PopCo (58 page)

‘Yeah,’ the girl is saying to her friend. ‘It’s like a small box. Upstairs. Yeah, in that pile in the toilet. Um … looks like a mix of old and new. Some of the old ones are a bit musty and stuff. Paperbacks, I think …’ She looks into the box and pulls out a couple of the Derrida books. I nod at her. ‘Yeah, just a real mix. Oh, do you? Cool. Yeah. Fifty quid? Seriously? That’s a lot. OK, I’ll ask her. Yeah. Sorry. OK. See you later.’

She puts the phone down and smiles at me. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that you can have the whole box if you want, but the bad news is that I can’t sell individual books from the box, so it’s all or nothing really. Sam says she bought the box herself from an auction, and the owner hasn’t even seen it yet. But apparently she’s already said she hasn’t got the space to shelve loads more stuff …But the other bad news is that the whole box is going to cost fifty pounds. So …’

‘I’ll take it,’ I say.

‘Seriously? You’d spend that on a box of books?’ She smiles and shrugs. ‘Well, OK. I guess that’s fifty pounds, then, please.’

My hands shake as I get my purse out of my bag, pull out
three crumpled ten-pound notes and a twenty and hand them over. I don’t stop to consider that this is almost the only money I have in the world, and that I am not going to be able to afford to eat for the next three weeks. I don’t actually care about anything apart from being able to walk out of this shop with
The End of Mr. Y
, without someone realising or remembering and trying to stop me. My heart is doing something impossible. Will I collapse and die of shock before I’ve even had a chance to read the first line of the book? Shit, shit, shit.

‘Fantastic, thanks. Sorry it was so much,’ the girl says to me.

‘No problem,’ I manage to say back. ‘I need a lot of these for my PhD, anyway.’

I place
The End of Mr. Y
in my rucksack, safe, and then I pick up the box and walk out of the shop, clutching it to me as I make my way home in the dark, the cold stinging my eyes, completely unable to make sense of what has just happened.

‘Exuberant … Thomas restores the novel to its primary purpose: a blueprint for a revolution. It is an outright amazement.’
Scotland on Sunday

‘Stories unravel within stories, and there are elaborate riffs on code-breaking, mathematical theorems and the pure pleasure of the hunt through numbers.’
Sunday Times

‘An anticorporate fable with enough code-breaking tips, puzzles and graphs, charts, postscripts and appendices to satisfy that other mathematician storyteller, Lewis Carroll.’
New York Times Book Review

Bright Young Things

Going Out

The End of Mr. Y