Tom McCarthy - Remainder

In the cupboard above the kitchen unit that I’d practised turning sideways round, I found vinegar, Worcestershire Sauce and blue peppermint essence. I got a blank piece of paper and experimented with each of these. Worcestershire Sauce made the best stain, by far. I found a half-drunk bottle of wine and tried staining the paper with that too. The consistency was thinner but the colour was fantastic. It looked like blood.

“Blood!” I said aloud to my empty apartment. “I should have used blood in the first place.”

I took a small knife from a drawer, pricked my finger with its point and squeezed the flesh and skin until a small bauble of blood grew on it. Holding my finger upright so as not to lose the bauble, I went back to the living room and pressed it to the card, stamping my print across the middle of the road in blood. Then I sat back and looked at it till morning.

It was a giant print, spanning the pavement on both sides, its contours swirling round bollards, cars and shop fronts, doubling back around the phone box, gathering the killers and their victim together in the same large, undulating sweep. They were too small to make it out, of course, or even to know that it was there. No: it was legible only from above, a landing field for elevated, more enlightened beings.

THE ACTUAL SURFACES, when I saw them later that day, were sensational. If the diagrams had been like abstract paintings, then the road itself was like an old grand master-one of those Dutch ones thick with rippling layers of oil paint. Its tarmac was old, fissured and cracked. And its markings! They were faded, worn by time and light into faint echoes of the instructions that they’d once pronounced so boldly. The road was cambered, like most roads. It had rained recently and its central area was dry, but had wet tyre tracks running over it. Its edges were still wet. Around the seams where road met kerb and kerbstone pavement, water and dirt had been skilfully mixed to form muddy, pockmarked ridges. In places these ran into puddles in whose centres hung large clouds of mud hemmed in by borders that turned rusty and then clear, as though the artist had used them to clean his brush.

Chewing gum, cigarette butts and bottle tops had been distributed randomly across the area and sunk into its outer membrane, become one with tarmac, stone, dirt, water, mud. If you were to cut out ten square centimetres of it like you do with fields on school geography trips-ten centimetres by ten centimetres wide and ten more deep-you’d find so much to analyse, so many layers, just so much matter-that your study of it would branch out and become endless until, finally, you threw your hands up in despair and announced to whatever authority it was you were reporting to: There’s too much here, too much to process, just too much.

I arrived at the re-enactment area from the south. Police tape had been unwound across the street where Shakespeare Road ran into Coldharbour Lane, beneath a bridge that crossed the road perpendicular to the bridge I’d been stopped by on the day of the actual shooting. A policeman had been posted there to turn traffic away. I showed him the pass Naz had biked over to me one hour earlier; he let me through. Naz came over to greet me, but I paused beside the policeman and asked him:

“Were you here on the day the shooting happened?”

“No,” he said.

“I mean, not here here, but just on the other side of the cordoned-off area?”

“I wasn’t there that day,” he said.

I stared at him intently for a few more seconds, then walked on with Naz.

“Slept well?” Naz asked.

I hadn’t slept at all. My tiredness made the dappled pattern of wet and dry patches on the pavement stand out more intensely. The air was bright but not bright-blue: the sun was beaming from behind a thin layer of white cloud. Its light cast shadows and reflections: from the bollards and the phone box and on the surfaces of puddles.

“Whatever,” I said. “How long do we have?”

“We’ve got until six o’clock this evening,” he said.

“Get it extended,” I told him.

“They won’t let us have more time,” he said.

“Pay them,” I said. “Offer them double what we’ve paid already, and if they say no, then double that again. Is all the area between the lines of tape ours?”

“Yes,” said Naz.

The cordoned-off stretch ran between the bridge and the traffic lights I’d been stopped by on the first day-but of this area only about a third was primary re-enactment space. The other two thirds were given over to back-up: cars and boxes, tables, a big van from whose back doors two women were handing out coffee. The vehicles were all parked unusually: not flat against the kerb but willy-nilly, right across the road, irregular.

“When you see that, it’s usually because there’s been an accident,” I told Naz.

“Sorry?” he said.

“Or the fair,” I said. “If it’s on grass.”

He looked at me intently for a while. Then his eyes lit up and he said:

“Oh yes, I see. I always liked the fair.”

“Me too,” I said.

We smiled at one another, then I looked across our area. One of Frank’s people who I recognized from the building was lifting replica sub-machine guns from a box and carrying them with another man towards the van the two women were serving coffee from. Another man was stepping from a dull red BMW he’d parked in the middle of the road beside the traffic lights. Another, shortish man I hadn’t seen before was standing two feet behind him, watching the goings-on. I looked back at the ground. Besides being layered and cracked, it was also plumbed: dotted with holes and outlets that had been placed there strategically when the street had first been laid. There was a small cover set into the tarmac that had ‘water’ written on it and another almost identical one that said ‘London Transport’. A larger, rounder one set into a hydrant carried two strings of figures, EM124 and B125; another simply bore the letter C. All these openings to tubes and pipelines, outlets and supply points, connections feeding back to who knew where. I saw we had a lot of work to do.

“Where are the re-enactors?” I asked.

“Over there,” said Naz.

He pointed to the van. Three black men were standing around behind it, drinking coffee. Two of them were the same ones I’d pointed out to Naz the day we’d hired the Soho Theatre; the third I’d not seen before. He was riding around in small circles on a red sports bicycle, trying to keep going without putting his feet down.

“Is that the victim?” I asked.

“Yes,” replied Naz.

“Stand him down,” I said. “I’ll take his place. Send the other two over to me. And Naz?”

“Yes?”

“I want to pay the people who’ve done all the organizing bits more.”

“Which ones do you mean?” he asked.

“The people who’ve worked with you to get all the elements of this coordinated. Not the ones who actually do stuff, but the ones who make the other people’s stuff all fit together. You understand?”

“I do,” said Naz. “But you’re already paying them generously.”

“Pay them more generously, then,” I said.

I pressed my thumb to my finger just where I’d stuck the knife in a few hours earlier as I said this. Money was like blood, I figured. I’d barely pricked myself; I had plenty more to give.

Naz walked across to the three black men by the van. I saw him take the man who’d been riding the bicycle in circles to one side and talk to him. The man got off the bike, talked to Naz some more, then strode back to the van, reached in, took out a bag and walked off towards the police tape. The other two, meanwhile, came sauntering over to me. I briefed them.