Tom McCarthy: Remainder

We ran through it countless times. In the early run-throughs we had everyone wear labels on their back: R1, R2 and so on for the robbers, C1 and so on for the clerks, P numbers for members of the public. We all looked like marathon runners, or entrants in a ballroom dancing contest. We added things and took things away. The first time Robber Five carried his bag across the lobby, for example, he tripped on a wrinkle in the carpet and fell over. Everyone laughed, but I said: “Do that each time.”

“What, fall over?” he said.

“No, just trip, but don’t quite fall over.”

I calculated that if he slightly tripped on purpose, this would prevent his tripping by mistake-forestall that event, as it were. After we’d run through it a few more times the wrinkle had been flattened. I got Frank to stick a piece of wood beneath it, so that it would kink and Robber Five could semi-trip each time. Another thing I tweaked was the departure from the bank of the accomplice in the enquiry desk line-the show-out. During the first few days’ practices he’d just step out, turn around and walk away. It looked awkward. I felt there must be a better way for him to do this, but I didn’t quite know how. After a week it struck me:

“Do it like a tight end,” I said.

“A what?” the re-enactor asked me.

“A tight end in American football,” I said.

I’d watched lots of American football on TV after the accident, in hospital late at night when I couldn’t sleep. I’d found it hypnotic: how the endlessly repeated static line-ups sprung into moving set pieces which the coaches signalled in from the touchlines by semaphore. Sometimes there’d even be two people semaphoring, one of them sending fake signals to confuse the other team’s code-breakers.

“Is he the guy that throws the ball?” the accomplice re-enactor asked me.

“No,” I said. “That’s the quarterback. The tight end’s the guy that’s in the line but is also eligible to receive the ball. So often he’s set with the others, crouching down; then just before the play begins, before the snap, he peels out and runs behind the other crouchers, parallel to them. I want you to leave the line like that. Not running, obviously-but peeling the same way.”

“Okay,” he said.

We tried it. It looked beautiful.

After almost two more weeks, when we’d got most of the movements right, we had Robber Re-enactors Five and Six actually smash down the airlock’s doors. They took some breaking. Watching them smash down the first, then move into the space between the two, then smash the second one and move on, I thought of explorers moving over polar ice, or mountaineers-how they have to secure each new position, no matter how small an advance it represents, before they progress to the next. We also used real guns. Naz got some shotguns-the type used for shooting pheasants. We needed the guns to be real for when Robber Re-enactor Two fired off the frightener. He fired it at the ceiling, and small bits of plaster fell down. The first time I saw him do this I thought of Matthew Younger, how plaster flakes had fallen onto him when he’d visited me in my building when it was all being set up. Strangely enough, when I got home that evening I found a message from him on my answering machine.

“Please contact me,” he said. “Your stocks are rocketing, but the level of exposure has become almost unbearable, and I have qualms about the sectors’ overall stability. You can call me at the office, or out of office hours on either of the following numbers…”

As I listened to his voice, I thought of what my short councillor had said: that I was wreaking magic, like a shaman. Maybe Matthew Younger had called me and left his message at the same instant that the plaster was falling. I’d never know. I did see the short councillor, though: he turned up the next day at the replica bank.

“Just as he said beside the football pitch,” he said. “A hold-up. He will simulate the robbing of a bank.”

“Yes,” I said. “Re-enact.”

“And re-enact and re-enact again, one presumes,” he continued. “His ultimate goal, of course, being to-how shall we put it? To attain-no, to accede to-a kind of authenticity through this strange, pointless residual.”

Just then I had to take up my position-I was Robber Re-enactor Three-but after we’d rehearsed the procedure again, I went looking for him so that I could ask him what he meant by “residual”. He’d used the word twice now. I couldn’t find him, though.

I decided to sit out the next couple of run-throughs. I put a marker, one of the spare re-enactors, in for me, stood to one side and watched. It was all working very well. The way Robber One’s leg held the door open, slightly bent; the movement of Robber Two’s gun as it described an arc across the lobby from inside the main door while Robber Three did the same but faster and from the floor’s centre, like the second and third hands of a clock set slightly apart; the way the tight end-accomplice turned as he peeled out of the line, his shoulders inclining so the left was slightly lower than the right, then straightening again; the sight of the clerks, customers and security men lying horizontal on the floor, static and abject-all these movements and positions carried an intensity that emanated way beyond them. As I stood watching them I felt that tingling start up at my spine’s base again.

Samuels came over and stood beside me for a while, watching the re-enactors running through their interlocking sequences.

“We used to do this too,” he said after a while.

“Do what?” I asked.

“Dry runs. Simulations. Before any major robbery. We didn’t just go through it on paper: we rehearsed it too, like this.”

I turned and looked at him.

“You mean you’d re-enact the robberies in advance?” I asked, incredulous.

“Well, yes, that’s what I’m saying. Not re-enact: pre-enact, I suppose. But yes, of course.”

I thought about that, hard. It started to make me feel dizzy. I walked over to Naz and told him that I wanted to go home.

“What?” he said, staring intently into space.

“I need to go home,” I said again.

He stared straight ahead for a few more seconds; then, eventually, he turned to me and said: “Oh, right. I’ll have you driven back.”

An hour later I was lying in my bath looking at the crack on the wall again. Piano music was wafting up from downstairs. The steam rising off the bath water seemed to be swirling in the patterns of the bank raid: the arcs of the guns, the half-trip on the kink. I was still thinking about what Samuels had said. I tried to map it all out on the surface of the water: I let one cluster of foam-bubbles be the duplicated bank at Heathrow and our exercises there; I moved another to the left and let it be the bank in Chiswick, the real bank on which we’d modelled our replica; I sculpted a third cluster together, moved it to the right and let it be the places in which Samuels and his gang used to practise their turning and pointing and exiting before they raided banks-their preenactments. I lay and watched the three foam clusters for a long time, comparing them. After a while I cupped my hands around the clusters to the right and to the left of the first one and dragged these back towards the centre of the bath, compacting all three together.

As I did this I had a revelation. The revelation sent a jolt through me-almost a shock, as though the water had become electric. I jumped out of the bath, ran naked to the living room, snatched the phone from its cradle and dialled Naz’s number.

“I’m back at the office,” he said. “I’ve started notating where second-string objects and people are. The ones not directly involved in the re-enactment: things like the coffee table and the ladder. For if you decide to re-enact the preparations at a later date. We could…”