Tom McCarthy - Remainder

“Shall I fire him?” asked Naz.

“Yes!” I said. “No! No, don’t fire him. He’s perfect-in the way he looks, I mean. And in the way he plays. Even the way he speaks: that vacant monotone. But give him hell! Really bad! Hurt him! Metaphorically, I mean, I suppose. He has to understand that what he’s done just won’t fly any more. Make him understand that!”

“I’ll talk to him immediately,” Naz said.

“Where are you now?” I asked him.

“I’m in my office,” he said. “I’ll come over. Can I bring you anything?”

“Some water,” I said. “Sparkling.”

I hung up-then phoned him back straight away.

“Find out how often he’s pulled this one, when you talk to him,” I said.

Naz turned up with the water after half an hour. Apparently the pianist was sorry: he hadn’t realized how vital it was that he should actually be playing the whole time. He’d only used the cassette two times before, when he’d needed to do something else, and…

“Something else?” I interrupted. “I don’t pay him to do other stuff! Three times, no less!”

“He’s agreed not to do it again,” Naz said.

“He’s agreed, has he? That’s nice of him. Shall we give him a raise?”

Naz smiled. “Shall I stick a surveillance camera on him?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “No cameras. Find some other way of making sure he’s doing it properly, though.”

The thing behind Naz’s eyes whirred for a while and then he nodded.

It wasn’t unreasonable to expect this guy to play when he’d been paid to play-been paid enormous amounts of money, at that. And the hours weren’t that bad: I generally put the building into on mode for between six and eight hours each day-mostly in stretches of two hours. Sometimes there’d be a five-hour stretch. Once I went right through a night and half the next day. That was my prerogative, though: it had been written in the contracts that all re-enactors and all back-up staff had signed-written right there in big print for them to read.

I moved through the spaces of my building and its courtyard as I saw fit, just like I’d told Naz I would when we’d first met. I roamed around it as my inclination led me. On some days I felt like gathering data: sketching, measuring, transcribing. So I’d copy the patch of oil beneath the motorbike, say-how it elongated, how its edges rippled-then take the drawing over to Naz’s office, have it photocopied several times, then stick the copies in a line across my living room wall, rotating the patch’s formation through three-sixty. I captured lots of places this way: corners, angles against walls, bits of banister. Sometimes instead of sketching them I’d press a piece of paper up against them and rub it around so that their surface left a mark, a smear. Or I measured the amount of time it took the sunlight to first flood and then drain from each floor in the afternoon, or how long it would take for the swings, if pushed with such and such a strength, to come to a complete standstill.

At other times I lost all sense of measure, distance, time, and just lay watching dust float or swings swing or cats lounge. Some days I didn’t even leave my flat: instead, I sat in my living room or lay in my bath gazing at the crack. I’d keep the building in on mode while I did this: the pianist had to play-really play-and the motorbike enthusiast hammer and bang; the concierge had to stand down in the lobby in her ice-hockey mask, the liver lady fry her liver-but I wouldn’t move around and visit them. Knowing they were there, in on mode, was enough. I’d lie there in my bath for hours and hours on end, half-floating while the crack on the wall jutted and meandered, hazy behind moving wisps of steam.

I worked hard on certain actions, certain gestures. Brushing past my kitchen unit, for example. I hadn’t been satisfied with the way that had gone on the first day. I hadn’t moved past it properly, and my shirt had dragged across its edge for too long. The shirt was supposed to brush the woodwork-kiss it, no more. It was all in the way I half-turned so that I was sideways as I passed it. A pretty difficult manoeuvre: I ran through it again and again-at half-speed, quarter-speed, almost no speed at all, working out how each muscle had to act, each ball and socket turn. I thought of bull-fighting again, then cricket: how the batsman, when he chooses not to play the ball, steps right into its path and lets it whistle past his arched flank millimetres from his chest, even letting it flick the loose folds of his shirt as it shoots by. I put the building into off mode for a whole day while I practised the manoeuvre: striding, half-turning as I rose to my toes, letting my shirt brush against it-grazing it like a hovercraft does water-then turning square again as I came down. Then I tried it for real the next day, with the building in on mode. After the two days I had three separate bruises on my side-but it was worth it for the fluent, gliding feeling I got the few times it worked: the immersion, the contentedness.

I worked hard on my exchange with the liver lady too. Not that anything-dropped bag apart-had been wrong with it on the first day we’d done it: I just felt like doing it again and again and again. Hundreds of times. More. No one counted-I didn’t, at any rate. I’d break the sequence down to its constituent parts-the changing angle of her headscarf and her stooped back’s inclination as I moved between two steps, the swivel of her neck as her head turned to face me-and lose myself in them. One day we spent a whole morning going back and back and back over the moment at which her face switched from addressing me with the last word of her phrase, the up, to cutting off eye contact, turning away and leading first her shoulders then eventually her whole body back into her flat. Another afternoon we concentrated on the instant at which her rubbish bag slouched into the granite of the floor, its shape changing as its contents, no longer suspended in space by her arm, rearranged themselves into a state of rest. I laid out the constituent parts of the whole sequence and relished each of them, then put them back together and relished the whole-then took them apart again.

One day, as I stood by my kitchen window looking down into the courtyard, I had an idea. I phoned Naz to tell him:

“I should like,” I said, “a model of the building.”

“A model?”

“Yes, a model: a scale model. Get Roger to make it.” Roger was our architect. “You know when you go into public buildings’ lobbies when they’re being developed and you see those little models showing how it’ll all look when it’s finished…”

“Ah yes, I see,” Naz said. “I’ll get on to him.”

Roger delivered the model to me a day and a half later. It was brilliant. It was about three feet high and four wide. It showed the courtyard and the facing building and even the sports track. There were little figures in it: the motorbike enthusiast next to his bike, the pianist with his bald pate, the liver lady with her headscarf and her snaky strands of hair, the concierge with her stubby arms and white mask. He’d even made a miniscule mop and Hoover for her cupboard. You could see all these because he’d made several of the walls and floors from see-through plastic. On the ones that weren’t see-through he’d filled in the details: light switches and doorknobs, the repeating pattern on the floor. The stretches of neutral space he’d made white. Sections of wall and roof came off too, so you could reach inside. As soon as Roger had left my flat I called Naz.

“Give him a big bonus,” I said.

“How much?” Naz asked.

“Oh, you know: big,” I told him. “And Naz?”

“Yes?”

“I’d like you to…Let’s see…”

The figures of the characters were moveable. I’d picked up the liver lady one while talking and was making it bobble down the stairs and out into the courtyard.