Tom McCarthy - Remainder

“Harder and harder to lift up.”

I froze. Harder and harder to lift up, she’d said. I thought about this as I stood there facing her. Harder and harder to lift up. I liked it. It was very good. As she got older, her bag of rubbish was becoming harder and harder to lift up. She smiled at me, still slightly stooped. It felt just right: all just as I’d imagined it. I stood still, looking back at her, and said:

“Yes. Every time.”

The words just came to me. I spoke them, then I moved on, turning into the next flight of stairs. For a few seconds I felt weightless-or at least differently weighted: light but dense at the same time. My body seemed to glide fluently and effortlessly through the atmosphere around it-gracefully, slowly, like a dancer through water. It felt very good. As I reached the third or fourth step of this new flight, though, this feeling dwindled. By the fifth or sixth one it was gone. I stopped and turned around. The liver lady’s head was disappearing back into her flat and her hand was pulling the door to behind it.

“Wait!” I said.

The door stopped closing and the liver lady poked her head back out. She looked quite nervous. A noise came from behind her, inside the flat.

“That was excellent,” I said. “I’d like to do it again.”

The liver lady nodded.

“Okay, dear,” she said.

“I’ll start at the top of the first flight,” I told her.

She nodded again, shuffled back out towards her rubbish bag, picked it up, then shuffled back into her flat again and closed the door. I started up the staircase-but before I’d reached the bend I heard her door open again behind me and a faster, heavier person step out onto the landing.

“Wait a minute,” said a man’s voice.

I turned round. It was one of Annie’s people.

“What is it?” I asked.

“If you’re going to start from the top of your own flight rather than back in your flat,” he said, “how will she know when to open the door?”

I thought about this. It was a fair question. Annie appeared behind this man.

“What’s the problem?” she asked.

I told her. She pondered it for a while, then said:

“We need someone to watch you and signal to us when the time comes to send her out. But no one can really do that without getting in the way themselves.”

“The cat people!” I said.

“Of course!” said Annie.

The people who’d pushed the cats onto the facing building’s roof would be able to see me from the top-floor windows of that building as I turned the staircase bend: there was a window there.

“They need to watch for me, and radio you when I’m on the-let’s see: when did the door open?” I walked back to the step I’d been on when the liver lady’s locks had clicked and jiggled. “The third one down,” I said.

“I’m not directly linked to them,” said Annie, holding up her radio. “We’ll have to go through Naz.”

She radioed him and the chain of communication was set up. The cat people would watch me from their building as I passed the window on the banister bend and, when I hit the third step of the next flight, give the order to open the door-this via Naz, who’d act as the join between the two parties from his office a few streets away. It took ten or so minutes to set this up. When all the links were in place, everyone apart from me went back into the liver lady’s flat, her door was closed again and I walked back up the stairs to the top of the first flight.

I stood there for a while, rocking very slightly forwards and backwards on my planted feet. I felt the point of pressure shifting from my heels to my toes via the arched tendon in between, the plantar fascia, then back again, a three-part chain. I rocked slightly back then slightly forward several times, then headed down the stairs again.

This time I paused in front of the window by the first bend. I even leant against it, resting my forehead on the glass like I had one floor up on the day I’d found the building. I couldn’t see the spotters in the facing building, the two cat men-but I knew they were there. If they’d been marksmen, snipers, they’d have had a clear shot at me right now. I slid both arms slightly up against the window pane. The tingling started in my right hip and seeped upwards, up my spine. I looked at the top branches of a tree below me in the courtyard: a light breeze was buffeting its leaves, making them dance.

I pulled my head away and made to move on down-but hesitated when I noticed a small patch of black moving quite fast against the facing building. It was gone so quickly that I thought it must have been another optical effect, a quirk of the kinked glass. I tried to reproduce it by pressing my forehead back onto the window pane and pulling it away again, but couldn’t make the black patch reappear. I tried it several times without success. I hadn’t imagined it, though: there’d been a streak of black moving fast against the facing building.

Eventually I gave up and moved on down. As I hit the third step I heard a buzz or scrape that came from behind the liver lady’s door. It could have been a radio or it could have been her rubbish bag scraping the floor. An instant later came the jiggle of her latch; then the door opened and she shuffled out again, her rubbish bag in her hand. Once more she stooped to set her bag down, holding her left hand to her lower back as she did this; once more she looked up at me and pronounced her phrase:

“Harder and harder to lift up.”

I answered her as before. Again I felt the sense of gliding, of light density. The moment I was in seemed to expand and become a pool-a still, clear pool that swallowed everything up in its calm contentedness. Again the feeling dwindled as I left the zone around her door. As soon as I’d reached the third step of the next flight I turned round, as before, and said:

“Again.”

We did it again-but this time it didn’t work. She’d steered the rubbish bag through its horizontal arc around her legs and, stooping, started to lower it to the ground when suddenly it slipped out of her hand and fell with a loud clunk. She bent over to pick it up but I stopped her.

“Don’t bother,” I said. “It’s broken the…you know: it won’t be right. Let’s take it from the top again. Someone should clean that patch up, too.”

Her bag had leaked from its bottom right corner, leaving a wet, sticky-looking patch on the floor. Someone came out and mopped this up.

“It looks too clean now,” I said when they’d done this.

Annie came out again and looked.

“We’ll have to dust and sand it again,” she said.

“How long will that take?” I asked.

“A good hour till it looks just like it did before.”

“An hour?” I repeated. “That’s too…I need it to…”

My voice petered out. I was quite upset. I wanted to slip back into it now, right now: the pool, the lightness and the gliding. There was nothing I could do, though: it wouldn’t be right if the floor wasn’t the right texture. I gathered myself together and announced:

“Okay: do it. I’ll move on.”

I’d come back to the liver lady later. And besides, she was just part of the re-enactment: I had a lot still to do, a lot more space to cover.

I walked past the pianist’s flat. The sound of his music grew crisper and sharper as I passed his door, then once again soft and floaty as I moved down from his floor. On the landing below his I passed the boring couple’s flat. This is where the Hoover noise was coming from. The Hoover was being shunted back and forth across a carpet, by the sound of it. The wife re-enactor would be doing it. I moved on, through a patch of neutral space, down past the motorbike enthusiast’s flat. His clangings were still coming from the courtyard, but with less of an echo now: maybe the trees and the swings were getting in the way down here. I carried on down to the lobby.