Remainder

by Tom McCarthy

  “When you see that, it’s usually because there’s been an accident,” I told Naz.

  “Sorry?” he said.

  “Or the fair,” I said. “If it’s on grass.”

  He looked at me intently for a while. Then his eyes lit up and he said:

  “Oh yes, I see. I always liked the fair.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  We smiled at one another, then I looked across our area. One of Frank’s people who I recognized from the building was lifting replica sub-machine guns from a box and carrying them with another man towards the van the two women were serving coffee from. Another man was stepping from a dull red BMW he’d parked in the middle of the road beside the traffic lights. Another, shortish man I hadn’t seen before was standing two feet behind him, watching the goings-on. I looked back at the ground. Besides being layered and cracked, it was also plumbed: dotted with holes and outlets that had been placed there strategically when the street had first been laid. There was a small cover set into the tarmac that had ‘water’ written on it and another almost identical one that said ‘London Transport’. A larger, rounder one set into a hydrant carried two strings of figures, EM124 and B125; another simply bore the letter C. All these openings to tubes and pipelines, outlets and supply points, connections feeding back to who knew where. I saw we had a lot of work to do.

  “Where are the re-enactors?” I asked.

  “Over there,” said Naz.

  He pointed to the van. Three black men were standing around behind it, drinking coffee. Two of them were the same ones I’d pointed out to Naz the day we’d hired the Soho Theatre; the third I’d not seen before. He was riding around in small circles on a red sports bicycle, trying to keep going without putting his feet down.

  “Is that the victim?” I asked.

  “Yes,” replied Naz.

  “Stand him down,” I said. “I’ll take his place. Send the other two over to me. And Naz?”

  “Yes?”

  “I want to pay the people who’ve done all the organizing bits more.”

  “Which ones do you mean?” he asked.

  “The people who’ve worked with you to get all the elements of this coordinated. Not the ones who actually do stuff, but the ones who make the other people’s stuff all fit together. You understand?”

  “I do,” said Naz. “But you’re already paying them generously.”

  “Pay them more generously, then,” I said.

  I pressed my thumb to my finger just where I’d stuck the knife in a few hours earlier as I said this. Money was like blood, I figured. I’d barely pricked myself; I had plenty more to give.

  Naz walked across to the three black men by the van. I saw him take the man who’d been riding the bicycle in circles to one side and talk to him. The man got off the bike, talked to Naz some more, then strode back to the van, reached in, took out a bag and walked off towards the police tape. The other two, meanwhile, came sauntering over to me. I briefed them.

  “What I want you to do,” I said, “is drive that BMW from over there beside the lights to just up there beside the Green Man.”

  “Your man talked us through the sequence,” one of them said. He had a London accent and an affable, smiley face.

  “Yes,” I told him, “but you must park it just there, see? Exactly there. Its bonnet, front, its nose, should be exactly there, no further forward than the end of the Green Man’s second window. You park it there, then get out—you take your guns with you—and walk across the street firing at me.”

  “At you?” the same man asked me.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ll be re-enacting the victim’s role. You must walk across the street quite slowly, almost casually, firing at me. But don’t fire until—here, come with me.”

  I walked them over to the phone box.

  “I’ll start here,” I continued. “I’ll have just left this phone box when you pull up. Or I’ll just be leaving it. I’ll get on my bike and start pedalling, riding in this direction, over here. That’s when you should start shooting: as I come up to just here, where Movement Cars starts.”

  “Where should we stand?” the man asked again.

  “There,” I said. I walked them back across the street to a spot just in the middle where the cracks branched out into a cell-like pattern of repeating hexagons. “Walk from the car up to here. No further than here, though. You can keep firing, but just stop advancing once you reach this spot. I’ll try to turn into this road here, Belinda Road, and my bike’s handlebars will twist under me, and I’ll fall off, then get up again, and you shoot again and I’ll go down again. You guys should stand here while I do that. Stand here for a while, then go back to the car. Yes, do it like that. Do it just like that.”

  The other man spoke now. Unlike his friend he had a strong West Indian accent:

  “You’re the boss,” he said.

  I signalled over to Naz, who had been talking on his mobile. He came over to us.

  “Ready to go?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “What news on the time front?”

  “Working on it,” he said.

  He called Frank and Annie over. They had Frank’s man in tow, plus the man I’d seen handling the sub-machine guns with him a few minutes earlier. They carried one gun each.

  “Sid,” Frank told me by way of introduction. “He’s an effects man I’ve worked with on several films. He’ll show our friends here how the guns work. You can take up your position if you like.”

  “Okay,” I said—but I stayed to watch this Sid explain the working of the guns.

  “Basically,” said Sid, “they’re like real ten-millimetre Uzis with the chamber taken out. They’ll make a nice bang. You’ve got two magazines,” he went on, pointing to two metallic blocks Frank’s man was holding, “which clip in under here. Look, try it.”

  He handed the guns to the two black men. Frank’s man handed them the magazines. They held both awkwardly. Neither could get their magazine to clip in properly. Sid showed them how to wedge the Uzis’ butts against their stomachs just below the ribs and guide the magazines in upwards with their left hand from below, feeling for the slot and catch. They tried it a few times, nodding in satisfaction when they got it right. I envied them. I thought of asking to try too, but didn’t want to get all self-indulgent. Besides, things were moving on. The coffee van was being shifted and the re-enactment area cleared of all personnel. The two black men were being led towards the BMW and handed its keys. The bicycle was being brought to me. I took it, wheeled it over to the phone box, balanced it against the railings just beside this, then opened the phone box’s door and stepped inside.

  The street’s sounds drained away and I was back in a cocoon—the same cocoon I’d been placed in when my phone connection had been ripped out of the wall the day the Settlement came through. The cabin had a little shelf in it. Perhaps this black man whose last moments I was re-enacting had rested his address book on this shelf as he made his final phone call. Had the book been shabby, fat and bulging? Yellow? I pictured it as yellow, tattered but not fat. Then it went blue and thin, like those vocabulary books you get in school.

  On the window above the shelf the figure of a messenger blowing a horn was stencilled in silhouette. Beyond it was the caged façade of Movement Cars, with the words Airports, Stations, Light, Removals, Any Distance painted on the window. The letters were painted on in white and with a blue outline that had been extended outwards on each letter’s right so they seemed to be casting shadows. What did Light mean? I picked up the phone’s receiver. I didn’t call anyone or put any money in the slot: I just stood there holding the receiver in my hand. When my phone socket had been ripped out of the wall it had lain across my floor looking disgusting, like something that’s come out of something.

  Inside the cabin it was quiet. There was no traffic passing by. My staff ’s vehicles, drawn across the road, formed an insulating wall between the re-enactment zone and the outside. In front of and between the vehicles
people stood quite still—all mine, a lot of people—looking straight in my direction, at the phone box. Then I heard the BMW’s motor start up: the sound of a spark plug firing a charge of compressed gasoline and of expanded gas shooting a piston off again and again and again—slowly at first, then faster, then after a few seconds so fast that the individual shots merged into a hum of infinite self-repetition without origin or end. It had begun.

  I saw the BMW pass the phone box on the far side of the street from the corner of my eye, and again in the metal of the cabin’s wall, reflected. I set the receiver back onto its cradle and opened the phone box’s door. I stepped out, turned my bicycle around and swung my right leg across its bar. The two men had backed the car into the space I’d shown them and were getting out. They’d parked it just right, exactly where I’d told them to. It was very good. The tingling started in my spine again.

  I pushed off the pavement with my foot and let the bike roll forwards, its handlebars wobbling. As its front wheel passed a white foam cup lying on the ground, I looked up and to my left at the two men. They’d taken out their sub-machine guns and were pointing them at me. The man with the West Indian accent opened fire. His gun made a tremendous noise. The other man opened fire too, not half a second after the first one. The noise of the two guns together was quite deafening. The affable man with the London accent grimaced as he shot. The other man’s face was expressionless, indifferent, the face of an assassin.

  The tingling grew more intense as I raised my buttocks from the bike’s seat and started pedalling furiously, past the grilled windows of Movement Cars, down the dip into Belinda Road. The two men kept marching on me across Coldharbour Lane, firing as they advanced. Just in front of the brush-cleaning puddle at the edge of Belinda Road I turned the bike’s wheel sharply to the right and went over the handlebars. As I fell to the ground a whole tumult of images came at me: the edge of the black bar with no name, a streak of gold, some sky, a lamppost, tarmac and the coloured patterns floating on the puddle’s surface. After I’d stopped tumbling and become still, the patterns took the form of Greek or Russian letters. I looked away from the puddle, up towards the men: they had stopped firing and were standing still, exactly where I’d told them to stand, by the hexagon-cell patterns in the road. It was all good.

  The men were waiting for me to get up again. I pushed myself up with my hands and noticed they were numb. This was good—very, very good. I stood up and felt the tingling rush to my head. The two men fired again. I turned from them, dropped to my knees, then let my upper body sink back down towards the ground until my face lay on the tarmac. I lay there for a few seconds, quite still. Then I rolled over onto my back and stood up again. The two men were getting back into their car.

  “Wait!” I shouted at them.

  They stopped.

  “Wait!” I shouted again. “You shouldn’t drive off. You shouldn’t even walk back to the car. When you’ve stopped shooting at me for the last time, just turn your backs on me and stop.”

  “What shall we do when we’ve stopped?” the man with the London accent asked.

  “Nothing,” I told him. “Just stop, and stand there with your backs to me. We’ll stop the whole scene there, but hold it for a while in that position. Okay?”

  He nodded. I looked at his friend. He nodded too, slowly.

  “Good,” I said. “Let’s do it again.”

  We resumed our positions. Back in the phone box, I looked through the window. The BMW was turning round by the traffic lights, beside the shortish man I’d noticed earlier. Just over half the crew and back-up people had chosen that end of the area to stand at and watch from; eight or so more were gathered at the far end, the end I’d entered from, beneath the bridge. The cabin’s glass was clear, not wrinkled like the windows of my building. All the same, I looked instinctively across to the roof of the building on the far side of the road, scanning it for cats, then realized my mistake and turned the other way.

  The grill across Movement Cars’ façade was, now I looked at it more closely, actually four panels of grill, each panel being made up of three sections of criss-crossing metal lines. It looked like graph paper, with large square areas containing smaller ones that framed, positioned and related every mark or object lying behind them—a ready-made forensic grid. Most of the grid’s squares were pretty blank. The lower left-hand-side one, though, the one closest to the pavement at the corner of Belinda Road, had two bunches of flowers stuffed behind it. They were hanging upside down, wrapped in plastic. Two grid-columns across were the painted words: Movement Cars, Airports, Stations, Light, Removals, Any Distance. They ran over all three of the column’s larger squares; the n and t of Movement ran into the next column, the column to the right. It was Light Removals, not Light then Removals: I knew that already, but had just forgotten that I knew.

  The dull red BMW passed the phone box again. Again I saw it twice: once from the corner of my eye and once reflected in the metal of the cabin’s wall—only it seemed flatter and more elongated this time. When the driver turned the engine off, for a half-second or so I could make out the individual firings of the piston as these slowed down and died off. I opened the phone box’s door, stepped out and got onto my bicycle. Again the tingling kicked in as I passed the white foam cup. Again the two men took their guns out and I pedalled furiously. This time when the bike dipped from the pavement to the road I felt my altitude drop, like you do on aeroplanes when they make their descent. The same tumult of images came to me as I went over the handlebars: a portion of the black bar with no name, a streak of gold, some sky, a lamppost, tarmac and the puddle with the Greek or Russian letters floating on its surface. I got up, let them shoot me a second time, went down again and lay with my face on the tarmac looking at the undercarriage of a parked van, at the patterned markings on one of its hubcaps.

  I lay there for longer this time than I had the last. There was no noise behind me, no footsteps: the two killers had remembered what I’d told them and were standing there quite still. I lay there on the tarmac for a long time tingling, looking at the hubcap.

  Then I got up and we did it again, and again, and again.

  After running through the shooting for the fifth time I was satisfied we’d got the actions right: the movement, the positions. Now we could begin working on what lay beneath the surfaces of these—on what was inside, intimate.

  “Let’s do it at half speed,” I said.

  The black man with the London accent frowned.

  “You mean we should drive slower?” he asked.

  “Drive, walk, everything,” I said.

  One of Naz’s men was striding over to us with a clipboard in his hand. I waved him away and continued:

  “Everything. The same as before, but at half speed.”

  “Like in an action replay on TV?” he asked.

  “Well,” I said, “sort of. Only don’t do all your movements in slow motion. Do them normally, but at half the normal speed. Or at the normal speed, but take twice as long doing them.”

  They both stood there for a few seconds, taking in what I’d said. Then the taller man, the one with the West Indian accent, started nodding. I saw that his lips were curled into a smile.

  “You’re the boss,” he said again.

  We took up our positions once more. Inside the phone box this time I examined every surface it had to present. My man, the victim, would have taken all these in—but then his brain would have edited most of them back out again, dismissed them as mundane, irrelevant. A mistake: perhaps if he’d paid more attention to the environment around him some association might have warned him of what was about to happen, even saved his life. He must have done something wrong, crossed someone, broken some code of the underworld. So if he’d looked more carefully at the cabin’s metal wall and taken in the fact that the dull red BMW was passing slowly by, too slowly perhaps, and connected this with the last time he’d seen that car or its reflection, who he’d been with then…who knows? The stencille
d figure on the window, the messenger, knew something was up and was trying to announce this with his horn—to blare it out, a warning; his free hand, the one not holding the instrument, was raised in alarm. And then the silence, like the silence in a forest when a predator is on the prowl and every other creature’s gone to ground except his prey, too tied up in his own concerns, in sniffing roots or chewing grass or daydreaming to read the glaring signs…

  I stood with the receiver in my hand. The digital display strip said Insert Coins. Outside, from beneath their grid, the windows of Movement Cars promised wide-open spaces opening to even wider distances—airports, stations and removals, light. An empty green beer bottle sat directly beneath the hanging plastic-wrapped flowers; it seemed to be offering itself to them as a vase if only they’d abandon their position in the grid, come down and turn the right way round again. The pavement, when I stepped out onto it this time, seemed even more richly patterned than it had before. Its stained flagstones ran past the phone cabin and Movement Cars to three or so feet before Belinda Road, then gave over to short, staccato brickwork before melting, as the pavement dipped onto the road itself, into poured tarmac. It was like a quilt, a handmade, patterned quilt laid out for this man to take his final steps across and then lie down and die on: a quilted deathbed. It struck me that the world, or chance, or maybe death itself if you can speak of such a thing, must have loved this man in some way to prepare for him such a richly textured fabric to gather and wrap him up in.

  The killers had parked and were leaving their car. Behind them the windows of the Green Man rose up, impassive. When my man, the dead man, saw the two men heading for him with their guns out, just as his first apprehension that there was malice in the air—finally gleaned from the arrangement of bodies and objects, from the grimace on the face of one man and the cold, neutral expression of the other—developed into full-blown understanding that they’d come to kill him: in this instant, this sub-instant, he would have searched the space around him for an exit, for somewhere to go, to hide. He would have pictured the space behind the windows, a space he’d seen before: the pub’s lounge with its stools and pool table, the toilets behind this with their window leading to the yard beyond. His mind would have asked this space to take him in, to shelter him—and been told: No, you can’t get there without being shot; it’s just not possible. It would have asked the same question of Movement Cars’ window, and been told: No, there’s a grill here, and you couldn’t pass through glass even if there weren’t. It might even have looked to the holes plumbed into the street’s surface: the water outlet and the London Transport one and the ones with strings of letters and even the one with just the C—and been told, by each one: No, you can’t enter here; you’ll have to find another exit.