Remainder - By Tom McCarthy Page 0,8

up on the Quai Malaquais embankment, climbed inside, untied it from its moorings and were just about to paddle it away using our hands when some men came along and turfed us out. Another time—well, there were lots of other times. The point is, though, that in Paris hanging out with Catherine I felt less self-conscious than I had at any other period of my life—more natural, more in-the-moment. Inside, not outside—as though we’d penetrated something’s skin: the city, perhaps, or maybe life itself. I really felt as though we’d got away with something.

We’d corresponded pretty regularly since then. It had dropped off on my part after the accident, of course, but as soon as I’d got my memory back I’d written to her and brought her up to date. In February, just as I was coming out of hospital, she’d written to tell me that she was being sent to Zimbabwe and would pass through London on the way back. We wrote more frequently after that. Our letters acquired a sexual undertone, something our in-person friendship had never had. I started imagining having sex with her. I developed various fantasy scenarios in which our first seduction might take place, which I’d play, refine, edit and play again.

In one of these scenarios, we were in my flat. We were standing in the hallway between the kitchen and the bedroom, although flashes of Paris and a Chicago which I’d never seen broke in, brasserie windows flanked with skyscrapers and windy canals jostling with the yellow walls. I’d say something witty and suggestive, and Catherine would reply You’ll have to show me or Why don’t you show me? or You’re really going to have to show me that, and then we’d kiss, floating towards my bedroom. In another version, we were somewhere in the country. I’d driven her out in my Fiesta, then drawn up and parked beside a field or wood. I’d have her standing in profile, because she looked better this way, with curly hair half-hiding her cheek. I’d move up close beside her, she’d turn to me, we’d kiss and then we’d end up making love in the Fiesta while treetops full of birds chirped and shrieked in ecstasy.

I never got this second sequence quite down, though, due to the difficulty of manoeuvring us both into the car without bumping our heads or tripping on the belts that always hung out from the doors. And then I’d worry about where I’d parked it, and whether someone might speed round a bend and crash into it like the drive-off guy from Peckham. The other scenario too, the corridor one: as we floated to the bedroom I’d remember there were loads of mouldy coffee cups beside the bed, and that the sheets were old and dirty. If it wasn’t that then it was that the neighbours were right outside and I hadn’t drawn the curtains and they’d start up a conversation through the windows, or—well, something always came along and short-circuited these imaginary seductions, fucked them up. Even my fantasies were plastic, imperfect, unreal.

When Catherine flew into London on the day the Settlement came through, I arrived at the airport just after her flight was due in. I saw from the Arrivals screens that it had landed and I hurried over to the area where the sliding screen doors separate the customs and immigration area from the public terminal. I leant against a rail and watched passengers emerge from these doors. It was interesting. Some of the arriving passengers scanned the waiting faces for relatives, but most weren’t being met. These ones came out carrying some kind of regard to show to the assembled crowd, some facial disposition they’d struck up just before the doors slid open for them. They might be trying to look hurried, as though they were urgently needed because they were very important and their businesses couldn’t run without them. Or they might look carefree, innocent and happy, as though unaware that fifty or sixty pairs of eyes were focused on them, just on them, if only for two seconds. Which of course they weren’t—unaware, I mean. How could you be? The strip between the railings and the doors was like a fashion catwalk, with models acting out different roles, different identities. I leant against the rail, watching this parade: one character after another, all so self-conscious, stylized, false. Other people really were like me; they just didn’t know they were. And they didn’t have eight and