Tom McCarthy: Remainder

Naz chartered planes: a huge one for all the others and a tiny private jet for us. He told them whatever he told them: one thing to Layer Two, another to Layer Three and yet another to Layer Four and so on, each of his stories calculated to slot in with the others so that the behaviour of group B, seen from the viewpoint of group D, wouldn’t seem inconsistent with Story Four, nor the knowledge-pool of C, grounded in Story Two, spill over into that of A and short-circuit that group’s behaviour towards-and so on and so on, every angle forecast and anticipated so as to get them all onto their plane before the cracks in the story (the overarching yarn involved a trip to North Africa, some project there, another re-enactment, sums of money so vast no one could refuse) showed, up into the air so they could vaporize, dehisce. He sneaked away for furtive meetings with airport staff and with Irish Republicans or Muslim Fundamentalists or who knows what, and came back looking, as always these days, sallow, manic, driven.

I didn’t follow all that-I didn’t need to, didn’t want to: I was totally absorbed by our rehearsals, by the routes and movements, the arcs, phalanxes and lines, the peeling out, cutting, stopping, turning back. We’d rehearsed the getaway so many times that the cars’ tyres had scored marks across the tarmac, just like the Fiesta’s tyres had in the other re-enactment, the cascading blue-goop one. The black patch was still there next to them: the big, dark, semi-solid growth of engine oil or tar. I stopped finding it annoying and started wondering what had made it: something must have happened there, some event, to have left this mark. After we’d finished practising one day I went over to it, crouched beside it, poked it with my finger. It was hard, but not brash or unfriendly. Its surface, viewed from just an inch away, was full of little pores-cracked, open, showing paths leading to the growth’s interior.

“It’s like a sponge,” I said.

“What’s that?” asked Samuels, who’d appeared beside me.

“Like a sponge. Flesh. Bits.”

Samuels looked down at the patch, then told me:

“Nazrul wants you to go with him somewhere.”

This was the day, Naz reminded me as we sat in the car being driven back to Chiswick, on which we were to tell the driver re-enactors that we’d switched the re-enactment’s scene back to the actual bank.

“They’re Layer Two, remember?” Naz said. “They have to practise driving through the streets. The story they’ve been given is Story Three, Version One-which it is vital not to mix with Version Two.”

“Fine,” I told him. “Whatever.”

We practised driving through the streets around the real bank. We only did the turning, cutting and stopping bit immediately outside the bank one time, and even then in a subdued way so as not to attract attention-but all the other streets we wove through time and again. It was autumn; trees were turning brown, yellow and red. If I let my eyes glaze over and unfocus the colours merged into a smooth, continual flow. In a few weeks, I thought to myself, the leaves would fall, then lie around in piles until someone carted them away.

“Like artichokes,” I said.

“This is Route Seven,” Naz was telling Driver Re-enactor One. “Route Seven, Version A. Remember that.”

“Or they might just decompose. Merge with each other and the tarmac.”

“At this point,” Naz said, “you can switch over to Route Eight, depending on the variables. There are three…”

“Leaves leave marks too, sometimes,” I said. “Outlines on the tarmac, their own skeletons. Like photos. Or Hiroshima. When they fall.”

Later, as we were driven back towards the warehouse, Naz said to me:

“Two days to go. The mechanism is being set in place this evening.”

The image of the plane dehiscing played across my mind again. I watched it, smiled, then looked back out of the car’s window. The West London traffic was slow. I turned my head forward and stared through the sound-proof glass at the chauffeur’s shoulders. He’d soon be dematerialized as well. I felt very affectionate towards this man. I stared hard at his jacket, letting its blue curves and wrinkles sink into my mind so that I’d remember them afterwards, when he was gone. We passed Shepherd’s Bush, then broke out onto the motorway and speeded up. As we did, Naz turned to me and asked:

“When was it that you came into contact with cordite, then?”

“Cordite?” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been near cordite.”

THE DAY CAME, finally. Then again, perhaps it didn’t.

In one sense, the actions we’d decided to perform had all happened already. They’d happened countless times: in our rehearsals at the warehouse, in the robbery training drills the real bank staff and real security guards had been through, and in the thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even millions of robberies that had taken place ever since mankind first started circulating currency. They’d never stopped happening, intermittently, everywhere, and our repetition of them here in Chiswick on this sunny autumn afternoon was no more than an echo-an echo of an echo of an echo, like the vague memory of a football being kicked against a wall somewhere by some boy, once, long after the original boy has been forgotten, faded, gone, replaced by countless boys kicking footballs against walls in every street of every city.

In another sense, though, it had never happened-and, this being not a real event but a staged one, albeit one staged in a real venue, it never would. It would always be to come, held in a future hovering just beyond our reach. I and the other re-enactors were like a set of devotees to a religion not yet founded: patient, waiting for our deity to appear, to manifest himself to us, redeem us; and our gestures were all votive ones, acts of anticipation.

I don’t know. But I know one thing for sure: it was a fuck-up. It went wrong. Matter, for all my intricate preparations, all my bluffs and sleights of hand, played a blinder. Double-bluffed me. Tripped me up again. I know two things: one, it was a fuck-up; two, it was a very happy day.

To start, then, from the moment-the long, stretched-out moment-during which we waited, set in our positions, for it to begin, to start again: we sat, seven of us, six robber re-enactors and two drivers, in two cars, one parked on each side of the street outside the bank. We sat in silence, waiting. The other re-enactors in my car looked through the windows fascinated, watching shoppers, businessmen, mothers with pushchairs and traffic wardens walking up and down the pavement, entering and leaving shops, crossing the road, milling around at bus stops. They watched them intently, looking for cracks in their personas-inconsistencies in their dress, the way they moved and so on-that might show them up as the re-enactors they’d been told they were. Their eyes followed these people round corners, trying to spot the re-enactment zone’s edge. They’d been told that the zone would be wide and not demarcated as clearly as the shooting ones had been; that its edges would be blurred, buffered by side and back streets as they merged gradually, almost imperceptibly, with real space. They’d been told this-but they still looked for some kind of boundary.

I watched too, with the same fascination. I stared amazed at the passers-by: their postures, their joints’ articulation as they moved. They were all doing it just right: standing, moving, everything-and this without even knowing they were doing it. The pavement’s very surface seemed as charged, as fired up as my staircase had been when I’d moved down it on the day of the first building re-enactment. The markings on the surface of the road-perfect reproductions of the ones outside my warehouse, lines whose pigmentation, texture and layout I knew so well-seemed infused with the same toxic level of significance. The whole area seemed to be silently zinging, zinging enough to make detectors, if there’d been detectors for this type of thing, croak so much that their needles went right off the register and broke their springs.