started fading in my mind. A sudden surge of fear ran through the right side of my body, from my shin all the way up to my right ear. I sat down, closed my eyes and concentrated on my building really hard. I kept them closed and concentrated on it till it came back and eclipsed the image of the office. I felt better. I stood up again.

I understood then that there was only one person who could take charge of seeking out the property, and that was me.

IN SCHOOL, when I was maybe twelve, I had to do art. I wasn’t any good at it, but it was part of the syllabus: one hour and twenty minutes each week-a double period. For a few weeks we were taught sculpture. We were given these big blocks of stone, a chisel and a mallet, and we had to turn the blocks into something recognizable-a human figure or a building. The teacher had an effective way of making us understand what we were doing. The finished statue, he explained, was already there in front of us-right in the block that we were chiselling away at.

“Your task isn’t to create the sculpture,” he said; “it’s to strip all the other stuff away, get rid of it. The surplus matter.”

Surplus matter. I’d forgotten all about that phrase, those classes-even before the accident, I mean. After the accident I forgot everything. It was as though my memories were pigeons and the accident a big noise that had scared them off. They fluttered back eventually-but when they did, their hierarchy had changed, and some that had had crappy places before ended up with better ones: I remembered them more clearly; they seemed more important. Sports, for example: they got a good spot. Before the accident I’d never been particularly interested in sports. But when my memory came back I found I could remember every school basketball and football game I’d played in really clearly. I could see the layout of the court or pitch, the way I and the other players had moved around it. Cricket especially. I remembered exactly what it had been like to play it in the park on summer evenings. I remembered the games I’d seen on TV: overviews of the field’s layout with diagrams drawn over them showing which vectors were covered and which weren’t, slow-motion replays. Other things became less important than they had been before. My time at university, for example, was reduced to a faded picture: a few drunken binges, burnt out friendships and a heap of half-read books all blurred into a big pile of irrelevance.

The art teacher fluttered back into a good, clear spot of memory. I even remembered his name: Mr Aldin. I thought a lot about what he’d said about stripping away surplus matter when I was learning to eat carrots and to walk. The movement that I wanted to do was already in place, I told myself: I just had to eliminate all the extraneous stuff-the surplus limbs and nerves and muscles that I didn’t want to move, the bits of space I didn’t want my hand or foot to move through. I didn’t discuss this with my physio; I just told it to myself. It helped. Now, as I wondered how to find my building, I thought of Mr Aldin again. The building, I told myself, or he told me, or to be precise my image of the school art room told me, in a voice hovering around paint-splashed wooden tables-the building was already there, somewhere in London. What I needed to do was ease it out, chisel it loose from the streets and the buildings all around it.