Tom McCarthy - Remainder

He pointed to a flow chart in which arrows clustered round three circles. I thought of the foam clusters in the bath again, how I’d moved them apart and then together.

“By sideways leakage I mean leakage between different staff groups: re-enactor-re-enactor, re-enactor-back-up, back-up-secondary-back-up and so on. The permutations are multiple.”

“So what do we do?” I asked him.

“Well,” he said. “I’ve stratified all the participants into five NTK, or Need to Know, categories. Within each category there’s a twofold decision to be made: how much they need to know, and when they need to know it…”

He went on for ages like this. I zoned out and lost myself among the curves and arrows of the charts, tracing in them arcs and pirouettes, entrances and escape routes, defiles. It was light when Naz’s lecture stopped. The outcome seemed to be that his NTK structure was like a pyramid: at the top, in the first category, me and Naz; below us, in the second, the two driver re-enactors, in the next the five other robber re-enactors and so on, widening with each layer. Layer Two would have to be informed of the change of venue before other layers. Layer Three could be told at the final minute, and even then wouldn’t be told that the real bank staff wouldn’t know that this was a re-enactment, or even be told that they were real bank staff. We’d just say we’d brought in new staff, public and security guard re-enactors to make it all seem fresher and more realistic. As for Layer Four…

“Fine,” I said. “Whatever. Let’s go back up to the warehouse.”

I was impatient to get back to it all-back to the movement, the swinging arcs, the peeling shoulders. When we got there I announced:

“We’re going to add a bit to the whole sequence now. We’re going to practise getting into cars and driving off.”

“Oh yes?” said Samuels.

“Yes,” I told him. “Widen it out a bit.”

He choreographed this over the next two days: who ran to which car, which pulled out first, how one, turning, paused for a moment in the middle of the road to block the traffic so the other could cut off into a side street. We marked these roads’ beginnings out in paint, extending the carefully copied markings we’d done earlier out of the warehouse’s wide hangar-door entrance onto the concrete of the airport ground outside. I wanted the markings done as accurately as possible: the white Give Way dashes, the yellow lines. There was this one big, dark patch on the concrete where some engine oil or tar must have been spilt before we moved there; it was semi-solid, like black mould or a small growth or birth mark sprouting from the surface of the ground. I told Annie’s people to remove it, scrub it off. There wasn’t an oil patch on the road in Chiswick. They went at it with brushes, then with trowels, then with all types of chemicals, but it was unshiftable. On the third day of running through the getaway sequence, after I’d put a marker in for myself so that I could watch it from the outside-the cars turning, stopping, cutting, looping back-this dark patch kept snagging my attention as the cars cut past it. It was annoying me. I thought of something that the short councillor had said to me a few days earlier, and called Naz over.

“What?” he asked.

“I’d like you to have the word ‘residual’ looked up.”

“Residual?”

“R-e-s-i-d-u-a-l.”

Naz tapped a message into his mobile, then stood with me watching the cars turn and cut. His eyes, still sunk, glowed darkly. After a while he said:

“We’ll need to disappear afterwards.”

“Disappear?” I said. I looked up at the sky. It was blue. It was a bright, clear early autumn day. “How can we disappear?”

“Get out. Cover our tracks. We should remove all traces of our activities here, and get ourselves and all the re-enactors well out of the picture.”

“Where can we all go?” I asked.

“It’s very complicated,” Naz said. “There are several…”

Just then, his phone beeped. He scrolled through his menu and read:

“Of or pertaining to that which is left-e.g. in mathematics.”

“Left over like the half,” I said. “A shard.”

“In physics,” Naz continued, “of what remains after a process of evaporation; in law, that which-again-remains of an estate after all charges, debts, etc. have been paid. Residuary legatee: one to whom the residue of an estate is paid. Resid…”

“Accrued,” I said.

“What?” Naz asked.

“Go on,” I said.

“Residual analysis: calculus substituting method of fluxions, 1801. Residual heat of a cooling globe, 1896. Residual error in a set of observations, 1871.”

“It’s because the time of year had changed. But that’s not how he used it.”

“Who?” asked Naz.

“The short councillor,” I said. “He used it like a…you know, like a thing. A residual.”

“A noun,” said Naz. “What short councillor?”

“Yes, that’s right: a noun. This strange, pointless residual. And he pronounced the s as an s, not as a z. Re-c-idual. Have it looked up with that spelling.”

“What spelling?” Naz asked.

“R-e-c-i-d-u-a-l.”

Naz tapped at his mobile again. I looked away, back up at the sky. A mile or so away, on the main runways, aeroplanes were taxying, turning and taking off, these huge steel crates all packed with people and their clutter moaning and tingling as they stretched their arms out, palms up, rising. Planes that had taken off earlier were dwindling to specks that hung suspended in the air’s outer reaches for a while, then disappeared. I thought back to my stairwell, then to the tyre and cascading sticky liquid re-enactment that we’d done in this same warehouse. I’d told Annie and Frank to come up with something, some device, that would stop the blue goop from falling on me-make all its particles go up instead, become sky, disappear. Frank had thought of feeding it up through a tube towards the ceiling and then through the roof, transforming it into a mist.

“We could do that,” I said.

“What’s that?” Naz asked.

“All vaporize and be sprayed upwards. When we have to disappear, like you said. Remove traces, all that stuff.”

Naz’s eyes went vacant while the thing behind them whirred. Another plane passed overhead, moaning and tingling.

“Or just take planes,” I said. “They’ll take us out of the picture.”

Naz’s whole body tensed. He was completely static for a while, his musculature suspended while the calculating part of him took all the system’s energy. After a while the body part switched back on and he said:

“Planes are a very good idea.” He thought for a while more, then added: “Two planes. No, three. We’ll have to separate the re-enactors who’ll have been at the bank from the others. They can’t mix before they board their flights.”

“Fine,” I said. “Whatever.”

“And then…” Naz began; his phone beeped. He looked at it, then slipped it back into his pocket and continued: “And then we’d also have to separate…”

“Is that the dictionary people?” I asked him. “What do they say?”

“Word not found,” he said.

“What do they mean, not found?”

“‘Recidual’: word not found,” he repeated.

I started to feel dizzy.

“It must be there,” I said. “A noun: r-e-c-i…”

“I spelt it that way,” Naz said; “just as you told me. They say there’s no ‘recidual’ in the dictionary.”

“Well tell them to go and find a bigger dictionary, then!” I said. I was really feeling bad now. “And if you see that short councillor here…”

“What short councillor?” Naz asked.

I leant against the replicated bank’s exterior, against a white stone slab. The stone was neither warm nor cold; it had an outer layer of grit that kind of slid against the solid stone beneath it. Nearby, the cars turned and cut.