Remainder Read Free

empty trolley back out of Movement Cars. It was Light Removals, not Light then Removals. It just looked like that, the way they’d laid the words out. The phone’s display window was in the teens now. Daubenay was congratulating me.
    “What for?” I asked him.
    “It’s an unprecedented sum,” he said. “Well done.”
    “I didn’t earn it,” I said.
    “You’ve suffered,” he replied.
    “That’s not really the right…” I said. “I mean, I didn’t choose to—and in any…”
    And the phone cut right there, in mid-conversation again.
    I walked back to my flat to get more coins. I walked back down the same street parallel to the one perpendicular to mine, then out again along the perpendicular one, as before: past the Fiesta, the ex-siege zone. I put two pound coins in this time. Daubenay seemed surprised to hear me.
    “I think we’ve just about got it wrapped up,” he said. “Go and have a glass of champagne. See you at eleven tomorrow.”
    He hung up. I felt foolish. It hadn’t been necessary to call him again. Besides, I needed to get to the airport fast now, eight and a half million or not. As I left the phone box I pictured Catherine’s plane somewhere over Europe, bearing down towards the Channel, towards England. I walked back for a third time to my flat, still using the same route, picked up my coat and wallet, and had made it to beside a tyre shop halfway between the siege zone and the phone box when I realized I’d left the piece of paper with the flight number on it in my kitchen.
    I turned back again, but stopped immediately as it occurred to me that perhaps I didn’t need the information: I could just look at the arrivals board and see which flight was coming from Harare. There wouldn’t be more than one at any given time. I turned back out and was about to start walking onwards when it struck me that I didn’t know which terminal to go to. I would have to go and get the details after all. But then before I’d taken a single step towards my flat I remembered that they have lists posted up in tube compartments on the Piccadilly Line, telling you which terminal to go to for each airline. I turned round yet again. Two men who’d walked out of a café next to the tyre shop were looking at me. I realized that I was jerking back and forth like paused video images do on low-quality machines. It must have looked strange. I felt self-conscious, embarrassed. I made a decision to go and pick the flight details up after all, but remained standing on the pavement for a few more seconds while I pretended to weigh up several options and then come to an informed decision. I even brought my finger into it, the index finger of my right hand. It was a performance for the two men watching me, to make my movements come across as more authentic.
    When I finally broke out of the circuit I’d now covered four or five times, following the same route each time, perpendicular road out and parallel road back, even crossing each road at the same spot, beside the same skip or just after the same manhole cover—when I finally turned left down Coldharbour Lane towards Brixton Tube, it occurred to me that from now on I didn’t need to move along the ground at all. I was so rich that I could have ordered up a helicopter, told it to come and land in Ruskin Park, or if it couldn’t land then hover just above the rooftops, lower a rope and winch me up into its stomach, like they do when rescuing people from the sea. And yet I kept to the ground, ran my eyes along it like a blind man’s fingers reading Braille, concentrating on my passage over it: each footstep, how the knees bend, how to swing my arms. That’s the way I’ve had to do things since the accident: understand them first, then do them.
    Later, as I sat inside the tube, I felt the need, like I’d done every time I’d taken the tube up to Angel, to picture the terrain the hurtling car was covering. Not the tunnels and the platforms, but the space, the