Free Remainder by Tom McCarthy

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 ran. I copied it really carefully. Meticulously. The knocking came again: two sets of knocks this time.
    “We’re bursting out here!” a girl’s voice called through.
    “Yeah: hurry up!” the same man’s voice repeated.
    I ignored them and carried on copying the crack. I had to start again two times—the first because I’d made the scale too big to fit the whole crack in, then once more when I realized that the flip side of the wallpaper was smoother than the bubbly side which I’d been drawing on, and so would make for a more accurate transcription. I copied it, meticulously, noting in brackets aspects such as texture and colour. After I’d finished copying the crack I stood there for a few more moments, letting the whole vision settle down inside me: bathroom, flat, staircase, building, courtyard, roofs and cats. I needed it to settle deep enough for it to stay. I closed my eyes for a few seconds, to see if I could see it in my mind, in darkness. I could. When I was satisfied of that I opened them again and left the bathroom.
    “I’m bursting!” the girl told me again. It was one of the two girls who’d been in the kitchen earlier. She pushed past me into the bathroom.
    “You been giving birth in there?” the man who’d told me to hurry up asked.
    “I’m sorry?” I said.
    “Giving birth. Is that what took you so long?”
    “No,” I said. I took my coat and walked out of the party with my strip of wallpaper.
    I walked down to the main Brixton intersection, where the giant box junction spreads across the tarmac from the town hall to the Ritzy cinema. It must have been midnight or so. Brixton was alive and kicking. There were red and yellow sports cars gridlocked on Coldharbour Lane, black guys in baseball caps touting for cab firms, younger black guys in big puffy jackets pushing cannabis and crack, black girls with curled and flattened hair and big round hips wrapped up in stretchy dresses screeching