Tom McCarthy - Remainder

I went up towards Plato Road, but ducked down a street parallel to it before reaching it. To go right back there might have short-circuited things, I reasoned. I turned right, then turned left to balance things up. Then I overshot a turning to the right but doubled back and took it after all. I came across some men laying wires beneath the street and stopped to watch them for a while. They were connecting wires to one another: blue, red and green ones, making the connections. I watched them, fascinated. They knew I was watching, but I didn’t mind. I had eight and a half million pounds, and could do what I wanted. They didn’t seem to mind either-perhaps because they could tell from how I watched them that I respected them. For me, they were Brahmins: top of the pile. More than Brahmins: gods, laying down the wiring of the world, then covering it up-its routes, its joins. I watched them for an age, then walked away with difficulty, really concentrating on each muscle, every joint.

A little after this I found a sports track. It was tucked into a maze of back streets and fenced in by knitted green wire. Inside the first fence another one caged in a beautiful green asphalt pitch. The pitch was multi-purpose. All sorts of markings cut and sliced across it: semicircles, circles, boxes, arcs-in yellow, red and white. It was beautiful for me, but to anyone else it would just have looked shoddy and run-down. Two smaller, decrepit cages stood at either end of this pitch: two football goals. Between the caged-in pitch and the green outer fence a red track ran. The tracks I’d seen in my coma had been like this one: red, with white lines marking out the lanes. A couple of loudspeakers were dangling from poles beside the track; they looked like they weren’t used any more, and probably didn’t work. I stood against the green fence, looking in and thinking about the commentaries I’d had to give during my coma. I stood there thinking for a while, then turned around-and saw my building.

It was my building alright. I knew that instantly. It was a large tenement building, seven floors tall. It was quite old-maybe eighteen nineties, nineteen hundred. It was a dirty cream colour. Off-white. I’d come to it from a strange angle, from the side, but I could see that it had large white windows and black drains and balconies with plants on them. These windows, drains and balconies repeated themselves as the side façade ran on, high and imperious, behind a wall, then turned away and out of sight. Oh, it was definitely mine.

The building had a compound round it, a kind of garden space, but I was separated from this by the wall. In front of me was an iron side door. I tried it: it was shut. It was one of those doors with an electronic keypad and a CCTV camera mounted above it. I moved out of the camera’s field of vision and waited to see if anyone would come through. Nobody did. After a while I walked around the sports track, passed beneath a railway bridge and came to the building from the front.

Oh yes: it was my building. My own, the one that I’d remembered. It was big and old and rose up seven floors. It was off-white at the front too, with windows but no balconies. Its main entrance had a kind of faded grandeur: wide, chequered steps ran from the street to a double doorway above which was carved in stone relief the building’s name: Madlyn Mansions.

I stood in the street looking at my building. People were coming and going through the double doors pretty regularly: normal-looking people, old and young, half white and half West Indian. Residents. After a while I walked up the chequered steps to the door and peered inside.

The building had a lobby. Of course. Almost straight away I saw my concierge’s cleaning cupboard-the one I’d sketched out in my diagram, with broom and mop and Hoover leaning across one another inside. It was six or so feet to the right of where it should have been, but it was the right kind of cupboard. On the lobby’s other side was a little concierge’s booth: a cabin with a sliding window in it. I could see a concierge, a small black man, talking to someone inside the cabin. Both these men’s backs were turned on the main doors-which opened now as a middle-aged West Indian man came out and, seeing me standing there, held one of them for me.

“You going in?” he asked.

I glanced towards the concierge again: his back was still turned.

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

I took the door from the West Indian man and stepped into the lobby.

The street’s sounds disappeared, replaced by the hollow echo of this tall, enclosed space. The sudden change felt like it does inside an aeroplane that suddenly descends, or when a train enters a tunnel and your ears go funny. There were footsteps echoing from somewhere up above and then the murmur of the voices of the concierge and the man he was talking to. The lobby’s floor was grainy-maybe granite. It wasn’t quite right, but I’d be able to change it. I strode quickly and lightly over it, still glancing at the concierge. He was more of a porter than a concierge, but I’d change that too. I’d replace him: it had to be a woman. I could picture her body now: it was middle-aged and pudgy. Her face was still blank.

At the far end of the lobby from the street doors the floor turned into a large, wide staircase. This was perfect. The patterning on its floor wasn’t right either-but the dimensions were perfect. The banister was too new, but I’d get it ripped out and replaced in no time. Looking up, I saw it dwindling and repeating as it turned into each floor. I stood at its base for a moment, watching it dwindling and repeating. It was exciting: the motorbike enthusiast’s flat was just a floor away, the pianist’s only two; two floors above that was the liver lady. I could even see the edges of my own landing as I craned my head back and looked up. I felt a tingling start up in my right side.

Eventually I looked down again and saw a door at the foot of the staircase. Above the door, carved in relief just like the building’s name above the front door, only slightly smaller, was the word Garden. I tried this door: it was open, and I stepped into a courtyard. Perfect too: it was large, with trees and bushes, enclosed on all four sides by buildings, by their backs. To my left were several sheds; I’d have those pulled down to make way for the patch of ground the motorbike enthusiast would use. When I stepped further out into the courtyard and turned round to look up at the building, I could see the pianist’s window; three floors above that, the windows to my bathroom and my kitchen. The building facing mine on the courtyard’s far side was similar to mine-equally tall but not identical.

“Good,” I said quietly to myself. “Very good. What colour are its roofs, though?”

This question couldn’t be answered straight away: from here the angle up to the facing building’s roof was too sharp to see the slates, or whether their level rose and fell. I could see hut-like bits protruding from it, though, their tops. That was good too, I thought: they’d have doors in them, most probably, for access to the roof. Just what I needed for the cats: to get them out there so that they could lounge around.

I took one last look at the courtyard, breathed in deeply, went back through the garden door and started up the staircase. The black-on-white recurring pattern wasn’t there, as I mentioned earlier; nor were the wrought-iron banisters with their oxidizing hue and blackened wooden rail above them, but their size and movement-the way they ran and turned-was perfect. The flats started on the first floor. Their front doors were the wrong size: too small. Another thing to change. I recognized my pianist’s one, though. I stood and listened at it for a while. A kind of grating was coming from inside-very subdued, probably pipes and water.