Remainder by Tom McCarthy Page B

don’t want no nothing from the Christians,” he said. “Make you pray before they feed you and all that. Big bunch of fucking hypocrites.” His voice was slow and drawn out, but quite nasal. It reminded me of strung-out rock stars from the Sixties—Bill Wyman, someone like that. I wondered if he was strung out too.
    “I’m really not a Christian,” I told him. “I just want to talk to you. I want to ask you something.”
    “What?” he said. His mouth stayed open after he’d pronounced the word.
    “I…” I began—then realized that I didn’t know exactly what it was I wanted to ask him. I said: “Can I buy you something to eat?”
    “Give us a tenner if you like,” he said.
    “No,” I said. “Let me buy you a meal. I’ll buy you a big meal, with wine and everything. What do you say?”
    He looked up at me with his mouth still hanging open, thinking. I wasn’t a Christian soul-hunter, and he could tell I wasn’t police. Then his face sharpened and he asked:
    “You ain’t no nonce, is you?”
    “No,” I said. “You don’t have to do anything. I just want to buy you a meal, and talk to you.”
    He scrutinized me for quite a bit longer. Then he closed his mouth, sniffed loudly, smiled and said:
    “Alright.”
    He stepped out of his sleeping bag, whistled to his friends up the street, signalled to one of them to come and take his place, then slapped his thigh and whistled again more quietly, to his dog this time. We headed off together, out of Soho onto Charing Cross Road, heading north. I took him to a Greek place just by Centre Point. The waitress, an old woman with big glasses, didn’t want to let his dog in at first. I handed her a twenty-pound note, told her it would behave itself and asked for a bone for it to gnaw on. We sat down and she brought him a big lamb bone which he chewed beneath the table quietly.
    “What would you like?” she asked. She was all smiles now, after the twenty pounds.
    I ordered a bottle of expensive white wine and mixed starters and asked for a few minutes to decide on our main course. She nodded, still smiling, and walked off to the kitchen.
    “Well!” I said. I leant back in my chair and drew my arms out wide. “Well!”
    My homeless person watched me. He picked up his napkin and fidgeted with it. After a while I asked:
    “Where are you from?”
    “Luton,” he said. “I came here two years ago. Two and a half.”
    “Why did you leave Luton?” I asked him.
    “Family,” he said, still picking at the napkin. “Dad’s an alkie. Beat me up.”
    The waitress came back with our wine. My homeless person watched her breasts as she leant over the table to pour it. I watched them too. Her shirt was unbuttoned at the top and she had nice, round breasts. She must have been about his age, eighteen, nineteen. We watched her as she turned and walked away. Eventually I raised my glass.
    “Cheers!” I said.
    He took his glass and drank from it in large gulps. He gulped down half of it, wiped his sleeve across his mouth, set the glass down and, emboldened by the alcohol already, asked me:
    “What do you want to know then?”
    “Well,” I said. “I want to know…Well, what I want to know is…Okay: when you’re sitting on your patch of street, sitting there wrapped up in your sleeping bag, with your dog curled up in your lap…You’re sitting there, and there are people going by—well, do you…What I really want to know…”
    I stopped. It wasn’t coming out right. I took a deep breath and started again:
    “Look,” I told him. “You know in films, when people do things—characters, the heroes, like Robert De Niro, say—when they do things, it’s always perfect. Anything at all. It could be opening a fridge, or lighting up a—no, say picking up a napkin, for example. The hero would pick it up, and give it a simple little flick, and tuck it in his collar or just fold it on his lap, and then it wouldn’t bother him again for the whole scene. And then