Remainder - By Tom McCarthy Page 0,75
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