Tom McCarthy - Remainder

“All yours,” she said, smiling warmly. “Call Naz when you’re ready to go.”

I nodded. She left, closing the door behind her.

Before phoning Naz I stood alone in my living room for a while. The layout of the sofas and the coffee table, of the kitchen area-the plants, the counter and the fridge: all this was correct. Below me I could hear radios and TV sets being switched on throughout the building. At least one Hoover was in use. I stepped into the bathroom and looked at the crack on the wall. Just right too: not just the crack but the whole room-taps, wall, colours, crack, everything: perfect. I stepped back into my living room, picked up the phone and called Naz.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Good,” he replied. “I’ll start the liver and the cats. We’ll take it from there.”

“Fine,” I said, and hung up.

I walked over to the kitchen window and looked out. Above the staggered, red-tiled rooftops of the facing building, the doors of two of the little cabins opened and two cats were shunted out of each. Three of them started meandering slowly around the roofs, each in his own direction; the fourth just sat down and stayed still-although if I slightly moved my head a centimetre or so to the left the kinked glass made him elongate and slither. A crackle came from downstairs: the snap of wet liver landing on hot oil; then came another one, a third, a fourth. For a few seconds it sounded as though fireworks were being let off a few streets away; then the crackles quietened down into a constant sizzle punctuated by the occasional pop. I wandered back into the bathroom and looked at the cats from there while I waited for the liver’s smell to reach me.

When it did, I stepped back into the living room and called Naz.

“It’s not right,” I said.

“What’s not?” he asked.

“That smell,” I said. “I thought Annie had made sure they’d broken the pans in. So they weren’t new, I mean.”

“I’ll check that with her now,” he said. “Hold on.”

I heard him radio Annie and repeat to her what I’d told him. I heard her radio crackle to his radio and back down the phone line to me. I heard her tell him:

“They are broken in. We went through all this.”

“She says they are broken in,” Naz told me. Then there was a crackle and I heard Annie’s voice ask Naz:

“What’s not right about the smell?”

“What’s wrong with it?” repeated Naz.

“It’s got that sharp edge,” I told him. “Kind of like cordite.”

“A bit like cordite,” I heard him tell her.

“That’s what he said before,” I heard her voice say. “Tell him to give it a few minutes. It should settle down once it gets cooking.”

“Give it a few minutes,” Naz said. “It should…”

“Yes, I heard,” I told him.

I hung up again and walked over to my kitchen area. The plants rustled in their baskets as I passed them, just like I’d first remembered them rustling. I went over to the window. The cats were widely dispersed now, black against the red. I could see three of them: the fourth must have slunk off behind a chimney pot. I brushed past the kitchen unit’s waist-high edge, the same way I’d remembered brushing past it when I’d first remembered the whole building-turning half sideways and then back again. My movement wasn’t deft enough, though, and my shirt caught slightly on the corner as I passed-not violently, snagging, but still staying against the wood for half a second too long, hugging it too thickly. This wasn’t right-wasn’t how I remembered it: my memory was of passing it deftly, letting the shirt brush the woodwork lightly, almost imperceptibly, like a matador’s cape tickling a bull’s horns. I tried it again: this time my shirt didn’t touch the woodwork at all. I tried it a third time: walking past the unit, turning sideways and then back again, trying to make my shirt brush fleetingly against the woodwork as I turned. This time I got the shirt bit right, but not the turning. It was difficult, this whole manoeuvre: I would need to practise.

I moved over to the fridge and pulled the door towards me. The door gave without resistance, opening in a smooth and seamless flow. I closed it, then pulled it towards me again. Again it opened smoothly. I did it a third time: again, faultless. Downstairs the pianist was coming out of a corrective loop, speeding up as he took off for new territory. I opened the fridge faultlessly once more, then closed it for the last time: I was ready to go.

I called Naz again.

“I’d like to leave my flat now,” I told him. “I’ll walk down past the liver lady’s.”

“Okay,” Naz said. “Count thirty seconds from now and then leave your door. Exactly thirty seconds.”

He hung up. I hung up too. I stood in the middle of my living-room floor, counting thirty seconds with my hands slightly raised, palms turned slightly outwards. Then I left my flat.

Moving across the landing and down the staircase, I felt like an astronaut taking his first steps-humanity’s first steps-across the surface of a previously untouched planet. I’d walked over this stretch a hundred times before, of course-but it had been different then, just a floor: now it was fired up, silently zinging with significance. Held beneath a light coat of sandy dust within a solid gel of tar, the flecks of gold and silver in the granite seemed to emit a kind of charge, as invisible as natural radiation-and just as potent. The non-ferrous-metal banisters and the silk-black wooden rail above them glowed with a dark, unearthly energy that took up the floor’s diminished sheen and multiplied its dark intensity. I turned the first corner, glancing through its window as I moved: light from the courtyard bent as it approached me; a long, thin kink travelled across the surface of the facing building, then shot off away to wrinkle more remote, outlying spaces. The red rooftiles were disappearing as I came down, eclipsed by their own underhang as the angle between us widened. Then I turned again and the whole façade revolved away from me.

I continued down the stairs. Sounds travelled to me-but these, too, were subject to anomalies of physics, to interference and distortion. The pianist’s music ran, snagged and looped back on itself, first slowing down then speeding up. The static crackle of the liver broke across the orphaned signals cast adrift from radios and television sets. The Hoover moaned on, sucking matter up into its vacuum. I could hear the motorbike enthusiast clanging down in the courtyard, banging at a nut to loosen it. The clanging echoed off the facing building, the clangs reaching me as echoes almost coinciding with the clangs coming straight up from his banging-almost but not quite. I remembered seeing a boy once kicking a football against a wall, the distance between him and the wall setting up the same delay, the same near-overlap. I couldn’t remember where, though.

I moved on down the staircase. As I came within four steps of the fifth-floor landing I heard the liver lady’s locks jiggle and click. Then her door opened and she moved out slowly, holding a small rubbish bag. She was wearing a light-blue cardigan; her hair was wrapped up in a headscarf; a few white, wiry strands were sprouting from its edges, standing out above her forehead like thin, sculpted snakes. She shuffled forward in her doorway; then she stooped to set her bag down, holding her left hand to her back as she did this. She set the bag down carefully-then paused and, still stooped, turned her head to look up at me.

We’d spent ages practising this moment. I’d showed her exactly how to stoop: the inclination of the shoulders, the path slowly carved through the air by her right hand as it led the bag round her legs and down to the ground (I’d told her to picture the route supporting arms on old gramophone players take, first across and then down), the way her left hand rested on her lower back above the hip, the middle finger pointing straight at the ground. We’d got all this down to a t- but we hadn’t succeeded in working out the words she’d say to me. I’d racked my brains, but the exact line had never come, any more than the concierge’s face had. Rather than forcing it-or, worse, just making any old phrase up-I’d decided to let her come up with a phrase. I’d told her not to concoct a sentence in advance, but rather to wait till the moment when I passed her on the staircase in the actual re-enactment-the moment we were in right now-and to voice the words that sprung to mind just then. She did this now. Still stooped, her face turned towards mine, she released her grip on the bag and said: