Remainder by Tom McCarthy Page B

told myself, or he told me, or to be precise my image of the school art room told me, in a voice hovering around paint-splashed wooden tables—the building was already there, somewhere in London. What I needed to do was ease it out, chisel it loose from the streets and the buildings all around it.
    How to do this? I’d need to see the block, of course, the slab, London. I had a grotty, dog-eared A-Z but couldn’t get any sense of the whole town from that. I’d need a proper map, a large one. I was about to go and buy one in the nearest newsagent when it struck me that I wasn’t thinking big enough. To do this properly I’d need coordination, back-up. I phoned Naz back.
    “I’d like to hire a room,” I told him.
    “What kind of room?” he asked.
    “A space. An office.”
    “Right,” said Naz.
    “I’d like to organize the search from there,” I continued. “With maps on the walls, things like that. A kind of military operations room.”
    “You’d like to organize the search yourself?” he asked. “I thought I was to…”
    “I’d like to take charge, but I’d like you to work with me.”
    There was a pause, then Naz said:
    “Fine. An office, then.”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Any other specifications?”
    “No,” I answered. “Just a normal office with a couple of desks in it. Light, windows. Just usual.”
    An hour later he’d got me an office in Covent Garden. It had a fax machine, two phone lines, a laptop, marker pens, white sheets of A1, two giant maps of London, some pins to stick one of the maps to the wall and some more pins to stick into it to mark locations. Naz had bought pins of several different colours and some thread to wrap round these, like cheese wire, slicing the town into blocks and wedges.
    Naz and I devised a method: we’d cordon off an area of the wall-mounted map with pins and thread, then scan the same area from the second map into the laptop, then, cutting away adjacent streets using the software, send the resulting image to mobiles Naz’s people were carrying. We isolated six main areas we thought most likely to contain my building: Belgravia, Notting Hill, South Kensington, Baron’s Court, Paddington and King’s Cross. Each of these had plenty of tall, tenement-style buildings—not to mention flowing, unbroken streets which, with the slight exception of some buildings round the stations, had escaped the bombing raids of World War Two pretty unscathed.
    We set our plan to work. Naz put five of his people on the case: it was their job to walk around each block and wedge of streets we sent to them. We worked methodically, marking off, scanning in and zapping out each section; Naz’s people would then go and walk around it, calling the office each time they saw a building they thought might approximate to mine. Each of them moved up each street in his or her block, then down the next, up the next and so on. One of our phones would ring from time to time:
    “I’ve found a large apartment building with a blue façade near Olympia,” the searcher would say.
    “What street?” we’d ask.
    “Corner of Longridge Road and Templeton Place.”
    “How many floors?”
    “… three, four, five— Six!”
    “Longridge Road, Templeton Place,” I or Naz would repeat to the other; the other would find the intersection on the wall-mounted map, stick a purple pin in it, then enter the particulars—six floors, blue façade and so on—into a spreadsheet Naz had created on the laptop. Sometimes both phones rang at once. Sometimes neither of them rang for several hours.
    By five or so on the first day the map had nine purple pins stuck in it.
    “Let’s go and look at them,” said Naz. “I’ll call us a car.”
    “Tomorrow,” I said.
    By five o’clock the next day we had fifteen buildings. I’d knocked the car’s arrival back to six, but when it came I told Naz:
    “I prefer to wait until tomorrow morning.”
    “As you wish,” he said. “I’ll send another car round to