Tom McCarthy: Remainder

“Why do you need to see it?” Catherine said. “Isn’t just knowing it’s happening good enough?”

“No,” I said. “Well, maybe. But I’d need…” I felt a kind of vertigo. I knew what I meant but couldn’t say it right. I wanted to feel some connection with these Africans. I tried to picture them putting up houses from her housing kits, or sitting around in schools, or generally doing African things, like maybe riding bicycles or singing. I didn’t know: I’d never been to Africa, any more than I-or Greg-had ever taken cocaine. I tried to visualize a grid around the earth, a kind of ribbed wire cage like on the champagne bottle, with lines of latitude and longitude that ran all over, linking one place to another, weaving the whole terrain into one smooth, articulated network, but I lost this image among disjoined escalator parts, the ones I’d seen at Green Park earlier. I wanted to feel genuinely warm towards these Africans, but I couldn’t. Not that I felt cold or hostile. I just felt neutral.

“Well, anyhow,” said Catherine. “That’s what I’d do. But that’s just me. It all depends on what you feel will give you the greatest, you know…”

Her voice trailed off. Greg came back in with his cocaine story. Then they went on to talking about Africa, where Greg had been once, on some safari. This led them back after a while to arguing about what I should do with my new fortune; then they truced up and chatted about Africa again. We went on in this vein for quite some time. The whole damn evening, probably. It went round in cycles, over the same ground again and again. I zoned out after a while. I knew already that I had no desire either to build schools in some country I’d never been to or to live like a rock idol. The Dogstar filled up and the music got louder and louder, so that Catherine and Greg had to shout to make themselves heard. And shout they did. We had another bottle of champagne and three more beers. They ended up quite drunk. I felt stone-cold sober the whole night.

Catherine and I left Greg outside the bar and walked back to my flat. I had to pull the sofa in the living room out into a bed for her. It was fiddly, finicky: you had to hook this bit round that bit while keeping a third bit clear. I hadn’t done it before we went out-deliberately, in case the extra bed wouldn’t be needed. But it was needed. Catherine had already begun to annoy me. I preferred her absence, her spectre.

THE NEXT DAY I went to see Marc Daubenay. His office was up at Angel, as I mentioned earlier. I rode the tube there, concentrating on the overhead terrain, keeping a grip on it.

Daubenay’s subordinates must have been told about the Settlement. The first one, the horsey young receptionist, buzzed me straight through, glancing at me nervously, as though I were contagious. The second, Daubenay’s secretary, rose from her desk and opened Daubenay’s door as soon as I came into her outer office, holding me all the while with her austere gaze. It really was chastising, that gaze-like the school secretary’s when you’ve been sent to the headmaster’s office for doing something bad.

Marc Daubenay rose to his feet and shook me warmly by the hand.

“Congratulations once more!” he said. “It’s a stupendous settlement!”

His face was beaming, wrinkling the skin around his eyes and on his forehead. He must have been in his late fifties, early sixties. He was tall and thin, with white hair swept over his thinning pate. He wore a waistcoat beneath his jacket and a thin-striped shirt and tie beneath that. Very proper. He remained behind his desk as he shook my hand. His desk was quite wide, so I had to kind of lean across it for my hand to reach his, and to concentrate on keeping my balance while the desk’s edge prodded my leg. Eventually he sat down and gestured for me to do the same.

“Well!” he said. “Well!” He leant back in his chair and drew his arms out wide. “We have a very pleasing resolution to our case.”

“Resolution?” I said.

“Resolution,” he repeated. “End, completion, finish. You sign these papers and it’s all done. The funds will be transferred as soon as they’re biked back.”

I thought about this for a while, then said:

“Yes, I suppose it is. For you.”

“What’s that?” he asked me.

“A resolution,” I said. “End.”

Daubenay was flicking through a mass of papers. He pulled several out, turned them around to face me and said:

“Sign this one.”

I signed it.

“And this one,” he said. “And this, and this. And that one too.”

I signed them all. After he’d gathered them back and straightened them into a stack I asked him:

“Where do all the funds go?”

“Yes, good question. I set up a bank account for them this morning. In your name, of course. It’s just to provide a landing pad for them. A holding tank, as it were. You can close it down and take them all out if you like, or you might choose to keep it open. I’ve also taken the liberty,” he continued, flicking through his documents again, “of booking you an appointment with a stockbroker.”

He handed me a dossier. It had gilded ornate writing on it, like the lettering on birthday cakes, spelling out the name Younger and Younger.

“They’re the best in the business,” said Daubenay. “Absolutely independent-yet well-connected at the same time. Ear to the ground, as it were. Matthew Younger will deal with you if you choose to go.”

“Which one is he?” I asked.

“He’s the son,” Daubenay answered. “Father’s Peter, but he’s semi-retired now. It’s been running for three generations.”

“Shouldn’t it be Younger and Younger and Younger then?” I asked.

Daubenay thought about this for a moment.

“I suppose it should,” he answered.

“Although when the youngest one comes up he can become the second one, and the father who was the second one can become the first one, and the first one can just drop off the end,” I said. “It’s all about what position they’re in. They rotate.”

Marc Daubenay looked at me intently for several seconds. Eventually he answered:

“Yes. I suppose you’re right.”

Younger and Younger’s office was close to Victoria Station. I took the tube there. As I came up to street level, out onto the concourse in front of the station, rush hour was getting underway. Commuters were streaming past me, heading back down the steps into the tube. I stood there for several minutes trying to work out which way Younger and Younger’s office was while hurrying men and women dressed in suits streamed past me. It felt strange. After a while I stopped wondering which way the office was and just stood there, feeling them hurrying, streaming. I remembered standing in the ex-siege zone between the perpendicular and parallel streets by my flat two days earlier. I closed my eyes and turned the palms of my hands outwards again and felt the same tingling, the same mixture of serene and intense. I opened my eyes again but kept my palms turned outwards. It struck me that my posture was like the posture of a beggar, holding his hands out, asking passers-by for change.

The feeling of intensity was growing. It felt very good. I stood there static with my hands out, palms turned upwards, while commuters streamed past me. After a while I decided that I would ask them for change. I started murmuring:

“Spare change…spare change…spare change…”

I continued this for several minutes. I didn’t follow anyone or make eye contact with them-just stood there gazing vaguely ahead murmuring spare change again and again and again. Nobody gave me any, which was fine. I didn’t need or want their change: I had eight and a half million pounds. I just wanted to be in that particular space, right then, doing that particular action. It made me feel so serene and intense that I felt almost real.