Remainder - By Tom McCarthy Page 0,22
Not recorded music playing on a CD or the radio, but real, live music, being played on a piano by the man who lived there, a musician. I remembered how it had sounded, its rhythms. Sometimes he’d paused, whenever he’d hit a wrong note or lost his place. He’d paused and started the passage again, running through it slowly, slowing right down as he approached the bit he’d got wrong. Then he’d played it several times correctly, running through it again, speeding it up again till he was able to play it back at speed without fluffing it up. I remembered all this clearly—crystal-clear, as clear as in a vision.
I remembered it all, but I couldn’t remember where I’d been in this place, this flat, this bathroom. Or when. At first I thought I was remembering a flat in Paris. Not the one I’d stayed in when I did my course—that hadn’t looked anything like the one unfolding in my memory, inside or outside: there’d been no cats on roofs, no liver and no piano music, no similar bathroom with an identical crack on the wall—but perhaps someone else’s: Catherine’s, or someone we’d both known, another student. But we hadn’t visited any of the other students’ places. No: it wasn’t Paris. I searched back further in my past, right back to when I’d been a child. No use. I couldn’t place this memory at all.
And yet it was growing, minute by minute as I stood there in the bathroom, this remembered building, spreading outwards from the crack. The neighbour who’d cooked liver on the floor below me had been an old woman. I’d passed her on the stairs most days. I had a memory of passing her outside her flat’s door as she placed her rubbish on the landing. She’d say something to me; I’d say something back, then carry on past her. She’d been putting out her rubbish for the concierge to pick up. The building that I was remembering had had a concierge, just like Parisian apartment buildings have. The staircase had had iron banisters and worn marble or fake marble floors with patterns in them. I remembered what it had been like to walk across them: how my shoes had sounded on their surface, what the banisters had felt like to the touch. I remembered how it had felt inside my apartment, moving through it: from the bathroom with the crack in its wall to the kitchen and living room, the way plants hanging in baskets from the ceiling had rustled as I’d passed them, how I’d turned half sideways as I’d passed the kitchen unit’s waist-high edge—turned sideways and then deftly back again in one continuous movement, letting my shirt brush the woodwork. I remembered how all this had felt.
Most of all I remembered this: that inside this remembered building, in the rooms and on the staircase, in the lobby and the large courtyard between it and the building facing with the red roofs with black cats on them—that in these spaces, all my movements had been fluent and unforced. Not awkward, acquired, second-hand, but natural. Opening my fridge’s door, lighting a cigarette, even lifting a carrot to my mouth: these gestures had been seamless, perfect. I’d merged with them, run through them and let them run through me until there’d been no space between us. They’d been real; I’d been real—been without first understanding how to try to be: cut out the detour. I remembered this with all the force of an epiphany, a revelation.
Right then I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my money. I wanted to reconstruct that space and enter it so that I could feel real again. I wanted to; I had to; I would. Nothing else mattered. I stood there staring at the crack. It all came down to that: the way it ran down the wall, the texture of the plaster all around it, the patches of colour to its right. That’s what had sparked the whole thing off. I had to get it down somehow—exactly, how it forked and jagged. Someone was knocking at the door.
“Hang on!” I called out.
“Hurry up!” a man’s voice shouted back.
I looked around. Beside the bathtub were two paint cans; lying on one of their lids were a tape measure and a pencil. I picked up the pencil, tore off a strip of paper that was still clinging to the wall beneath the window and started copying the way the crack