Remainder

I didn’t go and talk to him. I didn’t want to, didn’t have a thing to learn from him. Besides, I hate dogs, always have.

4

A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER, on Saturday, I went to David Simpson’s party. His new flat on Plato Road was on the second floor of a converted house. It was about a hundred years old, I suppose. Not a bad space. He hadn’t done it up yet: there were wires dangling from the ceilings and lines sketched out in pencil on the walls showing where shelves were going to go up, plus little diagrams scrawled beside switches showing the routes electric circuits were to follow. There were boxes everywhere too, full of clothes and books and plates.

“Oh! Hello!” David said as he opened the door to me. “I heard you were…you know, better.” His eyes were scanning my forehead just above my eyes; Greg must have told him about the plastic surgery on the scar.

“It’s over the right one,” I said.

“Oh, right,” he answered. “I hadn’t…Here, let me get you a drink.”

He’d made some kind of punch. It was pink and sweet-perhaps sangria. There were bottles of beer too, and wine. I sipped at the pink punch and moved into the main room. My name was called out: it was Greg.

“Hey dude!” Greg said as he threw his arm around me. He was already pretty drunk. “Where’s Catherine?”

“In Oxford,” I told him. She’d gone there for the weekend. She bored me enormously now. Everybody bored me. Everything too. I’d spent the days since my meeting with Matthew Younger pondering what to do with the money. I’d run through all the options: world travel, setting up a business of my own, founding a charitable trust, splurging it all. None of them appealed to me in the least. What kind of charitable trust would I have founded? I didn’t feel strongly about any issues. If I went out on a mad spending spree, what would I buy? I wasn’t interested in art, or clothes, or drugs. The champagne I’d had the other day had tasted acrid, like cordite, and then I’d only bought it because Marc Daubenay had told me I should; I’d tried foie gras once, in Paris: it had made me sick. No: I’d picked up all the options, held each one like a child holding a cheap and crappy toy for a few seconds until, realizing that it’s not going to spin, make music or in any way enchant him, he puts it down again. So I was bored-by people, ideas, the world: everything.

Greg lurched off to the kitchen to get more drink. I sat down on a sofa and looked around. It seemed a pretty boring party. I didn’t know many of the people there and wasn’t very interested in the ones I did know. David worked in PR or marketing or something like that; he bored me and his friends were boring too. I went and stood beside the window, two or so feet to its right. I stayed there for a while, then moved into the kitchen and topped up my glass. I’d hardly touched it, but it was something to do. I moved back to the main room and met Greg again.

“Hey dude!” he said, throwing the same arm round me. “So where’s Catherine?” He was slightly drunker than he’d been a quarter of an hour ago.

“She’s in Oxford,” I said.

He lurched off again and I moved back to the sofa, then to the spot beside the window. This second spot was a better one. I’d become good at sensing which are good positions and which aren’t when I’d been in hospital. It’s because you can’t move for yourself. In normal life, where you can move, you take being able to change your position for granted; you don’t even think about it. But when you’re injured and immobile, you have to go exactly where the doctors and nurses put you. Where they put you becomes terribly important-your position in relation to the windows, the doors, the TV set. The ward I spent most time in when I’d come out of intensive care was L-shaped. I was on the short side of the L, the foot, just inset from the corner where the long side hit it. It was a good spot: it had commanding views down both of the ward’s avenues, clear sightlines to the nurses’ enclave and the trolley station and the other little pockets of importance, crinkles in the flow of the ward’s surfaces. In the ward after that I had a really bad spot, in a bed facing the wrong way, facing nowhere in particular, just wrong. Position has been important to me ever since. It’s not just hospitaclass="underline" it’s the accident as well. I was hit because I was standing where I was and not somewhere else-standing on grass, exposed, just like a counter on a roulette table’s green velvet grid, on a single number, waiting…

I went back to the kitchen to top my glass up again, but realized that its level hadn’t sunk at all since the last time I’d filled it, so I just stood in the doorway while two girls beside the punch bowl looked at me.

“You looking for something?” one of them asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m looking for a…for a thing.” I made a kind of twiddling motion with my fingers, a gesture somewhere between opening a bottle with a corkscrew and using a pair of scissors. Then I left the kitchen again.

I was heading down the hallway back towards the main room when I noticed a small room set off the circuit I’d been following up to now. I’d moved round the kitchen each time in a clockwise direction, and round the main room in an anticlockwise one, door-sofa-window-door. With the short, narrow corridor between the two rooms, my circuit had the pattern of an eight. This extra room seemed to have just popped up beside it like the half had in my Settlement: offset, an extra. I stuck my head inside. It was a bathroom. I stepped in and locked the door behind me. Then it happened: the event that, the accident aside, was the most significant of my whole life.

It happened like this. I was standing in the bathroom with the door locked behind me. I’d used the toilet and was washing my hands in the sink, looking away from the mirror above it-because I don’t like mirrors generally-at this crack that ran down the wall. David Simpson, or perhaps the last owner, had stripped the walls, so there was only plaster on them, plus some daubs of different types of paint where David had been experimenting to see how the room would look in various colours. I was standing by the sink looking at this crack in the plaster when I had a sudden sense of déjà vu.

The sense of déjà vu was very strong. I’d been in a space like this before, a place just like this, looking at the crack, a crack that had jutted and meandered in the same way as the one beside the mirror. There’d been that same crack, and a bathtub also, and a window directly above the taps just like there was in this room-only the window had been slightly bigger and the taps older, different. Out of the window there’d been roofs with cats on them. Red roofs, black cats. It had been high up, much higher than I was now: the fifth or sixth or maybe even seventh floor of an old tenement-style building, a large block. People had been packed into the building: neighbours beneath me and around me and on the floor above. The smell of liver cooking in a pan had been wafting to me from the floor below-the sound too, the spit and sizzle.

I remembered all this very clearly. There’d been liver cooking on the floor below-the smell, the spit and sizzle-and then two floors below that there’d been piano music. Not recorded music playing on a CD or the radio, but real, live music, being played on a piano by the man who lived there, a musician. I remembered how it had sounded, its rhythms. Sometimes he’d paused, whenever he’d hit a wrong note or lost his place. He’d paused and started the passage again, running through it slowly, slowing right down as he approached the bit he’d got wrong. Then he’d played it several times correctly, running through it again, speeding it up again till he was able to play it back at speed without fluffing it up. I remembered all this clearly-crystal-clear, as clear as in a vision.