Remainder - By Tom McCarthy Page 0,3

would be arriving at Heathrow in just over an hour. There was a click on the line, then Marc Daubenay’s secretary picked up.

“Marc Daubenay’s office,” she said.

This woman was older, forty-plus. I’d come across her too, each time I’d visited Marc Daubenay. It was she who’d called me minutes ago. She always looked stern, austere, slightly chastising even. She never smiled. I gave her my name and asked to speak to Daubenay.

“Trying his line now,” she said. “No, I’m afraid it’s busy. He’s talking to someone.”

“Yes, he’s talking to me,” I said. “We were talking, and we got cut off. I think he’s trying to phone me back.”

“If you hang up I’ll tell him to try again.”

“No,” I said, “that’s no good. My phone’s come out of the wall. It’s broken. We were talking and it broke. I’m sure he’s trying to phone me now. Perhaps you could break in and tell him.”

“I’ll have to go through,” she said.

I heard her setting the receiver on its side, then footsteps, voices, hers and Daubenay’s, in the next room. He’s on your line? Daubenay was saying. But his phone’s gone dead. I’ve been trying it for the last ten minutes. She said something to him that I couldn’t make out, then I heard his footsteps coming to the phone in her room, then a rustle as he picked it off the desk.

“You there again?” he said.

“We got cut off,” I told him.

The phone’s display window was counting my money down and had already got to thirty-two. Peak rates. I dug into my pockets for more coins but only pulled out two-pence pieces.

“How much did you hear?” Daubenay asked.

“The figure. Could you say it again?”

“Eight and a half million pounds,” Daubenay repeated. “You understand the terms governing your acceptance of this sum?”

“I can’t tell anyone?”

“You can’t discuss, in any public or recordable format, the nature and/or details of the incident.”

“I remember you telling me that,” I said.

“You’ll lose the whole lot if you do, plus any surplus this might have accrued while in your custody.”

“Accrued, yes,” I said. “I remember that bit too. And is it legally enforceable?”

“It most certainly is,” he answered. “Given the status of these parties, these, uh, institutions, these, uh…”

“Bodies,” I said.

“…bodies,” he continued, “almost anything’s enforceable. I strongly suggest we accept. We’d be crazy not to.”

“What do I have to do?” I asked him.

“Come in tomorrow. They’re biking over documents for you to sign. Come at around eleven: they should be here by then.”

The Coke-machine man was wheeling his 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