Tom McCarthy - Remainder

And yet it was a good question, coming as it did: here, in front of this caged-in sports pitch, from the short councillor. Venturing outside after days of trances I felt lucid, fresh, refreshed. The clang of footballs hitting the caged goal was sharp; his question sharpened my whole mind, turned me into a sportsman, made me slow time down, expand it, push its edges out and move around inside it. I thought back over the last months, and beyond: right back to Paris, to the feeling that I’d had with Catherine of getting away with something. I thought back over the serenity, the floating sensation that I’d felt when walking past my liver lady as she put the bin bag out; over my elation when the blue goop had seemed to have dematerialized and become sky; the intense and overwhelming tingling that had fulgurated when I’d opened myself up and become passive lying on the tarmac by the phone box and had stayed with me for days; I let my thoughts run right up to that same morning. And yet to the simple question When had I felt least unreal? the answer was not any of these times.

It was, it slowly dawned on me, another time: a moment that had come about not through an orchestrated re-enactment, but by chance-without back-up people, two-way radios, architects, police moles and forensic reports, without piano loops and licences and demarcated zones. I’d been alone: alone and yet surrounded by people. They’d been streaming past me, on the concourse outside Victoria Station. Commuters. I’d been going to see Matthew Younger: I’d come out of the tube just as rush hour was beginning, and commuters-men and women dressed in suits-had hurried past me. I’d stood still, facing the other way, feeling them hurrying, streaming. I’d turned the palms of my hands outwards, felt the tingling begin-and been struck by the thought that my posture was like the posture of a beggar, holding his hands out, asking passers-by for change. The tingling had grown; after a while I’d decided that I would ask them for change. I’d started murmuring:

“Spare change…spare change…spare change…”

I’d stood like this, gazing vaguely in front of me and murmuring spare change, for several minutes. Nobody had given me any; I didn’t need or want their change: I’d just received eight and half million pounds. But being in that particular space, right then, in that particular relation to the others, to the world, had made me so serene, so intense that I’d felt almost real. I remembered, standing next to the short councillor now, having felt exactly that way: almost real. I turned to him and said:

“It was when I was outside Victoria Station, looking for my stockbroker’s office, asking passers-by for change.”

The short councillor smiled-the type of smile that implied he’d known what my answer would be before I’d even given it.

“Demanding money of which he most certainly had no need,” he said. “That’s what’s made him feel most real.”

“Demanding money, yes,” I told him, “but also the sense of…”

“Of what?” he asked.

“Of being on the other side of something. A veil, a screen, the law-I don’t know…”

My voice petered out. The short councillor looked at me for a while, then said:

“Demanding money, having passed onto the other side, he says. The question follows: What will he do next?”

What would I do next? Another good question. It should be something like the scene outside Victoria that day. Perhaps I could just re-enact exactly that: hire the concourse and get my staff to be streaming commuters while I stood with my hands out facing them, asking them for change. I pictured it, but it didn’t really catch my imagination. Re-enacting it wouldn’t be enough: there’d be something missing, something fundamental.

I closed my eyes and straight away an image came to me: of a gun, then of several guns-a whole parade of them, laid out like in Dr Jauhari’s diagrams, with their sleek finishes, curved handles and thick hammers. The image widened: I was with my staff, all in formation just like in my dream, an aeroplane-shaped phalanx. We were on a demarcated surface, an interior concourse divided into areas, cut up by screens which we were penetrating, getting to the other side of. We were standing in a phalanx and demanding money, standing on the other side of something, holding guns-and the whole scene was intense, beautiful and real.

On the asphalt pitch a football hitting a caged goal slammed me back into the present. I turned to the short councillor and said:

“What I’d like to re-enact next is a bank heist.”

ONE WEEK LATER Naz and I found ourselves stepping back into the Blueprint Café. We were there to meet a man named Edward Samuels. In his heyday Samuels had been one of the UK’s most prolific and audacious armed robbers. Besides holding up countless banks, he’d also stolen artworks, clothes, tobacco, televisions: whole shipments of all these. He’d always stolen in bulk. He’d hijacked lorries and raided warehouses. He’d been so adept at making large things disappear that he’d earned himself the name, among the underworld, of Elephant Thief-a moniker which, apparently, those who knew him well were permitted to abbreviate to Elephant.

Samuels’s criminal career hadn’t gone completely without hitch. He’d been imprisoned twice-the second time for an eleven-year stretch, of which he’d served seven. While in prison he’d started studying. He’d done some O levels, and then some A levels, then a degree in Criminal Psychology. He’d written an autobiography, Elephant, which he’d managed to get published shortly after leaving prison. That’s how Naz had hooked up with him and set up our meeting: he’d read his book, then contacted his agent.

Naz told me all this stuff about Samuels while we took a taxi to the restaurant. As he did I pictured him. I pictured him as tall and quite athletic. I was more or less right. I picked Samuels out as soon as we walked in. He was burly and fiftyish, with straight white hair. He had high cheekbones and was sort of handsome. He’d brought a copy of his book with him-or so it seemed: a book which I assumed was his was lying on the table just in front of him, but when I sat down and glanced at it, it turned out to be called The Psychopathology of Crime.

“Still studying?” I asked him.

“Halfway through my MA,” Samuels said. His voice was husky and working class, but had a middle-class kind of assurance to it. “I got the bug. In prison you go mad if you don’t put your mind to something. The weights are okay for your murderers and psychos, but if you’ve got half a brain you want to use your time to educate yourself.”

“Why criminal psychology?” I asked.

“There were psychologists in prison, studying us,” Samuels said, picking at a breadstick. “So I asked one of them to lend me some books. At first he lent me ones geared to the patient: how to manage anger, how to cope with this and that. Within a week I’d asked him to show me the ones he read. Books for psychologists.”

“Like textbooks?” I asked.

“Exactly,” he said. “Reading these was like suddenly being given the key to my own past. Understanding it. If you don’t want to repeat things, you have to understand them.”

I thought hard about what Samuels had just said, then told him:

“But I do want to repeat things.”

“So Nazrul’s informed me,” Samuels answered. “He says…”

“And I don’t want to understand them. That’s the…”

My voice trailed off. The waiter turned up. Naz and I ordered fish soup, kedgeree and sparkling water; Samuels ordered venison sausages and red wine.

“Did you serve us here before?” I asked the waiter.

He stepped back and looked at me.