Remainder - By Tom McCarthy Page 0,69

kind of trauma recently?” the doctor asked. He switched his torch-pen on. “What’s his name?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Send this man away.”

“Keep your head still,” the doctor said.

“No,” I said. “Send this man away, Naz, now. Get off my property or I’ll have you arrested.”

“I can’t help you if you won’t let me help you,” he said.

I looked past his ear and thought I saw another cat fall off the roof. I told this man:

“I’m ordering you to leave my property this instant.”

He stood still for a while. Naz did too. The three of us were static for several moments—and while we were I didn’t mind this doctor being here. I’d even have let him stay if he’d only behaved himself and not moved. Eventually, though, he turned to Naz and motioned with his eyes towards the door, then slipped his torch-pen back into his bag and left. Naz saw him out. I heard the two men murmuring together as I went into the bathroom and washed my face. I washed it in cold water and didn’t dry it straight away, but let it drip while I stared at the crack on the wall. I watched the crack as I listened to the doctor walking down the stairs.

When I went back into the living room, Naz was there and the flat’s door was closed. Naz said:

“I think it would be a good idea for you to…”

“Where have you managed to get us to?” I asked him.

He’d got the re-enactors, the car and bicycle and the replica sub-machine guns. He’d rung up to tell me all this, but I hadn’t answered.

“When did you ring?” I asked him.

“Several hours ago. Didn’t you hear the phone?”

“No,” I said. “Not that one.”

I did have a vague memory of ringing—but it was of the phone the black man with the bicycle had used in the phone box outside Movement Cars. His last words would still have been buzzing in his head as he left the phone box, and in the head of the person he’d talked to, their conversation only half-decayed at most. Then he’d have caught sight of his killers. Did he know them? If he did, he still might not have known they’d come to kill him—until they took their guns out. At what point had he realized they were guns? Maybe at first he thought they were umbrellas, or steering-wheel locks, or poles. Then when he realized, as his brain pieced it together and came up with a plan of escape, then changed it, he found out that physics wouldn’t let him carry out the plan: it tripped him up. Matter again: the world became a fridge door, a broken lighter, two litres of blue goop. That’s when he was first hit: as he went over. The first round of bullets struck him in his body, not his head, the report said. They didn’t even make him lose consciousness. He would have known he’d been hit but not really felt it, nor the scrapes he’d received from hitting the ground as he went over the handlebars—would have just vaguely understood that something had occurred, something had changed, that things were different now.

“…and a further licence from the local police,” Naz was saying, “which won’t be a great problem now the Council have given the nod, although the status of the event needs to be determined pretty quickly.”

“What?” I asked him. “What are you saying?”

Naz looked at me strangely, then started again:

“Lambeth Council are happy to give permission for the re-enactment to proceed, but there’s confusion about what type of licence they need to give us,” he said. “It’s not a demonstration and it’s not a street party. The activity that it most closely resembles is filming.”

“No,” I said. “No cameras. No filming. You know that.”

“Yes,” said Naz, “but we should apply for it under filming. We need to designate it as a recognized type of event so they can grant us permission to do it. Filming’s the easiest route. We apply to use the area for a film shoot and then just don’t have any cameras.”

“I suppose so,” I said. “As long as we don’t actually film. How soon can we do it, then?”

“Next week,” said Naz.

“No, that’s not soon enough!” I said.

“There’s not much we can…”

“It needs to be done sooner!” I said. “Why can’t we do it tomorrow?”

“Licence certificates can take days to process,” he explained, “even with the type of bribes we’re paying.”

“Pay bigger bribes, then!” I said. “It