Tom McCarthy - Remainder

“What I want you to do,” I said, “is drive that BMW from over there beside the lights to just up there beside the Green Man.”

“Your man talked us through the sequence,” one of them said. He had a London accent and an affable, smiley face.

“Yes,” I told him, “but you must park it just there, see? Exactly there. Its bonnet, front, its nose, should be exactly there, no further forward than the end of the Green Man’s second window. You park it there, then get out-you take your guns with you-and walk across the street firing at me.”

“At you?” the same man asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll be re-enacting the victim’s role. You must walk across the street quite slowly, almost casually, firing at me. But don’t fire until-here, come with me.”

I walked them over to the phone box.

“I’ll start here,” I continued. “I’ll have just left this phone box when you pull up. Or I’ll just be leaving it. I’ll get on my bike and start pedalling, riding in this direction, over here. That’s when you should start shooting: as I come up to just here, where Movement Cars starts.”

“Where should we stand?” the man asked again.

“There,” I said. I walked them back across the street to a spot just in the middle where the cracks branched out into a cell-like pattern of repeating hexagons. “Walk from the car up to here. No further than here, though. You can keep firing, but just stop advancing once you reach this spot. I’ll try to turn into this road here, Belinda Road, and my bike’s handlebars will twist under me, and I’ll fall off, then get up again, and you shoot again and I’ll go down again. You guys should stand here while I do that. Stand here for a while, then go back to the car. Yes, do it like that. Do it just like that.”

The other man spoke now. Unlike his friend he had a strong West Indian accent:

“You’re the boss,” he said.

I signalled over to Naz, who had been talking on his mobile. He came over to us.

“Ready to go?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “What news on the time front?”

“Working on it,” he said.

He called Frank and Annie over. They had Frank’s man in tow, plus the man I’d seen handling the sub-machine guns with him a few minutes earlier. They carried one gun each.

“Sid,” Frank told me by way of introduction. “He’s an effects man I’ve worked with on several films. He’ll show our friends here how the guns work. You can take up your position if you like.”

“Okay,” I said-but I stayed to watch this Sid explain the working of the guns.

“Basically,” said Sid, “they’re like real ten-millimetre Uzis with the chamber taken out. They’ll make a nice bang. You’ve got two magazines,” he went on, pointing to two metallic blocks Frank’s man was holding, “which clip in under here. Look, try it.”

He handed the guns to the two black men. Frank’s man handed them the magazines. They held both awkwardly. Neither could get their magazine to clip in properly. Sid showed them how to wedge the Uzis’ butts against their stomachs just below the ribs and guide the magazines in upwards with their left hand from below, feeling for the slot and catch. They tried it a few times, nodding in satisfaction when they got it right. I envied them. I thought of asking to try too, but didn’t want to get all self-indulgent. Besides, things were moving on. The coffee van was being shifted and the re-enactment area cleared of all personnel. The two black men were being led towards the BMW and handed its keys. The bicycle was being brought to me. I took it, wheeled it over to the phone box, balanced it against the railings just beside this, then opened the phone box’s door and stepped inside.

The street’s sounds drained away and I was back in a cocoon-the same cocoon I’d been placed in when my phone connection had been ripped out of the wall the day the Settlement came through. The cabin had a little shelf in it. Perhaps this black man whose last moments I was re-enacting had rested his address book on this shelf as he made his final phone call. Had the book been shabby, fat and bulging? Yellow? I pictured it as yellow, tattered but not fat. Then it went blue and thin, like those vocabulary books you get in school.

On the window above the shelf the figure of a messenger blowing a horn was stencilled in silhouette. Beyond it was the caged façade of Movement Cars, with the words Airports, Stations, Light, Removals, Any Distance painted on the window. The letters were painted on in white and with a blue outline that had been extended outwards on each letter’s right so they seemed to be casting shadows. What did Light mean? I picked up the phone’s receiver. I didn’t call anyone or put any money in the slot: I just stood there holding the receiver in my hand. When my phone socket had been ripped out of the wall it had lain across my floor looking disgusting, like something that’s come out of something.

Inside the cabin it was quiet. There was no traffic passing by. My staff ’s vehicles, drawn across the road, formed an insulating wall between the re-enactment zone and the outside. In front of and between the vehicles people stood quite still-all mine, a lot of people-looking straight in my direction, at the phone box. Then I heard the BMW’s motor start up: the sound of a spark plug firing a charge of compressed gasoline and of expanded gas shooting a piston off again and again and again-slowly at first, then faster, then after a few seconds so fast that the individual shots merged into a hum of infinite self-repetition without origin or end. It had begun.

I saw the BMW pass the phone box on the far side of the street from the corner of my eye, and again in the metal of the cabin’s wall, reflected. I set the receiver back onto its cradle and opened the phone box’s door. I stepped out, turned my bicycle around and swung my right leg across its bar. The two men had backed the car into the space I’d shown them and were getting out. They’d parked it just right, exactly where I’d told them to. It was very good. The tingling started in my spine again.

I pushed off the pavement with my foot and let the bike roll forwards, its handlebars wobbling. As its front wheel passed a white foam cup lying on the ground, I looked up and to my left at the two men. They’d taken out their sub-machine guns and were pointing them at me. The man with the West Indian accent opened fire. His gun made a tremendous noise. The other man opened fire too, not half a second after the first one. The noise of the two guns together was quite deafening. The affable man with the London accent grimaced as he shot. The other man’s face was expressionless, indifferent, the face of an assassin.

The tingling grew more intense as I raised my buttocks from the bike’s seat and started pedalling furiously, past the grilled windows of Movement Cars, down the dip into Belinda Road. The two men kept marching on me across Coldharbour Lane, firing as they advanced. Just in front of the brush-cleaning puddle at the edge of Belinda Road I turned the bike’s wheel sharply to the right and went over the handlebars. As I fell to the ground a whole tumult of images came at me: the edge of the black bar with no name, a streak of gold, some sky, a lamppost, tarmac and the coloured patterns floating on the puddle’s surface. After I’d stopped tumbling and become still, the patterns took the form of Greek or Russian letters. I looked away from the puddle, up towards the men: they had stopped firing and were standing still, exactly where I’d told them to stand, by the hexagon-cell patterns in the road. It was all good.

The men were waiting for me to get up again. I pushed myself up with my hands and noticed they were numb. This was good-very, very good. I stood up and felt the tingling rush to my head. The two men fired again. I turned from them, dropped to my knees, then let my upper body sink back down towards the ground until my face lay on the tarmac. I lay there for a few seconds, quite still. Then I rolled over onto my back and stood up again. The two men were getting back into their car.