Remainder - By Tom McCarthy Page 0,47

it is, though? It’s that the pans are new.”

“Bingo again,” I told her. “That must be it.”

The last two days were “sweep” days. I, Naz, Annie and Frank moved through the building sweeping it for errors: inconsistencies, omissions. We found so many that we thought we’d have to delay the whole thing. The recurring black-on-white floor pattern had continued through a bit of neutral space on the second floor; the door to the concierge’s cupboard had been painted—things like that. Smaller details too: the tar-and-grease coat in the hallway, under the outmoded lights, had too much sheen; it was obvious that the putty holding the new old windows in place had been set only days ago; and so on. And then often fixing one thing just offset another. All the neighbours had been trained up by now and were practising their re-enacted gestures in situ—but then they’d disturb our carefully contrived arrangements as they moved around rehearsing. Crossed wires. One of Annie’s people even misunderstood the word “sweep”.

“What are you doing?” I asked when I found her literally sweeping down the staircase after we’d spent ages lightly peppering it with bus tickets and cigarette butts.

“I’m…” she said; “I thought you…”

“Annie!” I called up the stairwell.

Even after we’d got it all just right we did four more sweeps. We’d jump from one detail to another to see if we’d catch a mistake unawares. We’d move from the bottom to the top and down again, across the courtyard, up the façade of the facing building, back and up the staircase again, over and over and over.

“Feeling nervous?” Naz asked on the final day before the date we’d set to put the whole thing into action.

“Yes,” I told him. I was feeling very nervous. I hadn’t been sleeping well all week. I’d lie awake for half the night, running in my imagination through the events and actions that we were to go through in reality when the time came. I could run through them in a way that made them all work really well, or in a way that made them all mess up and be an abject failure. Sometimes I’d run the failure scenario and then the good one, to cancel the bad one out. At other times I’d be running the good one and the bad one would cut in and make me break out in a panicky sweat. This went on every night for a whole week: me, lying awake in my bed, sweating, nervously rehearsing in my mind re-enactments of events that hadn’t happened but which, nonetheless, like the little bits of history in Kevin’s pop song, were on the verge of being repeated.

8

THE DAY OF THE FIRST RE-ENACTMENT finally arrived. July the eleventh.

We’d decided to begin at 2 p.m. I spent the morning in Naz’s office, then ate a final light lunch with him. The air there was solemn, its heavy silence punctured only by the occasional ringing phone or crackling radio which one of Naz’s staff would answer in hushed tones.

“What is it?” I’d ask Naz each time.

“Nothing,” he’d answer quietly. “Everything’s under control.”

At half-past one I left. Naz’s people stood by the door as I made my way out—three or four of them on each side, forming a kind of tunnel—and wished me luck, their faces grave and sober. Naz took the lift down to the street with me, then, when the car pulled up, turned to face me and shook my hand. He was staying behind to direct all activities from his office. His dark eyes locked on mine while our hands held each other, the thing behind the eyes whirring deep back inside his skull.

Our driver drove me from the office to the building. It was just two minutes’ walk away, but he took me there in the car we’d gone around in while setting all this up. I sat in the back seat and watched the streets slide by: the railway bridge, the sports track with its knitted green wire fence, its battered football goals, its yellow, red and white lane markings, boxes, arcs and circles. I turned my head to look out of the rear window just in time to see the top of Naz’s office disappear from view. Then I turned back—and, as I did, my building slid up to the car and loomed above me like a sculpted monolith, the words Madlyn Mansions still carved in the stone above its front door.

The driver brought the car to a halt in