Remainder Read Online Free PDF Page A

short. I ordered a small cappuccino.
    “Heyy! Short cap,” the man said. “Coming up! You have a loyalty card?”
    “Loyalty card?” I said.
    “Each time you visit us, you get a cup stamped,” he said, handing me a card. It had ten small pictures of coffee cups on it. “When you’ve stamped all ten, you get an extra cup for free. And a new card.”
    “But I’m not here that often,” I said.
    “Oh, we have branches everywhere,” he told me. “It’s the same deal.”
    He stamped the first cup and handed me the cappuccino. Just then someone called my name and I turned round. It was Catherine. She’d cleared customs already and had been standing in the coffee bar all the time I’d been watching the sliding doors.
    “Heyy!” I said. I went over and hugged her.
    “I tried calling you,” said Catherine as we disentangled, “but your phone’s not working.”
    “I’ve just become rich!” I said.
    “Well heyy!”
    “No, really. Just now, today.”
    “How come?” she asked.
    “Compensation for my accident.”
    “My God! Of course!” She peered into my face. “You don’t look like—oh yes, you’ve got a scar right there.” She ran the first two fingers of her left hand down the scar above my right eye, the one I’d had plastic surgery on. When they got to the end of the scar’s track, they stayed there. She took them away just before they’d been there too long for the gesture to be ambiguous. “So they’ve paid up?” she said.
    “An enormous amount.”
    “How much?”
    I hadn’t prepared myself for this question. I stuttered for an instant, then said: “Several—well, after tax and fees and things, a few hundred thousand.”
    Maybe a kind of barrier came down between us right then. I felt bad about lying, but I couldn’t bring myself to say the whole amount. It just seemed so big, too much to even talk about.
    We took the tube back to my flat. We sat beside each other, but her profile wasn’t quite as sexy as I’d made it by the field and the parked Fiesta in my fantasy. She had a couple of spots on her cheek. Her dirty and enormous purple backpack kept falling over from between her legs. When we arrived, the phone unit was still lying untwitching on the carpet.
    “Wow! Did it get hit by lightning?” she said—then, with a gasp, added: “Oh! I’m sorry. I mean, I didn’t…I know it wasn’t lightning, but…”
    “Don’t worry,” I said. “It doesn’t…I mean, I don’t think of it like…”
    My sentence petered out too, and we stood facing one another in silence. Eventually Catherine asked:
    “Can I go take a bath?”
    “Sure,” I said. “I’ll run it for you. Would you like tea?”
    “Tea!” she said. “That’s so English. Yes, I’d like tea.”
    I made tea while she took her bath. I considered whether or not to open the door and take it in to her, but decided not to, set the cup down outside the bathroom and told her through the door that it was there.
    “Cool,” she said. “Qu’est-ce qu’on fait ce soir?”
    What are we doing this evening, she meant. I know she said it in French to try to remind us of our time in Paris, but I didn’t feel like answering in French. And I felt slightly miffed about the English quip. Of course tea is English: what did she expect?
    “We’re meeting my friend Greg,” I said back through the door. “Near here, in Brixton.”
    Greg was my best friend. It was he who’d hooked me up with Daubenay, through an uncle of his. He lived in Vauxhall—maybe still does, who knows. We’d arranged to meet in the Dogstar, a pub at the far end of Coldharbour Lane. He was already there when Catherine and I showed up, buying a pint of lager at the bar.
    “Greg, Catherine—Catherine, Greg,” I said.
    Greg asked us what we’d have. I said a lager. Catherine took one too, but said she wanted to use the toilet first and asked Greg where it was. Greg told her and then watched her as she walked off. Then he turned to me and