Remainder by Tom McCarthy

Author:Tom McCarthy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction, English Novel And Short Story, Irish, London (England), Welsh, Men, Poetry, General, Fiction - General, Restitution, Literary, Memory, Amnesia, Scottish, English, Accidents, Visions, Dreams, Wounds and injuries
ISBN: 9780307278357
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2007-09-15T21:23:59.778000+00:00

10

I SHOULD HAVE JUMPED out of the car as fast as I could, but I sat there instead, letting the blue liquid gush all over me. When it had finished gushing it trickled, then dribbled, then dripped. I sat impassive while it ran itself out. It took a long time: even when it seemed to have dripped itself dry it still managed to grind out another half-drip a few seconds later, and another half-half-drip a few seconds after that.

Slowly, tentatively, the three boys edged over to the car and peered in. The youngest one gasped when he saw my trousers soaked in the sticky blue liquid. The other two said nothing: they just stared. I stared too: we all stared at the dashboard and my legs. We stayed there, static like that, for a long while. Then I drove back to my building.

When I got there, I took off my wet clothes and had a bath. I lay in my bath looking at the crack and thinking about what had happened. It was something very sad—not in the normal sense but on a grander scale, the scale that really big events are measured in, like centuries of history or the death of stars: very, very sad. A miracle seemed to have taken place, a miracle of transubstantiation—in contravention of the very laws of physics, laws that make swings stop swinging and fridge doors catch and large, unsuspended objects fall out of the sky. This miracle, this triumph over matter, seemed to have occurred, then turned out not to have done at all—to have failed utterly, spectacularly, its watery debris crashing down to earth, turning the scene of a triumphant launch into the scene of a disaster, a catastrophe. Yes, it was very sad.

I lay there in my bath replaying the event in my mind, scouring its surfaces. There’d been the garish model tin and piled-up tyres, the spinning sign, the swaying tyre-suit of the youngest boy, the lathe with its clamps and pedals and the blue tube full of air. I remembered how the boy had carried the tyre from my car boot to the shop, how grime had rubbed onto his shirt; then how his hands had whipped around it daubing glue on, re-inflating it. I lay for so long remembering that the bath turned cold and my skin wrinkled. After an age I got out and phoned Naz.

“I’d like you to facilitate another project I’m considering,” I said.

“Certainly,” Naz replied. “Tell me about it.”

“I should like a certain area,” I said, “to be reproduced exactly.”

“A small section of the building?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Another place. A tyre repair shop.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Naz said. “If you tell me where it is, I’ll give Roger a call right now and get him to knock you up another model.”

“It’s not a model I require,” I told Naz. “It’s a full-scale reproduction. I should like Roger to reproduce this tyre shop exactly, down to the last detail. Furthermore, I shall require re-enactors to run through a certain event which I’ll outline later.

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