Tom McCarthy - Remainder

“Surplus matter,” I said, still gazing through the telescope.

“What’s that?” asked Naz.

“All this extra stuff that needs to be carted away,” I said. “It’s like an artichoke-the way there’s always more of it on your plate after you’ve finished than there was before you started.”

“I like artichokes,” said Naz.

“Me too,” I said. “Right now I do, at least. Let’s eat some for supper this evening.”

“Yes, let’s,” Naz concurred. He got onto his phone and told someone to go and buy us artichokes.

It really took shape in the final two weeks. The hallways had been laid, the courtyard landscaped and re-landscaped, the flats fitted or blanked out as my diagrams had stipulated. Now we had to concentrate on the minutiae. We had to get the crack right, for example: the crack in my bathroom wall. I still had the original piece of paper that I’d copied it onto back at that party-plus the diagrams that I’d transcribed it onto over the next twenty-four hours, of course. Frank and I and a plasterer called Kevin spent a long time getting the colour of the plaster all around it right.

“That’s not quite it,” I’d tell Kevin as he mixed it. “It should be more fleshy.”

“Fleshy?” he asked.

“Fleshy: grey-brown pinky. Sort of like flesh.”

He got there in the end, after a day-or-so’s experimenting.

“Not like any flesh I’ve seen,” he grunted as he smeared it on.

That wasn’t the end of it, though: when it dried it darkened, ending up a kind of silver brown. We had to backtrack and remix it so that it would turn out dry the colour that the last mix had when wet. Nor was that the end of it: we hadn’t realized how difficult it would be to get plaster to crack the way we wanted it to.

“I mix plaster so it won’t crack,” Kevin sniffed.

“Well, do wrong what you usually do right, then,” I said.

He mixed it much drier-but then cracks are sort of random: you can’t second-guess which way they’ll go. It took another day of experimenting: trying salt and razor blades and heat and all sorts of devices to get it to crack the right way. Kevin whistled the same tune for hours while he did this: a pop tune, one I thought I recognized. He didn’t whistle the whole tune-just one bit of it, over and over.

“What is it?” I asked him after several hours of whistling and crack-forming, rubbing over and reforming.

“What’s what?”

“That song.”

“History Repeating,” he said. “By the Propellerheads.” He raised his eyebrows and his voice climbed as he half-sang and half-spoke the line that he’d been whistling: “‘All, just-a, little, bit-of, history re-peat-ing.’ See?” Then, stepping back, he asked: “How’s that?”

“It’s quite nice,” I said. “I’ve heard it on the radio.”

“No,” Kevin said. “The crack.”

“Oh! Quite good. Not quite sharp enough, though.”

Kevin sighed and went at it again. Several hours later a scalpel dipped in a mix of TCP and varnish managed to cut and set it in the formation we wanted.

“Satisfied?” asked Kevin.

“Yes,” I answered. “But there’s still the blue and yellow patches to daub on.”

“Not my job,” Kevin said. “I’m out of here.”

We didn’t have much problem finding the right type of large taps for the bathtub-the problem was with making them look old. We had this problem often, as you might imagine: making things look old. The hallway had to be scuffed down with sandpaper and smeared with small amounts of grease-diluted tar. The banisters had to be blasted with vaporized ice to make them oxidize. And then the windows were too crisply transparent: the courtyard and the roofs didn’t look right through them. I couldn’t work out why at first, nor express what was wrong with them: I just kept telling my staff that the courtyard didn’t look right.

“So what’s not right about it?” asked the landscape gardener.

“Nothing’s not right about it: it’s the way it looks through these windows. Too crisp. That’s not how I remembered it.”

“Remembered it?” he asked.

“Whatever,” I said, waving him away. Annie came over and looked. She solved it instantly:

“It’s the type of glass,” she said. “Not old enough.”

Bingo. New glass is totally consistent, doesn’t gloop and run and crimp the things you see through it like old glass does. We had all the panes removed and older ones brought in.

My living room and kitchen came together nicely. We’d knocked interior walls down to get the right open-plan shape. Now we got cracking on the furnishings. I brought the right type of plants in-eventually. That Portuguese woman! Formidable: her voice, her stark physique. She stomped out of her van lugging these beautiful, lush, healthy ferns and spider plants that seemed to cascade out of white ceramic pots.

“These are no good,” I said to Annie. “They’re too lush, too green.”

“Waz wrong wiz zem?” the Portuguese plant woman thundered. “My planz healzy! My planz good!”

“I know they’re good,” I said. “That’s just the problem. I need old and shabby ones in tinny baskets.”

“Baskez no good for zem!” she said, slapping the back of her hand against my arm. “They needz zpaze, zupport. I know waz good for zem!”

Behind her, through the window and across the courtyard, men on the facing roofs were busily replacing the tiles we’d had laid down. They’d been too blood-red, not orangey enough. The Portuguese plant woman took a frond between her fingers, held it up to me and slapped my arm with the back of her free hand again.

“Look! Zmell! My planz iz very healzy!”

I escaped and went to Naz’s while Annie got rid of her. Later that day we picked up some half-dead plants in some old junk shop.

The fridge arrived the next day. We netted it not from the Sotheby’s Americana auction that I mentioned earlier but from an auction site Naz had found on the internet. It looked just right-but its door slightly caught each time you opened it, just like Greg had said all fridge doors do outside of films.

“That sucks!” I said. “That really fucking sucks! You’d have thought that with all of their alleged craftsmanship” (they’d played this aspect of the fridge up on the website) “they could have made one whose door didn’t catch like this. I mean, what’s the whole point of doing all this if it’s still going to catch?”

“What do you mean?” asked Annie.

“It…Just, well…” I said. “It bloody shouldn’t!”

I sat down. I was really upset.

“Don’t worry,” said Annie. “It just needs new rubber.”

Someone was dispatched to get new rubber. While we waited for that to arrive, we tested for the smell of liver frying. An extractor fan had been installed above the liver lady’s stove, its out-funnel on the building’s exterior turned towards the windows of my kitchen and my bathroom. Liver had been bought that day-pig’s liver; but we found that frying just one panful didn’t produce enough smell. Someone else was dispatched to buy more frying pans and a lot more liver. They cooked it in four frying pans at once. Annie and I waited in my flat.

“How’s that?” she asked.

“It’s great,” I told her. “The spit and sizzle is exactly the right volume. There’s just one thing not quite…”

“What?” she asked.

“The smell is kind of strange.”

“Strange?” she repeated-then, into her cackling radio: “Wait a minute. Strange?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sort of strange. A bit like cordite.”

“Cordite? I’ve never smelt cordite. You know what I think it is, though? It’s that the pans are new.”

“Bingo again,” I told her. “That must be it.”