Remainder Read Free Page A

overground space, London. I remembered being transferred from the first hospital to the second one two months or so after the accident, how awful it had been. I’d been laid flat, and all I’d been able to see was the ambulance’s interior, its bars and tubes, a glimpse of sky. I’d felt that I was missing the entire experience: the sight of the ambulance weaving through traffic, cutting onto the wrong side of the road, shooting past lights and islands, that kind of thing. More than that: my failure to get a grip on the space we were traversing had made me nauseous. I’d even thrown up in the ambulance. Riding to Heathrow on the tube, I experienced echoes of the same uneasiness, the same nausea. I kept them at bay by thinking that the rails were linked to wires that linked to boxes and to other wires above the ground that ran along the streets, connecting us to them and my flat to the airport and the phone box to Daubenay’s office. I concentrated on these thoughts all the way to Heathrow.
    Almost all the way. One strange thing happened. It might seem trivial to you, but not to me. I remember it very clearly. At Green Park I had to change lines. To do this at Green Park you have to ride the escalator almost to street level and then take another escalator down again. Up in the lobby area, beyond the automatic gates, there were some payphones and a large street map. I was so drawn to these—their overview, their promise of connection—that I’d put my ticket into the gates and walked through towards them before I’d realized that I should have gone back down again instead. To make things worse, my ticket didn’t come back out. I called a guard over and told him what had happened, and that I needed my ticket back.
    “It’ll be inside the gate,” he said. “I’ll open it for you.”
    He took a key out of his pocket, opened the gate’s ticket-collecting flap and picked up the top ticket. He inspected it.
    “This ticket’s only for as far as this station,” he said.
    “That’s not mine, then,” I said. “I bought one for Heathrow.”
    “If you were the last person to pass through, your ticket should be the top one.”
    “I was the last one through,” I told him. “No one came past after me. But that’s not my ticket.”
    “If you were the last one through, then this must be your ticket,” he repeated.
    It wasn’t my ticket. I started to feel dizzy again.
    “Hold on,” the guard said. He reached up into the feeding system on the flap’s top half and pulled another ticket out from where it was wedged between two cogs. “This yours?” he asked.
    It was. He gave it back to me, but it had picked up black grease from the cogs when he’d opened the flap, and the grease got on my fingers.
    I walked back towards the down escalator, but before I got there I noticed all these escalator steps that were being overhauled. You think of an escalator as one object, a looped, moving bracelet, but in fact it’s made of loads of individual, separate steps woven together into one smooth system. Articulated. These ones had been dis-articulated, and were lying messily around a closed-off area of the upper concourse. They looked helpless, like beached fish. I stared at them as I passed them. I was staring at them so intently that I stepped onto the wrong escalator, the up one, and was jolted onto the concourse again. As my hand slipped over the handrail the black grease got onto my sleeve and stained it.
    I have, right to this day, a photographically clear memory of standing on the concourse looking at my stained sleeve, at the grease—this messy, irksome matter that had no respect for millions, didn’t know its place. My undoing: matter.

 
    2
    AFTER THE ACCIDENT —some time after the accident, after I’d come out of my coma and my memory had come back and my broken bones had set—I had to learn how to move. The part of my brain that controls the motor functions of the right side of my body had been damaged. It