Remainder by Tom McCarthy Page A

asphalt running round them, or else cricket grounds with white crease and boundary lines painted on the grass. There’d been a commentary and I’d had to join in with it, commentate as well. I’d had to speak my commentary to the rhythm of these beeps and rasps or else I’d fade out of the scene. I’d known the situation was a strange one, that I was unconscious and imagining it, but I’d also known that I had to keep the commentary up, to fill the format, or I’d die.
    As I sat by my window watching people go by, I wondered which of them was the least formatted, the least unreal. Not me—that was for sure. I was an interloper on this whole scene, a voyeur. There were other people sitting behind windows too, in other coffee shops, mirroring me: interlopers too, all of them. Then there were tourists, shuffling awkwardly along and glancing at the people behind windows. Even lower down the pecking order, I decided. Then there were the clubbers. They were mostly gay—scene gay, with tight jeans and gelled hair and lots of piercings. They were like the media types with the screen: performing—to the onlookers, each other, themselves. They crossed from coffee shop to coffee shop, bar to bar, kissing their friends hello and clocking other men exaggeratedly, their gestures all exaggerated, camp. They all had tans, but fake ones, got on sunbeds in expensive gyms or daubed on from a tin. Theatrical, made up, the lot of them.
    I must have been on my sixth cappuccino when I noticed a group of homeless people. They’d been there all the time that I’d been watching, camouflaged against the shop fronts and the dustbins, but I started paying attention to them now, observing them. One of them was sitting wrapped up in a polyester sleeping bag with a dog curled up on his lap. His friends had a spot twenty or so yards up the street—three or four of them. They’d move from their spot intermittently to go and visit him, one at a time, sometimes two; then they’d turn around and head back for their own spot. I watched them intently for a long time. The further-up-the-street people would approach the wrapped-up dog guy with a sense of purpose, as though they had messages for him, important information. They’d impart their messages, then go away; but one of them would come back seven or so minutes later with an update. Sometimes they’d take over from him, filling in his spot while he and his dog sauntered up to theirs.
    I started seeing a regularity to the pattern of their movements, the circuits they made between the two spots, who replaced whom, when and in what order. It was complicated, though: each time I thought I’d cracked the sequence, one of them would move out of turn or strike out on a new route. I watched them for a very long time, really concentrating on the pattern.
    After a while I started thinking that these people, finally, were genuine. That they weren’t interlopers. That they really did possess the street, themselves, the moment they were in. I watched them with amazement. I wanted to make contact with them. I decided that I would make contact with them. After the wrapped-up dog guy had sat back inside his sleeping bag for the fourth time and I could more or less safely predict that none of his friends would come over to him for seven or so more minutes, I got up from my stool, left the coffee shop and walked across the street to where he sat.
    His dog saw me coming first. It uncurled and perked up, looking at me all alert and sniffing. Then the wrapped-up guy looked up too. He must have been in his late teens. His skin was delicate, very pale with small red dabs on it where veins had burst beneath the surface. I stood in front of him for a while, looking down. Eventually I asked him:
    “Can I talk to you?”
    He looked up at me in the same way as his dog had: quizzically, excited and defensive at the same time.
    “You a Christian then?” he asked.
    “No. No, I’m not a Christian,” I said.
    “I