Tom McCarthy - Remainder

“Wait!” I shouted at them.

They stopped.

“Wait!” I shouted again. “You shouldn’t drive off. You shouldn’t even walk back to the car. When you’ve stopped shooting at me for the last time, just turn your backs on me and stop.”

“What shall we do when we’ve stopped?” the man with the London accent asked.

“Nothing,” I told him. “Just stop, and stand there with your backs to me. We’ll stop the whole scene there, but hold it for a while in that position. Okay?”

He nodded. I looked at his friend. He nodded too, slowly.

“Good,” I said. “Let’s do it again.”

We resumed our positions. Back in the phone box, I looked through the window. The BMW was turning round by the traffic lights, beside the shortish man I’d noticed earlier. Just over half the crew and back-up people had chosen that end of the area to stand at and watch from; eight or so more were gathered at the far end, the end I’d entered from, beneath the bridge. The cabin’s glass was clear, not wrinkled like the windows of my building. All the same, I looked instinctively across to the roof of the building on the far side of the road, scanning it for cats, then realized my mistake and turned the other way.

The grill across Movement Cars’ façade was, now I looked at it more closely, actually four panels of grill, each panel being made up of three sections of criss-crossing metal lines. It looked like graph paper, with large square areas containing smaller ones that framed, positioned and related every mark or object lying behind them-a ready-made forensic grid. Most of the grid’s squares were pretty blank. The lower left-hand-side one, though, the one closest to the pavement at the corner of Belinda Road, had two bunches of flowers stuffed behind it. They were hanging upside down, wrapped in plastic. Two grid-columns across were the painted words: Movement Cars, Airports, Stations, Light, Removals, Any Distance. They ran over all three of the column’s larger squares; the n and t of Movement ran into the next column, the column to the right. It was Light Removals, not Light then Removals: I knew that already, but had just forgotten that I knew.

The dull red BMW passed the phone box again. Again I saw it twice: once from the corner of my eye and once reflected in the metal of the cabin’s wall-only it seemed flatter and more elongated this time. When the driver turned the engine off, for a half-second or so I could make out the individual firings of the piston as these slowed down and died off. I opened the phone box’s door, stepped out and got onto my bicycle. Again the tingling kicked in as I passed the white foam cup. Again the two men took their guns out and I pedalled furiously. This time when the bike dipped from the pavement to the road I felt my altitude drop, like you do on aeroplanes when they make their descent. The same tumult of images came to me as I went over the handlebars: a portion of the black bar with no name, a streak of gold, some sky, a lamppost, tarmac and the puddle with the Greek or Russian letters floating on its surface. I got up, let them shoot me a second time, went down again and lay with my face on the tarmac looking at the undercarriage of a parked van, at the patterned markings on one of its hubcaps.

I lay there for longer this time than I had the last. There was no noise behind me, no footsteps: the two killers had remembered what I’d told them and were standing there quite still. I lay there on the tarmac for a long time tingling, looking at the hubcap.

Then I got up and we did it again, and again, and again.

After running through the shooting for the fifth time I was satisfied we’d got the actions right: the movement, the positions. Now we could begin working on what lay beneath the surfaces of these-on what was inside, intimate.

“Let’s do it at half speed,” I said.

The black man with the London accent frowned.

“You mean we should drive slower?” he asked.

“Drive, walk, everything,” I said.

One of Naz’s men was striding over to us with a clipboard in his hand. I waved him away and continued:

“Everything. The same as before, but at half speed.”

“Like in an action replay on TV?” he asked.

“Well,” I said, “sort of. Only don’t do all your movements in slow motion. Do them normally, but at half the normal speed. Or at the normal speed, but take twice as long doing them.”

They both stood there for a few seconds, taking in what I’d said. Then the taller man, the one with the West Indian accent, started nodding. I saw that his lips were curled into a smile.

“You’re the boss,” he said again.

We took up our positions once more. Inside the phone box this time I examined every surface it had to present. My man, the victim, would have taken all these in-but then his brain would have edited most of them back out again, dismissed them as mundane, irrelevant. A mistake: perhaps if he’d paid more attention to the environment around him some association might have warned him of what was about to happen, even saved his life. He must have done something wrong, crossed someone, broken some code of the underworld. So if he’d looked more carefully at the cabin’s metal wall and taken in the fact that the dull red BMW was passing slowly by, too slowly perhaps, and connected this with the last time he’d seen that car or its reflection, who he’d been with then…who knows? The stencilled figure on the window, the messenger, knew something was up and was trying to announce this with his horn-to blare it out, a warning; his free hand, the one not holding the instrument, was raised in alarm. And then the silence, like the silence in a forest when a predator is on the prowl and every other creature’s gone to ground except his prey, too tied up in his own concerns, in sniffing roots or chewing grass or daydreaming to read the glaring signs…

I stood with the receiver in my hand. The digital display strip said Insert Coins. Outside, from beneath their grid, the windows of Movement Cars promised wide-open spaces opening to even wider distances-airports, stations and removals, light. An empty green beer bottle sat directly beneath the hanging plastic-wrapped flowers; it seemed to be offering itself to them as a vase if only they’d abandon their position in the grid, come down and turn the right way round again. The pavement, when I stepped out onto it this time, seemed even more richly patterned than it had before. Its stained flagstones ran past the phone cabin and Movement Cars to three or so feet before Belinda Road, then gave over to short, staccato brickwork before melting, as the pavement dipped onto the road itself, into poured tarmac. It was like a quilt, a handmade, patterned quilt laid out for this man to take his final steps across and then lie down and die on: a quilted deathbed. It struck me that the world, or chance, or maybe death itself if you can speak of such a thing, must have loved this man in some way to prepare for him such a richly textured fabric to gather and wrap him up in.

The killers had parked and were leaving their car. Behind them the windows of the Green Man rose up, impassive. When my man, the dead man, saw the two men heading for him with their guns out, just as his first apprehension that there was malice in the air-finally gleaned from the arrangement of bodies and objects, from the grimace on the face of one man and the cold, neutral expression of the other-developed into full-blown understanding that they’d come to kill him: in this instant, this sub-instant, he would have searched the space around him for an exit, for somewhere to go, to hide. He would have pictured the space behind the windows, a space he’d seen before: the pub’s lounge with its stools and pool table, the toilets behind this with their window leading to the yard beyond. His mind would have asked this space to take him in, to shelter him-and been told: No, you can’t get there without being shot; it’s just not possible. It would have asked the same question of Movement Cars’ window, and been told: No, there’s a grill here, and you couldn’t pass through glass even if there weren’t. It might even have looked to the holes plumbed into the street’s surface: the water outlet and the London Transport one and the ones with strings of letters and even the one with just the C-and been told, by each one: No, you can’t enter here; you’ll have to find another exit.