Remainder - By Tom McCarthy Page 0,14

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.

The office turned out to be slightly to the station’s north, facing the gardens of Buckingham Palace. The receptionist here made Olanger and Daubenay’s Sloanette look like a supermarket checkout girl. She wore a silk cravat tucked into a cream shirt and had perfectly held hair. It never once moved as she lowered her mouth towards the intercom to let Matthew Younger know that I was there or walked into a small kitchen area to make me coffee. Above her, also sculpted into frozen waves, mahogany panels rose up towards high, ornately corniced ceilings.

Matthew Younger came in before she’d finished making me the coffee. He was short, really quite short—but when he shook my hand and said hello his voice boomed and filled up the whole room, billowing out to the mahogany panels, up to the corniced ceiling. It struck me as strange that someone who physically filled so little space could project such a rich sense of presence. He shook my hand heartily—not as cheerfully as Daubenay had, but more assertively, with a firm grip, bringing his transverse carpal ligament into play. Most handshakes don’t involve the transverse carpal ligament: only the really firm ones. He gestured out of the reception room towards a hallway.

“Let’s go upstairs,” he said.

I made towards the hall, but hesitated in the doorway because the receptionist was still preparing the coffee for me.

“Oh, I’ll bring it up,” she said.

Matthew Younger and I walked up a wide, carpeted staircase above which hung portraits of men looking rich but slightly ill and into a large room that had one of those long, polished oval tables in it which you see in films, in scenes where they have boardroom meetings. He set a dossier on the table top, slipped off the elastic band keeping it closed, slid a piece of paper from it which I recognized from the heading as coming from Marc Daubenay’s office, and began:

“So. Marc Daubenay tells me you’ve come into rather a large sum of money.”

He looked at me, waiting for me to say something in response. I didn’t know what to say, so I just kind of pursed my lips. After a while Younger continued:

“Over the last century the stock market has outperformed cash in every decade apart from the thirties. Far outperformed. As a rule of thumb, you can expect your capital to double over five years. In the current market conditions, you can reduce that figure to three, perhaps even two.”

“How does it work?” I asked him. “I invest in companies and they let me share in their profits?”

“No,” he said. “Well, yes, that’s a small aspect of it. They give you a dividend. But what really propels your investment upwards is speculation.”

“Speculation?” I repeated. “What’s that?”

“Shares are constantly being bought and sold,” he said. “The prices aren’t fixed: they change depending on what people are prepared to pay for them. When people buy shares, they don’t value them by what they actually represent in terms of goods or services: they value them by what they might be worth, in an imaginary future.”

“But what if that future comes and they’re not worth what people thought they would be?” I asked.

“It never does,” said Matthew Younger. “By the time one future’s there, there’s another one being imagined. The collective imagination of all the investors keeps projecting futures, keeping the shares buoyant. Of course, sometimes a particular set of shares stop catching people’s imagination, so they fall. It’s our job to get you out of a particular one before it falls—and, conversely, to get you into another when it’s just about to shoot up.”

“What if everyone stops imagining futures for all of them at the same time?” I asked him.

“Ah!” Younger’s eyebrows dipped into a frown, and his voice became quieter, withdrawing from the room back