Free Remainder by Tom McCarthy Page A

into mobiles, white girls queuing outside the Dogstar, chewing gum and smoking at the same time. They all came and went—people, lights, colours, noise—on the periphery of my attention. I walked slowly, with the strip of wallpaper, thinking of the room, the flat, the world I’d just remembered.
    I was going to recreate it: build it up again and live inside it. I’d work outwards from the crack I’d just transcribed. The plaster round the crack was pinky-grey, all grooved and wrinkled from when it had been smeared on. There’d been a patch of blue paint just above it, to the left (its right), and, one or two feet to the left of that, a patch of yellow. I’d noted this down, but could remember it exactly anyway: left just above it blue then two more feet and yellow. I’d be able to recreate the crack back in my own flat—smear on the plaster and then add the colours; but my bathroom wasn’t the right shape. It had to be the same shape and same size as the one David’s had made me remember, with the same bathtub with its older, different taps, the same slightly bigger window. And it had to be on the fifth, sixth or seventh floor. I’d need to buy a new flat, one high up.
    And then the neighbours. They’d been all packed in around me—below, beside and above. That was a vital part of it. The old woman who cooked liver on the floor below, the pianist two floors below her, running through his fugues and his sonatas, practising—I’d have to make sure they were there too. The concierge as well, and all the other, more anonymous neighbours: I’d have to buy a whole building, and fill it with people who’d behave just as I told them to.
    And then the view across! The cats, the black cats on the red roofs of the building facing the back of mine across the courtyard. The roofs had been coated in slate tiles, and had risen and fallen in a particular way. If the building I bought didn’t have roofs that looked like that facing the windows of the bathroom and kitchen of my fifth- or sixth- or seventh-floor flat then I’d have to buy the building behind it as well, and have its roofs changed until they looked that way. The building had to be tall enough too—the building behind mine, that is: not just one but two buildings of appropriate size and age would be needed. I thought all this through as I walked along Coldharbour Lane. I thought it through meticulously, still holding the strip of wallpaper.
    I could do it all, of course. That was no problem. I had funds. I could not only buy my building and the building behind it, but also hire the staff. I’d need the old lady. She was growing more distinct in my mind: she had white, wiry hair and a blue cardigan. Every day she fried liver in a pan, which spat and sizzled and smelled rich and brown and oily. She’d be stooping down to lower her rubbish bag onto the worn marble or fake-marble landing floor, holding her back with one hand as she did this—and she’d turn to me and speak as I passed by. I couldn’t quite remember what she’d say yet, but this didn’t matter at this stage.
    I’d need the pianist too. He was thirty-eight or so. He was tall and thin and very white, bald on top with fuzzy black hair sprouting at the sides. He was a fairly sad character: pretty lonely, didn’t seem to get that many visitors—just children who he’d teach for money. At night he’d compose, slowly and tentatively. In the day he’d practise, pausing when he made mistakes, running over the same passages again and again, slowing right down into the bits that he’d got wrong. The music would waft up just like the smell of the old woman’s liver. In the late afternoons you’d get the skill-less grind of his uninterested pupils, hammering out scales and trivial melodies. Sometimes, in the morning, he’d decide the lines that he’d composed the night before were worthless: you’d hear a discordant thump, then a chair scraping, a door slamming, footsteps dying away beneath