Tom McCarthy - Remainder

We discussed it as we were driven to Aldgate-we were meeting a wholesaler of rare and outmoded light fittings. By the time we’d got there I’d become convinced it wasn’t.

“Where else, though?” I wondered aloud as we left Aldgate for Brixton.

“Community centres?” Naz ventured as he stuffed the receipts for the order we’d just made into the glove compartment. “Swimming pools? Supermarket notice boards?”

“Yes,” I said. “Those sound like the right kind of places.”

We cancelled the next day’s audition, and Naz had notices distributed in the new venues. These ones brought us a much broader sweep of people. The old woman who became the liver lady saw it at her bridge evening, the boring couple’s wife at a yoga class. The pianist we hooked in a musicians’ journal-he was doing a Ph.D. in musicology. He was just right for the part: quiet, gloomy, even bald on top. He nodded glumly as I explained to him how he’d have to make mistakes:

“You make mistakes,” I told him, “then you go over the passage you got wrong again, slowing right down into the bit where you messed up. You play it again and again and again-and then, when you’ve got down how to do it without messing up, play it some more times, coming back to normal speed. And then you carry on-at least until you hit your next mistake. You with me?”

“I make the mistakes deliberately?” he asked, looking at the floor. His voice was vacant and monotonous, completely without intonation.

“Exactly,” I said. “In the afternoons you teach young students. School children. Pretty basic stuff. In the evenings you compose. There’s more, but that’s the gist of it.”

“I’ll do it,” he said, still looking away. “Can I huf an obvos?”

“What did you say?” I asked him. He’d mumbled his last phrase into his collar.

He looked up for an instant. He really looked miserable. Then his eyes dropped again and he said, only slightly more clearly:

“Can I have an advance? Against the first two weeks.”

I thought about that for a moment, then I answered:

“Yes, you can. Naz will see to that. Oh-but you’ll have to grow your hair out at the sides. Is that acceptable?”

His eyes moved slowly from one corner of their sockets to another, trying half-heartedly to catch a glimpse of the hair on either side of his pale head. They gave up pretty quickly; he looked down at the floor and nodded glumly again. He was perfect. He signed his contract, Naz gave him some money and he left.

Interior designers were the other nightmare group. We interviewed several. I’d explain to them exactly what I wanted, down to the last detail-and they’d take this as a cue to start creating décor themselves!

“What I’m getting from you is a downbeat, retro look,” one of them told me. “And that’s exciting. Full of possibilities. I think we should have faux-flock wallpaper throughout-Chantal de Witt does a fantastic line in this-and lino carpeting along the hallways. That’s what I’m seeing.”

“I don’t care what you’re seeing,” I told him. “I don’t want you to create a look. I want you to execute the exact look I’ll dictate to you.”

This one stormed out in a huff. Two others agreed in principle to execute the look I wanted but balked when it came to the blank stretches. I’d left blank stretches in my diagrams, as I mentioned earlier-stretches of floor or corridor that hadn’t crystallized inside my memory. Some of these had since come back, but others hadn’t, any more than the concierge’s face, and I’d decided that these parts should be blank in reality, with doorways papered and cemented over, strips of wall left bare and so on. Neutral space. Our architect loved this, but the designers found it quite repulsive. One of them agreed to do it, so we hired him; but when it came to actually realizing it he snapped.

“I don’t care what you’re paying me,” he shouted. “It will destroy me professionally if this gets out. It’s just so ugly!”

We had to fire him. He sued us. Marc Daubenay came in and dealt with him. I don’t know how it turned out. Perhaps the case is still running today, who knows.

So in the end we found a set designer. It was Naz’s idea: a brilliant one. Frank, his name was. He’d designed sets for movies, so he understood the concept of partial décor. Film sets have loads of neutral space-after all, you only have to make the bit the camera sees look real; the rest you leave unpainted, without detail, blank. Frank brought a props woman called Annie with him. She turned out to be vital in the later stages.

Matthew Younger came once to the building during the setting-up period. I’d had him sell four million pounds worth of stocks when I’d first bought the building. It had cost just over four in all: the three and a half price tag, plus conveyancing fees, stamp duty and all that stuff, plus the bribes of two grand each we’d given some of the long-standing tenants to get them to waive their rights and move straight out. Only two had refused, and they’d both changed their minds within a week. I didn’t enquire how they’d been persuaded.

The amazing thing, though, is that by the time Matthew Younger visited me on the site a few weeks later, my portfolio’s value had risen back almost to the level it had been at before he’d sold the shares.

“It’s like yoghurt,” I said, “or a lizard’s tail, that grows back if you yank it off.”

“Speculation!” he said, smiling from ear to ear. His voice boomed up the stairwell, zinging off the loose iron banisters that were being ripped out one by one. They’d looked right in the catalogue, but didn’t any more once we’d installed them, so they were being ripped out and replaced. “The technology and telecommunications sectors are experiencing a boom just now,” he went on. “They’re going stratospheric. This is great, but you must understand that your level of exposure is enormous.”

“Exposure,” I repeated. “I like exposure.” I turned the palms of my hands outwards and raised them both-almost imperceptibly, but still enough to feel a muffled tingling in my right side.

“I’ve prepared you a chart,” said Matthew Younger, taking a large piece of paper from his dossier, “that takes the mean performance of these aggregated sectors over eight years. If you look…”

I felt another type of tingling on my upturned palms-not one coming from inside me but an exterior one, a sensation of lots of little particles falling on it. I looked up: granite crumbs were tumbling from the stairs above us.

“Let’s go outside,” I said.

I led Matthew Younger out into the courtyard. Swings were being installed that day. I hadn’t seen swings in my original vision of the courtyard-but they’d grown there later, as I thought about it further: a concrete patch with swings on and a wooden podium a few feet to its right. Workmen had laid down the cement and were now planting the swings’ bases in it while it was still wet. Matthew Younger held his map up against the sky.

“Look,” he said. “In this first four-year period this chart covers…just here, see?-they rose pretty sharply. But then here, over the next two years, they drop again-and just as sharply, even dipping lower than they were back here. From here they rise again, and from the time when we bought into them their upward thrust has been phenomenal. But if they choose to plummet again…”

“Is there any reason they should?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “All the signs suggest they’ll rise still more. But one can never completely second-guess the market.”

“Isn’t that your job?” I said.

“Well, of course,” he said. “To a large extent. But there is a small degree of randomness-a capricious element that likes occasionally to buck expectations, throw a spanner in the works.”